Kephart made this assertion even as thousands of immigrants and African Americans were flocking to the central Appalachian region in search of jobs with the coal mines and railroads. In describing the population as “more English in speech than Britain itself, more American by blood than any other part of America,”2 Kephart echoed other commentators who portrayed the people of Appalachia as relics of an earlier age with a common race, ancestry, and culture.
The reality is that even before the time of the first European settlement in the 18th century, Appalachia contained a mix of cultural, ethnic, and racialized identities. By the turn of the 20th century, this cultural mosaic was plain to see in the coal camps of eastern Kentucky. Between 1880 and 1940, new immigrants and established minorities in the Appalachian coalfields shifted with changes in the coal industry and national population trends, representing one of the most diverse periods in the history of the region.
Bantering a Tennessee wife on her choice, she replied with a toss and a sparkle, "I-uns couldn't get shet of un less'n I-uns married un." "Have you'uns seed any stray shoats?" asked a passer: "I-uns's uses about here." "Critter" means an animal—"cretur," a fellow-creature. "Longsweet-'nin'" and "short sweet'nin'" are respectively syrup and sugar. The use of the indefinite substantive pronoun un (the French on), modified by the personals, used demonstratively, and of "done" and "gwine" as auxiliaries, is peculiar to the mountains, as well on the Wabash and Alleghany, I am told, as in Tennessee. The practice of dipping—by which is meant not baptism, but chewing snuff—prevails to a like extent. William Wallace Harney, “A Strange Land and Peculiar People” (October 1873)4
America's post-Civil War fascination with the rural white inhabitants of the southern Appalachian mountains is exemplified in William Wallace Harney's 1873 article, "A Strange Land and Peculiar People," in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine. The piece popularized Appalachia as a distinct region separate and isolated from the rest of the country, its people untouched by the problems of the modern industrial age. This idea of Appalachia as a "place where time stood still" remained fashionable through the mid-20th century as evidenced by the title of Jack Weller's book, Yesterday's People: Life in Contemporary Appalachia (1965).
Following Harney's lead, writers and journalists produced a multitude of stories, articles, and travel reports about Appalachia to amuse and enlighten readers. Few Americans at the turn of the 20th century had visited the region. Their information about Appalachia was limited to the writings of outsiders, all of whom had their own agendas. For most of these individuals, it was a chance to capitalize on the public's desire for entertainment and education. Berea College President William Goodell Frost recognized a different opportunity through marketing Appalachia as a homogeneous, backward culture.
To-day there are in the Southern mountains approximately the same number of people - Americans for four and five generations - who are living to all intents and purposes in the conditions of the colonial times! These people form an element unaccounted for by the census, unreckoned with in all our inventories of national resources. And their remoteness is by no means measured by the mere distance in miles. It is a longer journey from northern Ohio to eastern Kentucky than from America to Europe; for one day's ride brings us into the eighteenth century. Naturally, then, these eighteenth-century neighbors and fellow countrymen of ours are in need of a friendly interpreter; for modern life has little patience with those who, are "behind the times. William Goodell Frost, "Our Contemporary Ancestors in the Southern Mountains" (March 1899)5
In "Our Contemporary Ancestors," Frost made the first reference to the people of the region as Appalachian Americans. He portrayed the population as descendants of American revolutionary era colonists with observable Anglo-Saxonist characteristics, such as dialect, arts and crafts, tools. Their patriotism and heritage made them true Americans, he reasoned, and so it was the duty of other Americans to improve and educate them. Frost made this appeal to potential donors to Berea College, knowing that it would strike a chord with those who were anxious about the flood of new immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. In Frost's case, therefore, writing about Appalachia served as another way to raise money for his college. It also added to the evolving stereotypes about the region.
Other notable examples of writings about Appalachia include Mary Noailles Murfree's In the Tennessee Mountains (1884), John Fox Jr.'s novels The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come (1903) and The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1913), Julian Ralph's article “Our Appalachian Americans” (The Harper’s Monthly, 1903), and John C. Campbell's book The Southern Highlander and His Homeland (1921). Missionaries, social workers, and academics also added their voices to the mix, contributing to the idea of Appalachia as a mysterious, forgotten land whose people were relics of an earlier, better time in American history.
Even as popular culture mythologized Appalachia as a place whose people were just waking up from what Frost called "a long Rip van Winkle sleep",6 the region was being transformed by the railroads, coal industry, and the arrival of a new immigrant population.
