As one drives through the national forests, it is THE difficult to realize that only fifty years ago much of this land was still being farmed. As late as the 1930s, cultivated fields straggled up the slopes of hills, DECLINE ridges, and mountains throughout Southern Appala­ chia. At that time, most of the land was still owned by farm families and by private timber, coal, and OF railroad companies.' The region hosted one of the best remaining examples of forest farming-a kind of slash-and-burn farming in temperate forests that FOREST had characterized much of American frontier agri­

culture a century earlier. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/foreconshist/article/27/1/18/571934 by guest on 24 September 2021 FARMING Kentucky is often regarded as the quintessential Southern Appalachian state, containing great ex­ panses of the Cumberland Plateaus as well as the IN Highland Rim. Although much of the latter is still agricultural land, the Cumberland Plateaus of Ken­ tucky experienced rapid industrialization during the SOUTHERN early twentieth century, when timber and coal com­ panies began competing with farming for forestland. During the mid-twentieth century, public forests APPALACHIA supplanted agriculture and extractive industries in much of the Cumberlands. Thus, in Kentucky we can view in microcosm a wider process that occurred by John Solomon Otto throughout Southern Appalachia as farming, min­ ing, and forestry competed for use of the land surface during the twentieth century. At the turn of the century, agriculture still domi­ nated Southern Appalachian economic life. Agricul­ ture in the region ran the gamut from intensive commercial farming to extensive subsistence farm­ out hern Appalachia-the Cumberland-Alle­ ing.' Whether a farmer engaged in commercial or subsistence-oriented agriculture depended largely gheny Plateaus, the Blue Ridge Mountains, the Great Valley, and the Highland Rim­ upon his access to reliable transportation, such as S improved roads and railways.' contains one of the temperate world's largest mixed deciduous forests.' In Southern Appalachia, hard­ In the Great Valley, for example, farmers with woods such as yellow poplars predominate at lower access to rail transport could raise money crops and elevations, oaks and hickories prevail on slopes and produce for sale. Many acquired spacious dairy barns, prize draft animals, gangplows, commercial ridges, and conifers appear on drier sites and higher fertilizers, and even tractors-all the accoutrements elevations," Today, much of this huge woodland is of modern intensive commercial agriculture." When preserved in carefully maintained public lands such as the Daniel Boone, Jefferson, Pisgah, and Nanta­ hala national forests.

3Charles D. Lewis, "Government Forests and the Mountain Problem," Mountain Life and Work 6 (Ianuary 1931): 8. 4U. S. Department of Agriculture, Report of the Secretary of 'Southern Appalachia is defined in John Fraser Hart, "Land Agriculture in Relation to the Forests, Rivers, and Mountains of Rotation in Appalachia," GeographicalReview 67 (April 1977): 148; the Southern Appalachian Region, Senate Document no. 84 John C. Campbell, The Southern Highlander and His Homeland (Washington: GPO, 1902), pp. 25-26; L. C. Gray, "Economic (1921; reprint edition, Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, Conditions and Tendencies in the Southern Appalachians as 1969), p. 10. Indicated by the Cooperative Survey," Mountain Life and Work 9 2N. Bayard Green, "Man and the Apalachian Wilderness," in Guly 1933): 10. Mountain Heritage, ed. by B. B. Maurer (Morgantown, West 5SeeSamuel P. Hays, "Modernizing Values in the History of the Virginia: Morgantown Printing, 1974), pp. 7-9; Committee of the United States," Peasant Studies 6 (April 1977): 71; Colin Clark and Southern Appalachian Section, "A Forest Type Classification for Margaret Haswell, The Economics of Subsistence Agriculture (New the Southern Appalachian Mountains and the Adjacent Plateau York: St. Martin's Press, 1970), pp. 191-92. and Coastal Plain Regions," Journal of Forestry 24 (October 1926): 6Arthur W. Spaulding, The Men of the Mountains (Nashville: 675-80. Southern Publishing Association, 1915), pp. 62-63.

