Blue Ridge Parkway Begins 75th Anniversary Celebration

The Blue Ridge Parkway turns 75 in 2010, and to commemorate that milestone, the National Park Service kicked off an opening weekend celebration. It began with a torch lighting ceremony on Friday, and continued Saturday with a benefit concert. The yearlong celebration ends with a commemorative weekend September 10-12, 2010, in the Cumberland Knob, North Carolina, area, where construction of the road began in 1935. Considered a national treasure, the 469-mile Parkway connects Shenandoah National Park in Virginia with the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina.

The Blue Ridge Parkway, an All-American Road as designated by the National Scenic Byways Commission, will mark its 75th anniversary with celebrations, events, and symposia along the Parkway beginning November 12-14, 2009, in Cherokee and Asheville, North Carolina, and culminating with a commemorative weekend September 10-12, 2010, in the Cumberland Knob, North Carolina, area, where construction of the road began in 1935. Considered a national treasure, the 469-mile Parkway connects Shenandoah National Park in Virginia with the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina.

The parkway began as part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal during the Great Depression, with both private contractors as well as workers from the Bureau of Public Roads, and was the first national rural parkway to be developed for the new American pastime of leisure road trips. Additional laborers from the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) built campgrounds and picnic areas, trail shelters, rail fences, and waterlines. The CCC also cleared overlooks and assisted with landscape plantings.

The Parkway meanders through 29 counties and two major metropolitan areas – Roanoke, Virginia, and Asheville, North Carolina – and averages 16 million visits annually. The ridge-top corridor actually rises and falls in elevation from 649 feet at Virginia’s James River to 6,047 feet at Richland Balsam in North Carolina and is the highest and longest continuous route in the Appalachian area.

The Parkway has an estimated economic impact of $2.3 billion each year on the communities through which it passes. The five mountain ranges of the Parkway corridor include the oldest mountain building processes in the world. This national park also stands at the summit of many local and regional watersheds defining the hydrological patterns of much of the eastern United States.

Although the Parkway was started in 1935, construction was interrupted by World War II in the 1940s. The remainder of the road was built in the 1950s and 1960s with the exception of the route around the ecologically fragile slopes of Grandfather Mountain in North Carolina. After years of negotiating and dispute, the Blue Ridge Parkway was completed with the opening of the Linn Cove Viaduct in 1987.

To find out more about the yearlong celebration, go to www.blueridgeparkway75.org.