by Steven Stoll
That strategy would soon fail. The Flat Top Land Trust likely owned all the easy-to-acquire patents by 1888. After that, the company doubled down to get hold of the parcels they still needed to form a contiguous estate. The pile of notes and lists that I read at the small archive in Bluefield, West Virginia, could only have been written by someone traveling by horse from creek to branch in order to see who lived where. Someone knocked on cabin doors, seized a vacated farm in one hollow, and wrote a check in the next. This work required a fixer who knew the topography and represented the company. The fixer was Isaiah Welch.
In one instance, managers sent Welch to protect them from adverse possession. “In regard to the 3225 acre tract 2/3 of which is owned by the trust … [you are] advised to put someone on the property at once and take possession, as without this is done there is no title. I want you to attend to this as soon as possible. If there is no house on the tract, you had better select someone and have a cabin put up at once and the Company will pay for it.” Another fixer watched a piece of land for twenty years, keeping track of who used it and how often. When the Totten family failed to pay taxes for five years, the company got hold of it.68
The Tottens might have sold it anyway, even the homeplace. When Belcher met Davis they talked about land. Such meetings must have been common. The declining output and rising subsistence adversity that plagued mountain residents lay just under the surface of every communication they had with mining and timber companies. This helps explain why Thomas K. Totten released his heirs to sell the homeplace itself “if the family ever became needy of anything.” Neediness swirled around them in a way it hadn’t a generation before. To put this differently, mineral and timber rights amounted to the only equity in land, since no one would buy a farm intending to farm it where everyone knew coal companies would soon operate. So when mineral buyers came around, any ridge with an outcropping of coal, any river bottom that was not part of the homeplace, must have looked like a stack of cash.
Nothing about the sale of land to coal companies took place on an equal footing, even if both parties entered into a contract without overt coercion. Flat Top brought in attorneys who knew the entire history of title and intimidated residents into selling, telling them that they would never get a better deal. One farmer turned over 740 acres for $3.58 each, maybe a big sum to him but a trifle to the company. The companies knew things their targets didn’t. They knew the depth of coal seams and their value. They knew the future routes that railroads would take and where towns would be located. “Capt. Welch has just returned from his trip to Tug,” wrote a manager to the president of the Flat Top Land Trust. “The Hunt option is very short and must be decided soon. It is a very valuable tract and we ought to own it in view of the R.R. extension West.”69
The Belchers and the Tottens entered into a contradiction. The purpose of speculative profit was to ensure household autonomy, when it actually did the opposite. Men sought to maintain their social positions, their role as providers, and their power over wives and children. The problem was, land no longer could do for them what they needed it to. Holding on to it meant squeezing it dry for a paltry livelihood. But selling it to replace income lost from a degraded environment and to pay debts traded the only thing of any value for an ephemeral substance. Even when the money was good, a pile of cash hardly guaranteed a household’s security. People with limited financial knowledge could not invest it to earn an income. Once they burned through it, they had nothing. They knew that they were dealing with a new order of power, but they might not have sensed until late what that power wanted from them.
In 1889, the Trust made a triumphant announcement. Flat Top Land now owned “a vast unbroken … coal bed traversing an area of over 200,000 acres, undisturbed by a single break or fault and until recently comparatively unknown to the commercial world.” The money was about to pour in. “Within two or three years a large revenue will be derived from this part of the large territory controlled by your Association.” They owned rights from the surface to the center of the earth, just what they needed to begin large-scale mining. That same year, miners in McDowell County dug and shipped 586,529 tons of bituminous coal. Thirteen years later, they sent 5,459,655 tons down the tracks, most of it from the vast unbroken Flat Top Coalfield.70
For a century, highlanders played a game of trespassing, squatting, and sometimes asserting rights to ownership. They depended on using the forested landscape at will. Deeming all private property common property made their lives possible. After the Civil War, the rules began to change and the game ended. A new generation of capitalists extracted commodities directly from land rather than wait for real estate to increase in value. Mountaineers tried to maintain their old practices, but they found it increasingly difficult. When the new owners took active control, they diced up the functional commons. Mining operations closed off old hunting and gathering grounds. Most destructive of all, lumber companies ripped out the forest and hauled it away.