As immigration to the United States increased at the turn of the 20th century, many Americans became uneasy about how so-called undesirable immigrants could change the country's national identity. Nativist movements such as the Immigration Restriction League, founded in 1894, argued that immigrants who failed to assimilate threatened American culture and values. This issue was the basis for the League's existence as shown in the first lines of its constitution: "The objects of this League shall be to advocate and work for the further judicious restriction or stricter regulation of immigration ... to arouse public opinion to the necessity of a further exclusion of elements undesirable for citizenship or injurious to our national character."7 Opponents of immigration campaigned for tighter regulations on immigrants, including literacy tests and the establishment of immigration commissions. Their influence can be seen in the various anti-immigration laws and acts passed by the U.S. Congress in the years between 1880 and 1940.
For some people, the “rediscovered” Appalachian population represented what they believed the United States had once been. In this idea, there was no room for diversity.
In these isolated communities … we find the purest Anglo-Saxon stock in all the United States. They are direct descendants of the early Virginia and North Carolina immigrants, and bear about them in their speech and ideas the marks of their ancestry as plainly as if they had disembarked from their eighteenth-century vessel but yesterday. The stock is chiefly English and Scotch-Irish, which is largely Teutonic in origin. There is scarcely a trace of foreign admixture. Ellen Churchill Semple, The Anglo-Saxons of the Kentucky Mountains: A Study in Anthropogeography (1910)8
It is true that there were relatively few immigrants and minorities in Appalachia and especially eastern Kentucky at the turn of the 20th century. Yet evidence does exist for their presence in the region. Census data from 1880 to 1940 for the eastern Kentucky coalfields demonstrates that immigrants of many nationalities came into and out of the area over the course of 60 years. For all the decades in this period, the recorded foreign-born population in the coalfield counties fluctuated between 1,819 and 8,533 persons. Most of these people presumably migrated to eastern Kentucky to work with the railroads and coal mines.
The largest foreign-born population was recorded in 1880 (8,533) in the same period as the expansion of the railroads into the region and the opening of large coal mines. Over the next three decades as the anti-immigrant movement strengthened and Congress enacted legislation restricting immigration, the foreign-born population steadily declined: 1890 (2,396), 1900 (1,831), and 1910 (1,891). Between 1910 and 1920, the coal industry boomed with business from the war and the mines needed more laborers, which corresponds with the dramatic increase in the foreign-born population: 1920 (4,329). During the period from 1920 to 1930, new legislation established quotas that limited the number of new immigrants entering the country. Census data show a matching decline in the foreign-born population in 1930 (2,994). The population continued to decline during the Great Depression (1929-1941): 1940 (2,142).
Census data for 1880-1940 also notes place of birth for the foreign-born population. These records are a goldmine of information about the various immigrant groups that were present (and not) in eastern Kentucky during this time. For example, the number of foreign-born persons in the coalfields in 1880 totaled 8,533. Out of this population, 3,898 individuals came from Ireland. Ten years later in 1890, the number of Irish immigrants fell to 387. Why did the Irish immigrant population decline so much in a decade? Was this an outcome of immigration legislation? Can the decline be attributed to the hiring practices of different coal companies? Without further research, it is difficult to come up with a verifiable answer.
The correlation between the rise and fall of the foreign-born population in the eastern Kentucky coalfields and larger national trends shows that the region was not isolated from the rest of the country, as commentators at the time suggested.
Kentucky Railroad Map, 1890
Preliminary Map of Kentucky, prepared for the Kentucky Railroad Commissioners by the Kentucky Geological Society, University of Kentucky Libraries, Sciece Library, Map Collection.
Starting in the 1870s, the expansion of railroads in eastern Kentucky brought significant social and economic changes to the region. While there had always been outsiders willing to make the hard journey into the area before the railroads, the extension of lines into the coalfields opened travel to more people. The railroads also improved transportation of goods. Consequently industrialists saw a new opportunity to tap into eastern Kentucky’s rich coal deposits, which were often located in remote, rugged terrain too far from road or river access. The construction of major arteries and spur lines over the next six decades made it possible to open mines on large scale, import labor, and convey coal to distant markets.
Workmen on a railroad bridge, Samuel M. Wilson Photographic Collection, PA79W1, Special Collections, University of Kentucky.
Railroad construction camps were usually the first settlements near the coal mines.9 These temporary camps contained mostly single men of various ethnicities, races, and backgrounds, including native-born whites, African Americans, convicts, and many Italian immigrants. Women and children were almost always absent. Crews endured rough conditions in laying track and living in the camps. Exposed to the weather, the men had to build lines across rivers and valleys and through mountains.10 Their work paved the way for the opening of new mines, eventually launching a coal boom that attracted diverse groups of immigrants to the region.
