Ramp Hollow

by Steven Stoll

  54.  Hamilton to Morris (April 30, 1781), Papers of Alexander Hamilton, vol. 2, 604–35.

  55.  Coxe, “A Plan for Encouraging Agriculture, and Increasing the Value of Farms in the Midland and More Western Counties of Pennsylvania,” in View of the United States of America, 384–404. Emphasis in original. Coxe would have agreed with Fernand Braudel, who said that every town “generalizes the market into a widespread phenomenon.” Braudel, Structures of Everyday Life, 479–81.

  56.  “Report on the Difficulties in the Execution of the Act Laying Duties on Distilled Spirits” (March 5, 1792), Papers of Alexander Hamilton, vol. 11, 77–106. Hamilton sneered that surplus money “will sensibly foster the industry of the parties concerned, if they avail themselves of it under the guidance of a spirit of œconomy and exertion.”

  57.  Slaughter, Whiskey Rebellion, 220–21.

  58.  Ibid., 226–27.

  4. Mountaineers Are Always Free

    1.  Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, preface and 178. Johnson traveled with James Boswell in 1773. Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, 56–61, 111. Writing in 1857, Friedrich Engels argued against Prussia’s impending invasion of Switzerland on similar grounds. “Military men will recite the names of a dozen mountain passes and defiles, where a handful of men might easily and successfully oppose a couple of thousands of the best soldiers.” Engels, “Mountain Warfare in the Past and Present,” New York Daily Tribune, January 27, 1857.

    2.  William Preston, “Diary: Sandy Creek Expedition February–March 1756,” Draper Manuscripts, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison, http://www.as.wvu.edu/WVHistory/documents/003.pdf; Williams, West Virginia, 96; Dunmore, Documentary History of Dunmore’s War (letter of 1774), 371.

    3.  Eicher, Civil War High Commands, 482; Williams, Appalachia, 171–78.

    4.  Breckinridge, The Civil War, 641.

    5.  Seavoy, An Economic History of the United States from 1607 to the Present, 163.

    6.  Eller, Millers, Millhands, and Mountaineers, 50; Davis, The Wilson Carey Nicholas Survey.

    7.  Oil-Dorado of West Virginia, 3, 32; Prospectus of the West Virginia Iron Mining and Manufacturing Company (emphasis in original); Dodge, West Virginia, 220–25; Faulkner, Speech upon the Mineral and Agricultural Resources of the State of West Virginia … April 10, 1876, 10, 6.

    8.  I thank Elizabeth Blackmar for pointing this out to me.

    9.  Report on the Manufacturers of the United States at the Tenth Census (1880), 10. On railroads and the lumber business, see Lewis, Transforming the Appalachian Countryside.

  10.  Boreman, Inaugural Address. The entire state of Virginia counted 500,000 slaves in 1860. Willey, An Inside View of the Formation of the State of West Virginia, 9–11.

  11.  Dunaway, Slavery in the American Mountain South, 25–31.

  12.  Williams, Appalachia, 165–67. According to Barbara Rasmussen, “Neither eastern planters nor northern industrialists could accommodate the needs of the West without undermining their own security.” Rasmussen, Absentee Landowning and Exploitation in West Virginia, 62, 72.

  13.  West Virginia Iron Mining and Manufacturing Company (1837); Prospectus of the West Virginia Iron Mining and Manufacturing Company; Oil-Dorado of West Virginia, 3; Boreman, Inaugural Address; Eller, Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers, 44, 46–47.

  14.  The fifty counties that became West Virginia voted 34,677 to 19,121 to remain in the Union. Curry, A House Divided, 141–47. See Dunaway on slaves in manufacturing (Slavery in the American Mountain South, 120–26, and First American Frontier, 109). “Unionism was confined largely to twenty-four Northwestern counties along the banks of the Ohio River, the Pennsylvania border, and the lines of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad … But at least twenty-four West Virginia counties, forming nearly two-thirds of the total area of this state and containing 145,000 white inhabitants, were unquestionably Confederate in outlook and opposed to the dismemberment of the Old Dominion.” Curry, A House Divided, 6–8; Lewis, How West Virginia Was Made. There was one exception to the nonparticipation of mountaineers. Waitman T. Willey, who presented the petition to Congress for the creation of West Virginia and was one of its first U.S. senators, was born in a log cabin not far from Morgantown.

