During the Depression, thousands of mountain families crowded together to subsist on poor land or to survive on the dole or on government work programs. Those who were able to return to the family farm were fortunate, for many who remained in the now neglected coal camps faced unemployment, hunger, and disease. Almost half of the mountain population laid claim to some kind of public assistance during the Depression, and Appalachia emerged as one of the most impoverished regions in the nation.3 The Resettlement Administration estimated that about one-fourth of the rural relief cases in the United States in 1935 were in the Appalachian South.4 Many mountain residents who had witnessed the arrival of the modern age and the transformation of the land and the economy faced the future with uncertainty and frustration. As one Tennessee mountain farmer lamented, “The real old mountaineer is a thing of the past, and what will finally take our place, God only knows.”5
By 1940 a pattern of growth without development had settled over Appalachia. The region had experienced rapid expansion in jobs and in the capacity to extract its natural resources, but growth had come without the development of an internal capacity to sustain prosperity. With the outbreak of war in Europe and preparation for war at home, the demand for mountain labor rose again, and once more Appalachia’s resources became vital to the nation. The expansion of war industries stimulated demand for Appalachian coal and timber, and the new aircraft plants, steel mills, ordnance factories, and uniform manufacturers clamored for additional workers. As early as 1938, coal production began to recover as operators reorganized and consolidated companies in anticipation of wartime markets. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, a frenzy of production swept the industry as once idle mines were reopened and company towns reawakened.
The effect of war mobilization was to revive hope for a generation of mountain young people, a generation that had known only poverty and hard times. In rural areas farm prices recovered, and workers slowly returned to the mines and the mills, lessening the pressure on the land. Families and individuals migrated to defense jobs outside the mountains, and thousands of young men and women joined the armed forces. Sawmills that had not operated in years now hummed, turning out hardwood for building materials and military rifle stocks. New coal mines were opened and new sidetracks laid; abandoned tipples were repaired and painted and new mining equipment purchased. Company towns and county seats bustled with life, and a throng of mineral agents, timber buyers, and land developers invaded the region anew.
Much of the wartime boom was facilitated by government expenditures. Not only did federal contracts for ordnance and war materials stimulate production inside and outside the region, but government loans financed the expansion of critical industrial facilities. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation and other federal agencies, for example, helped to finance wartime conversion of the chemical industry in the Kanawha Valley of West Virginia and to underwrite the purchase of new mining machinery and loading equipment across the coalfields. The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) provided cheap electricity for the production of aluminum in east Tennessee and for making tents, uniforms, and blankets in North Carolina, Alabama, and Georgia. Throughout Appalachia the new public buildings and improved roads constructed by thousands of Works Progress Administration workers during the Depression provided critical infrastructure for the war effort.
The mountain population, moreover, responded to the call for national defense with enthusiasm. Even before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the attraction of military service and war industries jobs had begun to empty mountain public relief rolls of young men and mountain schools of some of their brightest students. Appalachian people had always been quick to serve their country in times of war, and enlistment rates in the region were among the highest in the nation during World War II. The war also provided an opportunity for escape from poverty and idleness. The promise of steady employment, higher wages, and better living conditions drew thousands into the armed services and into the defense plants of Chicago, Cincinnati, Dayton, Baltimore, and Norfolk. Companies from as far away as Michigan and Massachusetts recruited employees, including teenage boys and girls, from mountain hollows and transported them to mills and assembly lines in urban centers. When asked how he liked the army, one mountain youth responded, “Anything is better than what I had at home.” A year into the war, a mountain teacher reported, “The young manhood of our town has moved out almost en masse. . . . Never again can this section be the same.”6
Those who remained in the region suddenly found employment opportunities where none had existed a short time before. The revived coal mines, sawmills, and chemical plants quickly experienced a labor shortage and were forced to depend on older workers when the young men of the area were drafted or volunteered for service. Men in their forties and fifties who had entered the mines during the heyday of the first boom found themselves heading once again belowground or into some other kind of public work.
War mobilization helped to redistribute population within the region and to launch an out-migration from Appalachia that would stream millions of mountaineers into the nation’s urban centers over the next three decades. The movement of young people into the military and war industries and the return of families to the coal camps drained population from rural communities, renewing the process of decline that had begun at the turn of the century. Some rural agricultural areas experienced major difficulty in securing enough labor to sustain farm production, and many farmsteads were abandoned or only marginally maintained during the war.7 As families migrated to jobs in neighboring industrial counties or to nearby urban communities such as Lexington, Kentucky, and Knoxville, Tennessee, the population of rural farm communities declined proportionately.
A study of wartime migration in eastern Kentucky estimated that more than eighty-five thousand persons, almost 19 percent of the population, left the area between 1940 and 1942 alone. The decrease in population exceeded the gain for the entire previous decade and took 40 percent of the men between the ages of fifteen and thirty-four. Most of the decline was accounted for by the loss of farm people, with about half of the loss attributed to entering the armed services and the remainder to leaving for industrial work in the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes. The study determined that the out-migration had been largely one of young families and of individuals, especially young men. “Many heads of families,” it concluded, “have left their wives and children to carry on the farm operations.”8
While rural farm areas lost population, wartime recovery spurred unexpected growth in mountain county seats. These middle-class communities had stagnated during the Depression, but now local merchants, bankers, lawyers, and agents for outside companies flourished with the revival of activity in the outlying coal districts. Newly paved highways made possible by state and federal expenditures during the 1930s linked the county seats with each other and with the rapidly growing urban communities on the fringes of the mountains, and improved gravel roads constructed by the WPA stretched up the narrow valleys to the coal camps.9 Automobiles, whose numbers had expanded even during the Depression, now shuttled goods and people back and forth from these commercial centers, reducing the isolation of the once rail-dependent coal towns.
The improved highways also gave rise to a new form of mining enterprise, the truck mine, which would become ubiquitous in the southern Appalachian coalfields after the war. Rising wartime markets for coal enticed many local residents to open small mines on family-owned land or to lease seams of coal on the secondary spurs that jutted from the main ridges. The larger mining companies deemed the coal in these secondary spurs, being thinner and more remote from the tipples and railroads, to be unrecoverable, but with better roads and a booming market, these seams provided an opportunity for indigenous entrepreneurs. With as little as a one-thousand-dollar investment, a man could open a seam of coal at the outcrop, construct a wooden bin down the hillside with which to load the coal into trucks, and transport it to regional markets or rail-side tipples. These small operations, which generally employed only five or six men, could produce eighty to a hundred tons of coal a day and realize profits of close to a dollar on the ton for their owners.10
The federal Office of War Mobilization encouraged the production of more coal as a patriotic duty, and thousands of small operators took advantage of the artificial demand to open new mines. During the war the growth of such mines was phenomenal throughout the coalfields, but nowhere was it as prevalent as in eastern