Secrets of the Blue Ridge: Lost Communities of the Blue Ridge

[mahatmakanejeeves]

3. It's not a new story. Here's what the great Eddie Dean wrote in the Washington City Paper in 1997:

Appalachian Trail of Tears

Sixty years ago they were evicted from the Blue Ridge to make way for Shenandoah National Park. But the refugees haven't forgotten their lost mountain homes.

by EDDIE DEAN
FEBRUARY 28TH, 1997

When the men in dark suits first came to the mountains, the boy thought them exceedingly odd creatures. ... Though barely more than a tot, the boy had already seen many a stranger pass by his daddy’s farm on the east side of the Blue Ridge Mountains. After all, the 34-acre spread sloped all the way down to the meandering dirt road that cut through Swift Run Gap. Travelers used the well-worn route to make the journey between the Shenandoah Valley to the west and the rolling Virginia piedmont to the east.

It was the Depression, and many were drifters from the lowlands, looking for work and shelter and maybe a scrap of food along the way. The boy’s family would often leave bottles of fresh milk for them in the creek that trickled cold spring water below the farm. Despite the hard times, the cash-poor farm people could afford to be generous. They had cattle, horses, sheep, and turkey, along with other livestock; they had myriad vegetable gardens and orchards of apple, peach, and cherry trees. The altitude protected the crops from the bugs and blight down below.

Much of the nation was a dust bowl, but up here in the Blue Ridge -- or at least in this snug hollow between Saddleback and Hightop mountains -- the land was forgiving. ... All kinds of stragglers stopped by the farm, and no one was turned away. But the men in suits didn’t behave like most visitors, who were usually polite and gracious. These newcomers weren’t here for handouts, and they offered no greetings. Instead, they sauntered around in their city shoes all businesslike, as if they owned the place.

The boy and his siblings were curious about these silent strangers and peppered them with all sorts of questions. “We’d ask ’em, ‘What’s your name?’ You know, we were kids,” recalls Fred Collier, now a white-haired, ruddy-faced man of 71. “They’d say, ‘You don’t have a need to know.’”

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