Chapter 14: The "Discovery" of Appalachia — How Outsiders Invented a Region

"Appalachia was not a region that was discovered by the rest of America. It was a region that was invented by the rest of America — invented as backward, invented as a social problem, invented as a place that needed to be saved from itself. The invention served purposes that had nothing to do with the people who actually lived there." — Adapted from Henry Shapiro, Appalachia on Our Mind: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870–1920 (1978)

Learning Objectives

By the end of this chapter, you will be able to:

1. Trace the local color movement of the 1870s–1890s and its construction of Appalachia as an exotic region for Northern consumption
2. Analyze William Goodell Frost's "Our Contemporary Ancestors" thesis and explain its lasting influence on how Appalachia was perceived and treated
3. Describe the settlement school movement as simultaneously offering genuine educational opportunity and imposing cultural colonization
4. Apply Henry Shapiro's argument that Appalachia was "put on America's mind" as a social problem to be solved, and explain whose interests this construction served

The Moment of Invention

There is a particular kind of violence in being "discovered."

When Columbus "discovered" the Americas, millions of people were already living there. When Europeans "discovered" Australia, Aboriginal peoples had been there for sixty thousand years. The word "discovery" in these contexts does not describe the first arrival of human knowledge. It describes the moment when a powerful group decides that a less powerful group exists — and, in that deciding, begins to define them.

Something similar happened to Appalachia in the decades after the Civil War. The mountains had been settled for over a century. Hundreds of thousands of people were living in communities with churches, schools, courthouses, farms, and commercial enterprises. They voted in elections, fought in wars, sent their children to college, and participated in the national economy. They were not hidden, unknown, or lost. They were simply living their lives in the mountains, as their parents and grandparents had before them.

And then, in the 1870s and 1880s, the rest of America "discovered" them.

The discovery took the form of magazine articles, travel sketches, and short stories written by journalists and fiction writers who traveled into the Appalachian interior and reported back to readers in the Northeast and Midwest. These writers — collectively known as the local color movement — described the mountain people they encountered as strange, quaint, isolated, and frozen in time. They presented Appalachia not as part of modern America but as a window into America's past — a living museum where the folkways, speech patterns, and social structures of an earlier era had been preserved by geographic isolation.

This was the moment when "Appalachia" became a concept — not a geographic region but a social category, a label that carried meanings far beyond topography. And those meanings were not generated by the people who lived in the mountains. They were generated by the people who wrote about them, for audiences who would never visit, by writers who often spent only a few days or weeks in the region they claimed to understand.

This chapter tells the story of that invention. It is one of the most intellectually important chapters in this book, because the idea of Appalachia that was constructed in the 1870s–1920s is the foundation on which every subsequent stereotype, policy, and intervention has been built. To understand why Appalachia is perceived the way it is today — why the region is treated as a problem to be solved rather than a place to be understood — you must understand how it was put on America's mind in the first place.

The Local Color Writers: Selling Appalachia to the Nation

The local color movement was a literary phenomenon of the post-Civil War decades, roughly 1870–1900, in which American writers produced fiction and travel writing focused on the distinctive speech, customs, and landscapes of particular regions. Local color writing existed for every part of the country — Mark Twain's Mississippi, Bret Harte's California mining camps, Kate Chopin's Louisiana, Sarah Orne Jewett's New England. But the local color writing about Appalachia had a quality that set it apart from most of the others: it was not primarily written by people from the region, and it consistently portrayed its subjects as radically Other — as people fundamentally different from the readers consuming the stories.

The market for this writing was the great magazine industry of the Gilded Age. Publications like Harper's New Monthly Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, Scribner's Magazine, Lippincott's Magazine, and The Century Magazine catered to educated, middle-class readers primarily in the Northeast and urban Midwest. These readers had an appetite for stories about America's hinterlands — the frontier, the Deep South, the mountains — that combined the pleasures of travel writing with the frisson of encountering the exotic within the nation's own borders.

Appalachia was perfectly suited to this market. The mountains were close enough to the publishing centers of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia to be reached by a moderately adventurous writer, but remote enough to feel genuinely foreign. The people spoke a distinctive dialect, practiced customs that urban readers found quaint or alarming, and lived in a landscape that was both beautiful and (to outsiders) forbidding. A magazine writer could travel to the mountains, spend a few weeks gathering material, and return with copy that would satisfy readers' desire for the strange and the picturesque.

The Writers and Their Work

Several writers became particularly influential in shaping the image of Appalachia for the national audience.

Mary Noailles Murfree (1850–1922), who wrote under the pen name Charles Egbert Craddock, was among the first and most popular. A Tennessean from a prosperous family in Murfreesboro — not, herself, from the mountains — Murfree published a series of stories and novels set in the Great Smoky Mountains, beginning with In the Tennessee Mountains (1884). Her writing was atmospheric and richly detailed, but it consistently portrayed mountain people as primitive, superstitious, and trapped by their environment. Her characters speak in heavy dialect, rendered phonetically on the page in ways that emphasize their difference from standard English speakers. They feud, drink moonshine, distrust outsiders, and live in a world where nature is beautiful but human life is narrow and brutal.

Murfree's popularity was enormous. Her stories ran in The Atlantic Monthly and were collected into books that sold widely. For many American readers in the 1880s, her fiction was their only source of information about the Appalachian mountains, and they accepted her portrayals as realistic.

John Fox Jr. (1862–1919) was even more influential. A Virginian educated at Harvard, Fox set his novels in the Cumberland Mountains of Kentucky and Virginia. His most famous works — The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come (1903) and The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1908) — were bestsellers that shaped the national image of mountain people for a generation. Fox was more sympathetic than Murfree in some ways — his novels featured romance, beauty, and moments of genuine human warmth — but he fundamentally portrayed mountain people as backward, in need of education and civilizing influence, and destined to be transformed (for the better, in his telling) by the arrival of the outside world, represented by railroads, schools, and enlightened outsiders.

