Chapter 20: The Great Migration Out — Why Millions Left the Mountains

"I left Harlan County in 1952 on a Greyhound bus with eleven dollars in my pocket and a cardboard suitcase tied shut with twine. I was seventeen years old. I did not want to go. But the mines were closing, and my daddy told me, 'There ain't nothing here for you, son. Go where the work is.' So I went. I never did stop missing it." — Oral history interview, Appalachian Heritage Project, University of Kentucky, 1988

Learning Objectives

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

1. Quantify the scale of Appalachian out-migration from the 1940s through the 1970s and identify its major causes
2. Trace the "Hillbilly Highway" (Route 23) and other migration corridors that connected the mountains to industrial cities
3. Describe the experience of Appalachian migrants in cities including Detroit, Cincinnati, Chicago, and Baltimore — including the discrimination they faced
4. Analyze the consequences of mass out-migration for both the receiving cities and the mountain communities left behind

The Leaving

Between 1940 and 1970, approximately three million people left the Appalachian region.

Sit with that number for a moment. Three million. In a region whose total population hovered around eighteen to twenty million during those decades, the departure of three million people was not a trickle. It was a hemorrhage. It was, proportionally, one of the largest internal migrations in American history — comparable in scale, if not in the historical attention it has received, to the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North.

And like the Great Migration, the Appalachian out-migration was not random. It had specific causes, specific routes, specific destinations, and specific consequences — for the people who left, for the communities they entered, and for the mountain places they left behind.

The people who left were young. They were in their late teens and twenties, overwhelmingly — the generation that should have been building families, starting careers, paying taxes, and sustaining the communities where they were born. Instead, they boarded Greyhound buses and loaded secondhand cars and followed cousins and brothers and neighbors up the narrow two-lane highways that led out of the hollows and into an America that did not particularly want them.

They left because there was no choice. Or rather, the choice was between leaving and staying in a place where the economic ground was crumbling beneath their feet. The mines were mechanizing. The farms were consolidating. The timber was gone. The few other industries that had existed — small manufacturing, railroad work, logging — were declining or disappeared. A young man standing in a hollow in eastern Kentucky in 1955, looking at the slag heap from a closed mine and the rusting tipple that had employed his father and grandfather, had to ask himself: What am I going to do here?

The answer, for three million people over three decades, was: nothing. So they left.

Why They Left: The Structural Collapse

The Mechanization of Coal

The single most important cause of Appalachian out-migration was the mechanization of coal mining. The story is told in technical detail in Chapter 32, but its human consequences belong here, because mechanization did not just change how coal was mined — it changed how many people were needed to mine it, and the answer was: far fewer.

In 1940, approximately 440,000 men worked in the bituminous coal mines of the United States. By 1960, that number had fallen to roughly 170,000. By 1970, it was below 150,000. The decline was not caused by a decrease in coal production — production actually increased during parts of this period. It was caused by the introduction of machinery that could do the work of dozens of men.

The continuous mining machine, introduced in the late 1940s and widely adopted through the 1950s, was the most transformative technology. This device could rip coal from the seam, load it onto a conveyor, and move it to the surface at a rate that made hand-loading miners obsolete overnight. A mine that had employed two hundred men could, with a continuous miner and a handful of operators, produce the same tonnage with thirty.

The companies called it progress. The miners called it displacement. Families that had worked the same mines for two and three generations found themselves redundant. A man who knew nothing but mining — whose father had known nothing but mining, whose grandfather had known nothing but mining — woke up one morning and discovered that the skill he had spent his life developing was worthless.

There was no retraining. There was no transition assistance. There were no government programs to help displaced miners find new careers. The coal companies had extracted the labor they needed, and when they no longer needed it, they had no obligation to the people who had provided it. The miners and their families were, in the coldest possible sense, surplus.

The Death of the Small Farm

The decline of mining was paralleled by the decline of agriculture, which had been the economic backbone of the non-coalfield portions of Appalachia. Small family farms — the hillside plots and bottom-land fields that had sustained mountain families for generations — were increasingly unviable in the post-World War II economy.

Farm consolidation — the process by which small farms were absorbed into larger operations or simply abandoned — had been underway nationally since the 1920s, but it hit Appalachia with particular force. The steep terrain that characterized much of the region made mechanized farming difficult or impossible. While farmers in the Midwest could invest in tractors and combines and scale up production, an Appalachian farmer working a hillside plot with a mule had no way to compete. The economics were merciless: the same bushel of corn that an Iowa farmer could produce with a fraction of the labor cost was now available at prices that made mountain farming a losing proposition.

Tobacco, which had sustained small farmers across southern Appalachia, offered slightly better economics but was itself in decline. The federal tobacco program provided some price support, but the long-term trend was unmistakable: fewer farms, fewer farmers, less income.

