After the Backcountry: Rural Life in the Great Valley of Virginia, 1800-1900 ed. by Kenneth E. Koons and Warren Hofstra (review)

focused account to be sure, respectful and glowing—but lacking in prurient detail. Why, we are left wondering, did the folksinger John Jacob Niles turn into a snake? How did Doris pass her time in Reno? What would Freud have said about a young woman who made difficult portraits of every doctor on the staff atJohns Hopkins, then all of the editors in New York, and then married a doctor who happened to be in his own mind (and probably hers) a better photographer than she was? Inquiring minds want to know. We are told on the book's dust cover that John Jacob Niles was Doris Ulmann's paramour, and we wonder—what is a paramour? And did she and the chauffeur (picture Peter Sellers here), while stopping to stretch on some lonely North Carolina hillside, or looking at stars through Spanish moss, did they ever . .. did they ever kiss each other good night? —Ralph Price Kenneth E. Koons and Warren Hofstra, Eds. After the Backcountry: Rural Life in the Great Valley of Virginia, 1800-1900. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2000. 544 pages, illustrated. $58.00. For many readers, the Great Valley of Virginia calls to mind epic Civil War battles or the personalities of Stonewall Jackson and Philip Sheridan. For others, the region has been a focus of study by scholars examining the efforts of Euro-Americans to settle and claim the Valley in the eighteenth century, when the Shenandoah was the "backcountry" of established English settlement in Virginia. For editors Kenneth E. Koons and Warren Hofstra, however, little has been published about nineteenth century rural life in the Great Valley, and the history of the region's "ordinary inhabitants, its communities, or its development as a rural, agrarian, and small town society of the Upper South" (xi) has been neglected. Koons and Hofstra's book, After the Backcountry: Rural Life in the Great Valley of Virginia, 1800-1900, provides a much needed corrective to this area of scholarship. After the Backcountry comprises nineteen essays examining "the world wheat made." In examining economic growth in town and country, Kenneth Koons argues that despite the depredations of the Civil War, wheat production thrived in the Great Valley, and that the economic decline and malaise found throughout Virginia and parts of the South were noticeably absent from the Valley. Kenneth Keller, in his analysis of the upper Potomac Valley, shows wheat production had made the backcountry a "garden spot" by 1850; yet the region's bounty was eclipsed a decade later by the production from the Midwest and 74 the Great Plains, whichbenefited from fresh land, better transportation and improved agricultural technology. This world of wheat was not limited to farms, however. Robert Mitchell proposes that new approaches are needed to understand the integral nature of towns, villages and hamlets in the agrarian landscape. Case studies of the Opequon community in Frederick County and the Tye River Valley in Nelson County reveal, respectively, how some rural communities lost their "geographical distinctiveness" amidst the larger backdrop of mixed farms and market towns, while Eastern plantation gentry found themselves caught between economic forces that undermined their monopoly of social and political authority. Other essays explore the nature of slavery in this varied world of mixed farms, finding ambivalence among Shenandoah inhabitants. Market ties to the North promoted political interest in internal improvements and national economics; yet Michael Gorman argues that it was race that allowed Valley slaveholders to manipulate the political system in favor of secession. L. Scott Philyaw argues that the Valley was a "middle ground" wherein a strongly Unionist population reluctantly chose to support Piedmont and Tidewater interests over western Virginia counties, as the best of two generally undesirable options. After the Backcountry is a book rich in diversity and detail. Discussions of the wider region are pointedly illustrated with analyses of communities and sub-regions of the Valley. Throughout their work, the authors show a rural region that is not isolated, but intriguingly connected to national markets and ideas. The essays themselves are both scholarly and accessible, so this collection will appeal to general readers as well as students of Appalachia, Virginia and the South. More importantly, the...