Cutting down trees frequently preceded digging coal. Often, the same companies did both. Mining receives more attention because it eventually defined the region’s role in the capitalist world. But felling the woods affected a larger area and many more people. It removed the ecological base, the foundation of makeshift livelihood. It turned the mountains into an alien landscape. We need to retrace the same decades since the Civil War in a story that runs parallel to the direct dispossession of land and the coming of coal. At the same time that the Belchers and Tottens wrangled with the Flat Top Land Trust, the Great Appalachian Forest had come under assault.
* * *
IT LOOKS LIKE A LOCOMOTIVE with a ship’s mast. It clanks and spits, chugs steam, and sweats grease from its wheels and pistons. The power from the coal is released by the engine and transmitted to long cables that extend from the mast every which way. Workers attach them to fallen trees, pulling or skidding the logs hundreds of feet to a railroad flatbed. During the 1880s, the high-pitched whistle of the steam skidder echoed in the coves. The men worked in crews, cutting everything, leaving the slopes barren but for the stumps, branches, and bark that burned whenever a spark from a railroad wheel or glowing ash from a tinderbox fell on the detritus. Dorie Woodruff Cope, who grew up in the Great Smoky Mountains and moved to a logging camp with her family as a child, recalled the fires that burned through cutover hills, the eerie orange skies, the pine needles that shot like darts, and “the hissing sound of sap boiling.”71
Mountain people had always cut trees and sold them. In winter and spring, when nothing else went for sale and money ran low, they felled a giant yellow poplar or a black walnut. They would build a dam across a creek to hold back its flow, then roll their logs into the pool that formed against the earthworks. Opening one of these dams let go a torrent that heaved logs, rocks, and tons of debris down the hollow, into the river. They lashed the logs into rafts and steered them west toward the Bluegrass or Cincinnati. John Fox, Jr., traveled down the Kentucky River during a spring flood. “Sweeping around the bend I saw a raft two hundred feet long at the mouth of the creek—tugging at its anchor—and a young giant of a mountaineer pushing the bow-oar to and fro.” Rafting logs only worked in one direction. To reach the seaboard they assembled yokes of oxen to haul the trunks overland to sawmills. This was the cottage phase of logging. Households directed it, managed it, and took the profits.72
And yet, like every other aspect of land and livelihood in the mountains, cottage logging shuddered before the earthquake struck. The sense of looming change generated fear, competitiveness, and suspicion between those loyal to different families. It caused clashes over who controlled what fragment of forest in anticipation of scarcity and hard times. County courts settled most disputes. But smoldering animosity sometimes escalated into violence. The most famous feud in the history of Appalachia took place along the banks and tributaries of the Tug Fork River. It began in 1878 when one of the Hatfields of West Virginia and one of the McCoys of Kentucky found no way to settle a dis
agreement over the earmarks on a free-ranging pig. But the ambiguous ownership of a small mammal did not set off more than a decade of violence, in which twelve people died. The Hatfields and the McCoys confronted each other across a rising current of economic and ecological deterioration that reduced the viability of mountain makeshift.
The central figure in the conflict was William Anderson “Devil Anse” Hatfield, an aggressive logging entrepreneur. His litigiousness—not any act of violence—earned him his nickname. Devil Anse did not represent backward-looking traditionalism or a refusal to adapt. His financial success and cussed tenacity stirred resentment in others, most of all in Randolph McCoy. McCoy’s own attempts in the same business had not gone as well. Yet it is entirely likely that no feud would have erupted had there been sufficient forest for cutting and grazing. Hatfield and McCoy attempted to turn the landscape into money because subsistence practices were failing. Their coteries murdered each other at the very moment that the state of West Virginia allowed corporations to seize the Tug River Valley.
