MABRY MILL, Milepost 176 — Mabry Mill is the most popular and most photographed spot on the parkway. The mill and the pond it stands beside have also appeared on postcards with phony captions such as "Greetings from Iowa" and "Greetings from Vermont."

The Floyd County site itself is only slightly more authentic.

The 20th-century mill sits beside a 19th-century cabin that was moved in from a neighboring county. That log cabin sits very close to where Ed Mabry and his wife, Lizzie, lived until the 1930s. But they lived in a two-story frame house built from lumber Mabry milled himself. The National Park Service razed that house in 1942.

"Why they tore it down I'll never know," said Eugene Webb, a volunteer who demonstrates the mill's operations for weekend visitors. "They said it was a little too modern."

Gary Johnson, the parkway's current landscape architect, gave pretty much the same reason.

"We didn't want Ed Mabry living in a wood frame house like everybody else," Johnson said. "We wanted him to be a pioneer."

Virtually everything at the site except the mill and the blacksmith shop was hauled in from somewhere else, or created. The blacksmith shop was moved from another part of Mabry's land. The mill and the flumes that feed its wheel have been spruced up so much Mabry probably wouldn't recognize them.

"The flumes and everything Ed had wasn't much," said Stan Hawley, a volunteer who tells visitors about the site's history. "They were just put up on little old skittley poles. I'd say it wouldn't carry very much water around here."

(About 1930, Mabry gave up on the unreliable water supply and installed an 8-horsepower kerosene engine to drive the mill.)

Mabry certainly wouldn't recognize the pond beside his mill. The Park Service built it the same year it razed his house.

The mill itself was nearly razed. A parkway ranger happened upon some Virginia highway department workers who were clearing the parkway's right of way in the 1930s just in time to keep them from reducing the mill to kindling. That's not something even the most avid advocates of more accurate historical interpretation want to see.

"I can tell you we're not going to tear down Mabry Mill," said parkway spokesman Phil Noblitt. It was Noblitt who included the multistate Mabry Mill postcards in a display by the pond.

"We're not going to bring in some other more honest structure, so to speak. I mean, Mabry Mill was there. But did we groom it a little bit, and did we put in a reflecting pond of sorts, and is that place a lot more bucolic than it ever was historically? Yeah, it is."