The Appalachians: America's First and Last Frontier

Book by None

INTRODUCTION
The early morning mountain mist is spread over the valley like a large, gray blanket. Underneath it, the tiny hamlet, snug and settled, rests easy. It is early autumn and the rich greenery of summer is beginning to give way to brown, red, orange, and gold hues that will become more pronounced as the sun comes up over the mountains in the eastern sky. A dog barks, and then another. In the air there is a faint smell of burning wood. But there are no visible signs of smoke that might taint the picturesque landscape. The view is indeed gorgeous. You’d be hard-pressed to find a visitor who would disagree. Yes, he’d say, this is quite beautiful, postcard pretty. Then tell him this place is Appalachia and watch a look of surprise sweep across his face.

The idea of Appalachia as a particularly unique American place is deeply embedded in American popular culture. It began a century ago, perpetuated mostlyby Northern journalists who found that sensationalizing life in Appalachia was a good way to sell newspapers. Since then, the media have continuously put forth the notion that life is homespun, simple, and a bit “different” in Appalachia, giving rise to cultural stereotyping on the grandest scale. We’ve laughed, for example, at the antics of “hillbillies” in newspaper comics. Snuffy Smith quickly comes to mind, as does the always likable Lil’ Abner. (Even though Abner’s story was, technically, set in Arkansas, his character is certainly attributable to Appalachia.) Those of us who grew up in the 1960s might remember the Hanna-Barbera cartoon The Hillbilly Bears. Speaking of television, Andy Griffith, Barney Fife, Aunt Bea, Opie, and the bootlegging Darling family warmed our hearts and made us smile with each episode of The Andy Griffith Show. Like Lil’ Abner, The Beverly Hillbillies was also set in Arkansas, but, again, the connotation was equal parts Appalachian. Each week, we tuned in to the trials and tribulations of the Clampetts, those lovable country innocents who settle in the upscale suburb of Los Angeles and wreak havoc on California culture and everything having to do with modern convenience, while outsmarting Mr. Drysdale every time.

Then there was The Waltons, one of the most beloved and embraceable Appalachian families ever to surface in American popular arts. We’ve chuckled at some of the family’s antics, to be sure, and sometimes we’ve cried with them, too. But mostly we learned about values and integrity from characters like Grandpa Walton and Tom–about them and their family, and about ourselves and our families. Appalachia also made its mark in the movies. Deliverance, that particularly unsettling tale of survival starring Jon Voight and Burt Reynolds and featuring the hit theme song “Dueling Banjos,” certainly affected our thinking about Appalachia–both good and bad. Beyond film, we’ve heard about the Hatfields and McCoys and their family feud, one of the longest in American history. We’ve laughed at the many hillbilly jokes–too numerous to repeat here.

When it comes to popular culture and the media, then, Appalachia, more times than not, seems to exist merely to entertain the rest of us, to remind us how good wehave it compared with those unfortunate souls who live in the region’s hills and hollers. The region might also be likened to a strange, cross-eyed, and unruly child not in the least like any other offspring. The analogy would be made even better if such a child were illegitimate, dirty-faced, and dangerous in some degenerate way.

This is a book about the real Appalachia, however, not the one described above. The Appalachiansis the story of the people of this wonderfully unique region–their history and culture, their land, their hardships and triumphs. It is about Appalachia yesterday, and Appalachia today.

