Virginia’s Lost Appalachian Trail will recover the history of the segment of the Appalachian Trail that once passed through Southern Virginia from Salem, through Floyd, to the Pinnacles of Dan, then north through the communities of Galax, Fries, and Comer's Rock, ultimately traversing the Iron Mountain range south to the Tennessee border. The project will provide a free online resource for those interested in the history of the Trail and in the history of the region it once traversed. Centering on an interactive digital map of the “lost trail,” the project will include images, historical maps, and other relevant documents in a centralized, thoughtful, and accessible resource grounded in humanities scholarship. The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) will build the project in Omeka, an open source/open access digital platform developed at RRCHNM and used by more than one thousand museums, libraries, historical societies, and other cultural institutions for the gathering and displaying of humanities content. It will be linked to a much larger digital public history project on the history of the Appalachian Trail, currently being developed by the Principal Investigator (Mills Kelly) and his students at George Mason University, but will be a stand alone project specifically devoted to the history of this region.
January 16, 2019