by Steven Stoll
Not according to the census. Either Lanman failed to notice a greater stock of wealth or chose not to mention it. A census enumerator visiting the Vandever place in 1849 recorded herds of livestock along with a diversity of products, including wheat, oats, rye, corn, peas, tobacco, honey, milk, butter, and fruit. By 1870, the same Adam P. Vandever owned eight hundred acres valued at seven hundred dollars, with combined taxable assets valued at twice that amount. Other visitors wrote with amazement about grizzled men living in smoky cabins, their half-naked children rolling around with the pigs, with estates larger than those of British lords. One known only as Uncle Billy held a deed to twelve hundred acres. He raised top-quality cattle and let out small parcels on shares. The author of The Virginia Tourist described Uncle Billy’s farm as “a beautiful domain on a broad tableland, probably three thousand feet above the sea level.” The author also noted that rich mountaineers lived in the same cabins as those of lesser means.38
William Zinn recalled growing up on a mountain farm during the Civil War where the family produced most everything they needed, roasting wheat for a coffee substitute, spinning flax for their own clothing. His father earned $650 a year on three hundred acres—not much but not bad either. Yet Zinn became more prosperous. He became an advocate of agricultural improvement, including keeping cattle in pens during winter and hauling their manure to meadows. During the 1920s, the family made $3,000 a year from potatoes alone—on one-third of the land his father cultivated. And yet, like Adam Vandever, Zinn’s success did not change his family’s desire for self-sufficiency. “I attribute largely what financial success we have had in life to the fact that we have produced on the farm almost our entire living.” They still made their own brooms. They were unusual in another way as well: all the women in their household went to school and contributed to the management of the farm business.39
Adam Vandever, Uncle Billy, William Zinn, and also “Devil Anse” Hatfield (of whom more later) represented a highland entrepreneurial class. We get a larger view of them from the census. In 1870, West Virginia had 285 farms larger than five hundred acres, accounting for less than 1 percent of the nearly 40,000 farms in the state. Counties in the Shenandoah Valley included the highest number and the highest value of livestock. Harrison County, with 21 large farms, recorded $400,000 in cattle value. On the other side, the poorest 50 percent of counties included only 10 farms larger than five hundred acres. Of these, only five counties reported a livestock value greater than $100,000. McDowell County produced just $10,000 worth of cattle, hogs, and horses.40
Most households did not have the choice to intensify. They entered capitalist social relations as workers, not entrepreneurs. Mountaineers had long been part of the capitalist world by selling commodities into it, like whiskey, lumber, and cattle, without becoming subject to wages. “As a rule,” writes the historian Robert Brenner, “the transition from pre-capitalist to capitalist property relations cannot occur as the intended result of the rationally self-interested actions of individual pre-capitalist economic actors, even given the appearance of new opportunities for exchange or new technologies or new demographic trends.” Instead, for the majority of these families, the transition came about under four linked conditions: population pressure, the loss of the homeplace itself, ecological destruction, and the dwindling value of mountain commodities. Subsistence regimes die by a thousand cuts, and the wounds proliferated after 1860.41
The first cut came from within mountain society itself. The plain folk increased at a terrific rate, an indication that their practices and strategies succeeded. But subsistence economies are sensitive to population. More people require more cleared spaces for fields and gardens, more cattle browsing for forage, more ramps and mushrooms gathered in springtime. In the decade leading up to the Whiskey Rebellion, residents of western Pennsylvania shot up 61 percent in seven years, to 63,500 by 1790. The thickness of humans across the region, at about 19 per square mile, might not seem very impressive, but it likely rid the woods of large game animals. And since so much land was already in the hands of financiers, proliferating households competed for land to set down on. Those who decided not to risk an ejectment suit or who had lost one accepted tenancy.