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At the turn of the century, agriculture still dominated the Southern Appalachian economy. The 1934 photo taken in Wise County, Virginia (top), demonstrates the technique of forest farming common in the more isolated mountain areas. Pasture and cornfields occupy the lower slopes, while timber (largely mixed oak) grows higher up. The far ridge suggests fields returning to forest fallow. The mountainous expanse in the lower left photo (now part of the Jefferson National Forest in Virginia) is typical of the terrain that made farming such a precarious livelihood in Southern Appalachia. The map indicates important subregions. Top: U. S. Forest Service photo by Robert Winters. FHS Collection; left: U. S. Forest Service photo. FHS Collection; map furnished by author

DECLINE OF FOREST FARMING 19 a cover of weeds, bush, and grass and thus recovered sufficient fertility to permit cropping for a few more years. The practice was known as bush fallowing-a form of shifting cultivation wherein fields were fallowed for several years (or until covered with "bush") before being cultivated again.' Though bush fallowing permitted Pennyroyal farmers to raise crops with little use of commercial fertilizers, only half of the land could be cultivated in anygiven year. But when geographer D. H. Davis studied land use in the more isolated and mountainous Cumberland

Plateaus of eastern Kentucky, he found a rather Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/foreconshist/article/27/1/18/571934 by guest on 24 September 2021 different agricultural regimen. During the early twentieth century, railroads began penetrating the Kentucky Cumberlands, but they generally serviced the coal mines and logging camps in the mountain valleys and not the agricultural settlements. For many Kentucky mountain farmers, seasonal paths along streams remained the only link to the larger American economy. Given the poor roads and limited access to railroads, many farmers in the Cumber­ lands practiced subsistence-oriented farming, plant­ ing their fields in corn-a crop that either could be consumed by farm families or used to fatten surplus livestock for sale. Despite the importance of corn, only a fraction of the total acreage of a farm was cropped in corn at any given time; most of the acreage remained "unimproved" woodlands. In contrast to Pennyroyal farms, where about 10 percent of the total acreage was forest, as much as 60 to 75 percent of the total acreage on mountain farms was woodlands, while only 25 to 40 percent of the total land was "improved." Moreover, only half of the improved A 1953 Forest Service diagram indicates land use on a North Carolina mountainfarm; in this case, cultivated land was actually cultivated at any time. The fields had been abandoned recently. Forest farming remainder was "abandoned fields" used as rough typically required as much as 60 to 75 percent of the pasture "until the forest again takes possession land left in forest fallow. Rapid natural reforestation fully." Thus, most farmers were practicing a system restored nutrients to the soil so that the land could be of "forest fallowing"-constantly shifting'Tciiltiva­ cleared and cultivated once again. tion to return fields to fallow for two or more decades Robert E. Dils, Influence of Forest Cutting and Mountain Farming . .. (1953) (or until covered with forest) before being cultivated again," geographer Carl Sauer studied land-use patterns in the Kentucky "Pennyroyal" of the Highland Rim in the 1920s, he found that farmers with access to "Carl O. Sauer, "Geography of the Pennyroyal: A Study of the transportation typically raised tobacco and wheat for Influence of Geology and Physiography upon the Industry, sale, while smaller, more isolated farmers tended to Commerce, and Life of the People," Kentucky Geological Survey, raise only corn for home consumption. On commer­ Series VI, vol. 25 (Frankfort: Kentucky Geological Survey, 1927), pp. 154,159,163,201; EsterBoserup, TheConditions ofAgricultural cial Pennyroyal farms, tobacco usually occupied 5 to Growth (Chicago: Aldine, 1965), p. 15. 10 percent; wheat, 20 percent; corn, 30 percent; and BD. H. Davis, "A Study of the Succession of Human Activities in woodlands, 10 percent of the total acreage. The the Kentucky Mountains, a Dissected Highland Area," Journal of remainder lay in pasture and fallow. Tobacco in Geography 29 (March 1930): 95, 97-99; B. H. Schockel, "Changing particular was a demanding crop, so farmers Conditions in the Kentucky Mountains," Scientific Monthly 3 (August 1916): 115-18; D. H. Davis, "The Geography of the Moun­ practiced land fallowing to maintain their soil tains of Eastern Kentucky," KentuckyGeological Survey,Series VI, productivity and crop yields. They allowed old fields vol. 18 (Franfort: Kentucky Geological Survey, 1924), pp. 31,33, to lay as fallow pasture until the land accumulated 61-62; Boserup, Conditions of Agricultural Growth, p. 15.

