(gentle upbeat music) >>[Beverly Woody-Belcher] This is the Blue Ridge Parkway, a scenic highway meandering through the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia and North Carolina.

Millions of visitors every year come to see its beauty.

But our story isn't about the park.

It's about my people who lived on the land long before the parkway was built.

(gentle upbeat music) >>One of the closest trails that we have, and it's one of the prettiest.

You've got the creek, the river, the mountains.

And we specifically came for the Mountain Laurel and the Rhododendrons that are blooming right now.

(gentle upbeat music) >>[Beverly Woody-Belcher] When hikers come to the Gorge, they see beautiful countryside and a wonderful, beautiful stream.

What they don't see is a lot of history.

(gentle music) Now the Park Service talks about Rock Castle Gorge, but this wasn't Rock Castle Gorge to my grandmother.

This was Rock Castle.

That was the name of the community to her.

>>Funding for Rock Castle Home was provided by Virginia Humanities, the Kenan Institute for Ethics, the Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation, Duke University, and by others.

>>[Beverly Woody-Belcher] Okay, number, that's number nin.

That's the Hilton Mill.

(water flowing) Don't fall.

(water flowing) This is where my grandmother grew up.

It was a two story, and there were two chimneys.

It had a kitchen out the back.

When I was a kid, this was still standing, pretty much all of it.

I used to come down here a lot when I was younger.

(gentle music) You'd never find it if somebody in the family doesn't tell you where it's at.

My dad brought me up here.

And of course his father showed him.

If we don't keep, keep the story going, once I'm gone, it'll be lost.

Our ancestors came to Rock Castle looking for land, and a place to call home.

When they buried their family members here, they were sinking deep roots in this place that many of their descendants cherish to this day.

>>This is gonna be quite a climb for me.

But I desperately want to go back to the old home place where I was born.

I've got one specific thing that I want to see one more time, and that is an old chestnut log that was laying on the ground when I was about five or six years old.

(gentle music) That there is my log.

We used to have to carry water from that spring there to the house.

So, I used to come down to the spring and I'd set my bucket down and play on this tree.

And I'd be gone about half an hour.

Grandma would come out the back door, and at that time, they called me Burner, my middle name was Burner.

"Hey, Burner, bring that water on here.

I need it."

Well, I don't know why I fell in love with this tree like I did.

I've got to the point now, I want to know whether it's going to deteriorate before I do or not.

And I believe it's gonna outlast me.

(orchestral music) >>[Beverly Woody-Belcher] It's hard to explain why we as descendants gather around the idea of Rock Castle.

>>I don't think there's many of us living.

>>Don't say it that way.

>>Very few.

Very few.

>>Well, facts is facts honey.

>>My mother and daddy always talked about the Gorge, about how they lived in.

I did write down some of the stories that my daddy would tell me.

I just started trying to dig up information and figure out, "Hey, where did this man come from, or where did they live?

How do they connect with my family?"

And I never could put them together until I drew a map so I could see where everybody lived and how it was connected.

>>My grandparents came out of the Gorge.

I was at my mom's house.

And she brought a big box out and said, "You probably have never seen these."

There were pictures in there of old people that she didn't know who they were.

Started looking, asking my older uncles, and that's just how it started.

>>Every Sunday was coming to Gr.

had a big home cooked meal, always had fried chicken, potatoes, apples, green beans.

And so, you sat around he got really interested in talking.

I found it fascinating to find out the stories about the Gorge.

>>Blue Ridge Heritage was having a meeting about Rock Castle.

There were so many people there that had stories to share.

The next month, I got a meeting together.

And it has grown every year since.

I'm so glad you got to come and got to meet everybody.

>>I appreciate the invitation.

>>Yeah.

>>You're doing a fantastic job.

>>[Beverly Woody-Belcher] Thank you.

We decided that if we didn't hold on to these memories, and do the hard work of preservation, that we could lose our heritage.

>>When I think of going back up in there, I look as going back to home place.

When a generation lives on a piece of land, that land becomes part of you.

(gentle music) >>In the 1700s, white settlers from Eastern Virginia moved Westward.

Meanwhile, Scots Irish and German settlers ventured down the great wagon road from Pennsylvania through the valley of Virginia, and onto the Blue Ridge and beyond.

