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Park's creation story told Brutally honest Exhibit looks at Shenandoah Park's history

July 17, 2007 12:35 am

BIG MEADOWS--Strolling through the new permanent exhibit at the Harry F. Byrd Sr. Visitor Center, detailing the creation and history of Shenandoah National Park, Dave Thelen shakes his head.

The Brick, N.J., resident looks at a panel listing all 464 families displaced from the land when the park was created, and the pittance many were paid to give up their mountain heritage.

"The same thing's still happening today," said Thelen, of a locality near his home where land was recently condemned for a shopping center. "I like the way this exhibit explains the creation of this beautiful park, but also lets you know what it cost the people who lived here their way of life."

Claire Comer, an interpretive specialist at Shenandoah and one of many at the park who helped create the new exhibit, is happy when visitors come away with their own perceptions about the park's history.

"That's the way this exhibit was conceived," Comer said recently as we walked through the wonderfully crafted exhibit. "We wanted to put many different perspectives out there, along with basic facts and information, and let our visitors make up their own minds about how it all unfolded."

She's not just talking about the whens, wheres and hows of the creation of this 197,438-acre park that spans eight counties and offers a 105-mile parkway that runs along the spine of some of the most beautiful mountains in the country.

The basic story of the park is all here, noting that it was the first great national park in the East, spurred by the immense popularity of Yellowstone and Yosemite in the West.

But what's fascinating about this exhibit, an outgrowth of decades of study of the park's cultural history, is that it doesn't shy away from details many visitors will find disturbing.

The exhibit offers an array of perspectives, then leaves it to visitors to make up their minds about what to take home.

This includes:

A panel that shares the claim of those pushing for the park that it was largely an area "pristine and uninhabited" with little in the way of facilities, farms or other enterprises. A striking cutout of a farmer and cabin and other details paint a very different picture.

There were very few large tracts, but were hundreds of small farms and simple homes where people raised crops, worked in thriving mines or hauled produce to market.

Though a so-called "sociologist" paints mountain folk as often lazy, unconnected to modern life and devoid of modern facilities, other information calls that into question.

Displays show mountain folk working hard, stripping bark from trees for tanning and operating everything from country markets to boarding houses.

A straightforward depiction of a store at the park's Lewis Mountain campground, which in the late '30s was designated as the area of the park to be used by all black visitors.

Details of the camp store and a cutout of those who ran it show the way the men who managed the park and the National Park Service struggled with the question of segregation and use of government facilities.

"We really feel like we have two very different stakeholders in this exhibit," said Comer, whose great-grandparents gave up land they owned in the Page County section of the park. "There are our park visitors, and then the descendants of those displaced. Our goal was to make sure the exhibit serves both groups."

The exhibit is worth a trip on its own. But you'll be missing something if you don't use your visit to get out in the park's wild lands.

See the exhibit first and it's hard not to appreciate the cost those displaced families paid to make them available to all.