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Mountain farmers cultivated both the rich valley soils and the less fertile and more easily eroded slopes. Cornfields once extended to the top of the ridge on this farm in Lee County, Virginia. Inthis 1934 photograph, however, a vigorous stand of yellow-poplar (Liriodendron tulipi/era) has reclaimed the ridgetop, while the slope, usedfor pasture, gradually returns to cedar. U. S. Forest Service photo by Robert Winters. FHS Collection

In the Cumberland Plateaus, Davis found that these agricultural techniques may be traced to the farmers grew corn in the valleys as well as on the British-American pioneers who first occupied mountain slopes and ridges: "The more desirable Southern Appalachia during the late eighteenth and and deeper alluvial [valley] soils naturally give better early nineteenth centuries. The forest farming yields than do the thin and often sandy soils of the practices of the Appalachian pioneers represented a ridges, but with minor variations, the same crops are synthesis of native American, Scottish, and Irish raised on both soil types." Since the valley soils were agricultural techniques. The burning of under­ richer in nutrients and were less susceptible to growth, girdling of trees, and forest fallowing had erosion, fields could be cultivated for many years or once been practiced by native American cultivators. until all traces of the former forest cover-even the Corn, the preferred mountain crop, was a native stumps-were removed. Such valley lands, however, American cultigen. The practice of farming the were very limited in extent and thus were at a narrow mountain valleys, however, may have drawn premium. Farmers found it necessary to also bring from both native American and Scottish traditions. the less fertile and more easily eroded slopes and Native Americans had traditionally cleared their ridges under temporary cultivation. They cleared fields along creek and river bottoms; in addition, fields by burning the undergrowth and by girdling some Scottish farmers had tilled the alluvial soils, or the bark on trees so the sap could not rise to nourish haugh land, along streams that were enriched by the branches. In this fashion, the dying trees could winter floods. The custom of farming hillside slopes be removed at leisure. When the hillside fields may have derived from Scottish and Irish "outfield" declined in fertility, or when the soils eroded, cultivation-the clearing of temporary fields from farmers turned the old fields out to pasture, allowing fields to gradually revert to forest." Although Davis did not discuss the historical 9Davis. "Geography of the Mountains of Eastern Kentucky," origins of forest farming in the Kentucky mountains, pp. 61, 64, Plate XVIII.

DECLINE OF FOREST FARMING 21 marginal lands, taking crops until yields declined. ballads, be regaled with folktales about the super­ and turning out the old fields to serve as pasture." natural, and view cornfields dotted with girdled trees. Given this context, forest farming with its he survival of forest-fallowing or slash-and-burn cycle of fields. fallow. and forest was perceived as T farming in the forests is rather well docu­ another survival from the pioneer days." Yet, to mented, thanks to "outside" interest in Southern dismiss forest farming as a remnant of the past is to Appalachia during the nineteenth and early twen­ overlook the advantages that it offered to mountain tieth centuries. A series of family feuds. including farmers who lacked capital and who confronted such the famous Hatfield-McCoy vendetta, focused agricultural limitations as unseasonable frosts. national attention on the region and its quaint nutrient-poor soils, and steep slopes. Slash-and-burn folkways. Appalachia was "discovered" by journal­ farming was highly adapted to the climate, topog­

