Seconds after I heard the doorbell, my little feet hit the stone floor landing that served to separate the front door from the living room. The cold temperature of the floor on my feet meant it was colder outside. Thanksgiving was only two days away, it was dark and Dad was late coming home from work.

It was my father’s good job with the railroad that let my mom stay home and take care of us kids. All I knew is that he left for work early in the morning and got home before it was dark; I was 7 years old then.

I wrapped both hands around the doorknob, turned, and the big metal door opened. There stood three men in full suits; they were the darkest clothes I ever did see. “Is Mrs. Corbeil home?” one asked. “I’ll get her,” I replied.

Mom was on her way from the kitchen because she heard the doorbell ring too. She invited the men in on the landing. I’ll always remember that smell, a man’s smell. The businessman’s pungent odor from the mixture of fumes from heavy cigarette smoke and the leftover cover scent cologne purchased at a discount store. The smell still resonates decades later; for I am now a man.

“Mrs. Corbeil, we are from the Railroad and we need to tell you of an awful accident that happened in the yard,” a rough and choked voice said. Neither of the three would look at me, the man who broke the silence first reached out with his hand to my mom.

“There was an explosion at the yard, four men were hurt and Ed, Ed was badly burned and did not survive.” Edward M. was my father. I took off running through the living room and down the hall. My bedroom was the last one at the end. When I reached my room I busted out crying, drove my head with open mouth into a pillow wailing, wailing like there was no tomorrow, wishing that doorbell never rang ... crying.

In our world today we have access to professional psychologists and counselors for the young and adults. There are organized support groups that can help a spouse begin to reason with the heartache, loneliness, anger, and guilt that can follow a person the rest of their lives from a tragic life changing event like the lost of a parent, significant other or child These structured support services often require financial resources to gain access.

Ten years ago 343 firemen and paramedics were killed from the attacks on the World Trade Center. A total of 2,819 people lost their lives either at one of the two Towers, at the Pentagon Building or on United Airlines flight 93 crashing in Pennsylvania. It is estimated on New York Mag.com that 3,051 children lost a parent.

A decade later, I will be honoring those who lost their lives by bicycling 10 days on a memorial ride along the Blue Ridge Parkway. In our own region of the world there was another tragic explosion and fire that took the life of firemen Captain Jeff Bowen on July 28, 2011.

I have teamed with the Mission Hospital’s Healthcare Foundation to provide a path to accept donations to build the Fallen Firefighters Fund that will provide financial support for his surviving wife and three children. The days, months and years ahead will be accompanied with second-guessing, fear, and self-doubt. The Bowen family will need human support to cope with the loss of a husband and father; to live again sooner than later, to build self-worth and achieve total forgiveness moving forward.

If you find it in your heart to take action and join us, thank you! There is a link to a secured web site that will take you directly to the 9/11 Memorial Bike Ride with more information. http://support.missionfoundation.org/site/PageNavigator/911MemorialBikeRide.html. Once on the web page there is a link to a news article about the July 28 fire, along with buttons on the left side to follow my journey or learn more about our team, and donate.

Come join me in this 9/11 Memorial Bike Ride by showing your monetary support, or meet me at a Milepost and ride with me; add the link above to your favorites on your web browser then click on the button “Follow Keith on Twitter” for updates of the trip.

To mail a donation make your check payable to Mission Healthcare Foundation with a written Memo message of “9/11 Memorial Bike Ride” Mail a check to: Mission Healthcare Foundation, 980 Hendersonville Road, Suite C; Asheville, NC 28803-1740. To donate by telephone call Ms. Shaana Norton at 828.213.1052.

Keith Corbeil is a father, performance consultant, and competitive tri-athlete and can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Lots of folks like to study those molded relief maps of the region, the ones that show the upraised contours of the mountain ranges. Some have even pieced together the maps for the Southern Blue Ridge Province from Southwestern Virginia to North Georgia as wall hangings, making it possible to contemplate in miniature the glorious terrain we call home.

It’s pleasurable to sit in an easy chair on a rainy day and ponder the way the ridges join or meditate over how they might have looked before eons of erosion wore them down into their present configuration. Even more rewarding is a venture to a local vista for a panoramic look-see at the real thing.

In one sense, of course, high vistas are places that enable us to rise above our everyday humdrum existence and take in grand scenery, even when we don’t know exactly what we’re looking at. As one writer aptly phrased it, “There’s wonder and delight up there ... elbow room for the soul ... all you have to do is suspend judgment and analysis long enough simply to be there, on the mountain, experiencing it.”

