A piece of the mountains

The mountain homestead, assembled from buildings found along the Blue Ridge Parkway, is a snapshot of life as it might have been in the late 1890s on a certain kind of farm, said Randy Sutton, the district's chief interpretive ranger. When the Parkway was built, he said, workers found some cabins and outbuildings from that era and assembled them at Humpback Rocks. Farther down the parkway, near the Peaks of Otter, there's a collection of 1930s-era farm buildings.

It was in the 1930s that the Parkway was built, providing an income for depression-era workers and a national park that's the most heavily visited in this part of the country. Historic re-creations like the mountain homestead are especially popular, Sutton said: "In the season, we'll have 200 or so people through here every weekday, 300 or so at one time on busy weekends, and as many as 900 at a time at special events."

Some of those weekday visitors during the school year are area schoolchildren, Sutton said. The children from Lorain Harouf's first grade class at Bessie Weller Elementary School in Staunton planted the onions; other children helped with spring cleaning.

"[Spring] was when everything in sight was swept, aired and scrubbed out," Sutton said.

Mountain women gathered wild mint and mixed up a homemade air freshener, pounding mint leaves in spring water for a pleasant smell. The bedding was washed, aired and re-stuffed with straw or feathers; quilts were aired and put away; and weaving looms were taken down for the summer, when food preservation would fill the long evenings.

Outside the cabin, families gathered dandelion greens, wild mushrooms and whatever they could find growing green and wild in the woods. "About this time, people were hungry for anything green," Sutton said. "Most likely, the vegetables from the root cellar or those dried by the fire were running out." Farther south along the Parkway, families might gather creasey greens to cook along with the last bits of meat from the smokehouse.

It's not just mountain history that draws crowds. Music and other special events bring local people on weekend evenings during the season, which begins May 25. Most of the musicians play the kind of music that might have entertained the hard-working mountain families in the days before the Blue Ridge Parkway.

"Some of our visitors have the mistaken belief that these families were isolated and behind the times," Sutton said. "In fact, this part of the Parkway - the Howardsville Turnpike - was the Interstate 81 of its time."

People traveled along the ridge through a gap in the mountains, using the bare "humpback" rocks above as a landmark. When the homes along the Parkway were demolished in the 30s, workers removed many modern frame homes, improved and added onto many times over the years, he said. Some of the homes had begun as log cabins, built by hand and lived in for generations, very much like the simple log home now standing at Humpback Rocks.

The first 106 miles of the Blue Ridge Parkway is the Ridge District and includes the James River State Park and the Peaks of Otter, as well as the Humpback Rocks Visitors Center and Mountain Farm Museum. Like the Shenandoah National Park and the Great Smokies, the Parkway is a National Park, administered by the National Park Service, said Sutton. "The Parkway links these two other parks and is heavily traveled by tourists."

As visitations to some of the other Eastern Parks - like the Shenandoah - decline, there's an increase in traffic on the Parkway. Sutton guesses that some of the increase is from within Virginia. "As gas prices go up, I think people decide to take advantage of what the state has to offer," he said.

Volunteers and interpretive rangers staff the Mountain Farm during the season, with demonstrations of quilting, hearthside cooking, sawing and other mountain skills each weekend. There are five rangers and a number of different volunteers assigned to this district.

The Visitor's Center is at Milepost 5.8 on the Parkway, which begins just above Waynesboro, and has information on other historic sites along the Parkway, as well as information about the Mountain Farm. At Milepost 6.0, the popular steep two-mile hike up to the rocks begins. There is ample parking at both sites.

Musical events are held at the Mountain Farm, just next to the Visitor's Center.