Virginia Took 181,000 Acres to Give Away. The Court Said a Newspaper Notice Was Enough.

The man in the chair was about to lose the ground under it. So was everyone else in these photographs.

In October 1935 a federal photographer drove down off the new Skyline Drive into the hollows of the Blue Ridge.

The signs at the turn said Do Not Enter. Below them were the families Virginia was putting out, so the state could give their land away. This is his file, and the paper behind it.

The negatives are black and white. The color was put on by a computer, this year. A good guess, not a record. The documents are as printed.

Start with the plan. In 1931 the Southern Appalachian National Park Commission sent the Secretary of the Interior its final report.

Inside it are the minutes of a meeting in February 1927.

Once the land was a park, "the people now residing within them would, under regulations prescribed by the Secretary of the Interior, be required to move outside the parks."

Virginia's man told them how many. "There were at least 5,000 homes within the area, which constituted a big problem in their work of listing and appraising."

The park's promoters filmed the mountain that year. The man with the field glasses is E. O. Fippin, treasurer of the state committee that was listing the land under him.

How it was taken is set out by a federal court in January 1935. Vye-uh against the State Commission on Conservation and Development. Three judges, Western District of Virginia.

"A suit in equity, the broad purpose of which is to invalidate the proceedings whereby the defendant, as an agency of the state of Virginia, has undertaken to acquire lands" for the Shenandoah National Park.

The court lays out the trick of it. Congress had said in 1926 that no park land "should be purchased by the United States, but should be secured by it only by public or private donation."

So Virginia passed a Public Park Condemnation Act in 1928, took the land itself, and gave it away. One proceeding per county, every tract in one petition.

Mr. Vye-uh's land in Albemarle County was appraised at three thousand two hundred and thirty dollars. The money was paid into court, and in December 1933 "a judgment was taken divesting the title."

He sued in November 1934, because the commission "is about to enter on plaintiff's land and eject him therefrom."

Nobody had offered to buy the land first, he said, and nobody had told him it was being condemned.

The court agreed the question was "one of far-reaching importance," reaching the Great Smokies and Mammoth Cave as well.

Then it answered. An offer to buy first "is not a condition precedent to condemnation proceedings."

Notice to the owner? "The statute provides for publication of notice in a newspaper of the county for four successive weeks."

"It is difficult to believe the assertion of the plaintiff that he had no notice of these proceedings."

"However that may be, actual notice was not necessary. The proceeding being in rem, notice by publication was sufficient."

Would it stay a park forever? "We cannot attribute bad faith to either the state of Virginia or the United States."

"There are few conditions in this changing world that can be guaranteed to continue for all time."

"An order will be entered denying the interlocutory injunction and dismissing the bill." January 12, 1935. The photographs are from October.

Corbin Hollow. The photographer was Arthur Rothstein of the Resettlement Administration, the agency that would have to house the people the state moved. "Dicee Corbin's cabin."

Dicee Corbin.

"Dicee Corbin with some of her children and grandchildren."

"Broken Back Run, a path to Dicee Corbin's cabin." Lower down, it was the hollow's water supply.

"Fanny Corbin, the mother of twenty-two children."

"Fannie Corbin with some of her children." He spelled her name two ways on two frames.

Two years earlier a Washington paper had already found this hollow. August 1933. "Forgotten People of Virginia Hollows Fight Grim Terror of Starvation."

Two cabins side by side. One empty, known as the Dead House, where a mother had died of tuberculosis. The other full of children. The paper asked readers for forty dollars, to cover a bank note.

"Fennel Corbin who is being resettled on new land."

The hollow had a school, and a teacher. "School teacher at Corbin Hollow."

Inside one of the houses. "Mountaineer's home, Corbin Hollow." The photographer's word, not mine.

"Making cornbread with relief flour."

"Inhabitant of Corbin Hollow." Two of his other captions here diagnose children. They are not repeated.

Over the ridge. "Road to Nicholson Hollow."

"Russ Nicholson, grandfather of all the Nicholsons in Nicholson Hollow."

"John Nicholson with some of the baskets he weaves." They were sold to tourists on the new road at the top of the mountain.

"Charles Nicholson and some of his children." Charles Nicholson, another caption says, "is being resettled on new land."

"Eddie Nicholson and some of his children." He too "will be resettled on new land."

"Eddie Nicholson's supply of cornstalks and apples for the winter." It was October. He was not going to be there for the winter.

"One of the men from Nicholson Hollow who has found employment at the nearby summer resort."

At the foot of the mountain, the village of Nethers. "Main street at Nethers."

"Inhabitants of Nethers in front of post office."

