Mountains on the Market: Industry, the Environment, and the South

Chapter 2: Turnpikes to Ore and More

Prosperous northeastern cities and their fertile hinterlands led the young United States into a new industrial age in the first half of the nineteenth century, but the comparatively rural white people in the South continued to prosper in older ways. Because the lack of cities limited consumer markets in the region, the extractive industries, including those in the New River valley, rarely grew into more complex manufacturers and processors . A modest great divergence started.1 Slavery remained at the heart of the South’s economic and political system, and copper and lead, for instance , often went north for use in workshops and factories. In many ways, however, southern extractive industries kept on flourishing within the market-based norms that guided the entire country through its industrial evolution. In the early nineteenth century, both the lead mines and the budding iron makers along New River had to overcome the same challenges of transportation , business organization, and market conditions that vexed their peers elsewhere. And as occurred in the rest of the nation, conditions had improved by midcentury for those mountain businessmen as well as for entrepreneurs in a new Blue Ridge industry, copper mining and smelting. Turnpikes and railroads eased transportation problems; private and public geological investigations identified promising spots for extractive capitalism ; investors eagerly—sometimes too eagerly—put money into new ventures ; and free laborers, too, fought for better returns on their skills and hard work. As in the rest of the United States, the routine use of incorporation changed the form of business for some New River valley firms, whereas families kept control of others. Southern capitalists in the nineteenth century continued to find a ready place in the American economic mosaic in spite of regional divergence on slavery. Turnpikes to Ore and More Chapter 2 44 Turnpikes to Ore and More 45 Landscapes of Change At the turn of the century, the rigor of the trip through Flower Gap had moderated little since the time of John Bartram’s 1762 travels. In 1808, the Reverend Joseph Thomas saw an awe-inspiring landscape dotted with human activity as he trudged northward to the same spot: “I then went on and crossed the Blue Ridge at Flour Gap. Here I had the most extensive and delightful prospect of creation I ever had before. From thence I could see the distant hills and little mountains thrown, as it were by a careless hand, yet in beauteous order, over distant lands below.” More settlers had arrived, but their modest changes to the landscape did not diminish its power in Thomas’s imagination: “Numerous farms with many a rural scene rose into review, watered by parling rills, while distant Yadkin rolled along. Yonder stands dread Arrarat, forty miles distant, rising like an awful pyramid crowned as with a turret on the lofty mountain’s top. The contemplations of the mighty former of all, that arose from the sight, were profitable to me as I was led to adore the great Creator, as wise, good and powerful without any parallel, and to view myself as a base particle, insignificant as nothing. I was then in Grayson County, Virginia.”2 More than three decades later, in June 1841, Brother Van Vleck, a Moravian missionary visiting the area from Salem, North Carolina, described the area at the summit of Flower Gap with language that likewise looked to the romantic sublime. Even atop the mountain, though, the community had developed considerably in the intervening years: “The Mountain Ridge is from 10 to 20 miles wide, sloping gradually towards the north, the water courses flowing in that direction into New River. Many farms are scattered along the top of the mountain, which is undulating, and produces good pasturage. The woods were embellished by the flowering laurel, now in richest bloom, and by the still more splendid honeysuckle of these regions , the blossoms of which decked the copses on both sides of the road, and along the clear, cool mountain-streams, dashing over their rocky beds.” The arduous path down the mountain still made him catch his breath, however: “With our faces now again towards home, we descended the Flower Gap, justly so called from the laurels and honeysuckles, crowning its brow, and walked down the steep, rough road, leading our horses,—with deep, precipitous vallies on both sides of us,—the mountain torrent rushing through the abyss below.”3 In 1857, Hardin Taliaferro, an Alabama Baptist minister and a native of Surry County, North Carolina, made his attempt...