The Trail of the Lonesome Pine is particularly significant. Its plot centers on a romance between a mountain girl and an engineer who comes to the mountains with the railroad, and the novel's resolution involves the transformation of the mountain community by industrial development — a transformation presented as unambiguously positive. The book was adapted into a hugely successful stage play and later into three films. Fox's vision of Appalachia — picturesque but backward, redeemable only through outside intervention — became one of the most widely shared images of the region in American popular culture.

Will Wallace Harney published "A Strange Land and Peculiar People" in Lippincott's Magazine in 1873 — one of the earliest and most influential travel sketches about the Appalachian mountains. The title alone established the framework that would dominate outside writing about Appalachia for decades: the land was "strange," the people were "peculiar," and both required explanation to a presumably normal, non-strange, non-peculiar readership.

Harney's essay described the mountain people he encountered as living in a state of primitive simplicity, untouched by the progress that had transformed the rest of America. He marveled at their dialect, their customs, their apparent isolation from modern life, and their fierce independence. His tone was not hostile — he wrote with what he clearly considered affection and admiration — but his framing was unmistakable: these were people out of time, living relics of an earlier America, interesting precisely because they were not like the readers consuming the essay.

The Outsider Gaze

What united the local color writers — beyond their talent for vivid description — was their position as outsiders looking in. They came to the mountains as visitors, stayed briefly, and wrote for audiences that would never visit at all. Their work was shaped by the expectations of their readers as much as by the reality of what they observed.

This matters because the act of observation is never neutral. A writer who arrives in a mountain community looking for evidence of primitive quaintness will find it — not because the evidence doesn't exist, but because every community, in every era, contains material that can be read as quaint, backward, or exotic when filtered through the right expectations. The local color writers looked at mountain communities and saw dialect, isolation, folk customs, and poverty. They did not see — or did not consider worth reporting — the things that did not fit their narrative: the commercial enterprises, the political participation, the literacy, the engagement with the wider world, the diversity of opinion and experience within individual communities.

The outsider gaze — the particular way that people from outside a community see, interpret, and represent the people within it — is one of the most powerful concepts for understanding Appalachian history. It does not require malice. Many of the local color writers genuinely liked the mountain people they met. But liking someone and understanding them are different things, and representing someone accurately and representing them entertainingly are different things still. The local color writers produced entertaining copy that confirmed their readers' assumptions about mountain people. Whether that copy was accurate was a question that never had to be asked, because the readers had no independent basis for comparison.

William Goodell Frost and "Our Contemporary Ancestors"

If the local color writers created the image of Appalachia as exotic and backward, it was William Goodell Frost who gave that image an intellectual framework that made it seem not just entertaining but important — important enough to demand action.

Frost (1854–1938) was the president of Berea College in Berea, Kentucky — a remarkable institution founded in 1855 as the first interracial and coeducational college in the South. Berea's original mission was to educate both Black and white students in the Appalachian region, and Frost inherited an institution with a genuine commitment to serving mountain communities. He was not a cynical exploiter. He was an educator who believed passionately in the importance of his work.

But Frost was also a fundraiser, and he needed to convince wealthy donors in the Northeast — the same readers who consumed local color fiction — that Berea's mission was urgent. To do this, he needed a story about Appalachian people that was compelling enough to open checkbooks.

In 1899, Frost published an essay in The Atlantic Monthly titled "Our Contemporary Ancestors." The essay made an argument that would shape perceptions of Appalachia for the next century:

The mountain people of Appalachia, Frost claimed, were the descendants of the original American frontier settlers — Scotch-Irish and English pioneers who had crossed the mountains in the eighteenth century and then, because of the isolation imposed by the terrain, had been cut off from the currents of American progress ever since. They had preserved, in living form, the speech patterns, folkways, customs, and social structures of Elizabethan and colonial-era England and America. They were, literally, "our contemporary ancestors" — living relics of the American past, preserved like insects in amber by the geography of the mountains.

The thesis was electrifying. It transformed mountain people from exotic curiosities into objects of national significance. If Appalachians were really living remnants of Elizabethan England — if their dialect preserved Shakespearean words, their ballads carried melodies from the sixteenth century, their community structures reflected the social patterns of the colonial frontier — then they were not merely backward. They were precious, a national treasure to be studied and, crucially, to be helped before the forces of modernization destroyed what geography had preserved.

Frost's "contemporary ancestors" thesis was also, in its essentials, wrong.

Appalachian communities in 1899 were not frozen in time. They had changed, adapted, and evolved continuously since their founding, just like every other American community. Their dialect was not Elizabethan English miraculously preserved; it was a living, evolving language that incorporated elements from multiple sources. Their folkways were not relics of the colonial frontier; they were adaptations to specific environmental, economic, and social conditions that had themselves changed over time. The mountain people Frost described were not his "contemporary ancestors." They were his contemporaries, period — people living in the same historical moment he was, facing the same forces of industrialization and modernization, responding to those forces in ways that were rational, creative, and shaped by their specific circumstances.

But the appeal of the "contemporary ancestors" thesis was too powerful to be corrected by facts. It offered Northern audiences something irresistible: the idea that somewhere in America, the old ways had been preserved, that the past was still alive, and that by supporting institutions like Berea College, they could simultaneously save that precious past and bring its guardians into the modern age.

The thesis also, not incidentally, defined mountain people as passive — as objects of preservation and uplift rather than as agents of their own history. If Appalachians were "contemporary ancestors," then they were not people making choices about their own lives in a rapidly changing world. They were specimens, valuable but vulnerable, requiring the intervention of educated outsiders to survive the transition to modernity.

