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Pull off the Blue Ridge Parkway at Bluffs Coffee Shop and you’re likely to find Ellen W. Smith waiting on customers there, as she has since 1949.

The tall, thin woman smiles in the cool afternoon light, remembering the day 74 years ago when she moved to the white farmhouse beside the brand new parkway in Laurel Springs.

“They were graveling the road in front of our house,” she said during a break from serving the families, bikers and couples who come to eat the soft ham biscuits and crispy fried chicken at Bluffs.

“When we moved there, I was homesick,” she said, recalling the home she left in another part of Alleghany County.

But Smith, 80, decided she would stay put. And she has lived and worked on this five-mile stretch of the Blue Ridge Parkway nearly every day since.

“It’s the best place in the world to be,” she said.

You don’t have to live on the parkway to love it.

Drive this stretch on a bright summer day and the parkway becomes a breezy tunnel of rich, green trees and blue skies punctuating hazy views of homes and valleys below.

This road, which turns 75 this year, means freedom for the 17 million who drive it every year: Freedom from city heat and crowding, freedom to pilot big iron up around the bend, freedom to watch a soaring hawk, freedom from the daily grind of work, and freedom from the high cost of family vacations.

“The parkway? It is grounding. It centers you. It urges you to be at peace,” said Emily Vail, a Greensboro resident who has driven the complete parkway many times for the pure pleasure of it.

This grand highway has survived ice storms, hurricanes, rock slides and political squabbles. But it may fall victim to its own popularity if its caretakers can’t find the people and money to maintain and protect it.

The parkway was born of hardship during the Great Depression’s massive government stimulus programs that put hundreds to work building the road.

The National Park Service now cares for the road much as it would a treasured antique that’s meant to be used but is inherently fragile.

Potholes dot the parkway and need constant attention.

An ice storm splintered trees along hundreds of miles.

A thousand miles of grass need mowing.

Vacationers build homes near the road, encroaching on the first-class vistas and natural space it was designed to showcase.

That is the fundamental tension of the Blue Ridge Parkway: a 469-mile strip of national park land built for automobiles that combines a man-made vision of nature, commerce, tourism and everyday life into an environment unique in America.

Hit the road, Jack

Start your trip in the nondescript green lowlands near the North Carolina-Virginia border and you might miss the Lowgap monument that marks where it all began for the road that stretches north to Shenandoah National Park and south to Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

Step out of your car and you’ll see nothing but forest, with the sounds of a bubbling stream and wind in the trees. It’s an image that conveys exactly what the parkway’s founders intended.

The workers who turned the first dirt here on Sept. 11, 1935, began an experiment in national park development that continues to this day: A landscape architect’s hand-sculpted vision of the mountains as a grand spectacle. An escape for tens of millions of Americans.

Vickie Burleson of Greensboro is one who has built family traditions around the parkway.

She met her husband on April 1, 1973, while hiking with a group of friends around Price Lake. For the first 12 years of their marriage, they lived in Hickory and took a short trip to the parkway to celebrate April 1 every year.

“Many afternoons after work, we would ride up on the parkway near Linville Falls so Mike could trout fish,” she said. “I’d fix a picnic supper, take a good book and just chill while he fished.”

Mike Burleson was born in Mitchell County, and his parents and grandparents are buried there, so the couple head to the mountains several times a year.

“He still has a thing about always having a picnic, so we rarely go on the parkway without one,” Vickie said.

Myths have grown up like mountain laurel around the parkway’s heritage.

Author and historian Anne Mitchell Whisnant believes it’s time to take a harder look at the parkway’s history as a guide for the next 75 years.

“A lot of what you read is kind of the 'Southern Living’ history of the parkway,” she said. “It’s very gauzy and kind of encased in fluff and nostalgia, and it doesn’t express the real history of the parkway at all.”

Born to be wild

In Ellen Smith’s world, at the parkway’s Doughton Park, the mountains slope gradually.

At higher elevations 200 miles south, a far different, grander landscape awaits at Graveyard Fields, where travelers such as Wytske Lunter, 31, and Paulien Wenting, 35, immerse themselves in the raw beauty of the place.

The camping and hiking area near mile post 418 is a jumping-off point for nature lovers in search of cool weather, rocky terrain and vigorous waterfalls.

To these Dutch scrub nurses on a monthlong holiday from New Orleans to New York, the parkway is among America’s natural wonders.

“Last year we were on the West Coast, and (the parkway) reminds us of Yosemite,” Went­ing said.

Wild places such as Yosemite and Yellowstone inspired the idea of national parks in the 19th century.