By 1800, most of the land in Virginia had been claimed, much of it by the wealthiest landowners.

Small farmers were forced to take what was left.

In Appalachia, 80% of the population squeezed on to only 4% of the land.

Many farmed in narrow hollows, and on steep slopes, any place they could find to call their own.

These mountains became home to new settlements, and many communities thrived.

Rock Castle was one of them.

(gentle music) >>When the white Anglo settlers came, they found rock quartz crystals.

From what I understand, it reminded them of castle turrets from their homelands, from Britain, Ireland, Scotland, and Germany.

So that's what I understand that that's how the name derived Rock Castle.

The first inhabitants of the area of course were the Native Americans.

We know from projectile points, every time the farmers up here plough the ground even today, something like this comes up.

They're everywhere, are up here in the mountains.

>>[Beverly Woody-Belcher] This is a quartz rock.

In Native American culture and lifestyle, these rocks were important because they made a hard point.

Some theories think that while the Native Americans may not have ever settled here, they probably came here for this rock.

In the 1700s, there were some pretty drastic wars.

And a lot of the people from here left and went up to New York and joined the tribes up there, the Iroquois, yeah, because there was a lot of unsettled because people, I'm sure there was pressure from the East, with the white settlers coming in, pushing people further West.

And then people were coming in from the North too.

There aren't a lot of stories about Native Americans at all.

So I don't think there was a lot of interaction because we know stories about everything.

>>The idea that Rock Castle Gorge had these kinds of formations would definitely lead me to a deeper understanding that this would have been a place where people would have gone to to gather that.

These kinds of rocks, these sorts of beings, they have something that can be transformational, and used in ceremony.

In this area of Rock Castle Gorge, you would have had [ ] Sappony people.

The Monacan people, Cherokee.

Most of the lands of what was to become the United States are left to bereft of indigenous presence.

And that is a long history with multiple stories, so many narratives, millions of experiences of people over generations, that are uprooted from the spaces that they had created relationship with and built culture upon for 1000s of years.

It happens in a way that is pulled out of historic knowledge.

There are people that are still alive today, who remember Virginia.

And they remember it in their names and stories.

>>We know that native peoples were here in these mountains starting more than 12,000 years ago.

They loved this place long before Europeans arrived.

Their stories still echo here.

We must leave a space that their memories may someday fill, even if in silence.

(water flowing) >>The people living here was really self sufficient.

They had to be in order to live.

(car engine roaring) That part of the house was log, and on up there about 75 yards, we had a stable where we kept the cows.

But we didn't need a whole lot.

If you put it on the table, we grew it.

We grew lettuce, we grew tomatoes, we grew onions, corn.

>>[Beverly Woody-Belcher] They had chickens and you took the eggs to the local store.

And he would trade your eggs for sugar, coffee, the things you could not get.

Bust most everything came right off the farm.

>>It was not an easy place in the mountain areas here to make a living but they did.

They were smart people, they were intelligent people.

They were hardworking people.

They prospered.

(gentle music) >>As many as 35 families made their living in this Gorge now returning to forest.

They were close families and neighbors.

They raised houses and barns together.

As a community, they invented, made, built, grew or traded for everything they owned, used or ate.

Appalachian strength, creativity and ingenuity gave their families a strong sense of place they honor still.

Stories are a community's lifeblood.

One can imagine Rock Castle residents sitting at their huts, telling stories to their children.

There are some stories every Rock Castle descendant seems to know.

>>There were a lot of stories about the Civil War.

The big story that I heard over and over again was about my great grandfather, Benjamin Belcher.

His wife is Sarah, and they had several sons.

Captain [ ] was the Confederate Officer in the area, and apparently he was in charge of looking for deserters.

And in his journal, it says, gone to hunt the Belchers.

He found grandpa Benjamin, and grandpa wouldn't tell him where the boys were.

And at the time, this tree, of course, was standing.

And they tied him up in the tree.

They would pull him up, and they'd let him choke a little while and they put him back down and say, "Where are the boys?"

And he wouldn't say.

They pull him up and let him choke a little while, and they would let him down, and he wouldn't say.

Finally, Grandma Sarah said, "Benjamin, is time for supper."

And they let him down and she invited all the boys to come in and eat.