ists and travelers. who were soon followed by raphy. and forest conditions of the Southern Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/foreconshist/article/27/1/18/571934 by guest on 24 September 2021 missionaries. educated folklorists. sociologists. geog­ Appalachians. raphers, agronomists. and foresters. From the 1870s Since poor transportation provided only limited to the 1930s. a great outpouring of popular and commercial outlets, many mountain farmers re­ scholarly literature on the Southern Appalachians tained a self-sufficient agriculture that was based described the landscape as well as the lifeways of the on corn cropping and forest fallowing. Given their inhabitants. Inspired by outside interest in Appala­ meager cash incomes and financial resources. most chia. some native mountaineers also published mountain farmers could not acquire the latest accounts of local lite," Perhaps the best documented agricultural equipment and techniques. Even portion of Southern Appalachia was the Cumberland commercial fertilizers were priced beyond the means Plateaus area of eastern Kentucky. Few who wrote of most mountaineers. During the early twentieth about mountain life failed to comment on the local century, fertilizers often retailed for more than $23 agriculture, since farming obviously intruded upon a ton. In fact, fertilizers were so expensive that most landscape, provided subsistence for the bulk of the farmers throughout the South used commercial population, and competed with extractive indus­ manures only on their money crops-tobacco and tries-notably logging and coal mining-for land. cotton-and rarely on their corn crops. Even so, forests, and labor." Whether written by travelers, many southern farmers went deeply into debt to pay scholars. or local inhabitants. these early descrip­ their yearly fertilizer bills. The Kentucky mountain tions of Appalachian agriculture delineated features farmers wisely avoided undue expense and in­ of slash-and-burn cultivation that are still found debtedness by raising corn-a crop that offered today among tropical forest farmers. reliable yields without fertilization and could be Visitors to the region noted that forest farming grown with little expense on fields claimed from provided the subsistence base for a way of life that unimproved woodlands." often included such traits as log cabins, log barns. By burning the undergrowth and girdling trees. split-rail fences. homemade furniture, and even mountain farmers could quickly clear new fields on homespun garments-all the familiar attributes of the forested slopes. Although these partially cleared pioneer life. 1;~~ surprisingly. scholars often felt as if fields. colloquially called "deadenings," impressed they had been transported back to the time of Daniel outside observers as evidence of agricultural sloven­ Boone, Davy Crockett, and young Abe Lincoln. liness. deadenings offered farmers a means of coping Several proclaimed the Kentucky Cumberlands to be with an unpredictable climate in which frosts could a "retarded frontier" that still bore the stamp of the occur during ten months of the year. The air eighteenth century. The mountains were regarded as an isolated enclave of pioneer culture. where one could hear archaic words, listen to traditional 13See, for example, George E. Vincent, "A Retarded Frontier," American Journal of Sociology 4 (Iuly 1898): 1-20; Ellen Churchill Semple, "The Anglo-Saxons of the Kentucky Mountains: A Study in Anthropogeography," Geographical Journal 17 (Iune 1901): l°For the cultural antecedents of mountain farming, see Hart, 588-623; William Goodell Frost, "The Southern Mountaineer: Our "Land Rotation in Appalachia," p. 151;]. S. Otto and A. M. Burns, Kindred of the Boone and Lincoln Type," AmericanMonthlyReview "Traditional Agricultural Practices in the Arkansas Highlands," of Reviews 21 (March 1900): 308-11; Horace Kephart, Our Southern Journal of American Folklore 94 (April-June 1981): 182-83. Highlanders (New York: Outing Publishing Co., 1913), pp. 37-38; llJames C. Klotter, "The Black South and White Appalachia," James Watt Raine, The Land of Saddle-bags: A Study of the Journal of American History 66 (March 1980): 832-33; Charlotte T. Mountain People of Appalachia (Richmond: Presbyterian Com­ Ross, ed., Bibliography of Southern Appalachia (Boone. North mittee of Publication, 1924), pp. 28, 30. Carolina: Appalachian Consortium Press, 1976). 14Rosser H. Taylor, "Fertilizers and Farming in the Southeast, 12Everett E. Edwards, References on the Mountaineers of the 1840-1950: Part II: 1900-1950," North Carolina Historical Review 30 Southern Appalachians, U. S. Department of Agriculture, Biblio­ (October 1953): 491-95, 510-12; Davis, "Geography of the graphical Contributions no. 28 (Washington: GPO. 1935). Mountains of Eastern Kentucky," pp. 67-68.

