A History of Appalachia

11. Regional Society and Social Change

11 Regional Society and Social Change IT HAS BEEN MENTIONED previously that Cratis Williams, for years recognized as the "Dean of Appalachian Studies" and himself a native of the region, observed that there are three quite distinctive groups among Appalachian mountaineers. The first he termed the town-oriented elite and city folk, who are little different, he said, from the rest of middle-class Americans. Members of this group are the region's elite and the professional and commercial people. The second group, he says, are the substantial farmers in the region's more fertile valleys. This is a quite prosperous group, and at the time Williams made this observation in the late 1950s, it was a group almost as numerous as the town and city folk. The last group, whom Williams called "Branchwater Mountaineers," was actually the least numerous of the three, but it was also by far the most unusual and the group about whom so much had been written and upon whom the well-known regional stereotypes have beenbased. The Branchwater Mountaineers, Williams said, were those who lived in the region's more remote areas, at the end ofthe hollows (hollers), along the ridges and the worst roads, and were the farmers who have tried to farm the region's most marginal lands. Recently, Professor Charles Smith of Cumberland College, and a candidate for Congress in Kentucky's old Fifth District, designated a similar three-category description of Appalachian social structure. Professor Smith spoke of three groups ofpersons he would expect to find in any Appalachian county. The first group he called the "town folk." These are the lawyers, doctors, teachers, and businessmen and their families of the county-seat towns who "run things." The contrasting group to this controlling elite in each county he termed the "hollow folk," or those who live in the county's most remote sec- 184 Modem Appalachia tions-"up at the head of the holler." They are the ones who present the major problems to the town folk of the county seat. Their children are the school dropouts and the problems for the truancy officers . Overall, they are not very dependable employees. Furthermore, they are often the ones whose petty crimes cause them to fill the county's small jail. The third group, Professor Smith says, are the "Big Road Folk." These are the people that live in the small houses that line the county's main roads where transportation is relatively easy. Essentially, he says, they are "hollow folk on their way to town." These Big Road Folk usually live with some economic precariousness , but they work hard. Their children attend school with some regularity, and they thus represent a middle group between the culture of the town folk and the culture of the hollow folk. Other observers have seen a two-part structure for Appalachian society. Harry Caudill, for one, claimed that there were only thefew, who held the wealth and the power, and the many, who were poor and powerless. David Hsiung's recent study of EastTennessee claims that "two worlds" have existed in mountain society since well before the Civil War. I Mostsociologists and anthropologists who have looked into small Appalachian rural communities have found that the local community , apparently fairly democratic, is actually divided by family reputation , income differentials, and the degree of urban sophistication. Other useful analyses trace the distance from urban ways, placing the person closest to the city as "superior," with the rural "back forty" places next, and the remote "holler" as the poorest and least powerful . SociologistJohn Stephenson found that the traditional folk ofhis community, Shiloh, had their highest regard for"good church folk" with steady jobs. ThenShiloh's class structure descended in four steps down to the "no-good families" who had no steady employment. Recent immigrationhas broughtmany retired folk and mainline families into Appalachia's rural communities. In the 1960s, "back to the landers" came in considerable numbers to set up their own groupings , and the 1980sbrought a steady flow of refugees from the American mainstream who were attracted to the region's lack of serious crime and other urban problems. Many scholars and observers have focused on the region's problems , such as lack of income and low educational level-in fact, seeing the region itself as identifiedby the appearance ofseveralnegative indicators in a county's statistics. Such scholars also make much of Regional Society and Social...