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

Introduction

Here again, the very earth cries out beseechingly, for a way to market. —S. F. C., “A Ramble in Southwestern Virginia” (1849) Thomas Jefferson bears much responsibility for the longtime idealism about agrarian life in the United States, but he also revealed a deep faith in the power of industry and commerce. “All the world is becoming commercial,” he informed George Washington in March 1784. “Our citizens have had too full a taste of the comforts furnished by the arts & manufactures to be debarred the use of them.”1 Representing Virginia in Congress, Jefferson was negotiating his home state’s cession of its western territories to the young United States. He had definite ideas about where Virginia’s western boundary should fall—the state should extend “to the meridian of the mouth of the great Kanhaway” River. He listed several reasons. First he put forth, “That within that are our lead mines.” Next he explained, “This river rising in N. Carola traverses our whole latitude and offers to every part of it a channel for navigation & commerce to the Western Country.” But the river would make deep demands on state resources: “It is a channel which can not be opened but at immense expense and with every facility which an absolute power over both shores will give.”2 Jefferson had identified two issues—mineral resources and infrastructure needs—that preoccupied market-oriented residents of western Virginia ’s mountains for the subsequent two centuries. The lead mines he mentioned abut the Blue Ridge Mountains along the New River, the name given the upper reaches of the Kanawha. The New River rises as two forks in Ashe County, North Carolina, along that state’s northern border. The branches combine and flow toward the northwest, eventually uniting with Introduction 1 2 Mountains on the Market the Gauley River to form what we now know as the Kanawha. The New River’s path through mineral-rich Virginia lands presented not only a great opportunity for commerce, but also a great challenge because of the area’s isolation and the need to transport bulky minerals to more densely populated areas. Industry grew slowly in early Virginia. The Northeast and then areas of the Midwest pushed the United States to the forefront of industrialized nations in the early nineteenth century, but the South lagged somewhat behind. The region developed industrial capacity ahead of most nations, but several factors explain the southern states’ poor showing relative to the parts of the United States that surged to world industrial leadership. Slave owners operating profitable plantations shaped much of the southern economy and regional politics; they benefited by buying manufactured items made elsewhere while keeping their focus on commercial crops. Their concentrated wealth and slaves’ lack of purchasing power stunted home markets, and the growing of lucrative staple crops dispersed the population because comparatively poor soils mandated large amounts of land for each plantation. The region thus did not have the large cities and broad consumer demand that catalyzed industry in the Northeast and Midwest. Canals and railroads often lost money because they had to meander far to reach nodes of customers. And the Appalachian Mountains ranked as the spot perhaps least hospitable to early industrialization owing to the inherent difficulty of transportation across the rugged terrain. Despite these obstacles, entrepreneurs in the South developed a variety of industries. Railroads coursed through several parts of the region by the end of the 1850s, and the manufacturing of textiles and cotton gins as well as the mining and processing of iron and copper ore, coal, and phosphates commenced before the Civil War. And as Jefferson had expected, extractive industries took hold even along the New River in the Appalachian Mountains. The lead mines lay in present-day Wythe County, Virginia. Wythe County (formed in 1790), Grayson County (taken from Wythe in 1793), and Carroll County (carved largely from Grayson in 1842) make up a substantial section of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Plateau and New River valley near the border with North Carolina. Lead was identified there in the 1750s, and miners worked the deposits by about 1761. In Notes on the State of Virginia , Jefferson also pointed out a second valuable mineral in this same highland spot: “we are told of iron mines . . . on Chestnut creek, a branch Introduction 3 of the Great Kanhaway, near where it crosses the Carolina line.”3 By the 1780s, charcoal furnaces and...