PEAKS OF OTTER, Milepost 86 — At Humpback Rocks, the National Park Service built a faux farmstead to fit its notion of mountain life. At the Peaks of Otter, it leveled most of an existing farmstead and the Bedford County community that surrounded it for the same purpose.

A sign on the trail between the Peaks of Otter visitor center and the old Johnson farm says the people who lived there were isolated subsistence farmers.

In fact, they marketed tomatoes, cabbage and potatoes to stores and canneries in the valley below. As part of a community of 20 or more families, with a school, a church and an Odd Fellows hall, it's unlikely they felt particularly isolated. Especially considering that there was a resort hotel a short walk from their back door.

The first turnpike came through the area in the 18th century. Since the 19th century, a road has taken visitors to the peak of Sharp Top. Polly Woods opened a tavern that offered overnight lodging in 1834. Benjamin Wilkes and his son Leyburn built the first hotel at the peaks in 1857. By the 1920s, the Hotel Mons complex included two hotels, two cottages and a camp on Sharp Top that could accommodate 30 people. The Mons also had a dairy, a sawmill, a stable, an electrical generator and a swimming pool filled with spring water.

"It was a real nice place, the Hotel Mons was," James Bryant, who lived a short walk from the Mons, remembered. "It was mostly run in the summertime. People would come from California, New York, Philadelphia and everywhere."

Bryant, now 83, moved off the Johnson farm in 1941, when his aunt, who raised him from the time he was 3 days old, sold it to businessmen who sold it to the park service.

"Hotel visitors made a point of coming up to see members of the Bryant family," historian Anne Whisnant said. "They would come back every year and kind of felt like they knew each other. Mrs. Bryant had a gorgeous flower garden. People loved to see it. There was a whole lot of traffic through there. They were really pretty closely related to the whole tourist operation at the Hotel Mons." After the government bought the land, the first thing the park service did was tear down most of the structures there, Whisnant said. "The park service obliterated all evidence of the road that used to run by the farm and then basically allowed the farmhouse to sit there."

More than 20 years later, the park service stripped away the farmhouse's poplar board siding, its porches, its tin roof and some other 20th-century additions, including a room that had been added for Bryant's uncle, Dr. Edward Johnson.

"The park service tore all of that off," Whisnant said. "Tore off the siding, the tin roof and, lo and behold, underneath all that was a cabin which they date from the 19th century. And that, of course, was perfect for the kind of image that they wanted to portray."

Then the parkway hired its first historian, F.A. Ketterson. Ketterson led a charge to rehabilitate the Johnson farm.

"So they brought in the carpenters and the builders and, by gum, they put the porch back on and the siding back on and the tin roof back on and stabilized the remaining outbuildings and tried to present it as a 1920s or '30s Appalachian farm on which people had really tried to make their lives better," Whisnant said.