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Long viewed as a problem in other countries, the ownership of land and resources is becoming an issue of mounting concern in the United States. Nowhere has it surfaced more dramatically than in the southern Appalachians where the exploitation of timber and mineral resources has been recently aggravated by the ravages of strip-mining and flash floods. This landmark study of the mountain region documents for the first time the full scale and extent of the ownership and control of the region's land and resources and shows in a compelling, yet non-polemical fashion the relationship between this control and conditions affecting the lives of the region's people. Begun in 1978 and extending through 1980, this survey of land ownership is notable for the magnitude of its coverage. It embraces six states of the southern Appalachian region—Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Alabama. From these states the research team selected 80 counties, and within those counties field workers documented the ownership of over 55,000 parcels of property, totaling over 20 million acres of land and mineral rights. The survey is equally significant for its systematic investigation of the relations between ownership and conditions within Appalachian communities. Researchers compiled data on 100 socioeconomic indicators and correlated these with the ownership of land and mineral rights. The findings of the survey form a generally dark picture of the region—local governments struggling to provide needed services on tax revenues that are at once inadequate and inequitable; economic development and diversification stifled; increasing loss of farmland, a traditional source of subsistence in the region. Most evident perhaps is the adverse effect upon housing resulting from corporate ownership and land speculation. Nor is the trend toward greater conglomerate ownership of energy resources, the expansion of absentee ownership into new areas, and the search for new mineral and energy sources encouraging. Who Owns Appalachia? will be an enduring resource for all those interested in this region and its problems. It is, moreover, both a model and a document for social and economic concerns likely to be of critical importance for the entire nation.
Long viewed as a problem in other countries, the ownership of land and resources is becoming an issue of mounting concern in the United States. Nowhere has it surfaced more dramatically than in the southern Appalachians where the exploitation of timber and mineral resources has been recently aggravated by the ravages of strip-mining and flash floods. This landmark study of the mountain region documents for the first time the full scale and extent of the ownership and control of the region's land and resources and shows in a compelling, yet non-polemical fashion the relationship between this control and conditions affecting the lives of the region's people. Begun in 1978 and extending through 1980, this survey of land ownership is notable for the magnitude of its coverage. It embraces six states of the southern Appalachian region—Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Alabama. From these states the research team selected 80 counties, and within those counties field workers documented the ownership of over 55,000 parcels of property, totaling over 20 million acres of land and mineral rights. The survey is equally significant for its systematic investigation of the relations between ownership and conditions within Appalachian communities. Researchers compiled data on 100 socioeconomic indicators and correlated these with the ownership of land and mineral rights. The findings of the survey form a generally dark picture of the region—local governments struggling to provide needed services on tax revenues that are at once inadequate and inequitable; economic development and diversification stifled; increasing loss of farmland, a traditional source of subsistence in the region. Most evident perhaps is the adverse effect upon housing resulting from corporate ownership and land speculation. Nor is the trend toward greater conglomerate ownership of energy resources, the expansion of absentee ownership into new areas, and the search for new mineral and energy sources encouraging. Who Owns Appalachia? will be an enduring resource for all those interested in this region and its problems. It is, moreover, both a model and a document for social and economic concerns likely to be of critical importance for the entire nation.
Absentee landowning has long been tied to economic distress in Appalachia. In this important revisionist study, Barbara Rasmussen examines the nature of landownership in five counties of West Virginia and its effects upon the counties' economic and social development. Rasmussen untangles a web of outside domination of the region that commenced before the American Revolution, creating a legacy of hardship that continues to plague Appalachia today. The owners and exploiters of the region have included Lord Fairfax, George Washington, and, most recently, the U.S. Forest Service. The overarching concern of these absentee landowners has been to control the land, the politics, the government, and the resources of the fabulously rich Appalachian Mountains. Their early and relentless domination of politics assured a land tax system that still favors absentee landholders and simultaneously impoverishes the state. Class differences, a capitalistic outlook, and an ethic of growth and development pervaded western Virginia from earliest settlement. Residents, however, were quickly outspent by wealthier, more powerful outsiders. Insecurity in landownership, Rasmussen demonstrates, is the most significant difference between early mountain farmers and early American farmers everywhere.
How the United States underdeveloped Appalachia Appalachia—among the most storied and yet least understood regions in America—has long been associated with poverty and backwardness. But how did this image arise and what exactly does it mean? In Ramp Hollow, Steven Stoll launches an original investigation into the history of Appalachia and its place in U.S. history, with a special emphasis on how generations of its inhabitants lived, worked, survived, and depended on natural resources held in common. Ramp Hollow traces the rise of the Appalachian homestead and how its self-sufficiency resisted dependence on money and the industrial society arising elsewhere in the United States—until, beginning in the nineteenth century, extractive industries kicked off a “scramble for Appalachia” that left struggling homesteaders dispossessed of their land. As the men disappeared into coal mines and timber camps, and their families moved into shantytowns or deeper into the mountains, the commons of Appalachia were, in effect, enclosed, and the fate of the region was sealed. Ramp Hollow takes a provocative look at Appalachia, and the workings of dispossession around the world, by upending our notions about progress and development. Stoll ranges widely from literature to history to economics in order to expose a devastating process whose repercussions we still feel today.
In Hillbilly elegy, J.D. Vance described how his family moved from poverty to an upwardly mobile clan while navigating the collective demons of the past. The book has come to define Appalachia for much of the nation. This collection of essays is a retort, at turns rigorous, critical, angry, and hopeful, to the long shadow cast over the region and its imagining. But it also moves beyond Vance's book to allow Appalachians to tell their own diverse and complex stories of a place that is at once culturally rich and economically distressed, unique and typically American. -- adapted from back cover