World War II: The Catalyst

The mechanization of mining and the decline of farming were slow-burning structural forces. The event that catalyzed the mass migration — that turned a gradual outflow into a flood — was World War II.

The war drew Appalachian men and women into the broader American economy on a scale that nothing before had achieved. Hundreds of thousands of young Appalachian men were drafted or volunteered for military service. They shipped out to training camps in Georgia, Texas, California — places as foreign to a boy from a Harlan County hollow as Europe or the Pacific would soon be. For the first time in their lives, they saw cities, factories, ocean ports, and the flat, fertile farmland of the Midwest. They saw how other Americans lived. They saw what wages were possible.

The women left behind also moved — not to the military, but to the war production factories. Rosie the Riveter was not only an urban phenomenon. Women from Appalachian communities traveled to defense plants in Cincinnati, Baltimore, Detroit, and the Ohio Valley, where they worked in munitions factories, shipyards, and aircraft plants. The wages were transformative — a woman who had earned nothing or next to nothing on a mountain farm could suddenly earn a real paycheck.

When the war ended, the calculus of return was complicated. A man who had served in the Navy and seen San Francisco had a harder time settling back into a hollow where the only employer was a mine that might or might not be hiring. A woman who had earned her own wages in a Baltimore factory had a different sense of possibility than she had before the war. The war did not cause the migration, but it showed an entire generation that alternatives existed — and it created the industrial infrastructure that would absorb them.

The Pull of Industrial Wages

The push factors — declining mines, dying farms — were matched by powerful pull factors, and the most important of these was the extraordinary industrial expansion that followed World War II.

The auto industry in Detroit was hiring. The steel mills of Gary, Indiana and Pittsburgh were hiring. The manufacturing plants of Cincinnati, Dayton, Columbus, and Chicago were hiring. The defense industries of Baltimore were hiring. These jobs paid wages that were, by Appalachian standards, almost unbelievable. A young man who had earned four or five dollars a day in a mine — when there was work at all — could earn twenty or thirty dollars a day on a Ford assembly line.

The wage differential was not subtle. It was the difference between poverty and something approaching middle-class life. It was the difference between a company house with no indoor plumbing and a rented apartment with hot water and a telephone. It was, for many families, the difference between feeding their children adequately and not feeding them adequately.

The pull was intensified by World War II itself, which had drawn hundreds of thousands of young Appalachian men and women into military service and war production. For many, the war was their first experience outside the mountains. They discovered that the outside world, while different and sometimes hostile, offered opportunities that the mountains could not match. When the war ended, some returned home — but many did not, and those who did often returned only temporarily, staying long enough to realize that the economic situation had not improved, before leaving again.

The Routes: Highways of Departure

Route 23: The Hillbilly Highway

If the Great Appalachian Migration had a single physical artery, it was U.S. Route 23 — a two-lane highway that ran from the coalfields of eastern Kentucky north through Ohio to the factory towns of the upper Midwest. Route 23 earned a name that was half affection and half contempt: the "Hillbilly Highway."

The route began in the mountains. From Pikeville or Paintsville or Prestonsburg in eastern Kentucky, Route 23 wound north through the narrow valleys of the Big Sandy River, crossed into Ohio at the river town of Portsmouth, and then ran straight north through Chillicothe, Columbus, and on toward Toledo and Detroit. It was not a fast road. In the 1950s, before the interstate highway system, it was a winding, two-lane blacktop that followed the contours of the land, climbing ridges and dropping into valleys, passing through small towns where the traffic lights were the only concession to modernity.

On any given weekend in the 1950s and 1960s, Route 23 was a river of Appalachian humanity. Cars packed with families — parents in the front, children in the back, household goods tied to the roof — streamed north. Greyhound buses, full to capacity, made the run from Ashland, Kentucky to Detroit in a single day. Young men with nothing but a change of clothes and an address scrawled on a piece of paper — a cousin's address, a brother's address, a friend-of-a-friend who had a couch you could sleep on until you found work — hitchhiked north along the highway's shoulder.

They called it the Hillbilly Highway because the traffic was almost entirely one-way — north, toward the factories — and because the people on it were identifiably Appalachian: the accents, the cars (old, often overloaded), the license plates (Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia). The name was given partly by the migrants themselves, with a kind of resigned humor, and partly by the people who lived along the route and watched the endless stream of mountain people passing through.

Route 23 has been memorialized in country music — Dwight Yoakam, who grew up in Columbus, Ohio, as the child of Kentucky migrants, wrote about it. It has been the subject of documentaries and academic studies. In 2004, Kentucky officially renamed its section of Route 23 the "Country Music Highway" in honor of the many country music artists who came from the counties along its route — Loretta Lynn, Chris Stapleton, Billy Ray Cyrus, and others. The renaming was fitting: the music of the mountains traveled the Hillbilly Highway alongside the people.