Frost used the "contemporary ancestors" argument with devastating fundraising effectiveness. He toured the Northeast, speaking to church groups, women's clubs, and philanthropic organizations, and he raised substantial sums for Berea College. His success inspired dozens of imitators — other educators, missionaries, and reformers who learned that the most effective way to raise money for Appalachian work was to present mountain people as exotic, backward, and in desperate need of civilizing help.

The damage was not in the fundraising itself. Berea College did genuinely valuable work, and many of the students who received Berea educations went on to lives of accomplishment and service. The damage was in the framework — in the idea, planted deep in the American consciousness, that Appalachian people were fundamentally different from other Americans, that their difference was a deficit, and that the appropriate response to that deficit was outside intervention. This framework would shape federal policy, charitable giving, media coverage, and popular perception of Appalachia for more than a century.

The Settlement School Movement: Help, Harm, and the Space Between

The intellectual framework established by Frost and the local color writers created the conditions for one of the most consequential — and most ambiguous — movements in Appalachian history: the settlement school movement.

Settlement schools were residential educational institutions, typically founded by Northern women of means and education, located in remote Appalachian communities where formal educational infrastructure was weak or nonexistent. The two most famous were the Hindman Settlement School (founded 1902 in Knott County, Kentucky) and the Pine Mountain Settlement School (founded 1913 in Harlan County, Kentucky), but dozens of others were established across the region in the early twentieth century.

The founders of these schools — women like Katherine Pettit and May Stone at Hindman, and Ethel de Long and William Creech Sr. (a local leader) at Pine Mountain — were motivated by genuine compassion and a sincere desire to serve communities where children had limited access to education. The schools they built provided real, tangible benefits: literacy, numeracy, health education, agricultural training, and exposure to ideas and opportunities that geographic isolation had made difficult to access. For many of the children who attended settlement schools, the experience was transformative — opening doors to further education, professional careers, and broader horizons.

But the settlement schools also carried assumptions that were deeply problematic — assumptions inherited directly from the "contemporary ancestors" framework.

What the Schools Provided

The practical contributions of the settlement schools were significant and should not be dismissed:

Education. In communities where one-room schools were underfunded, understaffed, and available only sporadically, settlement schools offered consistent, structured education taught by trained teachers. Students learned reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, history, and science — the basic curriculum that their peers in urban areas took for granted.

Health services. Settlement schools often included nurses or doctors who provided basic healthcare to students and surrounding communities. In a region where the nearest physician might be a day's ride away, this was not a trivial service. The schools introduced hygiene practices, vaccination programs, and prenatal care that measurably improved health outcomes.

Economic opportunity. Settlement schools taught practical skills — farming techniques, craft production, home economics — that could be economically valuable. Some schools established craft cooperatives that marketed traditional mountain crafts (weaving, woodworking, quilting) to outside buyers, providing income to families and communities.

Libraries and cultural access. Settlement schools typically maintained libraries — often the only significant book collections in their counties — and hosted lectures, concerts, and cultural events that connected mountain communities to the broader intellectual world.

What the Schools Assumed

The settlement school movement was built on assumptions that its founders rarely examined:

The assumption of cultural deficit. Settlement school founders generally believed that mountain culture was deficient — that the speech, customs, child-rearing practices, religious beliefs, and social structures of mountain communities needed to be reformed and replaced with "better" alternatives derived from middle-class Northern norms. This was not a subtle implication. It was stated openly in fundraising materials, school reports, and personal correspondence.

Katherine Pettit, in her early diaries and letters from the Hindman area, described mountain customs with a tone that mixed sympathy with condescension. She and her colleagues believed that mountain children needed to be taught not only academic subjects but proper manners, proper hygiene, proper English, and proper values — with "proper" defined by the standards of educated, middle-class, Protestant New England.

The assumption of passivity. The settlement school model assumed that mountain people were recipients of help rather than agents of their own development. While some schools — Pine Mountain was notable in this regard — made genuine efforts to involve local communities in decision-making, the fundamental power dynamic was clear: outsiders decided what mountain people needed, created institutions to provide it, and expected gratitude for the favor.

The assumption of timelessness. Settlement school founders, influenced by the "contemporary ancestors" thesis, often believed that they were reaching a population that had been static for generations. They did not recognize the dynamic, adaptive quality of mountain culture — the ways in which mountain people had been continuously innovating, changing, and responding to new circumstances for as long as they had lived in the mountains.

The Cultural Colonization Dimension

The most serious charge against the settlement schools is that they functioned, in part, as instruments of cultural colonization — not in the sense that they intended to destroy mountain culture (most of their founders thought they were preserving it) but in the sense that they systematically replaced local knowledge, customs, and values with those of the dominant culture, and they did so from a position of power that made resistance difficult.

Consider language. Settlement school teachers insisted on "correct" English — which meant Northern, middle-class, Standard American English — and actively discouraged the use of Appalachian dialect in the classroom. Students learned that the way their parents spoke was wrong, that the words and grammatical structures they had grown up with were markers of ignorance rather than a legitimate linguistic tradition. This was not education in the neutral sense. It was a form of cultural displacement that taught children to be ashamed of their own heritage.

Consider music. Some settlement schools preserved and celebrated traditional mountain music — the ballads, hymns, and fiddle tunes that were the soundtrack of community life. But others introduced "proper" music — classical and popular compositions from the mainstream American repertoire — and treated local musical traditions as curiosities rather than as living art forms. The line between preservation and patronization was often blurry, and it was drawn by the outsiders, not by the community.

Consider religion. Mountain religious traditions — the Primitive Baptist emphasis on predestination, the emotional worship styles of the Holiness and Pentecostal movements, the deep roots of camp meeting culture — were often viewed with discomfort or outright disapproval by settlement school workers, who came from mainline Protestant traditions (Presbyterian, Congregationalist, Episcopal) that prized restraint, education, and rationality. The schools did not explicitly forbid local religious practices, but they introduced alternative religious models and, in doing so, implied that the local traditions were inferior.

