Appalachia
THE MOUNTAIN REGION OF THESE UNITED STATES
Appalachia Culture
Appalachian culture is a way of life that dates back to the 1700s, when Europeans began immigrating to America in greater numbers.
The culture of Appalachia consists of art and crafts, food, myths and folklore, multiple ethnic influences (including African, German, and Native American), and an array of stereotypes.
It is a culture that essentially defined “Americana” as we know it today. And if your family has roots in Ireland, Scotland, or Germany, chances are good it’s a core aspect of your personal genetic heritage.
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Where is Appalachia?
Appalachia is a vast area that stretches from southern New York to north Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. It encompasses 420 counties across 13 states, spans 205,000 square miles, and is home to some 25 million people. Although it started in the states of North Carolina and Virginia, the culture spread quickly to other states after the Revolutionary War, as settlers began to explore outside the original 13 colonies.
Coal Mining History
Central Appalachia’s history is the story of coal. At its peak in the mid-20thcentury, mining employed more than 150,000 people in West Virginia alone, mostly in the state’s otherwise poor and rugged counties. For decades, the United Mine Workers of America, a muscular, strike-prone union that allied itself with Franklin Roosevelt to support the New Deal, anchored the solidly Democratic highlands where West Virginia meets eastern Kentucky and Virginia’s western-most tip. In 1921, during the fight to unionize the region’s mines, ten thousand armed miners engaged strike-breakers and an anti-union militia in a five-day gun battle in which more than a hundred people were killed. The Army arrived by presidential order and dispersed the miners.
Coal Mining Today
Today, after decades of mechanization, there are only about twenty thousand coal miners in West Virginia, and another sixteen thousand between Kentucky and Virginia. The counties with the greatest coal production have some of the region’s highest unemployment rates, between 10 and 14 percent. An epidemiological study of the American opiate overdose epidemic found two epicenters where fatal drug abuse leapt more than a decade ago: one was rural New Mexico, the other coal country.
Although jobs have disappeared, Appalachia keeps producing coal. Since 1970, more than two billion tons of coal have come from the central Appalachian coalfields.
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