Ninety years ago, in July 1936, President Franklin D. Roosevelt stood at Big Meadows to dedicate Shenandoah National Park. That first year, nearly 700,000 visitors came to see the new park, and a million came the year after. The crowds still come. On a recent Monday at peak autumn color, the overlooks were busy, and a ranger told me the weekend before had been "an absolute zoo."
At the entrance, I received a handout about the park, featuring its early years. In among the dedication and visitor figures was a single sentence noting that the first superintendent set aside Resettlement Administration funds to build homes for displaced residents.
One sentence. Behind it are the families who lived in these mountains for generations, with their farms, orchards, churches, and graves, and the homes they left behind when the park was created.
The same day, I walked the trail into Nicholson Hollow, one of the best-known of those mountain communities. A placard at the trailhead shows a photograph of an elderly man, John "Russ" Nicholson, a prominent local patriarch, spreading out sliced apples to dry outside his home just months before the local mountain families were permanently displaced to establish Shenandoah National Park. It was taken in 1935 by Arthur Rothstein, a young photographer documenting rural America for the Resettlement Administration, much as photographer Nate Bernstein does in the novel. The stone remains of the Nicholson family’s homestead, along with a one-room cabin and chimney ruin, can still be seen along the trail.
I have passed that placard many times, and it has always left me uneasy. It presents the hollow's residents as rustic and colorful, picturesque figures from a vanished past, while saying little about the families themselves: what they built, what they believed, and what they lost. That photograph became part of my inspiration for Enduring Fire.
In the novel, a young man named Will Everett comes to the Blue Ridge in 1935 to document the last stages of what the park’s founders envisioned as a gift to present and succeeding generations. The mountain people he meets are not curiosities. They are farmers, fiddlers, churchgoers, and neighbors, with long memories and opinions of their own. When Will fully understands what the project will cost them, he must decide whether to remain safely silent or tell their story to the readers of the Washington Post and beyond.
As the park celebrates its ninetieth year, I hope we can acknowledge two truths together: the beauty of a place that millions now treasure, and the legacy of families whose homes once stood where we hike. Next time you walk a trail through one of these hollows, look for the foundation stones in the woods. They are still there.
Enduring Fire will be published this winter. In a couple of weeks, I'll share the book's cover here.
If you'd like to read a glimpse of the story now, I invite you to join the readers' list. New subscribers receive a free story, "Calling on the Widow in 1935,” about the courtship of Will Everett and Evelyn Grant.