Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, September 11, 1995 TAG: 9509110145
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: COPPER HILL LENGTH: Long
The Blue Ridge Parkway is among the gentlest of roads - a rolling green preserve of pastoral America.
Tourists along the 470-mile scenic highway behold weathered barns, gnarled orchards and meadows littered with lichen-trimmed rock. It is a landscape of innocence.
But to Floyd County farmers who gave up their land when the Parkway was created 60 years ago today, it has been far from gentle or innocent. The Parkway forced many from their homes and split priceless farmland in two, half a farm on one side of the road and half on the other side. The bitterness still lies as deep as the quartz veins in these Blue Ridge foothills.
"You want to know what the people who live on it call it?" Ruby Beckner, 64, said of the Parkway.
"The hell road."
Beckner's great-grandfather, George Anthony King, a sergeant in the Confederate army, is buried by the Parkway. The Kings had farmed 100 acres of this fertile mountain land since the 1700s.
Beckner, 64, was a little girl when the Commonwealth of Virginia shoved her kin off some of their best pastures and gave the land to the Parkway. It was a few years after the National Park Service broke ground for the Parkway on Sept. 11, 1935.
"They paid him some, but not what the value of land was. He didn't want to sell," she said of her grandfather, John Radford King. The state, acquiring the land for donation to the National Park Service, took his wheat field and "the prettiest cabbage patch you ever saw." She said he quit farming after that.
Parkway officials and rangers had little respect for the mountain farmers, said her husband, Aubrey Beckner, 66. "They treated them like dirt."
In the 1970s, the Beckners relinquished their 70-acre farm, adjacent to the King holdings. Aubrey Beckner still trembles when he recalls how a U.S. marshal came to his door at midnight to tell him his property was being condemned for the Parkway and he had 30 days to decide whether to fight it. The Beckners fought it in court and lost.
A year later, the Beckners sold their home of 35 years and the 10 surrounding acres. It's been torn down. A white hydrangea and a lilac bush are all that remains of their yard. The government paid for their new house - a spacious, wood-paneled home nestled in the woods east of the Parkway - and allows the Beckners to graze their cattle rent-free on their old farm.
The Beckners have no complaints about how they are treated by current Parkway rangers. "Right now, it's fine," Ruby Beckner said. "They don't bother us, they don't harass us. They don't fine us no more."
But they and longtime neighbors said there long was a double standard along the Parkway. Tourists could picnic, park and haul trailers along the road, but local residents were fined $10 for leaving their trucks there and were stopped by rangers if they used the Parkway to drive to work. Residents were required to get permission to haul furniture or cattle from farm to farm.
When he and Ruby lived on the Parkway, Aubrey Beckner came home one day to find travelers roasting weenies in his driveway. He said a ranger told him, "That's OK. They can do it, as long as you don't."
Ruby Beckner said her father, Posey King, a farmer and state highway worker, parked at a Parkway overlook while he hunted ginseng on a neighbor's land. Rangers accused him of taking the plants from Parkway property and put him in jail. She said the case was dropped when her father requested a jury trial.
Several families told the story of a Bible-fearing farmer named Noah Shaver who got tired of beer cans that tourists tossed into his fields. He gathered up the cans and bottles and laid them along the Parkway. People said he was fined for littering.
Farmers were prohibited from selling eggs or vegetables along the Parkway. That made it harder than ever for Parkway residents to make a living, but many men got jobs building the road or working in a quarry that supplied materials for it.
Seth Poff, 72, picked and shoveled rock from the Parkway's path for a dime an hour. He said much of the road-building was done with horsedrawn plows and scoops.
There's long been pressure on property owners to shut down roads along the Parkway. Before the Beckners moved from their old house, Aubrey Beckner said, a ranger dumped three truckloads of rock and cinderblock on his old farm road. Beckner said it was to discourage him from using the farm lane. Beckner was so angry, he spat on the ground during a talk with the ranger. Beckner said the ranger told him, ```I can give you a ticket for that, too.' They'd give you a ticket for anything.''
The Beckners said things got better after they went to Atlanta years ago to complain to the Department of the Interior about rangers' rough treatment of people.
``It's `tourists this' and `tourists that,''' Ruby Beckner said of the Parkway. "They don't care about the people who live on it."
In Floyd County, the Blue Ridge Parkway's relations with local people seem nearly as traumatic as those of mountain families ousted from central Virginia counties to create the Shenandoah National Park in the 1930s, or black urban families removed from their homes across the country to create interstates, civic centers and other public projects in the 1950s and 1960s.
The Beckners and other Floyd County families said the government paid some people between $18 and $30 an acre for their land. Newspaper stories from the late 1930s indicate that Parkway planners prized the high Floyd County plateau, or "tablelands," for their spectacular Parkway views.
"I do know the going rate [for land] was $18 an acre, and if there was fruit trees on it they paid $20 a tree," said Reginald Hancock, who did Parkway maintenance for 34 years.
"They just paid so much an acre. Didn't make no difference whether it was good cropland or rough land or what it was," Clifford Shaver of Copper Hill said in an interview with Virginia Tech students two years ago. His grandfather's land was acquired for the Parkway.
Gary Everhardt, Parkway superintendent since 1977, said he finds the accounts of abuse by rangers and land purchasers "somewhat exaggerated."
He acknowledged that property prices in the Depression days of the 1930s were "pretty daggone cheap .... Who knows what went on?"
He reiterated that it was Virginia and North Carolina - not the Parkway - that acquired the land.
In defense of the rangers, Everhardt said that 60 years ago people thought the Parkway was just another highway. Rangers needed a few years to make sure residents understood it was a scenic highway, not just another hard-surface road for the locals.
Sylvia Poff, 80, was a young woman when her family learned that much of her family's farmland would be taken for the Parkway. "Took the best part there was. And they would take it regardless of what you wanted," she said. "Didn't nobody much like it."
What made the land-taking harder, said the Poffs, was that the government kept coming back for more.
A few years ago, she and her husband, Seth, sold their home for the Parkway, too. They go back there now, but the old log farmhouse is falling down. They found copperheads inside and out this summer.
The Poffs, like the Beckners, said the early, pistol-packing Parkway rangers were hard-nosed.
One ranger, now dead, is legendary for his fines and threats. "Oh, he said he'd give his mother a ticket," said Seth Poff. "He was giving somebody hell all the time." The ranger got a bullet through his hat one time as a sign of the animosity he'd aroused.
A reminder of the tense relations between local farmers and the Parkway is still visible in an old wooden barn just off the Parkway between mileposts 147 and 148.
The story goes that an old farmer's barn sat diagonally on the Parkway's property line. He reportedly refused to pay the government $2 a month for the small portion that rested on government land, so the Parkway came along and trimmed off the contested corner.
Seth Poff said, chuckling, "They made their point."
Memo: ***CORRECTION***