Appalachian History Series – The Appalachian Trail and the Making of Appalachia
On a clear morning on any high ridge from Georgia to Maine, the Appalachian Trail feels simple. White blazes on tree trunks. A narrow ribbon of dirt. The soft scrape of boots on rock. Step back a little, though, and that narrow path turns out to be something much bigger. It is the visible edge of a century of arguments about land, work, recreation, and what the word “Appalachia” should even mean.
The Appalachian Trail is a real place that you can walk, but it is also a plan that grew out of Progressive Era reform, New Deal work camps, postwar conservation, and War on Poverty regional policy. To understand the trail, you have to look not only at hikers and shelters, but also at foresters, planners, dam builders, federal lawmakers, and the people who have lived in the mountain counties long before the first white blaze went up.
This story begins on paper, not on a mountaintop.
Benton MacKaye’s regional dream
In October 1921, forester and planner Benton MacKaye published an essay in the Journal of the American Institute of Architects with an unassuming title: “An Appalachian Trail: A Project in Regional Planning.” In it he imagined a connected chain of camps and work communities running along the Appalachian crest. He wrote in the language of planners rather than recreation writers. The trail was not just a footpath but a “plan of escape” from the pressures of industrial labor and city life, a way to reorganize life and work across the eastern highlands.
MacKaye’s map was more social than topographic. He envisioned people from crowded cities spending part of each year in cooperative communities along the mountains. Farms, forest preserves, and camps would be linked by a long-distance trail that tied local economies to a healthier regional order. In later introductions to his essay, historians have pointed out that his “Appalachian Trail” was really a program for reshaping the economic geography of the entire eastern United States, with the mountains as organizing spine rather than forgotten backwater.
The trail that actually emerged from his idea was shaped as much by other hands as by MacKaye himself. Those hands turned a sweeping regional plan into a continuous line of white paint on trees.
Myron Avery and the work of building a trail
In the late 1920s and 1930s, Washington lawyer Myron H. Avery pushed MacKaye’s vision from concept to reality through the Appalachian Trail Conference, the coalition of clubs and agencies that became the Appalachian Trail Conservancy. Avery was less interested in community experiments and more interested in miles of completed footpath. Jeffrey Ryan’s “Blazing Ahead” traces the sometimes sharp rivalry between the visionary planner and the relentless trail builder, a tension that echoes through later debates over what the trail should be.
On the ground, that work depended on a network of volunteer-based clubs. The Potomac Appalachian Trail Club took responsibility for long stretches in the mid Atlantic region. The Appalachian Mountain Club and allied New England groups managed northern sections. Local clubs from Georgia to the Great Smoky Mountains shouldered blazing, shelter construction, and negotiations with landowners in the southern ranges. Their minutes, correspondence, maps, and newsletters now sit in club archives, at George Mason University, and in the Appalachian Trail Conservancy collections at Harpers Ferry, documenting thousands of small decisions that made the line on the map real.
The Civilian Conservation Corps expanded that work during the New Deal. CCC camp reports and project files in National Archives branches and agency records show crews cutting new trail, relocating older routes, and building shelters and fire towers in national forests and parks along the crest. For some mountain communities, the CCC meant wages and training during the worst years of the Great Depression, as well as new infrastructure that opened nearby highlands to recreation.
By 1937 the Appalachian Trail Conference could proudly say that a continuous footpath ran from Georgia to Maine. The physical trail was complete, but its legal and political footing was fragile. Long stretches crossed private land at the goodwill of owners. Other parts threaded narrow road shoulders or passed uncomfortably close to new development. In the mid twentieth century, the question shifted from “Can we finish this trail” to “Can we protect it and the landscapes around it.”
From long trail to national scenic trail
The boom in automobile tourism and second homes after World War II brought new pressure to the mountain regions. Conservationists worried that a skinny corridor of footpath would not survive unchecked roadside development and suburban sprawl. Within the Park Service, Forest Service, and growing environmental movement, a new tool took shape: a national system of long-distance trails with federal recognition and protection.
