Part Two: Settlement and the Frontier

They came down the Great Wagon Road — through the Shenandoah Valley, through the gaps, into the hollows — and they came for reasons as old as migration itself. Land. Escape. Opportunity. Sometimes just the next valley over, because the one they were in had gotten too crowded or too expensive or too full of people telling them what to do. They were Scotch-Irish and German and English and Welsh, and among them — in nearly every wagon train, on nearly every settlement tract — were African Americans, enslaved and free, whose presence in the mountains has been systematically erased from the story for two hundred years.

The conventional narrative of Appalachian settlement is a tale of hardy Scotch-Irish pioneers carving homesteads out of wilderness. There is truth in it, but it is nowhere near the whole truth. The mountains were not empty — Chapter 4 made that clear. The settlers were not all one ethnicity. And the economy they built was not the pure self-sufficiency of myth but a complicated blend of subsistence farming, barter, cash exchange, and global market participation. The man growing ginseng in a West Virginia hollow in 1790 was connected, through a chain of traders, to buyers in Canton, China. The woman spinning flax in a one-room cabin was producing textiles that entered a regional exchange economy. Isolation was real, but it was always relative, never absolute.

Part Two covers roughly a century of settlement — from the first waves of migration in the mid-1700s through the early decades of the republic — and it asks you to look past the frontier mythology to see the complex, diverse, often contradictory reality of early Appalachian life. Six chapters. Six angles on the same landscape.

The first question is simply who came and why. The Scotch-Irish story is important, but so is the German story, and the English story, and above all the Black story — the enslaved people who cleared land, worked salt furnaces, and built the infrastructure of settlement without being credited for any of it. The second question, often avoided entirely, is whether there was slavery in Appalachia. There was. Not on the scale of the cotton South, but it was present in every state, and its erasure from regional memory was deliberate and served the interests of those who wanted to imagine the mountains as a white Eden untouched by America's original sin.

Then there is the matter of how people actually lived — the frontier economy that was neither pure subsistence nor pure market but something in between. The churches that were not just places of worship but the social infrastructure holding isolated communities together. The women whose labor — agricultural, domestic, medical, economic — was essential to survival and almost never recorded. And finally, the moment when mountain people first collided with the authority of a distant government: the American Revolution and, more revealingly, the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794, when federal troops marched into western Pennsylvania to collect a tax that mountain farmers considered an assault on their livelihood and their liberty.

That confrontation — local autonomy against centralized power, mountain people against a government that seemed to serve interests far away — is a pattern that will repeat throughout this book, from the coalfield labor wars to the War on Poverty to the politics of the twenty-first century. It begins here, on the frontier, with whiskey and fury and a deep conviction that the people making the rules had never set foot in the hollows where those rules would land.

Chapters in Part Two

  • Chapter 5: Who Came to the Mountains? — Scotch-Irish, German, English, and African migration into Appalachia. The Great Wagon Road. Push and pull factors. Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road. The diversity that the "Scotch-Irish thesis" has obscured.

  • Chapter 6: Slavery in the Mountains — The hidden history of Black Appalachia. Slavery at salt works, iron furnaces, and small farms. Demographic patterns by subregion. Free Black communities. Why the erasure has been so thorough and whose interests it served.

  • Chapter 7: The Frontier Economy — Subsistence, trade, ginseng, salt, iron, livestock. The myth of pure self-sufficiency versus the evidence of market integration. Whiskey as currency. Women's home production as economic engine.

  • Chapter 8: Religion, Community, and Culture in Early Appalachia — Baptist and Methodist traditions, camp meetings, shape-note singing, folk medicine, ballads, quilting. Churches as the social infrastructure of isolated communities.

  • Chapter 9: Women on the Frontier — Gender, labor, and survival. Agricultural work, spinning, midwifery, herbal medicine. Mary Draper Ingles and the captivity narrative. The tension between the "helpless frontier woman" myth and the evidence of extraordinary agency.

  • Chapter 10: Revolution, Republic, and the Whiskey Rebellion — The Battle of Kings Mountain, the Overmountain Men, the State of Franklin, and the 1794 Whiskey Rebellion. The first confrontation between mountain communities and federal authority — and the pattern it established.

Chapters in This Part