Above: 1875 and 1975 maps of what is now the Browntown trail.
A few days back, I hiked the little-used Browntown Trail in Shenandoah National Park, starting from Gravel Springs Gap on Skyline Drive.
On my first hike (see just-prior post), I spotted what appeared to be a stone retaining wall, holding up a long section of the road bed. As below:
When I got home, a bit of research suggested that the road bed in its current form probably dates to the 1870’s-era industrial boom that occurred around Browntown (see Post #2151). That’s when they began clear-cutting the surrounding oak forest to use the oak bark for tanning hides.
I went back there this morning to look at that wall.
Lots of crude stone walls, hidden in plain sight.
Once you know they’re there, those stone retaining walls get easier to spot. Above, that’s the top edge of a retaining wall at one of the turns in the switchbacks. From the trail, it looks like a line of stones laid at the edge of the road. Not really different from the many lines of stones along the roadside edge.
It’s only when you step off the trail, and look at that line of stones edge-on, that you realize that the line of stones on the ground is actually the top of a massive stone retaining wall, literally holding up the hairpin bend in the road.
Once you work your way around to the back side of the wall, you can see that this isn’t some artisanal, carefully-laid, farmer’s-field dry stone wall. This is a ten-foot tall wall of stacked boulders, curved and sloped to resist effects of gravity on the dirt being retained.
All the walls had this same crude, open construction.
Conclusion
Around 150 years ago, somebody went to a great deal of trouble to construct a very nice road, from Browntown up to Gravel Springs Gap (on what is now the Skyline Drive).
What I spotted on my first trip was merely the biggest of many retaining walls holding up the road bed. That wall is a bit over 500′ long, and perhaps 10′ tall at the middle. But there are also retaining walls holding up most of the hairpin turns on the switchbacks. And there are walls scattered throughout the route, evening out the smaller ups-and-downs of the terrain.
All had the same crude piled-up-boulders construction. They have little in common with the tightly-laid decorative dry stone walls found elsewhere in the Virginia Piedmont landscape. Plausibly, these were never intended to be seen as anything more than bits of roadway engineering.
However they look, you can’t fault the quality of the construction. Roughly a century and a half after these were built, they remain virtually 100% intact.
Why they were built, in this obscure location, on the western slope of the Blue Ridge, I can’t say. I’m guessing it has to do with the clear-cutting of the local oak forest for use in the tanning industry that grew up in Browntown. But that’s just a guess, based on a couple of dated maps (presented in prior post).
In any case, the surprise is that there isn’t just a wall. There’s a whole series of walls, all with the same open construction, all using rocks of about the same size, down the length of much of that trail. Which, along with the maps presented in an earlier post, suggests a one-point-in-time makeover of the roadbed, occurring at the same time as the logging/tanning boom in nearby Browntown.
You just have to step off the trail to see them.
