Sara M. Gregg Draft—not for circulation 1 of 21 “Hill People: Appalachian Culture and the American State” Introduction to Cultivated Country: Subsistence Farms, the New Deal, and the Creation of a Federal Landscape in Appalachia Home of Fannie Corbin, Shenandoah National Park, October 1935 Library of Congress, # LC-USF33- 002167-M2 This scene of a mountain farm, which was replicated thousands of times up and down the Appalachian chain, was selected by New Deal photographer Arthur Rothstein as evocative of the mountain way of life—of its hardscrabble setting and its peripheral beauty. The family in this photograph represents the more than 150,000 farmers who eked a subsistence out of the rocky soils Sara M. Gregg Draft—not for circulation 2 of 21 of the Appalachian Mountains in the early twentieth century.1 Transitional decades preceded this 1936 photograph, during a period when economic depression, erosion and drought, and government policies all combined to threaten the already tenuous hold of these farmers on their land. In some areas, these forces brought the mountain way of life to an end, transforming stretches of the Appalachians from a vernacular agrarian landscape to a federally managed forest landscape. Cultivated Country tells the story of that conversion in two areas, the northern Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, which were organized into the Shenandoah National Park, and the Green Mountains of Vermont, parts of which were set aside as the Green Mountain National Forest. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, when most Americans look at the forested lands of the Appalachian Mountains, few visual reminders remain of those households that populated the mountains a century ago, and so current visitors envision a landscape with a long and uncomplicated history. The dense forests appear untouched, save by the occasional mountain resort or ski area, and much of the region is dedicated to recreation and forestry. Celebrated as a national treasure, these mountains are a safety valve for the populous cities and suburbs of the Eastern Seaboard, and today, the Blue Ridge and Green Mountains are tourist meccas, offering rugged beauty and solitude within an easy drive of some of the nation’s largest cities. The eastern mountains serve as an exemplar of how conservation policies have been implemented in the United States, and a reminder of the compromises that have been effected in order to open public access to natural areas. During the middle decades of the twentieth century—because of a conjuncture of reformist ideology, economic conditions, and government expansion—the Appalachian landscape re-assumed a primeval aspect. Consequently, the twentieth-century history of these mountains demands a 1 The number of subsistence farms was placed at 150,659 according to the census report released on 1 April 1930. The source of this figure is one of the definitive studies of mountain life, published by the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, Economic and Social Problems and Conditions of the Southern Appalachians, miscellaneous publication no. 205 (Washington: USDA, 1935), 46. Sara M. Gregg Draft—not for circulation 3 of 21 deeper look beneath the sylvan façade. It is worth revisiting how, and why, the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia and Vermont became a recreational escape for American tourists and hikers. A great shift in land use in Appalachia occurred between the 1910s and the 1930s, as large swaths of the mountains were placed under federal management and farms and private forests were converted to public lands. The evolution of conservation planning in Appalachia redefined national land use planning, and the creation of national parks and forests in the East is partially a tale of losers and winners: those who had to give up their land for the larger national cause, and those who benefited from newfound access to the mountains. By the end of the century, the result of these land use changes was the reforestation of the eastern mountains. The complexity of these mountain landscapes is matched by their history. The early twentieth century was rife with tensions between outsiders’ promotion of conservation and land use reform and localism, and the regulation of land use provided a particularly acute point of conflict between local people and federal officials. During the 1920s and 1930s a local vision of Appalachia as a forested commons came into conflict with Progressive plans for expert management and land use reform, and the debate over the future of the mountain landscape reintroduced many of the issues first raised about government conservation policy in the late nineteenth century. The dramatic realignments of the New Deal era are well known, and yet their precedents have been largely ignored. This book focuses on the antecedents of New Deal planning during the 1910s and 1920s, and the lessons that New Dealers took from them. In spite of the profound impact of the Depression and New Deal on American society, it is a principal contention of this book that the conservation programs for which the New Deal is famous are better understood as the culmination of drastic changes in land use that were already underway by the 1920s. New Deal initiatives and funding helped to restructure the American landscape, but this book