Finally, the shift from human labor to high-technology mining has had a devastating impact on the environment. Old workings continue to seep orange acid mine drainage into the streams, and coal companies increasingly lop off the tops of mountains to extract coal seams. Few knowledgeable people doubt that the environmental and social costs of filling valleys and streams with overburden will present subsequent generations with an extraordinary financial burden.
During the industrial era, when so many central Appalachian families depended on the coal industry for employment, most were willing to tolerate the disadvantages that inevitably accompany a dependency on coal. But how long they will accept these heavy environmental and social costs in the face of shrinking benefits remains an open question.
NOTES
1. Will Wallace Harney, “A Strange Land and Peculiar People,” Lippincott Magazine 12 (Oct. 1873): 430–31. See also Henry D. Shapiro, Appalachia on Our Mind: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978); Allen W. Batteau, The Invention of Appalachia (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1990).
2. For some recent examples, see Dwight B. Billings and Kathleen M. Blee, Road to Poverty: The Making of Wealth and Hardship in Appalachia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Mary Beth Pudup, Dwight B. Billings, and Altina L. Waller, eds., Appalachia in the Making: The Mountain South in the Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Wilma A. Dunaway, The First American Frontier: Transition to Capitalism in Southern Appalachia, 1700–1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Robert Tracy McKenzie, One South or Many? Plantation Belt and Upcountry in Civil War Era Tennessee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); John C. Inscoe, Mountain Masters, Slavery, and the Sectional Crisis in Western North Carolina (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989).
3. Dunaway, First American Frontier, 145.
4. Ibid., 157–64, passim.
5. Fletcher M. Green, “Georgia’s Forgotten Industry: Gold Mining,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 19 (1935): 93–111, 210–28; Green, “Gold Mining: A Forgotten Industry of Antebellum North Carolina,” North Carolina Historical Review 14 (1937): 1–19, 135–55; David Williams, The Georgia Gold Rush: Twenty-niners, Cherokees, and Gold Fever (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993).
6. Dunaway, First American Frontier, 182–83, 185.
7. For early ironworks, see Kathleen Bruce, Virginia Iron Manufacture in the Slave Era (1930; reprint, New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1960); Lester J. Cappon, “History of the Southern Iron Industry to the Close of the Civil War” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1928); J. P. Lesley, The Iron Manufacturer’s Guide to the Furnaces, Forges, and Rolling Mills of the United States (New York: John Wiley, 1859); Eugene B. Willard, ed., A Standard History of the Hanging Rock Iron Region of Ohio, 2 vols. (N.p.: Lewis Publishing, 1916); R. Bruce Council, Nicholas Honerkamp, and M. Elizabeth Will, Industry and Technology in Antebellum Tennessee: The Archaeology of Bluff Furnace (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992).
8. Ronald L. Lewis, Transforming the Appalachian Countryside: Railroads, Deforestation, and Social Change in West Virginia, 1880–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 43–44;Lewis, “Beyond Isolation and Homogeneity: Diversity and the History of Appalachia,” in Back Talk from Appalachia: Confronting Stereotypes, ed. Dwight B. Billings, Gurney Norman, and Katherine Ledford (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 29.
9. For works on the early coal industry, see Howard B. Eavenson, The First Century and a Quarter of American Coal Industry (Pittsburgh: Privately printed, Koppers Building, 1942); Ronald L. Lewis, Coal, Iron, and Slaves: Industrial Slavery in Virginia and Maryland, 1715–1865 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1979), 48–49; Ethel Armes, The Story of Coal and Iron in Alabama (Birmingham: Birmingham Chamber of Commerce, 1910).
10. John E. Stealey Jr., The Antebellum Kanawha Salt Business and Western Markets (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993), 119–57 passim. See also Billings and Blee, Road to Poverty.
11. Lewis, Transforming the Appalachian Countryside, 47.
12. For examples of his work, see Immanuel Wallerstein, The Capitalist World-Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Wallenstein, Historical Capitalism (London: Verso Editions, 1983). For examples of recent studies influenced by this approach, see Billings and Blee, Road to Poverty; Dunaway, First American Frontier; Lewis, Transforming the Appalachian Countryside.