Well, no one would want to fail to take in the beauty or be exhilarated, but we also shouldn’t forget that Blue Ridge vistas are windows that allow us to see and comprehend more truly. A little “analysis” from time to time won’t hurt.

On a clear day, you can observe the bare bones of the land and come to a fuller understanding of the exact lay of the land. The thoughtful choice of a series of strategic vistas in your particular section of the Blue Ridge will enable you to observe just where the major ranges abut and how the peaks, spurs, gaps, upland valleys, streams, rock cliffs, gorges, grassy balds and other topographical features fall into place. You will come away with a more precise notion of your place in the world.

Because we’ve lived in the Tuckasegee River valley on the southern edge of the Smokies for the last 40 or so years, my wife and I have concentrated our attention on the interior portion of the Southern Blue Ridge Province from the Great Smokies on the west and north, to the Nantahalas in the south, and the Balsams in the east. One of our greatest satisfactions while driving or walking is being able to look up and recognize specific peaks and ranges by name, to know how they interconnect and relate to the remote cove we live in. They have become old friends. Each new lookout visited, each new mountain range recognized by its distinctive shape adds acreage to our spiritual landscape.

Among our favorite vistas are Wayah Bald (5,342 feet) in the Nantahalas, Waterrock Knob (6,292 feet) in the Plott Balsams along the Blue Ridge Parkway, and Clingman’s Dome (6,643 feet) on the high divide of the Smokies along the N.C.-Tenn. state lines. All three can be reached directly by vehicle within a single day. When it’s clear, one can easily see the 30 or so miles from each of these vantage points to the other two corners in what is a vast triangle. This triangulation technique allows an observer to view a given terrain from various directions and fit together landscape in an efficient manner.

Waterrock Knob is a fun place to visit because it attracts such a mix of visitors: drive-by tourists looking for the next overlook; thoughtful tourists savoring a special spot; plant enthusiasts seeking out species restricted to the northern hardwood and spruce-fir forests (yellow birch, spreading wood fern, mountain ash, etc.); birders looking for high-elevation species (ravens, golden-crowned kinglets, winter wrens, etc.); frisbee-catching college students; sunset and sunrise watchers; hikers, walkers, and strollers; and so on. I like remote, difficult-to-access spots, but I also like places where a diverse gathering of people are having fun. I like to watch them go about their chosen activities.

Just last week, I found out about the upcoming “Blue Ridge Parkway: Celebrating Heritage and Communities” event that will take place this coming Saturday at Waterrock Knob. Nevertheless, I wanted to support the event if possible. So I contacted BRP ranger Pam Mann and offered to do a nature walk and talk of about 45 minutes duration starting at 3 p.m. I’ll talk some about the geologic-geographic setting. I’ll have with me a handout for the field guides I use for general natural history as well as for trees, shrubs, vines, ferns, grasses and wildflowers in Western North Carolina. (And I’ll also bring copies of the actual books and source materials). Then we’ll go walking (slowly) and see what we may see. I hope that you will join me in support of one of our great national treasures.        

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Another 110 acres of mountain landscape are now part of the Blue Ridge Parkway’s protected corridor, thanks to a landowner whose family has lived near the scenic highway since its construction.

The Conservation Trust for North Carolina bought the tract from landowners Joe and Wilma Jo Arrington last year at a bargain sale price. It recently conveyed the tract to the National Park Service in February for $500,000 to become an official part of the Parkway.

The property, known as the Richland Creek Headwaters tract, is near Milepost 440 in Haywood County. The Arrington family purchased it in 1936. When parkway construction reached the region in the late 1950s, 30 of the family’s 188 acres were condemned and used for the site of Pinnacle Ridge Tunnel.

The Richland Creek Headwaters tract provides a backdrop for Blue Ridge Parkway travelers – especially from the Waynesville and Saunook overlooks – near the boundary of Haywood and Jackson counties in the Great Balsam Mountains.

The tract’s position will help safeguard water quality in the region; the property contains headwaters streams of Richland Creek, which flows through Waynesville and into Lake Junalaska. The land also contains important wildlife habitat in the Pinnacle Ridge Significant Natural Area.

The Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy (SAHC) recently protected Blackrock Ridge in northern Jackson County, a striking and important component of the Plott Balsam Mountains. The Plott Balsams, which reach 6,000 feet in elevation, tower above Waynesville, Sylva and Cherokee. Blackrock Ridge is a 60-acre parcel just a little south and west of Waterrock Knob, which is located at milepost 451.2 on the Blue Ridge Parkway. Blackrock Ridge lies within the Yellow Face/Blackrock Mountain State Natural Heritage Area and Audubon North Carolina’s Plott Balsams Important Bird Area. The tract ascends Blackrock Mountain where it adjoins The Nature Conservancy’s 1,595-acre Plott Balsam Preserve.