The spine of Appalachia is the Appalachian mountain range, which begins in the Saint Lawrence Valley, in Canada, and runs right down the eastern part of the United States. Appalachia begins north in upper New England, where the Green Mountains of Vermont and the White Mountains of New Hampshire dominate the landscape. The Appalachian Trail, one of America’s great hiking challenges, actually runs from Maine to northern Georgia. Included in the Appalachian system are the Allegheny Mountains, the Blue Ridge Mountains, and the Great Smoky Mountains, along with the Great Valley, which takes in the Shenandoah, the James, the New, and the Tennessee valleys. About twenty-three million people live in this two-hundred-thousand-square-mile region. All of West Virginia and parts of twelve other states–Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, Mississippi, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia–can claim Appalachia as both a geographical and cultural identity. Historically, Appalachia was America’s first frontier. The region’s original inhabitants were Indians. The Iroquois, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and especially Cherokee tribes created thriving indigenous cultures there before the arrival in the early 1700s of English, Scottish, and Irish settlers, who, along with Germans, were attracted to the verdant valleys, the rich, green hills, and the mountains. Protestant was the dominant religion; Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans, Baptists, and Pentecostals were among the Christian denominations that established rural churches in Appalachia. Appalachian culture largely has its origins in the British Isles. Not just religious practices but social customs, traditions, and music came across the Atlantic to Appalachia largely intact. Thanks to the geographical isolation that the mountains provided, such things were virtually free of outside meddling in Appalachia. Isolation–it is a word that figures large in the Appalachian legacy.

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Appalachia’s mountainous terrain caused deeply rural settlements to sit isolated from other small communities and, certainly, the rest of America. Prior to the War for Independence, the vastness of the Appalachian mountain range hindered any large-scale westward expansion, although tales of Daniel Boone’s exploits and his exploration of the Cumberland Gap are a vital part of early Appalachian history and folklore. Like first- and second-generation Appalachian settlers, Boone was fiercely independent and rugged. He led the crossing over the mountains and provided the inspiration to move the frontier farther west. (Eventually, thousands upon thousands of eager settlers, many of them fresh from Europe, followed Boone’s trail, and just about all of them traveled over and through the mountains and kept on going.) After the War for Independence, many soldiers given land grants settled onto homesteads in Appalachia. There, they tended the land and lived their lives, generation after generation.

The Civil War was a difficult period for Appalachians. Poor white mountain people were torn between staying loyal to the Union and fighting on the side of their Southern brothers. In sections of Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina, there seemed to be no dividing line at all. Some Appalachian families chose one side, while their neighbors chose the other. In some cases, it was truly brother fighting against brother. Part of the problem was the unique situation of blacks in Appalachia. Although there were slaves in virtually every county in Appalachia, there were fewer of them than elsewhere in the South, because there were no huge plantations and because fewer families could afford slaves. Most slave-owning households owned fewer than five, although there were some plantations in Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee on which slaves numbered ten and twenty times that amount.

In all, it is estimated that perhaps 10 percent of Appalachia’s population at the outset of the Civil War was black. It could be said that the Civil War started in Appalachia, with John Brown’s raid in 1859 on the United States Armory and Arsenal at Harpers Ferry, back then located in Virginia, today, in West Virginia, which was created in 1863 as a separate state. Brown, a fanatical abolitionist, hoped to rouse slaves and to inspire an insurrection that would lead to emancipation. What Brown did was make a dangerous situation even worse, pushing the nation past the point of no return. Two years later, Americans were fighting Americans, and the key issue was slavery. Appalachia wasn’t without its war heroes or famous battlefields. Confederate general Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, second only to General Robert E. Lee in terms of military genius on the Southern side, was Appalachian born and bred, and defeated Union forces at Winchester and Front Royal in the Shenandoah Valley, among other Appalachian-based battles. Confederate forces also won a key victory at Chickamauga in northern Georgia. In all, dozens of battles and countless skirmishes were fought in Appalachia during the Civil War. Both the Union and Confederate forces drew more than one hundred thousand Appalachian soldiers to the conflict, with the South holding a considerable edge in recruits. After President Lincoln was assassinated in 1865, it was Andrew Johnson from the east Tennessee section of Appalachia who led the country into its Reconstruction era. Following the Civil War, isolation became less of an issue in Appalachia.

Yet, even though the region grew increasingly involved in economic, political, and cultural matters that affected the rest of the nation, most Americans outside Appalachia continued to subscribe to the belief that mountain people there were cut off from the world. The fact is there was more to Appalachia than barely surviving farms and turnip patches. During the Reconstruction years, coal mining attracted Appalachians and outsiders alike, forcing dramatic changes not just in the landscape but also in the makeup of Appalachian society. European immigrants and African Americans streame...