by Steven Stoll
One politician did his part to further this process. William MacCorkle did not own a coal company or work for one. He had roots in western Virginia and came up through the ranks of the Democratic Party. He was elected governor in 1892. The encroaching influence of industry at all levels of government must have disturbed him because he said this in his inaugural address:
The State is rapidly passing under the control of large foreign and non-resident landowners. We welcome into our State the immigrant who comes to us with the idea of home seeking and home building with all its profits to the State, with its family ties, with its clearing of the forests, its building of churches and school houses … But the men who to-day are purchasing the immense areas of the most valuable lands in the State, are not citizens and have only purchased in order that they may carry to their distant homes in the North, the usufruct, of the lands of West Virginia, thus depleting the State of its wealth to build grandeur and splendor in other States. In a few years at the present rate of progress, we will occupy the same position of vassalage to the North and East that Ireland does to England, and to some extent, for the same reasons.
In the same speech, MacCorkle declared, “I am for the people and in favor of all legislation which will curb and restrain corporate influences from interfering with the right of the people.” Long before terms like internal colony and capitalist periphery, the governor knew something about world-system theory. He knew workers and environments created capital in West Virginia, though it accumulated in other places. And he clearly knew his words would appeal to members of the Farmers’ Alliance, which had organizations in all but thirteen of fifty-four counties. Farmers feared falling prices, rising tenancy, and the high cost of short railroad hauls. They complained of poor roads and schools. So it’s remarkable that during his four years as governor, William MacCorkle never mentioned home seekers or church builders or the usufruct of the land of West Virginia in any public statement ever again.24
Looking back from the 1920s, the aged MacCorkle distilled his term in office. “My administration was directed almost solely to this essential proposition,” the “advertisement of the state to the great national constructive interests … advertisement and exploitation.” Without irony or trepidation, he defined West Virginia’s reason for being as providing capitalists with the cheapest resources, by the cheapest transportation, and (he might have added) with the cheapest labor. Perhaps no political leadership anywhere in the United States or the Atlantic World ever exposed its own people and environment to the same unbridled destruction and abuse.25
The confluence of money, private property, and political power accomplished what no invading army could have. It delivered an ax to the neck of the peasant economy within half a century. Demographic changes within mountain society, in motion years before the scramble began, also weakened the viability of makeshift. Dependency has more than one cause. Yet by 1900, if not before, the hunting, gathering, tilling, and herding households of West Virginia had lost the floorboards beneath their social existence. The same thing happened in western Pennsylvania, eastern Tennessee, and eastern Kentucky. But what exactly did they lose? The struggle broke up a lattice of ecological spaces that began and ended with the homeplace.26
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THEIR MOUNTAIN FORTRESS did not protect the plain folk from the onslaught of extractive industry, but for a time their households did. A domestic mode of production can and often does thrive within a highly commercialized economy. By the early nineteenth century, mountain Appalachia had settled into a pattern of gardens, maize, and woods pasture.
The homeplace was, first of all, a house. Horizontal log construction traveled with the backwoods settlement culture from its hearth in the Delaware River Valley. While botanizing in the 1770s, William Bartram saw low-slung buildings made of tree trunks, “stripped of their bark, notched at their ends, fixed one upon another, and afterwards plastered well, both inside and out, with clay.” A long sloping roofline allowed the addition of a covered porch for eating, drying laundry and meat, churning butter, hanging tools, relaxing, and playing. Grass and earth plugged the gaps between the logs, and chestnut bark made the roof. Many cabins consisted of just one room, with a plank floor and maybe a detached kitchen. A woman born and raised in such a house recalled “one big room … the kitchen and the living room and everything together.” Two cabins placed side by side with a chimney on each end was a “double pen.” An open passage between the two structures created a “dogtrot.” Enclosing the passage around a central chimney made it a “saddlebag.” Into the house and yard flowed all the products from garden, forest, and field.27
The most intimate clearing was the garden. Every homeplace had its own provision ground, a space as large as two acres given over to vegetables and fruits. Beans formed the mainstay: greasy cut shorts, half-runners, Kentucky wonders, Logan giants, and peanut beans, prepared by boiling for hours with cured pork. Mountain bean pods came in an assortment of shapes and sizes—mottled, spotted, shriveled at the ends, and fat seeded.28 The people also harvested cushaw, a smooth winter squash that can grow to thirty inches and twenty pounds, using it as a starchy staple to make soups and breads. They bought and sold lots of things, but they kept the garden for themselves. For one thing, everyone grew the same plants. For another, paths to market were too distended and unreliable for transporting perishable foods. Residents in twenty-four West Virginia counties reported no annual income from their gardens in 1860, and only ten counties reported totals of $1,000 or more. Wyoming County’s figure of $2,140 averages to $5.50 per farm. Statewide, household gardens earned households 56 cents each. Yet the garden, by itself, did not produce a livelihood.