According to Jay Leutze, SAHC trustee, the organization had been negotiating with the landowner when it learned the property was going to be auctioned.

“We had five days to raise donor funds,” Leutze said. “We’re fortunate — we don’t have a lot of bureaucracy — and we can be pretty nimble,” he said. SAHC was nimble enough to be high bidder and purchased the tract for around $110,000.

The tract is located near the newly created Pinnacle Park (Sylva’s old watershed), and trails maintained by natural resources students from Western Carolina University link the Blackrock Tract and Pinnacle Park.

Leutze said SAHC was extremely happy to be able to preserve the Blackrock tract. “It’s in a larger assemblage of private tracts and would have surely been developed,” he said.

Attributes

The proximity to thousands of acres of already protected wilderness makes the tract important as a wildlife corridor. Blackrock Ridge attains an elevation of 5,600 feet, making it an ideal habitat for high-elevation species like the endangered Carolina northern flying squirrel. According to Leutze, Carolina northern flying squirrels have been documented on The Nature Conservancy’s Plott Balsam Preserve and the protection of this tract will add further protection and preserve more suitable habitat for the endangered flying squirrel.

Protection of the tract also helps preserve the cultural heritage of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, who have strong ties to the craggy peaks of the Plott Balsams.

A nice fit

Leutze said that SAHC breaks the regional landscape up into “focus areas.”

“This allows us to focus on who would be likely partners and where to find likely donors for particular projects,” he said Blackrock Ridge falls within SAHC’s “Smoky Mountains Focus Area.”

“The Smoky Mountains Focus Area, of course, includes efforts to try and help buffer the Park [Great Smoky Mountains National Park] but it also provides the opportunity to try and protect outstanding high-elevation sites like this one that don’t have a lot of protection,” he said.

And parcels that help protect the integrity of the Blue Ridge Parkway viewshed help protect the goose that lays the golden egg.

“A 2007-2008 study noted that 90 percent of the visitors that come to the Blue Ridge Parkway come for the view,” said Carolyn Ward, the new head of the Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation (BRPF).

That translates into about $2.3 billion for communities adjacent to the Parkway.

“Those of us who live in the area know the value of protecting our natural resources and anytime we can add land, whether by purchase or by an easement, it helps protect that resource,” said Ward.

Ward said that the one of the BRPF’s projects for 2011 would be to help design guidelines for protecting viewsheds along the scenic byway that celebrated its 75th birthday in 2010.

Ward said the foundation would not only focus on the technical aspects and/or options for protecting tracts of land that would be useful to landowners and organizations and agencies but also work on outreach and education for residents to help them see the incredible value of the resource.

“Protecting our viewsheds is critical,” she said.

About SAHC

The Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy — headquartered in Asheville — is one of the oldest land trusts in the country.

SAHC was founded in 1974 and works to conserve the unique plant and animal habitat, clean water, local farmland and scenic beauty of the mountains of North Carolina and east Tennessee for the benefit of present and future generations. SAHC achieves this by forging and maintaining conservation relationships with landowners and public agencies, owning and managing land, and working with communities to accomplish their conservation objectives.

SAHC’s flagship project is protecting the Highlands of Roan in Mitchell and Avery counties North Carolina and in Carter County in Tennessee. But its focus areas include the Smoky Mountains, Newfound and Walnut Mountains, Pisgah Ridge and Balsam Mountains, Black Mountains and the Mountains of East Tennessee.

To learn more about the SAHC visit www.appalachian.org.

Dr. Carolyn Ward of Asheville was recently named as head of the Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation.

Ward replaces Dr. Houck Medford, a Waynesville native, who has served as the founder and CEO of the Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation since its inception.

Ward has been serving chief operating officer. Medford will continue to serve as a consultant to the Foundation.

Bob Shepherd, chairman of the board of trustees, praised Medford’s vision and dedication to preserving the beauty and culture of the nation's most visited national parks. The parkway extends 469 miles through 29 counties in North Carolina and Virginia.

“Our board is unanimous in expressing deep appreciation for Houck’s and K.B’s (his wife) perseverance over the years in creating and growing our foundation so that citizens and organizations can have a tax deductible conduit through which they can contribute in a meaningful way to enhancing the Blue Ridge Parkway,” Shepherd said.

A 35-acre tract of forested land next to the Blue Ridge Parkway on the Haywood-Jackson countyline in Balsam has been protected thanks to work of the Conservation Trust of North Carolina and the help of private donors and land conservation champions, Fred and Alice Stanback.