Jump ahead about a century to 1880. Population on the Appalachian Plateau (including western Pennsylvania and most of West Virginia) had risen by 156 percent in the previous thirty years. The area that became West Virginia counted just 56,000 people in 1790, or 2.3 per square mile. There were 300,000 mountaineers in 1850 and 960,000 in 1900, or 40 per square mile. Though an increasing number of men went to work as miners and loggers, most households continued to live on a dwindling and crowded ecological base. Between 1870 and 1900, West Virginia added almost 115,770 farms, a 100 percent gain. In the same period, the total number of acres in farms expanded by 24 percent, while improved acres (gardens, fields, and cultivated meadows) gained almost 90 percent, or 3 million acres. All of this points to the fate of the average farm in West Virginia (including wooded and cultivated land), which shrank from 214 acres in 1870 to 103 in 1910, or by 52 percent. Behind all these changes was the rise in population, which forced downward the number of cleared acres per person from 34 to 21. These statistics, by themselves, do not establish that the landscape could not support the fecundity of the people. But in order for agrarians to thrive in such a situation, they have to change the way they do things.42
In the 1920s, a seventy-year-old man told a journalist of the changes he had seen since his father’s time. “The farm I inherited was 225 acres, of which forty-five were in cultivation. Now it is occupied by ten families and 150 acres are in cultivation.” That meant that each family ate from 15 acres, with only 75 remaining in forest. The journalist commented, “Year by year the axe clears the steeper slopes and the plow tears them open … Up a two mile ‘branch’ you may find twenty to thirty farms, becoming more Lilliputian as you mount to the head of the ‘branch’ where the valley has narrowed into a ravine.” More and smaller farms, some on marginal land, along with the loss of a common range for grazing and hunting, posed unprecedented challenges. The absolute number of cleared acres fell along with the relative area available to support each person. But why should this have caused a crisis? Coal and lumber production caused the rise of towns and cities. Charleston went from 1,000 residents in 1850 to 11,000 in 1900. Ten years later it had doubled to 22,000. Townspeople should have provided a market for local farmers. There should have been more money around and greater demand.43
Agrarian people have a long history of adapting to population pressure, but for some reason adaptation didn’t often happen in Appalachia. The relevant thinker here is Ester Boserup, a Danish economist who while working for the United Nations in Asia after the Second World War found conventional models inadequate to explain smallholder agriculture. Boserup rejected the conventional wisdom. She rejected technology and fossil fuels as the only possible pathways for increasing returns. Most of all, she rejected Thomas Robert Malthus and his unsubstantiated assertion that increasing numbers of people will always outstrip increases in food. Boserup revealed that whenever smallholders feel the stress of mouths against supplies, they spend more time in their gardens, apply more manure to their fields, and generally redouble their labor. “The reaction normally to be expected would be an increase of the average number of hours worked per year so as to offset the decline in return per man-hour.”
Though Boserup didn’t know of West Virginia in the nineteenth century, she explained what people there faced. Rapid population growth in an agrarian economy presents hard choices, she said. “The cultivators must be able to adapt themselves quickly to methods which are new to them, although they may have been used for millennia in other parts of the world, and—perhaps even more difficult—they must get accustomed, within a relatively short period, to regular, hard work instead of a more leisurely life with long periods of seasonal idleness.” No Arcadia here. Adding to working hours yields more food but less time for leisure. It in
terrupts chatting with neighbors by imposing tasks like building terraces and hoeing into evening.44
But modest increases from longer hours should have been easy in Appalachia. What if a family had cleared fifteen acres, as in the above example? Let’s take this farm out of West Virginia for a moment. Let’s put a large garden and an orchard on five acres, with a small field of corn and space for chickens and pigs on another five. Then, we’ll use the last five for meadow and wood. Assuming a neighborhood and town, and perhaps some off-farm income, fifteen could be enough for a family of five or six and within their capacity. Safe subsistence can be achieved on a third as much land—even less. Cash would come from berries, apples, and eggs, along with occasional wages and home industries. So why didn’t this farm appear all over West Virginia after the Civil War? Why didn’t this intensification take place? Why, instead, did Appalachia experience poverty and dependency?45
Mountaineers needed to think differently about how they did things as their condition rapidly worsened. But they approached the landscape with long-standing assumptions that they could not (or would not) adjust or abandon. It was not that they failed to understand what it meant to harvest more food from a limited space. Everyone who has ever kept a garden knows how. But extending an intensive system over their fields as well required a kind of knowledge they did not have at hand. Instead of continually clearing for new fields, they needed to restore the soil in those already planted. Doing that would have required them to build new structures and plant fodder crops. An intensive system called for them to internalize some of the functions that the forest had always provided, to reduce the subsidy they received from the wider landscape. While lowland farmers were busy modifying breeds and seeds over the previous half century, improving the biological component of farming at the same time that they experimented with new ways of restoring fertility, mountain people strove to keep on living as they always had.
There were exceptions. Some highlanders did change their ways of doing things and succeeded. Those who became ranchers made the transition from the come-and-go-easy method of raising cattle to one designed to produce profit. But not every grazier could become a rancher. It required good flat land. That fifteen-acre farm that I dreamed up would have been difficult to replicate in McDowell County. Sloping fields could not be intensified. They lost topsoil immediately, accelerating the need for shifting, even as farmers ran out of forest to clear. This meant their labor would not be recompensed with an adequate harvest, that they would work harder and harder just to stay in place.
The mountains seemed to close in on them. In 1916, the geographer J. Russell Smith asked a man plowing in a hollow what he did when his corn showed signs of infertile soil.
“I kin turn the field into grass a couple o’ years.”
“Then will you put in corn again?”
“Law, no; by that time hit will be so pore ’twouldn’t raise a cuss-fight.”
“Then you must begin all over again with a new one?”
“That’s what we ben a-doin.”
