High Mountains Rising

by Richard A. Straw

  In addition to primary industries such as agriculture and timber, industrialization played an increasing role in attracting people away from their mountain homes. As early as 1847 mountaineers were seen as a potential source of factory hands, or “lint-heads,” as textile workers were then known in the Carolinas.7 With the expansion of the cotton industry in the 1880s and 1890s, mountaineers were actively recruited into the mill towns of the Piedmont. “Agents were sent by many mills into the remote districts, sometimes to put up posters and signs telling of the golden opportunities to be had at the mill for the asking, sometimes with instructions to engage laborers and furnish tickets for transportation, money for extra clothing, or any other necessities for the move from mountain to village.”8

  In the early twentieth century, as job opportunities grew more plentiful outside the Appalachians, migration streams from the mountain region became significantly larger and focused on closer destinations such as Lexington, Kentucky, and Cincinnati, Akron, and Hamilton in Ohio.9 The migrants, now more aware of the effects of boom-and-bust economic cycles, adopted shuttle migration as a survival strategy. Keeping their home places in the Appalachians, shuttle migrants became temporary laborers or, in more contemporary language, migrant workers. Marshall Vaughn, an editor of Mountain Life and Work, notes that “trekking (frequently by the hitchhike method) is taking place back and forth between the mountains and outside work projects.” He describes shuttle migration as a practical recourse: “During days of depression or low industrial activity, the stream of migrants from industrial centers to the little ‘up-right’ farms in the mountains becomes large. There is always the inexpensive cottage or dad’s old cabin that offers shelter until something else shows up.”10

  Along with the growth in factory jobs across the nation, agricultural work remained a staple for migrants who preferred to maintain their rural lifestyles. Some families of migrants joined in corn and wheat harvests on Midwestern farms, the children making a dollar and adults two for a day’s work.11 Others labored from March until August, working the tomato crop in Indiana or onions in Ohio, then returning home with their earnings to await the next picking season.12 Historian Carey McWilliams puts it bluntly: “It took almost a hundred years of intermittent effort, in the face of great difficulty, to drain the Scioto marshes in Ohio—17,000 acres of the richest farmland in America. . . . It was necessary to squeeze every possible penny from the soil. This meant concentration on a single cash crop; it also meant cheap labor. Once a preserve for muskrats, the marshes soon became the home of Kentucky migrants.”13

  As early as 1907 onion growers in Ohio sent recruiters into the mountains of Kentucky and West Virginia seeking seasonal labor; newspaper ads were placed in the counties of southeastern Kentucky in particular. By the 1930s many of these “seasonal” workers had become “stayover” residents of northeastern Ohio; some stayed voluntarily to save the expense of transportation, and others simply could not afford to go back home between seasons. Moreover, as the soil became depleted and crop production began to suffer, the farm owners enticed the migrants into a system of sharecropping. The migrants had to pay rent on their shacks, work the owners’ fields for twelve cents an hour, pay the owners a fee for the “preparation” of sharecropped land, and split the proceeds from the harvest with the owners.14

  The situation in Indiana in the 1930s was not much better; most of the 5000, out-of-state migrants who came to pick the tomato crop came from Kentucky. Historian McWilliams called it “a one-crop migration made up, for the most part, of families.”15 Some of the families were forced to sleep in barns, tent “jungles,” and even strawstacks. After two or three seasons, many families stayed in Indiana and tried to find better, more permanent quarters.

