Shenandoah looks ancient because the Blue Ridge is old. The national park is much younger-and its creation changed the lives of people who already called these mountains home.
William Stanek's The Living Shenandoah Biography follows mountain building and erosion, forest and wildlife, Indigenous presence, settlement, farms and hollows, tourism, land acquisition, displacement, Skyline Drive, conservation, forest recovery, and the transformation of inhabited mountain country into a national scenic landscape.
The road along the ridge became one of the park's defining experiences.
Behind it lies a more difficult history about who was allowed to stay, whose stories became visible, and how a recovering forest can hide the human landscapes that came before it.