Other Routes

Route 23 was the most famous migration corridor, but it was not the only one. The geography of departure was shaped by the geography of the mountains, and different parts of Appalachia fed different destinations.

From southern West Virginia and southwestern Virginia, the primary route ran north along U.S. Route 19 and U.S. Route 21, feeding into the industrial cities of Ohio — Columbus, Dayton, Akron, Cleveland. West Virginia migrants also traveled east to Baltimore, where the steel mills of Sparrows Point and the shipyards of the Inner Harbor offered industrial employment.

From eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina, migrants traveled north to Cincinnati (via U.S. Route 25 and U.S. Route 27) or northwest to Indianapolis and Chicago. The route from eastern Kentucky to Cincinnati was particularly well-traveled — Cincinnati became, by some measures, the largest urban Appalachian community in the country.

From the northern Appalachian coalfields of Pennsylvania and northern West Virginia, migration flowed to the nearby industrial cities of Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Akron, and Youngstown — cities that were close enough to the coalfields that the cultural transition was somewhat less jarring.

Each route created a migration corridor — a chain of connection between specific mountain communities and specific urban neighborhoods. A family from Harlan County, Kentucky was likely to end up in Detroit or Cincinnati. A family from McDowell County, West Virginia was likely to end up in Cleveland or Baltimore. A family from eastern Tennessee was likely to end up in Cincinnati, Dayton, or Chicago. These patterns were not accidental. They were the product of chain migration — the process by which one person's successful move to a city created a pathway for others from the same community to follow.

The chain migration pattern produced a remarkable phenomenon: the transplanted hollow. In Detroit, a neighborhood might contain twenty or thirty families from the same county in Kentucky, reproducing — in a flat, treeless urban landscape — the tight kinship bonds of the mountain community they had left behind. The families knew each other. They had known each other for generations. Their grandparents had attended the same church, worked the same mines, been buried in the same hillside cemetery. Now they lived on the same block in Detroit, watched each other's children, shared meals, and drove home to the mountains together on weekends. The hollow had been transplanted — not perfectly, not completely, but recognizably. The social structure survived, even when the geography that had created it was hundreds of miles away.

The Destinations: Appalachians in the City

Detroit: The Promise of the Assembly Line

Detroit was the single most important destination for Appalachian migrants from eastern Kentucky and southern West Virginia. The auto industry — Ford, General Motors, Chrysler — was the magnet. In the postwar boom, the Big Three automakers needed workers in numbers that strained the local labor supply, and Appalachian migrants filled the gap.

The migrants settled in specific neighborhoods, creating urban Appalachian enclaves that replicated, as much as possible, the social structures of the communities they had left behind. In neighborhoods like Corktown, Brightmoor, and sections of the suburb of Hazel Park, Appalachian families clustered together, attended the same churches, shopped at the same stores, and maintained the kinship networks that had defined community life in the mountains.

The adjustment was brutal. City life was loud, crowded, and bewildering. The flat, treeless industrial landscape of Detroit was as alien to a mountain person as the Sahara Desert. The work itself — standing on an assembly line for eight hours, performing the same repetitive motion thousands of times a day — was physically demanding in a different way than mining, and many migrants found it soul-crushing in its monotony. In the mines, a man had controlled his own work to some degree — loading coal at his own pace, making decisions about how to attack the seam. On the assembly line, the pace was set by the machine, and the worker was an appendage of it.

But the money was good. Better than good, by Appalachian standards. A factory worker in Detroit in the 1950s could earn enough to buy a car, rent a decent apartment, feed a family, and send money home to relatives still in the mountains. The economic transformation was real, even if the cultural dislocation was painful.

The Greyhound bus station in downtown Detroit became an informal welcome center for Appalachian migrants. A young man stepping off the bus from Pikeville or Prestonsburg would find, in the station or on the sidewalk outside, other mountain people — some waiting for arriving relatives, some simply hanging around because the bus station was one of the few places in Detroit where you could hear the accents of home. Information was exchanged: which plants were hiring, which neighborhoods were affordable, which rooming houses would take mountain people without asking for a deposit they could not afford. The bus station was, in its way, a modern version of the docks where immigrant ancestors had arrived from Europe — a point of entry into a new world, chaotic and disorienting, but not entirely without help.

Oral History Excerpt — Virgil Slone, Pike County, Kentucky, migrant to Detroit (1984): "I got off that bus in Detroit and I couldn't believe what I was seeing. Buildings as far as you could look. Traffic going every which way. More people on one block than lived in the whole hollow back home. I stood there on the sidewalk with my suitcase and I thought, 'Lord, what have I done?' But my cousin Hobart was supposed to meet me, and sure enough, there he was, leaning against a parking meter, smoking a cigarette. He said, 'Come on, boy, I got you a job at Ford starting Monday.' And that was that. I worked at Ford for thirty-one years."