The cumulative effect of these interventions was to send a message — reinforced daily, in dozens of small ways — that mountain culture was not good enough. That the way mountain people spoke, worshipped, sang, cooked, raised their children, and understood the world needed to be corrected by people who knew better. This message was received by the children who attended the schools, and it shaped their relationship with their own culture for the rest of their lives. Some embraced the new learning and used it to build successful lives. Others internalized the shame and carried it as a wound. Most experienced both, in complicated proportions that defied simple summary.

The View from the Communities

It is important to note that mountain communities were not passive recipients of the settlement school movement. They had their own views, and those views were diverse and complex.

Some families actively sought out settlement schools for their children, recognizing that education was the most powerful tool for economic advancement in a rapidly changing world. These families were not dupes or victims of cultural colonization. They were making rational decisions about their children's futures, and they accepted the trade-offs involved — including the cultural costs — with open eyes.

Other families were suspicious of the schools and their outsider founders. They recognized that the schools carried assumptions about mountain people that were patronizing and sometimes insulting, and they resisted the implication that their way of life needed to be fixed. Some families refused to send their children to settlement schools, preferring the local one-room schools (however underfunded) or keeping children at home to work on the farm.

Most families fell somewhere between these poles — grateful for the educational opportunities, uneasy about the cultural implications, proud of their children's achievements, and wounded by the condescension that accompanied them.

The settlement school story does not reduce to a simple verdict of "good" or "bad." It is a story about power — about who had the power to define what education meant, what culture was valuable, and what mountain people needed. The answer, in every case, was that the power lay with the outsiders. And that power imbalance — regardless of the good intentions behind it — inflicted costs that the region is still reckoning with.

The Mission School Movement and Denominational Work

Alongside the settlement schools, a parallel movement of denominational mission work brought churches from across America into the Appalachian mountains with their own agendas for uplift and reform.

The major Protestant denominations — Presbyterian, Methodist, Congregationalist, Episcopal, and others — had been active in Appalachia since the frontier era, but the post-Civil War decades saw a dramatic intensification of mission work, driven by the same "discovery" narrative that powered the settlement schools. Denominational mission boards raised funds from urban congregations by depicting mountain people as spiritually and materially deprived — a population living in darkness, in need of the gospel and the civilization that accompanied it.

The denominational mission schools that resulted shared many characteristics with the secular settlement schools: they provided genuine educational services, they introduced healthcare and agricultural improvements, and they operated on the assumption that mountain culture was deficient and in need of reform. But they added a specifically religious dimension that made the cultural colonization more explicit. Mountain religious traditions — the very traditions described in Chapter 8 of this book — were treated as inadequate, superstitious, or dangerously emotional by mission workers who came from restrained, educated, mainline Protestant backgrounds.

Denominational mission work was particularly active in the coalfield regions of eastern Kentucky and southern West Virginia, where the arrival of the coal industry had created acute needs for education, healthcare, and social services that local institutions could not meet. In communities like those in Harlan County, mission schools and churches provided services that were desperately needed — and, in providing them, established a dynamic of outside dependency that would persist for generations.

The mission school movement also intersected with the settlement school movement in important ways. Many settlement school founders were deeply religious women whose motivations combined social reform with evangelical impulse. The line between secular uplift and religious mission was often invisible, and the communities on the receiving end experienced both as aspects of the same outsider intervention.

Photography and the Outsider Gaze: How Images of Poverty Were Curated

The written word was not the only medium through which Appalachia was "discovered" and defined. Photography played a crucial role — and the photographs that circulated most widely were not neutral documents of reality. They were carefully curated images that reinforced the narrative of mountain backwardness.

From the 1890s onward, photographers accompanied writers, missionaries, and reformers into the mountains, producing images that were published in magazines, used in fundraising appeals, and archived by institutions. The most widely circulated photographs showed the same subjects again and again: barefoot children, weathered log cabins, gaunt-faced women, ragged clothing, and landscapes of rugged isolation.

These images were real in the sense that the people and places they depicted existed. But they were not representative. The photographers chose their subjects — and their angles, framing, and context — to produce images that matched the narrative their publishers wanted to tell. A log cabin with a family on its porch was an image of primitive quaintness. The frame house down the road — better built, better furnished, occupied by a family that subscribed to a newspaper and owned a piano — was not photographed, or if it was, the image was not published. The barefoot child was selected over the child in shoes. The most weathered face was preferred over the youngest and healthiest.

This practice — selective documentation — is one of the most insidious tools in the construction of regional stereotypes. It does not require lying. It requires only choosing, and the choices are made by people who are not from the community, do not answer to the community, and are producing images for audiences who will never see the community firsthand and therefore have no basis for questioning the representativeness of what they are shown.

The fundraising dimension made the curation especially intense. Settlement schools, mission organizations, and later government agencies discovered that images of poverty were their most effective tools for soliciting donations and political support. A photograph of a well-fed, well-clothed mountain family in a comfortable home did not open wallets. A photograph of a gaunt child standing barefoot on a sagging porch did. The economic incentive to document poverty — and to select the most extreme images of poverty — created a feedback loop in which the most unrepresentative photographs became the most widely circulated, and the most widely circulated photographs became the basis for public perception.

This dynamic has never stopped. From the Depression-era photographs of the Farm Security Administration through the images that accompanied Michael Harrington's The Other America (1962) and the War on Poverty's media campaigns in the 1960s, through the "ruin porn" photography of abandoned coal towns in the 2000s and 2010s, the curated image of Appalachian poverty has been one of the most persistent and damaging tools in the stereotype arsenal. Chapter 35 will examine this dynamic in its modern forms. But its origins are here, in the 1890s and 1900s, when the first photographers accompanied the first "discoverers" into the mountains and produced the first carefully selected images of a region that was defined, from the very beginning, by its worst moments rather than its whole reality.