According to Whisnant’s book “Super-Scenic Motorway,” business leaders in Asheville had been working since 1899 to create some kind of Appalachian national park.

But North Carolina’s Blue Ridge and Smoky mountains, long revered for their beauty, were also major timberlands. And powerful logging companies fought efforts to create parks or build tourist roads there.

Loggers cut nearly 60 percent of the timber in the Smoky Mountains area.

“What loggers had not gotten, fires and floods had finished off so that much of the landscape of western North Carolina had become decidedly unscenic,” Whisnant wrote.

Carolina in my mind

Franklin D. Roosevelt swept into office in 1933 and started looking for ways to put Americans to work. For three years, the Great Depression had ravaged the nation’s economy and created historic unemployment levels.

Business and political leaders, especially in Asheville and Knoxville, Tenn., thought they had the ideal project.

At their urging, the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 authorized the parkway to be built under the new Public Works Administration.

But first, the road needed a route.

Most leaders in Washington agreed that running the parkway through Virginia, beginning at Shenandoah National Park’s Skyline Drive, made for the best northern route. But North Carolina and Tennessee were left to haggle over the best route for the southern half of the road, where the mountains were higher and deeper.

Some favored a split route that would reach the Tennessee lowlands to the west and the North Carolina highlands, converging again at Smoky Mountains National Park.

Whisnant credits an unsung hero for making the best case for the single-road option. His name was R. Getty Browning, and he would become the senior locating engineer for the road’s path through the mountains.

Browning showed Washington that the high-mountain route he sketched out in North Carolina would expose the most scenery for the least cost.

In November 1934, Interior Secretary Harold L. Ickes announced a complete victory for North Carolina.

The North Carolina stretch would be nearly 250 miles long; Virginia’s part, 220 miles long.

Working on the highway

Just as landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted designed New York’s Central Park as an imitation wilderness to soften the concrete of Manhattan, the landscape architects and engineers who built the parkway sculpted a natural vision with machines and drafting tables.

“They were given a piece of canvas that was 469 miles long,” said Houck M. Medford, founder and CEO of the Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation, a private, nonprofit fundraiser for the parkway.

They set out to “construct a photograph that created a moment of anticipation around every curve,” Medford said.

Without a protected centerpiece such as the Grand Canyon or Yosemite Valley, the parkway’s architects and engineers had to simulate vast park land without actually owning the property. Along the road, they had to plant trees, move rocks and pile dirt to showcase, camouflage or blend with nearby farms, valleys and towns.

That was a hard job for the hundreds of construction workers who built the road, said Bob Ballew of Reidsville, whose father helped build tunnels near Mount Mitchell during the 1930s.

Ballew’s father told him many stories about the work.

“They hand-drilled ’em and blasted the rocks and sledded them out with mules,” Ballew said. “It was all done very primitive. Before the parkway was built, they didn’t have any way to get equipment in there.”

The landscape designers left behind 800 ink-on-linen drawings at the Blue Ridge Parkway archives in Asheville that chronicle its detail mile by mile.

“Every view, every curb, every stone — they are as richly detailed as any residential landscape plan that would be presented to a client today,” Medford said.

Drive North Carolina’s segment and see for yourself. Despite thousands of private properties that touch the parkway’s edges, the uniform impression is one of traveling through a vast and separate world that spools out at a leisurely 45 mph.

“I don’t know that you can go anywhere in the world and see anything as beautiful in the U.S. as the Blue Ridge Parkway,” said Sandy Phillips of St. Simons Island, Ga., who recently camped near the area.

A driver can thread through woods that seem like deep forests, scale rocky heights that seem to defy gravity, see bright blooming rhododendron and stop on grassy berms for picnics.

The parkway capitalizes on what its curators call a “borrowed landscape” that touches more than 4,000 properties from Waynesboro, Va., to Cherokee.

Most of the road was complete by 1966. Ongoing fights with the owners of Grandfather Mountain did not end until the 1980s, when the Linn Cove Viaduct was built, finally completing the road in 1985.

It’s like home

For Greensboro’s Emily Vail, in many ways the parkway has become her home away from home.

“Its gently rolling mountains are like a sea of soft blues and greens. The meadows stretch and roll. ... Rock faces tumble with mosses and tiny flowers, and toward the south the mountain laurel suspends from the cliffs as though hanging in mid-air,” she wrote in an e-mail.

“No matter how many times I drive the parkway, and for the past 15 springs it is the entire length, no two pilgrimages are the same. For me, it is a spiritual home.”

Contact Richard M. Barron at 373-7371 or richard.barron@news-record.com