  15.  For more on the world internal to households, see Honor Sachs, Home Rule. To what extent was this insularity a recent adaptation or something brought with them from the formation of Scots-Irish kinship? Tony Waters notes, “Subsistence groups often fear and distrust those beyond the immediate kin-group.” Waters, The Persistence of Subsistence Agriculture, 39.

  16.  For this and the previous paragraph: Billings and Blee, The Road to Poverty, 304–13, 331, 417. Billings and Blee write about Clay County, Kentucky, but the same conclusions hold for West Virginia. They also detail the continuing legacy of patronage into the 1980s and 1990s. More than 450 films produced between 1904 and 1927 told stories about mountaineers, and 92 of them were about feuding. See Williamson, Southern Mountains in Silent Films.

  17.  Acts of the Legislature of West Virginia (1866), 141–269.

  18.  I learned about Dillon’s Rule from Paul Salstrom. For a critical essay on Dillon’s Rule, see Ben Price, National Organizing Director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, “A (Very) Brief History of ‘Dillon’s Rule,’” www.celdf.org/downloads/A_(Very)_Brief_History_of_Dillons_Rule.pdf. Dillon quoted in City of Clinton v. The Cedar Rapids and Missouri River Railroad Company in Reports of Cases in Law and Equity, 3 (June Term, 1868), 475. Emphasis in original document. The case decided by the Supreme Court of the United States was Merrill v. Monticello (1891).

  19.  Smith, The Spirit of American Government, 289. This book appears to be popular among the “home rule” movement in the United States today. The legislature of West Virginia abolished Dillon’s Rule in 1969. Richardson, Gough, and Puentes, Is Home Rule the Answer? Clarifying the Influence of Dillon’s Rule on Growth Management, 21.

  20.  Williams, West Virginia, 92; New York Times, August 15, 1872, July 25, 1876; Constitution of West Virginia, as Adopted in 1872. There were two justices of the peace and one president (also a judge). All three were elected positions.

  21.  This and the following paragraphs owe their detail to the spectacular research of John Alexander Williams, in West Virginia and the Captains of Industry, 16, 109, 148–53, 161–64.

  22.  Williams, West Virginia and the Captains of Industry, 148–53, 161–64; Gaventa, Power and Powerlessness, 91–92.

  23.  Lewis, Transforming the Appalachian Countryside, 110–16.

  24.  West Virginia voted for Democrat Grover Cleveland in the election of 1892. William MacCorkle, “Inaugural Address” (1893), in Public Papers of Governor William A. MacCorkle, of West Virginia, 297. On the Farmers’ Alliance in West Virginia, see Barns, West Virginia State Grange, 71–73.

  25.  MacCorkle once refused to send in military forces to put down a strike, apparently telling one mining corporation that he would not merely act in their interests when the miners were not a threat to public order. MacCorkle, Recollections of Fifty Years of West Virginia, 480–85.

  26.  See Graeber, “In Regulation Nation,” Harper’s Magazine, March 2015. On how local elites and those in positions of political power interacted over the industrial transition, see Billings and Blee, Road to Poverty; Bailey, Matewan Before the Massacre; and Weise, Grasping at Independence. A painting by George Caleb Bingham, The Country Politician (1849), suggests a meeting between a politician, a merchant, and a farmer in Missouri.

  27.  Bartram quoted in Williams, Homeplace, 24. Blankets and curtains created separate spaces, which could then be taken down for dancing. Visitors described beds near the back wall and the table placed near the hearth. Williams, Homeplace, 48–52.

  28.  Sohn, Appalachian Home Cooking, 42: “Mountaineers don
’t look for the greenest, straightest, cleanest beans. In some cases it seems that the worst looking, most mottled beans are the old varieties that have the best flavor.”