And they all came in and sat and ate with them, after they had hung her husband.

There was a group of moonshiners from Princeton or Bluefield, Virginia, that were coming up and the car broke down.

>>He got out of the car, went first to Edward's store and couldn't find a telephone.

>>And so they went to some house and called.

>>To get somebody to come and pick them up.

>>They sent another car back and loaded up the whiskey out of there.

Automobile, it was broke down.

>>And they just rolled the car over the bank.

>>I know the car is there.

>>It is there, yeah.

(gentle music) >>This is the location of the corn mill that served the community here.

Cal Mangrum owned the mill and old wheel-type, it was powered by water.

There was five mills on Rock Castle Creek.

Each community had a mill because you couldn't carry your grain but so just far to get it ground.

(gentle upbeat music) >>Almost every place down there had an apple orchard.

>>Grandpa told me stories that when he was a kid, they had the apple orchard.

It wa so steep they didn't use wagons they used sleds.

But they had put chains across the sled runners, to keep from running overtop of the horse or whatever he's pulling with.

>>George William Mac Connor, had an apple orchard somewhere between 25 and 30 acres.

It was the big apple orchard of Rock Castle.

My dad said they'd load 27 bushels and three bushel barrels on a wagon and take them all day to haul those apples and put them on the train.

They'd sleep under the wagon and then come back the next day.

They would either sell them for a few cents, these raw apples, or they could get a lot more money for the apples at the distillery to make apple brandy.

>>Took good water to make good whiskey.

And there was plenty of good water in those creeks and springs there in the mountains.

There were lots of legal distilleries.

If you had good water, and you had the knowledge and you have the apple orchard nearby, or the Peach Orchard or the cornfield nearby, then you can produce your own whiskey.

(gentle music) When the settlers moved into the Blue Ridge, they brought their whiskey dancing and music.

It was all homemade music, homegrown.

They learned tunes that have been handed down from earlier generations.

(gentle music) >>American music basically started here.

What we call old time music now is basically what the beginning of American music was.

And it blossomed from that.

Music from here has been recognized worldwide.

I think it's a different energy.

And I think that's what what it all boils down to, is the energy it had when it got here.

And I think the Black influence had a lot to do with it.

(gentle music) If you listen to authentic African music is a drive to it, and there's an energy and there's just so much push.

That influence was still a part of it when it came to this area from the coast.

And it still hangs in this region because it's been passed down through the generations.

>>What'll it take to get you in C?

>>Our uncle taught me how to play the guitar, my grandfather played the banjo, and he taught his son to play the banjo.

And we got another boy that lived on down the creek.

We got us up a little band.

We played until World War 2 broke us up.

One way of developing a close relationship with your firnds and so on and so forth.

>>[Nannie Ruth Conner] We'd work all week and feed the livestock and raise their crops.

And then we'd look forward to this weekend that the homes would invite the kids in and turn over a big room and they play the fiddle and the banjo, and the flatfoot dancing.

And all would have enough fun to last us to all the next week.

>>Bar buildings and corn shuckimgs and gatherings that people did at harvest time, that was their reward was to dance after.

It was community.

(gentle upbeat music) >>Recorded music of the region began to take the world by storm in the 1920s with groups like the Carter Family, and Charlie Poole and the North Carolina Ramblers.

(orchestral music begins) >>My dad was always telling me stories about growing up in the mountains.

And his aunt, Lou Emma Lorh had married a man named Charlie Poole who was a banjo player.

Charlie rambled, he was a rambler in the truest sense of the world.

He recorded a song called He Rambled, and it could have been autobiographical as life he lived.

(orchestral music) >>Charlie Poole had a habit of just leaving home and prowling around for a week to two.

And one time, he ran into my uncle.

So, my uncle brought him home down to the Gorge.

I was about three or four years old.

I just walked around and listened to him playing.

It was some feat to have a person as popular as Charlie Poole was at that time to listen to.

>>My grandfather played banjo and guitar.

He learned from Charlie Poole.

He didn't have a lot of exposure to it, but it was enough to where he would be able to get the tune in his head, and if he kept playing it, he would remember.

>>People who saw him never forgot it.

And I think that's one reason that people in the mountains loved him so much because even though he was a big quote recording star, he never got the big hit from it.