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Since forest farming provided only a subsistence crop, many mountain farmers supplemented their incomes by occa­ sional work in the small "peckerwood" mills that dotted Southern Appalachia. The hardwood growth, so crucial to the cycle of farm-pasture-forest fallow, thus added a more commercial dimension to the region's forest economy. FHS Collection currents generated between deadenings and the among the standing dead trees. After a few seasons, neighboring woods fostered the formation of dews the dead trees could be removed by calling on and fogs, thus often saving corn crops from untimely neighbors for a "log-rolling"-the formation of a frosts." communal work group to fell, pile, and burn the In addition to unseasonable frosts, the climate of trees." Burning the forest growth not only released Southern Appalachia was characterized by heavy nutrients present in the underbrush and trees, but yearly rainfall that leached minerals from the the heat from fires killed insect pests and weeds. And mountain slopes, creating nutrient-poor soils. Trees since the forest vegetation was removed over a living on Appalachian soils extended complex root period of time, the root networks of the girdled dead networks in order to collect minerals. Thus, most of trees helped retain the thin topsoil for a few seasons the nutrients were locked up in the living vegetation, of cultivation, even on steep mountain slopes." not in the soils. Nutrients could be restored to the The most laborious aspect of forest farming was soils, however, by burning the forest cover, thereby the clearing of new fields from woodlands to replace releasing minerals in the form of fertilizing ash for the old fields turned out to forest fallow. This task, the forthcoming corn crops." In the mountains, nevertheless, was lightened by reliance on com­ farmers often removed forest vegetation in two munal work groups and the use of fire. Since fire also stages. During the first season, workers burned the released nutrients locked up in the forest growth, undergrowth and girdled the trees, planting crops even the poorest soils were enriched for a few seasons. And since newly cleared fields required little tillage, even areas with thin soils and rugged 15W. R. Thomas, Life Among theHillsandMountainsofKentucky (Louisville: Standard Printing Co., 1926), pp. 27·28; U. S. Bureau of Agricultural Economics et al, Economic and Social Problems and Conditions of the Southern Appalachians, U. S. Department of Agriculture, Miscellaneous Publications no. 205 (Washington: GPO, 1935), p. 9; R. W. Lang, "The Natural Environment and 17See Reportofthe Secretary ofAgriculture,p. 58; Oren F. Morton, Subsistence Economy of the McKees Village Site," Pennsylvania Land of the Laurel: A Study of theAlleghanies (Morgantown, West Archaeologist 38 (December 1968): 53. Virginia: Acme Publishing Co., 1903),pp. 54,64; William A. Nesbitt 16See Economic and Social Problems, p. 10; Soil Survey Staff, and Anthony Netboy, "The History of Settlement and Land Use in Soil Taxonomy, Soil Conservation Service, Agricultural Handbook the Bent Creek Forest," Agricultural History 20 (April 1946): 123. no. 436 (Washington: GPO, 1975), pp. 412·13, 421, 428; Donald 18See Clark and Haswell, Economics of Subsistence Agriculture, Steila, The Geography of Soils: Formation, Distribution, and p. 42; Arthur Keith, "Topography and Geology of the Southern Management (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1976), Appalachians," Mountain Life and Work 4 (October 1928): 26; p. 143; Clark and Haswell, Economics of Subsistence Agriculture, Harold Lutz and Robert Chandler, Forest Soils (New York: John pp.40-41. Wiley and Sons, 1946), p. 455.

DECLINE OF FOREST FARMING 23 terrain were brought under temporary cultivation.w In the mountains, homemade plows (such as "bull­ tongues") and hoes sufficed for cultivating corn crops." Requiring little labor, no fertilizer, and few tools, forest farming substituted abundant forest­ lands for scarce capital.

espite these advantages, forest farming placed a D ceiling on agricultural productivity. Davis found that less than a third of the acreage on Kentucky mountain farms was actually cultivated at