Ownership of the tract will be transferred to the Blue Ridge Parkway.

Mount Lyn Lowry is known for the lighted cross that can be seen at night when driving through Balsam on U.S. 23-74. The tract is near Waterrock Knob around milepost 450 and is highly visible when traveling that section of the Parkway.

“The Mount Lyn Lowry property is small in size, but large in importance to the region’s wildlife habitat and spectacular natural beauty,” said Reid Wilson, director of the Conservation Trust.

Part of Mount Lyn Lowry remains in private hands and is dotted with homes.

In addition to bordering the Parkway, the tract is directly across from The Nature Conservancy’s 1,700-acre Plott Balsams Preserve, which links Waterrock Knob and Sylva’s Pinnacle Park.

Funds for the $200,000 bargain purchase of the tract were provided by Fred and Alice Stanback of Salisbury. The property was brought to Conservation Trust attention by the Land Trust for the Little Tennessee.

Map of tract and photos can be downloaded at ctnc.smugmug.com/News/Richland-Creek-Headwaters.

Sometimes I wonder what I’m a gonna do cause there ain’t enough time for all the summertime blues. And by blues I mean all those wonderful summer wildflowers that run the gamut from lavender to blue to violet and purple.

Joe-pye, Eupatorium maculatum, is raising his regal pale purple head along road shoulders, in fields and from almost any conceivable opening now. This large aster may grow to a height of 15 feet and the flowering inflorescence can be more than a foot high and a foot across. In summers past, I’ve seen beautiful stands of Joe-pye intermingled with the rich purple New York ironweed, Vernonia noveboracensis, in the open area at the intersection of Raccoon Road and U.S. 276.

Tall bellflower, Campanula americana, is another robust blue wildflower blooming now. The beautiful blue flower is an inch or so across and the protruding style turns up sharply at the end. It is pretty widespread across Western North Carolina and can be found along the Blue Ridge Parkway around the Waynesville Overlook.

The Parkway is a great place for summertime blues. Heintooga Spur Road and the Flat Creek Trail from Heintooga Picnic area offer a wide variety of summer wildflowers. Some of the blues to see there include obedient plant, Physostegia virginiana, which can be found along Heintooga Road. Obedient plant got its name because if you take your finger and gently push the corolla to one side or the other it will, obediently, remain in its new position.

Stiff gentian, Gentianella quinquefolia, a small purple wildflower with a closed corolla may also be found along Heintooga Road as well as numerous places along the Parkway, especially the road shoulders around Richland Balsam.

An especially striking summertime blue is monkshood, Aconitum uncinatum. The plant can grow 2 to 4 feet tall and the blue to purplish-blue, rounded, hood-shaped flowers are clustered at the end of the stem. One of the most reliable places I know of to fine monkshood is along the Flat Creek Trail.

I have also found turtlehead, Chelone lyonii, along Flat Creek Trail. Turtlehead also has a somewhat closed lavender-purple corolla. I think these closed corollas invite bees and other pollinators to crawl in and roll around, insuring they will collect lots of pollen. Devils Courthouse trail is another good place for turtlehead.

And as long as we are talking hoods and heads it may be a good time to mention skullcap, Scutellaria incana. Skullcap grows to about three feet tall. It has square stems and opposite leaves. The lavender to purplish-blue flowers are clustered in racemes at the end of the stem. The upper part of the corolla is hood-like while the lower lip is larger and wider and there is a conspicuous patch of white near the throat of the flower. It is common along the shoulder of the Parkway.

It’s not spring, but it’s clearly not too late for a wildflower pilgrimage. In fact the wildflower show in Western North Carolina is far from over. Grab a hand lens and a field guide and get outside and revel in the summertime blues.

Don Hendershot can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

A celebration of the 75th anniversary of the Blue Ridge Parkway will be held from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturday, Aug. 7, at the Waterrock Knob Visitor Center between Balsam and Maggie Valley.

The festivities, called “Blue Ridge Parkway: 75 Years of Heritage and Communities” will have a variety of free, ongoing craft demonstrations throughout the day as entertainment.

The entertainment lineup includes Cherokee Dancers at 10:30 a.m. and 1 p.m., Old Time Appalachian Music by the Bean Town Boys at 11 a.m., Ammon sisters storytelling at noon and the Francis Family Bluegrass band at 2 p.m.

Demonstrations will include potters, blacksmith, woodcarvers, quilting and yarn spinning. David Brewin will have Nannie the Plott Hound on display and will talk about the famed state dog bred for hunting bears.

Food will be available for purchase from Soul Infusion Tea House & Bistro.

