The Blue Ridge Parkway cut a path through Nicholas Beasley’s Roanoke County farm long before he inherited it. Though he’s still bitter about the bisection, Beasley seems more upset by the parkway’s attempts to influence what he does with the land he still owns.

"We were here first," Beasley said. "They give me a hard time about anything I’ve ever done. They’re not good neighbors, and that’s why I want to leave."

Beasley sold part of the farm nearly a decade ago. Now nearly 300 houses stand in what used to be a pasture near parkway milepost 125.

Seeds of bitterness government bureaucrats planted decades ago have grown like briar hedges along the scenic highway.

"You do talk to landowners who say, ‘The parkway killed my granddad. He died an early death, and I’ll never forgive you for it,’ ” said Gary Johnson, the parkway’s chief landscape architect. "The people have a right to be angry. For some of these people, it devastated their lives. It ruined their property."

That’s a departure from how the story has been told for most of the parkway’s history. Harley Jolley’s 1969 history of the park said most landowners in the project’s path were eager to sell. Jolley blamed any resistance the parkway encountered on absentee landowners, a misguided band of Cherokees agitated by an outsider and people who were simply anti-Roosevelt.

Jolley, a history professor who is retired from Mars Hill College in North Carolina, still holds that view. He’s particularly disdainful of revisionists who seem to be measuring New Deal land deals by modern standards.

"To make a great case out of it and say, ‘Hey, they were gypped,’ I don’t think so," Jolley said. "When that parkway was being routed, much of that land wasn’t worth 25 cents, period."

Jolley is convinced the government treated landowners fairly. "I think, from one end of the parkway to the other, as fair as any man could do it," he said.

But different landowners got very different deals. A 1938 report shows that North Carolina paid from $5 to $200 per acre for parkway land.

Virginia acquired its section of the route by dealing with each landowner individually. If they couldn’t come to an agreement, the state condemned the land and a court determined the sale price. North Carolina’s procedure was different.

"The state would go to the courthouse and post the map and that day the land conveys, the ownership conveys and only later did you get paid for it — after negotiations and after months have gone by and you haven’t heard anything," said Anne Whisnant, author of "Parkway Politics."

In some cases, years passed without payment; meanwhile, landowners were forbidden to use the property. The North Carolina highway commission told a lawyer representing one disgruntled mountain farmer, "This land has not belonged to your client since the day the map was filed in the courthouse." The client and his family "have been either trespassers or tenants at will since that time," in the commission's view.

The government did not run roughshod over every landowner. The Eastern Band of the Cherokee fought the parkway route through the Qualla reservation for five years.

"They really raised some important issues," Whisnant said. "They said, ‘Why a scenic parkway with no access from adjoining properties? Why is this going to be put through our best farmland and our most developable land and then put all tourist development in the Cherokee reservation in the hands of the federal government?’ ”

Eventually, the parkway followed ridge lines through the reservation rather than cut up valuable farmland. In exchange, the tribal government got a more conventional highway in the lowland — one that didn’t require such a wide right of way — and $40,000.

Heriot Clarkson, developer of a 1,200-acre resort in Little Switzerland, N.C., was among the early supporters of a mountain parkway. Yet Clarkson, a state Supreme Court judge and a prominent Democrat in an era when Democrats ran North Carolina, compared the government’s taking of his land to Japan’s invasion of China, Hitler’s invasion of Austria and Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia.

He fought the parkway in North Carolina’s newspapers and courtrooms for two years, from 1937 to 1939, recusing himself from the state Supreme Court decision that settled the issue.

Clarkson’s colleagues gave the parkway a narrower right of way and gave Clarkson more access roads than the parkway preferred. Clarkson also got $25,000 for 88 acres the parkway took — despite government arguments that his whole place was worth only $16,000.

Many landowners went to court. Many wrote letters to the governor or to the president. Few had an outcome as happy as Clarkson’s. Some still hold grudges.

"Every summer they come through here and they’ll tell you," said Stan Hawley, a volunteer at Mabry Mill. "They all got a different story, but it all boils down to the same thing, you know. They kind of still — they feel a lot of hardness, you know, toward the park service in a lot of ways."