Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, October 23, 1994 TAG: 9410240075
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: CHARLOTTESVILLE LENGTH: Medium
``They purposefully leave people with the false impression that all the land was donated, which is a slap in the face to the people who had to watch as their homes were burned down,'' said Lisa Berry, president of Children of Shenandoah.
Park spokesman Sandy Rives said members of the group have a legitimate complaint and some of the information given to tourists may be changed. ``People were moved out of the park and we recognize that,'' Rives said.
Park officials have been correcting visitor presentations that negatively portray the former inhabitants of the hills and hollows that now form the park, he said.
``In the past five years we've made tremendous changes in our interpretative programs,'' Rives said. ``We've stopped all presentations that called them hillbillies, uneducated or backwoods people.''
Between 1924 and 1936, the state and federal governments worked together to create Shenandoah National Park along the Blue Ridge Mountains. Scholars say between 500 and 800 families had to leave their farms and homes in eight counties to accommodate the park.
The state condemned large chunks of land and turned them over to the federal government. Some of the previous owners had to be forcibly removed to the relocation sites.
``There are pictures of a pregnant woman being removed by two large men,'' Berry said Friday, ``and another one of an elderly man being handcuffed.''
Berry, whose grandmother had to leave her home to make way for the park, formed Children of Shenandoah in May to help descendants of the families hang on to their mountain heritage.
The group, which has 160 members, wants park officials to make several changes to the material visitors read and view, because it thinks some presentations are slanted.
For example:
A 20-minute video shown every half-hour at the visitor center at Big Meadows portrays the mountain people as being uniquely destitute. The video does not mention, Berry noted, that people all across the country were destitute during the Great Depression.
A guidebook put out by the park leaves the reader with the impression that the land was donated.
A window display at the Big Meadows visitor center shows a mountain man on his front porch with a barren landscape behind him. The inscription refers to the land as being depleted and says ``the mountain man's hope lay in the land beyond the coves.'' However, Berry said, the photo was taken during the winter when the landscape naturally looked barren and, furthermore, many people were happy living in the mountains. Last year students in a research methods class at Germanna Community College in Locust Grove studied how the park's history is presented.Suzanne Crane, the assistant professor who taught the class, said roadside markers and other materials consistently say the mountain residents exploited their land.
The students, Ms. Crane said, ``were shocked and angry because they realized that a tourist would assume that the mountain people had to be removed because they devastated their own land.''
Rives said park materials do let people know of the treatment of the land's former inhabitants, but maybe not to the degree that Children of Shenandoah would like.
by CNB