Case Study 1: William Goodell Frost and "Our Contemporary Ancestors"

The Fundraiser's Dilemma

In the winter of 1898, William Goodell Frost had a problem. He was the president of Berea College in Berea, Kentucky — an institution with a noble history and an empty treasury. Founded in 1855 by the abolitionist John G. Fee as the first interracial and coeducational college in the South, Berea had survived the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the violent backlash against integrated education to become one of the most important educational institutions in the Appalachian region. It served students — Black and white, poor and less poor — from the mountain counties of Kentucky and surrounding states, providing an education that was, for many of its students, the only pathway out of the subsistence economy.

But Berea needed money. Its campus was modest, its faculty underpaid, its facilities inadequate for the number of students who sought admission. The college depended on donations from wealthy philanthropists and church organizations in the Northeast — the same people who supported foreign missions, funded settlement houses in immigrant neighborhoods, and donated to the education of formerly enslaved people. These donors were generous, but they were also selective. They needed to be convinced that their money would make a difference, that the cause was urgent, and that the people being helped were deserving of help.

Frost understood this dynamic intimately. A graduate of Oberlin College and a Congregationalist minister, he had come to Berea in 1892 from a career in Northern academia and religious education. He was a skilled administrator, an earnest educator, and — most relevantly for this case study — a gifted fundraiser who understood what Northern audiences wanted to hear about the Southern mountains.

What they wanted to hear was a story.

The Invention of "Our Contemporary Ancestors"

In March 1899, Frost published an essay in The Atlantic Monthly — one of the most prestigious and widely read magazines in America — that would shape perceptions of Appalachia for over a century. The essay was titled "Our Contemporary Ancestors."

The argument was simple, vivid, and brilliantly crafted for its audience. Frost claimed that the mountain people of the South — the population that Berea College served — were not simply poor Americans in need of education. They were living relics of an earlier America. Isolated by the mountains from the currents of progress that had transformed the rest of the nation, they had preserved the speech, customs, folkways, and social structures of the colonial frontier — and, through it, of Elizabethan England itself. They were, literally, "our contemporary ancestors."

The implications of this argument were breathtaking. If mountain people were contemporary ancestors, then they were not merely pitiable. They were precious. They were living links to the nation's founding era, human time capsules whose continued existence was a matter of national heritage. Helping them was not charity. It was cultural preservation — a rescue mission to save something irreplaceable before the advancing forces of modernity destroyed it.

Consider the rhetorical genius of this framing. Frost took a population that most of his audience would have dismissed as backward, poor, and uninteresting and recast them as fascinating, valuable, and urgent. He transformed the mountain poor from objects of condescension into objects of admiration — admiration that was still thoroughly condescending, but condescension wrapped in enough romance and national sentiment to make wealthy donors feel good about opening their checkbooks.

What Frost Got Right — and What He Got Catastrophically Wrong

Frost was not entirely fabricating. Some elements of his argument had a basis in reality:

Dialect. Appalachian English did preserve archaic features — certain vocabulary, grammatical structures, and pronunciations — that had fallen out of use in other American dialects. Linguists have documented these survivals, and they are genuinely interesting from a scholarly perspective.

Ballads. The ballad tradition in the southern Appalachians did preserve songs — the so-called Child ballads — that had been carried from the British Isles by eighteenth-century settlers and maintained through oral tradition. The English folklorist Cecil Sharp would travel to the mountains in 1916–1918 specifically to collect these survivals, and his findings confirmed that the Appalachian ballad tradition was one of the richest repositories of English-language folk song in the world.

Craft traditions. Mountain communities did maintain craft traditions — weaving, quilting, basket-making, woodworking — that had deep historical roots and that had, in some cases, been abandoned or industrialized in other parts of the country.

But the leap from "some archaic features survive" to "these people are our contemporary ancestors" was not a legitimate inference. It was a distortion — a distortion that served Frost's fundraising needs but that had devastating consequences for the people it claimed to celebrate.

The distortion of language. Mountain dialect was not frozen Elizabethan English. It was a living, evolving language that had absorbed elements from multiple sources — Scots-Irish, German, African American, and Indigenous — and had adapted continuously to changing circumstances. The archaic features were real, but they existed alongside innovations, borrowings, and creative adaptations that were entirely contemporary. Treating mountain speech as a relic denied its vitality and creativity.

The distortion of culture. Mountain culture was not a preserved fossil of colonial life. It was a dynamic, adaptive culture that had responded to changing economic conditions, new technologies, population movements, and contact with the wider world for generations. Mountain people were not living in the past. They were living in the present, dealing with the same forces of industrialization and modernization that were transforming every other American community — and dealing with them in ways that were creative, strategic, and rational.

