One person is, however, more responsible for this book than any other, my wife Jane Wilson Eller. Without her steady support, encouragement, and gentle prodding, this manuscript might not have been completed. She alone understands my love for the mountains. After all, this is her story too.
How America Came to the Mountains
Jim Wayne Miller
The way the Brier remembers it, folks weren’t sure
at first what was coming. The air felt strange,
and smelled of blasting powder, carbide, diesel fumes.
A hen crowed and a witty prophecied
eight lanes of fogged-in asphalt filled with headlights.
Most people hadn’t gone to bed that evening,
believing an awful storm was coming to the mountains.
And come it did. At first, the Brier remembers,
it sounded like a train whistle far off in the night.
They felt it shake the ground as it came roaring.
Then it was big trucks roaring down an interstate,
a singing like a circle saw in oak,
a roil of every kind of noise, factory
whistles, cows bellowing, a caravan
of camper trucks bearing down
blowing their horns and playing loud tapedecks.
He recollects it followed creeks and roadbeds
and when it hit, it blew the tops off houses,
shook people out of bed, exposing them
to a sudden black sky wide as eight lanes of asphalt,
and dropped a hail of beer cans, buckets
and bottles clattering on their sleepy heads.
Children were sucked up and never seen again.
The Brier remembers the sky full of trucks
and flying radios, bicycles and tv sets, whirling
log chains, red wagons, new shoes and tangerines.
Others told him they saw it coming like a wave
of tumbling dirt and rocks and carbodies
rolling before the blade of a bulldozer,
saw it pass on by, leaving a wake
of singing commercials, leaving ditches
full of spray cans and junk cars, canned
biscuit containers, tinfoil pie plates.
Some told him it felt like a flooding creek
that leaves ribbons of polyethylene
hanging from willow trees along the bank
and rusty cardoors half silted over on sandbars.
It was that storm that dropped beat-up cars
all up and down the hollers, out in fields
just like a tornado that tears tin sheets
off tops of barns and drapes them like scarves
on trees in quiet fields two miles from any settlement.
And that’s why now so many old barn doors
up and down the mountains hang by one hinge
and gravel in the creek is broken glass.
That’s how the Brier remembers America coming
to the mountains. He was just a little feller
but he recollects how his Mama got
all of the younguns out of bed, recalls
being scared of the dark and the coming roar
and trying to put both feet into one leg
of his overalls.
They left the mountains fast
and lived in Is, Illinois, for a while
but found it dull country and moved back.
The Brier has lived in As If, Kentucky, ever since.
INTRODUCTION
Americans have an enduring faith in the power of development to improve the quality of our lives. At least since the late nineteenth century, we have associated progress toward the attainment of a better society with measures of industrial production, urbanization, consumption, technology, and the adoption of modern education and cultural values. Early in the twentieth century, we assumed that movement along the road to the good life was best left to the engine of private enterprise, but after the Great Depression and World War II, government played a larger role in assuring economic growth and incorporating minorities into the new American dream. Areas such as Appalachia were deemed to be backward and underdeveloped because they lacked the statistical measures of progress, both material and cultural, that had become the benchmarks of success in a modern world. For policy makers of the 1950s and 1960s, convinced of the appropriateness of the American path to development, those backwater places needed to be energized and brought into the supposed mainstream.
Appalachia has long played an ironic role in the drama of American development. Discovered or, more accurately, created by urban journalists in the years following the Civil War, the idea of Appalachia provided a counterpoint to emerging definitions of progress at the turn of the twentieth century. Those writers who disliked modernity saw in the region a remnant of frontier life, the reflection of a simpler, less complicated time that ought to be preserved and protected. Those who found advancement in the growth of material production, consumption, and technology decried what they considered the isolation and backwardness of the place and sought to uplift the mountain people through education and industrialization. The perceived economic and cultural deficiencies of Appalachia allowed entrepreneurs a free hand to tap the region’s natural resources in the name of development, but by midcentury the dream of industrial prosperity had produced the opposite in the mountains. Persistent unemployment and poverty set Appalachia off as a social and economic problem area long before social critic Michael Harrington drew attention to the region as part of the “other America” in 1962.1
As the United States matured into a global economic power in the late twentieth century, the effort to spread the development faith at home and abroad once again focused the nation’s attention on the region. The migration of millions of young whites from Appalachia and young blacks from the Deep South into the cities of the Midwest added to the congestion and poverty of urban ghettoes, and the shocking scenes of rural blight captured by