  29.  For this and the previous paragraph I used census data. In the census, it is not clear whether “unimproved” included land once cultivated but left to fallow or never cultivated. Taking the category at face value, I set up a ratio of acres of improved land in farms to acres of unimproved land in farms for various Virginia counties according to the tabulated census returns of 1860. These ratios apply mostly to the higher elevations. Agriculture of the United States in 1860 … Eight Census, 158. Newfont reports that Blue Ridge farmers kept between 60 and 90 percent of their overall holdings in forest as late as 1900. Newfont, Blue Ridge Commons, 30–31. Waller also finds that cleared spaces were about 10 percent of total land owned or claimed. Waller, Feud, 22–23. Also see Billings and Blee, Road to Poverty, 180–81.

  30.  West Virginia Department of Agriculture, Old-Fashioned Cookbook [n.d.], www.agriculture.wv.gov/divisions/comm/Documents/Publications%20Print/Old%20Fashioned%20Cookbook%20WEB.pdf.

  31.  Newfont, Blue Ridge Commons, 5.

  32.  Warman, Corn and Capitalism, 117. Farmers in Nebraska harvested thirty to eighty bushels per acre. Nebraska State Board of Agriculture, Annual Report for the Year 1888 (1889), 243. On corn and yields, see Otto, “Forest Fallowing in the Southern Appalachian Mountains,” 55–56, and Debar, West Virginia Hand-Book, 57–60. Mountaineers produced a regional average of thirty-seven bushels per capita, according to Gray and Thompson, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States, 876, 884. “Planting more corn than was needed for one’s own annual consumption was also a calculated way of ensuring family survival.” Davis, Colten, Nelson, and Allen, Southern United States, 145. By labor-days I mean the number of days worked per individual laborer in order to produce a given commodity.

  33.  Olmsted, A Journey in the Back Country, 228–32; Anonymous, “Poor White Trash,” The Living Age 153, June 17, 1882, 688–91; King, The Great South, 503. Two New Englanders recounted being served, in one meal, pork, potatoes, cornbread, applesauce, blackberries, buckwheat cakes with maple syrup, pies, and wheat biscuits. “A Farming Experiment in West Virginia. (Concluded),” Catholic World 41 (August 1885), 627. And see the first part, “A Farming Experiment in West Virginia,” Catholic World 41 (July 1885).

  34.  Previous paragraph, Pollard, The Virginia Tourist, 165–69. “Prior to the arrival of railroads, once or twice a year mountain farmers drove their stock to regional gathering points, where large herds were purchased and driven to distant markets by professional drovers.” Lewis, “Railroads, Deforestation, and the Transformation of Agriculture in the West Virginia Back Counties,” 310. L. C. Gray collected this data, comparing the mountains and the Shenandoah Valley by livestock per capita. The mountains outproduced the valley in cattle, 1.9 to .81. See Gray and Thompson, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860, 876. Roger Kennedy notes that the annual value of Southern livestock (not limited to the mountains) was one and a half times the value of cotton in 1860. Mr. Jefferson’s Lost Cause, 57. During the 1850s, raising a steer to the age of three cost around $8 in West Virginia, compared to $24 in New York and Ohio. See Debar, West Virginia Hand-Book, 83–85; Lanman, Letters from the Alleghany Mountains, 123; and Pollard, Virginia Tourist, 165–69.

  35.  The practice of not feeding cattle in winter was well observed. Olmsted, Journey in the Back Country, 224; Debar, West Virginia Hand-Book, 83–85; Dodge, West Virginia, 43. Henry M. Price of Nicholas Court House, Virginia, explained the custom of the country: “Cattle command the chief attention of our farmers. They are chiefly raised by ‘browsing,’ having little attention given them besides regularly salting during the summer … The fall before the cattle are four years old, they are usually sold and driven off to other counties to be grain fed. The usual price is from $17 to $20.” Report of the Commissioner of Patents for the Year 1853: Agriculture, 8, 19. A correspondent for the Missouri State Board of Agriculture wrote this of the method: “I have no doubt but one-half of the entire neat cattle of this country with horses, mules, sheep and hogs go through the winter season with no more food than would be required to feed them well two weeks.” Quoted in Vance, Human Geography of the South, 149. Lanman said, “his beast subsists upon whatever it may happen to glean in its forest rambles, and, when the first supply of his own provisions is exhausted, he usually contents himself with wild game.” Lanman, Letters from the Alleghany Mountains, 49.

