DATE: Monday, March 31, 1997                TAG: 9703310090

SECTION: FRONT                   PAGE: A1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY CALVIN WOODWARD, ASSOCIATED PRESS 

DATELINE: LURAY, VA.                        LENGTH:  105 lines

UPENDED LIVES IS LEGACY OF CREATING SHENANDOAH PARK SERVICE WORKS TO TELL STORY OF HOW GOVERNMENT DISLOCATED PEOPLE FOR A PARK.

Now comes the Appalachian spring. The black bears are pawing for grubs and acorns. The woodcocks are well into their mating rituals at Big Meadows. Clouds of Canada geese are moving north.

Nothing much disturbs nature in Shenandoah National Park, except Skyline Drive, running along the backbone of the Blue Ridge mountains.

No one has lived there for generations. Not since Franklin Roosevelt's government forced people off the mountains, assigned them property in the flatlands, promised homes with bathtubs and said they'd be better off below.

As Washington prepares to dedicate its FDR memorial in May, the National Park Service is struggling to tell in a new way the story of how people were removed to create a natural treasure.

In part, Park Service historian Reed Engle says, that story is about ``the flip side of Roosevelt'' and his time, along with the ``gross moral judgments'' made to justify the resettlement of the mountain people.

Some prospered, some withered.

They were portrayed as hillbillies who slept on corn stalks, their children needing their heads smeared with lard and turpentine to kill lice.

``Money didn't buy Shenandoah Park,'' says Randolph Shifflett, who was 8 when government men torched his family farm. ``It was bought with tears, heartaches, grief and hardship.''

In the 1930s, nature could be brutalized for industry, progress and Depression-era jobs. People could be cast aside if man decided to save nature.

``We own these people's pasts,'' Engle says. ``We've got an obligation to preserve it factually, and to work with everybody to find out what that past is.''

Now oak, poplar and hemlock crowd once-cleared land. Stone walls and artifacts - a bedstead here, a Buck Rogers space-gun toy there - are among remnants of the mountain homes.

Most of the park, stretching more than 100 miles along the eastern rampart of the Appalachians, is forested - a jewel in America's early environmental legacy.

Authorities knew back then that just as nature heals itself over time, the bitterness of the displaced people would someday vanish.

That reality approaches, as Shenandoah's last children slip into their 70s and 80s. But their grievances remain, older than the trees.

``The older I get,'' said Virginia Baugher, 75, ``the more it bothers me.''

Her past is the kind the park service is trying to capture through archaeology, computer mapping and firsthand, if distant, memories.

Baugher remembers a different life than that portrayed until recently, when the park removed what came to be seen as disparaging exhibits of the mountain people.

She remembers her father coming up the mountain from the tannery, the light on his cap bobbing in the dark.

``Him and my mother would pick apples and slice them, spread newspapers on the roof and dry the apples,'' she said. For Christmas, the family cracked nuts and sold them to raise money for candy and dolls.

``I never went hungry,'' she said. ``I never slept cold. If everybody could have stayed like it was, it was fine.

``It was nonsense taking all that land.''

An estimated 4,000 people lived on the mountains in the 1920s when Congress authorized the park's creation. Drought and chestnut blight drove many away.

Ultimately, 204 families moved to designated resettlement communities.

Today, survivors have sharp recollections of old indignities, no matter how they made out in life.

Yet ``outsiders'' or ``politics'' are often blamed, not the president who put many of them to work in the Civilian Conservation Corps, giving them jackhammers and hope even as their mountain existence was shattered.

Indeed, desperate poverty coexisted with subsistence farming and logging.

But the workers who moved in to erase the human imprint made no distinction between the likes of Li'l Abner and the Waltons.

Arnold Via, 72, saw both sides. His father was a moonshiner who got real work after the resettlement and ``made out pretty good for being an old mountain boy.''

His maternal grandfather had a good mountain home. ``One day, a government man knocked on the door and said, `We're taking your place, here's a check.'

``He moved to the flat country,'' Via said. ``He wasn't broke, money-wise. Money don't mend a broken heart.''

On balance, he thinks resettlement might have benefited many. ``We couldn't go on all marrying our cousins.''

Shifflett's family sued to keep their farm and, when that failed, squatted until the government men came with matches.

``Before we got out of sight they had the big barn and houses up in smoke,'' he said.

Still, Shifflett was enthused about moving and getting on with a normal boy's life. Not so his grandparents, who owned the farm and knew nothing else.

``When you sat on your porch and watched the sun set for 50 years, it's kind of hard to get in somebody else's rocking chair,'' he said.

Workers sculpted and planted the land. Since then the park has been increasingly entrusted to nature's own rhythms.

Now spring's renewal has begun, with the first butterfly spotted and the male woodcocks impressing mates by flying straight up, diving and leveling off.

Children of the Shenandoah, a group made up of mountain people and descendants, is working with the park to get a fuller story told and raise money for the effort.

Officials are videotaping interviews with homesteaders and former conservation corps workers. A portion of the park's new fee increase is to go to the exploration of their history.

One goal is to redo the film, called ``The Gift,'' at the visitor's center, which mentions only passingly that not everyone left willingly.

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