To mountain communities, the coming of the Blue Ridge Parkway 75 years ago was seen as economic salvation.

It would provided much-needed construction jobs to a region ravaged by the Depression and ultimately bring a parade of tourists seeking natural scenery.

The Parkway symbolized America’s newfound love affair with the automobile, increasingly accessible to the

middle-class yet still a novelty.

“The Parkway was conceived very much in the vein that the car would be a pleasure vehicle,” said Ted Coyle, an anthropologist at Western Carolina University. “When the Parkway was built, no one had the idea that you would take your car to go shopping. Cars were to go out and take scenic drives with.”

Today, the Parkway seems intrinsic to the mountains and carries a sense of entitlement to the millions of locals and tourists who enjoy it annually.

“It makes us feel like the Parkway was inevitable somehow, that someone thought it up wholesale, saw the

mountains and put it right out there on the land,” said Anne Whisnant, a leading Parkway historian and author at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

But the Parkway could easily have been something quite different. It was beset by social and political battles, which shaped and reshaped its route through the landscape from its conception in the early 1930s until

its eventual completion in 1987.

No sooner had President Roosevelt endorsed the Blue Ridge Parkway under the New Deal in 1933 than a raging debate broke out between North Carolina and Tennessee about which state would win the Parkway.

It had but one parameter at first: connect Shenandoah National Park with the Great Smoky Mountains. Designers soon crafted a route that would send the Parkway veering out of North Carolina and into Tennessee around Grandfather Mountain, bypassing the established tourist magnate of Asheville entirely and bringing traffic to the Smokies via Tennessee’s doorstep.

Asheville business leaders and politicians were distraught. The Depression had brought the city to its knees, and Asheville leaders saw the Parkway as a life or death proposition.

“If the Parkway were diverted from Asheville, it seemed the situation would be entirely and permanently hopeless,” Whisnant said. “The state of North Carolina got busy writing Tennessee out of the picture.”

Asheville politicians and business leaders mounted a masterful campaign to reroute the road past their city, enlisting far reaching support from the local tourist industry to the state house and governor’s mansion.

North Carolina “flung down the gauntlet” in its bid to cut Tennessee out and the “battle for the Parkway was on,” Fred Weede, director of the Asheville Chamber of Commerce at the time, wrote in his personal account of the year-long fight. Giving the Parkway to Tennessee would be an “appalling disaster,” Weede wrote in his retrospective.

The North Carolina contingency argued that God anointed them with better scenery and higher mountains. To put the Parkway anywhere else would be an affront to the Creator. But they realized that alone would not be enough to prevail.

“God had given us better scenery but man’s strategy and energy had to win the Parkway,” Weede wrote. “There were numerous tight spots encountered in shaping up a unified front. Iron hands were sometimes necessary.”

Masterful campaign

North Carolina’s campaign would not be an easy one. President Roosevelt had already endorsed the three-state route for the Parkway in a proclamation from the summer of 1933. Tennessee was well-established as the primary gateway to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park with park headquarters located there.

The Bureau of Public Roads, which would oversee eventual construction, also preferred the Tennessee route. The mountains around Asheville were the steepest and highest in the Appalachian chain, and building a road across them was seen as too expensive and challenging.

Even the landscape architects tasked with the Parkway’s design favored the lower-lying Tennessee route to provide a diversity of scenery, rather than subjecting travelers to mile upon mile of scenic but repetitive high-elevation peaks.

In an early strategy meeting held at the Asheville Chamber of Commerce, Weede impressed on the gathering the enormity of their attempt to turn the tide.

“I asserted we should face the fact we were licked before we began. But as dedicated citizens we should roll up our sleeves and fight,” Weede recounted.

Under mounting pressure from the North Carolina delegation to at least consider its pleas, Department of Interior Secretary Harold Ickes appointed a special committee tasked with selecting a route. The two states squared off in a public showdown before that committee in February 1934. In the hearing, the dueling states had three hours to present their cases.

North Carolina arrived with a well-orchestrated pitch, including large maps and photos of the “best” route for the Parkway. While several speakers made remarks, the bulk of the presentation was deferred to Getty Browning, a top road engineer with the N.C. Highway Commission, who had emerged as an effective point man for the North Carolina route.

Realizing the hue and cry from Asheville business leaders would do little to bend the committee’s ear, Browning instead focused on what he considered more objective reasoning: the superior scenery of the high mountains around Asheville.

As a locating engineer, Browning often set out cross-country on foot, climbing rugged mountains in search of the most ideal highway routes and had personally blazed every mile of the Parkway corridor North Carolina was proposing.