  36.  Debar, West Virginia Hand-Book, 57–60; Olmsted, Journey in the Back Country, 222. Otto, “Southern ‘Plain Folk’ Agriculture,” 31. Pinchot, Breaking New Ground, 61; Report of the Commissioner of Patents for the Year 1853: Agriculture, 58.

  37.  In 1820, one cattleman said, “This plan has been proved here for forty years,” quoted in MacMaster, “The Cattle Trade in Western Virginia,” 143.

  38.  He sometimes spelled his name Vandivier. Census of the United States (1870), Halberstam County; Bonner, “Profile of a Late Ante-Bellum Community,” 664 (note); Lanman, Letters from the Alleghany Mountains, 40–43. Billy’s tenants probably included members of his extended family, whom he referred to as his “boys.” He likely charged them little, accepting food or labor in exchange for a field and garden. But he also might have taken a portion of their crop and sold it, adding to his own accumulated wealth. Pollard, Virginia Tourist, 170. Two New Englanders in West Virginia said the same: “They neither know poverty nor riches, the well-to-do living about the same as their poorer neighbors.” See “A Farming Experiment in West Virginia. (Concluded),” Catholic World 41 (August 1885).

  39.  Zinn’s mother attended Rector College and studied by firelight. Zinn, The Story of Woodbine Farm, 1–12, 37.

  40.  Census of the United States (1870). Another way to reveal the presence of improved cattle is improved meadow. In 1880, one-third of all West Virginia counties had fewer than 10,000 acres of improved meadow. McDowell had 265. Boone had 616. Census of the United States (1880). In 1899, the State Board of Agriculture began to advise ranchers on how to improve. “The ‘come-and-go-easy’ methods together with the ‘pennyroyal cow’ and the ‘razor-back hog’ are rapidly becoming a thing of the past.” The same institution had little advice for the majority striving to stay in place and make a few dollars. Fifth Biennial Report of the West Virginia State Board of Agriculture, vol. 5 (1900), 8.

  41.  Brenner, “The Social Basis of Economic Development,” 23–28. The crucial distinction is not how many head of cattle households sold or the manufactured commodities they bought, write Dwight Billings and Kathleen Blee, “but rather to what extent agrarian households were able structurally to reproduce themselves independently of these exchanges.” Billings and Blee, Road to Poverty, 164; Pruitt, “Self-Sufficiency and the Agricultural Economy,” 335. Generally, the mountaineers of the nineteenth century did not exchange wages for work. In 1870, West Virginians disbursed the lowest annual wages of any state in the country—$48 per farm. By comparison, Minnesotans shelled out twice that ($95) and Californians almost ten times as much ($437, an average composed of tiny sums paid to armies of harvesters on thousand-acre wheat farms). In Mercer County, households paid an average of $3 for all the work they hired out in a year. In Wyoming County, they paid 29¢. In Logan and Nicholas counties, they paid nothing at all. Calhoun County represented the mean at $33 per farm in annual wages paid. Historical Census Browser (https://mapserver.lib.virginia.edu).

  42.  Harper, The Transformation of Western Pennsylvania, 13. Only 2.6 percent of men, women, and children worked in manufacturing in 1870, and that number was still just 3.4 percent in 1900. The number of people employed in manufacturing did not include the number employed as miners or loggers. Numbers that refer to the Plateau come from Salstrom, Appalachia’s Path to Dependency, 21, and “Agricultural Origins of Economic Dependency,” 270. Mary Beth Pudup notes, “Emigration was
relatively small in amount, and this, coupled with the rapid increase in population, forced an increase in the number of farms, largely by the process of subdivision.” Pudup, “The Limits of Subsistence,” 59. The hidden defect in any estimate of cleared or improved land has to do with uses and quality. Statistics from “Farms and Farm Property,” Census of the United States (1920), 41, 47. The census does not tell us what improved land looked like—thriving in maize or ravaged by erosion. One researcher found that 30 to 40 acres of “improved” land in farms that averaged 144 consisted of old field and pasture—not very productive. Davis, Geography of the Mountains of Eastern Kentucky, 52–60.