Miners Millhands Mountaineers: Industrialization Appalachian South (Twentieth-Century America Series) [Paperback]

Ronald D. Eller (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 298 pages
• Publisher: Univ Tennessee Press; 1 edition (September 1, 1982)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0870493418
• ISBN-13: 978-0870493416
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #767,302 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Why Appalachia industrialized, but failed to modernize., March 26, 2007

By 

James Hoogerwerf (Auburn, AL United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Miners Millhands Mountaineers: Industrialization Appalachian South (Twentieth-Century America Series) (Paperback)

Mention "Appalachia" today and the idea of a "backward" people in an impoverished region left behind by progress comes to mind. When it was published in 1982, Ronald D. Eller's Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers: Industrialization of the Appalachian South, 1880-1930, was the first study to argue that, contrary to this common perception, modernization had not passed the region by. Until Eller's no other scholarly study had address the industrialization of Appalachia. What Eller discovered was that Appalachia had indeed passed through a dynamic period of transformation but that as a result "the mountaineers had lost the independence and self-determination of their ancestors, without becoming full participants in the benefits of the modern work." (242) What remained after the boom years was a society trying to cling to tradition but unable to afford the trappings of modern life. Profits generated from the extraction of timber and coal had flowed into the coffers of outside investors.

It is Eller's thesis that while Appalachia had undergone industrialization, the region failed to modernize. He argues that in order to understand the reasons, Southern Appalachia's industrialization should be viewed in a national context. Profits came from the extraction of mountain resources at the lowest possible cost for national markets. This view is buttressed by Gavin Wright's (1996) economic interpretation of the South as a low wage economy within a larger economy. Eller agrees with this interpretation. Like Wright, he argues industrialization was accomplished with cheap labor.

Eller's treatise spans the years 1880 to 1930. Prior to 1880 the area's remoteness and inaccessibility had delayed development. In chapter one, "On the Eve of a Remarkable Development," Eller paints an idyllic Jeffersonian agrarian scene of pre-industrial life in the mountains. Isolated by geography, "the mountain landscape favored the establishment of five forms of settlement - gap, cove, hollow, ridge, and meadow communities - but cove and hollow settlements predominated throughout the region."(8) The topography limited communication and transportation. Subsistence farming was the order and what agrarian economy existed was limited. "By 1880, Appalachia contained a greater concentration of noncommercial family farms than any other area of the nation."(16)

A distinct mountain culture shaped communities and people were self sufficient and independent. It was a patriarchal society where families depended on each other and kinship relationships determined social, religious and political order.(30) Urban centers were few and, except for the villages and towns, society was ordered according to status rather than class. Respectability was valued within the community. Unfortunately the idyllic life that Eller describes was on the threshold of destruction. Two forces were directed toward Appalachia. One, capitalistic, was aimed at the riches of the land, and the other, intellectual, targeted the people. "Businessmen emphasiz[ed] the need for economic development while most missionaries spoke of cultural change, education, and human concern - but ultimately both components were for the modernizing process."(43)

Two early Virginia promoters, General John Daniel Imboden and Major Jedidiah Hotchkiss promoted the region's coal and iron resources.(49) The earliest speculators were able to acquire expansive property rights for pennies. Virginia developers, Rufus A. Ayers and George L. Carter consolidated hundreds of thousands of acres. A Kentuckian, John C. Calhoun Mayo, bought options on thousands of acres.(61) Regional speculators like Ayers, Carter and Mayo, facilitated the influx of outside money. "By purchasing land and mineral resources from local residents for minimal amounts and transferring them to outside corporations for profit, they accumulated great personal wealth, but they handed the regions economy and its future to absentee control."(63) Absentee ownership and control of Appalachia's resources set the pattern for the future and is a major theme in Eller's study.

After timber and coal rights were acquired, railroads were constructed to extract the booty. Eller says "the coming of the railroads to the Appalachian South was almost as dramatic as the selling of the land itself."(65) The Chesapeake and Ohio was the first line constructed in the region after the Civil War. However its purpose was not local. Collis Porter Huntington, envisioned it as a critical, but ultimately unsuccessful, link in a coast-to-coast railroad.(67) When the company defaulted, Huntington sold out to the Drexel-Morgan-Vanderbilt interests which "under the management of the new president. Melville E. Ingalls, the C&O began a rebuilding and expansion program which would eventually make it one of the leading coal carriers on the East Coast."(69) When the railroads came new towns were built and existing ones expanded. For example "the population of Roanoke exploded from fewer that 400 to more than 25,000 people."(70) The changes were written about by John Fox Jr, a Harvard educated New York newspaperman, turned real estate speculator and author. His observations of the mountain people and their culture, taken from his travels and experiences in the mountains, provided him the background for his stories on mountain life. "His two most popular novels, The Trail of the Lonesome Pine and The little Shepard of the Kingdom Come, helped to confirm America's growing conception of Appalachia as a `strange land and a peculiar people.'"(78) Fox's writings highlighted the ongoing struggle between modernity and tradition in the mountains.