Vine-strewn gardens anchored properties that stretched out over extensive areas. Cleared spaces—yards, gardens, and fields—often made up a small portion of the total. In 1860, almost half of all the households in Clay County, Kentucky, cultivated fewer than thirty acres as part of homesteads (in whatever legal status) of up to ten times that size, nearly the same proportion found in western Pennsylvania seventy years earlier. The key metric for understanding the agroecology of the mountains is the ratio of unimproved to improved land. In Upshur County, West Virginia, forested acres outnumbered cultivated two to one. Upshur was thoroughly cultivated compared to Webster County, bordering Upshur to the south, where the ratio stood at twenty to one. In Nicholas County, just south of Webster, it was forty to one.
We might think of a farm as consisting of fields of grain, with a couple of cows and a spate of woods in the background. But that’s a particular kind of farm, one that takes its renewed soil fertility from manufactured fertilizers. That farm is geared entirely for commodity production. No farmer before the late nineteenth century thought of a farm as a house surrounded by fields. Every form of agriculture requires a subsidy from the ecological base. The subsidy takes the form of rainwater rich with silt flowing down the coastal plain to rice paddies on the Georgia coast, or it is salt grass in a tidal marsh that feeds cattle in Connecticut, or it is all the things that come from forests. Agrarians without much money but who wanted to buy things with money needed uncultivated spaces to carry much of the burden of commodity production.29
The garden’s closest relation was not the cornfield but the woods. It might seem odd to compare the most and least intensively cultivated spaces, but both provided fresh green vegetables. With winter stores of dried beans and fruit preserves diminished and the first squashes months away, people bought what they could in town and exchanged with neighbors. The forest made up every shortfall. Households foraged for uganost, a Cherokee word for wild greens. They brought home toothworth (a horseradish-like root), corn salad (a sweet flower), and especially ramps.