“He was the man on the ground in the literal sense,” said Houck Medford, director of the Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation. “He walked the Blue Ridge Parkway boundary an untold number of times. He was certainly a man’s man, but he had these other attributes and qualities that made him successful.”

He was a well-heeled socialite — charismatic, persuasive and politically savvy — yet with the mind of an engineer and persona of an outdoorsman.

Throughout the hard-fought crusade fraught with political wars and the feuding business interests, Browning kept his sights fixed on true purpose behind the Parkway.

“For Browning, it was ultimately about letting other people see the beauty of the mountains the way he saw it. There is something noble in that,” Whisnant said. “It would be useable by everyone. It would be available for free. It wouldn’t be overly controlled by commercial or monetary influences. It had something to do with our spirit.”

Following the hearing, the committee decided to take a tour of the North Carolina route. A caravan of 15 cars left Washington in March. The traveling party included many of the key players within with the National Park Service, Department of Interior and Bureau of Public Roads who would later shepherd the Parkway’s design and construction.

Since no good roads existed along much of the proposed route for the Parkway, the party planned to take side roads up and down the mountains to get a feel for the general terrain where the Parkway might pass. But the traveling party encountered a major snowstorm after crossing into North Carolina. Some gave up on the expedition in Blowing Rock. Those who ventured on to Asheville through the snow, ice and fog quite nearly didn’t make it. They later resorted to viewing the routes from the air.

Refining a strategy

As the summer of 1934 dragged on, the North Carolina contingency grew anxious. The committee tasked with recommending a route was mum.

The strategists didn’t let the downtime go to waste, however. They constantly refined their arguments and enlisted new messengers to lobby on their behalf in Washington. They met often to plan and carry out a campaign Weede later described as a “mosaic.”

“Road blocks, and they were plentiful, were approached from all angles and various solutions were weighed,” Weede wrote. “Between us — even if otherwise disposed — all cards had to put on the table face up.”

They heralded the already developed tourist industry in Asheville, ready and able to provide Parkway travelers with the type of amenities they would expect, compared to the more industrial nature of Knoxville.

They also pointed out the dearth of New Deal spending in their state. Tennessee was meanwhile the recipient of huge federal investments from the massive network of hydroelectric dams being construction by the Tennessee Valley Authority.

Newspapers played an integral role as well. The publisher of the Asheville Citizen, Charles Webb, brought the full force of his newsprint to bear for the campaign and convinced newspapers elsewhere in the state to follow his lead.

The strategists left no stone unturned, even throwing an extravagant dinner in honor of the wife of the Secretary of Interior at the Grove Park Inn when she visited Asheville.

But the centerpiece of the campaign came in the form of a red, Moroccan-leather bound photo album with a gold engraving of Roosevelt on the cover to be hand delivered to the President by an Asheville contingency. The photos showcased the scenery of the mountains around Asheville — scenery that would be left out by a Tennessee route.

The photos were culled from the collection of George Masa, a famous Japanese photographer who documented landscape scenes in Western North Carolina, while others were shot by a paid photographer escorted by Browning for the sole purpose of the project.

While much of the campaign was mounted on a shoestring due to the Depression, the nearly bankrupt Asheville Chamber of Commerce funded the production of the album, which included an inside pocket with a hand-drawn relief map of their favored route and artfully-lettered titles over each photo.

Final showdown

With still no word from the committee, Secretary of Interior Ickes announced that he would personally preside over a final hearing before selecting the route in September 1934.

A testament to the sophisticated campaign by the North Carolina delegation, a strategy was mounted to pack the hearing with their own supporters. A special train was chartered to carry their entourage to Washington. It was 18 Pullman cars long when it left Asheville with more tacked on as it traveled across the state, including a car for the governor.

A memo was read out to every car on the train instructing them to show up early for the hearing the next day. When the appointed hour arrived, nearly every chair in the room was filled by the North Carolina delegation, relegating Tennessee to standing room and the hallway outside.

Throughout the summer, Browning had bolstered his engineering case in preparation for such a final hearing, including large mounted photos offering a visual tour of the preferred route. The presentation wholly dwarfed that put on by Tennessee.

But unbeknownst to North Carolina, their opponent had an ace up its sleeve. Earlier that morning, the committee tasked with recommending a route had finally issued its decision: It unanimously favored the Tennessee route. The report was leaked to Tennessee and, although Ickes had likewise received a copy that morning, Tennessee’s delegation proudly flaunted it during the hearing.

“The announcement was a bombshell for us,” Weede wrote. “We looked at each other with considerable consternation. It was no light matter.”

To side with North Carolina, Ickes would have to rebuff his own committee.