is based upon Sara M. Gregg Draft—not for circulation 4 of 21 the argument that the most visionary federal conservation programs of the 1930s were solidly rooted in the research, programs, and policy debates of the 1910s and 1920s. Cultivated Country refocuses attention on the influence of land use planning of the early twentieth century, and three principal arguments drive its structure. First, during the 1910s and 1920s, the federal government assumed a new objective—the conservation of private land through its reacquisition by the federal government. Congress’ decision to return private land to the public domain represents a dramatic break with centuries of American precedent, and the 1911 Weeks Act created new national forests, thus preparing the way for a paradigm shift in federal and state policies that has reshaped the American landscape. The consequences of this change were particularly clear in Appalachia: the transformation of small, subsistence farms into federally managed forests and recreation areas had a measurable ecological impact on the natural landscape. The implementation of this policy highlights some of the earliest environmental consequences of state planning, as well as the expansion of government through a new approach to land management. Second, New Deal planning had its roots in the conservation ideas of the Progressive Era, as many scholars have observed. However, far more important, and less acknowledged, is the precedent that the land use planners during the 1910s and 1920s had established for those New Deal conservation programs that have long been celebrated as the first of their kind. While conservationism in the early twentieth century is widely acknowledged, scholars have devoted less attention to the development of recreation areas during the 1920s, particularly in regions like Appalachia that were easily accessible to urban areas. The recreation and conservation initiatives of the 1910s and 1920s are the predecessors of the land use programs of the New Deal. Because of these early-twentieth-century land acquisition and recreation planning at both the state and federal levels, New Dealers had models of how to manage ambitious conservation projects. While local Sara M. Gregg Draft—not for circulation 5 of 21 antecedents did not ensure federal success, the history of land use planning in many areas did smooth the way for receptiveness toward many New Deal initiatives. Third, the success of the New Deal was affected by local responses to federal initiatives, just as much as by the better-chronicled clashes between liberals and conservatives in Congress. Local reactions to federal land policy were intimately linked to the legacy of land use planning in the preceding decades, and this history had itself been conditioned by regional political culture. As plans for federal recreation and conservation areas proliferated, the people threatened with displacement to create parks responded—addressing their complaints to state officials, federal agents, the President, and the Supreme Court. While some of these protests resonated at the highest levels of power, many others went unheeded, and the impact of political pressure on both environmental management and land use planning is an important component of the history of these regions. In Appalachia, the structural differences between town and county management had a particular impact on how constituents reacted to government at all levels. Towns tended to demand greater citizen participation, while counties maintained a more hierarchical approach to government. The divergence between democratic involvement at the township and county levels had a measurable effect on public responses to federal land use planning. In sum, the tradition of government influence within mountain communities proved determinative in affecting the claim of local residents to a say in how change was implemented in their communities. Federal land use planning and conservation policy led to fundamental changes in the approach of government to private lands, and, by extension, the rights of the American public. The transition from subsistence landscapes to federally managed public spaces reflects the intersection of Progressive-Era planners' ambitions to promote recreation and consumption with conservationists' efforts to monitor forest protection and production. By examining the negotiations over land use within the eastern forests, and their outcomes, this book demonstrates that the impact of policy Sara M. Gregg Draft—not for circulation 6 of 21 decisions altered both the American environment and those communities that shared the mountain landscape. A Place Apart The Appalachian Mountains were one of the first American frontiers, and they remained on the margins of national culture and economic relations into the twentieth century. The range stretches from northern Alabama into Quebec, and encompasses a diversity of mountain landscapes. The Northern and Southern Appalachians are rarely considered together, and yet the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia in central Appalachia, and the Green Mountains of Vermont, in the region’s northern reaches, share a number of characteristics. Like most of the range, they boast a moderately rugged terrain, have historically been covered in forest and are ideally suited to growing trees, they