That tool arrived with the National Trails System Act of 1968. Congress created a framework for national scenic, historic, and recreation trails and singled out two existing routes as the first national scenic trails: the Pacific Crest and the Appalachian. The act described these routes as resources of national significance and authorized federal agencies to acquire lands and easements to protect them.
For the Appalachian Trail, this was a kind of legal rebirth. The trail had already existed on the ground for decades, with a small but dedicated group of “end to end” hikers who had walked the entire length. The new law turned that largely volunteer project into the Appalachian National Scenic Trail, backed by congressional authority and supported by a formal partnership between the National Park Service, the Forest Service, and the nonprofit Appalachian Trail Conservancy.
Over the next two decades, federal and state agencies worked with clubs to secure a continuous corridor of public land, often hundreds of feet wide, along most of the route. The National Park Service’s 1981 Comprehensive Plan for the Appalachian National Scenic Trail laid out how that corridor should be acquired, managed, and developed, while later Foundation Documents in 2015 and 2016 revisited the trail’s significance and the values that needed protection in a changing world.
Today the trail extends roughly 2,190 miles through 14 states from Springer Mountain in Georgia to Katahdin in Maine, with more than three million visitors walking at least a portion of it each year. Pick almost any overlook on that route and you are likely to be standing in the official Appalachian Region as defined by another Great Society creation: the Appalachian Regional Commission.
A line through the Appalachian Region
The word “Appalachia” meant mountain ranges long before it meant a federally defined region of persistent poverty and uneven development. Historians like Henry Shapiro and John Alexander Williams have traced how, between the late nineteenth century and the mid twentieth, writers, missionaries, industrialists, and social reformers turned the “Southern Highlands” into a distinctive region in the national imagination, often portrayed as isolated, backward, and white.
In 1965, the Appalachian Regional Development Act tried to tackle long term economic problems in those mountains. The Appalachian Regional Commission that grew out of that law drew a boundary around the places it would serve. That boundary stretches over 423 counties in 13 states from southern New York to northern Mississippi, including all of West Virginia and portions of states such as Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, North Carolina, and Alabama.
The Appalachian Trail crosses that policy region again and again. It runs the spine of Georgia’s Blue Ridge and North Carolina’s high country, threads the Great Smoky Mountains, crosses the coalfield ridges of southwest Virginia, and touches the old anthracite belt of eastern Pennsylvania. In these stretches, hikers walk not only through national parks and forests but also above communities whose histories shaped the very idea of “Appalachia” in American politics.
The trail also runs far beyond the ARC map, across New England peaks and Maine’s North Woods. In those northern miles, “Appalachian” is more geological than political. The contrast between the ARC’s data heavy maps and the trail’s own romantic imagery reminds us that Appalachia is always both real and constructed. It is a set of counties, but it is also an idea that has been used to justify missionary work, extractive industry, reform campaigns, and today’s outdoor recreation economy.
Dams, development, and the reshaping of mountain landscapes
While the Appalachian Trail’s managers focused on blazes and land protection, other federal agencies remade nearby valleys in steel and concrete. Nowhere is that more obvious than in the Tennessee River watershed, where the Tennessee Valley Authority built a network of multipurpose dams that flooded thousands of acres of bottomland, relocated families, and electrified large parts of the region. TVA annual reports and project histories frame this as a story of modernization, flood control, and power, but local records and oral histories often tell more complicated stories about displacement and change.
In the years of the War on Poverty, the Office of Economic Opportunity brought anti poverty programs into Appalachian counties, while Appalachian Regional Commission projects tried to link isolated communities to broader markets and services through roads, industrial parks, and education initiatives. ARC’s ongoing “Appalachia Then and Now” data reports lay out how much has changed in terms of income, health, and education and how much inequality remains when you compare the region to the nation as a whole.
Seen against that background, the Appalachian Trail is both refuge and boundary line. It offers a narrow corridor of protected high ground above valleys that have wrestled with timber booms, coal camps, TVA reservoirs, and plant closures. At the same time, tourism and outdoor recreation tied to the trail have become part of the new regional economy, especially in gateway towns and counties that market themselves as trail friendly communities.
