High Mountains Rising by Richard A. Straw Read Free Book Online

1992): 35–41.
    39. Noe, “‘A Source of Great Economy?’” 103.

5
    Industrialization
    Ronald L. Lewis
    The Appalachia created by the late-nineteenth-century local color writers was a “strange land and peculiar people,” as one of them wrote. Their construction emphasized spatial and cultural isolation and presented Appalachia as a remnant of America’s frontier. 1 Whatever its literary merit, this view obscures the reality that industry has always played an important, if not always leading, role in the region’s history. Several historical paradigms seek to explain the industrial transition in Appalachia, but the perspective presented in this chapter is that industrial enterprises, such as coal, salt, timber, iron, and agricultural processing, have long been important to the Appalachian economy. The unprecedented capital investment in the railroad and basic industries in the last decades of the nineteenth century lifted the expansion to a crescendo and transformed much of the region from a rural agricultural economy to one in which major subregions became dependent on industry.
    As a producer of raw materials, Appalachia played a significant role in America’s rise as a global power between the Civil War and World War I. The transition from a rural agricultural to a rural industrial region has both spatial and temporal dimensions. Internally, industries generally were concentrated in subregions, and temporally the region’s economy evolved through stages of growth and complexity from early settlement to the present. More generally, the economy evolved from agriculture and self-subsistence, through the transition to industrial dependency at the turn of the twentieth century, and to deindustrialization in the last half of that century, when technology replaced human labor. In Appalachia as elsewhere, this era is associated with mill and mine closings, chronic unemployment, poverty, and out-migration, all of which raise serious public policy issues.
    Contrary to the popular image of Appalachia as a closed and inward-looking folk culture, recent scholarship has demonstrated conclusively that a strong market orientation developed in the region. These studies show that almost from the beginning mountain settlements spawned acommercial elite, and subsequent population growth and the adoption of slavery ensured that mountain society would be not only class differentiated but also heterogeneous. 2 Manufactures related to agriculture served a vital function in the early mountain economy, particularly gristmills, wool-carding mills, sawmills, and tanyards, which grew in relation to population density and social complexity. A wide variety of economic activities have been documented in Appalachia, taking us far beyond the marginal hardscrabble hill farm of lore.
    Appalachian enterprises concentrated primarily on processing agricultural commodities and raw materials for export, enterprises that did not stimulate sustained, diversified economic development. Agricultural processing in southern Appalachia was concentrated in flour and cornmeal milling, distilling grains into liquor, packing beef and pork, finishing livestock hides into leather goods, and manufacturing tobacco products and cotton and woolen cloth. Three-fifths of the region’s manufacturing investment went into extractive industries such as salt, coal, iron, timber, gold, and other mineral exports, such as copper, lead, saltpeter, and alum. These industrial enterprises tended to be concentrated in industrial enclaves located on strategic river, canal, and later railroad connections that conveyed these commodities to distant markets. 3
    Natural resource industries, although a distant second to agriculture as a mainstay of the early Appalachian economy, also employed an increasing number of people throughout the nineteenth century. By 1860 there were 6,019 industrial enterprises in southern Appalachia, employing 23,357 laborers.