Appalachian History

If you’re an Ohio briar and you’re in Dayton this weekend, stop by the 21st annual Mountain Days Festival, a local celebration of the culture and heritage of Appalachian people. Those not familiar with the connection between Dayton and the official center of Appalachia might find it puzzling to encounter an Appalachian celebration in that city, and therein hangs the tale of the Appalachian Diaspora.

"Briars," first off, are what (some) Ohioans call migrant workers from Appalachia, and the term refers almost exclusively to Kentuckians and West Virginians, as Michael Ralstin recently explained in an excellent commentary on the Rednecromancer blog.

"It has been said that all mountain regions must import capital or export people," says John Alexander Williams in his thoughtful Appalachia: A History. "During most of the twentieth century, Appalachia did both.


Photo: Women workers making sparkplugs at the Firestone Tire & Rubber Company, Akron, Ohio, ca. 1930.

"With only their labor to invest and in numbers that exceeded the region's capacity to support its population through agriculture, forestry, and mining, most Appalachian migrants had little choice but to go wherever work could be found. Local leaders never willingly embraced a solution that deprived mountain localities of workers and voters.

"Nevertheless, migration remained a fact of Appalachian life throughout the 20th century. The Appalachian core sustained a net population loss through migration as early as 1910, but such losses were disguised, up until the 1950 census, by a relatively high birthrate and by the seemingly temporary nature of war-related migration during the two world wars."

"The impact of out-migration was particularly pronounced in West Virginia, which sent generation after generation of young adults to other states," Paul Salstrom tells us in Appalachia's Path to Dependency. "One study, a 1941 survey of Lewis County, West Virginia, noted that 'the principal export product of this area appears to be children.'"

And Mary Hufford observes in From Landscape and History at the Headwaters of the Big Coal River Valley: "Between 1935 and 1955, the introduction of mechanical loaders revolutionized deep mining. Nationwide, in the 1950s, some 250,000 miners (60 percent of the workforce) lost their jobs, overwhelming their pension fund.

"In addition, small operators unable to afford the industry-wide standard were driven out of business. Fifteen mines on Coal River (WV) shut down, and between 1951 and 1961 coal production declined dramatically. The roads leading out of Coal River to the factory towns in the north received a new name: Hillbilly Highways. 'You had to learn the three r's,' said Shorty Bongalis, 'Reading, Writing, and Route 21. And if you couldn’t swim, you better have help crossing the Ohio River.'"

Dayton, Detroit, Columbus, Ashtabula. One thing they all have in common: they’re at the end of the Hillbilly Highway.

Sources:
Paul Salstrom, Appalachia's Path to Dependency: Rethinking a Region's Economic History, 1730-1940 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994), p. 117.

Mary Hufford, From Landscape and History at the Headwaters of the Big Coal River Valley /An Overview at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/tending/essay5.pdf

John Alexander Williams, Appalachia: A History (UNC Press, 2002)


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