Park Service Strains To Let 86-Year-Old Stay Permits Run Out For Lifelong Resident To Stay On Land She Was Forced To Sell

For all 86 years of her life, a sliver of land between the Potomac River and the historic C&O Canal has been Lettie Shores’ home. Now she finds herself reduced to the status of a squatter.

Shores, born at her family home near Point of Rocks, Md., grew up watching canal boats loaded with coal pass on their way to Washington, 50 miles to the southeast.

The canal closed and dried up, her four sisters married and moved away, her parents died, but Shores stayed on. She weathered 18 floods, even two that washed her home away. She raised eight children on her three acres.

In 1975, the government forced Shores to sell the house and land for a little over $25,000, to become part of a national park. But a two-year lease and then a series of special permits let her rent for $254 a year.

In December, the last permit expired, and the National Park Service attorneys said there could be no more.

Lettie Shores stayed on.

Neither she nor the National Park Service knows what to do next.

“There’s no use to worry about it,” said Shores, who makes money in the summer by renting campsites near her house. “I hope they won’t make me leave. I would like to stay here the rest of my life.”

Officials of the C&O Canal National Historical Park seem worried. They aren’t eager to force out an elderly woman with poor eyesight and recurring heart trouble. But there are legal considerations.

Park Service lawyers have determined that issuing special use permits to Shores and 20 other landowners who got them after the buyout was illegal, Keith Whisenant, the park’s chief ranger, said Monday.

So the permits are not being renewed. As they expire, the former landowners - most of them keep only summer fishing shacks in the park - are forced out.

Some shacks have already been torn down, to return the park to nature.

The other tenants were notified last August of the new policy. But Shores was not. She remains in limbo while the park tries to find a legal way to make an exception for her, “because of her age and because of the situation,” Whisenant said.

Maybe Shores could stay by winning a park concessions license for her campground, which she operates without a license now, Whisenant said. But licenses are supposed to be awarded by competitive bid.

Or possibly the government could take over the campsite, he said, and keep Shore on to run it.

“The superintendent is trying to work something out for her,” Whisenant said. “He’s interested in trying to find a legal way for her to stay there.”