Henry Shapiro and the Idea of Appalachia

In 1978, the historian Henry Shapiro published a book that changed the way scholars understood the relationship between Appalachia and the rest of America. The book was called Appalachia on Our Mind: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870–1920, and its central argument was deceptively simple but profoundly important:

Appalachia was not a region that existed and was then discovered. Appalachia was a concept that was created — put on America's mind — by a specific set of writers, reformers, and institutions, at a specific historical moment, for specific purposes.

Shapiro's argument was not that the mountains didn't exist or that the people living in them weren't real. His argument was that "Appalachia" as a social category — as a label that carried specific meanings about backwardness, poverty, isolation, and cultural difference — was a historical construction. Before the local color writers, before Frost, before the settlement schools, the mountains were simply part of the South, or part of the frontier, or simply home to the people who lived there. The people in the mountains did not think of themselves as "Appalachian" in the sense that the term came to carry. They thought of themselves as Kentuckians, or West Virginians, or simply as people from a particular county or hollow.

The creation of "Appalachia" as a concept required several intellectual moves, which Shapiro traced with meticulous scholarship:

First, the local color writers had to establish that mountain people were different — not just geographically different (living in mountains rather than plains) but culturally different, essentially different, different in ways that required explanation. The local color writing of the 1870s–1890s accomplished this by presenting mountain people as quaint, primitive, and frozen in time.

Second, reformers like Frost had to transform that difference into a problem. If mountain people were merely picturesque, they could be enjoyed and forgotten. But if their difference was a deficit — if they were "contemporary ancestors" who had been left behind by American progress — then their condition demanded a response. Frost's genius was to reframe cultural difference as cultural deprivation, turning the mountains from a curiosity into a cause.

Third, institutions had to be created to address the newly defined problem. Settlement schools, mission organizations, Berea College, and eventually government agencies all positioned themselves as the solution to the problem of Appalachian backwardness. Each institution's existence depended on the continued perception that the problem was real and urgent, creating an institutional incentive to maintain and reinforce the narrative of mountain deficiency.

Fourth, the concept had to be sustained — reproduced across decades by each new generation of writers, reformers, and policymakers who inherited the framework and applied it to the conditions of their own era. The "contemporary ancestors" of 1899 became the "culture of poverty" subjects of the 1960s, who became the "despair" cases of the 2010s. The specific content of the narrative changed, but the structure remained: Appalachians are different, their difference is a problem, and the problem requires outside intervention.

Shapiro's analysis was not universally accepted. Some scholars argued that he overstated the role of outside perception and understated the real material conditions — the genuine poverty, the genuine lack of infrastructure, the genuine consequences of economic exploitation — that the "discoverers" observed. This criticism has merit. Appalachian poverty was and is real, not merely a figment of outsider imagination. People in the mountains were not suffering from a perception problem. They were suffering from the actual consequences of economic extraction, political neglect, and geographic disadvantage.

But Shapiro's contribution was not to deny the reality of Appalachian hardship. It was to show that the interpretation of that hardship — the framework through which it was understood — was a construction that served interests beyond the mountains. When poverty was explained as a product of mountain culture rather than economic exploitation, the prescription was cultural intervention (schools, missionaries, uplift) rather than structural change (land reform, labor protections, corporate accountability). And cultural intervention was cheaper, less threatening to existing power structures, and more flattering to the interveners than structural change would have been.

The question Shapiro forced was: Whose interests are served by defining Appalachia as a cultural problem rather than an economic one? The answer, consistently, was: the interests of the people and institutions that profited from the economic structures that produced the poverty in the first place.

The "Culture of Poverty" Thesis and Its Damage

Shapiro's analysis gained additional force from the work of scholars who traced the intellectual lineage from Frost's "contemporary ancestors" through to the most damaging social science framework applied to Appalachia in the twentieth century: the "culture of poverty" thesis.

The phrase "culture of poverty" was coined by the anthropologist Oscar Lewis in the 1960s to describe a set of attitudes and behaviors — present orientation, fatalism, distrust of institutions, weak family structures — that he argued were characteristic of persistently poor communities and that perpetuated poverty across generations regardless of economic conditions. Lewis developed the concept primarily through his studies of Mexican and Puerto Rican communities, but the framework was quickly applied to Appalachia by researchers and policymakers who saw in the mountains exactly the kind of isolated, traditionalistic, poverty-mired community that Lewis described.

The most influential application of the culture of poverty thesis to Appalachia was Jack Weller's 1965 book Yesterday's People: Life in Contemporary Appalachia. Weller, a Presbyterian minister who had spent years working in the West Virginia coalfields, argued that mountain people were trapped in a "reference system" shaped by pre-modern values — fatalism, individualism, fear of change, clan loyalty — that made them unable to take advantage of economic opportunities or participate effectively in modern institutions.

Weller's book was widely read and enormously influential, particularly among policymakers, social workers, and educators who were designing War on Poverty programs for the Appalachian region. Its message was seductive: if poverty was caused by culture, then the solution was cultural change — education, exposure, intervention — rather than structural reform. This was much more palatable to a political establishment that was willing to fund schools and social programs but was not willing to challenge the coal companies, the absentee landowners, or the economic structures that had produced Appalachian poverty in the first place.

The culture of poverty thesis was wrong, and it was damaging.

It was wrong because it confused effects for causes. The attitudes that Weller and others described — fatalism, distrust of institutions, present orientation — were not the causes of poverty. They were rational responses to conditions of poverty. People who have been repeatedly betrayed by institutions learn to distrust institutions. People who have been told for generations that their labor and resources benefit someone else develop fatalistic attitudes about the possibility of change. People who live in economic systems that offer no reliable future develop a present orientation. These responses are not cultural pathology. They are survival strategies.