But North Carolina had an ace of its own — one known to only a handful of key players within the campaign. It wasn’t revealed for nearly two decades and still remains a largely unknown turning point in the great routing debate.

“This ace was a very hush-hush move. No more than half a dozen individuals were in on the secret,” Weede wrote.

North Carolina’s clandestine trump card was a man named Josephus Daniels, a newspaper tycoon in the state with a summer home at Lake Junaluska near Waynesville, N.C., a town west of Asheville.

Daniels, a supporter of the North Carolina route, had personal connections that reached straight to the top. He served as the Secretary of the Navy during WWI, and his assistant secretary and right-hand man was none other than Roosevelt. Daniels was friends with Ickes to boot.

Daniels was reluctant to exploit his personal friendship with Roosevelt and Ickes, however, and throughout the agonizing spring and summer of 1934, Daniels refused to pull that lever.

“How to get him to move was our big problem,” Weede recounted.

One summer evening, Weede and Charles Webb, the publisher of the Asheville Citizen, and two other compatriots set out from Asheville to Lake Junaluska to confront what Weede called “the Daniels’ problem” head on. They arrived on the porch of Daniels’ summer home to find him already chatting with none other than Getty Browning. Daniels had clear moral objections to what the men were asking.

“Indeed our own consciences had to be stifled in urging a man to lay aside his lofty and sincere ideals of propriety and the niceties of friendship and perform an act to aid his state in its rugged battle for a great project,” Weede wrote. “It was no easy task to out argue him. But we were four against one. And we were sincere and desperate.”

They spent three hours lobbying Daniels on his porch that night, according to Weede’s account. But they left with the wording of a telegram Daniels scribbled on the back of an envelope asking Ickes for a meeting that Weede would wire the next morning.

Daniels met with both Ickes and Roosevelt that week and continued his conversations with Ickes leading up to the final showdown in September.

Two more months of waiting passed before Ickes made the announcement in November 1934 that the full route would go to North Carolina. Tennessee was livid and chastised Ickes for overruling his own advisory committee, and even appealed to Roosevelt to overturn the decision but to no avail.

The Last Front

With a route in hand, construction was imminent. But Browning’s general strokes on a map were a long way from being fixed on the landscape. The tug-of-war for the Parkway would now play out between villages and neighbors.

“You are going through a populated landscape with farms and communities. They all had different ideas about where the Parkway should go and what it should be,” Whisnant said.

While the federal government was putting up money for construction, buying rights of way fell to the states. The fabled road suddenly wasn’t so appealing to farmers along the proposed route who faced the reality of losing their land. Early descriptions of the Parkway called for a right of way of only 200 feet. But designers and engineers realized it must be five times that at least.

“If you are going to have a scenic parkway you have to preserve the scenery. They had to do that with a wide right of way,” Whisnant said. “That was a shock to landowners. It was much wider than a regular road.”

The rhetoric used when selling the Parkway wasn’t playing out like locals were led to believe. The great economic benefit seemed to evaporate with they found they couldn’t build roads and driveways from neighboring land onto the Parkway.

“Road building before that was always about giving people a way in and out,” Whisnant said.

Instead, the Parkway would have only a few appointed entrances. The Parkway was prone to trespassing and vandalism by disgruntled landowners along its length.

“A few said ‘I’m going to bulldoze a road from my property to the Parkway and there’s nothing you can do to stop me,’” Whisnant said. Others cut trees on Parkway right of way to purposely despoil roadside views.

Meanwhile, business interests were dismayed to learn they couldn’t put up billboards or signs along the route.

“It was supposed to benefit tourism but how is it going to benefit tourism if we can’t put up signs to direct people to our businesses?” Whisnant said of the sentiment. “This was sold to us as a tourism prospect but it is not.”

To make matters worse, the Parkway built its own diners and gas stations, a form of direct competition that gave tourists no compelling reason to exit the motorway.

There were also inevitable conflicts with landowners about the price being offered for rights of way. Some of the more admirable opponents were Hugh Morton of Grandfather Mountain and Harriet Clarkeson of Little Switzerland, two already developed tourism enterprises along the Parkway’s route north of Asheville. They not only understood the legal process but had political clout to take their case to the media.

Others simply lamented the passing of an era symbolized by the coming of the Parkway. Bill Watson, born in 1923, remembers when the Parkway came through the small community of Benge Gap near Boone, claiming part of his father’s farm and general store in 1938. His dad built a new one, but it wasn’t the same.

