Today, Lewis Mountain remains little changed from when it was built in the 1930s and 1940s. It retains all of its rustic cabins and its central lodge. (Photo: Jacob Torkelson 2022)
Honeymoons. Homecomings. Live music. Great food. Kids playing ping-pong on a big porch. These are just some of the fond memories that Shirley Ann Tutt McCoy and Elaine Taylor Blakey recall from their time at Lewis Mountain, a center of Black life in Shenandoah National Park in the late 1930s through the 1950s. McCoy’s uncle, Lloyd Tutt, was the manager of the resort. “Mr. Tutt really had that lodge swinging. He really did. And everybody had such a good time,” Blakey, a frequent visitor to Lewis Mountain, recalled in an interview with researchers at the Urban Heritage Project (UHP), an initiative of the Department of Historic Preservation at Weitzman and PennPraxis, the applied research and community engagement arm of the School.
Lewis Mountain was the center of Black life at Shenandoah National Park during the late 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Under Jim Crow, it was the only area designed to offer overnight accommodations to Black visitors. It was also the only area within the park run by and for Black campers, providing a safe space for recreation. This undated historic photo shows a group from Washington, D.C. travelling through Shenandoah National Park. (Photo: personal collection of Reed Engle, National Park Service)
However, Lewis Mountain’s history is not so simple. Located along Skyline Drive in Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park, it was the only overnight lodging available to Black campers in the park. The picnic grounds, lodge, cabins, and campgrounds were all built separately and unequally under Jim Crow-era segregation laws. There is a tension between the joyous times and the painful history that ran parallel to them. That history is very much a part of the place and its memorialization. Randall Mason—a professor of historic preservation and city and regional planning at Weitzman, senior fellow at PennPraxis, and director of UHP—and his team are drawn to places where such “negative heritage” demands attention.
Mason and his team deal with negative heritage in their preservation work, which is situated at the “intersection of built heritage, cultural landscape, and societal change through multi-disciplinary research and practice.” They have been working alongside the National Park Service (NPS) and community stakeholders at three sites where New Deal-era design and its complicated history are at the fore: Lewis Mountain in Shenandoah National Park, as well as several camps in Catoctin Mountain Park in Maryland and Prince William Forest Park in Virginia. All three sites feature formerly segregated cabin camps and are being evaluated as nationally significant cultural heritage sites.
During the Great Depression, Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) crews made many disused agricultural and industrial landscapes into newly valuable parklands. “The segregated cabin camps created in these places are beautiful, carefully designed, and manifest some of the deep tensions of public space in the US,” Mason said. “It really was ‘America’s best idea,’ but it was also one of our worst moments.”
The Weitzman team, with NPS, as well as the Olmsted Center for Landscape Preservation, NC State University, and Monica Rhodes of Weitzman’s Center for the Preservation of Civil Rights Sites, recently produced a cultural landscape report (CLR) for Lewis Mountain. The process included significant community engagement with the New York-Virginia Club, a group of Luray residents who moved away and formed the club to stay connected. Among its many events, the club frequently hosted an annual homecoming picnic at Lewis Mountain. Many club members also visited or worked at Lewis Mountain. Today, the club stewards the complicated legacy of Lewis Mountain and wants to keep its history alive. In meetings with the Weitzman team, the club’s members brought to life the once-thriving community that visited Lewis Mountain.
“Throughout the project, New York-Virginia Club members emphasized the need for us to focus on the joys they experienced at Lewis Mountain, above and beyond the negative aspects of segregation that were forced upon them,” project lead and UHP Senior Research Associate Jacob Torkelson (MSHP’19) said. “Our work is about how to make space for those stories.”