The distortion of agency. By casting mountain people as "ancestors," Frost denied them the one thing that mattered most: their status as contemporaries. If they were ancestors, they were objects of study and preservation — specimens to be examined, appreciated, and carefully managed. If they were contemporaries, they were fellow citizens with their own ideas, their own ambitions, their own capacity for self-determination, and their own right to define what they needed. The "contemporary ancestors" thesis was, at its core, a denial of Appalachian agency — a declaration that mountain people did not know what was best for themselves and needed to be told by people like Frost.

The Fundraising Machine

The practical impact of "Our Contemporary Ancestors" was immediate and enormous. The essay gave Frost — and the many reformers, educators, and missionaries who adopted his framework — a narrative that Northern donors found irresistible.

Frost toured the Northeast extensively, speaking to church groups, women's clubs, literary societies, and philanthropic organizations. His audiences were educated, affluent, Protestant, and primed by the local color literature to find Appalachia romantically fascinating. Frost gave them exactly what they wanted: a story about noble savages in need of rescue, told by a cultured, articulate intermediary who could translate the exotic mountain world into terms they understood.

The money flowed. Berea College's endowment grew substantially under Frost's presidency. New buildings were constructed. Scholarships were established. Programs were expanded. The material benefits to Berea's students — many of whom went on to successful careers in education, medicine, law, and public service — were real and significant.

But the cost of the narrative was also real. Every dollar raised under the "contemporary ancestors" banner reinforced the idea that mountain people were fundamentally different from — and fundamentally inferior to — the rest of America. Every speech Frost delivered, every article he published, every fundraising letter he mailed contributed to a definition of Appalachia that the people of Appalachia had no role in creating and no power to contest.

The fundraising imperative also created a perverse incentive structure. Frost and his imitators discovered that the most effective appeals were those that emphasized the most extreme poverty, the most dramatic isolation, and the most colorful evidence of "backwardness" in the mountain communities. Images of well-off mountain families in comfortable homes did not loosen purse strings. Images of barefoot children in front of dilapidated cabins did. The fundraising machine systematically selected for the most unrepresentative depictions of mountain life and presented them as the norm — a form of curated misrepresentation that the communities themselves could not control.

The Legacy

Frost's "contemporary ancestors" thesis did not remain an isolated argument in a single magazine essay. It became the foundational narrative for an entire institutional apparatus — settlement schools, mission organizations, denominational boards, educational foundations — that would shape the relationship between Appalachia and the rest of America for the next century.

The settlement school movement (examined in Case Study 2) was built directly on Frost's framework. The mission school movement operated on the same assumptions. When the federal government "discovered" Appalachian poverty in the 1960s and launched the War on Poverty, the language had changed — "contemporary ancestors" had become "yesterday's people," in Jack Weller's formulation — but the logic was identical: mountain people were culturally deficient, and the appropriate response was outside intervention aimed at changing their culture.

When J.D. Vance published Hillbilly Elegy in 2016, reviewers and politicians praised the book for its unflinching look at Appalachian "cultural dysfunction." Few recognized that Vance's argument — that mountain poverty was rooted in attitudes, values, and family structures rather than in economic exploitation — was the same argument Frost had made 117 years earlier, dressed in a memoir rather than an essay.

The "contemporary ancestors" thesis was wrong in 1899. It was wrong in 1965. It is wrong now. And it has been useful — useful to fundraisers, useful to politicians, useful to writers, useful to anyone whose interests are served by locating the cause of Appalachian poverty in the character of Appalachian people rather than in the structures that surround them — for every one of those years.

Understanding how a single essay in a single magazine issue could have such enduring power is a lesson in the mechanics of stereotype construction. Frost did not create the Appalachian stereotype single-handedly. But he gave it an intellectual respectability that the local color writers and newspaper sensationalists could not provide on their own. He made it possible to treat the condescension as concern, the patronization as preservation, and the denial of agency as an act of love. And that is the most durable form of stereotype — the one that convinces even its practitioners that they are doing good.

Discussion Questions

1. Frost was a genuinely dedicated educator whose work at Berea College provided real opportunities to real students. Does the material good accomplished by his fundraising justify the narrative he used to achieve it? Can harmful means produce genuinely good ends, and how should we evaluate the trade-off?

2. The "contemporary ancestors" thesis cast mountain people as passive objects of preservation rather than active agents of their own history. How does this framing compare to the way other marginalized groups — Indigenous peoples, immigrant communities, people in the Global South — have been described by outsiders claiming to help them?

3. Frost wrote for an audience of wealthy Northern donors. How did the expectations and desires of that audience shape the narrative he produced? Could he have told a more accurate story and still raised the money Berea needed?

4. The line from "Our Contemporary Ancestors" (1899) to Yesterday's People (1965) to Hillbilly Elegy (2016) is remarkably direct. What makes the "cultural deficiency" explanation of Appalachian poverty so persistent? Why do audiences in each generation find this explanation more appealing than structural explanations rooted in economic exploitation?