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Southeastern Geographer Vol. 30, No. 2, November 1990, pp. 121-139 DEVELOPMENT AND CHANGE IN APPALACHIAN KENTUCKY'S ECONOMY: 1870-1890* Tyrel G. Moore The economic development efforts of the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) have met with their most mixed results in Kentucky and West Virginia. Both places have provided tremendous challenges to economic development throughout the 20th century. In the 1930s they formed the geographic core of the severe economic depression that first identified Appalachia as a poverty area. (J ) Thirty years later, on the eve of the ARCs formation, eastern Kentucky's economic indicators earned it the dubious distinction of being Appalachia's most serious problem area. (2) After 25 years of federal planning programs, eastern Kentucky continues to be something of an economic enigma. (3) The periodic identification of Appalachian Kentucky as an economic problem area during the 20th century usually links the region's economic status with cycles in its coal-mining industry. (4) The interruption of sustained economic productivity also characterized the region during the 19th century. Spatial aspects of that early economy have not been studied in much detail because the evolution of economic structures and industrialization is generally considered to be a 20th-century phenomenon . (5) Caudill characterized these earlier periods of development as reaching no more than a frontier economy and conditions, while Eller stressed the importance of a non-commercial agricultural system as the cornerstone of the pre-mining economy. (6) Studies by Banks and by Pudup reached similar conclusions that a locally based 19th-century capitalistic economy was greatly inhibited by the pervasiveness of a subsistence agricultural economy. The long-term implication ofthis economic environment was that it eased the path for later outside economic control and development of the region. (7) Thus, the literature largely presents the 19th century as an economically static period, during which Appalachian Kentucky is portrayed as an essentially closed subsistence * Thanks are extended to Leonard Brinkman and John Morgan for helpful comments on an earlier version of the manuscript and to Linda Beverly for cartography . Dr. Moore is Assistant Professor of Geography and Earth Sciences at the University ofNorth Carolina at Charlotte in Charlotte, NC 28223. 122Southeastern Geographer agricultural economy until mining interests were developed around the turn of the century. This paper argues, however, that Appalachian Kentucky's late-19th century economy was far more dynamic than previous studies have indicated . Two points must be made in this regard: 1) the economy was not exclusively agrarian, but a manufacturing sector developed in areas where either agriculture progressed to support local milling and processing or the resource base favored industrialization; and 2) the character of change within the region's agricultural and manufacturing sectors was an important early example of the region's long-term history of cyclic economic development. As such, the period and its patterns of development represent a transition between the region's earliest economic growth and the emergence of an era dominated by coal mining. This study therefore contributes to a more detailed understanding of development processes in what has been one of America's least-understood regions. (8) PROCEDURE. Data came primarily from manuscript and published census returns for 1870, published census returns for 1890, and reports of the Kentucky Bureau of Agriculture and the Kentucky Geological Survey. These provided basic information on the spatial characteristics of the area's agricultural and manufacturing sectors in 1870 and 1890. The relative importance of these two sectors was determined by measuring their relative input to aggregated county-level values of all economic activities, similar to a gross national product at the county scale for both years. The data for 1890 included inputs of coal mining, which had assumed significance in the economy of some counties at that time. Changes in the relative importance of the region's agricultural, manufacturing , and mining sectors were then summarized comparatively to evaluate the trends generated by dynamics within the regional economy between 1870 and 1890. THE STRUCTURE OF THE REGIONAL ECONOMY, 1870. The American economy experienced remarkable growth between 1870 and 1890 as eastern capitalists extended industrial technology and corporate organization into the Midwest. In the process, manufacturing supplanted agriculture as the country's chief...

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