High Mountains Rising (19 page)

36.
William N. Beehler to Harry Hopkins, Apr. 4, 1934, FERA records, state files: West Virginia, box 312, folder 400. Two years later, Lincoln County's welfare recipients were still so numerous (43 percent of households) that FERA did an in-house
investigation, which attributed the high numbers to many Lincoln County natives having come home unemployed from coal and timber jobs elsewhere. See Thomas,
Appalachian New Deal
, 128.

37.
Irene Conley, “Survey of the Rural Relief Situation for Johnson County, Kentucky,” Oct. 1935, pp. 3, 15; in BAE records, RG 83, Rural Relief Studies [entry 156], box 5, folder: “Johnson Co., Ky.”

38.
Ray Gene Black (mgr., Black Brothers General Merchandise store, Myra, W.Va.), statement to author, June 1973. Similarly, a major 1935 newspaper investigation in Virginia found welfare money going to subsistence farm families who were no worse off than they had been before the Depression. The investigation found those families growing dependent on the government. See Ronald L. Heinemann,
Depression and New Deal in Virginia: The Enduring Dominion
(Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992), 83–84.

39.
U.S. Census of 1940,
Agriculture
, vol. 1 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1942), part 3, county table 1, 220–24, and part 4, county table 1, 16–25, 168–75.

40.
Jack Roy, statement at a public hearing held in Lincoln County by the West Virginia Department of Energy, June 28, 1988, regarding an application by Black Gold Coal Company and Mountain Black Diamond Coal Company to strip-mine at Six Mile Creek (p. 2).

41.
James S. Brown and George A. Hillary Jr., “The Great Migration, 1940–1960,” in
The Southern Appalachian Region: A Survey
, ed. Thomas R. Ford (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1962), pp. 58–60 (tables).

42.
John Craft Taylor, “Depression and New Deal in Pendleton: A History of a West Virginia County from the Great Crash to Pearl Harbor, 1929–1941” (Ph.D. diss., Pennsylvania State University, 1980), 844.

7

Migration

Phillip J. Obermiller

This chapter is a study of the streams of individuals and families moving out of the region now known as Appalachia. It does not describe how the area was initially populated by Native Americans, then by Europeans and Africans, because these topics have been examined in other chapters.
¹
Our interest here is not in migrants who became Appalachians but in Appalachians who became migrants.

It is appropriate to focus on Appalachian migration because of the distinctive composition and patterns in the movement of the region's population. However, this approach does not justify the assumption that Appalachian migration is somehow unique. As we shall see, Appalachians who left or returned to the region were responding to the larger forces that influenced most internal migrants in America, such as economic and demographic pressures, social changes, new technology, and evolving national policies, to name a few.

Mountains are an abiding symbol of permanence, but in Appalachia that symbolism can be misleading because fluidity and movement have long been characteristics of the Appalachian population. Early accounts indicate that some Appalachian migration was simply a part of the opening of the American frontier: “Several large families have been traced . . . from the Atlantic seacoast in 1790, through North Carolina to Kentucky by 1820, and some were found in Indiana and Missouri in 1840, while by 1850, a few were located in Oregon and Washington. In 1870 another large group of these same people had settled in the Panhandle region of Texas.”
²

These initial trans-Appalachian migration streams flowed through the region to the nation's western frontier throughout the nineteenth century. Early settlers in the Ozark Mountains of Missouri and Arkansas came predominantly from migration out of the southern Appalachians between 1820 and 1840. After the Civil War a second wave of Appalachian migrants came to the Ozark-Ouachita range, a hilly region extending from southern Illinois across Missouri and into Arkansas and Oklahoma. From 1880 to 1890
eastern Kentucky and eastern Tennessee in particular contributed heavily to the population of the Ozarks.
³

Step migration from the Southern mountains into the Ozark-Ouachita area and then into central Texas in the mid-nineteenth century is well documented. High rates of natural increase and overcrowding in the mountains between 1845 and 1880 brought many Appalachian families south and west out of the mountains into the Texas hill country. The rural agricultural economy and hilly terrain of central Texas lured migrant families accustomed to a similar social and economic environment back in the mountains.
⁴

Jobs in the timber industry, along with the availability of large tracts of timber through the Federal Homestead Act, attracted migrants from the Southern mountains north to Wisconsin and west to Washington and Oregon. Beginning in about 1880, mountaineers from the East began settling on Washington's Cascade Range and in the Klamath Mountains of southern Oregon; these earlier migrants used a combination of jack boat and railroad to make their way west. The availability of direct rail connections caused this migration stream to flow even faster after 1900: “It was a profitable business to haul mountaineers to Cincinnati, from whence they could continue rapid transit through alien country of flat prairies to the wonder of Chicago, then across treeless plains and sage-covered mountains to a somewhat familiar and welcoming mountain country on the western Cascade slope.”
⁵

The Appalachian population in the Cascades became so dense that residents of other parts of the Northwest called it “Little Kentucky.” In some locales an estimated 70 percent of the population came from the mountains of Kentucky or Tennessee. Kinship networks substituted for formal social organizations among the migrants, with extended families ranging in size from 50 to 250. The Appalachian migrants in the Northwest even organized politically; in one instance a group of migrants unsuccessfully tried to secede from the local government and form their own county.
⁶