"One of the oldest inhabitants in the village of Nethers."

"Mrs. Dodson and some of her children." Another frame calls her the mother of nine.

"Home of family which is to be moved to Shenandoah National Park Homesteads. Old Rag." The first time the file names where they were going.

And out on the Lee Highway, "a cider and apple stand." That highway is where the fight had already happened.

Melanchthon Cliser ran a store and filling station on the Lee Highway under Thornton's Gap, on forty-six acres his grandfather had held. In August 1935 the Washington Times found him refusing to sell.

Three days later the paper counted. Of 350 families originally on the park land, 265 were still there. The sheriffs "admit they do not like their task."

October first, front page of the Evening Star. Cliser had locked himself in his kitchen. The officers reportedly talked about tear gas. He warned them "not to try it."

The Star sent a photographer. Mr. and Mrs. Cliser and their dog, on the steps of the home they refused to leave.

October third. "Shenandoah Park Evicts Man From Home of 61 Years. Singing National Anthem, Mountaineer Is Forced to Receive Handcuffs." He had refused four thousand eight hundred and fifty-five dollars.

The judge had told the sheriff to do it by noon or stand in contempt himself. The deputies drove up like customers. Cliser came out to serve them, and one took him by the wrist.

"You've got me, boys, but I ain't agoin' nowhere from now till Christmas."

It took four deputies to get him into the car. This is the Star's photograph of it.

The sheriff and a deputy carrying out the furniture. It was stacked beside the highway, and the Civilian Conservation Corps stood guard over it that night. Mrs. Cliser had told him not to put up a cent of bond.

Park officials told the paper "there will be no permanent residents left in the park when the land is transferred to the Federal Government."

The state said it acted "at the request of the National Park Service." The Park Service said it was watching as an "interested onlooker."

October fifth. Cliser gave up. He asked for one thing, a chance to "start life over again in a new home. Carrie and I."

In November the Culpeper paper reported he had bought a house three miles down the highway, with about a thousand dollars of the condemnation money left.

"His old store and dwelling remains dismantled, with doors and windows gone. It will be torn down and hauled away."

December 18. What the wrecking crew did not want, it burned.

Mr. Vye-uh took his case to the Supreme Court. Argued November 19, 1935. Decided November 25.

One sentence. "The decree is affirmed on the ground that appellant has an adequate remedy at law." He could sue for money. He could not keep the land.

The sheriffs already had their papers. Eviction warrants: four in Page County, one in Albemarle, nine in Madison, six in Rockingham. The park superintendent: "I anticipate no trouble."

December, Dark Hollow. "The Caves of Dark Hollow are splitting firewood and waiting on the sheriff." Eight families, and a sheriff in no hurry to put children on a county road in winter.

Most had signed. A new house, with the condemnation award credited against it, had been "accepted by more than 90 per cent of the dwellers in the Blue Ridge hollows."

Where they went is federal paper too. November 1935. "Rural Resettlement to Take 350 Shenandoah Park Families to New Sites."

The first unit was Ida Valley, near Luray. Forty-six thousand six hundred and seventy-eight dollars for twenty-five farmsteads. Eighteen families got seven to twelve acres. The rest, "families too old to manage larger farms," got about two.

A Star reporter went to see the first houses go up, and asked whether "the year 1650" could "be fitted into the year 1936."

He called the people in these photographs "the derelicts of Corbin Hollow," and said it had not been decided whether they would get houses at all.

The Farm Security Administration's fact sheet on the project. "Facts about Shenandoah Homesteads."

Purpose: "To provide farms for the families dispossessed of their homes, located in Shenandoah National Park."

Six thousand eight hundred and ninety acres. One hundred and seventy-five farms. Seven sites in five counties.

And the count. "Approximately 550 families were dispossessed through the purchase of 181,000 acres of land for the National Park." The farms went to those "unable to relocate themselves without governmental aid."

Five hundred and fifty families. One hundred and seventy-five farms. The sheet then says who they were: "representative of the native Anglo-Saxon inhabitant of the Southern Appalachian Mountains."

Rothstein went back in November, to a farm outside the park. "Mending a plow which has been bought through funds advanced by the Resettlement Administration."

"Wife of a successful rehabilitation client." Her jars are the last color in the file.

Rothstein came back once more, in January 1942. Skyline Drive.

The commission counted five thousand homes in 1927. The government's own sheet counts five hundred and fifty families dispossessed and one hundred and seventy-five farms built. The rest of the count is not in any of these papers.

"Children whose family will be resettled on new land."

"Sam Corbin, who will be resettled on new land." He is the man in the chair. If your people came out of these hollows, the caption stops here. You know the rest.