"We Were an Oddity": A Look at the Back-to-the-Land Movement in Appalachia

In 1975, attendance at the annual Mountain State Folk Festival in Glenville, West Virginia, swelled above five thousand. Young folk enthusiasts joined the ranks of old-time musicians and local residents to celebrate Appalachian traditions. Most festival promoters would have been beside themselves with joy knowing that their event attracted such a sizeable crowd. But something about the new people who attended the Mountain State Festival bothered long-time attendees. Festival promoter Mack Samples was not only concerned about the growing size of the event, which he feared would outgrow the small town, but he was also worried about the effects that the newcomers would have on mountain culture. Not only were they showcasing new styles of music, but also, much to the shock of old-time musicians, female festival attendees were playing the fiddle! Even more problematic to Samples, however, was that these people were not merely attending the festival. They were coming to Appalachia to live.¹

"Appalachia is 'in' and has been for five years or more," wrote David A. Peyton in 1975. "The arts, crafts, the Appalachian life style are a lure to those from outside the region." During the 1960s and 1970s, countless thousands of Americans moved into the hills and hollers of Appalachia to live out their dreams of a simpler existence. Many aimed for self-sufficiency, believing that simple living and old-time practices had the potential to heal a broken America. As Peyton explains, the settlers who came to Appalachia felt that certain aspects of the region's culture and environment would be conducive to realizing their Arcadian dreams: "Thousands of them are lured to Appalachia annually. Many buy inexpensive hillside farms and vow to build lives based on the Appalachian values and traditions they have found at folk festivals."² Of course, festivals were by no means the only regional features attracting would-be back-to-the-landers. A number of pathways led them into the southern highlands. Once they arrived, their desire to achieve self-sufficiency was met with more than a few raised eyebrows from mountain residents. What many residents knew that the newcomers did not was that mountain living was rife with challenges. In time, many of these idealists discovered that the realities of rural living, particularly in terms of financial opportunities and physical hardship, were more difficult than they had anticipated.

This essay explores the back-to-the-land movement in southern and central Appalachia. It is not meant to answer questions about whether back-to-the-landers' experiences were unique because they came to a region with perceived unique cultural traits and traditions; rather, it investigates some of the regional attributes, both romanticized and real, that were likely to have attracted new settlers in the first place. This analysis also considers how both natives and newcomers perceived each other and how those perceptions influenced their relationships as neighbors. Finally, it profiles life on the land in Appalachia and attempts to determine whether back-to-the-landers' experiences lived up to their ideals. But, before exploring the movement in Appalachia, it is necessary to understand who the back-to-the-landers were and what circumstances gave rise to the movement in the 1960s.

The folk festival attendees who moved to the region represent a subset of the counterculture that abandoned metropolitan lifestyles for more simple, agrarian ones during the 1960s and 1970s. These back-to-the-landers—also called "neonatives," "homesteaders," or "alter-natives,"—were, as anthropologist Patricia Beaver notes, typically from middle-class households, well-educated, and environmentally conscious.³ Scholars Merlin Brinkerhoff and Jeffery Jacobs describe them as "former urban residents … returning to the non-metropolitan countryside to take up residence and practice simple, semi-subsistence agriculture on small parcels of land."⁴ Corley Malone, a fictional character in Mack Samples's murder mystery Hippies and Holiness, has a somewhat different definition: "We call them hippies…. They are mostly young folks from the colleges up in the northeast who are running from this war over in Asia. Some of them have moved into...