He would still come to the local folks' houses to come and entertain them and tell about what it was like in New York City.

And I think they loved him for that.

(old-time music) >>We're stopping at the old baptizing hole.

Preachers would drop in at times, and hold revival.

Everybody that joined the church was baptized right here in this one particular hole.

>>[Beverly Woody-Belcher] There was never a church down in Rock Castle, but they did use the school building for itinerant ministers and revivals and all of that sort of thing were a huge social aspect of the community life.

>>Local Missionary Reverand Bob Childress left for seminary and came back to the mountains where he inspired a number of communities to build churches out of rocks they picked up and hauled to the building sites.

People from Rock Castle built the Slate Mountain Church.

All around the door are quartz crystals that inspired their very name, Rock Castle.

>>[Beverly Woody-Belcher] He would go around and pick up little kids all over the community in his car and just pile them in.

My mother was one of them.

He'd take them to services.

So, he did do a lot for the region.

What the book does, however, is exaggerate about how wild and ungodly the people were.

Pretty much you got the impression everybody was just laying around drunk.

As far as people taking away from the book, that he came here and saved the community, no.

That is a wild exaggeration, like so many other stereotypes.

(people laughing) >>Appalachian people have had to put up with stereotypes of all sorts, lazy, toothless, uneducated and violent people shooting guns at one another.

(orchestral music) They show up on TV ads, movies, billboards.

Somehow, these Hillbilly stereotypes survive.

>>What I heard my great great grandmother and grandfather talking about, they would go out and rake up chestnuts and (indistinct) just rake them up, put them on a wagon and take them to Stuart as a cash crop.

>>When the first white settlers came, Anglo settlers came here, I'm sure they were in awe of the size of the American chestnut trees that were in this area.

There's an old legend saying that these trees grew from Georgia to Maine.

And the canopy in the top was so wide of these chestnut trees that a squirrel could run the canopy all the way from Georgia to Maine never touched the ground.

>>[Beverly Woody-Belcher] They first realized the value of chestnuts and Rock Castle Gorge when they saw hogs being attracted, and the wild hogs became a commodity.

>>They saw many chestnuts and they just turned them loose.

They branded them get slipped in the ear, and made one slit, it belonged to this fellow who belonged to another fellow.

>>They would gather them back up and divide them out depending on which slit belonged to which family, and butcher what they needed for their family for their winter food, and sell the rest.

>>[Beverly Woody-Belcher] The chestnuts themselves were also incredibly valuable.

From probably the 1830s on, the chestnuts were a foundation of the economics in the area.

>>We're inside an old barn.

We have here, American chestnut boards.

They're so much weathered, they're probably close to a century old.

Sort of at the center of the life of folks living in the mountains around here was the American chestnut.

It was a source of food, trade, timber for their homes, fencing that we see along the parkway and round farming was originally chestnut.

It is one of the most decay resistant woods that you've come across.

That's why they used it for the fences because it took decades and decades for fencing to decay.

Local folks would gather the nuts for their own use.

They would preserve them in salt, or dry them out as a source of food through the winter.

But they would also trade in chestnuts.

They'd go to the local country store, and those who didn't have cash could trade chestnuts for goods in the store.

And then the store shipped the nuts to Richmond, to Philadelphia, even to New York to wholesale houses.

So, the local mountain Poles were connected to the larger world through the country store.

(gentle music) >>My grandmother wanted an education more than anything.

She was determined to get an education.

She went to all kinds of schools.

There were up on this ridge, there was a place called Stomp and Birches, that was one school that she went to.

She went to school, she went to several mission schools.

She went to a boarding school a couple of times.

Education at that time was not really county supported.

They had subscription schools.

People would pay to have their children come, and they would hire the teacher from what the parents paid.

In the 30s, public school started, but before that, really not so much.

These are grandpa read spelling books.

>>Okay.

Wow.

>>[Beverly Woody-Belcher] That sounds good.

>>Well, Mr. Henry Squire.

>>Yes, Squire Dylan, you're right.

>>He was very intelligent.

He had no formal education.

But apparently, he would read books of all kinds of books, and was considered a medical doctor.

>>Yep, that's grandpa.

>>Mr.

Henry Dillon was the patriarch of that whole area.

He taught the school, taught my dad and all his siblings.

