Allen Boyer: “Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia” By Steven Stoll

*A previous version of this review was published in the Phi Beta Kappa Key Reporter.

On official maps, the mountains and poverty of Appalachia stretch from southwestern New York to northeastern Mississippi – from the watershed of the Hudson River to the backwaters of the Tallahatchie. Rather than measure elevation or income, however, Steven Stoll locates the region as a place in history:

Author Steven Stoll.

“The southern mountains are half a billion years old but Appalachia did not exist before the industrial invasion of those uplands during the nineteenth century. . . . It was created and constantly re-created by hunters and farmers of every ethnicity who employed the landscape for subsistence and exchange; by land-engrossing colonial elites; by corporate attorneys scheming to get hold of deeds; by investors wielding cadastral maps; by coal miners resisting company managers and starving on strike; by the social engineers of the New Deal; by the Appalachian Regional Commission; and by brokenhearted citizens watching beloved hollows buried by mountaintop-removal mining.”

Map of Appalachia.

This book is a history of Appalachia and a history of how we have visualized Appalachia. It is about how American business has dispossessed mountain people and how American culture has made that easy by mocking them.

In the narrative that Stoll hammers home, mountain people lived simply, but rarely starved. Mountaineers became impoverished only when they lost the ecological base upon which they lived – bottomlands where they raised crops, balds where they pastured cattle, hollows where they cut timber for cabins and firewood. Afterwards, they became poor enduringly, crushed to the bottom of a cash economy.

“Poverty on such a scale is only comprehensible historically,” Stoll warns; “nothing about the history of the southern mountains can be explained as social evolution.” Rather, the pervasive poverty of Appalachia is the other side of a rapacious industrial drive to make money out of the lands on which mountaineers live. “The central event in Ramp Hollow is the scramble for Appalachia, or the rapid onslaught of joint-stock companies to attain the rights and ownership needed to clear-cut the forests and dig out the coal.”

George Washington had squatters ejected from mountain land to which he held title. Alexander Hamilton imposed an impossible tax on rye whiskey and marched troops into the mountains to collect it. As the Gilded Age fired up, coal seams were discovered under West Virginia. Mountaineers had traded land among themselves. They had filed few deeds. Taking advantage of every gap in the record, land trusts challenged or bought up titles – getting hold of timber and mineral rights.

By 1890, mountaineers had been written off as “Hill-Billies,” poor, careless, and “natural,” given of course to drinking and gunplay, people too shiftless to step out of the way of progress. “Foresters, economists and New Dealers had a word for [their] farms: submarginal,” Stoll scathingly comments. Arnold Toynbee pronounced Appalachians a “melancholy spectacle . . . a people who have acquired civilization and then lost it.”

This stereotyping has denigrated mountain people and misled professors. It has meant that the bloodiest chapter in mountain history has been misunderstood – mistaken for a picturesque hillbilly squabble. The Hatfield-McCoy feud of the 1880’s was not a series of shoot-outs between backcountry families. It was the Appalachian version of a range war. In the hollows where the Norfolk & Western Railway was building branch lines, William Anderson “Devil Anse” Hatfield was a rough-edged businessman, an operator notorious for lawsuits and shady land deals. The gunmen who followed him came mostly not from his kith and kin, but from his logging crew.

Appalachia touches a dozen states but includes completely only one, West Virginia. It is in that state, outside Morgantown, in the valley of Ramp Hollow, that Stoll centers his book. Once a meadow where mountaineers gathered wild onions – close to Arthurdale in Scotts Run, where a New Deal “model town” experiment failed – the valley is a place of ruined cabins. Their lonely chimneys cast shadows over this book. If you seek a model for District Twelve of “The Hunger Games,” the most recent fictional vision of Appalachia, here it is.

Ramp Hollow surveys more than Appalachia. It is also a history of agrarians, people who subsist on family farms and shared common lands, and how they have been dispossessed. Stoll remembers other embattled agrarians: English copyholders resisting landowners as their American cousins resisted King George; freedmen in the Deep South, slaves no longer but forced by planters to grow cotton, a cash crop; modern West African villagers battling sugar company plans to turn ancient village communes into company towns.

Appalachia ends, ironically, where Yoknapatawpha starts. Lafayette County is not officially part of the region, although mountain country all but surrounds it. Marshall, Union, Lee, Pontotoc, and Yalobusha Counties are defined as Appalachia – so is even Panola County, which stretches out to the Delta.

Perhaps the Appalachian Regional Commission left out Lafayette County because William Faulkner’s fiction spoke of the Deep South, and not the mountains. Yet the story of Appalachia has one moral that any reader should retain: be ready to question claims of progress, particularly that progress can come only in one way.

In long years of research, Stoll sadly remarks, “I often came across an idea that amazed me but that I could not understand, the idea that historical progress required taking land away from agrarians and giving it to others.” He has exposed that pernicious makeweight justification in this outraged, learned, generous book.

Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia. Steven Stoll. Hill & Wang. 410 pages. $30.00.

Allen Boyer is a native of Oxford who lives and writes in Staten Island.