Today, the Blue Ridge Parkway may feel like a ride through the "primeval forest," as one parkway sign calls the woods near Rocky Knob.

But every stretch of the parkway was chosen and crafted, routed curve by curve to catch a view or avoid a ramshackle farm. Williamsburg architect Carlton Abbott, the son of original parkway landscape architect Stanley Abbott, said the parkway is different from most other national parks; its appeal is due as much to human design as natural wonder.

"A well-designed ribbon in the sky is what it is," said Abbott, who has helped design such parkway structures as the administrative headquarters in Asheville and the Blue Ridge Music Center at Fishers Peak. "It really clears up your head because it reveals the drama and the beauty of North Carolina and Virginia."

Abbott remembers hearing his father proclaim that there will never be another Blue Ridge Parkway. Indeed, Stanley Abbott also worked on other projects, such as a Mississippi River parkway, that never saw fruition.

Carlton Abbott said the Blue Ridge Parkway was built under special economic and political conditions that won't be repeated. And now, perhaps more than ever, the parkway's unique design makes it a prime agent of preservation of a vanishing rural culture, from log cabin designs to fence styles, Abbott said.

Roanoke County's Bob Hope, a retired chief landscape architect for the parkway, said the parkway's design runs counter to the common notion of a road. It is more concerned with the driver's view and experience through the curves than with straight lines and direct routes.

"Don't think of it as a means of travel," Hope said. "It's a park."

Harley Jolley, author of "The Blue Ridge Parkway," describes the parkway as an act of rehabilitation, a result largely of Stanley Abbott's vision. According to Jolley in "Painting With a Comet's Tail," Abbott wrote:

"Few of the show places of the parkway environs remain in an unspoiled natural state. The predominance of cut-over forests, cultivated farm land and the commercialization of the few protected scenic types have greatly reduced the recreation values."

This meant that along with the work of choosing varied views, designing stone bridges and avoiding commercialization, creating the parkway required tons of seed and fertilizer, timber-stand improvement, agricultural leases and extensive roadside plantings.

"These engineers and landscape architects took a hold of some pretty rugged territory back in 1935 and turned it into one of the premiere aesthetic attractions in the country," said Gary Everhardt, who was the parkway's superintendent from 1977 to 2000.

Often it was tough manual labor that transformed the rugged territory. As part of the "make work" goal of Depression-era government projects, many tasks were done by hand by many men, even if a more automated method was more efficient.

As for what Abbott called "a museum of managed American countryside," the parkway today entails monumental maintenance — constant mowing, leasing land to farmers who keep it in pasture or row crops, working with the U.S. Forest Service to minimize the visual impact of timber cuts. Designers must grapple with everything from new abutments and trail crossings to new housing developments and impending interstates.

What seems primeval and unchanging is always changing, and much of it is a far cry from what Abbott first saw.

Dan Brown, the parkway's current superintendent, summed up the park's position by paraphrasing its architect:

"Once you start messing with Mother Nature, you better keep at it."