This regional map of Shenandoah National Park shows Lewis Mountain's location in relation to other major park landmarks and cities. (Map: Torkelson 2022)
This 330-page CLR document contains historical research as well as recommendations to NPS for maintenance, preservation, interpretation, and design considerations. It will be used as a blueprint for how to manage, change, and preserve Lewis Mountain and its contradictory histories. The CLR—and others like it completed by UHP—are not only about preserving what was. “The idea is to provide them with a roadmap for decision-making in management and maintenance, in order to honor the history and tell the stories today,” UHP Associate Director Molly Lester said. “We bring additional ideas about community engagement and future-oriented preservation that NPS might not embrace on its own.”
UHP researchers construct these histories through archival research augmented with first-hand oral histories. “This helps us take a step back and really understand what these places were like for the communities who used them,” Torkelson said. “We cast a wide net to talk to as many people as possible.”
During a field visit, Jake Torkelson (far left) and students from Professor Kofi Boone's NC State University landscape architecture studio pose in front of the Lewis Mountain entrance sign. Boone and his students drafted landscape treatment recommendations parallel to the UHP cultural landscape report. Several of the students' recommendations were further refined by the UHP team and incorporated into the final report. (Photo: Kofi Boone 2022)
Lewis Mountain’s historically Black-only cabins and lodge were completed by the summer of 1940. They were located with inferior vistas of the valley below and contained smaller and fewer facilities than the park’s other white-only facilities. Facilities at Lewis Mountain were not improved until the late 1960s, leaving them more rustic than their white-only counterparts that received regular investment. Although these historical disparities complicate the understanding of the rustic architecture today, they do mean that more of the original design intent remains intact at Lewis Mountain. Without the historic research, less obvious details might be discarded, such as cheaper materials or lack of care that are traces of segregationist policy.
Alum Jane Nasta (MSHP'23) measures a historic boulder drinking fountain at the Lewis Mountain campground in a 2022 photo.
The lodge at Lewis Mountain had originally been designed with a large terrace overlooking the valley below, but it was never built. Furthermore, the lodge’s vista overlooking the park was not maintained and became overgrown. The CLR’s recommendations include finally completing that terrace and clearing the vista to match the original design intent. They also suggest policy changes, such as restoring the use of the lodge from a convenience store back to a gathering space, recalling the rich social history of the site.
Because of the multi-disciplinary approach of PennPraxis and the connections at Weitzman, UHP is well-positioned to bring in cutting-edge knowledge from many different areas of expertise. For students, such as second-year Master of Landscape Architecture students Annie Parker and Zhijie Wang, working with communities and the collaborators such as NPS offers precious experience in the field. “It has been good to see how integrated the team could be in the culture landscape practice,” said Wang. “We have talked to ecologists, historians, managers. It is about collaboration.”
Parker, who also worked with Mason’s team on the difficult legacy of Robert E. Lee’s plantation (Arlington House), said she appreciated the unique challenges of these negative heritage sites. “We learned how to counter historical injustice by reclaiming landscapes in the manner of a just design,” she said. “It is also a good way to see the alternative pathways that landscape architects can take.”
Over the past several years, the Urban Heritage Project team has completed various cultural landscape studies on rustic National Park Service cabin camps. Pictured from left to right are team members Molly Lester, Jake Torkelson, Meg Frisbie, Randall Mason, and Blake Troxel.
In the end, the work of the Urban Heritage Project will help the NPS to design for more intense and contradictory experiences that tell sometimes difficult stories from multiple viewpoints. “Stewardship requires compiling an in-depth historic context, analysis of the evolution of the landscape, a condition assessment, and a treatment plan,” said Julie McGilvray MLA, Program Manager, Preservation Services in NPS’ National Capital Region (and a frequent collaborator with the UHP team). “The treatment plan informs future design strategies and implementation for features and processes associated with the landscape and ensures any future work will not harm the historic character of place.”
Mason hopes this work will contribute to a positive change by bringing a more holistic way of understanding the parks as dynamic places. “Natural landscapes always change. Culture continues to change. Cultural landscapes embrace change,” Mason said. “We are in the business of managing and designing change.”
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