“This Park, together with its many sisters which are coming to completion in every part of our land, is in the largest sense a work of conservation. Through all of them we are preserving the beauty and the wealth of the hills and the mountains and the plains and the trees and the streams."

            - President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Address at the Dedication of Shenandoah National Park, July 3, 1936

            Shenandoah National Park has been a fixture of the Virginia landscape since its establishment in the 1930s. Its breathtaking views and vistas, made accessible  by the winding and serene Skyline Drive, invite nearly two million annual visitors to experience complete immersion among some of Earth’s oldest mountains. The park’s magnificent natural beauty hides the many individuals throughout history who have lived within these 200,000 acres. Long before Skyline Drive spread its tendrils across the valley, Shenandoah was a vibrant landscape of mountain life.

            Humans have populated the Shenandoah Valley and the Blue Ridge Mountains for over ten millennia, with European settlers displacing Siouan-speaking inhabitants beginning in the eighteenth century. These settlers worked the land, participated in cottage industries, raised children, created unique cultures, and carved out lives for themselves and their families. The Commonwealth of Virginia relocated more than 365 of these families to make way for Skyline Drive and Shenandoah National Park, with the “boys” of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) erasing all but their names and stories from the landscape. In the 1920s and 1930s, promoters celebrated Shenandoah as “a western park in the East”—one of the first of its kind. The CCC constructed dozens of overlooks, picnic grounds, and hundreds of miles of trails along the  Skyline Drive. Nearly a century later, Shenandoah continues to welcome travelers from every corner of the world.

            This summer, I had the privilege of serving as a cultural resources intern at Shenandoah National Park. In this position, I assisted in protecting and fostering the stories of Skyline Drive’s historic landscape. This uniquely cross-disciplinary experience required extensive use of park archives, physical site visits, and the creation of historical preservation interventions. I spent much of my time in Shenandoah’s archives, which contained a vast collection of maps, building records, pre-park land surveys, oral histories of relocated residents, and National Park Service master plans completed by the Civilian Conservation Corps. I researched historical sites, wrote biographical sketches on previous residents, and offered context for building locations and conditions. I also completed more than one hundred site assessments of cultural locations within park boundaries, including Herbert Hoover’s summer home at Rapidan Camp, pre-park development at Skyland, and the historically African American Lewis Mountain area. I cataloged each site’s condition and suggested mitigation measures for its preservation.

            In between site visits, I researched and wrote "Signs of the Times: A History of Signage in Shenandoah National Park," a comprehensive ArcGIS StoryMap project that explores park signage from the 1930s to the present day. When researching this project, I directed oral history interviews with sign shop carpenters, previous park employees, and current park volunteers. I also utilized more than one hundred undigitized and unpublished photographs and administrative records from the park archives. This StoryMap project now resides within a National Park Service repository, which is accessible throughout the agency. Distilling these oral history interviews and archival findings was the ideal capstone to this interdisciplinary internship.

            As part of my internship, I also visited Historic Germanna near Fredericksburg once per week. Governor Alexander Spotswood built Fort Germanna here in the early 1700s and later commissioned his “Enchanted Castle” home on the site. The non-profit Historic Germanna Foundation acquired the land in 2013, and their archaeological center conducts field work each summer. By working with archaeologists there, I developed a better understanding of cultural resource management practices, both in the field and in the laboratory. This experience helped ensure that I was delivering a quality product to my supervisors at Shenandoah.

            My work with the National Park Service exposed me to a richly diverse array of talent. This summer, I worked alongside archivists, museum collections managers, cultural resource managers, compliance personnel, maintenance workers, firefighters, search and rescue teams, landscape architects, archaeologists, law enforcement officers, information technology experts, and park administrators. All staff members within the National Park Service, and certainly at Shenandoah, play a vital role in the preservation of our cultural and natural resources. I would like to extend my gratitude to all my colleagues and mentors who supported me this past summer. Additionally, I would like to thank the Nau Center for Civil War History at the University of Virginia. This was my second internship with the Nau Center; I spent last summer at Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park. I was excited to be the first Nau Center intern at Shenandoah, and I trust all future interns will experience the same enriching environment that I did.

            I will always remember my quarters at Big Meadows, at the heart of Shenandoah, fondly - feeling the cool breeze rip between two mountain hollows, watching whitetail deer accompany their fawns across Skyline Drive, and sitting on the porch of my house reading and wondering about what makes Shenandoah so special. This experience galvanized my interest in working for the federal government. I hope to draw upon the experiences from my Nau Center internships as I seek an occupation that preserves and protects the resources that make our history so notable. It was a privilege to represent the University of Virginia’s Nau Center and to assist the National Park Service in its mission of "preserving unimpaired the natural and cultural resources and values of the National Park System for the enjoyment, education, and inspiration of this and future generations.”