The most revealing aspect of the feud is also the thing most misunderstood about it. Kinship does not explain it. Members of both families crossed sides. Fewer than half of Hatfield supporters were related to Devil Anse. And of those who took his side, 85 percent worked in his logging crew, including three men named McCoy. Financial dependence on wages and anxiety over how they would provide for their own households created new loyalties among young men. When it ended in 1890, writes the historian Altina Waller, “the conflict was no longer rooted in the internal dynamics of the community; instead, the feudists were now enmeshed in a raw struggle for economic and political power.”73
The Norfolk and Western Railway acted as an unnamed instigator of the bloodshed. Everyone involved knew that it would change social life and the landscape, spreading fear. The first major trunk line to cross Appalachia was the Baltimore and Ohio. By 1853, it had set down track beyond Harpers Ferry, across northern Virginia and into the western counties. Other railroad corporations appeared and disappeared; they splintered and reorganized and consolidated. Some of them were called Chesapeake and Ohio; Winchester and Potomac; Wheeling, Pittsburg and Baltimore; Huntington and Big Sandy; Ripley and Mill Creek Valley. The railroad eventually known as Norfolk and Western started out from Chesapeake Bay in the 1830s, moving westward across Virginia to the lower Shenandoah Valley, arriving at the Flat Top Coalfield in 1883. It carried the first shipment of coal from southern West Virginia. Then, in 1890, the Norfolk and Western initiated an extension that would take the line along the Tug River through McDowell County and from there to Ohio.
The feudists might have known something else. The Norfolk and Western Railway was no longer just a railroad. It had swallowed the Flat Top Land Trust in 1885, creating a giant amalgamation of capital, a liquidation machine whose vortex drew in the entire landscape, from treetops to minerals a mile deep. The company reported a capital stock of $32 million in 1889, a sum equal to about $800 million in the early twenty-first century. The railroad not only connected major towns and cities, it ran steel into almost every hollow. Mills, tanneries, steam skidders, and labor camps spread out behind its locomotives like the wakes that follow ships. With this kind of scale and scope, it was difficult to find a breathing space, any distance from the new source of power. The Hatfields, McCoys, Belchers, Tottens, and thousands like them entered a new mode of production.74
Cottage logging and industrial logging had only trees and saws in common. The former provided households with money from the ecological base. The latter funneled profit to shareholders, resulting in a transformation so devastating that it marked the end of an epoch in the history of the southern mountains. The clear-cutting of the Appalachian woods did not happen all at once but in different locations and altitudes at different times. Yet along with the direct loss of homes and hollows through sale, ejectment, and the separation of mineral rights from surface rights, the removal of the forest brought about the enclosure of the functional commons. It uprooted highland society, setting off the transfer of tens of thousands from a subsistence economy to wage earning. They tumbled and splintered down the creeks into camps. Combining logs and workers in sawmills resulted in lumber, the sale of which accumulated money. Their labor had always turned trees into boards. Now it confronted them in alien form, as a commodity owned and sold by someone else.75
Professional conservationists urged on the rush for hardwoods in Appalachia as the best use of a neglected region. Bernard Fernow, third chief forester of the United States, directed eastern investors away from the diminished groves of Maine and toward the Blue Ridge. In 1888, he beheld a nation-sized vault of photosynthesizing wealth: 10 million acres of ash, aspen, beeches, and cottonwood; black oak, black walnut, and black locust; red maple, red oak, and red pines; along with chestnut, birches, buckeye, cedar, cherry, and hickory. “The greatest body of uncut hard wood timber of the eastern United States,” Fernow announced. He told of stands of poplar, each thirty inches around with a volume of 400 board feet, 16,640 board feet to the acre.76
