Dickey Ridge Visitor Center

You're at Dickey Ridge, mile 4.6 on Skyline Drive, in the northern part of Shenandoah National Park, just up the mountain from the Front Royal entrance. Look at the low stone building beside the road, then past it, at the trees. It looks like forest that has always been left alone. Hold that thought, because this park came with a strange condition attached.

In May 1926, Congress and President Calvin Coolidge authorized a national park here in the Blue Ridge. There was one catch, and it's a remarkable one. The law prohibited the use of federal money to buy the land. Washington had, in effect, said yes to a park and then handed someone else the bill.

In Virginia, a businessman named William E. Carson took on the job. He was the first chairman of the state's Commission on Conservation and Development, and his friend Harry F. Byrd, the governor, was involved in raising the money. Carson's first question was a plain one: who owns these mountains?

The answer was not plain at all. A hillside you'd call wilderness from the road was, on paper, a patchwork of private holdings, and each piece had to be sorted out before a park could exist. Wilderness, it turns out, involves a great deal of paperwork.

And here is the part the view hides. This ground was not empty. People had lived on it and worked it. The park came into being by changing who was allowed to stay. I can't give you one family's story from the facts I can vouch for here, and that gap is itself worth noticing. The tidy green you're looking at has left out the names of the people it replaced.

The road came next. Planning for a sky-line drive dates to 1924, when the park was first planned, and groundbreaking took place in 1931. Skyline Drive was extended north to Front Royal in 1936, and the Civilian Conservation Corps played a large part in building it. So the road you drove up was made, too, by hand and by crew.

When you stop at an overlook later, try this. Let the view be beautiful, and let it also be a decision. A law, a ban on federal money, and a state that had to deliver the land are all folded into that calm green. So are the people who were there first.

Drive southwest, mostly on Skyline Drive, then US 340 and US 211, about 47 miles and an hour and a half, to Skyland, a resort on the same road that had its own stake in the park's story.