Shenandoah National Park, farm by farm

Before it was a park, this was home to hundreds of families. Here are the 3,087 tracts of land Virginia surveyed and took for the park in the 1920s and 1930s, with what the surveyors wrote down about each one.

Map of the tracts

The map shows tract boundaries only. Each of the eight counties has a stone chimney monument, built by the Blue Ridge Heritage Project, opens in a new tab to honor the families who were forced from their homes.

Search the owners' names and tract numbers.

By county

The park took land in eight counties. 2,892 tracts have a page here; the rest are on the map, where the record gives no owner or tract number.

How the park was made

Congress authorized Shenandoah National Park in May 1926, but the law barred federal money from buying the land. Virginia had to acquire it and give it to the United States. Virginians pledged money for the purchase, and the state took charge of acquiring the land. [6, 1, 2]

Between 1926 and 1928, surveyors for the Commonwealth mapped every property inside the proposed boundary. They described each house and barn and recorded orchards and timber, and they set a value on each tract. That survey is what each tract page here puts into plain words. [4, 3]

The land cost far more than anyone had expected. In March 1928 the General Assembly passed the Public Park Condemnation Act, which let the state take the land by eminent domain, whether or not its owners wanted to sell. Owners were taken to court in large groups: in Rockingham County, a single case named one owner “and others” and covered more than 52,000 acres. [6, 7, 1, 5]

The park was put together from more than 3,000 tracts in eight counties: Albemarle, Augusta, Greene, Madison, Page, Rappahannock, Rockingham and Warren. When the deeds went to Washington, about 465 families, some 2,200 people, still lived inside the boundary, and fewer than half of them owned the land they lived on. Federal officials decided that everyone had to leave. The National Park Service counts at least 500 families displaced. [2, 6, 1]

People lost homes their families had held for generations, along with the orchards, churches, schools and neighbors that went with them. Some went to court and lost. Many wrote to park and government officials, asking for more time, for their crops, or for a place to go. After families left, Civilian Conservation Corps crews took down their buildings and planted over the ground, to make the landscape look untouched. [1, 7, 2]

The government built seven homestead communities outside the park for families who had nowhere else to go. A few older residents were allowed to stay for the rest of their lives; the last of them died in 1979. President Franklin D. Roosevelt dedicated the park on July 3, 1936. [1]

Sources

  1. Encyclopedia Virginia, “Shenandoah National Park”, opens in a new tab
  2. National Park Service, Shenandoah National Park, “The Displaced”, opens in a new tab
  3. National Park Service, “One Tract at a Time” map release (2019), opens in a new tab
  4. Reed Engle and Caroline Janney, A Database of Shenandoah National Park Land Records (Shenandoah National Park Association, 1997), opens in a new tab
  5. James Madison University Libraries, Rockingham County Shenandoah National Park Records: condemnation cases, opens in a new tab
  6. Christine Homa, “Shenandoah National Park: The Human Cost of Conservation,” DttP: Documents to the People 49, no. 3/4 (American Library Association, 2021), opens in a new tab
  7. Katrina M. Powell, ed., “Answer at Once”: Letters of Mountain Families in Shenandoah National Park, 1934–1938 (University of Virginia Press), opens in a new tab

Source: National Park Service, Shenandoah National Park, Historic Land Tracts.