Those Who Came

ARTICLE Those Who Came Carter Taylor Seaton "Once upon a time a tribe of people went off into the woods and nobody ever heard of them again..." These words from the 1972 commune journal of West Virginia filmmaker, dancer, wood sculptor, mask-maker and teacher, Jude Binder, tell only part of the story of the back-to-the-land movement's impact on West Virginia. While her words may have echoed the sentiments of those who came during the late 1960s and early 1970s, the quote has proven naive. Not only were they heard of again, many made an indelible mark on their adopted state. Without them, the cultural landscape of the state would look very different. Some might even argue that there would be no Tamarack, the nation's first statewide collection of its own fine arts and handcrafts, and no Mountain Stage, the weekly live musical radio program broadcast on NPR to thousands of listeners worldwide since 1983—two of West Virginia's best advertisements. According to well documented social histories by Judson Jerome, Timothy Miller, Irwin and Debbi Unger, and Todd Gitlin, following the tumultuous 1960s—especially 1968, often described as "The Year the Dream Died"—the youth of America lost heart. Unable to sense that their activist approach on civil rights had been effective, disheartened by the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, disgusted by the National Guard killings at Kent State and the brutal attacks of the Chicago Police Department during the Democratic National Convention, and horrified by the intensification of the Vietnam war and the bombing of Cambodia, youth across the country began to drop-out, to set up a new world for themselves. Despite mainstream stereotypes, it wasn't necessary to take drugs to drop out; it was more a way of life, a philosophy, a rejection of the current state of affairs, a matter of survival. If they couldn't change things, they could simply stop participating. Nationally, the numbers of those who went back-to-the-land are staggering, even if the counting methods were somewhat imprecise. Both Timothy Miller and Jeffery Jacob reported that by the end of the 1970s the number of those living on the land, either in communes or as independent homesteaders, topped one million in rural North America. Enclaves of homesteaders began to dot the US map in rural 74 areas ofCalifornia, Oregon, Washington, New Mexico, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and Maine, among others. (Eleanor Agnew, Back From the Land, 2004.) This migration contributed to a dramatic population shift in West Virginia as well. Census figures from the WV Department of Health and Human Resources' website reveal that the only decade in the last fifty years to see a significant increase in population was the 1970s when the population swelled by more than 200,000. Of those, 110,000 were added through the influx of newcomers alone. Although this increase cannot be attributed solely to the back-to-the-land movement, it did help reverse an alarming trend of out-migration by the state's youth, which began in the 1950s and had continued un-abated in the 1960s. In that twenty-year period, WV lost almost 700,000 due to out-migration alone. According to some estimates the influx of young people in the late 1960s and the 1970s—predominantly middle-class and college educated—brought more than 10,000 to West Virginia in search of a better life in the hills. (Paul Salstrom, "The Neo-Natives: Back-to-the-Land in Appalachia's 1970s," Appalachian journal, Summer 2003.) But why West Virginia? The majority of those who came as part of this national movement were drawn by the romantic ideal of living off the land and bolstered by articles in the new publication, Mother Earth News or by the homesteader's Bible, Helen and Scott Nearing's Living the Good Life. Dedicated back-to-the-landers, searching for a place to build their alternate lives found a story touting cheap land in West Virginia in the third issue of Mother Earth News. (May/June 1970) Its feature article, by Lawrence Goldsmith, boasted "much inexpensive acreage" in WV and described newly purchased land...