any given time. Most of the land was forest, fallow The bare slope on the Tennessee ridge above shows Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/foreconshist/article/27/1/18/571934 by guest on 24 September 2021 pasture, or old fields undergoing gradual reforesta­ evidence of the severe erosion that ultimately led tion. After being cultivated until crop yields declined mountain farmers to abandon their clearings alto­ gether. The trees on the right side of the 1912 photo or the soils eroded, old fields were turned out to have been girdled and new plantings have been es­ "rest," serving as scrub pasture until finally giving tablished beneath them. Demographic pressures and rise to mixed hardwood forest. After an old field was competing forms of land use eventually outmoded such reforested, it could be cleared and farmed anew. But expansive farming practices. photo album. FRS Collection if the field was again cultivated before reforestation and restoration of nutrients in the forest growth was only 60 percent of the total land in Southern Appala­ completed, then declining yields, soil exhaustion, chia was still owned by farm families, and only 14 and severe erosion resulted. Since reforestation of percent of the land was planted in harvestable old fields could take decades, farmers were con­ crops." stantly clearing new fields in order to replace the The problem of diminishing agricultural land was land turned out to forest fallow. And since the exacerbated by the practice of partible inheritance, reforestation of old fields lagged far behind the or dividing family lands among all the heirs. This clearing of new fields, the continued success of practice allowed the heirs to pursue farming as a Appalachian forest farming required a plentiful way of life, but it steadily subdivided the agri­ supply of fresh woodlands to provide new corn cultural land, increasing the number of farms and fields." decreasing their average size and productivity. In Appalachian farmers fortunately lived in the 1880, there were about 35,000 family farms in the midst of a huge mixed deciduous and coniferous Kentucky mountains. Forty years later, there were forest. One government survey estimated that three­ more than 71,000. The average farm in the Kentucky fourths of Southern Appalachia was still forested as mountains in 1880 was 176 acres. If no more than a late as 1911. As early as the 1880s, however, timber third of a farm's acreage could be cultivated at a and coal mining companies began acquiring forest­ time, such a farm would have provided less than 58 land, and by the 1920s, private companies had gained acres of cropland. By 1920, however, the typical control of thousands of acres of valley lands and mountain farm was only 83 acres in size, providing mountain slopes. Entire valleys were given over to less than 27 acres of cropland. As mountain farms railroads, coal mines, and coal towns, while forested declined in size, their productivity also declined, mountain slopes were denuded to provide timbers for either as a function of smaller cultivated plots or the mines and lumber for the coal towns. By 1930, more rapid rotation of previously tilled fields. Writing in 1927, one observer found that the typical Kentucky mountain farm contained about 37 acres of unimproved woodlands, 23 acres of fallow, and 19See Boserup, Conditions of Agricultural Growth, pp. 29-30; Robert McC. Netting, Cultural Ecology (Menlo Park, California: Benjamin Cummings Publishing Co., 1977), pp. 61-62. 2°Spaulding, Men of the Mountains, p. 66; Samuel H. Thompson, The Highlanders of the South (New York: Eaton and Mains, 1910), 22Glenn, Denudation and Erosion, pp. 8-9; Ronald D. Eller, p. 30; Report of the Secretary of Agriculture, p. 57. "Industrialization and Social Change in Appalachia, 1880-1930: A 21See Davis, "Geography of the Mountains of Eastern Look at the Static Image," in Colonialism in Modern America: The Kentucky," p. 61; Willard Rouse Jillson, "Geology of Eastern Appalachian Case, ed. by Helen Mathews Lewis et al. (Boone,North Kentucky Soils," Mountain Life and Work 4 (October 1928): 13; Carolina: Appalachian Consortium Press, 1978), pp. 35·46; Harry Keith, "Topography and Geology of the Southern Appalachians," M. Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a p. 27; Leonidas Glenn, Denudation and Erosion in the Southern Depressed Area (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1963), pp. 98·99, Appalachian Region and the Monongahela Basin, U. S. Geological 144·49; Laurel Shackelford and Bill Weinberg, eds., Our Appala­ Survey, Professional Paper no. 72 (Washington: GPO, 1911), chia: An Oral History (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), pp. 133·55; pp. 11-12. Gray, "Economic Conditions," p. 9.

24 JOURNAL· OF FOREST HISTORY. JANUARY 1983 only 22 acres of cropland, much of which was "far restored. In the 1940s, U. S. Forest Service re­ from first quality."23 searchers studied the process of reforestation on Mountain farmers were attempting to feed a several experimental tracts in the Blue Ridge growing population on a diminishing land base. Mountains of western North Carolina. On one tract, Southern Appalachia had one of the highest birth they removed the forest growth but did not cultivate rates in the United States, for mountain families the land or permit cattle to graze the regenerating needed children to aid in the farm work. Larger vegetation. Within a decade, the plot was covered families, of course, increased the population with an immature hardwood forest whose largest pressures on the land. By 1910, population densities trees were only twelve to fifteen feet in height and in the Kentucky mountains had reached an average only three to three and a half inches in diameter. of forty-three persons per square mile. Traditional On another tract, the experimenters cleared the

