"To Keep All Their Topsoil from Washing Away": Writer Jesse Stuart and the Conservation of the Twentieth-Century Rural Landscape of Eastern Kentucky

Jesse Stuart (1906–1984) from Greenup County, Kentucky, was a prolific author of poetry, fiction, and autobiographical essays in the mid-twentieth century. A keen observer of people and place, Stuart wrote frequently about the relationship between eastern Kentucky's rural people and the land, especially the region of W-Hollow, so named for the creek that meandered through the valley in the shape of that letter.¹ Stuart is well known for poetry volumes such as Man with a Bull-Tongue Plow (1934), novels of rural life including The Good Spirit of Laurel Ridge (1953), and autobiographical works like To Teach, To Love (1970) which discussed his career in education. He began his career as a published author in the late-1930s. By then, new conservation ideals had emerged in American society that challenged older concepts of "wise use" of natural resources. Among discussions of education, politics, and agriculture, Stuart also expressed his personal beliefs about land use in W-Hollow primarily through the example of his father, Mick Stuart, a farm tenant in eastern Kentucky. Despite acknowledging the author's father as an individual who engaged in conservation practices, Stuart scholars have not necessarily placed Jesse Stuart's nonfiction in the context of midcentury writers who contributed to a developing critique of Progressive-era conservation ideology. Stuart should be contextualized within a cohort of agriculturalists, agrarians (most notably Louis Bromfield), and nature writers active at midcentury who engaged the public in a discussion of conservation that predated the modern environmental discourse of the 1960s.²

A considerable amount of Stuart's published books and magazine articles in the mid-1950s laud and discuss the land conservation practices of his father in the early part of the twentieth century. Jesse took his father's efforts at gully prevention, soil rehabilitation, and reforestation and made them into nonfiction for a national readership. In so doing, he effectively articulated for a popular audience the principles necessary to move from a Progressive-era, wise-use ideology to a more ecologically conscious point of view that would, in time, embrace the need for land preservation in W-Hollow. In a practical sense, Stuart fused philosophical ideas about land conservation with the daily actions performed by his father Mick Stuart, which extolled the virtue of maintaining strong connections to the land. After World War II, Stuart's conservation writings corresponded with his growing fame as an American author—with descriptions of W-Hollow's flora and fauna, his writings show similarities with the works of other writers at a time when a cultural vogue existed for the works of amateur naturalists. According to cultural historian Joan Shelley Rubin, in the postwar years the American public was willing to accept authorities on subjects somewhat outside the traditional academic world.³ Stuart joined writers who wrote conspicuously about nature but were not themselves scientifically trained. Popular nature studies, such as Joseph Wood Krutch's The Twelve Seasons (1949), flooded the book market in the years before and after World War II. The public was clearly interested in the world beyond their front door.

While Stuart wrote extensively about nature in W-Hollow, he also proclaimed his Appalachian mountain heritage by chronicling his father's efforts to rehabilitate lands that had languished at the hands of fellow farm tenants. Stuart explored the forward-thinking practices of his father, in part, to show a more positive image of the lands and people of eastern Kentucky. He presented his father's early-twentieth-century practices in print to affirm his own concern for soil conservation, reforestation, and wildlife preservation that reflected belief in a more integrative view of the landscape. Such a view tied many concerns, both environmental and cultural, back to the importance of soil health. For instance, Stuart discussed the environmental costs of soil depletion in relation to issues of the day, such as population growth. He adamantly maintained his focus on rehabilitation of the image of rural mountain folk, even as his work provided...