The industrial class in Charleston and Wheeling also cheered the conversion of the blanketing woods into money. They justified the human and ecological fallout of the takeover as the necessary violence in the achievement of something greater—civilization, historical progress, social order. “Already, the peaceful seclusion of those hills and vales is a thing of the past. The timber-hunters, the oil-explorers, the coal-buyers, the projectors of new railroads, the seekers after cheap lands for homes or for investment, are everywhere.” This revolution that “put capital and commerce into domination” carried extraordinary costs, this writer admitted. “One sees these beautiful hills and valleys stripped of nature’s adornment; the hills denuded of their forests, the valleys lighted by the flames of coke-ovens and smelting furnaces; their vegetation seared and blackened … and one could wish that such an Arcadia might have been spared such ravishment. But the needs of the race are insatiable and unceasing.”77
“Tremendous onslaught has been made upon the forests … New sawmills are building every day, new territory being opened, and it is safe to say that now the total cut of all the mills is no less than 500,000,000 [board] feet a year,” marveled one newspaper editor. At that rate, the total destruction of the forest took about fifty years. Of the 10 million acres that had never been cut in 1870, only 1.5 million stood in 1910. In that year, mills in a single county turned out 1 million board feet each day. From 1907 to 1914, one thousand mills produced between 1 billion and 1.5 billion board feet each year. By 1920, the Appalachian forest had yielded 30.4 billion board feet. The largest trees went first; then the smaller ones, for telegraph poles and railroad ties. “The forests are being rapidly destroyed,” said the editor. A northern lumberman explained his company’s plan as rip and run: “All we want here is to get the most we can out of this country, as quick as we can, and then get out.”78
The liquidation happened so fast and with such efficiency that nineteen years after Fernow had advertised Appalachia to industry, another chief forester predicted doom. After inspecting five thousand square miles of eastern woodland, Gifford Pinchot concluded that the United States would enter a “timber famine” within twenty years unless it adopted a policy of conservation. The Weeks Act of 1911 followed, creating the Monongahela National Forest, a new role for the governing economy, in which the raw material of industry would be guarded and managed for future consumption. But mountaineers had no place in this landscape. They had no way of living on denuded hillsides and no rights to dwell in national forests or parks. Both private and public planning ruled them out.79
The system of forest and farm staggered. For a while, graziers borrowed woods pasture in neighboring counties to make up for losses closer to home. They gained the habit “of sending their stock to be summered in the woods, in distant and less improved sections, under the care of some settler of the locality.” But the relentless cut finally reached even the highest elevations. Alonza Be
echer Brooks watched and recorded the effects of deforestation. Born in Upshur County, he taught himself surveying and attended West Virginia University, among the first of its students to study forestry. In 1910, Brooks published a map of the remaining forest in the state. It showed only 12 percent of the original woods uncut. He described a subsistence economy in shambles. Once-common practices took on a menacing quality when so little forest remained. “The cutting of poles and trees for all manner of domestic purposes is generally indiscriminate; fires are permitted to burn through small areas at frequent intervals in many places; and cattle and other domestic animals are permitted to browse the leaves and tender twigs of valuable seedling trees which are the only promise of a future supply of timber.” Yet gathering, swidden, and woods pasture are basic subsistence strategies. The work of living in the forest did not change when the forest disappeared. The people had been cornered, their homesteads made into islands, their economies hollowed out. “The woodlot,” said Brooks clinically, “must be made to yield the product which has heretofore been drawn from the larger adjacent forests.”80
At the same time it disappeared into barren clear-cuts, the forest lost one of its most essential species. In 1904, a fungus accidentally introduced from Japan killed American chestnut trees in New York City. The blight spread west, destroying billions of trees over the next few decades. Before the blight, chestnut represented 15 to 20 percent of all trees in parts of Appalachia and up to 60 percent in others. It can attain a height of two hundred feet. Its rot-resistant wood made furniture and tools. Its bark tanned leather and could be sold for cash. And its nuts provided forage for pigs and a sweet and substantial fall meal, adding to the complement of foods mountain dwellers took from the landscape. By itself, the loss of the American chestnut would have been wounding. Combined with industrial deforestation, it was devastating.81
