Shenandoah National Park announces launch of ‘Exploring Shenandoah National Park History – One Tract at a Time’

Park Superintendent Jennifer Flynn announced the release of “Exploring Shenandoah National Park History – One Tract at a Time (EPH)”.

This new web-based interactive map provides the public with historic land tract boundaries “linked” to information about the tract including land ownership, acreage, houses, structures and land use. This information was previously published in “A Database of Shenandoah National Park’s Land Records” (Engle, 1997). The historic map is displayed with current park boundary, roads and trails.

“We are excited to offer this additional method for students, researchers and the general public to explore nearly 1,600 individual tracts of what once were private lands and are now included in Shenandoah National Park,” said Flynn. Descendants of the families who once lived on these tracts of land will find information that extends beyond simple map locations. They will discover historic photos, letters/correspondence, additional land records and oral history transcripts/recordings related to many aspects of the park history. Increasing the scope of EPH to cover more of the park history will expand the users to not only descendants and researchers of the land acquisition for the park; but will include those interested in the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Appalachian Trail and other topics and points of interest.

The launch is the culmination of a several year project led by a multi-disciplinary team of park staff and largely shaped by students and researchers at North Carolina State University’s Center for Geospatial Analytics. Now fully implemented, the EPH map application will help satisfy public interest in park museum collections while preserving original documents for future generations. Furthermore, serving this information in an intuitive, interactive web-map application will serve the growing interest in park history. Creating portals to information about the park in a digital format becomes increasingly important as our population becomes more digitally oriented.

Users can access the “Exploring Shenandoah National Park History – One Tract at a Time” map application by copying and pasting the following link into any standard web browser:

https://nps.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=81acffc694a24f4692e704051526f61c