If someone had a wound or something like that, they'd come to him.

He was a justice of the peace.

He was a licensed surveyor.

He was a notary.

He just seemed to know everything to me.

>>Squire Dillon's story is an anti stereotype.

His individual story represents how Appalachian people made something out of nothing.

It shows how Rock Castle thrived despite the odds against them.

By ingenuity, they turned natural resources into a life for themselves and their children.

Yet no matter how strong any community is, there are always larger forces that determine its survival.

Prohibition in Virginia began with actions from anti liquor forces called the Temperance Movement.

They pushed for legislation to outlaw all production and consumption of alcohol.

First, a Prohibition Bill passed in Virginia in 1916.

Then prohibition went national with the passage of the 18th Constitutional Amendment in 1919.

>>Joseph H.D.

Hart, Mountain rose Distillary, put out an advertisement and this is it here, subject "Preparedness."

Prepare for the coming prohibition drought that hits Virginia.

Good whiskey will be hard to procure.

It will be no bad idea to lay away a 10 year supply of corn whiskey.

So he's telling everybody that it's about to close down, November 1st.

And of course, that was a big economic hit to people of Rock Castle.

(old-time music) >>Here were the skills they had to make whiskey, and they had been making it legally for 20, 30 years.

So, all of a sudden, one day it's legal, the next day, it's not.

So what do you do?

You go up the hollow and you keep making it, you just keep on making it.

(old-time music) >>My dad had a still.

According to my dad, what they did, made its way to New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington DC to the Gin Mills and, speakeasies of that day.

When people were working for $1, $1.5 a day, he was making $75 a week, plus a car and room and board.

So that's pretty desirable wages for that day and times.

(gentle music) >>Not too long after prohibition, here comes the black fungus that kills the Giant American chestnut tree.

That's like another big bite out of the economy.

Two blows in a row.

>>The blight was first noticed in 1904 in Botanical Gardens in New York.

Within a few years, it started to spread pretty widely and very quickly.

It produces spores that can be blown through the air.

Animals get it on there fur, people get it on the shoes and automobile tires, and spread it around.

It completely changed the ecological composition of forests around here.

Bears and turkeys and squirrels, many of them died of starvation because the nuts weren't around.

The major tree of the forest was gone.

One guy said it felt like the whole world was dying when the chestnuts were dying.

>>A third and major blow was the Great Depression, a huge economic downturn that started with the stock market crash of 1929, spread misery to every community in the nation.

>>[Franklin D. Roosevelt] The savings of many years and thousands of families are gone.

More important, a host of unemployed citizens face the grim problem of existence, and an equally great number toil with little return.

>>[Dr. William Leuchtenburg] If you could imagine a huge football stadium with 100,000 people, as you all find out, all 100,000 of you, you're each handed a notice saying you're fired.

You no longer have a job.

And imagine that happening for 52 weeks of the year, 100,000 at a time, for three straight years.

You will then have approximated the total of unemployed when Franklin Roosevelt becomes president of the United States.

People approached the point of starvation, particularly children, who went for months at a time without some of the basic necessities of life.

It was a time that would be remembered for decades later, with horror, looking back upon it.

>>The Great Depression, combined with prohibition, and the chestnut blight, pushed Rock Castle to the breaking point.

Young people began to leave to look for work in mills and mines hours and even days from home.

>>I remember my daddy told stories of being hungry with a house full of children that you had to supply food for.

Then when daddy was probably in his round 16, he decided to go to West Virginia to try to make some money.

Him and a friend of his, hopped on a train, he spent his last dime on a can of pork and beans and crackers.

Then he went on to Davy, West Virginia and worked in the coal mines.

>>[Dr. William Leuchtenburg] Franklin Roosevelt was particularly worried about the 200,000 young people who were traveling around the country hopping freight trains, desperately seeking for work so they would no longer be a burden of their family.

>>[Franklin D. Roosevelt] I pledge myself to a New Deal for the American people.

(gentle music) >>[Dr. William Leuchtenburg] The New Deal transformed the American landscape that we all live in today to an extent very few of us realized.

>>The whole idea of the Public Works Administration, the Works Progress Administration, all these big agencies that were doing big infrastructure projects, money was supposed to be flowing into the economy by the purchase of goods and materials, as well as labor of the roles and rosters of people who had registered as needing jobs under federal job creation projects.

