It was a warm, sunny October afternoon when my meandering path along the Appalachian National Scenic Trail in Shenandoah National Park took me directly through an old apple orchard. The trees’ limbs were sagging with ripe fruit.

The apples were small - but crisp and tart - and a wonderful snack on a day of hiking the ups and downs of Shenandoah. They also were a reminder that long before this rumpled landscape became a national park, it was home to thousands of residents who scratched a living off the land.

Sue Eisenfeld opens a window into the lives of some of those mountain folk in Shenandoah: A Story of Conservation and Betrayal. Just now arriving in bookstores, this 162-page narrative (with another 31 pages of acknowledgements, notes, and bibliography) follows Eisenfeld and her husband, Neil, as they seek out old homesteads and family cemeteries that have been grown over by the returning woodlands.

They turned up pottery fragments, broken heirlooms, foundations, and chimneys, and rows of daffodils that outline some of these long lost cabins. She sifts through the personal upheavals as the Commonwealth of Virginia turned the Blue Ridge Mountains into a park. This meant clearing the landscape of these homesteads and their owners, a chore the Commonwealth accomplished with the power of eminent domain.

The never-never land we find ourselves in -- a place that once was and will never be again -- reminds me of something Mattie Yager said in the 1970s, years after her parents were gone, years after the family left the mountains. “Oh, I’d love to have went over there but I never could have,” she lamented about a place such as where Neil and I happen to find ourselves at this moment, land lost to the ages. “I couldn’t walk up that mountain and you couldn’t get there in a car. Now I think about all our ancestors; grandmother, and all of their children and everything buried up there. I just wonder if it’s all growed up. I reckon that you wouldn’t even find the cemetery.

Ms. Eisenfeld recounts the stories of cast-out residents. It's not a new story, but has been repeated time and again since Europeans arrived on the shores of the continent. In national park history, it played out in that other great Appalachian park, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, along the Blue Ridge Parkway, and elsewhere in the park system. It continues even today as inholdings are purchased.

But this book is poignant, and one that would have been invaluable on that hike I took, glimpsing those that came before. Some of their claims dated back to the 1600s when the king of England bequeathed a great expanse of the “New World” to Lord Fairfax. The beauty of Virginia’s high country can’t be denied, and Ms. Eisenfeld’s book won't let us forget those who were uprooted here, so that that beauty could be preserved long after they gone.

What also shouldn't be overlooked, though, is that the Blue Ridge, in many areas, was a worn-down landscape when Virginia began its drive to create a national park. It had been logged, cleared, and mined in some areas. As Darwin Lambert noted in his book, The Undying Past of Shenandoah National Park, "Timber cutting wiped out large areas of Blue Ridge forest. Where the soil was fertile (usually from granites or basaltic greenstone in the park) and not too deep, the cleared areas might become livestock pasture..."

When the Commonwealth sent experts out to value properties that needed to be acquired to make way for the national park, they sometimes found areas where "there was virtually no timber of value on the entire tract. They pointed to the exhaustion of chestnut oak from tanbarking," wrote Lambert. 

The forests of the Southern Appalachian Mountains were following the lowland forests into oblivion, and a few people around 1900 began to recognize the loss. The science of forestry accumulated evidence of "wasteful lumbering and ravages of uncontrolled fires." In all the long past there had been no organized effort to prevent or fight forest fires. On top of that, the forests had suffered intentional burning by both Indians and whites, he wrote.

In 1902 President Theodore Roosevelt issued a report showing what was wrong and pointing out "the necessity of protecting through wise use a mountain region whose influence flows far beyond its borders with the waters of the rivers to which it gives rise." In some sections the report specifically referred to the Shenandoah-Blue Ridge, but mostly it discussed the whole vast region. Photos showed examples of drastic erosion in the mountains after logging and heavy flood damage in the lowlands nearby. Some mountains were shown stripped of both forest and soil. Water-supply systems and river navigation were shown to be suffering, as well as mills whose waterwheels needed regular stream flow.

The park's creation allowed the forests to recover and mend their scars, and preserved a landscape that today serves millions of visitors a year and helps drive the local economy. Do the ends justify the means? It has been, and in some corners will continue to be, debated.