13. Kenneth Noe, “Appalachia’s Civil War Genesis: Southwest Virginia as Depicted by Northern and European Writers, 1825–1865,” West Virginia History 50 (1991): 91–92; Noe, Southwest Virginia’s Railroad: Modernization and the Sectional Crisis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 3–4, 6;Mary Beth Pudup, “The Boundaries of Class in Preindustrial Appalachia,” Journal of Historical Geography 15 (1989): 139–40. For an example of works that argue for a dramatic transformation at the turn of the twentieth century, see Ronald D Eller, Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers: Industrialization of the Appalachian South, 1880–1930 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982). For examples of other works that argue for an earlier transition to capitalism, see Dunaway, First American Frontier; Paul Salstrom, Appalachia’s Path to Dependency: Rethinking a Region’s Economic History, 1730–1940 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994); and Pudup, Billings, and Waller, eds., Appalachia in the Making.
14. Noe, Southwest Virginia’s Railroad, 6.
15. Dunaway, First American Frontier, 10.
16. Lewis, Transforming the Appalachian Countryside, 52; Dunaway, First American Frontier, 198–99, 204–11.
17. Kenneth W. Noe and Shannon H. Wilson, eds., The Civil War in Appalachia: Collected Essays (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997), xxvi.
18. Eller, Miners, Millhands, Mountaineers, 45–53; Jerry Bruce Thomas, “Coal Country: The Rise of the Southern Smokeless Coal Industry and Its Effect on Area Development, 1872–1910” (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), 23–55; Charles Kenneth Sullivan, “Coal Men and Coal Towns: Development of the Smokeless Coalfields of Southern West Virginia, 1873–1923” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pittsburgh, 1979), 76–81.
19. Lewis, Transforming the Appalachian Countryside, 52–60; Ronald L. Lewis, Black Coal Miners in America: Race, Class, and Community Conflict, 1780–1980 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1987), 123; Charles Bias, “The Completion of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad to the Ohio River, 1869–1873,” West Virginia History 40 (Summer 1979): 393–403; Eller, Miners, Millhands, Mountaineers, 68–69.
20. Lewis, Black Coal Miners in America, 123; Joseph T. Lambie, From Mine to Market: The History of Coal Transportation on the Norfolk and Western Railway (New York: New York University Press, 1957), chaps. 1–2; Eller, Miners, Millhands, Mountaineers, 69–75.
21. Eller, Miners, Millhands, Mountaineers, 140–43; Maury Klein, History of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 23.
22. Lewis, “Beyond Isolation,” 33; Eller, Miners, Millhands, Mountaineers, 101; Ina Woestermeyer Van Noppen, Western North Carolina since the Civil War (Boone, N.C.: Appalachian Consortium Press, 1973).
23. Margaret Ripley Wolfe, Kingsport, Tennessee: A Planned American City (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1987), chaps. 2 and 4;V. N. Phillips, Bristol, Tennessee/Virginia: A History, 1852–1900 (Johnson City, Tenn.: Overmountain Press, 1992), chaps. 10 and 12.
24. For the railroad’s impact elsewhere in Appalachia, see Allen W. Trelease, The North Carolina Railroad, 1849–1871, and the Modernization of North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); William Price McNeel, The Durbin Route: The Greenbrier Division of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway (Charleston, W.Va.: Pictorial Histories, 1985); Mary Verhoeff, The Kentucky Mountains: Transportation and Commerce, 1750–1911 (Louisville, Ky.: Filson Club, 1911); Noe, Southwest Virginia’s Railroad.
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25. There are two polar views on coal company towns. For the standard view that, with few exceptions, the company towns oppressed their inhabitants, see Eller, Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers, chap. 5; David Alan Corbin, Life, Work, and Rebellion in the Coal Fields: The Southern West Virginia Miners, 1880–1922 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981), chap. 3. For the opposing view, which also grants exceptions but generally argues that life was better in company towns than what their inhabitants had previously known, see Crandall A. Shifflett, Coal Towns: Life, Work, and Culture in Company Towns of Southern Appalachia, 1880–1960 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991).