In addition to primary industries such as agriculture and timber, industrialization played an increasing role in attracting people away from their mountain homes. As early as 1847 mountaineers were seen as a potential source of factory hands, or “lint-heads,” as textile workers were then known in the Carolinas.
⁷
With the expansion of the cotton industry in the 1880s and 1890s, mountaineers were actively recruited into the mill towns of the Piedmont. “Agents were sent by many mills into the remote districts, sometimes to put up posters and signs telling of the golden opportunities to be had at the mill for the asking, sometimes with instructions to engage laborers and furnish tickets for transportation, money for extra clothing, or any other necessities for the move from mountain to village.”
⁸

In the early twentieth century, as job opportunities grew more plentiful
outside the Appalachians, migration streams from the mountain region became significantly larger and focused on closer destinations such as Lexington, Kentucky, and Cincinnati, Akron, and Hamilton in Ohio.
⁹
The migrants, now more aware of the effects of boom-and-bust economic cycles, adopted shuttle migration as a survival strategy. Keeping their home places in the Appalachians, shuttle migrants became temporary laborers or, in more contemporary language, migrant workers. Marshall Vaughn, an editor of
Mountain Life and Work
, notes that “trekking (frequently by the hitchhike method) is taking place back and forth between the mountains and outside work projects.” He describes shuttle migration as a practical recourse: “During days of depression or low industrial activity, the stream of migrants from industrial centers to the little ‘up-right' farms in the mountains becomes large. There is always the inexpensive cottage or dad's old cabin that offers shelter until something else shows up.”
¹⁰

Along with the growth in factory jobs across the nation, agricultural work remained a staple for migrants who preferred to maintain their rural lifestyles. Some families of migrants joined in corn and wheat harvests on Midwestern farms, the children making a dollar and adults two for a day's work.
¹¹
Others labored from March until August, working the tomato crop in Indiana or onions in Ohio, then returning home with their earnings to await the next picking season.
¹²
Historian Carey McWilliams puts it bluntly: “It took almost a hundred years of intermittent effort, in the face of great difficulty, to drain the Scioto marshes in Ohio—17,000 acres of the richest farmland in America. . . . It was necessary to squeeze every possible penny from the soil. This meant concentration on a single cash crop; it also meant cheap labor. Once a preserve for muskrats, the marshes soon became the home of Kentucky migrants.”
¹³

As early as 1907 onion growers in Ohio sent recruiters into the mountains of Kentucky and West Virginia seeking seasonal labor; newspaper ads were placed in the counties of southeastern Kentucky in particular. By the 1930s many of these “seasonal” workers had become “stayover” residents of northeastern Ohio; some stayed voluntarily to save the expense of transportation, and others simply could not afford to go back home between seasons. Moreover, as the soil became depleted and crop production began to suffer, the farm owners enticed the migrants into a system of sharecropping. The migrants had to pay rent on their shacks, work the owners' fields for twelve cents an hour, pay the owners a fee for the “preparation” of sharecropped land, and split the proceeds from the harvest with the owners.
¹⁴

The situation in Indiana in the 1930s was not much better; most of the 5000, out-of-state migrants who came to pick the tomato crop came from Kentucky. Historian McWilliams called it “a one-crop migration made up,
for the most part, of families.”
¹⁵
Some of the families were forced to sleep in barns, tent “jungles,” and even strawstacks. After two or three seasons, many families stayed in Indiana and tried to find better, more permanent quarters.

In addition to movements to industrial and agricultural settings, migration directly into cities has been another enduring feature of Appalachian migration. In the early nineteenth century, for instance, Cincinnati had already become a destination for Appalachian migrants. Historian Carter G. Woodson notes that “during the period between 1826 and 1840 . . . Cincinnati had to grapple with the problem of the immigrating Negroes and the poor whites from the uplands of Virginia and Kentucky.”
¹⁶
Later, a 1935 study conducted by sociologist Grace Leybourne in Cincinnati showed that there were a substantial number of migrants from the southern Appalachian plateaus living in the city and that 8.4 percent of them had arrived before 1915, whereas 42.5 percent had arrived before 1925.
¹⁷

The migration streams out of the Appalachians into the metropolitan centers surrounding the mountains swelled after World War I. Among the first to leave, seeking better lives in the industrialized cities of the Northeast and Midwest, were the groups with the weakest ties to the mountains: southern blacks and European immigrants. Their departures for greener pastures continued through the postwar economic expansion of the 1920s. Although each of these groups left some members behind, many of the long-term residents stayed in the mountains to weather the cyclical fluctuations of an economy based on agriculture, textiles, and mineral extraction.

When long-term residents finally began to move away in large numbers, the impelling forces were twofold: demographic pressures and economic hardship. Columbia University professor Carter Goodrich led a study of population dynamics in the 1920s and 1930s that included a section on the southern Appalachian coal plateaus. His team's primary finding was that the area had extraordinarily high birthrates, which placed overwhelming population pressure on the region. They recommended that this pressure could be adequately reduced only by the migration of 340,000 people from the region and that federal programs should be established to encourage this movement.
¹⁸
A similar recommendation appeared in a study sponsored by the federal Bureau of Agricultural Economics. The bureau concluded that “encouragement of emigration” was the rational solution to the basic problem of overpopulation in the mountains.
¹⁹
The eminent Southern sociologist Rupert Vance summarized the conditions that impelled migration in a proposition and a corollary: “The chances of attaining a higher level of economic opportunity are better in the Northeast, the Far West, and the Middle States, than in the Southwest and Southeast. . . . Within these regions there exist special problem areas [such as] . . . Southern Appalachia.”
²⁰