As mines opened in the 1880s, coal companies hired local men and used labor agents to recruit additional workers from southern states and immigration points of entry like New York City, Baltimore, and Philadelphia.11
The early miners were mountain farmers, native-born whites, African Americans, and immigrants, all of whom were drawn to the jobs offered by the mines. In searching for immigrant workers, coal companies often preferred certain nationalities. Carl Shifflett writes in Coal Towns (1991) that "in spite of the difficulty of acquiring workers, coal operators developed preferences in some cases for specific ethnic groups over others. These biases might grow out of a previous experience, good or bad; sometimes the bases of their choices were not clear. Employment agencies, anxious to win contracts, accomodated these biases."12 He notes that Italian, Polish, Hungarian, and Slavic immigrants were considered the most desirable foreign-born workers.13 Coal companies avoided other immigrant groups who seemed more prone to labor activism and political radicalism, such as Irish workers and their association with the Molly Maguires.14 Due to these biases, the combination of native-born whites, African Americans, and immigrants was different for every mine.
Immigrant workers traveled to the coal camps on trains. Some of the men came with families, but most of the early miners were single or alone. Separated from their families and home communities, single and solitary men lived in cramped, crowded quarters in boardinghouses. Every day, the miners worked until the point of exhaustion in dangerous underground mines. They never knew when they might die from rock falls, gas explosions, or other accidents.
The prejudices against minorities and immigrants that were common in society at the turn of the 20th century often led to confrontations between the residents of coal towns. Coal companies encouraged this division through the separation of different races and ethnicities, and discrimination of miners based on the kinds of jobs available to each group. Crandall Shifflett in Coal Towns notes that all phases in the development of coal towns involved segregation, a common practice in the United States at the time.15 Most coal companies divided towns into areas set aside for different groups. The town of Wheelwright, for example, separated residents with three boardinghouses to house immigrants, African Americans, and native-born whites.
IMAGE: Typewritten label on back of photograph: "Street in colored section of company housing project."; children stand on porch of house while two men walk down street, Russell Lee: Wheelwright, KY Photographic Collection, 1946, 88PA1,Special Collections, University of Kentucky.
In the coalfields, native whites, African Americans, and foreign immigrants lived and worked in company towns where they usually were segregated into sections designated as “Colored Town,” “Hunky Hollow,” or “Little Italy.” Generally, there was discrimination in the kinds of jobs available to each group in the mine as well, with natives or British immigrants serving as bosses or in the technical positions, and blacks and immigrants in the harder, more dangerous, and most unsteady jobs. Still, blacks and immigrants were attracted by relatively high wages. Underground the men worked together, but even on the surface the rigid segregation often became blurred in company towns, and without other employment opportunities, the workers came to focus on their common economic interests in the United Mine Workers of America, the one organization in the coalfields they could control. Ronald Lewis, "Beyond Isolation and Homogeneity: Diversity and the History of Appalachia"16
Severe discrimination did exist in the coal towns and mines. On the other hand, the coal towns were multicultural communities in an otherwise segregated landscape. There was cooperation across the divide through the labor unions, in which miners of different races and ethnicities came together to bargain with coal companies for better wages and working conditions.
Harlan County Mine Strike, 1939
A crowd of miners confroting soldiers, Harlan County Mine Strike Photographic Collection, 81PA109,Special Collections, University of Kentucky.
In view of the harsh living and working conditions around the camps, why did immigrants choose to work in the eastern Kentucky mines? These men and their families were willing to contend with the dangers of the work, the prejudices of their employers and neighbors, forced isolation, and the bleak conditions in the coal towns in order to improve the future for themselves.
As the coal industry changed and legislation restricted immigration to the United States, foreign-born miners started leaving the coalfields in droves to seek better opportunities. With the economic depression of the 1930s, few of these workers found a reason to return to the coal mines. Today our knowledge about their experiences and lives in the coal camps of eastern Kentucky is limited mainly to company records, oral histories, photographs, and other archival materials.