agricultural techniques could no longer support the forest cover, cultivated successive corn crops with Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/foreconshist/article/27/1/18/571934 by guest on 24 September 2021 burgeoning rural population. During the next two "bull-tongue" plows, and exposed the soils to decades, many mountain families migrated to rainfall. They recorded soil losses approaching one Missouri, Texas, and Oklahoma, hoping to continue ton per acre per year. After a few years of cultivation their agricultural way of life as tenant farmers. and declining crop yields, they abandoned the corn­ Others abandoned farming altogether, settling in the fields to rough pasture, allowing cattle to graze on coal towns and logging camps of Southern the old fields. Browsing livestock, however, com­ Appalachia." pacted the soil, reducing its ability to absorb and During the Great Depression, some migrants retain rainwater. Soil losses on the rough pasture returned to the mountains to subsist on tiny hillside approximated three-fourths of a ton per acre per farms. About 400,000 farms could be found in the year. Thus, the cumulative effect of cropping and Appalachian mountains during the 1930s; half of grazing on cleared mountain slopes was severe soil them were less than fifty acres in size, and one­ erosion. The more severely a field was eroded, the fourth were smaller than twenty acres. Such tiny more slowly the forest growth recuperated. Refores­ farms could offer little more than space for a house, a tation was further delayed if farmers continued to corn patch of seven to ten acres, a few acres of small use the old fields as rough pasture, since grazing grains, a potato patch, and a vegetable garden. A livestock fed on tree sprouts and saplings. Refores­ viable balance between forest, fallow, and cultivated tation of badly eroded old fields could take decades." land was clearly impossible. Farmers could no longer clear new fields to replace old fields turned out to hanks to the slow reforestation of old fields, loss forest fallow. Soil exhaustion and severe erosion T of surplus lands to the extractive industries, and became common complaints on mountain farms." popula tion pressures on the remaining lands, forest The slow reforestation of fallow fields was farming became maladaptive in Southern Appala­ apparently the Achilles heel of Appalachian forest chia. Thousands of families lived on small mountain farming. Farmers cleared new fields from the forest farms, eking out a subsistence from eroding, more rapidly than old fields could be reforested and marginal lands. During the Great Depression, the failure of forest farming became more apparent as unemployed workers from the coal mines and sawmills swelled the ranks of mountain farmers. 23Hal Seth Barron, "A Case for Appalachian Demographic The plight of "submarginal" farmers attracted the History," Appalachian Journal 4 (Spring-Summer 1977): pp. 212-13; attention of government reformers who urged that Davis, "Geography of the Mountains of Eastern Kentucky," pp. mountain slopes should not be cultivated but rather 48-53; Thomas Cooper, "What is the Problem of Mountain Agri­ be reforested and incorporated into the public culture?" Mountain Life and Work 3 Guly 1927): 13. 24Schockel, "Changing Conditions," pp. 118-20; Josiah Henry forests." Combs, The Kentucky Highlanders from a Native Mountaineer Viewpoint (Lexington: J. L. Richardson and Co., 1913), pp. 43-44; Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberlands, p. 103;Shackelford and Weinberg, eds., Our Appalachia, pp. 193-209. 2sCratis D. Williams, "Who Are the Southern Mountaineers?" 26Robert E. Dils, Influence of Forest Cutting and Mountain Appalachian Journal 1 (Autumn 1972): 49-50; Alva W. Taylor, Farming on Some Vegetation, Surface Soil, and Surface Runoff "Sub-Marginal Standards of Living in the Southern Mountains," Characteristics, U. S. Forest Service, Southeastern Forest Experi­ Mountain Life and Work.14 (Iuly 1938): 13; U. S. Bureau of ment Station Paper no. 24 (Asheville, North Carolina, 1953), pp. 7, Agricultural Economics, Economic and Social Problems, p. 70; 17-18,20,23,25-26,48-52; Glenn, Denudation and Erosion, p. 9. J. Wesley Hatcher, "Appalachian America," in Culture in the South, 27V. S. Bureau of Agricultural Economics, Economic and Social ed. by W. T. Couch (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Problems, pp. 2, 5; W. D. Nicholls, "Families on Submarginal Press, 1934), p. 389; C. F. Clayton and W. D. Nicholls, Land Utili­ Land," Mountain Life and Work 10 (April 1934): 26-28; Taylor, zation in Laurel County, Kentucky, U. S. Department ofAgriculture, "Sub-Marginal Standards," pp. 12-13; Lewis, "Government Technical Bulletin no. 289 (Washington: GPO, 1932), pp. 86-88. Forests and the Mountain Problem," pp. 2-9.

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The Weeks Act of 1911 authorized federal purchase of forested watersheds to protect navigable streams in the East. Subsequently, much of the region formerly tilled by mountain farmers was surveyed for possible inclusion in new national forests. These four Forest Service surveyors investigated eastern Tennessee lands in 1912. The team's journal reports that the German mountaineering hat sported by the man second from right was "the envy of the natives." photo album. FHS Collection

Most national forests in the East traced their increased its forest holdings at the expense of origins to the Weeks Law of 1911, which authorized abandoned farmland. Between 1940 and 1960, almost the federal government to acquire lands in the 2 million people left the mountains of Southern forested watersheds of navigable streams. The Appalachia to seek jobs in the industrial cities of the passage of the Clarke-McNary Act of 1924 extended Midwest and South. Among the migrants were re­ federal acquisitions to lands that were primarily dundant workers from Appalachia's extractive useful for timber production rather than for water­ industries as well as marginal farmers who simply shed protection. By 1930, the Forest Service abandoned their eroded hillside farms." managed seven national forests in Southern Appala­ Forest industry firms acquired some abandoned chia, incorporating more than 2 million acres. The farmland in Southern Appalachia, but private com­ National Industrial Recovery Act (1933) and the panies preferred to purchase large contiguous tracts Emergency Relief Act (1935) permitted federal of forest. More of the abandoned farmland passed agencies to add thousands of acres of cutover and into the federal forests. By 1960, the nine national eroded lands to the public reserves." forests in Southern Appalachia contained more than When World War II and a booming national 11 million acres. And by 1970, there were more than economy precipitated a new wave of out-migration 14 million acres of federal forest in the mountain from Southern Appalachia, the federal government

