What is The Crooked Road?

Patrick County's comprehensive plan dates the idea to the month. The concept for The Crooked Road: Virginia's Music Heritage Trail began in January 2003, the plan says, to promote the traditional music, history and culture of the region.

What came of it is a route rather than a single place. The same plan says highway signage identifies the 330-mile route as it winds through the region's terrain. The organization behind it describes The Crooked Road as "a 330 mile driving trail through the mountains of Southwest Virginia" that connects ten Major Venues and over 60 Affiliated Venues and Festivals. The venue list and the calendar of events are the organization's to keep, so the current list comes from The Crooked Road itself.

A search of the Code of Virginia for this page turned up no statute that designates The Crooked Road. The county plans that mention it describe a driving route and, in Carroll County's case, a policy of support, not a status created by law.

For land, that is the practical point. No source read for this page attaches a rule of its own to the route signs. A parcel with road frontage on a signed stretch fronts whatever road the route follows there, and the entrance question goes to whoever maintains that road: the VDOT residency for a state-maintained road, and the city for a street inside Galax.

The two stops Carroll County's plan names sit on different kinds of ground, and the difference is a small lesson in how this corner of Virginia is divided.

The Blue Ridge Music Center, the plan says, is near mile marker 213 on the Blue Ridge Parkway, in both Carroll and Grayson counties. The National Park Service lists Galax 10 miles away and places the center at the crossroads of two music heritage routes: Virginia's The Crooked Road and the Blue Ridge Music Trails of North Carolina. The center is a Park Service site on the Parkway, whose right-of-way the United States holds and the National Park Service administers. The concert schedule is the Park Service's to publish.

The Rex Theatre is the other stop, and it stands in the City of Galax, a point the Carroll plan itself makes. Its ground answers to the city rather than to either county. Felts Park, the fiddlers' convention grounds and the rest of the city's land are covered on the page for Galax VA real estate.

U.S. 58, the highway Patrick County's plan follows into Carroll, is also the road the Department of Conservation and Recreation gives for reaching Grayson Highlands State Park from Interstate 77 at the Hillsville exit. That park is high country near Mount Rogers and a subject of its own, covered in what Grayson Highlands State Park is.