Extracting Appalachia: Images of the Consolidation Coal Company, 1910-1945 (review)

In Extracting Appalachia, Geoffrey Buckley has produced a nuanced and well-read template for using photos to understand historic landscapes. Through his exploration of theoretical approaches to using photos, then, Buckley adds texture and context to the landscape and culture of Appalachian coal mining during the early twentieth century.

The emphasis of Buckley's research is a set of approximately four thousand photos in the archive of the Consolidation Coal Company, all of which were taken in Kentucky, West Virginia, and Maryland. As he describes the moment of discovering the collected albums and photos, Buckley initially asked the basic questions of a researcher: "Who took these pictures? Why were they made? How were they used?" (p. xii). Extracting Appalachia displays his intellectual effort in answering these questions (p. xxiii):

To make any sense of them at all, "they must be situated in both historical and spatial context. This is particularly important given that they were company photographs taken to satisfy contemporary company needs. To interpret them in any other way—to view them as 'neutral' windows on the past for instance—would be confusing at best and at worst, misleading.

Using approaches from historians and geographers such as Alan Trachtenberg, Yi-Fu Tuan, Richard Francaviglia, Brian Black, Donald Meinig, and Pierce Lewis, Buckley carefully manages the limits of his source material. With his approach established, Buckley uses the pages of Extracting Appalachia to yield a "collective glimpse of life and labor in central Appalachia's coalfields" (p. xv). However, he writes that the photos also "allow us to follow closely the construction and development of mines and company towns; inspect the work of miners; to track the technological advances; to observe conditions in and around the mines; and to speculate on social and cultural aspects of coal town life" (p. xvii).

In addition to providing a window to the past, the photos in Buckley's hands become active artifacts that allow modern viewers to evaluate and measure the activities being depicted in the photos. Buckley offers readers an entirely new, textured, snapshot of Appalachia in the early twentieth century. Unlike many other studies, Buckley's landscape of mining is not captured after the fact; it is alive and vibrant. Miners and company towns are made into real people and real places. Buckley humanizes the enterprise of mining through visual records as the anthropologist Anthony F. C. Wallace (1987) did with details of everyday life in St. Clair.

Buckley's findings range from views of social and ethnic segregation to cultural gatherings, such as Fourth of July celebrations. We see the construction and placement of workers housing before 1900. Another view demonstrates the racial makeup of the mine's baseball team. Buckley is able to use the context and background of such photos to analyze other aspects of mining life, such as town layout and design, railroad placement, location of company stores, and even interior views of the items for sale in the store.

Perhaps of most interest to readers in geography, Buckley uses an entire chapter to analyze what the images reveal about environmental transformation. Similar to Francaviglia's (1997) Hard Places, Buckley demonstrates how the mining landscape is composed of "additive and subtractive features" (p. 127). Emphasizing chronology, Buckley uses the photos to demonstrate landscape change over time, such as how the company shot photos prior to mining and then afterward. This allows Buckley to ascertain a more exact appropriation of the physical changes that mining brought to the landscape. This reader, however, would have also enjoyed seeing some contemporary views of the photographed sites in order to understand further ecological recovery (or lack thereof). Demonstrating a strong foundation in physical geography, Buckley leads readers on a discussion of mining's impact on water runoff, erosion, and so forth.

Overall, Buckley leaves the readers wanting more analysis. In...