It was damaging because it provided intellectual cover for blaming the victims of economic exploitation for their own suffering. If mountain people were poor because of their culture, then the coal companies that had extracted their wealth, the railroads that had charged monopoly rates, the absentee owners who had bought their mineral rights for pennies, and the state and federal governments that had enabled all of this were absolved. The problem was not what had been done to mountain people. The problem was what mountain people were like.

The direct line from William Goodell Frost's "Our Contemporary Ancestors" (1899) to Jack Weller's Yesterday's People (1965) is unmistakable. Both define mountain people as culturally deficient. Both prescribe outside intervention as the cure. Both locate the problem in the people rather than in the structures that surround them. The language changed — "contemporary ancestors" became "yesterday's people" — but the logic was identical.

This logic is still alive. When contemporary commentators describe Appalachian poverty as a product of "bad choices," "welfare dependency," or "cultural decline," they are repeating the culture of poverty thesis in updated language. When politicians propose to address Appalachian problems through education and job training alone, without confronting the structural forces that continue to extract wealth from the region, they are operating within the same framework that Frost established and Weller codified. The "discovery" of Appalachia is not a historical event. It is an ongoing process, and its intellectual architecture is still in use.

Asheville: A Case Study in "Discovery"

The town of Asheville, North Carolina provides a vivid illustration of how the "discovery" of Appalachia worked in practice and how its consequences continue to ripple through the present.

Asheville sits in a broad valley at the confluence of the French Broad and Swannanoa Rivers, surrounded by the Blue Ridge Mountains. In the late nineteenth century, the arrival of the Western North Carolina Railroad (completed to Asheville in 1880) transformed a small mountain town into a destination for wealthy tourists and health-seekers from the coastal South and the Northeast. The mountain air was believed to be therapeutic for tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments, and Asheville quickly became home to a string of sanatoriums and resort hotels.

The most famous visitor was George Vanderbilt, grandson of the railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, who purchased 125,000 acres south of Asheville in the late 1880s and built the Biltmore Estate — a 250-room French Renaissance chateau that remains the largest privately owned house in the United States. Vanderbilt's construction of Biltmore was, in miniature, the entire dynamic of Appalachian "discovery": a fabulously wealthy outsider arrives in the mountains, is enchanted by the landscape, acquires an enormous tract of land, and builds something spectacular — for himself, by his own standards, according to his own vision of what the mountains should be.

The economic impact of Vanderbilt's presence and the broader tourism industry was real: jobs were created, money flowed into the local economy, and Asheville developed infrastructure — hotels, restaurants, roads, a cultural scene — that would not otherwise have existed. But the terms of the exchange were set by the outsiders. The mountains were valued not for what the people who lived in them valued — the community ties, the farming economy, the cultural traditions — but for what visitors valued: scenery, clean air, romantic rusticity, and the pleasure of encountering a landscape that felt untouched by modernity.

Asheville's experience foreshadowed a pattern that would repeat across Appalachia in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: outside "discovery" brings economic activity but on terms defined by the discoverers, with benefits flowing primarily to those with the capital to invest and the connections to shape development. The local population provides the labor and the authenticity, but it does not control the narrative or the profits. (This pattern will be explored in depth in Chapter 36, on the "New Appalachia" of tourism, remote work, and reinvention.)

Harlan County: Settlement Schools in the Coalfields

At the opposite end of the "discovery" spectrum from Asheville's tourism economy stood the coalfield communities of eastern Kentucky, where the settlement school and mission movement encountered conditions very different from the rustic charm described in the local color magazines.

Harlan County, Kentucky — which will become central to the coal and labor chapters later in this book — experienced the full force of both industrial extraction and outsider intervention in the early twentieth century. Coal companies arrived in the 1910s and 1920s, transforming farming communities into company towns almost overnight. The companies provided housing, stores, and schools — but on their terms, for their purposes, and under their control.

Into this environment came settlement school workers and missionaries who found communities in genuine crisis: overcrowded housing, inadequate sanitation, limited medical care, children with no access to education beyond the company school (which was run by the same company that employed their parents and controlled every other aspect of their lives). The need was real. The help was welcome.

But the settlement school workers in the coalfields faced a dilemma that their colleagues in more isolated communities did not. In Harlan County, the problem was not cultural isolation. The problem was economic exploitation. The coal companies were extracting enormous wealth from the land while leaving the communities that produced that wealth in squalor. The children who attended settlement schools were not backward relics of an earlier era. They were the children of industrial workers living under corporate rule.

The settlement school framework — designed to address cultural deficiency — was poorly suited to address structural exploitation. Schools could teach children to read and write, but they could not challenge the company store's monopoly pricing. They could introduce modern hygiene, but they could not force the coal company to install running water in company housing. They could provide libraries and cultural enrichment, but they could not give miners the right to organize unions without being evicted from their homes.

Some settlement school workers recognized this disconnect and became advocates for structural change. Others — constrained by their own ideological assumptions and by the fundraising imperatives that required them to present mountain people as culturally deficient — continued to operate within the "uplift" framework even when the evidence all around them pointed to a different diagnosis.

The Harlan County experience illustrates the fundamental limitation of the "discovery" paradigm: it defined mountain problems as cultural problems, which meant that the solutions it generated were cultural solutions. When the problems were actually structural — rooted in economic exploitation, political corruption, and the concentration of power in the hands of outside corporations — cultural solutions were, at best, palliative and, at worst, a distraction from the changes that were actually needed.

The Construction of "Appalachia" as a Concept

One of the most consequential outcomes of the "discovery" era was the creation of "Appalachia" itself as a unified concept — a single label applied to an extraordinarily diverse region, flattening its internal complexity into a single narrative of backwardness and need.

