Shenandoah Removals
Jesse Dukes’ story on the Shenandoah was inspired by Justin Reich’s article, Recreating the wilderness: Shaping narratives and landscapes in Shenandoah National Park.
Here are two pieces of archival tape, courtesy of the Carrier Library at James Madison University.
In this piece, Dorothy Noble Smith, who conducted a private oral history project, reads aloud the lyrics to a song written by Roy Harris’ father. Harris had earlier asserted that his father “never got over” leaving the Blue Ridge Mountains. The song lyrics are:
“I spent my life in the Blue Ridge Hills
Where I coudn’t hear nothing but the whippoorwills
There the lightning blazed such a beautiful sight
I could hardly tell when it grew night
But now I’m down in this low land
Where the water is warm and the land is poor”
Listen to the song:
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In this 1983 recording, interviewer Dorothy Noble Smith asks Roy Harris of Grottoes, VA, his feelings on having to leave his home in Brown’s Gap, which later became Shenandoah National Park. He says that he did not mind, but that his father never got over it. Harris also tells that the park did not help his father re-settle, but later admits they paid his father for his land in Brown’s Gap, which allowed him to settle in Stony Point, Virginia. Only he says: “They gave him about half of what it was worth.”
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