On a hazy, Canada fire smoke-filled day in Shenandoah National Park, we decided to go exploring down a nearly hidden fire road off Skyline Drive to visit the ruins of the Far Pocosan/Upper Pocossin mountain community and mission. Like so many dozens of other mountain communities, this village crossroads and surrounding hill farms were cleared to make way for the new park in the 1930s. As many of our hikes in to the park have revealed over the years, the story is a similar one of displacement, resettlement, and return to nature.
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| Remains of the mission worker's house |
As we walked along we encountered a bear-scrounged tree missing its yummy ants and cronchy beetles. We were happily surprised by the calls of Blackburnian and Hooded Warblers and escorted almost the whole way down the holler by Eastern Wood Peewee and Goldfinches. The road under our feet slipped from pavement to cobbles to dirt to wagon ruts to single-wide trail.
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| Mission workers house next to the stone chapel at Upper Pocossin Mission. Source: Larry E. Lamb Collection (BRHP) |
At the crossroads, we explored for an hour or so, poking in and out of cellar holes, peering into the precariously leaning remains of the mission house, probing stone foundations and the remaining stone steps. I don't know why we didn't go further down the road towards the South River - there are more ruins and foundations, including a cemetery closer to the river. Instead we lingered for long in one place. I can't speak for my sister, but I found myself lost in imagination, trying to reanimate the place in my mind. Could I hear hymns being sung in the church or children reading aloud to their teachers in the school? Or did I hear someone yell a warning to folks further down the holler that a revenue man was making his way over from Dean Mountain?
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| Tall Thimbleweed, Anemone virginiana |
In this place, a bridle path and trail intersection are all that remain of the busy mountain crossroad. I tried to imagine the general store and post office, and in the 1920s, a filling station (built in anticipation of increased vehicular traffic as the national park was established). The people who lived here had an intimate knowledge of the land as farms, orchards, and wild edges that climbed the mountain to its ridge. To outsiders like those mission folk, the mountain community here was isolated, superstitous, marginal, and in need of a modern God.
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| Amos on the steps of the Upper Pocossin Mission Church |
A builder of churches, Minister Frederick Neve answered the call to build Epsicopal missions clear up the spine of the Blue Ridge Mountains across seven Virginia counties. He arrived in Virginia from England in 1888 and served as rector of Emmanuel Church in Greenwood, Virginia, until the mission bug bit - and bit hard. Receiving permissions from the regional bishop, Neve set out to site, build, and staff a dozen new mission churches and schools to serve mountain communities. With each site, he included the main church or chapel, mission worker's home, and a school or community hall that doubled as school and meeting.
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| Left front facing corner of the church. |
"After the work [in the Ragged Mountains] had been carried on for some time, I could not help thinking what a good thing it would be if the same kind of work could be extended to the Blue Ridge, where I knew from what I had heard, the conditions were very similar to those prevailing in the Ragged Mountains, only worse...my idea was to plant strong missions all along the Blue Ridge, about 10 miles apart." - Frederick Neve, 1902
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| Black bear scavaged tree |
Of course the communities that Neve selected for "saving" didn't all want to be saved. In fact, many resisted his efforts and in the case of Upper Pocossin, violently so. The community liked its isolation and that, for them, could be interpreted as a kind of depth of place felt by people having for so long been left alone. But the Episcopal Church prevailed and the mission was built and the young, good virtuous women of God, sent to serve as school teachers kept diaries and wrote letters home. They painted a picture of both pity and reverence for these people, being not at all what they had expected, and with whom they found a firece sense of independence and spirit.
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| Missy Breeden, at her home in Upper Pocossin Mission. She was given lifetime tenure of her home by the NPS and died in her beloved cabin in 1949. Source: NPS Archives |
The intersection of trails that wraps around the ruins once carried horse and wagon, buggies, and mostly people walking up and down the mountain. Before the mission, the most engagement these folks had with the federal government would have been the post office. A young mission worker wrote home that while the community folks were interested in what was happening in the outside, they were content not to have the government or wars or extractive industries intrude upon their world. Over time, the community came to accept the young mission workers and their church. No one could have imagined then the impact the new park would have had on this and dozens of crossroad communities throughout the Blue Ridge in the coming decade.
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| The abandoned stone and timber built Episcopal church, Upper Pocossin Mission, 1940s. Source: Larry E. Lamb Collection |
We hiked back up the old road to the Skyline Drive and the hidden dirt lot where we'd left the borrowed truck. (I hope I can get my truck back soon!) Then we drove to another hidden road and found the Dean Cemetery, still in use and very well cared for. Again, we lingered here. The Dean Mountain community thrived on the western flank of the ridge, opposite the Upper Pocossin community. Reading the log book for comments left by relatives and visitors was really cool.
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| Dean Cemetery |
The system of mountain roads that once tied these far-flung communities together are now designated as fire roads and can be explored with thr right maps. Not all are marked today as trails in the park literature, so many are overlooked by hikers. It made us more curious about finding and following these old roads, though there are many folks who have made it their outdoor passion to do this and several folks have written books or maintain YT or blogs about these adventures.
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| Artifact from the Dean Mountain community |
Later, at home, I consulted the NPS historic tract map to see which families owned which tracts at the time of the park buy-outs (or in some cases, aquisition by eminent domain). Many of the names we read on stones in the Dean Cemetery were also names from Upper Pocossin: Meadows, Greene, Dean, etc. These communities married into each other and maintained ownership of vast sections of mountain properties as farms, timber land, and orchards. The roads that connected them, as well as some of the existing trails, were walked or ridden by these people to visit, attend meetings, burials, church, and weddings for two hundred years.
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| Pocossin Road |
These paths as fire roads or trails today, were the connective strands of a web of communications and thriving mountain society a hundred and more years ago. The idea of isolation and marginal existence was misapplied to these communities by outsiders then and enhanced by the take-back-by-nature appearance of these places today. Though I love the wilderness that is the park today, the road system and trails have taken on new meaning for me as I look forward to more fire road rambles to come.
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| Toppled stove chimney of the Pocossin Mission church. |
Far Pocosan, Night or Day
Reverend Frederick W. Neve
Knight ushers in the Brighter Day
And yet she does not pass away;
For strange to say
She shines and drives dark away.
Since this is so, it must be right
To call her Day, as well as Knight.
AllTrails Map of the Pocosin Road (now Pocosin Trail) and Dean Mountain
NPS Tract Finder Map is a useful tool for finding the old road systems (now demarcated as fire roads) and the family names of last owners.
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