Before the local color writers, there was no "Appalachia" in the public mind. There were the mountains of western Virginia, the Cumberland Plateau of Kentucky, the Smokies of Tennessee and North Carolina, the Blue Ridge, the Alleghenies, the hill country of West Virginia. These were recognized as geographically related but culturally diverse — different states, different economies, different histories, different peoples. A coal miner in McDowell County, West Virginia, had little in common with a farmer in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia or a Cherokee basket-maker on the Qualla Boundary in North Carolina, despite the fact that all three lived in "the mountains."

The "discovery" era collapsed this diversity into a single category. "Appalachia" became a label that carried uniform associations: poverty, isolation, backwardness, violence (the feuds), quaintness (the folk culture), and need (the settlement schools and missions). The label flattened the immense internal variety of the region — its multiple ethnicities, its range of economic systems from subsistence farming to industrial mining to commercial agriculture, its different political histories, its distinct cultural traditions — into a single story that could be told quickly and consumed easily by outside audiences.

This flattening was not accidental. It served the needs of the people doing the labeling:

Writers needed a single, evocative term that would signal to readers what kind of story they were about to read. "An Appalachian story" carried instant associations — the same way "a Western" or "a Southern story" carried associations — that saved the writer the trouble of establishing context from scratch.

Reformers needed a single, definable "problem region" that could be the target of fundraising campaigns and policy initiatives. It is easier to raise money for "Appalachia" than for "the mountain communities of eastern Kentucky, southwestern Virginia, southern West Virginia, western North Carolina, and eastern Tennessee, each of which has distinct characteristics and needs."

Politicians needed a constituency that could be addressed — and promised things — as a bloc. The creation of "Appalachia" as a concept made possible the creation of the Appalachian Regional Commission (1965) and other political structures that treated the region as a single policy unit.

The entertainment industry needed a setting that audiences would recognize instantly and associate with specific emotions and expectations. "Appalachia" became that setting — a shorthand for a world of mountains, poverty, violence, and rustic charm that required no further explanation.

The problem is that the label, once created, took on a life of its own. It became a filter through which all information about the mountain region was processed — a filter that amplified everything that confirmed the stereotype and suppressed everything that contradicted it. A coal mine explosion in West Virginia was an "Appalachian" story. A successful technology company in Blacksburg, Virginia — thirty miles from the coal fields — was not. An opioid death in a mountain county was "Appalachian." A Rhodes Scholar from the same county was an exception that proved the rule.

The word "Appalachia" itself became a kind of prison — a label that trapped the people and places it described inside a narrative they did not create and could not escape. To be "Appalachian" was not simply to live in the mountains. It was to be defined by someone else's idea of what living in the mountains meant. And that idea, forged in the 1870s–1920s, has proved remarkably resistant to correction, updating, or nuance.

Primary Sources: Reading the Discovery Literature

The "discovery" literature is available in archives and online collections, and reading it directly — rather than relying on summaries — is one of the most valuable exercises for understanding how Appalachian stereotypes were constructed.

Primary Source Excerpt — William Goodell Frost, "Our Contemporary Ancestors," The Atlantic Monthly, March 1899: "There is a considerable area in the South and in the border states which is as truly 'benighted' as any foreign mission field... The mountain people of the South are our contemporary ancestors. They are living in conditions identical with those of the colonial frontier... In a broad way one may say that these mountain regions are the back yards of the Eastern states, partly abandoned, partly overlooked."

Note the language: "benighted," "foreign mission field," "back yards." Mountain people are simultaneously pitiable and invisible — both dangerously backward and simply unnoticed. The prescription is implicit: they need to be noticed, reached, and changed by people from outside the "back yard."

Primary Source Excerpt — Will Wallace Harney, "A Strange Land and Peculiar People," Lippincott's Magazine, 1873: "The natives of this region are characterized by marked peculiarities of the social state... They are close to nature; and so close that they are to the higher possibilities of their being as unconscious as are the trees around them."

Harney explicitly compares mountain people to trees — natural objects, not historical agents. This dehumanizing rhetoric, delivered in a tone of sympathetic observation, is the signature move of the "discovery" literature: the writer admires his subjects while denying their full humanity.

Primary Source Excerpt — Settlement school fundraising letter, Hindman Settlement School, circa 1905: "In the heart of the Kentucky mountains there are thousands of children growing up without schools, without books, without any knowledge of the great world beyond their narrow valleys. They are bright children, eager to learn, but they have never had the chance. With your generous support, we can bring light to these dark places and give these children the future they deserve."

The rhetoric of light and darkness, of brightness trapped in narrowness, is characteristic of the fundraising genre. Note the complete absence of any reference to the economic structures — the coal companies, the absentee landowners, the extractive economy — that were, by 1905, well established as the primary causes of mountain poverty. The problem is defined as a lack of schools, not a lack of justice.

How This Chapter Connects to the Rest of the Book

The "discovery" of Appalachia in the 1870s–1920s is not a self-contained episode. It is the foundational moment for much of what follows in this book.

Chapter 23 (The War on Poverty) will show how the frameworks established by Frost and the local color writers shaped federal policy in the 1960s — how the "discovery" of Appalachian poverty by journalists and politicians repeated, almost exactly, the "discovery" of Appalachian backwardness by magazine writers and reformers seventy years earlier.

Chapter 25 (Education and the Fight for Literacy) will trace the legacy of the settlement schools through the twentieth century, examining how the institutions they created evolved and how the tension between educational opportunity and cultural colonization persisted across generations.

Chapter 35 (Stereotypes, Media, and the Battle Over Identity) will examine the modern descendants of the images and narratives created in the "discovery" era — from The Beverly Hillbillies to Hillbilly Elegy — and will show how the same intellectual architecture that Shapiro identified in 1978 continues to structure media representation of the region.