But at the same time, there was really a move of foot to develop national parks in the East.

The Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Shenandoah National Park, Mammoth Cave, and some other parks in the East.

>>The Federal New Deal programs reached the Blue Ridge in the early 1930s.

Franklin Roosevelt's policies reached Rock Castle first through the idea of having a scenic highway linking two national parks, the Great Smokies and Shenandoah, with a scenic byway.

The Blue Ridge Parkway was born.

The design began with the vision of one young landscape architect.

Stanley Abbott, a recent graduate of the landscape architecture program at Cornell University, was hired to head up the project.

At age 25, he and his new wife moved to Salem, Virginia.

From there, he began to map the route that would span the Blue Ridge Mountains in two states, Virginia, and North Carolina.

>>When they got married, they came down the Blue Ridge Mountains, and they were on their honeymoon.

And they gave him a truck to drive down and go down, explore where we should come with the parkway.

>>I can't imagine a more creative job than locating the Blue Ridge Parkway because you worked with a 10 League Canvas, and a brush of a comet's tail.

Your composition is one of fields and fences, lakes and streams, and hills and valleys.

And your problem is that of placing your roadway in such a position as best to reveal them.

About the wayside parks along the Blue Ridge, these are not a mere additive.

They were a most important part of the formula for conservation along the parkway.

They're like the beads on a string, rare gems in the necklace.

>>[Dr. Anne Mitchell Whispant] The Park Service planners got very enamored, and they weren't alone in this, it's the whole country.

There's a whole phenomenon of getting very enamored with a certain mythology about Appalachia.

Particularly the idea that somehow this is a repository of American pioneer values.

And that somehow, the old ways have persisted in this strange and odd region in ways that they haven't in other parts of the country.

They actually went around tearing down things that were more modern, or that didn't fit this notion of Pioneer rural, clinging to old fashioned life ways myth.

They would just take things down that were modern frame houses and leave up the one cabin while removing lots of other things.

The Mabrey Mill, here's a grist mill that had been in existence for several decades, by the time the Park Service came, and the Maybrys had a modern frame house that was in view right behind the mill.

That was taken down, and a cabin was brought in from another county to create essentially picturesqe Park created scene at that site that wasn't at all representative of the actual history of that location.

And that happened over and over again.

>>There's this preconceived notion that we should look like we lived in log cabins, and we lived like Abe Lincoln.

That's the way it was maybe fora time, but communities evolved.

So people really need to see that as well.

The stories are wonderful.

The memories are wonderful.

But it also needs to capture the fact that it's not static.

It's an evolving thing.

>>After Stanley Abbott established the route for the parkway, the government used money from the Department of the Interior and the Rural Resettlement Administration to purchase the land along the route.

A national park employee named Sam Weems got the assignment to buy land in Rock Castle.

>>[Beverly Woody-Belcher] Sam Weems was an interesting person.

He was the fellow that managed the acquisition, people respected him.

And also apparently, he was very honest.

>>What sort of approach did you use with the mountain people that convinced them that the price that you were willing to pay was a fair price?

That must have taken some little argument once in a while.

Didn't it?

>>Well, it sure did.

And I look back on it now.

And out of the five big recreation areas that we bought, I dealt with hundreds of owners and I didn't have to condemn one piece of property.

They were all purchased by negotiation.

>>Grandpa was planting corn, and we saw this new looking '35 Ford pull in Mr. Sam Weems got out, told grandpa they was thinking about buying land up in a Gorge.

And Mr. Weems asked grandpa if he'd mind going with him and showing where the land was.

Mr. Weems Gave grandpa a job, helping him buy the land as Goodwill Ambassador between the people up in the Gorge and the National Park Service.

>>Private contractors built the road bed itself.

And then CCC and WPA workers, built the concessions and recreation areas and did replanting, reforestation along the parkway route.

(old-time music) >>Right after Roosevelt was elected, just about everybody in the Gorge went to work for the WPA.

That was there income.

>>The CCC camp VANP that's Virginian National Park number 14 was down in Rock Castle Gorge.

>>The CCC boys, when they moved in, you met them on the road, you started talking to them, and first thing you know you're a good friend.

I got invited to eat with them, which was one of the best things that ever happened to me.

