Nevertheless, despite economic and cultural barriers, a majority of migrants eventually made successful transitions to urban life. Those same factors that made them different in the new setting—cultural traditions and strong family ties—also provided strength and support to overcome adversity. Migrants who brought higher levels of education or some technical skills to the city were among the first to achieve stable employment and upward mobility. In time, thousands of fellow migrants followed them into the middle-class suburbs, becoming part of a growing, invisible minority of urban Appalachians. A study of West Virginia migrants in Cleveland in the mid-1960s found more former mountain residents living in the suburbs than in the Appalachian ghetto.35 Certainly the folks back home in the mountains were conscious of this success, since they continued to leave for the cities in growing numbers.
It was the inner-city ghettos, however, that attracted the attention of journalists and drew the concern of local officials and social welfare professionals to the plight of the Appalachian migrants. As early as the 1950s, some urban governments began to organize special study commissions and to hold workshops to address the problems created by the great migration. In 1954, for example, the Mayor’s Friendly Relations Committee and the Social Service Association of Greater Cincinnati sponsored a special workshop that focused on migrants in that city. The workshop was attended by over two hundred social workers, teachers, personnel managers, city officials, and church and civic leaders and featured a lecture on the southern Appalachian people by a sociology professor from Berea College.36
Near the end of the decade, the Council of the Southern Mountains (CSM), a Berea-based association of educators and social workers, began to hold workshops in cities across the Midwest to help northern professionals “gain a better understanding of the mountain people and their background.” With funding from the Ford Foundation, the council established a network of civic leaders from Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Akron, Columbus, Dayton, and Cincinnati who traveled to Berea for a three-week training course and a tour of the region. These efforts not only helped to organize programs to improve the “urban adjustment of southern Appalachian migrants” but increasingly drew national attention to the worsening economic crisis in the mountains.37
As larger numbers of families joined the exodus from Appalachia, community leaders, educators, and politicians in the region began to struggle with the loss of population and deteriorating economic conditions. The emigration of young adults that began during the war reached its peak in the 1950s, when more than a million people left the region. Rural communities throughout the mountains experienced population decline, but the losses in central Appalachia were especially severe. Eastern Kentucky suffered a loss of a quarter of a million residents in the 1940s, and West Virginia exceeded this number over the next decade with a net loss of more than 400,000 residents. Together the two states lost 1.2 million people between 1940 and 1960. The losses during the 1950s in Appalachian Kentucky accounted for almost 35 percent of the population in eastern Kentucky. The loss rate in West Virginia was more than 25 percent.38
The rates of population decline were even more alarming given the traditionally high birth rates in Appalachia and the expanding population in the rest of the country. Birth rates in the mountains had long exceeded the national average. Throughout most of the first half of the twentieth century, natural population increases had helped to balance emigration, but in 1957 birth rates in southern Appalachia began to decline. By 1960 migration out of the region exceeded the natural increase by more than 12 percent, and in Kentucky the figure was almost 50 percent. Nor was the population decline of the 1950s limited to rural areas, as it had been in the 1940s. Appalachian small towns and growth centers such as Huntington, Charleston, Knoxville, and Asheville also lost population during a decade when other metropolitan areas in the United States were growing and the national population increased by almost 20 percent.39
The movement of people out of Appalachia was a symptom of the deeper economic and social problems that had settled over the region in the years since the Depression. The mechanization of coal mining displaced thousands of families in the coalfields, but unemployment, poverty, and welfare dependence became a way of life in communities throughout the region. The decline of farming, for example, pushed families off the land across most of Appalachia. Mountain agriculture had languished since the turn of the century, when industrialization altered traditional land use practices and local market patterns. After the war, this decline continued at an even more rapid pace. Between 1950 and 1960, half of the farmers and farm laborers in Appalachia left the land. By the end of the decade, only about 6 percent of the mountain population was employed full time in agriculture.40
The loss of the farm population in the 1950s completed the region’s transformation to public work that had begun at the turn of the century. The number of full-time farmers was drastically reduced as some people fled the region and others searched for part-time work off the farm. With the coming of consumer society and the emergence of national marketing networks, many of the familiar elements of the old family farm were replaced by symbols of the new age. Orchards and beehives, mules and milk cows gave way to store-bought goods, tractors, trucks, and automobiles. The once prominent livestock industry all but disappeared with the elimination of woodlands for pasturage as a result of mining, logging, and absentee land ownership. Now more dependent on row cropping, most mountain farms were unable to compete with larger, flatland farms for national markets.
In 1954 only one in three Appalachian farms had running water and indoor plumbing, but over half had access to an automobile, and 92 percent had electricity. Because the mountain terrain was less conducive to the operation of tractors and other modern farm machinery, only about a third of the farms had tractors. The primary cash crop in many mountain counties was tobacco, which was labor intensive and could be raised on an acre or two of bottomland, but even this crop was dependent on government quotas to maintain market prices. The average southern Appalachian farm at midcentury contained less than eighty-one acres, with only fifteen acres of productive cropland. In the more rugged areas, from southern West Virginia through western North Carolina, the average was less than fifty-five acres.41
In some counties the movement off the land in the 1950s was so profound that it almost eliminated farming altogether. Forty counties in eastern Kentucky and West Virginia lost more than 70 percent of their farm population. Leslie County, Kentucky, lost 98 percent of its farmers and was left with only 20 full-time farms at the end of the decade. Harlan County, Kentucky, with a population of 51,000, had only 112 farmers, a loss of 82 percent. Mingo County, West Virginia, was left with only 32 full-time farmers; McDowell County, West Virginia, with 40; and Logan County, West Virginia, with 66. Even heavily agricultural counties in the Blue Ridge suffered major losses of the farm population. Ashe and Madison counties in North Carolina lost more than 2,000 farms each, and the number of farmers in Swain County was reduced by 80 percent. Carter and Campbell counties in Tennessee each lost about 40 percent of their full-time farms.42
Many traditional forms of off-farm employment in Appalachia declined as well during the 1950s, including logging, furniture manufacturing, railroads, and textile production.43 Although the number of manufacturing establishments increased in northern Alabama and in some metropolitan areas of Georgia and North Carolina, rural Appalachian counties as a whole did not benefit from the expanding national business climate of the Eisenhower years and fell even further behind the nation and the non-Appalachian portions of their states. Eastern Kentucky, for example, failed by a considerable margin to keep pace with manufacturing growth both in Kentucky and in the nation as a whole. Between 1950 and 1955, manufacturing employment increased by almost 20 percent in Kentucky but by only 2 percent in eastern Kentucky. Of the thirty-five counties in the