
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, September 12, 1995                   TAG: 9509120059
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

THE PARKWAY

THE ROUNDED peaks of the Blue Ridge Mountains attest to the fact that these are among the oldest mountains in the country. Sixty years hardly register in the history of the worn slopes that grace our region.

The passage of six decades has likewise been but a flicker in time to many farm families living along the Blue Ridge Parkway, families who in some cases had worked the land for generations before the scenic highway cut through their rolling fields and along the highland plateaus that offer 2.7 million visitors a year breathtaking views of lushly vegetated mountains and valleys.

Sixty years, and the memories still are bitter.

Yet their individual grievances - in some cases recalled with understandable pain and animosity - should not eclipse the wondrous national treasure that was the result.

The Blue Ridge Parkway is a gem, drawing millions upon millions over the years to drive its winding roadway, to see and revel at the face of an American landscape as familiar as their childhoods to many, as strange and intriguing to others as the craggy peaks of the Rockies appear to Appalachian Mountain folk.

We are, each of us, enriched by the opportunity to see this land, our land.

The irony is that this project caused hurt to some who have known the land and loved it best. Stories of high-handed rangers and the midnight knock at the door to tell a property owner his land had been condemned cause groans of sympathy nowadays (though some of the stories may have gotten worse through the decades). Ensuring that the parkway became a scenic roadway, as intended, was more a process of enforcement than education, apparently, and efficiency bulldozed its way over diplomacy in the push to acquire property rights.

It is gratifying that relations between parkway rangers and neighbors are more congenial these days.

Still, the lessons learned do not and should not abrogate the long-established principle of eminent domain that applied equally in the mountains of Virginia as it did, and does still, in crowded cities throughout the country. Land needed for public use is acquired, by condemnation if necessary and for a fair price, to make way for roads and schools and water treatment plants - all of the common uses to which the public puts land to meet the common needs of civilized society.

It must be so.

by CNB