  In addition to movements to industrial and agricultural settings, migration directly into cities has been another enduring feature of Appalachian migration. In the early nineteenth century, for instance, Cincinnati had already become a destination for Appalachian migrants. Historian Carter G. Woodson notes that “during the period between 1826 and 1840 . . . Cincinnati had to grapple with the problem of the immigrating Negroes and the poor whites from the uplands of Virginia and Kentucky.”16 Later, a 1935 study conducted by sociologist Grace Leybourne in Cincinnati showed that there were a substantial number of migrants from the southern Appalachian plateaus living in the city and that 8.4 percent of them had arrived before 1915, whereas 42.5 percent had arrived before 1925.17

  The migration streams out of the Appalachians into the metropolitan centers surrounding the mountains swelled after World War I. Among the first to leave, seeking better lives in the industrialized cities of the Northeast and Midwest, were the groups with the weakest ties to the mountains: southern blacks and European immigrants. Their departures for greener pastures continued through the postwar economic expansion of the 1920s. Although each of these groups left some members behind, many of the long-term residents stayed in the mountains to weather the cyclical fluctuations of an economy based on agriculture, textiles, and mineral extraction.

  When long-term residents finally began to move away in large numbers, the impelling forces were twofold: demographic pressures and economic hardship. Columbia University professor Carter Goodrich led a study of population dynamics in the 1920s and 1930s that included a section on the southern Appalachian coal plateaus. His team’s primary finding was that the area had extraordinarily high birthrates, which placed overwhelming population pressure on the region. They recommended that this pressure could be adequately reduced only by the migration of 340,000 people from the region and that federal programs should be established to encourage this movement.18 A similar recommendation appeared in a study sponsored by the federal Bureau of Agricultural Economics. The bureau concluded that “encouragement of emigration” was the rational solution to the basic problem of overpopulation in the mountains.19 The eminent Southern sociologist Rupert Vance summarized the conditions that impelled migration in a proposition and a corollary: “The chances of attaining a higher level of economic opportunity are better in the Northeast, the Far West, and the Middle States, than in the Southwest and Southeast. . . . Within these regions there exist special problem areas [such as] . . . Southern Appalachia.”20

  Goodrich and his colleagues noted another condition in the Appalachians that impelled population movement: poverty. “Of 3,071 counties in the United States, 380 had an average gross income in 1929 of less than $150 per rural-farm inhabitant. All but 7 of these are in the South and in the border state of West Virginia. The majority of these poorer counties are in the Southern Appalachians and in the Piedmont.”21 They went on to note that “the poorest group of agricultural counties in Kentucky and West Virginia, largely mountain counties . . . [all] lost population through migration during the twenties.”22

  Initial relocations were predominantly short-distance moves, within the mountains themselves, usually from agricultural areas into coal camps. This became the first step in a migratory pattern that lasted for decades. Goodrich and his associates expressed their misgivings about the intraregional migration to coal towns with a question: “But were these not the very regions that would suffer most severely when the depression came, and was not the migration of the twenties therefore largely a movement into the trap of business fluctuation?”23

  The first surfaced highways in the mountains brought bus lines into the Appalachian region in the late 1920s. The road-building programs of the Roosevelt administration came to the mountains in the 1930s; north-south arteries such as Routes 23, 25, and 27 and east-west corridors such as Routes 50 and 52 made the mountains and many outlying cities accessible to each other. Although these roads were ostensibly built for commerce, they began to be used heavily by individual commuters as routes out of the mountains. An oft-repeated mountain maxim prescribed a knowledge of “readin’, writin’, and Route 23” as key elements for success. This bit of popular wisdom promoted the paradox that the only way to survive in the mountains was to leave
them.

  Urban areas not too distant from the mountains became the next set of favored destinations.24 Lexington, Kentucky, for instance, was a growing metropolis located on the periphery of the Southern mountains. With few manufacturing jobs, the city’s early-twentieth-century economy revolved around horse breeding, health care, and higher education; it became a popular destination for many newcomers from the eastern Kentucky mountains.

