STORY AND PHOTOS BY ELIZABETH HUNTER
The Blue Ridge Parkway's venerable split-rail fences, once in disrepair, are finally being restored.

“Icon to eyesore,” i wrote four years ago about the Blue Ridge Parkway’s distinctive split rail fences. The fence situation looked dire. A 2002 inventory had revealed that much of the parkway’s fencing had already disappeared and that nearly a third of what remained needed to be replaced. To preserve “the original design intent of the parkway,” approximately 85,000 linear feet of the fencing needed to remain in place and be maintained, said Larry Hultquist, then the parkway’s resident landscape architect. (He has since retired.)

The biggest problem was building materials. The blight that swept through eastern America’s forests in the early decades of the 20th century had provided parkway designers and builders with an abundance of cheap, decay-resistant, straight-grained fence-building material.

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