Ramps have been known by more than one name. Bear onion, wild leek, and ramson all refer to either Allium tricoccum or Allium ursinum, known in both Europe and North America. Highlanders ate them in salads, in soups, and with eggs. (Cut into one-inch pieces and parboil. Fry bacon in a large iro
n skillet to just before it becomes crisp. Drain the ramps and place them in the hot bacon fat. Season with salt and pepper and fry. Serve with a sliced hard-boiled egg.) The common name derives from Old English, but it might (or might not) be related to the German rampen for a platform that connects two uneven surfaces. That would make sense. Ramps provided a subsistence bridge between spring and summer. They represented the role of the forest in providing direct subsistence in addition to commodities. They offered security by spreading risk. But it would be a mistake to think of foraged foods as meager provisions, eaten in desperation. They were a delicacy, a seasonal event, a cherished custom.30
The forest offered so much more than greens; it held a diversity of species comparable to Amazonia. Great Smoky Mountains National Park, in the Blue Ridge of North Carolina and Tennessee, might include 100,000 species. In 2009, researchers found 240 birds, 75 fishes, 65 mammals, 40 amphibians, and 40 reptiles. There are 2,700 species of fungus and 1,600 vascular plants. “A single Blue Ridge cove may rival all of Europe in the number of tree species it sustains … Acre for acre,” writes one historian, “no other temperate region on earth can surpass the southern Blue Ridge in biological wealth.” The Appalachian Plateau might not be quite as rich, but it fulfilled the same purpose. The forest did not serve as an attribute of the farm, as just a woodlot, but functioned as its very core.31
Between garden and forest came fields, usually planted in maize. As a summer crop, it could be sown after rye. Like rye, it could be used as cattle and hog feed and could be turned into mash for whiskey. But corn made up a larger part of the diet than rye. Mixed with wheat flour, it made bread. Fried in lard, it provided the essential starch at just about every meal. Combined with beans, it formed a complete protein. No other harvested commodity added value to wedding dowries. Most of all, it yielded about twenty bushels per acre, or one thousand pounds. That would have been unimpressive to any farmer in Nebraska at the time, but it was still two to three times the yield of wheat and rye and for only sixteen labor-days a year.32
These subsistence practices created an abundance of food. When Frederick Law Olmsted traveled through the highlands during the 1850s, he chatted up everyone he met, a good strategy for getting invited to supper. Olmsted concluded what many others did: “Extreme poverty is rare in the mountains, but a smaller proportion of the people live in a style corresponding to that customary among what are called in New England ‘forehanded folks,’ than in any other part of the civilized world.” By forehanded he meant prudently frugal, not impoverished. In 1882, even a visitor as unsympathetic as the anonymous author of “Poor White Trash” described plenty of food during a two-month stay in eastern Kentucky. “Every mile or so, a little log-cabin sits in a varied growth of beans, potatoes, maize, and tobacco.” He saw squashes and melons, pawpaws and apple trees. The author joined a Sunday dinner, sitting elbow to elbow at a table wedged tightly between the front door and the bed. The meal began with a dozen watermelons before moving on to chicken, bacon, green maize, beans, potatoes, sweet potatoes, apple pudding, biscuits, and cake. People with control over a robust landscape work hard, but they don’t go hungry.33
Makeshift economies also thrive on commodities for exchange. Trading this for that, with money or without, engages people in the wider world and brings novel things to the homeplace. For mountaineers, grains and vegetables usually did not serve as exchange commodities. Of the 7.8 million bushels of corn grown in West Virginia in 1860, little of it left the state or even the cabins where it originated. Something so bulky and commonplace didn’t pay for transport. Instead, the most essential products south of Pennsylvania and west of the Blue Ridge were not plants but animals. Since the eighteenth century, visitors traversing winding roads witnessed the visible wealth of the mountains mooing and snorting their way to Lynchburg, Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, and other regional cattle markets. Herders moved in every direction that promised a sale. They migrated northwest to Ohio and west into the Bluegrass of Kentucky. In one account, recorded just after the Civil War, a visitor noted that “the people sell only those things which ‘walk away’—meaning cattle, horses, swine, etc. In midsummer the farmers begin to gather their cattle for the drovers, who start usually about the first of September on their way to the Eastern markets.”
According to the Census of 1870, livestock (including horses) accounted for 73 percent of all the exchange-value from agriculture in West Virginia. Animals slaughtered on the homeplace or sold for slaughter accounted for 20 percent of all the money farmers earned. But while livestock made up a larger portion of relative farm value than in nearly any other state, its absolute value was among the lowest. Annual profits from cattle averaged just $432 per farm, placing West Virginia twenty-ninth out of the thirty-seven states. If cattle were money on the hoof, the most valuable product, then why did farmers sell so few of them? Why did they rarely house them in barns or raise hay for them to eat?34
The answer circles us back to the patterns of peasant economies. International aid organizations and development agencies often cite low cash incomes as the measure of poverty around the world. (How many times have we heard that farmers here or there live on less than a dollar a day?) But money can be misleading. People who practice subsistence and exchange do not organize themselves for profit. They want money, but they cannot exceed their familial or ecological limits. So although they might have all the resources they need, if a cash income is the standard, they will fail the test of financial adequacy. Mountaineers loved money, not because they lived on it but because it bought them things that made life better, like dishes, dresses, candy, guns, toys, and tools. They didn’t need it in order to eat, but without it they existed narrowly. One of the best proofs of this thinking is the near indifference they displayed toward the survival of their livestock.