have proved viable for small-scale farming and husbandry, and they are located in close proximity to important agricultural areas. In the early twentieth century the mountains of each state remained largely detached from the expanding regional markets, and yet regional road networks and rail lines bisected their ranges. In sum, these were geographically and economically similar areas that contained a diversity of households—much like the rest of rural America in the early decades of the twentieth century. Each was, however, easily caricatured by visitors and the press, and came to represent in the public imagination a particular, bygone, and unsustainable way of life. These caricatures developed into a critical component of the rhetoric of poverty and backwardness that eventually facilitated the transformation of private property into federal lands. In Virginia and Vermont, and throughout Appalachia, local people recognized that the mountains were a dynamic landscape—where shifting resource uses and malleable boundaries meant that the local economy was constantly adapting to environmental conditions. The local dynamics within these communities belie the distortions often perpetrated by outsiders, and by revisiting the Sara M. Gregg Draft—not for circulation 7 of 21 history of local communities this book reinterprets their environmental impact on the mountain landscape, as well as the disjunction between local uses and the perceptions of visitors to the region. The mountain environment has always been its own force, not least during the development of plans for Appalachian land reform. A critical reevaluation of local ecology and land use practices allows for a more complex understanding of both the environmental and economic challenges that faced residents and policymakers, as well as the motivations that led to the push for government oversight of local land policy. The policy developments of the 1920s and 1930s had an impact that reached far beyond the nation-state, however, and the environmental impacts of the new purview of government reshaped the Appalachian landscape. This book builds upon the foundation of a “hidden history” of American conservation, rooted in the opposition of local people to the institutionalization of an externally-conceived system of land use and land management.2 Appalachia is more diverse than simply the coal fields of West Virginia or the rugged White Mountains of New Hampshire. Consequently, this study moves beyond the industrial and recreational enclaves of the mountains and into the agricultural countryside that sustained the region’s population in the centuries before industrialization. While some sections of Appalachia had been ravaged by natural resource extraction during the late nineteenth century, others, including northwestern Virginia and Vermont, remained largely untouched by industrial forces. Even in the early twentieth century, the majority of the Appalachian region remained in small farms, and the mountains of the northern Blue Ridge of Virginia and the Green Mountains of Vermont remained primarily devoted to agriculture. These areas were not part of an extraction-dependent economy in which outside landowners exercised a dominant influence on land use decisions and, thus did not 2 Karl Jacoby, Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999): Louis S. Warren, The Hunter’s Game: Poachers and Conservationists in Twentieth-Century America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). Sara M. Gregg Draft—not for circulation 8 of 21 fulfill the preconditions for a colonial economy like those described by many Appalachian scholars. 3 The most influential surveys of Appalachian development document a transition toward capitalism dependent on outside capital during the early twentieth century, with an accompanying waning in self-sufficiency, this evolution did not occur equally throughout the region.4 In fact, land use in the 1920s in Virginia and Vermont looked similar to that in the 1880s, with all of the attendant advantages and disadvantages. Appalachia has long been held up as a symbol of independence, challenge, and rugged survival. The region was re-discovered by folklorists and vacationers as a repository of folk culture in the late nineteenth century, and thereafter it was reinvented as a landscape of leisure, through a combination of private ventures and, later, with state and federal sponsorship. To a new class of tourists, the temperate Appalachian range appeared an ideal site for the expansion of national recreation lands. The twentieth century expansion of regional road networks finally domesticated these mountains; after having been bypassed by roads and railroads for over a century, they were increasingly tamed by the automobile and turned into a vacationer’s retreat. Initially, the moderate mountain summers lured urban elites into their cool hollows and coves, and by the early 1920s the federal government started to take the initiative to expand access into mountain areas for all Americans. The democratization of recreation extended quickly into the Appalachian Mountains, which offered accessible, low-cost vacations for people from the eastern cities. The population 3 See, for example, Paul Salstrom, Appalachia's Path to Dependency: Rethinking a Region's Economic History, 1730-1940 (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1994); Ronald D. Eller, Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers: Industrialization of the Appalachian South, 1880-1930 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee, 1982); Ronald L. Lewis, Transforming the Appalachian Countryside (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); and more recently Ken Fones-Wolf, Glass Houses: Industry, Labor, and Political Economy in Appalachia, 1890s-1930s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007). 