“In case you don’t know,” Fiddling Bob’s nephew likes to remind a stranger, “Shenandoah Valley Park was presented by Virginians to the nation in 1935 and more than three million dollars have been spent on the Skyline Drive alone—a drive that hasn’t a parallel in America. Through this wilderness the Father of his Country once trudged on foot as a surveyor and looked down upon the beauty of the Shenandoah Valley from the lofty peaks of the Blue Ridge. His was the task to survey lands for the oncoming settlers. He had no moment to explore under the earth. That was the task of later men. Today for good measure, after you have beheld the breathtaking beauty from the heights, just travel seven eighths of a mile from Front Royal to the Skyline Caverns where you’ll see the most unusual cave flowers that man has ever looked upon. Why”—Fiddling Bob’s nephew puffs vehemently on his corn-cob pipe—“do you know that Dr. Holden, he’s professor of Geology at VPI, says these Hellicitites, that’s what he calls ’em, ‘these weird, fantastic, and pallid forms’ warp scientific judgment. And, friends, it’s nature’s work, these inconceivable structures hidden from the world for millions of years down under the ground.”
He turned with a beaming countenance when we had emerged from the cavern of matchless wonders. “Young Americans don’t have to study geography books these days. All they have to do is get a second-hand car, fill it up, and strike out on the Park-to-Park Highway. They’ll get an eyeful and an earful too from native sons, and learn more about America than they can dig out of the dry pages of a book in a year. Why, right down there at Charlottesville there’s Ash Lawn where James Monroe lived and meditated. His friend, Thomas Jefferson, set about building the place in 1798 while Monroe was in France looking after Uncle Sam’s business. Even great and busy men in those days were neighborly. Thomas Jefferson did a good part by his neighbor James Monroe when he built that house, and the ambassador thanked him generously when he came back to occupy the place. The two used to roam the grounds together and spent many happy hours there. They visited to and fro; you see Monroe lived across yonder within sight of his friend’s home. The great of the past take on reality when you actually set foot upon the ground they have trod. Places come to life when we see them with our own eyes. That’s the purpose of these great highways, the Park-to-Park highways that connect the scenes of American history.”
As the terrain changes there is a great variety in the scenes along Skyline Drive. Sometimes the road leaves the crest to tunnel through a rocky flank of mountain and you come unexpectedly upon sparkling streams tumbling down the mountain side to the valley below. The eye follows the cascade to the very edge of the drive. It disappears beneath the wide surface and reappears beyond a rocky wall, cascading down and down to fertile valleys below.
Virginians, and people of the Blue Ridge generally, count one of their greatest prides the restoration of the capital at Williamsburg through the generosity of John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Old and young who pass through the graceful wrought-iron gates to the Governor’s Palace thrill at the sight of the restored colonial capital named for King William III, a scene which all in all reflects old England in miniature, “as the state of mind of its citizens reflected the grandeur that was to be America.” Here are the stocks in which offenders were locked while they suffered jibes from passing tormentors. Elegant coach-and-four remind the visitor of days of grandeur of Old Virginia when the FFV’s were entertained at the royal palace. Across the way is the wigmaker’s shop, and the craft house, displaying the Wolcott Collection of ancient tools and instruments. Here too is seen the Wren building, oldest academic structure in English America, “first modeled by Sir Christopher Wren.”
Even a youngster of the Blue Ridge knows about Yorktown where Lord Cornwallis surrendered in 1781. “Here’s where we fit and plum whopped the life outten the redcoats,” we overheard a mountain boy from a mission school boasting to his companions.
Within a few short hours I had left behind Old Virginia and its reminders of colonial days and crossed into the Mountain State.
“There’s plenty of beauty and culture in Old Virginia, I’m not denying that—” Bruce Crawford looked over his spectacles at his inquisitive visitor—“but there’s just as much on this side of the Blue Ridge. We’ve got as many wonders under the earth as above it. And”—he turned now in his swivel chair in his quarters in the Capital to look far up the Kanawha River—among the many duties of this Fayette County man is that of letting the world know about his state—“I’m not forgetting Boone roved these parts. Trapped and hunted right here on the Kanawha. But what I started to talk about was not the hills, the rivers, and the caves, but the people.” He spoke slowly, deliberately, this sturdy, well-groomed hillsman. Like Sergeant York of the Tennessee Mountains Bruce Crawford can, if need be, drop easily back into the dialect of his people. And he is an accomplished writer. “I don’t care enough about it to follow the profession of writing,” he said, and fire glowed in his gray eyes. “But as old Uncle Dyke Garrett used to say, ‘I takened all I could a while back from furriners’ so I cut loose and wrote my notions about it and it was published in the West Virginia Review. Take it along with you on your travels through the Mountain State and see if I’ve come near hitting center.”
It seems to me he came mighty near hitting center and with Bruce Crawford’s permission, here are his sentiments:
“In recent weeks two ignorant jibes were flung at the State of West Virginia, one by a Southern editor and the other by a Northern cartoonist.
“The editor, a Virginian, moaned that rude mountaineers had routed Democrats of the ‘old Southern type’ from the Capital on the Kanawha and that the Lost Cause was lost all over again. He was still sad because Senator Matthew M. Neely had been elected Governor on a platform to restore democracy to the Democratic Party, and government to the governed, in West Virginia.