By Marcus Wohlsen
Special to The Washington Post
Wednesday, October 24, 2001; C02
A cold Blue Ridge winter day, 1924. George Corbin's wife gave birth to her third child. The ordeal killed her. The baby lived. Outside the family's log cabin, snow piled up waist-high along the Hughes River. After burying his wife, Corbin walked four miles through forest and field to the nearest store to buy milk for the newborn. I warmed myself by Corbin's granite hearth one recent rainy day and read the story of his sad journey. The cabin was dry and hospitable, but Corbin hadn't lived there for decades -- not since the federal government drove him out to make way for me and millions of other recreational users of Shenandoah National Park. Between 1935 (when the park was officially established) and 1937, the National Park Service forced the resettlement of some 465 families outside Shenandoah's boundaries. By 1938, only a few holdouts remained. Today the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club maintains Corbin Cabin, one of several it rents to tourists. It is an intact relict of a past Appalachian community. Park authorities had most of the other homes taken down or burned. And yet the ghosts of Shenandoah's former residents linger -- at least their bones do. Along the trails and deep in the forest, a hodgepodge of artifacts and melancholy ruins evoke a way of life intimately tied to the land, and a community dismantled to preserve the land. That morning, my brother and I hiked much the same route that likely brought Corbin back to his hungry baby. We started warm and sunny two days earlier at the Pinnacles Overlook just off Skyline Drive, the park's main attraction. Across the hazy hills and dips to the east stood the billion-year-old cap of Old Rag. For 200 years and more before the park arrived, assorted Nicholsons, Corbins, Weakleys and Jenkinses lived off the rocky hillside soil between Old Rag and Pinnacles in hollows that still bear their names. Residents practiced a rural lifestyle that in many ways still resembled that of their Scottish and English forebears. They raised corn and other grains, tended apple and peach orchards and stripped bark from giant chestnut trees to sell to local tanneries. Corbin reportedly earned a tidy living from bathtub brandy during Prohibition. Despite their traditional ways, recent research shows that few resembled the backward hillbilly stereotype foisted on them by early Shenandoah boosters eager to justify the forced resettlement. Residents had radios, Victrolas and cars, all of which belie the once-predominant image of the mountain people as isolated from the 20th century. Hannah Run Trail led us deeper into a lush wilderness that might never have been, down hills now afire with the annual autumn color pageant that attracts visitors by the thousands. More than a million visitors a year come to Shenandoah. Most pre-Shenandoah national parks, such as Yellowstone and Yosemite, were established to protect pristine natural landmarks west of the Mississippi. Calvin Coolidge's secretary of the interior, Hubert Work, searched for a new national park that, in his words, "would be closer to America's predominantly eastern population and maximize support for the new National Park Service." A coalition of Virginia business and tourist industry leaders, fronted by the voluble George F. Pollock, proprietor of the same Skyland Resort still in operation in Shenandoah today, campaigned vigorously -- and successfully -- for Virginia's Blue Ridge as the site of the new park. In 1926 Congress authorized the development of Shenandoah, making it one of the first examples of inhabited land specifically set aside to let wilderness recover. And, with much planning and planting, it has. An estimated 300 black bears roam freely beneath giant tulip poplars towering 120 feet high. Thick groves of pine shade former pastures. But the forest has yet to completely obscure all the evidence of its former human tenants. Just beyond Hannah Run, over the shoulder of the next rise, we caught our first glimpse: three-foot-high walls of a stacked-stone foundation framing a burned-out depression filled with ash and brush. Up on the ledges, charred tree trunks at right angles hinted at the log-and-mud walls that once offered shelter from the elements. As we walked on, decrepit stone piles appeared left and right, the crumbled remains of one-time sheds and root cellars. Long walls appeared back in the trees. On the site of a former orchard, we saw old glass bottles sanded by time and the badly decomposed sole of a shoe. Up another hill sat a squat but intact chimney strikingly well preserved. A few shards of broken crockery perched on its mantel beside a rusted crosscut saw blade, the days when it cleared land for crops long past. That night, we camped on a flat shelf of land in Nicholson Hollow above the Hughes River. J.M. Jenkins once had a frame house on that spot, a log barn and 55 apple trees on the surrounding land. The Commonwealth of Virginia gave him $1,043 for his 103 condemned acres and everything on them before transferring control of the land to the park. Money had never played an important role in the mountain economy, leaving poorer residents with few choices post-Shenandoah. Many joined farming communities funded by the Department of Agriculture in valleys east and west of the Blue Ridge. Others worked as skilled laborers in nearby towns like Luray and Sperryville. Some even joined the Civilian Conservation Corps and helped build facilities for the park that had displaced them. The next morning, a short walk brought us to the foot of Old Rag. For a brief moment we ventured outside the park; an onslaught of "No Trespassing" signs and barbed wire didn't let us forget it. With a copy Leonard F. Wheat's "The 18 Cabins of Old Rag: A Field Guide for Bushwhackers," we headed off-trail to explore the last vestiges of the village of Old Rag. In the village's heyday, a school, two stores, a post office and two churches connected Nicholson Hollow to the outside world. Wheat's hyper-detailed directions took us back an abandoned wagon path he calls "Old Road." More like a vague rut now, it led around and up a low ridge. We crashed through laurel thickets and thorny greenbrier into a burnt-hazel-choked hollow. Wading through the brush, we found the first cabin tucked away in a dip by a trickle of a creek. The foundation's walls still looked solid. But creeping vines and upstart saplings where the floor used to be made me wonder how long before this relic would disappear, like the people who built it. The next site had walls that looked like concrete (Wheat calls it "Concrete Cabin"). We tried to follow Wheat's directions to a third site. We turned east and climbed a hill. No site. We looked back. All the trees looked the same. Feeling sheepish, we tromped back out to the government-sanctioned trail. We struck camp in a downpour and made Corbin Cabin by early afternoon. Across the Hughes River from Corbin Cabin, back from the river and hidden, we went off-trail one more time to seek the remains of Aaron Nicholson's house. Once the owner of some 650 Blue Ridge acres, Old Man Nicholson sired 10 children, including Corbin's mother, before he died in 1911 at the age of 80. In its prime, his house offered luxury rare in the Blue Ridge then -- two chimneys, one at each end. The chimney closest to the river had fallen into a heap, but not so the far chimney. Tall as the trees, rugged as the patriarch who built it, Nicholson's chimney stands as tenacious commemoration of the people who lost their homes so we could hike Shenandoah's radiant wilderness. ESCAPE KEYS