Living with the trail
The Appalachian Trail is often described as wilderness. Much of it does traverse national parks, wilderness areas, and national forests where large blocks of forest remain relatively intact. Yet the trail has always depended on people and institutions, from the early club volunteers who hammered together shelters to the contemporary crews and ridge runners who try to manage impacts from growing numbers of hikers.
Technical reports from researchers like Jeffrey Marion and his colleagues, produced for the National Park Service and the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, document the wear and tear on footpaths and campsites. Using detailed measurements of trail grade, soil loss, and campsite expansion, they recommend design and management strategies that make the route more sustainable under heavy use.
Beyond management reports, there is a thick cultural record of life on the trail. Since 1939 the Appalachian Trail Conference and Conservancy have published Appalachian Trailway News and later A.T. Journeys, full of route updates, club notes, photographs, and essays by hikers. Trail memoirs such as Earl Shaffer’s “Walking with Spring” and later accounts like Bill Bryson’s “A Walk in the Woods” have brought the trail to a wider reading public, mixing humor and hardship with thumbnail histories of the route.
At Harpers Ferry, the Appalachian Trail Conservancy’s archives hold the administrative paper trail of the organization and its partners. Nearby, the Appalachian Trail Museum in Pennsylvania curates artifacts from early thru hikers, shelter registers, club publications, and a growing digital library of photographs and journals. Together, these collections show how the culture of the trail has changed, from wool and hobnail boots to ultralight gear and trail names recorded in online communities.
Appalachian voices beyond the white blazes
If you only followed the trail’s promotional photographs, you might think the story of the Appalachian Trail is mostly about hikers with trekking poles standing on summits. Mountain communities, however, have always been more than trailheads and resupply points.
Across the region, archives and oral history projects preserve voices that rarely appear in official trail documents. East Tennessee State University’s Archives of Appalachia hold manuscripts, photographs, and recordings from families, unions, businesses, and churches across central and southern Appalachia. Berea College’s Special Collections and Archives gather Kentucky and central Appalachian materials that range from missionary reports to folk music. The West Virginia and Regional History Center at WVU collects coal company records, labor papers, and community photographs from the northern and central coalfields.
Projects such as the Appalachian Oral History Project, which began in the 1970s with campuses including Alice Lloyd College and Appalachian State, recorded residents talking about work, family, religion, and change in mountain counties from eastern Kentucky to southwest Virginia. The Foxfire collection in Rabun County, Georgia, preserves interviews and field notes gathered by high school students who turned local knowledge into nationally known books. These voices often talk about trails and roads, but their focus is everyday life, not thru hiking.
Put alongside the official trail histories, these collections remind us that the Appalachian Trail passes through real communities that have their own long and sometimes painful histories with extractive industries, out migration, and outside reformers. The footpath is a narrow slice across a much wider and more complicated landscape.
Framing Appalachia on our minds
In the late twentieth century, scholars tried to untangle the myths from the realities of that wider landscape. Works like Ronald Eller’s “Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers,” “Uneven Ground,” and the edited volume “Appalachia in the Making,” along with David Whisnant’s “All That Is Native and Fine” and collections such as “Appalachians and Race,” traced how industrialization, class conflict, race, and cultural politics shaped the region behind the stereotypes.
John Alexander Williams’s “Appalachia: A History” pulled many of these threads together into a single narrative, from early frontier settlement through coal booms, TVA reservoirs, and ARC highway projects. Ronald Eller and others writing in the Journal of Appalachian Studies have continued to push back against simple images of mountaineers as either noble survivors or helpless victims.
When you read these works alongside trail centered histories such as Tom Johnson’s “From Dream to Reality,” Brian King’s “The Appalachian Trail: Celebrating America’s Hiking Trail,” or Philip D’Anieri’s “The Appalachian Trail: A Biography,” a fuller picture emerges. The trail is one expression of a longer argument about what Appalachia is for and who gets to define it. Is it a playground for city hikers. A resource bank for distant industries. A home region with its own cultures and demands for justice. In practice it has been all of these at once.
