By Paul Salstrom

A History of Appalachia. Richard B. Drake. University Press of Kentucky, 2001; 292 pages, illustrated, maps; hardbound only, $29.95.

Lately a lot of colleges have started offering courses about Appalachia, and this is the first history textbook issued to meet that situation. (The next one scheduled to emerge from the pipeline is by West Virginia's own native son John Alexander Williams and it’s due out early in 2002.)

The book by Richard Drake has a strong narrative line but it also engages in some interpretation of the region’s past. Everyone who reads it is sure to learn something new.

What’s especially fascinating here is Professor Drake’s explanation of how Southern Appalachia came to be considered a "region" in the first place. "Well," you might say, "hills are obviously different." Yes, but that only made Appalachia seem a geological region -- it didn’t make its human history seem separate or distinct.

Back just before the Civil War, several writers and artists started portraying "local color" in various American regions, and the eastern mountains received some of that treatment. Then after the Civil War, when most of the US started snowballing toward industrialization, urbanization and consumerism, the mountain people suddenly looked very old-fashioned, so their "local color" was mass-produced. It was thus through regional folklore and works of fiction that the highlands came to seem distinctive, not just geologically but humanly distinctive. Hundreds of "home missionaries" were sent to change mountain people’s fatalistic Calvinist theology; scores of "settlement schools" were started to steer mountain children toward modern thinking; and hundreds of opinion makers with land to sell (especially merchants, editors, and other professionals in the rural county seats) prescribed industrialization as a remedy for the hill people’s backwardness and their failure to contribute to the local economy. (It’s all still going on in the Third World. That’s why my own college course on Appalachia carries the title "America’s Third-World Region.")

And so things stood until the 1960's. By then, Southern Appalachia had seemed culturally distinctive for several generations but there still wasn’t much thought about the region’s historical trajectory being distinctive. But then, in the 60's, thousands of young poverty workers were set loose in the hills, via the War on Poverty's Community Action Program, to encourage poor people’s "maximum feasible participation" in decisions affecting themselves.

We all know what happened: by 1970 the local PACs had crashed head-on into the bulwarks of local power structures (as Richard Drake documents in his Chapter 10). But something else happened, too: thousands of burnt-out ex-poverty workers had discovered the region, and had told their friends about it, and many of them were putting down roots in its rural hideaways. It was called a back-to-the-land movement. Imagine their surprise when they learned about strip-mining and clear-cutting! Their rural hideaways weren’t hidden from coal companies.

That shock led thousands of people in the mountains to read Harry Caudill’s 1963 book, Night Comes to the Cumberlands, which in turn led to the creation of "Appalachian Studies" in academia. Activists and scholars alike suddenly realized that Appalachia’s history had been distinctively different all along from the rest of the eastern United States. First they saw that its industrialization era (late 1800's-early 1900's) had been different because it was financed from elsewhere, and its products were almost all exported. Then they realized that its settlement era had been different because Appalachia hadn’t all been fully settled until the early 1900's. The settlement of Appalachia lasted so long that by the time the region was full of people there was no frontier left anywhere else in the US to move on to. (And yet the mountain people kept having lots of kids; they couldn’t afford to mechanize their farms.) When the Depression hit, and people suddenly couldn’t supplement their subsistence farming with wage jobs, there seemed no alternative to welfare -- the WPA, etc. And maybe it’s been welfare that has given the rest of the country the moral authority to turn Central Appalachia into a "national-sacrifice-area" to help fill the US craving for energy.

Richard Drake’s book doesn’t shrink from seeing the handwriting on the wall. His final chapter is on "The Appalachian Future" and sets forth his belief that Central Appalachia will continue being sacrificed to the national energy appetite, and that the rest of the region will continue being gentrified by more and more second homes and tourist destinations. But Drake isn’t only a realist; he also remains an idealist who points to an alternative. An alternative Appalachia would require, he says, a return to decentralized networks of largely self-sufficient farms making full use of the traditional local non-money reciprocal "informal economy." Professor Drake sees that kind of Jeffersonian future as theoretically attainable -- because he believes the region’s traditional localism is still quite strong -- but he doubts that very much local economic networking will be started until mountain people have no other choice.

Paul Salstrom is a professor at St. Mary-of-the-Woods College. He moderated the Roundtable on West Virginia's deforestation during the years 1880-1920 that was just published in the new issue of West Virginia History. It features papers by Altina Waller, Chris Bolgiano, John Alexander Williams, and Ronald L. Lewis. It is available for $12 by phoning Mary Johnson at the W. Va. Division of History and Archives, at (304)558-0230.