Selective logging had begun around 1880, but, Eller recounts that, "between 1890 and 1920 the lumber barons purchased and cut over huge tracts of mountain timberland, devastating the region's forest in one of the most frenzied timber booms in American history."(87) Railroads brought the logs to saw mills and carried the lumber out to national markets. Logging and mill locations were only temporarily situated and the transient nature of this industry and its labor did not promote settlements or local improvements. "National needs, whether they were those of the tourist, the scientist, or the industrialist, were given priority over local concerns."(114)

During the progressive era, the destruction of the forests did give rise to preservation movements. However even in the conservation movement, just like with timber and later coal, power and control emanated from outside the region. Under the Weeks Act of 1911 the federal government was authorized to purchase cut-over land to protect the flows in navigable streams and this began the expansion of government land holdings. Eller argues "this rapid growth of government-owned lands would bring the Forest Service and its sister agencies, the Tennessee Valley Authority and the National park Service, into increasing conflict with local mountain people."(119) Some critics accused the government of purposely fostering policies intending to move people out of the mountains and into cities and towns.(120) However logging had already begun the metamorphosis of farmers into wage laborers. Once the process had begun it was impossible to return to the old ways. With the timber gone, and now accustomed to wage-labor, family cohesiveness was lost. Even if they wanted to it was difficult to return to subsistence farming because the land had been altered. "In the 1920s, most of the lumber companies abandoned the mountains, leaving behind a land and a people deeply scarred by their operations."(127)

After logging, coal presented the next opportunity. Market conditions had delayed coal's exploitation, but "by 1900, coal production in the region tripled, and in the next three decades it multiplied again more than fivefold, coming to account for almost 80 percent of national production."(128) Costs were low because extraction was easier in Appalachia than other regions, bulk freight charges favored transportation over greater distances, and labor was cheap.(129) Wages were kept low by operator's resistance to labor's organizing. Nonetheless the intensity of coal production caused a concomitant rapid increase in population growth. Shortages of labor was a continuing problem. A wide net was cast to attract willing laborers to supplement mountain workers. Blacks were brought in from southern states and immigrants, primarily Italians, were recruited as well.(174)

The effect of coal extraction on mountain communities was profound. Where previously people had lived dispersed in the valleys, mining villages doted the landscape. Miners lived near the mines in company towns. "The problem of labor stability was a major concern for southern coal operators, and this contributed to the degree of social control they wielded over life in the company town."(193) Conditions varied from place to place, but housing and sanitation were generally substandard. "Completely owned and dominated by the coal companies, the mining towns also reflected the underlying transition in land ownership and social power which had swept the region with the coming of the industrial age."(162)

As the industry matured, under the influence of outside investors to promote greater efficiency in response to declining prices, companies consolidated. But with the advent of WWI demand increased which continued after the war.(156) But after 1927 demand declined forcing the region into a severe recession which proved to foretell the end of King Coal. Over production, cutthroat competition, and fluctuating demand weakened the industry. Rising freight rates, use of oil and gas, and new technologies contributed to the decline. (158-159) While timber and coal had integrated Appalachia into the national economy, earnings were withdrawn... Read more ›

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Ellers monumental text, April 10, 2006

By 

Roy L. Salmons (Lexington Kentucky) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Miners Millhands Mountaineers: Industrialization Appalachian South (Twentieth-Century America Series) (Paperback)

This text was one of the first books to explore the industrialization of Appalachia. It set the field for much of the current discouse that is being developed in Appalachian History. It is very well written and provides a good list of sources for additional study.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers: Industrialization of the Appalachian South, 1880-1930, May 2, 2010

By 

George C. Arnold (Frankfort, Kentucky) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Miners Millhands Mountaineers: Industrialization Appalachian South (Twentieth-Century America Series) (Paperback)

Ronald Eller shows extensive research into the history of how the cultural, economic, and industrial landscapes of southern appalachia was changed through the demands of its renewable and non-renewable natural resources. This book is highly recommended to individuals who are both anxious and curious to strengthen their knowledge about the exploitation of labor and natural resources in southern appalachia.