By DAPHNE HUTCHINSON

By DAPHNE HUTCHINSON

Rappahannock News Staff Writer

When the white man first crossed the Blue Ridge, he found the mountain rich in wildlife.

Bison, elk and deer grazed in the high meadows, their trail dogged by timber wolves and mountain lions. Beavers dammed the lower streams. Trout lurked beneath the coolness of cascading waterfalls.

But as the settlers claimed the hollows and ridges, they stripped the heights of their wealth. They harvested the bison, beaver, elk and deer for furs and food.

They carved pastures from the forest for their cattle and horses, then stalked the predators who would have preyed on the stock.

Not only the wildlife felt their presence. Trees, particularly the chestnut, were cut for timber and bark.

So it was a scarred and wounded land that Virginia gave Congress for its national park in the Blue Ridge.

First the Civilian Conservation Corps and later the rangers of the National Park Service labored to heal the mountains.

It was a mountain of a job, by any standard. A booklet put out by Camp Fechner at Big Meadows gave a picture of the project’s scope. CCC workers based at that camp rounded and smoothed 40,000 square yards of banks left by construction of the Skyline Drive, sodded 16 acres, and dug, moved and replanted 300,000 native trees and shrubs in a total of 90,000 “man-days.”

In March 1938 alone, the nursery at Big Meadows supplied 3,600 black locust seedlings and 1,200 Blue Ridge firs.

Along the drive, at abandoned mountain farms and homesteads, along unused trails and on “gully washed” land, rangers planted Canadian yew, Virginia creeper, trum