Appalachia

Appalachia. Geographically, Appalachia includes the mountains and valleys of states eastward from the Ohio River to the piedmont and northward from Georgia to Maine. Appalachia most often refers to the more populated southern Alleghenies, Blue Ridge, Appalachian, Ozarks, and Great Smoky mountains, a land inhabited by a people with a distinct history, memory, and culture.

Appalachian settlement constituted part of the fourth great migration wave (ca. 1717–1775) from Europe to America. Over 60 percent of the settlers came from England's borderlands region surrounding the Irish Sea: the Scottish lowlands, northern Ireland, and the six northern counties of England. The numbers averaged 5,000 per year or about 285,000 total. Largely Presbyterians at first, many were converted to more evangelical forms of Christianity by Methodist and Baptist missionaries. From the Palatinate of southwestern Germany about 100,000 German Protestants (Lutherans, Quakers, Moravians, Calvinists, Dunkers, and Mennonites and Amish) came to British America in a series of waves that began in 1683 and continued until the Revolutionary War. The number who settled in Appalachia is unknown, but at the first census in 1790, they composed only 5 percent of the population of the Carolinas, Georgia, Tennessee, and Kentucky, compared to 90 percent who were English, Irish, or lowland Scots.

Demographically, one of Appalachia's most arresting features has been the fertility rate. Beginning in the nineteenth century and continuing for roughly 150 years, the birthrate of Appalachia exceeded the national average. If the reasons are unclear, the consequences are obvious. In a region of narrow valleys, steep mountainsides, and rocky ridges, continuous population growth and practices of partible inheritance over time produced overpopulation, land scarcity, and rural poverty. Consequently, throughout its history, mobility has been another distinctive feature of Appalachian life. The need to find supplementary work to preserve the family in a kinship‐based society has been called “the stable ideal.” Such conditions also bred a patriarchal family structure with strong male authority over women and children in the household.

Poverty and isolation, often mistakenly associated with Appalachia's entire history, actually arose in distinct periods of its development. Between 1850 and 1900, as turnpikes and railroads diverted traffic around Appalachia, the region grew isolated. Overpopulation led to increasing landlessness. Sectionalism and the Civil War exacerbated these conditions, giving rise to xenophobia and a more introverted society.

Simultaneously, beginning in the 1880s, local‐color writers began to paint literary pictures of a “strange land and a peculiar people.” The “hillbilly” genre they created persisted into the late twentieth century as the source of misunderstandings and caricatures of regional history and culture. Over eight hundred movies, from the early nickelodeon one‐reelers to late twentieth‐century films like Deliverance, Thelma and Louise, and Raising Arizona, depicted hillbillies as “cultural others.” Other twentieth‐century writers and folklorists such as Altina Waller, Durwood Dunn, and David Whisnant, provided correctives to these distorted images, however.

Between the 1890s and the 1930s, migration to nearby rural industries such as quarrying, coal mining, lumbering, and iron making provided some respite from chronic rural poverty. In Appalachia's version of the New South, local and state governments, legislatures, and politicians transformed themselves into propagandists for the region and invented tax incentive schemes to encourage industrial development. Outside capital flowed into the region and, together with inside help from a small commercially minded urban elite of lawyers, bankers, and merchants, stimulated rapid urban and industrial growth. With the coming of alternative fuels in the 1920s and the Great Depression of the 1930s, the boom decades ended. Racial segregation, as seen, for example, in Coe Ridge, Kentucky, and Piedmont, West Virginia, and higher rates of lynching than in the non‐Appalachian South during these years shattered the illusion of racial harmony in the region.

Between 1940 and 1970, New Deal programs, the World War II draft, and out‐migration brought more contact with other Americans. Many fled to the “Appalachian ghettos” in Baltimore, Cleveland, Dayton, Cincinnati, Chicago, and Detroit. The 1960 census revealed a regional population decrease for the first time since the area was settled by Europeans. John F. Kennedy focused attention on poverty in Appalachia in his 1960 campaign for the Democratic party's Presidential nomination, as did Michael Harrington in The Other America (1962). The 1970s saw a reversal, demographically and economically, as out‐migrants returned, young people chose to remain, and many older Americans decided to retire in Appalachia.
See also Folklore; Methodism; New Deal Era, The; Regionalism.

Bibliography

Henry D. Shapiro , Appalachia on Our Mind: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1978.
Ronald D. Eller , Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers: Industrialization of the Appalachian South, 1880–1930, 1982.
Altina L. Waller , Feud: Hatfields, McCoys, and Social Change in Appalachia, 1860–1900, 1988.
David Hackett Fischer , Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America, 1989.
Crandall A. Shifflett , Coal Towns: Life, Work, and Culture in Company Towns of Southern Appalachia, 1880–1960, 1991.
Henry Louis Gates Jr. , Colored People, 1995.

Crandall Shifflett