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about Luray caverns in a hyper-selling brochure. “No pen can do them justice...no photograph or painting can give but a faint idea..” The Graves, like all of us, surely owe him one.
Who was this George Pollock? I asked one of the asembled experts. “A nut!” he replied and quickly asked not to be identified. “He spent every nickel he ever had on Skyland.” George Freeman Pollock was a nut when it came to his vision of the private Skyland kingdom that he was instrumental in turning into America’s Shenandoah National Park.
The first time he saw the view from Stony Man Peak, Pollock lost it. “I raved and shouted and would have yodeled...Then and there I made up my mind to consecrate my life to the development of this, my father’s land,” he wrote.
In 1894 Pollock led his first small group up the trail to a collection of tents with chairs and cots. As the years went by, Skyland grew to span some 6,000 acres with 50 rustic cabins, 15 acres of camp gardens, a dining room and amusement hall. All of this and everyone energized by his famous bugle call.
He invented tourism in the region. But it was a tourism grounded in a conservationist’s values. He worried in a letter written in 1920 that “in the next year 20 mills will be in operation...Alas for the beautiful timbered sections in these wonderful mountains, which are not protected from destruction by G.F.P.—they have to go. The Stony Man lands will remain.” More and more Pollock saw himself as a protector as well as a promoter. Concerned that timber interests or mountain people would chop down the magnificent Eastern Hemlock trees near Skyland, he and his wife purchased the grove of virgin hemlocks now known as “The Limberlost.”
Today those hemlocks are in trouble.
Park Superintendent Bill Wade spoke passionately about the damage being caused them by a critter called the hemlock wooly adelgid. “It doesn’t take a great leap in logic,” he said, “to recognize how these trees may be succumbing because of other
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