But where would he begin again? No higher altitudes awaited. Some might have left for the Plains to become small-scale commodity producers on arid quarter sections, but perhaps not many. Emigrating cost money and entailed risk. Men owed a debt here and a favor there or awaited the inheritance of land. The perceived lack of options further limited their view. Increasingly trapped in place by a web of private property and the disadvantages of topography, mountaineers had no way to make up their losses. Smith said that what might have been an agricultural Eden had become “a slum with a high death rate.”46
J. Russell Smith was the Ester Boserup of his time. In spite of what he had seen, he believed that nothing made the demise of the mountain farm inevitable. The people simply needed new ways of doing things and credit that would allow them to make investments. But scientific institutions did not address their problems and credit remained almost nonexistent.47 Smith responded to those who condemned the mountaineer as a savage. “He is doing the best he can … He should be taught better, and that is the task of the schools and of the great organizations that we have built up for the dissemination of agricultural knowledge. We have a Federal Department of Agriculture, many State departments, State colleges, State experiment stations … Can they not among them develop and teach a mountain agriculture that will make the mountaineer prosperous and leave him his mountain?” No one else asked that question.48
And yet, it is difficult to imagine a scenario in which the Appalachian Plateau could have thrived in the late nineteenth century. Between 1840 and 1880, almost every commodity raised there—corn, potatoes, cattle, and pigs—deteriorated in quantity and value. As the mountains diminished, the flatlands bounded. Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin had matched or surpassed the Plateau in every one of these products. During the 1880s, West Virginia farmers hauled in twenty-three bushels of corn per acre. Wisconsin farmers hauled in thirty. The prairie and Great Plains attained tremendous economies of scale compared to the mountains because their large, square, flat, and unobstructed fields were ideal for machinery.49
But it wasn’t just the shape of the land that contributed to the rise of the Corn Belt. As Smith said, an unprecedented complex of institutions emerged to accelerate commodity production. Merchants and later banks offered credit, and though easy credit sometimes led to chronic indebtedness, agriculture is not possible without it. Farmers borrowed to expand the land they tilled, to buy a tool or machine, to start a cattle herd, and to build a house or barn. Merchants did offer credit to mountain farmers, often in the form of store accounts and promissory notes. But the potential of the borrower to make good on the loan was as thin as the soil running up the side of a hollow. The institutions that defined emergent industrial agriculture were not designed to function in a world of subsistence and barter.50
It might seem that agriculture in the southern mountains never had a chance. An agronomist might argue that no one ever should have plowed up the Plateau. Yet agrarians have flourished in all kinds of places. They’ve created durable cultures, lasting thousands of years, in the mountains of South America and around the Mediterranean Sea. The makeshift world of the southern mountains faded for its own internal reasons and because of the enormous aggression it faced. The struggles of mountaineers against narrowing options cannot be separated from their weakening hold on the homeplace. One set of families faced all these hardships. Before mining engineers and timber mills arrived, the Belchers and the Tottens began to lose control of their land, hollow by hollow, without an armed invasion or a shot fired.
* * *
FIFTY-THREE OF WEST VIRGINIA’S FIFTY-FIVE COUNTIES lie within the Appalachian coal-bearing region. But to say that the mineral exists in a certain location is not to say that it can be profitably mined. In 1902, only sixteen counties turned out at least 200,000 tons. Before a stock-issuing scheme could make the transition from a chartered pool of capital to an organization capable of blasting tunnels into the sweltering depths of the earth, it needed to acquire great stretches of the countryside in one of the advantageous counties. After that, it needed to remove anyone living there. Like British lords and their allies in Parliament, the managers of newly capitalized ventures deployed various tactics intended to pry agrarians out. And like the history of British enclosure circa 1680, the dispossession of the Appalachian peasantry circa 1880 is no simple story. It begins with how mountain folk held mountain land because that begins to explain how they lost it.51
In 1889, Thomas K. Totten wrote a deed in the form of a will. Totten wanted to ensure that his wife and five children would inherit his land and take from it “a good and peaceable life maintenance.” He meant it literally. His will transmitted useful things, like kitchen furniture, two horses, two cows, two calves, eight hogs, and assorted blacksmith’s tools. But while Totten wanted his family to remain on the homeplace, he stipulated that this land could be sold, “if the family ever became needy of anything.” The same documen
t revealed that Totten claimed more than thirteen hundred acres that he admitted he did not own. He anticipated that he or his family would gain title to it somehow, and he brazenly assumed that its eventual sale would pay his outstanding debts. The deed in the form of a will reveals the economic realms Totten attempted to hold together. He tended to his household with an agrarian’s sense of makeshift practicality while making a gambit for gain elsewhere.52
Humans have organized the use of land many ways. Mostly, they have created regions for collective hunting, gathering, and cultivation and limited access to a band, tribe, village, or town. They justified their appropriation by their active use. Private property is different. It carries an exclusive right regardless of use. Governments that create private property often eliminate collective rights because the two are usually incommensurate. Mountain households in the nineteenth century tended to see land as fulfilling both roles. Some of it they held close, as homeplace, where they farmed and gardened. Other pieces they exchanged within families, to launch a young couple or to provide for an elderly relative. When they established ownership, they sometimes sold to speculators and corporations. But operating across the two transactional realms generated a contradiction. Subsistence livelihood cannot endure the widespread commodification of land. When every knob and hollow carries a price, young couples can’t start out. Household reproduction can no longer continue outside of wage dependency. And when highlanders attempted to profit from the rising value of coal and timber by selling their land, they often ended up with too little in cash to buy a farm somewhere else.53