In the mountains, cattle lived in the woods. Frederick Law Olmsted never saw a cow under shelter. Even in the heart of winter, “they are only fed occasionally, hay or corn being served out upon the ground, but this is not done daily, or as a regular thing, even by the better class of farmers.” It was just as common for Olmsted to meet people who never fed their cattle at all, though they might find the animals dead in heaps from starvation or freezing when the snow melted. One author familiar with the practice confirmed that cattle “seldom have any sheds to run to, but are accustomed to ‘rough it’ under the lee of hills, or timber, as best they may.” These hard-bitten animals not only had to survive the cold but also wolves and bears. Olmsted listened as neighbors in one North Carolina county tallied the pigs they had lost to predators during the previous two months. “It amounted to three hundred.” By what logic did they allow their livestock to die of neglect? By the logic of the ecological base.35
Like other commodities that came from the base, free-range livestock sold for money without costing money. Domesticated animals lived from the general fund of matter available in the forest without making financial demands. But cattle-raising households lost nothing by allowing predators to feed at will. Farmers hedged against the uncertainty of money and markets. Keeping bears in business, so to speak, kept them on the menu just in case it ever became necessary to roast one on a spit. The base gave cattle or it gave bears. All that mattered was that it gave. As long as woods pasture provided something above a total loss, it raised enough animals to be converted into enough money to suit household needs. Paying scant attention brought forth commodities with little labor and nothing spent.36
If cattle raised on winter forage gave graziers something for nothing, they got what they paid for. The gaunt creatures that crept out of the icy woods sold for ten or fifteen dollars a head to feeding operations. The beasts needed to be fattened for weeks before final sale. Certain farmers in certain locations wanted a finer product and larger returns. They intensified the practices of feeding livestock, eventually becoming a highland entrepreneurial class.
As early as the 1780s, some farmers over the Blue Ridge began feeding corn to cattle. They inve
nted the feedlot. The method originated in the region known as South Branch, in Hardy County, in what is now the northeastern portion of West Virginia. Young cattle spent the summer in woods pasture before being corralled into cornfields during the fall and winter. They ate the ears right off the stalk. A middling rancher might have run between twenty and thirty head. But making the transition from casual grazier to cattle merchant required specific advantages. A rancher needed land with secure title in order to remain in control of woods, deep river bottom for a steady supply of corn and hay, and close proximity to coal camps and market towns. Completing a circuit of capital, in which cattle could be turned into more land and more cattle, assumed that the price of beef followed the expansion of the industrial economy. Ranchers succeeded when they entered an escalator of demand, capturing a small but ever-greater share of the value generated by logging and mining.37
Lowland tourists had trouble recognizing the rich mountaineer. A writer and painter named Charles Lanman visited Tesnatee Gap in northern Georgia in 1848. He went looking for a famous hunter from those parts named Adam Vandever. Lanman found a small man about sixty years old with a “weasel face,” gray eyes, and a long white beard, riding a mule named the Devil and Tom Walker. The writer treated the mountaineer with contempt. “I told him that the first portion of the mule’s name was more applicable to himself than to the dumb beast.” Vandever grinned a rack of broken teeth. Lanman liked to collect colorful hunting adventures, like one in which Vandever killed a bear with a knife in order to save his dogs. The writer walked away sure that the homely hunter owned little more than his horse and a gun. “He tills, with his own hand, the few acres of land which constitute his domain. His livestock consists of a mule and some half dozen of goats, together with a number of dogs.”
