Grandma Gatewood's Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail by Ben Montgomery Read Free Book Online Page B

fermented, some friends convinced him to describe his vision in an article for the
Journal of the American Institute of Architects.
MacKaye wrote that the purpose of the trail would be to “extend the primeval environment and to set bounds to the metropolitan environment,” providing a grand natural backbone accessible by those packed into cities along the Eastern Seaboard. After the article was published, MacKaye led a concerted effort to involve hiking clubs, lawyers, and others who might help bring his plan to fruition. Hundreds contributed, blazing and mapping sections, searching through property and tax records in county courthouses, angling to cobble together and preserve for the public the longest continuous walking path in the world.
    Ten years later, nearly half the trail had been marked—but mostly in the Northeast, where many trails had long been established and hiking communities had a history. Myron Avery, a young lawyer and early visionary who took the reins, helped organize hiking clubs and plan undeveloped sections. Avery became chairman of the fledgling Appalachian Trail Conference in 1931, and by the group’s meeting in 1937 in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, the trail was nearly finished. Avery knew even then, though, that the A.T. would “never be completed.” It would shift and bend and be subjected to endless rerouting and relocation, as if it had a life of its own. The timing of the completion was perfect, and it’s quite possible the trail might not have existed if the plan had been delayed.
    At the beginning of the twentieth century, the United States had just one hundred miles of paved highways. But by the 1930s, cities had begun to spill outward, like a spreading blot, and roads that had been designed for horses and buggies were quickly becoming obsolete. Maybe those early A.T. volunteers felt the need for expediency as their country transformed quickly, as the population grew, as the American automobile industry sped forward at an unprecedented rate.
    The very same year of the trail conservancy meeting in Gatlinburg, in fact, the federal Public Works Administration signed a check for more than $29 million and the federal Reconstruction Finance Corporation bought nearly $41 million in revenue bonds, and 10,000 men began working day and night to move 26 million tons of earth and stone and pour 4.3 million square yards of reinforced concrete to create two steady, even, parallel lanes that ran the length of Pennsylvania—including more than 114 new bridges, with acceleration lanes and paved shoulders—bisecting the state east to west.
Popular Mechanics
would call the Penn Turnpike “America’s first highway on which full performance of today’s automobiles can be realized.”
    The big road was born.
    It’s ironic, perhaps, but the new expressway’s conceptual father was the same man who thought up the Appalachian Trail: Benton MacKaye. A few years after his article on the “primeval environment” that stretched from north to south, MacKaye, in an article in the
New Republic,
envisioned a “highway completely free of horses, carriages, pedestrians, town, grade crossings; a highway built for the motorist and kept free from every encroachment, except the filling stations and restaurants necessary for his convenience.”
    Two years later, as the small army of trail blazers and pioneers worked to connect and maintain a footpath through a streak of American wilderness, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was already planning ways to absorb millions of soldiers, soon to engage fully in World War II, back into the nation’s economy once the last bullet had been fired. And he saw a national system of highways that connected the country’s major cities and spliced together rural agriculture centers as a possible solution. Planners immediately started charting a proposal to build or expand nearly forty thousand miles of road. By 1939, when Ford Motor Co.’s “The Road of Tomorrow” and General Motors’