Virginia

Skyline Drive was built to be looked at from. The road runs about 105 miles along the crest of the Blue Ridge through Shenandoah National Park, and nearly every turn was planned around a view. There are more than 70 overlooks, each one a place to pull off and see the Shenandoah Valley spread out on one side or the Piedmont rolling away on the other.

Construction began in 1931 and ran through the decade. Much of the stonework, the low walls along the edge, the overlooks and the trails was done by young men in the Civilian Conservation Corps, the New Deal program that put the unemployed to work in parks and forests. Shenandoah National Park was established in 1935, and the drive was completed in 1939.

There is a harder side to the story. The land for the park was not empty. Several hundred families lived in the mountain hollows, farming small plots, and the state of Virginia acquired their land and moved them out. Photographers documented some of those families and their homes before they left, and those pictures sit quietly alongside the scenic views.

The rest of Virginia carries more history than almost any other state. Jamestown was founded in 1607. Williamsburg was the colonial capital. Washington lived at Mount Vernon and Jefferson at Monticello. Richmond was the capital of the Confederacy, and more Civil War battles were fought in Virginia than anywhere else. Pictures from the state tend to divide along those lines, between colonial houses and churches, Civil War fields and ruins, and the tobacco farms and small towns of everyday life.

In the Skyline Drive pictures, look at how young the trees are. Much of the Blue Ridge had been logged, farmed and grazed before the park was created, and photographs from the 1930s often show open slopes and thin second growth where there is thick forest today. The park was in a real sense allowed to grow back.