This long sliver of wilderness, along the Shenandoah River between ridges of the Blue Ridge Mountains, was created as a National Park by Franklin Roosevelt in 1936.

The dedication capped three decades of efforts to preserve wilderness in the eastern United States.

While enormously grateful that the area has been preserved, one can still be uneasy about the forced relocations of poor subsistence farmers from remote and isolated hollows of the Appalachian Mountains that were performed by state and federal authorities.

On line, one can find an interesting history of the decades-long effort to create the park, first by the Commonwealth of Virginia and, later, by the National Park Service.

The relationship of the park’s creation to the Chestnut Blight and to the Civilian Conservation Corps was not known to me before looking up the “back story” of this postcard.

The postcard photograph is lovely; it was printed and published by the Asheville Postcard Company which perfected the “linen” postcard.

 Neither addressed nor mailed, the postcard survived for eighty years as a souvenir or memento of this beautiful landscape.