26. Lewis, “Beyond Isolation,” 35; The population data were extrapolated from the following decennial census reports: Department of Interior, Census Office, Statistics of the Population of the United States at the Tenth Census: 1880 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1883), Table 5, 380–415; Department of Interior, Census Office, Report on Population of the United States at the Eleventh Census: 1890 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1897), Table 116, 530–627; Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of the Census, Special Reports: Occupations at the Twelfth Census, 1900 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1904), Table 41, 220–423;Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Population 1910: Occupational Statistics (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1914), Vol. 4, Table 7, 434–534; Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Fourteenth Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1920: Population 1920: Occupations (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1923), Vol. 4, chapter 7, Table 1, 874–1048. See also Randall G. Lawrence, “Appalachian Metamorphosis: Industrializing Society on the Central Appalachian Plateau” (unpublished Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1983), 51–52; Ronald L. Lewis, “From Peasant to Proletarian: The Migration of Southern Blacks to the Central Appalachian Coalfields,” Journal of Southern History 55 (Feb. 1989): 81.
27. Shifflett, Coal Towns, 81–84. For a classic novel portraying a Kentucky farm woman’s distaste for coal camp life, see James Still, River of Earth (1940; reprint, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1978).
28. Joe William Trotter Jr., Coal, Class, and Color: Blacks in Southern West Virginia, 1915–32 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), chap. 3; Lewis, “Peasant to Proletarian,” 82.
29. Lewis, “Peasant to Proletarian,” 86.
30. Ibid., 88, quoted from James T. Lang, “The Negro Miner in West Virginia” (Ph.D. diss., Ohio State University, 1933), 126–27.
31. Lewis, “Beyond Isolation,” 35–37; Margaret Ripley Wolfe, “Aliens in Southern Appalachia: Catholics in the Coal Camps, 1900–1940,” Appalachian Heritage 6 (Winter 1978): 45; Kenneth R. Bailey, “A Judicious Mixture: Negroes and Immigrants in the West Virginia Mines, 1880–1917,” West Virginia History 34 (1973): 141–63.
32. Lewis, Black Coal Miners in America, 156; Wolfe, “Aliens in Southern Appalachia,” 43; Barry O’Connell, “Doc Boggs, Musician and Coal Miner,” Appalachian Journal 1–2 (Autumn-Winter 1983–84): 44–57.
33. Shaunna L. Scott, Two Sides to Everything: The Cultural Construction of Class Consciousness in Harlan County, Kentucky (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 27–38. For a detailed study of the struggle to organize Harlan County, see John Hevener, Which Side Are You On? The Harlan County Coal Miners, 1931–39 (1978; reprint, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002).
34. Harry M. Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area (Boston: Little, Brown, 1962), 305–24.
35. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Technological Change and Productivity in the Bituminous Coal Industry, 1920–1960, Bulletin No. 1305 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1961); U.S. Bureau of the Census, Characteristics of the Population (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1950); U.S. Bureau of the Census, Characteristics of the Population (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1960; Keith Dix, What’s a Coal Miner to Do? The Mechanization of Coal Mining (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988).
36. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Characteristics of the Population (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1970); U.S. Bureau of the Census, Characteristics of the Population (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1980); U.S. Bureau of the Census, Characteristics of the Population (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1990); National Mining Association, Coal Data 2000 (Washington, D.C.: National Mining Association, 2000), 11–19; U.S. Department of Commerce, Statistical Abstract of the United States (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 2000), 421; Paul Nyden, “A Collapse of Coal Employment: Why Are the Jobs Vanishing?” Sunday Gazette-Mail (Charleston, W.Va.), 15 Oct. 1989.
37. James S. Brown and George A. Hillery Jr., “The Great Migration, 1940–1960,” in The Southern Appalachian Region: A Survey, ed. Thomas R. Ford (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1962), 54–78. See also Chad Berry, Southern Migrants, Northern Exiles (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000); Phillip J. Obermiller, Thomas E. Wagner, and E. Bruce Tucker, eds., Appalachian Odyssey: Historical Perspectives on the Great Migration (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2000); Andrew M. Isserman, “Appalachia Then and Now: Update of ‘The Realities of Deprivation’ Reported to the President in 1964,” Journal of Appalachian Studies 3 (Spring 1997): 43–69.
