Appalachian History

In May of 1926, President Calvin Coolidge signed a bill authorizing the establishment of a 521,000-acre Shenandoah National Park. The bill stipulated that no federal funds could be used to acquire the land for the park. The job of obtaining the land therefore fell to the Commonwealth of Virginia. In order to avoid the slow [...]

She was the only woman to take part in the negotiations that brought about the creation of Shenandoah National Park in 1935. Addie Nairn Hunter, an accomplished, independent divorcee from Washington, exercised an enormous impact on the direction of George Pollock’s Skyland resort in Stony Mountain, VA from the moment she swept into Pollock’s life. [...]

To the locals, he was an arrogant and self-serving businessman, responsible for the dislocation of over 400 families when he sold his mountaintop acreage to create the core of the Shenandoah National Park. One neighbor felt “especially betrayed by George Pollock…[for] “pushing the people out. And, you know, coming up with all the stories of [...]