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Southern Cultures 9.3 (2003) 109-110



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Hill Folks: A History of Arkansas Ozarkers and Their Image. By Brooks Blevins. University of North Carolina Press, 2002. 340 pp. Cloth $55.00; paper $19.95

The Ozarks have long suffered from an image problem. Even compared with Appalachia—itself no stranger to degrading stereotypes and blatant misrepresentation—these other southern highlands have been exceptionally maligned. One of the region's few definitive studies, folklorist Vance Randolph's The Ozarks, was tellingly subtitled An American Survival of Primitive Society; he pronounced the area one of the "the most backward and deliberately unprogressive regions of the United States."

Unlike Appalachia though, the Ozarks have also suffered from scholarly neglect. In the past couple of decades, Appalachian scholars have produced a remarkable outpouring of work on that region's history, culture, literature, and environment. The Ozarks, on the other hand, have inspired nothing comparable, at least until now. Brooks Blevins, a native of the region, has begun to fill the relative void with Hill Folks, a comprehensive history of one section of the Ozarks—those that extend across northwestern and north central Arkansas. (Missouri claims the majority of the range, and Oklahoma a much smaller section of it.) As rich as Blevins's historical narrative is—a well-written blend of economic, social, and cultural history—it is the added layer of analysis on changing perceptions of the region and its people that most distinguishes his study.

The Ozarks' past makes for a somewhat more compact history than that of Appalachia. Only in the early-nineteenth century did serious settlement begin there, though, curiously, the fertile Springfield Plain in Arkansas's northwesternmost corner had already emerged as the most populous and prosperous area in the state when it entered the Union in 1836. Also unlike any other highland region, cotton came to dominate the cash economy for some of the hill folk, although it emerged too late to provide them with the prosperity or affluence that it did for antebellum lowland plantation areas. [End Page 109]

The so-called "discovery" of the Ozarks by outsiders took place well after that of the Appalachians. Whereas those more eastern highlanders faced transformative forces—the influx of mining and timber companies, missionaries and social workers, railroads, and tourists—during the post-Civil War decades, similar developments came somewhat later to the Arkansas highlands, sometimes as late as the 1920s and 1930s. Those who did discover the region, according to Blevins, did so with a far more clinical detachment than was true of the missionary zeal and cultural intervention that so characterized the earlier discovery of the Appalachians and their residents.

Midwesterners discovered the curative power of Ozark mineral springs well before the turn of the century, although it was only in the 1920s that the most successful summer resorts came into their own, usually financed and managed by outsiders. More pervasive was the influx of back-to-the-landers—those of the urban middle class who were attracted to the picturesque and remote Ozarks, where they sought to duplicate the simplicity of frontier life with log homes and self-sufficient lifestyles. This romantic sense of "homesteading" reached its height during the Great Depression, when the backwoods became for many "a world foreign to advertising, and sales luring, and trade slogans, and patched pavements."

Blevins notes the irony in the fact that such idyllic notions of the region were being firmly implanted just as its agricultural base and social structure were undergoing major modernizing alterations. A massive outmigration of farm families was followed by yet another influx of midwestern and northern vacationers and retirees, which have made tourism a more dominant part of the region's identity and economic base. The book is at its best in chronicling the contrasts and contradictions of the post-World War II era. Blevins juxtaposes the backgrounds of Ozark natives J. William Fulbright and Orval Faubus to illustrate the region's socio-economic diversity: the Senate's foreign-relations leader's affluent upbringing in the college town of Fayetteville, and...

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