6
The Great Depression
Paul Salstrom
The 1960s saw the growth of what was called the back-to-the-land movement. One part of that movement involved a group called the School of Living that had started in 1936 during the depths of the Great Depression to help people learn to support themselves from the land. In the 1960s the group was busy setting up rural apprenticeship programs. After leaving the apprenticeships, many of the younger participants bought land in Appalachia, where land prices (as of 1970) still ran as low as $17 an acre. In rural Appalachia, those new “homesteaders” found themselves welcomed by senior citizens who still knew how to harness horses, build log cabins, clear pastures, grow food and preserve it, find ginseng, bake bread, and do hundreds of other homesteading tasks. The young newcomers also found themselves grafted into Appalachia’s local networks of daily borrowing and bartering (including exchanges of work). That neighborhood economic networking allowed a comfortable existence even if no one in the neighborhood had much money.1
If we step back from such details and look at the big picture, we can see the back-to-the-land movement of the 1960s and 1970s as part of a larger canvas. Many people who had grown up in the 1930s were economically traumatized by the Great Depression. When their own children became teenagers, they tried to indoctrinate them with materialistic play-it-safe values. But to their children (who were growing up in the affluent 1950s and 1960s), materialistic play-it-safe values made no sense.2 The materialism of many suburban parents helped drive their children to seek “simplicity” in mountainous Appalachia and other rural retreats—where, to their surprise, they fell into the arms of “surrogate parents”—into the arms of senior rural farm folk who, like their parents, had also grown up in the 1930s (or in the 1920s, which in Appalachia were not very different).
But did not the Depression happen everywhere? How could its aftereffects drive youngsters away from their 1960s suburban parents but also turn mountain farmers into attractive role models for those same youngsters?
It happened because the youth of the 1960s perceived Appalachia as being very different from the rest of America. That is why the 1960s generation fell in love with Appalachia. In their eyes, Appalachia had backwoods credentials; it even had dropout credentials.
When we think of rural America, most of us probably visualize a straight road with huge crop fields on both sides and every so often a white farmhouse with a car and pickup in the driveway and lots of farm equipment out back. But that is not rural Appalachia. By the 1920s many farm families elsewhere in the United States were already creating that homogenized “modern” farmscape, but not Appalachia’s farm families. Appala
chia comprises only 3 percent of the land area of the United States, but the 1930 Census found one-third of America’s “self-sufficing” farms tucked away there.3 The Census defined self-sufficing farms as farms “where the value of the [home] farm products used by the family was 50 percent or more of the total value of all products of the farm.”4 In Appalachia in 1930, about a million farm dwellers lived that way, far more than in any other region of the United States. Many of Appalachia’s self-sufficing farm families brought in cash incomes of less than $100 a year (equivalent to about $1,150 today).
Some of those mountain farm families were so successfully self-sufficing that the Depression barely affected them. If some member of the family had previously been working for wages—perhaps in timber cutting or coalmining—that work probably shriveled after the stock-market crash of 1929. But if the family could still farm enough to support itself completely, it generally did so.
After the stock market crash of October 1929, when stocks lost more than a third of their value within a few weeks, the Great Depression swept the United States with numbing swiftness, and year by year it grew worse. By the winter of 1932–33, the U.S. gross national product had fallen almost by half, and farm families’ average income had fallen by more than half. By that winter, at least one-fourth of all U.S. workers were unemployed, and many others worked only part-time.
Appalachia was especially hard-hit by the Depression because its two main products were lumber and coal. With construction down 78 percent, lumber was not in demand. And with few factories operating at their normal pace, demand for energy was way down, including demand for coal. Thus many of Appalachia’s workers faced personal economic disaster, and that included hundreds of thousands of farm families who could not support themselves by simply operating their farms. The situation was especially grim in central Appalachia, the rugged coal-laden hills of western West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, and east-central Tennessee. There the number of farms that were producing enough for the Census-takers to label them as a “farm” shot up over 35 percent in the first five Depression years.5 This happened mainly because thousands of people who had lost their jobs returned to their old home farms to try to eke out a living by subsistence farming.
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