Recreating Boone's Wilderness at Cumberland Gap National Historical Park

Cumberland Gap National Historical Park (NHP) is a 24,000-acre national park unit situated at the intersection of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia. Congress authorized the park in 1941 to commemorate the Gap's important association with the Wilderness Road, Daniel Boone, and westward settlement in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century. In a region where good roads were hard to come by, the Wilderness Road proved to be an important transportation corridor well into the twentieth century. In 1909, the Bureau of Public Roads built an "Object Lesson Road" through the Gap as a federal demonstration project, opening the area to commercial traffic. In the 1920s, the Wilderness Road became Highways US 25E and 58 and was part of both the Dixie Highway and the Federal Highways System. When the National Park Service (NPS) took possession of the area, US 25E was a paved road heavily used for local and interstate traffic.¹

Successive generations of park planners and administrators reckoned with the dilemma of how the NPS should interpret the Gap's pioneer past with a modern road running through it. New Deal park planners did not see roads and wilderness as incompatible. Thinking that the most appropriate way for visitors to experience the Wilderness Road was through the convenience of their automobile, they proposed building a parkway drive along US 25E. However, the disruption of World War II, and a slow land acquisition program which drug out well into the 1950s, waylaid plans for the parkway. It would not be until 1996 that motorists were able to drive their vehicles through the mountain under the Gap in an impressive tunnel. But the old question still remains. How does this manifestly modern tunnel that bypasses the very Gap itself by diverting traffic under it fit within park planners' vision to recreate an eighteenth century wilderness?

In the 1960s, there was a marked change in discourse at Cumberland Gap NHP due to three pieces of legislation that impacted park management: the Wilderness Act of 1964, the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, and the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966. Wilderness preservationists achieved success with the Wilderness Act of 1964, which required landowning federal agencies to evaluate all roadless areas over 5,000 acres for inclusion in a new federal wilderness system. Although Cumberland Gap was a National Historical Park, not a park specifically dedicated to the preservation of natural resources, the legislation mandated that it, too, had to evaluate its holdings and hold public hearings. These hearings revealed tensions between local elites and outside activists as well as between environmentalists and the NPS that echoed the larger societal clashes of the 1960s. Specifically, these hearings provide a moment to examine the intersections of environmental policies and social and economic reform, since eastern Kentucky was a primary focus for the Johnson administration's War on Poverty efforts.

This article takes a deeper look at these hearings and their outcomes: pursuing a tunnel project in 1973, electing to manage certain areas of the park as wilderness, and opting to selectively preserve and interpret a twentieth-century mountain community called Hensley Settlement. Through these efforts, the NPS attempted to balance wilderness preservation, economic development, and historic preservation at Cumberland Gap NHP. Federal administrators across programs intended heritage tourism to be the bridge that would bring both groups together. Instead, that tourist discourse replicated tropes about Appalachian people, reinforcing longstanding regional stereotypes that residents of the area were primitive and isolated from the mainstream of American life.

Creating a National Park

Middlesboro, Kentucky, boosters began clamoring for a national park in the tri-state area as early as 1922. They were interested in bringing tourist dollars into the region but lacked a clear vision for the park. Kentucky Republican Congressman John M. Robsion, from nearby Barbourville, submitted a number of bills but faced stiff competition from dozens of other Appalachian communities pressing for a national park. In 1922, Congress selected Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina and Tennessee, Shenandoah National Park in Virginia, and Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky as...