Super-Scenic Motorway

The most visited site in the National Park system the 469-mile Blue Ridge Parkway winds along the ridges of the Appalachian mountains in Virginia and North Carolina. According to most accounts the Parkway was a New Deal “Godsend for the needy” built without conflict or opposition by landscape architects and planners who traced their vision along a scenic isolated southern landscape. The historical archives relating to this massive public project however tell a different and much more complicated story which Anne Mitchell Whisnant relates in this revealing history of the beloved roadway.