| PC150 |
 | Diary of a Trail
Tom Floyd tells the story of the people who struggled to build the Tuscarora Trail, a 250-mile hiking trail, to serve as backup or replacement for a lengthy section of the Appalachian Trail threatened by encroaching development. With the passage of the National Scenic Trails Act of 1968, the trail had protected status and its continuity was assured; nonetheless, the Keystone Trails Association and the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club determined to complete the work they had begun. This is the story of how the two trails - the Tuscarora Trail in Pennsylvania and Maryland, and the Big Blue Trail in Virginia and West Virginia - became the Tuscarora Trail. Floyd recounts the long quest to this end that began in Shenandoah National Park and George Washington National Forest, and then headed north to the top of Blue Mountain just west of the Susquehanna River and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. In the story he tells, no part of planning or building the trail was easy; it entailed long months of scouting, poring over land records, writing letters to landholders and visiting them, seeking informal agreements or donations of lands, rights-of-way, and easements; and sometimes raising money to purchase forestlands, springs, and campsites. The volunteers broke trail, cleared thickets, moved stone, and built and shored up footway through rugged terrain. They built bridges, campsites, and shelters. The work didn't end there; once built, volunteers maintained the trail, rebuilt sections, bought more lands and easements, and rerouted parts of the trail to satisfy changes in landownership. These activities are never ending and continue on today as a renewed interest in the Tuscarora Trail is evident.
Regular price: 20.00
Discounted member price: 16.00
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| PC180 |
 | Breaking Trail in the Central Appalachians
In November 22, 1927, six men (Avery, Ricker, Schmeckebier, Schairer, Corson and Anderson) gather to form a new club. Their job - to build the Appalachian Trail from Pine Grove Furnace in Pennsylvania to Rockfish Gap in Virginia.
But as PATC member and author Dave Bates points out, that is not all they did. PATC scouted, designed, selected and in some cases built, the entire Appalachian Trail all the way from Delaware Water Gap in New Jersey to Springer Mountain in Georgia, plus the trail through Maine. And because of Myron Avery's dominant personality, president of PATC and chairman of the Appalachian Trail Conference at the same time, PATC became ATC, and ATC became PATC. This is the early history of the club that build the Trail.
Bates has recaptured the enthusiasm, the energy, the passion of those early trail builders. Liberally illustrated with old photos, it takes you back to the 1920s and 1930s, when the AT was just a series of paint blazes in the wilderness.
Regular price: 20.00
Discounted member price: 16.00
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| PC210 |
 | Lost Trails and Forgotten People: The Story of Jones Mtn.
Tom Floyd was one of the hikers in the 1960s who heard that a trail used to cross Jones Mountain. One day, while hiking near the Laurel Gap, he was warned by another hiker to stay off the mountain because it was wild and people had gotten lost. In the early 1970s, the author was one of the hikers on the Appalachian Trail who heard that a cabin had been discovered on Jones Mountain.
Floyd first visited the mountain in 1976. That year, as the supervisor of trails for the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club, he designed and helped build the trail to Bear Church Rock. On his work trips to the mountain, he was intrigued by the old trails and roads that he occasionally came across. While exploring old traces near Cat Knob, he discovered faint blue blazes on trees, evidence of a trail-building era that he had not heard about. Then one night during a work trip, when all the sleeping spaces were taken at the Jones Mountain Cabin, Floyd climbed to a flat above the hollow, where he slept on the ground. The next morning, he awoke to discover two fieldstones marking a grave just a few feet from where he had slept.
These events fed his curiosity and eventually led him to explore the mountain further and research its history. What started as a feature article soon became a book.
Jones Mountain and the adjacent ridges and valleys are rich in history, part of the great drama that has molded the American continent. Here, the story of human events spans more than 250 years of recorded time, from the first settlements of the 1720s to a trail-building era of the 1970s. Before the arrival of the Europeans, Indians occupied the Blue Ridge for 12,000 years.
Most of Jones Mountain is today in Shenandoah National Park. In its remote valleys and wild backcountry are some forty old trails and traces. There are two sites of prehistoric Indian camps, more than twenty former homesites, old cemeteries, several distillery works, two old mill sites, four abandoned narrow-gauge railroad lines, old logging roads, former pasturelands and cultivated fields now grown over, and the site of a military encampment. This book is the story of the mountain and the people who lived there, left their mark, and died there.
The new edition (2004) corrects and updates the information based on subsequent interviews and adds an historic photograph.
Regular price: 10.00
Discounted member price: 8.00
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| PC230 |
 | The Dean Mountain Story
The Dean Mountain Story began in England in the mid-1750s when two brothers, John and William Deane, boarded a Dutch ship and sailed to Pennsylvania. From there the brothers traveled south to Orange County, Virginia, and settled east of the North Mountain, now known as the Blue Ridge.
Little is known of John's and William's lives, but Rockingham County records show that in 1816 James Dean, son of John (who had dropped the "e" from his name), married Susanne Harness. In the early 1820s, Susanne and the couple's two young daughters died in an epidemic, leaving James and his son Jeremiah alone.
In 1824 James married his second wife, Sarah Monger, and built a lovely two-story brick house for her in the valley beside Elk Run.
The story of how James and Sarah Dean and their children left the valley and lived out their lives on Dean Mountain, now a part of Shenandoah National Park, has been reconstructed from family folklore and records in the family Bible. A fascinating look at life in the mountains before the Park.
Regular price: 10.00
Discounted member price: 8.00
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| PC240 |
| PC250 |
| PC260 |
 | Shenandoah Secrets: The Story of the Park's Hidden Past
(Revised 2011 ) The authors point out significant and interesting events that transpired within what is now the boundaries of the Shenandoah National Park before it was a park. What secrets lie hidden in the Park's forests and briery tangles? What fascinating all-but-forgotten incidents took place inside its boundaries?
Today, Shenandoah National Park is, in the words of an old mountain woman, "a play place for city folk." But that was not always the case. Before it was a Park, it was home to nearly 500 families in more than 300 square miles of Virginia countryside — a microcosm of an earlier America.
Industry, agriculture, commerce, war with its military actions, political decisions, community, church, and family life—all these have left their mark here. As time passes, these marks grow fainter. The Reeders have kept their memories alive through the words of this book.
The authors have collected and published many photographs gleaned from the files of history, some of which were published for the first time. They are candid in their realism and their articulation of life as it was in the past, before the arrival of the artificial "wilderness" created by the formation of the Park.
It is many of these same photos that have caused the Park's cultural resource mavens to ban Secrets from being sold in the Park because they depict a period in American history when poverty was prevalent, not only within the confines of current Park boundaries, but in much of rural and urban American. The Depression affected millions of people everywhere, not just in SNP. Within the mountain culture, no one was ashamed to be poor because people cared for each other. No one went hungry.
The book's rare and unusual photos depict some of the only interior shots of mountain homes, as well as cabins, schools, mills and other industry, recreation, farm life, animals, and the admirable Appalachian ethics and way of life. Complementing the photos are anecdotes straight from the former inhabitants (some quite humorous), as well as carefully researched events going back to before the founding of the nation. Where possible, these events are tied to the sites where they occurred within the Park, along the roads, the trails, and through the gaps.
Regular price: 16.00
Discounted member price: 12.80
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| PC270 |
| PC280 |
| PC320 |
| XX535 |
| XX545 |
| XX771 |