Shenandoah Moon
By Duane Hahn
$17.95 plus shipping/handling
Announcing Shenandoah Moon, a new novel set in the Shenandoah Valley during a troubled, desperate 1930s, the coming of the Shenandoah National Park, the government intervention, love, and the CCC boys of Roosevelt’s Tree Army.
Join one family’s fight to preserve their land in a battle of eminent domain.
Introduction
In the early 1930’s, many people who lived in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains had their lives forever changed when the government decided to establish the Shenandoah National Park and the Skyline Drive. Although the Shenandoah National Park had been an idea “on the table” since the mid-1920’s, the Great Depression brought its planning and development to a virtual standstill. The “Condemnation Act,” which had been passed by the Virginia legislature, had not been put into full effect. This act would allow the state government to buy up property from mountain landowners and then donate it to the federal government for the creation of the park.Many in the state looked forward to the time the park would become a reality, bringing in new revenues by way of tourists, hikers, and campers. Private citizens donated money toward the purchase of the land, some even receiving “certificates” showing their “ownership” of an acre or two of mountain land.
It was a conflicted, confusing time. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had told the country that there was “nothing to fear but fear itself.” Jobs were scarce. Across the land, people stood in breadlines and prayed that things would soon change.
Things soon did change in the Blue Ridge Mountains. In one attempt to jump-start America’s economy and morale, FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps set up camps and began work on the planned Shenandoah National Park and Skyline Drive that would link them to the Smoky Mountains National Park to the southwest.
Though many proclaimed the good that would come with the building of the park, there was controversy over the way it was planned and put into effect. Robert Via sued the government, saying it was unconstitutional to force someone to sell his property to the state. Via owned a profitable apple orchard in the mountains. The case went as far as the Supreme Court, but Via lost. Like Via, other mountain residents believed the forced sale of their land and the forced resettlement of their families elsewhere to be wrong in every sense of the word. They fought it to the bitter end – threatening government officials, holing up in their homes, returning even after they’d been moved off. Yet others saw it as a chance at a new life, something better than the poverty they’d lived with for so long.
Shenandoah Moon is a novel that relates these times of hope, fear, anger, acceptance, and defiance, primarily though the lives of the fictional but realistic Shifflett family of a Blue Ridge hollow. Filled with humor and drama, adventure and suspense, romance and turmoil, it is a story worth reading, worth studying, worth remembering.
- Elizabeth Massie