The Parkway brought rapid change to the barter-based economy that once played out inside the general store. Customers would haul in chestnuts, herbs, eggs, chickens, lumber, furs and even livestock to trade for goods from Watson’s father. Suddenly, Watson’s father found himself selling root beer to tourists.

“He much didn’t like it. He was used to being in a quiet place,” Watson said in an oral history preserved in the Parkway’s archives.

Watson moved away as a young man, but came back in the early ‘60s with a proposition for his father. He wanted to build a motel and restaurant in hopes of catering to Parkway tourists. His father was reluctant, but Watson eventually won out.

“He said that ‘Bill had lost his mind to spend his money on a motel and restaurant,’” Watson recounted. “Then so many people started coming in.”

And so it goes today. With nearly 17 million visitors every year, the Blue Ridge Parkway was indeed a prize worth fighting for.

“Certainly our forefathers, when they had the vision for the Parkway, were right on target,” said Lynn Minges, director of the N.C. Division of Tourism. “It has done exactly what they intended it to do.”

Each July since 1991, I’ve led field trips along the Blue Ridge Parkway offered as part of the Native Plants Conference sponsored by Western Carolina University. This year’s outings (July 25) will have taken place by the time you read this.

Between Waterrock Knob and Mt. Pisgah, the eight participants in my group will identify perhaps eight fern species, several grasses, a few lichens, maybe a mushroom or two, and more than 100 wildflower species, including wild quinine, large-flowered leafcup, bush honeysuckle, green wood orchis, starry campion, Indian paintbrush, enchanter’s nightshade, Small’s beardtongue, downy skullcap, tall delphenium, pale Indian plantain, tall bellflower, southern harebell, horsebalm, round-leaved sundew, Blue Ridge St. Johnswort and false asphodel.

No group of flowering plants along the Parkway, however, will be of more interest to participants than the “Monardas,” a genus in the mint family that includes the ever-popular bee balm. There are two other distinct “Monarda” species — wild bergamot and basil balm — that appear in this section of the Southern Blue Ridge Province in addition to a hybrid backcross called purple bergamont.

“Monardas” are sometimes called horsemints because “horse” signifies “large” or “coarse,” and the members of this genus are generally larger, coarser plants than many other members of the mint family.  In this instance “coarse is beautiful.” Most of the horsemints have quite appropriately been introduced into cultivation.

Here’s a checklist of those three horsemint species and the hybrid found in the Western North Carolina mountains. All flower from mid-June into September and can be readily located along the parkway, especially in the areas of the Grassy Ridge Mine (milepost 436.8) and Standing Rock Overlook (milepost 441.4).

• Bee balm, also called crimson bee balm or Oswego tea (Monarda didyma): occasional in moist, shaded situations; adapted by scarlet color long tubular shape of flowers for pollination by hummingbirds, but often “robbed” by bees and other insects that bore “bungholes” at the base of the corolla tube; note the reddish leaf-like bracts just below the flowers; called “bee balm” because it made a poultice that soothed stings; sometimes called Oswego tea because of its use as a steeped medicinal by the Oswego Indians of New York; generic name honors an European botanist, Nicholas Monarda, who had an interest in medically useful plants from the New World. No red flower — save, of course, cardinal flower — is more resplendent. And like cardinal flower, this member of the mint family often haunts a lush and dark setting so that when it catches slanting light the flaming crimson gleams like a beacon.

• Wild bergamot (M. fistulosa): common but variable species flowering in open fields, meadows, and on dry wooded slopes; petals are usually lilac or pinkish-purple (rarely white) with the upper lip bearded at the apex; bracts often pink-tinged; frequently visited by butterflies; oil with an odor resembling essence of bergamot was once extracted from the plant to treat respiratory ailments; brewed as tea by the Cherokee for many ailments, including flatulence and hysterics.

• Basil balm (M. clinopodia): occasional in both moist and dry woods and thickets; similar to wild bergamot but with paler pink or white flowers that have purple spots on lower lip and whitish bracts; common name indicates that it was used like bee balm as a poultice. Wild bergamot and basil balm often interbreed along the parkway.

• Purple bergamot (M. media): an infrequently encountered natural hybrid backcross of the above species displaying deep reddish-purple flowers and dark purple bracts; habitat about the same as bee balm, so look for color differences between scarlet of that species and deep purple for the hybrid; despite the hybrid status it’s reliably distinctive and exciting to encounter.

Note: Excellent colored illustrations of each of these horsemints appear opposite p. 92 of Newcomb’s Wildflower Guide (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1977).  Dotted horsemint (M. punctata), which has purple-spotted yellow flowers, is primarily a species of the piedmont and coastal plain that does not — to my knowledge — appear in the Southern Blue Ridge Province.

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..