The Undying Data

The data tables had the name of the person or people, which county they lived in, how many acres they had, and how much they got for their land. It didn’t have any information about a lot of things, like the terrain or fertility of the land. Sometimes men and women would get a different price for the some amount of land. We couldn’t tell if the Virginia government did it on purpose, or the women’s land just wasn’t as good as the men’s.

Since the data had information about everyone that was displaced, we decided we wanted to make it available on our web site. We were happy to learn that there is not copyright on data! It took us over a week to enter it all into the computer. It was over 800 entries! Even after we had it all in the computer, we had to edit it all and make sure it said exactly what it had in the book. The reason that the data is so important is that it told us information about the individual people who were displaced. The other information we had (which wasn’t much) only had information about them as a whole, not individually. Still, there was some things that were plainly unfair. On one occasion, the State of Virginia sold 0.5 acres of land to themselves for $16,000. But the really strange thing is that the sale was on one of the ‘Condemned’ pages. That didn’t seem very fair to us.

The data has made us ask questions. One of these was: “How did the Government of Virginia decide who would get paid what?" This question was raised because we found the same amounts of land were sold for different amounts of money to males and females, to blacks and whites. Ask yourself some of these questions as you look at the data.

Download the data from The Undying Past of Shenandoah National Park by Darwin Lambert (Mac: click on the file name, hold and select "download link", or Windows:right click on the file name) - Excel (data.xls) or as a tab delimited file (data.tab)

Activities related to this data

Return to The Undying Past of the Shenandoah National Park

Continue to Our Visit with the Lamberts

We also found some very interesting maps on another web site. The creators of that site gave us permission to use them here and we created several questions to go with each map.