When the park was conceived in the early 1930s, the federal government began evicting homesteading families in order to claim land through eminent domain. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt opened the park with a grand speech on July 4, 1936, dedicating Shenandoah “to this and succeeding generations of Americans.” It was a platitude that came across as cruel irony to the more than one hundred families who had already received eviction notices.
