The Mountains Of Central Appalachia

In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson declared an unconditional war on poverty in the United States and the most photographed area was the Appalachia region. Many of the photographs intentional or not, became a visual definition of the Appalachia region. The images have drawn from the poorest areas and people to gain support for the war on poverty, but came to represent the entirety of the region. The point of the Looking at Appalachia project is to explore the diversity of Appalachia and to establish a visual counter point. (Home - Looking at Appalachia.) The three images I am going to analyze are challenge some of the stereotypes put on the Appalachia region. I believe my images challenge the stereotype that all Appalachian people do is work hard, go to church, and don’t have time for anything besides those two things.

When people think Appalachia, they think of West Virginia, but the Appalachian Mountains stretch far from West Virginia and the people living in their hills have a shared cultural heritage that is evident no matter what state they are a part of.

The Rocky Mountains, also known as the Rockies, extends for some 3,000 miles (4,800 km), that covers land in two North American countries! With a distance of 3,000 miles, the Rockies must have a variety of physical features and landscapes that makes it an attractive area to tour and explore. However, all of the human interest in this mountain range could come at a devastating cost. Disturbances such as resource extraction, tourism/settlement, and farming in the Rocky Mountain region must cease because they are causing major, irreversible environmental degradation.

estled between the Blue Ridge Mountains and Allegheny Mountains, Rockingham County is located within the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Originally founded in 1778, Rockingham County has become a historical community committed to implementing an economic strategy of attracting new business and industry that are compatible with the way of life in the Shenandoah Valley and assisting in the retention and expansion of existing companies (Rockingham County). Most commonly known for its beauty, Rockingham County is comprised of six metropolitan cities, of which Harrisonburg holds the county seat (Rockingham County).

In Uneven Ground, the author Ronald D. Eller narrates the economic, political, and social change of Appalachia after World War II. He writes “persistent unemployment and poverty set Appalachia off as a social and economic problem area long before social critic Michael Harrington drew attention to the region as part of the “other America” in 1962.”(pp.2) Some of the structural problems stated by Eller include problems of land abuse, political corruption, economic shortsightedness, and the loss of community and culture; personally view the economic myopia as being the most daunting.

Burns, Shirley Stewart. Bringing Down the Mountains: The Impact of Mountaintop Removal Surface Coal Mining on Southern West Virginia Communities, 1970-2004. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2007. Print.

Biggers referred to the Appalachia as, “the burning ground of industrial America; the region’s coal.” Coal was a vast reason why immigrants began to inhabit the area to work and families settled to make a living on the natural resources offered. It was not until the late 1800s, after the Civil War when cotton mills became established and “outside corporations and entrepreneurs, tied their hopes for prosperity to the whirling of spindles and the beating of looms.” Jacquelyn Hall, Luke a Family: The Making of the Southern Cotton Mill World.

If you look at early Appalachian history, many of the earliest settlers in the mountains were of Irish decent. Their ancestors had originally migrated to northeastern America to escape religious persecution and eventually made their way south to the Appalachian Mountains, which they preferred because the area was similar in climate and geographic features to Ireland. Early settlers in the mountains had a Paganistic belief system and because of the geographic location of their settlements, were isolated from the outside world. In the early 1900s there weren’t roads, railroads, paths, etc. to travel into the mountains, which socially isolated groups living in those areas.

Appalachia has long been regarded as a place of natural beauty and allegedly 'backwards' people. In one of the early attempts to 'civilize' rural Appalachia, the population was characterized as consisting of "agricultural savages" who refused to learn better farming practices (Anglin 2002: 565). "The poverty and environmental abuse I witnessed there were not simply a failure of economics. It went much deeper than that; hence our continual failure to 'social engineer' meaningful changes there. It was a poverty of the spirit; a poverty of the soul" said one observer, of the attempt to encourage rural Appalachians to adopt modern farming practices at the turn of the 20th century (Anglin 2002: 565-566). Other than subsistence farming, the only other predominant industry in rural Appalachia is the coal industry. Rather than provide a potential source of enrichment to the region, this too has been seen as impoverishing, rather than sustaining the residents. "Appalachia has become virtually synonymous with coal and problems of the notoriously dangerous, cyclically unstable, and highly competitive industry" (Pudup 1990: 61).

The author identified two Appalachian crisis in this article. First, the author mentioned that many people in Appalachia places like eastern Kentucky lost nearly 70% of their coal jobs to mechanization (mountain removal strip mines). Also, the author argued that mountain removal causes the most deaths related to cancer and other diseases in central Appalachia.

Since 1742, West Virginia has provided our nation and the world with the finest coal found anywhere. As of today, West Virginia’s coal miners apply useful and effective mineral removal technology that makes other countries envy their counterparts around the world. West Virginia’s exports more coal than any other state in the country. West Virginia has more longwall mining systems than any other state. This leads the nation in underground coal productions and sets the pace for the rest of the industry in recovery and environment protection. At the same time, West Virginia coal industry displays a sense of responsibility for health, safety and environmental that is incomparable anywhere in the world. Over the years, coal has

To understand Appalachian culture one has to look at the culture’s traits, customs, nomenclatures, strengths, and the weaknesses. While the Appalachian region is large, 1,500 miles of land that reaches Quebec, Canada to northern Alabama (Pollard, 2003), the culture discussed will be considered “coalfields.” The coalfields consist of West Virginia, eastern Kentucky and Tennessee, and south western Virginia. Some of the traits of coalfields Appalachian culture is being family orientated and having large families (Jude & Jude, 2015; Baghbad, 1984). Being family oriented means that family is always the center of importance. No matter how hard times may be, there is always family to be support. While Jude and Jude (2015) can remember a time were family sizes could be between 5 to 12 children, today the number had decreased. According to Pollard (2003), families in Appalachia more slightly higher in amount of children than the

Coal mining, in particular, strip mining has become the latest casualty of the growing green movement in the United States. What is strip mining? Encyclopædia Britannica Online defines strip mining as the removal of vegetation, soil, and rock above a layer of coal, followed by the removal of the coal itself (“strip”). Most Americans don’t realize the impact this material of biological origin that can be used as a source of energy (“fossil”), or fossil fuel, has on their everyday lives or the nation’s economy. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the mining industry directly employs some fifty thousand Americans with nearly half that number working in the more specific field of strip mining, or mountain top removal

The Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina is a diverse geological area to study tectonic setting, metamorphic and igneous rocks, and how the tectonic history has affected the development of the minerals in the area.

During visits to the archive much of the focus will be to the studies of effects of strip mining what it looks like when employed on the mountain range. Research of primary source pictures will be extremely helpful in helping elaborate on the circumstances here. Reliance upon the small economy they have can be easily shown in the pictures from Anne and Harry Caudill which sadly show the gaps amidst the poor and the rich. In the archive, bills, legislation, ecological studies, and journal entries can also be found as those aware of the detrimental cause and effects strip mining and the economy and will be crucial to the argument. The peer-reviewed sources I have personally found are also supplements to the argument. The first source is that which describes the situation of President Ford deciding the passing of legislation to deter strip mining and the argument of the environmental impact with the economical reliance. Further research has lead me to a source that provides the background, trends and introduction of strip mining in Appalachia and also the gradual decline of strip mining with lack of constraints on the