Approximately 200 families and landowners in Rockingham County were displaced by the creation of Shenandoah National Park. The effort to establish a national park in the populous eastern United States began in 1923 with a recommendation by the first director of the National Park Service, and conservation, business, and political interests drove the project. President Calvin Coolidge signed a bill on May 22, 1926, authorizing Shenandoah National Park, and Virginia then mounted a campaign to raise money to buy land and encourage donations. In 1932, President Hoover ordered construction of Skyline Drive, the park's central attraction, and residents were first told they would not be displaced unless they were in the direct path of the highway. However, in 1934, a new Park Service director required all inhabitants of the park lands to leave. President and Mrs. Roosevelt helped social workers develop plans to resettle mountain people in homestead communities, and according to Shenandoah National Park Homestead Records, 51 families from Rockingham and neighboring counties were resettled north of Elkton in areas such as Homestead Road, Parkway, and Scenic Drive, while other families settled along Huckleberry and Red Brush Roads. Five people in Rockingham County received lifetime rights to remain in their homes within park boundaries. Others refused to sell, and authorities threatened forcible eviction, though it was rarely used. To return the land to its natural state and erase signs of prior habitation, homes, businesses, schools, churches, stores, one post office, and three gas stations in Rockingham County were destroyed, and some families watched their own homes burn. Most mountain residents left on their own and adapted to life beyond the mountains, finding local work, moving to nearby cities, relocating to Washington, D.C., for government jobs, or leaving for other states. Ambrose Shifflett of Simmons Gap refused to sell and was given an ultimatum to leave by December 6 or be put out on the road; after last-minute arrangements secured a temporary home in an abandoned house in Nortonsville, his wife and young children were taken there by a car from the Episcopal Mission, and as he and an older son drove their cows, sheep, and mules on the seven-mile trip down the mountain, park authorities burned their home.