Following a recent foray into the pronunciation of "Appalachia," and summoning my grammar school self, I have begun really wondering about the entire phenomenon, with its strange, definite/indefinite, geological/cultural, rock/squishy character. What the heck is it?
Source after source seemed to say that the only thing most people agree on is that the region we call "Appalachia" has a geographic definition, and that its boundaries are more or less those of the Appalachian Mountain region from southern New York southwest down halfway through Alabama. Then the qualifications begin: "but in this book you won't hear much about southern New York," says one book about Appalachia that agrees with the definition.
How have cartographers handled it? The University of North Carolina libraries has a nifty series of maps by David Whisnant showing the boundaries as conceived at various times by multiple entities: John C. Campbell in 1921 (in Our Southern Highlander), the US Dept. of Agriculture in 1935, a 1962 survey that was doubly Ford (written by Thomas R. Ford; project funded by Ford Foundation), the map of the 1964 President's Appalachian Regional Commission, and the 1967 map with the finalized boundaries of the territory served by the Appalachian Regional Commission.
The UNC website, in addition to the base map (above), includes a detailed one for each state, with the counties labeled. I had been wondering, for example, if Monticello/Charlottesville (Albemarle County) could be considered Appalachia. Looking at the detail map for Virginia it's fascinating to see that Campbell's map -- the earliest -- not only includes Albemarle, but all of the counties on the eastern flank of the Blue Ridge, including Loudoun. (Well I never! Loudoun County is in Appalachia!) But the later the map, the more these boundaries get pushed west, so that the 1967 ARC map doesn't include any of the Shenandoah Valley counties at all.
The PARC/ARC maps, however, show considerable enlargement of the region as a whole, compared to the earlier ones. All the earlier ones -- including the 1935 USDA map -- have "Southern" somewhere in their title, but by 1967 this distinction is gone, and Appalachia stretches into New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Mississippi.
Regardless of cartographical definition, it is important to note that all of these maps were the results of commissioned studies of a region that was somehow considered a "problem." Campbell's survey was a Russell Sage Foundation project to guide the efforts of aid workers; the 1935 USDA's report was titled Economic and Social Problems and Conditions in the Southern Appalachians; the Ford study updated the 1935 one; and PARC/ARC was essentially an arm of the War on Poverty.
The fact is that none of these maps do justice to the cultural complexity of the region. To say "geographic Appalachia is cultural Appalachia" seems to me a form of begging the question. It would be a salutary exercise to put socioeconomic/cultural matters first and then see what kind of map might result from that approach.
What makes me say that is something I read in the essay "O, Appalachia!" by Harry Caudill, the Kentucky lawyer whose Night Comes to the Cumberlands helped lead to the formation of the ARC. The essay, written a decade or so into the life of the ARC, is bitterly critical of the agency. But it's in Caudill's musing about what might work in Appalachia that he makes a critical distinction: in order to help alleviate Appalachian poverty, Caudill writes, the government
might have aimed at a TVA-like program designed to use Appalachia's bountiful resources in a job-generating cycle within the region. The Tennessee Valley Authority pioneered in an area with few rich vested interests to offend while the equally destitute hill people were never considered for a federally mandated Appalachian Mountain Authority.Here, then, is a definition that places the Tennessee Valley outside of Appalachia, but every map in the series above shows the valley inside Appalachia.
Caudill has blown up the map, and I think rightly so. He places socioeconomic, cultural, and political factors, rather than geographic ones, at the heart of the distinction.
Campbell, for example, places the Tennessee Valley inside the "Southern Highland Region" for a geographical reason: it is a high valley within an upland region "and not merely two separate mountain areas with a dividing valley." The valley has bordering ridges that are sometimes as remote and inaccessible as the more mountainous lands east and west of it.
But, having included the river valley in his definition, Campbell excludes it from the focus of his study. The cities and towns of the Tennessee Valley are included in the "urban" or "near-urban" category, of which Campbell writes, "We shall in the course of this study have little to this part of the mountain [sic] population."
His geography-based definition has betrayed him. The major cities of the valley -- Knoxville and Chattanooga -- are bustling river cities, and most of the other population centers in "Appalachian" Tennessee are in the valley. They have long been industrial centers, and have had such "high culture" amenities as large public libraries, art galleries, and symphony orchestras since the time that Campbell was writing: they cannot be defined as culturally Appalachian. Campbell all but admits this -- thus belying his own definition -- by concerning himself only with the remote residents of the cities' nearby mountains and rugged plateaus.
While he disapproves of the word "mountaineer" in his sections on terminology -- Campbell naysays the term as "opprobrious" and "resented by all," and twists himself into knots coming up with "highlander" as preferable -- the words "mountain" and "mountaineer" saturate his book. He himself uses it again and again and again, including in one passage that goes to the heart of his sociology: "Others seemingly forget that the ultimate solution of mountain problems must come through convincing the individualistic mountaineer that he cannot live for himself alone, and through enlisting him in co-operative service to create an environment that will breed in his children the community spirit."
Campbell and Caudill agree on the essential feature of mountain life: it is a survival of pioneer or "backwoods" (Caudill) ways. As to their individualism, Caudill adds a political ramification that lies at the heart of the culture and its problems: "The essential trouble lay in this reality: from the beginning Appalachian people nurtured a profound distrust of government, sought to elude its influence and consistently refused to use it as a tool for social and economic enhancement. ... What Toynbee has described as a retreat to barbarism is actually a persistence of the backwoods culture and mores into an age of cybernetics and rockets -- nearly two centuries after the frontier itself rolled westward and passed into history."
Regardless of the cultural manifestations of such factors, it is clear that isolation or remoteness should be held to be cardinal attributes of any definition of Appalachia. What social isolation is to Campbell, political isolation is to Caudill. Yes, geographical isolation underlies them both. But it isn't a defining cause so much as it was a physical aspect that served as a resource to achieve already-existing cultural ends. That those ends may have backfired into important socioeconomic problems doesn't matter. We ain't paid no whisky tax since 1792, and that's that.
Still, it should be possible to map the actual, cultural Appalachia rather than the bloated, unreal one that has its own encyclopedia (which I love, but which suffers from the same definitional problems as all the maps). I envision a kind of cross between a contour map and a political precinct map that would produce a truer picture of the region by filtering out low or accessible locations; population density; and socio-economic factors relating to income, education, access to health care, etc.
It's not that those filtered-out places are not at all Appalachian, culturally speaking. They are, but so in that sense is Detroit. Furthermore, there are many ways to shade the results by quantification. The community I grew up in, and where my grammar school self still resides and wonders about the "rootedness" of the back-of-the-mountain kids, is a good example. It would be possible (although not easy) to subject it to genealogical, generational demographic analysis and arrive at a weighted score for just how "Appalachian" it was; to this factor could be added dozens of others. All of them together could produce a statistical map of Appalachia.
The real question is how to drill down (now there's an Appalachian metaphor) to an actuality that is invisible to a geographic hegemony because it doesn't translate well.
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