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with chemicals—by hand. Brush crews were out from July until cold weather in the fall, cutting back weeds and thickets from the shoulders of roads—again by hand. “That’s how I got my start with the state, with a brush crew,” Atkins said, adding that he was paid 55 cents an hour to wield a sickle.
There were no front end loaders, no graders, no snow plows parked on the maintenance shed lot. The Sperryville crew relied on two surplus army trucks—the entire fleet of maintenance vehicles assigned to that end of the county. “The war was over then and the army was selling its old trucks to the state. That was it. That was what we had,” Atkins said, adding, however, that crews at Flint Hill and 729 had their own vehicles.
Roy Atkins grew up in what is now Shenandoah National Park and he remembers when Route 211 was just a dirt road from Sperryville to Beech Springs. ‘The only traffic was horses and mules pulling buggies, wagons and slides. That and people walking. Later on, you’d see a car—a model T—every once in a while.” The slides, wooden flat beds set on runners, were used to haul corn and apples “and whatever else you had back then to move from one place to another,” Atkins said.
There was a prison camp at Beech Springs, near Atkins’ boyhood home, home to the convicts and “gunmen” who built the first hard-sur
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