This week’s assignment is to blog about our proposed migration moment and complete a secondary source annotated bibliography. As a reminder, the three ideas that we originally considered—the German Internment Camp at Hot Springs, NC, the Alexander House, and the Blue Ridge Parkway (BRP). As Liz and I are leaning more toward the Parkway, we did our research this week on this topic. Naturally, reading other sources about the history of the Parkway got me thinking about how we should approach this topic in terms of how the establishment and placement of the Parkway through the Blue Ridge Mountains affected migration in our area. I had a few different ideas about this:

As I imagine it at this stage, our project would begin with the construction of the Parkway in 1936. Assuming we are able to locate the primary sources, I would like to discuss the individuals that were brought in by Franklin Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) to work on the project. This is the first wave of migration relating specifically to the Parkway. I would also be interested in looking into the locals in the area who were displaced due to the Parkway running through their land. I see this as another form of migration, one where locals were forced away from their homes. I think this would be an interesting addition to our project as some of these families (and the descendants of the families) had very negative experiences and feelings with this project. I think we stand a good chance of finding at least some sources on this topic as Heather South, the head archivist at the Western Regional Archives (WRA) mentioned these families to me and Liz during our visit. This leads me to believe that Heather has probably seen some primary sources supporting this claim. Another component to our research would be the various forms of tourism that the Parkway has brought to Western North Carolina. This includes leaf-lookers, conservationists, cyclers, and movie/commercial crews, to name a few. These tourists are short-term migrants in our area, brought to this area because of the Parkway and staying only for a while.

This undoubtedly needs to be fleshed out more, but this is where we started and the direction that our thoughts are taking us so far. Needless to say, this project will develop more as we begin digging into primary sources. For right now we started looking at secondary sources to see what kind of work has been done on the BRP so far. Most of what we found leaned more towards the history of the BRP itself and not the people that were influenced by it, but we still managed to find some information about individuals related to the project. One website even includes oral histories and stories. I still need to look into this a bit more, but I am extremely hopeful that these will be useful to us.

To get a better idea of where our research has taken us, please see our secondary source annotated bibliography that I have included in this post. I created a Word document with properly formatted citations, but had some trouble attaching the document to the post, so I here is a link to a Google doc that Liz and I were working from. It is not nearly as pretty as my Word document, but it is the only way I could think to make sure it was attached properly.