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

Industrialization both stunted and distorted economic development in Appalachia, however. Capital investment was only one-half the national average and was below average for the South as a whole. Therefore, most firms were small. Moreover, industrialization proceeded unevenly throughout the region, creating enclaves of concentration but failing to spawn ancillary enterprises that would provide the base for a sustainable economic expansion. 4
    Gold discovered in 1829 sparked a rush of speculators in northern Georgia, northern Alabama, North Carolina, and Tennessee. Over the next thirty years several thousand placer miners, free and slave, dug millions of dollars’ worth of gold for export. 5 Copper was also an important extractive industry in antebellum Appalachia, particularly after the copper strike in southeastern Tennessee and northwestern Georgia opened the region’s most significant copper mining operations. Nearly all of the ore was extracted to export to distant markets, primarily in Europe. Appalachian alum was used by canneries, manganese for steel manufacturing, lead for shot and other metallurgical uses, and saltpeter for gunpowder. 6
    Iron manufacturing was one of the largest industrial activities in the antebellum years. Charcoal was the primary fuel for iron furnaces, and the dense forests provided a plentiful supply of wood, but by the mid-nineteenth century technological improvements permitted the use of coal to fire iron furnaces. Consequently, the proximity of coal and iron deposits dictated that the industry would be concentrated in northern Alabama, the Cumberland River basin of Tennessee, southeastern Pennsylvania, and northwestern Virginia, and in the Hanging Rock district of Ohio and Kentucky, where the raw materials were located. Appalachia’s 250 ironworks employed more than 6,000 free workers and innumerable slaves, who produced approximately one-fifth of the nation’s iron in 1840. The Mount Savage Iron Works in western Maryland was one of the largest firms in the nation, employing more than 900 slave and free laborers at its peak in the 1850s. 7
    Lumber was the most extensive industry in antebellum Appalachia. Most settlements had their local sawmills. As the century wore on, however, local leather, coal, iron, and salt industries stimulated the manufacture of other forest products, such as barrels, wooden pipes, planks, fence railings, shingles, ship masts, and charcoal. Much of this production was consumed locally, but the Midwest was a major consumer, and shingles, ship masts, and planking were exported to the coastal seaports. 8
    Although coal became synonymous with Appalachia by the end of the nineteenth century, its importance was primarily local in the antebellum era. At some locations the production of coal grew into a significant industrial undertaking. Coal from eastern Kentucky was shipped down the Cumberland River to Knoxville and Nashville for use in the iron mills, and Kanawha coal fueled the salt furnaces in West Virginia. Other mines produced cannel coal, from which was produced gas for the street lights of Baltimore and other cities of the Northeast. 9
    Salt was a vital food seasoning and preservative before the invention of chemical preservatives and refrigeration, and Appalachian saltworks led the nation in production for the first half of the nineteenth century. Although the works in Virginia and Kentucky were regionally significant, the most extensive salt-producing complex in antebellum Appalachia was made up of 65 salt wells and 20 furnaces located on the Kanawha River near Charleston, West Virginia. The Kanawha industry reached its peak in the 1840s, when approximately 3 million bushels of salt were produced. Like most industries in the Old South, Kanawha salt manufacturers relied on the labor of African American slaves. Major changes in the economy by the Civil War, particularly the growth of railroads, the population shift westward to Chicago, and