29James Brown and George Hillery, Jr., "The Great Migration, 1940·1960,"in The Southern Appalachian Region: A Survey, ed. by 28W. N. Sparhawk, "The History of Forestry in America," in Thomas Ford (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1962), Trees: The Yearbook of Agriculture, 1949 (Washington: USDA and pp. 54-78; Gordon F. Dejong, "Ebb in the Exodus?" Mountain Life GPO, 1949), pp. 711-13; Guy and Candy Carawan, Voices from the and Work 45 (October 1969): 8; R. N. S. Harris et aI., Cropland Mountains (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1975),p. xi; American Forest Reversion in the South, Department of Agricultural Economics, Products Industries, Government Land Acquisition (Washington, Agricultural Economics Information Series no. 100(Raleigh: North 1965), pp. 5-6. Carolina State College, 1963), pp. 44-47.

26 JOURNAL OF FOREST HISTORY. JANUARY 1983 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/foreconshist/article/27/1/18/571934 by guest on 24 September 2021

Since passage of the Weeks Law, more than 14 million acres of mountainous land have been purchased for inclusion in the federal forests of the region. Above, White Oak Creek provides waterpower for a small mill on the Nantahala National Forest of North Carolina. U. S. Forest Service photo. FRS Collection region." only 35,300 acres in 1974. In much of contemporary Coal companies also expanded their holdings at Appalachia, agriculture is presently confined to the the expense of marginal Appalachian farmland when larger valleys, where transportation as well as they introduced strip mining after World War II. terrain permit intensive commercial agriculture Bulldozers, power shovels, and trucks could remove based on livestock, grains, and tobacco. Commercial the overburden covering coal seams at a fraction of fertilizers and modern machinery have become the cost of underground mining. Strip mining, none­ commonplace." theless, removed soils and vegetation as well as Yet, even today, vestiges of forest farming may be overburden, transforming fields and forests into found in portions of Southern Appalachia. Numbers barren slopes. By 1964, about 800,000 acres in of small farmers continue to clear fields in wood­ Southern Appalachia had been disturbed by strip lands with axes and chain saws, plant corn for a mining; less than half of this total had been few years, and abandon old fields to bush pasture permanently restored." and forest. Forest fallowing still persists among Strip mining, the expansion of federal forests, and poorer farmers who lack the funds for commercial rural depopulation contributed to the loss of fertilizers and heavy equipment, for it offers an thousands of acres of marginal farmland that was inexpensive, though limited, means of maintaining once cultivated by forest farming techniques. The soil fertility on family farms.P 0 acreage of harvested cropland in the Cumberland­ Allegheny Plateaus of Kentucky, West Virginia, and Tennessee plummeted from 576,300 acres in 1939 to

32John Fraser Hart, "Cropland Concentrations in the South," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 68 (December 1978): 516; Eugene Mather and John Fraser Hart, "Agriculture in 3°John Fraser Hart, "Loss and Abandonment of Cleared Farm the Deep South and Border States," Tijdschrift uoor Economische Land in the Eastern United States," Annals of the Association of en Sociale Geografie 45 (September-October 1954): 164;J. Leonard American Geographers 58 (September 1968): 434; Harold A. Raulston and James Livingood, Sequatchie: A StoryoftheSouthern Gibbard, "Extractive Industries and Forestry," in The Southern Cumberlands (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1974), Appalachian Region: A Survey, p. 115; Carawan, Voices from the pp.224-26. Mountains, p. xi. 33Donald Lee Hochstrasser, "Possum Ridge Farmers: A Study in 31Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberlands, pp. 309-24; Gibbard, Cultural Change," (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Oregon, "Extractive Industries and Forestry," pp. 108-09; Hart, "Loss and 1963), pp. 130, 171-72; Hart, "Land Rotation in Appalachia," Abandonment of Cleared Farm Land," p. 429. pp. 148-66.

DECLINE OF FOREST FARMING 27