Stereotypes about Appalachia continue to persist in popular culture, spread largely through the media and entertainment industry. Just as the writings of William Goodell Frost and John Fox, Jr. were published to inform and amuse the American public at the turn of the 20th century, much of today’s media about Appalachia exploits the region for attention and money. This treatment has consequences beyond humiliation. As Katherine Ledford, Dwight Billings, and Gurney Norman write in the introduction to Back Talk from Appalachia: Confronting Stereotypes, “the “idea of Appalachia” … not only masks the exploitation of land and people in the region, but it obscures the diversity of conditions, relationships, and cultures within Appalachian society itself – diversity of race, gender and class as well as diversity in religion, education and history.”16
Appalachian scholars and activists are now pushing back against the stereotypes and refusing to accept their continuation into the future. Many artists, writers, and musicians in Kentucky have challenged the idea that Appalachia is a homogeneous region with one race, one ethnicity, and one culture. The Affrilachian Poets are one notable example. Kentucky's Poet Laureate Frank X Walker, a founding member of the group and University of Kentucky assistant professor of English, invented the terms “Affrilachia” and “Affrilachian” to demonstrate the role of African Americans in Appalachian history and culture. According to the group’s website, “since 1991, the Affrilachian Poets have been writing together, defying the persistent stereotype of a racially homogenized rural region.” Another example is Appalatin, whose sound combines Appalachian folk and Latin music.18 These individuals and others counter the idea that immigrants and minorities in Appalachian culture have been silenced by the stereotypes.
There is still much work to be done in documenting the multicultural history of the Appalachian region and redefining the identity of Appalachians. With further research and increased awareness of the various groups who have lived in Appalachia, perhaps the stereotypes that have plagued the region for the past 100 years will finally disappear into the history books.
We would like to thank the following people at the University of Kentucky for their contributions to this exhibit: Dr. Ann Kingsolver, Dr. Dwight Billings, and the Appalachian Studies Center; Jan Carver and Gwen Curtis with the Science Library; the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History; the Digital Library Services Department; the University Archives and Records Program; and the staff of Special Collections.
1. Horace Kephart, Our Southern Highlanders: A Narrative of Adventure in the Southern Appalachians and a Study of Life Among the Mountaineers. (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, c1976), 452-453.
2. Horace Kephart, Our Southern Highlanders: A Narrative of Adventure in the Southern Appalachians and a Study of Life Among the Mountaineers. (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, c1976), 454.
3. Wilma A. Dunaway, “Speculators and Settler Capitalists: Unthinking the Mythology about Appalachian Landholding, 1790-1860,” in Appalachia in the Making: The Mountain South in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Mary Beth Pudup, Dwight B. Billings, and Altina L. Waller (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, c1995), 50-51.
4. William Wallace Harney, “A Strange Land and a Peculiar People,” Lippincott’s Magazine of Popular Literature and Science 12, no. 31 (1873): 431, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/13964/13964-h/13964-h.htm#strange.
5. William Goodell Frost, “Our Contemporary Ancestors in the Southern Mountains,” Atlantic Monthly Company, March 1899: 1. http://cdm272901.cdmhost.com/cdm/ref/collection/p15131coll3/id/38
6. William Goodell Frost, “Our Contemporary Ancestors in the Southern Mountains,” Atlantic Monthly Company, March 1899: 1. http://cdm272901.cdmhost.com/cdm/ref/collection/p15131coll3/id/38
7. Immigration Restriction League (U.S.). Constitution of the Immigration Restriction League. Collection Development Department, Widener Library, Harvard University (189-?): 1. http://pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/view/5233215.
8. Ellen Churchill Semple, “The Anglo-Saxons of the Kentucky Mountains: A Study in Anthropogeography,” The Geographical Journal 17, no. 6 (1901): 6, http://www.archive.org/details/anglosaxonsofken00semp.
9. Crandall Shifflett, Coal Towns: Life, Work, and Culture in Company Towns of Southern Appalachia, 1880-1960. (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 34.
10. “Railroads in the Late 19th Century.” Library of Congress. http://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/presentationsandactivities/presentations/timeline/riseind/railroad/.
11. Crandall Shifflett, Coal Towns: Life, Work, and Culture in Company Towns of Southern Appalachia, 1880-1960. (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 68.
12. Crandall Shifflett, Coal Towns: Life, Work, and Culture in Company Towns of Southern Appalachia, 1880-1960. (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 71.
13. Crandall Shifflett, Coal Towns: Life, Work, and Culture in Company Towns of Southern Appalachia, 1880-1960. (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 72.
14. Dwight Billings, e-mail to authors, February 24, 2014.
15. Crandall Shifflett, Coal Towns: Life, Work, and Culture in Company Towns of Southern Appalachia, 1880-1960. (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 60.
16. Ronald Lewis, “Beyond Isolation and Homogeneity: Diversity and the History of Appalachia” in Back Talk from Appalachia: Confronting Stereotypes, ed. Dwight B. Billings, Gurney Norman, Katherine Ledford (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky, 1999), 36-37.
17. Katherine Ledford, Dwight B. Billings, and Gurney Norman, Introduction to Back Talk from Appalachia: Confronting Stereotypes. (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2001), x.
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