Some of the officials didn't like it.

I've been run off a time or two, but I didn't go far.

I'd just go up and sit down behind a hill and wait for the officers to leave, then I'd go back and finish my meal.

(newsreel music) >>Virginia, inspiring his forest army by a personal visit, President Roosevelt makes his first tour of the Civilian Conservation Corps and he enjoys every bite of the plain, wholesome food.

>>[Franklin D. Roosevelt] Very good to be here, these Virginia CCC camps, I wish I could see them all over the country.

I hope that all over the country, they're in this fine condition as the camps that I've seen today.

(audience cheering) >>This place was terrible before we started up the CC camp, the WPA.

Roosevelt spread money where it needed to go.

And every dollar that come in is hollow, was spent.

No question about that.

The Park Service bought all the land from the owners in this Gorge.

When they did that, people started moving out.

>>[Beverly Woody-Belcher] I'm sure that the families that left Rock Castle didn't really want to leave.

I think they felt that they had to because of the economy, because of making a better life for their children and grandchildren.

(gentle music) The first settlers were there in the early 1800s.

I don't think a lot of the families would have moved if they'd been given the choice.

My grandmother told me there was one lady that when the sheriff, when they came to remove them, she wouldn't leave.

And so they carried her out on her bed, she was sitting on her bed.

So they picked her and the bed up and carried her out of the house.

>>Some of my uncles really gave the Park Service a hard time.

But I think the Park rangers went around and mellowed a lot of people and got them on their side before they actually took over the land.

>>Right now, I'm standing here with my foot up on one of the rocks of the foundation of the old Josh Nesta House.

>>Joshua Nesta was the very first person to sell.

There's a picture of him beaming over the check.

He's standing with Sam Weems who was the manager of the acquisition.

He was elderly and it was probably really hard to live there.

The folks saw the handwriting on the wall, that there was a dying community.

>>When the community left, their knowledge of how to live in this place began to fade.

Farm knowledge is a precious resource and hard to reclaim after it's gone.

Human beings have learned to work with nature in many places on the planet.

Their knowledge of how this is done is nearly as precious as the places themselves.

>>[Beverly Woody-Belcher] We have formed a Rock Castle Community again, out of memories we have preserved from our ancestors.

>>Yes.

>>Tell me.

(Matt Hubbard chuckles) >>It's a really good turnout this year.

It's really good.

And we gather once a year in a reunion to renew our support for these community efforts.

>>If you ever forget where you came from, you don't know where you're going to go, whether you move away to Winston Salem or whether you move away to the California, going to the mountains is going home, that's what it is.

And by going back there, you always feel that you're part of that.

>>You know, sometimes age gives you an advantage, >>Very few times.

>>Very few times but sometimes it will >>[Beverly Woody-Belcher] If we don't tell our story, someone else will as we're seen, or maybe the story will be forgotten altogether.

We refuse to let that happen.

What's wonderful about the fact that the Park Service bought this property is that we can go back.

We can go to the cemeteries.

We can go to the house sites and show other people, which we could not have done if it had gone into other private hands.

>>[Dr. Anne Mitchell Whispant] The national parks really represent an aspiration of setting aside places of meaning, either scenic or historical significance that the country values for the public good.

The Park Service and the parks do have in them a lot of places where we can learn where we're going as people, as citizens, as a country.

(gentle music) >>What do you think this mountain would look like, (indistinct)?

>>Right now, they're towers.

I'm probably one of the happiest men that hears about tell you the truth.

I played in this gorge all my life.

And anywhere I go, this is home to me.

(gentle music) >>[Dr. Gabrielle Tayac] It's important to understand that you are always part of a larger story.

You're very rarely if ever going into a place where nobody has ever been, where it hasn't been shaped in interaction with other people.

(gentle music) >>Learning about Rock Castle's people helps us remember that history, culture and stories that speak of the resilience of the human spirit underlie almost every place on earth.

Remembering those who have gone before makes us realize our connections, and helps us imagine our future.

The more we know, the humbler we become, and hopefully, the more prepared we will be.

(gentle music) (old time music) >>Funding for Rock Castle Home was provided by Virginia Humanities, the Kenan Institute for Ethics, the Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation, Duke University, and by others.

(gentle upbeat music)