One national park removed a highway and restored a historic trail.

Story from the archives by Chris Fordney / Dec. 5, 2003

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Cumberland Gap park officials used old maps and photographs to restore the Wilderness Road to its 19th-century appearance. In the Gap's heyday, from 1775 to 1810, almost 300,000 people passed through the first gateway to the west. (NPS)

At the southwest tip of Virginia, where Tennessee and Kentucky mountains coalesce in one Appalachian chain, one national park has achieved the dream of many superintendents. Cumberland Gap National Historical Park has torn out an intrusive highway that funneled 18,000 cars a day through its central attraction and made a rear-ender the most memorable experience for many visitors. And, after this rare success in the ongoing fight over roads in national parks, the park is now restoring a 200-year-old historic trail.

Bulldozers had been busy in the winter of 2002 ripping up two miles of U.S. 25 East, the two-lane highway that followed the route of the old Wilderness Road through the pass and was so treacherous—with an average of six deaths every year—that people in nearby Middlesboro, Ky., called it "Massacre Mountain."
 

Bulldozers at work on U.S. 25 (NPS)

Now the highway runs through a gleaming four-lane tunnel under the adjacent mountain, and park officials hope to open the restored Wilderness Road as early as June. Visitors will be able to admire the same rugged landscape that 300,000 pioneers saw as their wagons streamed through the key portal in the Appalachians between 1775 and 1810, on their way to Kentucky and farther west. After the earth-moving is done, nature will be allowed to reclaim the area around the 10-foot-wide dirt path with help from the Natural Resources Conservation Service, which has collected native plants and grasses and is propagating them for replanting in the gap.

Hauling out 13,000 tons of asphalt has transformed the 20,400-acre destination, the nation's largest historical park. Now its 1.7 million annual visitors will be able to walk along the 1.2-mile restored trail—and eventually, park planners hope, ride in pioneer wagons—with a much better chance of seeing wildlife, including elk, which were released on nearby state lands and have been spotted in the park. The park is the northern terminus for the 300-mile Cumberland Trail, a hiking path and greenway under development by the Tennessee government and a conservation group along the eastern escarpment of the Cumberland Plateau. "It allows for a real network of trails to come into the gap," assistant park superintendent Mary Collier says.

Park advocates are delighted with the Cumberland Gap restoration. "I think it's just a magnificent thing," says Don Barger, southeast regional director of the National Parks Conservation Association. But Barger said he's been battling proposals for new roads and a highway interchange at Stones River National Battlefield in Murfreesboro, Tenn., and a plan for a 21-mile road along the north shore of Fontana Lake in Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina. The association remains concerned about attempts by some counties in Utah and Alaska to claim old rights-of-way through public lands under a provision in a 19th-century mining law that environmentalist say could be used to expand old wagon traces into major new highways—the opposite of Cumberland Gap's recent victory. "It's an open issue," says National Parks Conservation Association attorney Libby Fayad.

Site of Battle of Manassas (NPS)

Of all the parks, national battlefields face the greatest threat from sprawl and growing commuter traffic, and the traditional solution—a bypass—is problematic because it can spur even more development.

At Manassas National Battlefield Park in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., site of a major controversy over development in the late 1980s, park officials agreed in 1998 to the widening of a dangerous intersection of two busy commuter routes in the battlefield on the condition that planning be speeded up for a bypass that has no construction date. Superintendent Robert K. Sutton said he looks forward to the day when the heavy commercial and commuter traffic is out of the park and visitors can have a more relaxed experience—without cars. "It's really inaccessible to bicycles," he says. Such a bypass opened in the summer of 2001 around Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park in Ft. Oglethorpe, Ga.

The Cumberland Gap restoration is just a small piece of an ambitious road-building program in eastern Kentucky, a $4 million mitigation of the environmental impact of the $280 million tunnel, which opened in 1996. Improvements at the park are part of a determined effort by local Congressman Harold Rogers, chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Transportation, to build highways and bring tourists to his impoverished and environmentally ravaged district, a landscape scarred by strip mines, illegal dumps, and sewage-fouled streams. A conservative Republican, Rogers has won grudging support from environmentalists for his efforts to clean up his district and expand the national historical park to include nearby Fern Lake, one of the area's last pristine bodies of water. Cumberland Gap fought off an attempt to open a strip mine near the lake in 1998.  

Wilderness Road, which Daniel Boone first blazed in 1775 (NPS)

Removing traffic from the gap has been a goal since the park opened in 1940. Park officials were approached early on by community boosters about widening the highway to four lanes, but they suggested the road be rerouted through a tunnel instead. "It's an idea that was a long time coming to completion," Collier said. The tunnel took 17 years to build and exceeded its budget because engineers had to deal with unexpected underground springs.  

To restore the Wilderness Road, park planners pored over Civil War-era photographs and old maps. Over the centuries, the trail evolved from a track used by bison and American Indians, to the frontier path cut by Daniel Boone, to a paved highway around 1900. The park aims to return the trail to its appearance in the early 1800s, when most settlers came through, but sometimes a lack of documentation forces planners to study the landscape to determine how the trail followed the steep contours of the gap. "A lot of it is based on logic," said Park Service landscape architect Mike Tomkosky. When finished, the Wilderness Road will bring visitors to a 200-year-old natural and cultural setting. "We're peeling away civilization," ranger Carol Borneman says.

Chris Fordney is a freelance writer living in Winchester, Va.

This story was first published in Preservation Online on Feb. 22, 2002.

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