Following the paper trail yourself
For anyone who wants to research the Appalachian Trail and the wider Appalachian Region, the path runs through a mix of national legislation, agency records, club archives, and local collections. MacKaye’s original 1921 essay is available through Places Journal and as scanned PDFs, complete with his maps and diagrams. The National Trails System Act and later amendments can be read through GovInfo and National Park Service pages, while the NPS History portal hosts the Comprehensive Plan, Foundation Document, and other management reports.
The Appalachian Trail Conservancy and Appalachian Trail Museum maintain research libraries that include early guidebooks, issues of Appalachian Trailway News and A.T. Journeys, and club newsletters. Their collections are essential for understanding how the route changed, how shelters and side trails evolved, and how hikers and managers talked about the trail at different moments.
Beyond the trail specific repositories, the big regional archives and the manuscript collections at universities like East Tennessee State, Berea, Appalachian State, Kentucky, and Tennessee hold the records of communities that lived with early tourism, CCC projects, TVA dams, and War on Poverty programs. Read together, these sources let you see how the line of white blazes fits into a much older and broader story about Appalachia itself.
Walk a few miles on the Appalachian Trail and you feel that story in your legs. Read the planning reports, congressional hearings, oral histories, and memoirs and you can start to see the invisible lines behind the footpath: the boundaries of the Appalachian Regional Commission map, the routes of TVA transmission lines, the back roads where Foxfire students drove to reach their interviewees, the CCC truck trails fading back into forest. The Appalachian Trail is one of the most famous walks in America, but it is also a doorway into a deep archive about how this mountain region has been imagined, used, and defended for more than a century.
Sources & Further Reading
MacKaye, Benton. “An Appalachian Trail: A Project in Regional Planning.” Journal of the American Institute of Architects 9 (October 1921). Reprinted in Places Journal, 2012. https://placesjournal.org/article/an-appalachian-trail-a-project-in-regional-planning/
United States. Congress. National Trails System Act. Pub. L. 90-543, 82 Stat. 919, 2 October 1968. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/COMPS-1727/pdf/COMPS-1727.pdf
National Park Service. “Appalachian National Scenic Trail.” U.S. National Park Service. https://www.nps.gov/appa/index.htm
Appalachian Trail Conservancy. “History of the Appalachian Trail.” https://appalachiantrail.org/about-us/history/
Johnson, Tom. From Dream to Reality: History of the Appalachian Trail. Gardners, PA: Appalachian Trail Museum, 2017. https://www.atmuseum.org
Marion, Jeffrey L., Jeremy Wimpey, Johanna Arredondo, and Fletcher Meadema. Improving the Sustainability of the Appalachian Trail: Trail and Recreation Site Conditions and Management. Final report to the National Park Service Appalachian Trail Park Office and Appalachian Trail Conservancy, 2020. https://npshistory.com/publications/appa/
Appalachian Regional Commission. “About the Appalachian Region.” https://www.arc.gov/about-the-appalachian-region/
Appalachian Regional Commission. Appalachia Then and Now: Looking at a Half-Century of Change in Appalachia. Washington, DC: ARC, 2012. https://www.arc.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/AppalachiaThenAndNowCompiledReports.pdf
Williams, John Alexander. Appalachia: A History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. https://uncpress.org
Eller, Ronald D. Uneven Ground: Appalachia Since 1945. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008. https://www.kentuckypress.com
Shapiro, Henry D. Appalachia on Our Mind: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870–1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978. https://uncpress.org
Billings, Dwight B., Mary Beth Pudup, and Altina Waller, eds. Appalachia in the Making: The Mountain South in the Nineteenth Century. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. https://uncpress.org
Abramson, Rudy, and Jean Haskell, eds. Encyclopedia of Appalachia. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2006. https://utpress.org
Author Note: I have not walked the whole Appalachian Trail yet, but I hope to thru hike it at some point in my lifetime. When I finally do, I plan to carry these stories with me and share new ones from the footpath itself.