Rockingham County SNP Records: Court Proceedings

Dublin Core

Title

Description

The first series of the SNP Records collection consists of 4,756 documents related to The State Commission on Conservation and Development of the State of Virginia v. Cassandra Lawson Atkins and others, and Fifty-Two Thousand Five Hundred and Sixty-One (52,561) Acres of Land, more or less in Rockingham County, Virginia, court case initiated by the state of Virginia in order to acquire 52,561 acres of privately held land located within the northern Blue Ridge Mountains. The Virginia government in collaboration with the federal government, used condemnation, a process that involves the seizure of an individual's private property for public use, without the owner’s consent, but with payment of compensation, and more formally known as “eminent domain,” to create the Shenandoah National Park. The documents within the collection almost entirely refer to land located within Rockingham County, but other counties within the park’s scope followed a similar process to acquire the land. The documents are broken up into three categories: Deed Books, Miscellaneous Documents, and Condemnation Cases. This collection contains the Condemnation Cases.

For more information on the Rockingham County Shenandoah National Park collection, visit the "Finding Aids" tab in the menu above.

In the 1970s and 1980s many of the individuals displaced by the park creation were interviewed in hopes of preserving their stories. To listen to those records visit, http://catalog.lib.jmu.edu:80/record=b2286919.