  In 1938 a University of Kentucky professor, Morris Caldwell, completed a study comparing two groups of migrant families in Lexington: one from the eastern Kentucky mountains and the other from the Bluegrass counties of central Kentucky. Caldwell focused on what he called “social maladjustments” among the families and concluded that “mountain families appear to be unable to make satisfactory social adjustments in an urban environment.”25 He asserted that “the strain and stress of modern living conditions in an urban environment have caused the disorganization of a type of family adapted for a simple mountain existence.”26 Caldwell’s work is an example of the negative assumptions and stereotypes many migrants encountered upon leaving the region.27

  A popular misconception held by many city dwellers was that the migration was simply an effort by mountaineers to exchange rural poverty for urban welfare benefits. Grace Leybourne tested this hypothesis in 1937 and concluded, “There seems no evidence then to support the general belief that Hill-Billies [sic] come to the city to establish legal residence with no more anticipation than extra dollars from relief agencies . . . [and] there is little doubt that these Hill-Billies were attracted to the city by the hope of finding employment and not of securing the protection of its social services.”28

  However, nearby destinations such as Lexington usually were a single link in a chain of migration stops ever more distant from the region. Most migrants’ destination decisions were driven by the availability of work in industrialized cities across the United States: “Where the migrants went the statistics do not show, but it is known that large numbers found employment north of the Ohio, especially in such centers as Cincinnati, Middletown, Dayton, Detroit, Chicago, and the cities of the lake front.”29 The 1935 U.S. Agricultural Department report indicates an even wider scope of migration: “Ohio, Texas, Oklahoma, Illinois, Michigan, and California are the States that have attracted large numbers of people whose place of birth was in the six Appalachian States.”30

  Industrial work during the Depression of the 1930s had its own seasons, and mountaineers working in canneries, mills, and factories were regularly laid off according to cyclical fluctuations in the marketplace: “The Briers [sic] were laid off before natives whether in temporary slack seasons or permanent dismissals.”31 When harvests ended or layoffs occurred, the laborers gave up their rented quarters and returned to their highland homes: “Many men who had cut themselves loose from the soil to take a wage job and were now cast off by industry were driven back into the mountains.”32 Helen and Robert Lynd, in their classic sociological study of an Indiana city they dubbed Middletown, note the following comments by one of the city’s “influential manufacturers”:

  In 1922 we were so rushed with orders we couldn’t possibly fill them or get enough men here in town to carry on, so we had to import some men from Kentucky and West Virginia. Our men from our local district here, born and bred on the farms near here, knowing the use of machinery of some sort from their boyhood, reliable, steady, we call “corn-feds.” These men we brought in from the mountains we called “green peas.” We brought two train loads of them down. Some of them learned quickly, and some of them didn’t. Most of them have drifted back by now. We figured it cost $75-$200 to train each one of them, and there was such a demand for labor about town that they didn’t stay with us. They drifted about from shop to shop, and of course when the slump came we fired them and kept our old men.33

  Appalachian shuttle migration continued for decades after the 1920s and 1930s. In the later years, however, returns home took on social dimensions beyond the purely pragmatic aspect of having a refuge in hard times. Visits home became a form of cultural refreshment and social renewal apart from the rigors of city life. In the words of Louisville Courier-Journal reporter Ora Spaid, “They find the big cities cold, impersonal, and unwelcoming. So they come back home. Not necessarily to stay, but to be emotionally restored in the warmer, friendlier surrounding of people who care.”34

  The war years of the 1940s brought a new wave of out-migration as young Appalachian men and women left the mountains for military service. Other mountaineers were drawn to jobs in wartime industries located in and near metropolitan areas along the eastern seaboard, in the Midwest, and even as far away as California.35 A World War II labor survey conducted in selected areas of eastern Kentucky showed a drop in population of 18.8 percent in the early 1940s, wiping out in two years the 17.4 percent gain in population that occurred over the previous decade. The survey report concludes, “About half of those leaving since Pearl Harbor entered the armed forces. . . . The majority of the remaining emigrants from these districts entered industrial work, principally in the Ohio Valley, Great Lakes, and Eastern cities.”36

