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lhe Drive is credited primarily to President Herbert Hoover who had a cabin in the area at Camp Rapidan, now Camp Hoover. Interested in the mountain people and their lives, he built a school for local children, the ranger recalled. Then during a year when water was scarce, the president conceived the idea of using drought relief funds to pay laborers to construct a scenic drive. “The Drive was actually a relief measure to give people living here assistance. . . The Drive wasn’t going to give them water but the Drive would give them cash money,” Anibel said. He emphasized that private contracts—not the Civilian Conservation Corps— worked on the Drive, at a cost of $47,000 per mile for its 96 mile expanse.
“When the Drive opened, it became a tourist attraction used and known before the Park opened. The Drive eclipsed the Park,” the ranger said.
Later, workers at the CCC camps in the Park built fire roads, planted trees, added soil erosion controls on the bare slopes, put in telephone and water systems, camps, picnic areas and restrooms, built the overlooks and the rock walls along the Drive.
A few of the Park’s features have changed over the years. There’s no documented evidence of mountain lions within its boundaries since the last verified killing of one in 1896. “But we sure have had a lot of undocumented reports,” Anibel noted. The deer that had disappeared were in re-introduced by the Park Service. The beer that disappeared returned on their own. Beavers were introduced, again by the Park Service, but they never took inside the Park, according to the ranger. The woods bison, the wolves and the elk disappeared centuries ago. The foxes never left and otters are still around as well, although not in great numbers and only near the Park’s borders.
For the most part, the forests cut by mountain lumberers have reclaimed the land on their own. Trees are primarily hickory and oak. “Five percent of the Park is still virgin forest. It’s in the mre inaccessible Limber Lost area,” Anibel reported.
The gradure of the open sweep at Big Meadows, the tumbling cascades of White Oak Canyon, the wildlife. Old Rag Mountain with its pre-cambrian granite the oldest exposed rock formation in the United States—all this and more the Park is pledged to preserve. “The general thrust of the Park is as a natural area, to grow and be natural,” the ranger concluded.
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