Throughout the rest of this book, when you encounter moments where Appalachia is being described, defined, or explained by outsiders — and there will be many such moments — ask the questions that this chapter has tried to teach you to ask: Who is doing the describing? For what audience? With what assumptions? And whose interests are served by the description being offered?

These are not abstract questions. They are the tools for dismantling a mythology that has been used to justify exploitation, excuse neglect, and deny agency to millions of people for more than a century. The "discovery" of Appalachia was, in reality, an act of invention. And understanding how inventions are made is the first step toward understanding how they can be unmade.

Community History Portfolio Checkpoint

Chapter 14 Component: Investigate the "discovery" of your county by outsiders. Consider the following:

1. Local color and travel writing: Were any magazine articles, travel sketches, or fiction pieces published about your county during the 1870s–1920s? Check digitized magazine archives (HathiTrust, the Internet Archive, Making of America) for references to your county or its communities.

2. Settlement schools and missions: Did any settlement schools, mission schools, or denominational institutions operate in your county? When were they founded? By whom? What services did they provide, and what assumptions did they carry about local culture?

3. Photography: Can you find historical photographs of your county from this era? What do they show? What do they not show? Are the images representative of the community as a whole, or do they appear to be curated to emphasize poverty or exoticism?

4. The label question: When did your county begin to be described as "Appalachian"? Did local people use that term themselves, or was it applied from outside? How has the label shaped the way the county is perceived by outsiders?

5. Contemporary echoes: How do the patterns described in this chapter — outside "discovery," cultural deficit framing, curated images of poverty — continue to affect your county today?

Add a section to your portfolio titled "The 'Discovery' and Its Legacy" that addresses these questions.

Whose Story Is Missing?

The "discovery" literature was overwhelmingly written by white, educated, middle-class outsiders — and it described an overwhelmingly white mountain population. Missing from both the writing and the response to it are:

• African Americans in Appalachia, whose presence was rendered invisible by the "contemporary ancestors" framework. If mountain people were living relics of Elizabethan England, there was no room in the narrative for Black Appalachians — despite the fact that they had been present in the mountains since the colonial era and remained present throughout the "discovery" period.

• Indigenous peoples, whose prior and continuing presence in the mountains was erased by a narrative that treated white settlers as the region's original inhabitants. The Eastern Band Cherokee, living on the Qualla Boundary in western North Carolina throughout the "discovery" era, were invisible in the local color writing.

• Immigrant communities — Italian, Hungarian, Polish, and other groups arriving in the coalfields during this exact period — who did not fit the "contemporary ancestors" narrative and were therefore excluded from the story of "Appalachia" even as they were becoming a significant part of the region's population.

• Mountain people who were not poor, who were educated, commercially active, politically engaged, and connected to the wider world — the vast majority of the mountain population — whose existence contradicted the "discovery" narrative and was therefore ignored.

The "Appalachia" that was invented in the 1870s–1920s was a caricature — not because it bore no relation to reality, but because it selected from reality only those elements that confirmed the story the inventors wanted to tell. The full reality was too complex, too diverse, too human, and too uncomfortable — because it would have required acknowledging that the poverty and hardship the discoverers observed were not products of mountain character but of the same economic forces that the discoverers' own society had set in motion.

Then and Now

Then (1899): William Goodell Frost publishes "Our Contemporary Ancestors" in The Atlantic Monthly, arguing that mountain people are living relics of an earlier era, preserved by geographic isolation, and in need of civilizing intervention. The essay is widely read and shapes philanthropic giving to the region for decades.

Now (2016): J.D. Vance publishes Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, arguing that Appalachian poverty is rooted in cultural dysfunction — learned helplessness, family instability, and resistance to personal responsibility. The book becomes a bestseller, is widely cited by politicians and policymakers, and is described by many Appalachian scholars as a modern iteration of the "culture of poverty" thesis that Frost's framework helped to establish.

The question that connects them: Both Frost and Vance locate the problem of Appalachian poverty in the people rather than in the structures. Both prescribe personal and cultural transformation rather than structural change. Both are embraced by audiences who find it more comfortable to believe that poverty is caused by the deficiencies of the poor than by the systems that produce and maintain poverty. What would an account of Appalachian poverty look like that started not with the character of the people but with the history of what was done to the land, the labor, and the wealth of the region?

That is the question this book is trying to answer.

Chapter Summary

In the decades following the Civil War, a set of writers, reformers, and institutions "discovered" Appalachia — not in the sense of finding something that was hidden, but in the sense of creating a concept that had not previously existed. The local color writers of the 1870s–1890s presented mountain people as exotic, backward, and frozen in time for magazine audiences in the Northeast. William Goodell Frost's "Our Contemporary Ancestors" thesis (1899) gave this image an intellectual framework, arguing that Appalachians were living relics of an earlier American era. The settlement school and mission movements translated this framework into institutional action, providing genuine educational services while also imposing outside cultural norms and reinforcing the assumption of mountain deficiency.

The "culture of poverty" thesis, applied to Appalachia most influentially by Jack Weller in Yesterday's People (1965), extended the "discovery" framework into the twentieth century, explaining Appalachian poverty as a product of cultural characteristics rather than economic exploitation.

Henry Shapiro's Appalachia on Our Mind (1978) provided the definitive scholarly critique of this entire tradition, arguing that "Appalachia" as a concept was a social construction — put on America's mind by specific people, at a specific moment, for specific purposes. The purposes consistently served the interests of those outside the region: justifying economic exploitation, excusing political neglect, and providing a comfortable explanation for poverty that did not require confronting the structural forces that produced it.

The word "Appalachia" itself — and the constellation of assumptions it carries — is the most lasting product of this "discovery." Understanding how it was constructed, by whom, and in whose interest is not merely an academic exercise. It is a prerequisite for seeing the region clearly, hearing its people accurately, and responding to its challenges honestly.