Byrd Visitor Center — The Park Was Created by Removing Communities
Listen at the stop, then read the transcript and follow the sources behind the story.
Listen
Transcript
Several hundred families lived on land that became Shenandoah National Park. The National Park Service now explicitly recognizes that many residents were forced to leave as Virginia acquired and condemned property for the park. Officials often described mountain communities through paternalistic stereotypes, claiming relocation would improve lives. Those assumptions influenced policy as much as conservation goals did. The visitor centre at Big Meadows is a good place to confront that history because it represents the public institution that inherited the landscape. Shenandoah was not made by protecting an unoccupied forest. It was made through a legal and political process that transferred inhabited land into a national park.