A Brief History of the Middle Fork Greenway

A MISSION ON THE MOVE

A timeline of what’s happened and where we are now

In the late 1970’s, U.S. 221-321, the two-lane highway between Blowing Rock and Boone, was widened to four lanes. Many people said it was about time: tourism was booming; the county’s population increased from 17,529 in 1960 to 23,404 in 1970 (and by 1980 it was 31,666); and during the 1970s ASU enrollments doubled to about 9,500.  The road was widened and more and more people were able to go faster and faster between the two towns.   Many people considered this to be a good thing; efficient transportation is always good. 

But if you lived between Blowing Rock and Boone, and were accustomed to walking across the road to visit your neighbor every morning, or to fish in the Middle Fork, or to having your neighbor drop in to sit a spell on your porch, you might feel, as many roadside residents did after the road was widened, that your life had suffered a wide, deep disruption.  Eventually we learned to adjust to driving everywhere, but the sense of loss never went away.

In the late 1990's residents between Blowing Rock and Boone started meeting to talk about ways to improve our communities. Invariably our conversations turned to the way things used to be. The older residents remembered a time when your neighbor was anybody who lived up or down the river and anything you needed was a walk away. Several people talked about the teacher who walked from Boone everyday to the two-room Middle Fork School, and the peripatetic music instructor—the Johnny Appleseed of Shape Note Singing—who carried his bag of shapenotes to the citizens of every hill and hollow. Listening, we were transported to a magical time when hellbenders inhabited the streambanks, and pigs roamed free, living on the chestnuts that covered the ground, and people walked from one community to another to help saw lumber, plant and harvest crops, build barns, deliver babies, play the banjo, make quilts, swim, sing, pray, care for the sick, and play various games, from checkers to baseball. Everybody was poor but nobody knew it.

“Used to be a man could walk anywhere. Not anymore,” said one man, and several of us pointed to the fast pace of “the four lane” as the major factor curtailing our ability to walk even the relatively short distance from one neighborhood to the next.

Buoyed by these get-togethers and encouraged by the widespread demand for greenway trails, footpaths, sidewalks, crosswalks, bike lanes and bike paths that led to the adoption of alternative transportation plans by Blowing Rock in 1994 and Boone in 1995, we embarked on a journey to create an alternative route, “a slow lane” between the two towns, along the Middle Fork.  In 2000, with the goals of protecting our waterway, celebrating its beauty and history, and creating a walking and bicycling trail that will reinvigorate old community bonds and forge new ones, the all-volunteer Middle Fork Greenway Association was born.

In 2013 the Middle Fork Greenway Association became part of High Country Pathways, a non-profit organization with the goal of connecting the High Country with a network of trails and paddle access points.  High Country Pathways and Blue Ridge Conservancy, our local land trust, have joined forces to lead the Middle Fork Greenway initiative.