Editor’s Note: This column marks the second installment of a two-part series on the Blue Ridge Parkway.

Most Alleghany residents have never known these mountains without the Blue Ridge Parkway. It’s as if Earth and that serpentine road were formed at the same time. The Parkway’s construction — laborious and complicated as it was — also followed a winding path through the legislatures of several states. Those most involved were North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, West Virginia, and, of course, Washington, D.C.

Originally envisioned as a scenic route 350 miles long and 24 feet wide, it would have passed Mount Mitchell 800 feet below the mountaintop and cost $5,000 a mile. Colonel Joseph Hyde Pratt first put the idea on paper, naming it the “Crest of the Blue Ridge Highway.” He described his dream in one sentence eighty-five words long. That word-picture also included a chain of hotels from one end to the other, but none of it would have been in North Carolina.

Parkway work began in July, 1912, between mileposts 317 and 319, near Altapass and Linville. World War I stopped the effort, and our nation’s post-war recovery overshadowed new roadway plans.

The first official mention of federal construction on a scenic highway came in 1928, with the Mount Vernon Project and the George Washington Memorial Parkway — renamed the Colonial National Parkway — linking Jamestown, Williamsburg, and Yorktown. Three years later the government began serious public works efforts to ease the Depression, reopening discussions of joining the Shenandoah National Park to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. When it began to look like the proposed route would miss North Carolina altogether, Congressman Robert Doughton turned the tide toward the Parkway’s present location. West Virginia’s Senator Robert Byrd and the Public Works Administration’s head, Theodore Strauss, continued to guide the effort along.

R. Getty Browning, Chief Locating and Claims Engineer for the North Carolina Highway Department became the project’s point man, charged with selling the idea of a North Carolina route instead of one through Tennessee. By 1933, construction costs were projected at nearly $25,000 per mile, and the task could employ 10,000 people. President Roosevelt favored it as a toll road to offset that expense.

When E. B. Jefferies, Chairman of the North Carolina State Highways and Public Works Commission, said flatly that this state would not accept any toll roads, Byrd quickly offered a federal-only investment of $40,000 a mile, and the employment of 4,000 men for at least two years. Amid opposition from the governors of North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia, he sent telegrams explaining the road’s mileage in each state and mentioned his “…plan to finance from federal works program without obligation on the parts of the states except as to maintenance of road…Tentative survey indicates a distance of four hundred seventy-five miles; total cost sixteen million dollars… This road will be the greatest scenic road in the world and will attract millions of tourists…I ask your cooperation in this project…”

Byrd then gave North Carolina’s Governor Ehringhaus a list of this State’s elected and public officials who had been appointed to the Park-to-Park Scenic Highway Commission. Senator Robert R. Reynolds iced the cake with a report that in 1929-30, Americans spent approximately five billion dollars in travel-related expenditures.

The states involved quickly explained that they had already given the government large parks valued at twelve million dollars, hopefully killing any ideas of their further contributions to the project. Washington countered with a promise of no additional state costs whatever, if landowners provided 200-foot rights-of-way along the route. North Carolina’s Congressman Robert L. Doughton again entered the fray, this time on behalf of the hardscrabble mountain farmers whose average yearly income was only $86, and area schools doing the best they could with educational expenditures just one-third of what was spent in the rest of the state.

“The only way to help them,” he said, “is to give them employment, and the only way to do it is to bring the development to them.”

Debate continued with North Carolina and Tennessee arguing over the road’s route. With Tennessee’s leverage compromised by millions of Tennessee Valley Authority dollars flowing into their economy, Washington’s final decision favored the North Carolina plan. Congressman Doughton introduced a House Resolution assigning the “Administration and Maintenance” of the road to the Department of the Interior. Assorted objections delayed its passage until Indiana’s Representative Greenwood clarified the issues. The bill passed by just 14 of 276 votes cast.

In 1939, the Parkway was to end in Cherokee, with a 1,000-foot right-of-way and “restricted uses” there. That opened a lengthy debate with the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indians. By rerouting the Parkway’s final miles and paying forty thousand dollars for 750 acres, the political issues were settled.

From a humble beginning in 1912, Parkway construction took a deep breath and rolled up its sleeves. Millions of dollars and more than five decades later, it was done.