4 The literature on the market revolution is significant for this project, as many of the cycles that nineteenth century studies identify are visible in the developing economies of Appalachia during the twentieth century. Critical among these is Melvyn Stokes and Stephen Conway’s edited volume The Market Revolution in America (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996). Sara M. Gregg Draft—not for circulation 9 of 21 explosion in eastern cities led federal policymakers to search out safety valves that might distribute social pressures during the hot and volatile summer months. Expanding the national domain into the East required that the United States government reframe its approach to property and land management, and federal agencies undertook a new role as land purchasers and conservationists. These new federal initiatives were spearheaded by a cohort of professionals who sought to put order into the American system, harkening a period of intensive experimentation in agriculture, conservation, and reform. Policymakers envisioned the most productive distribution of resources and energies for the entire nation, and during the early twentieth century researchers expert in agricultural economics, rural sociology, geography, and forestry were deployed to bolster nascent conservation policies. Appalachia became a laboratory for federal planners during the 1910s and 1920s, as experts deployed an innovative planning apparatus, ideas about social uplift, and focus on conservation and preservation. The first stage of federal intervention in the region began in the forests, where the perennial potential for over harvesting and destruction meant that these areas increasingly attracted the attention of conservationists and land use planners. Because there was no formal regulation of forestry on private lands, and no avenue for federal forestry experts to offer assistance to private landowners, the first step toward forest protection occurred with the passage of the 1911 Weeks Act enabling the creation of new eastern national forests. Federal decisions to begin reacquiring private land and regulating land use were rooted in Progressive Era ideas about efficiency, best use, and the value of public improvements. With the expanding federal focus on regulation and management, and the development of a new class of experts who could direct federal efforts, the groundwork was laid for the establishment of a new land use program in the eastern mountains. As federal officials took additional responsibility for national affairs during the 1920s and 1930s, government began to assert an unprecedented influence on the economic and political Sara M. Gregg Draft—not for circulation 10 of 21 landscapes of the Blue Ridge and Green Mountains. Federal planners sought to stabilize mountain economies by moderating the effects of depopulation in some areas; of overpopulation in others; and addressing the economic dislocation that had come to characterize both local communities and their people. Beginning in the early 1910s, foresters spread out to assess the health of the Appalachian woodlands, while agricultural economists deployed their expertise in order to analyze the viability of mountain farms. Social reformers and local boosters joined together in the early 1920s to investigate conditions in the mountains, spurred on by what they saw as a social and economic declension that they feared would continue to spread. The efforts of these disparate groups culminated in the late 1920s when local and state governments initiated new collaborations with federal agencies in an ambitious plan to preserve wide swaths of the mountain forests. The grandiose scale of plans for the mountains caused the eruption of a series of conflicts over local and federal power, as local people and federal planners disagreed over the prioritization of public over private property, and this period of state transformation did not pass unchallenged. The transitional decades of the early twentieth century generated a new cadre of experts working to reform American society, the expansion of a national state that embraced innovation and efficiency, and the emergence of an economically intertwined civil society that allowed for the state to enter a new phase of influence in the daily life of its citizens.5 This confluence of events swept the Appalachian Mountains—which had long remained apart from the economic, political, and transportation infrastructures of the nation—into the orbit of national life in an unprecedented way. In the process, the tension between the locals’ vision of the mountains as an open commons and the planners’ ethos of conservation and reform ricocheted across the region, and the conflicts that emerged in the 1920s over local autonomy and power continues to resonate in many areas of Appalachia today. 5 Scott, 2, 5.