The Lost Provinces

The region used to be so remote that people called it The Lost Provinces. As late as World War One people traveled into Virginia and around to the north to get into this area, so bad were the wagon tracks that led up from the North Carolina Piedmont. The Blue Ridge, fifteen hundred feet of bare rock cliff — among the hardest rocks in the world — formed a barrier that had to be avoided rather than crossed. Oddly enough, it was here that the first shovel-fulls of dirt were turned on the Blue Ridge Parkway in 1934, and the parkway closely follows the Blue Ridge crest in these parts. Behind that rich bottomlands stretch for twenty miles to the mountains along the Tennessee border. Roads in and out are no longer impassible, but are still windy two-lanes. Tourists tend to stay away, and the Lost Provinces remain unspoiled.