  The economic roller coaster the nation experienced in the 1930s and 1940s was mimicked by a parallel boom-and-bust cycle in the coal industry. In the 1950s, however, white and black miners in the central Appalachian coalfields fell off the economic roller coaster altogether. Coal was displaced by electricity, diesel oil, and natural gas as the fuel of choice in steel mills, in marine and railroad engines, and in commercial and residential furnaces. In addition, new technology raised productivity in the mines while shrinking the number of miners needed to operate them. The economic decline in the mountains resulting from these structural changes was steep and painful. The initial relocation trends among mountaineers grew in the post-World War II era into a large-scale migration involving millions of people, called by some the Great Migration.37

  In addition to the push factor of a devastated regional economy, industrialized urban areas outside Appalachia had a great deal of allure. Service, construction, and manufacturing jobs were abundant, a substantial housing stock became available as previous migrant groups moved to the suburbs, and educational opportunities appeared to be plentiful. The city streets might not have been paved with gold, but at least they were paved.

  Throughout the 1950s and 1960s Appalachian families left the mountains by the carful for cities such as Detroit, Chicago, Columbus, Lexington, Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Atlanta, Baltimore, Washington, and Cleveland to name a few. The Appalachian exodus turned around briefly in the early 1970s when the region began to experience net increases in population from in-migration. This was the era of an international oil embargo and a concomitant energy crisis in the United States that put a premium on the value of coal, bringing many miners and their families back into the central Appalachian coalfields. Net in-migration to Appalachia also ended with the resolution of that crisis, and the outward flows began anew.

  Over time the migrants who participated in the Great Migration, which peaked in the late 1950s, became urban Appalachians. Like migrant groups before them, some migrants initially clustered in Appalachian enclaves such as Chicago’s Uptown, Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine, Dayton’s East Side, Detroit’s Cass Corridor, Cleveland’s Near West Side, and Stringtown in Indianapolis or the Southside area in Columbus. They formed social and cultural organizations such as the O’Tucks, Our Common Heritage, and the Appalachian Community Development Association in Ohio; the Kentuckians of Michigan; and local chapters of the Eastern Kentucky Social Club in more than a dozen cities. Appalachian service and advocacy organizations including Chicago’s Southern Center and Cincinnati’s Urban Appalachian Council appeared as well.38

  Most migrant families eventually moved from their initial port-of-entry neighborhoods into working-class and then suburban neighborhoods in cities all over the country and continued the process of social and economic assimilation. A longitudinal research project begun in 1980 in Cincinnati pro
vides a time-lapse picture of urban Appalachians in that city. The study uses randomized sample surveys to profile first-and second-generation Appalachian migrants (people born in the region or who had at least one parent born in the region) in Hamilton County, Ohio, which encompasses the city of Cincinnati.39

  The study indicates that black and white Appalachians make up about a fifth of the county’s population. Appalachians have now lived in the county, on average, the same length of time (about thirty years) as the non-Appalachian population. Urban Appalachians are making progress but have not yet caught up with non-Appalachians in terms of overall educational attainment. Among Appalachians in the labor force, by 2001 97 percent were employed, and more than nine out of ten Appalachian families were in the county’s middle or upper income categories. Appalachians living outside the city limits but in Hamilton County outnumbered those living in the city two to one. Appalachians are increasingly less likely to be married and more likely to be divorced than non-Appalachians in the county. Although the Appalachian cohort is still predominantly Protestant, the study shows that one in five is Catholic, up from one in ten in 1980.

  The increasing divorce rates and growing Catholic affiliation may be indicators that the process of assimilation is under way for Appalachians in greater Cincinnati. Both first-and second-generation migrants have achieved employment and income parity, indicating that for many economic assimilation is complete. Although urban Appalachians in greater Cincinnati seem to be well along in the process of social and economic assimilation, there are cultural issues, particularly those revolving around education and negative stereotypes, that remain unresolved. There are also pockets of deep Appalachian poverty in Cincinnati’s urban and suburban neighborhoods; the residents of these neighborhoods are beset with social problems similar to those affecting the local African American community.