Appa-LATCH-ee-yuh—Part 1

For about three decades I have lived on the cusp between two dramatically different cultures. An hour and a half to the east is Washington, D.C and 90 minutes to the west is the heartland of Appalachia. To the east, the powerful; to the west, the manipulated. Towards the coast, the money; towards the mountains, poverty. To one side, chic; to the other, hick.

These two cultures have little in common and are even rather suspicious of each other. Since those in power control both the recording of history and the current news, Appalachian culture has had a reputation in the media for being poor, ignorant, and violent. Occupying the middle ground, I can be a little more objective and have a different perspective. Furthermore, I once lived in the D.C. area, so I got fairly familiar with that urban culture—familiar enough to have fled it 25 years ago (so maybe I’m not that objective).

Appalachia covers parts of as many as 13 states and extends over the southern range of the Appalachian Mountains—which run from northern Georgia to Newfoundland. The heart of Appalachia is usually considered to be eastern Tennessee and Kentucky, southwest Virginia, and all of West Virginia. I live on the western slope of the Shenandoah Valley, just to the east of Appalachia.

The Appalachian Mountains acquired their name from the Spaniards, who sent expeditions into America’s interior from Florida in the 16th century. They encountered an Indian tribe in northern Florida that they called Apalachee and later ascribed to the territory farther north.

When European colonists first settled the eastern seaboard they considered the Appalachian Mountains to be a forbidding barrier to the west, which contained equally forbidding savages. These flatlanders from Europe were happy to stick near the coast and stay clear of the wild and wooly mountains. As more Europeans migrated to America, however, they began to press westward into those mountains. Most of them still feared the hills, but the Scots Irish among them were already quite at home in mountains and they happily settled in “them thar hills.” (Interestingly, the mountains of Great Britain from whence they came were once the very northern tip of the Appalachian range, 350 million years ago, when America and Europe were joined. So, in a way, these folks were simply moving down their own mountain range.)

The Scots Irish had previously been regarded in Great Britain as a lower class people, so we can see the seeds of modern-day American prejudice against the people of Appalachia. These Scots Irish folks were rugged, self-sufficient people. Mountain people have always had more autonomy than flatlanders. They know they live in remote areas, far from “civilization,” and that’s just fine with them. Their mountainous land has always been regarded as less desirable and accessible than coastal land, so mountaineers have experienced fewer intrusions. Many an invading army has met its match in attempting to attack mountain people (think of Afghanistan).

As the European immigrants settled into their Appalachian Mountains, their culture deviated more and more from Americans to the east—and often that was just fine by them. The friction between the two cultures occasionally broke out in conflict, as issues of taxes and governance arose. The lowlanders dominated state legislatures and hogged an unfair proportion of tax money. By the early 1800s many areas of Appalachia were agitating for secession. In fact, before the Civil War, Tennessee state senator Andrew Johnson (later US president) initiated legislation to create the state of Frankland, which would have covered eastern Tennessee, as well as parts of Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama. When the Civil War began, the western part of Virginia did break away, later to become the heart of Appalachia.

In the last 150 years the reputation of Appalachia has not improved in the minds of most Americans. Despite the fact that the region is rich in natural resources (coal and wood), those assets have been removed by outside robber barons, who used the area’s cheap labor, but allowed few of the economic benefits to be enjoyed by residents. As a result, the economic and educational divide between Appalachia and the rest of the country has inexorably widened. Roosevelt’s New Deal initiatives brought attention to the region, as well as some improvements, but the people of Appalachia still lag behind, and the stereotypical viewpoint of Americans remains.

Some qualities of my near-Appalachian neighbors next time…