The Blue Ridge Parkway is nationally significant as the premier long-distance, scenic national parkway in America. Beginning in Virginia at Rockfish Gap, at the southern end of Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park, it runs for 469 miles through the Southern Appalachian Mountains and ends at the entrance to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina. It winds along the Blue Ridge, across forested mountain slopes and settled agricultural valleys and plateaus, and then rises into some of the most rugged mountains east of the Mississippi. The Blue Ridge Parkway was meant to be the prototype for what some in the 1930s envisioned as a national system of long-distance scenic parkways. Begun in 1935, the Parkway was a New Deal project of extraordinary complexity and unprecedented scope. Work on the parkway was suspended during World War II; a large commitment of federal resources in the postwar period was required for its completion. After World War II, it became clear that there would be no national network of long-distance, scenic parkways; and efforts were redoubled to complete the Blue Ridge Parkway and the Natchez Trace Parkway (which traverses Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee), the only two examples of the type. Motorists continue to enjoy a sequence of views and rural landscapes along the Blue Ridge Parkway, although some scenery in more urban areas has been subject to development since the 1950s.