From the Eastern Kentucky Oral History Collection, University of Kentucky.

Cincinnati: The Closest City to Appalachia

Cincinnati became the largest urban Appalachian community in the United States — a distinction it holds to this day. The city's proximity to eastern Kentucky and southern West Virginia (less than three hours by car from the Kentucky coalfields) made it a natural destination, and the migration stream that flowed into Cincinnati was enormous.

Appalachian migrants in Cincinnati concentrated in specific neighborhoods, most notably Over-the-Rhine — a historic neighborhood just north of downtown that had previously been home to German immigrants (hence the name, a reference to the Rhine River). By the 1950s and 1960s, Over-the-Rhine had become one of the most densely populated Appalachian communities outside the mountains themselves. The neighborhood was poor, overcrowded, and neglected by city services, but it was also a community — a place where mountain people could find others who spoke the same way, cooked the same food, attended the same kind of church, and understood the particular homesickness of people far from the hills.

Other Cincinnati neighborhoods — Lower Price Hill, East Price Hill, Camp Washington — also absorbed large numbers of Appalachian migrants. These neighborhoods developed their own institutions: Appalachian-oriented churches (often Baptist congregations that maintained the preaching style and hymnody of the mountains), community centers, mutual aid organizations, and social clubs that served as gathering places for people from specific counties or communities in the mountains.

The Urban Appalachian Council, founded in Cincinnati in 1974, became the most prominent advocacy organization for urban Appalachians in the country. It fought for recognition of Appalachian migrants as a distinct cultural group, documented the discrimination they faced, and advocated for educational and social services tailored to the needs of transplanted mountain families.

Chicago: Uptown and the Northern Frontier

Chicago drew Appalachian migrants primarily from eastern Tennessee, eastern Kentucky, and West Virginia. The Uptown neighborhood on the city's North Side became Chicago's primary Appalachian enclave — a neighborhood so closely associated with southern mountain migrants that it was sometimes called "Hillbilly Heaven" or, less charitably, "Hillbilly Harlem."

Uptown in the 1950s and 1960s was a receiving zone for multiple waves of poor migrants — Appalachians, Native Americans, and others drawn to Chicago by the promise of industrial employment. The neighborhood was characterized by cheap rooming houses, SRO (single room occupancy) hotels, and aging apartment buildings where landlords rented to people who could not afford better. Appalachian families in Uptown lived in conditions that were, in many cases, worse than what they had left behind in the mountains — not in terms of material poverty (the apartments had running water and electricity, which many mountain homes did not) but in terms of social isolation, overcrowding, and the hostility of the urban environment.

Uptown was also a site of political organizing. In the late 1960s, a group called JOIN (Jobs or Income Now) — affiliated with Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) — organized Appalachian migrants in Uptown around issues of poverty, housing, and police brutality. The Young Patriots Organization, a radical group composed largely of young Appalachian men, allied with the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords (a Puerto Rican activist organization) in the Rainbow Coalition — one of the most remarkable and least remembered cross-racial political alliances of the 1960s. The fact that poor white Appalachians in Chicago found common cause with Black and Puerto Rican activists challenges every lazy assumption about Appalachian racial politics.

Baltimore, Dayton, Columbus, and Beyond

Other cities absorbed significant Appalachian populations. Baltimore's industrial base — steel, shipping, manufacturing — drew migrants from West Virginia and western Virginia. Dayton and Columbus, Ohio became major Appalachian centers. Indianapolis, Louisville, and Akron all developed substantial Appalachian communities.

In each city, the pattern was similar: migrants clustered in specific neighborhoods, built institutions that replicated mountain community life, faced discrimination from established residents, and gradually — over a generation or two — integrated into the broader urban population while maintaining elements of Appalachian identity.

Women's Migration: A Different Leaving

The migration literature has tended to focus on men — the workers, the breadwinners, the ones who found factory jobs and punched time clocks. But women's migration experience was distinct and, in many ways, more wrenching.

For women who came from mountain communities, the move to the city meant the loss of an entire world of competence. A woman who could garden, can vegetables, keep chickens, sew clothing, midwife a birth, and nurse a sick child with herbs gathered from the hillside was, in the mountains, a skilled and essential member of her community. In a Detroit apartment, most of those skills were irrelevant. There was no garden. There were no chickens. The vegetables came from a grocery store. The midwife was replaced by a hospital. The herbal remedies were replaced by a pharmacy. A woman who had been competent and necessary found herself dependent and diminished.

The loss of kinship networks was particularly devastating. In the mountains, women lived near their mothers, their sisters, their aunts, their neighbors — a web of female support that provided childcare, emotional sustenance, practical help, and the kind of daily companionship that made hard lives bearable. In the city, that web was torn apart. A young mother in a Detroit apartment, with her husband on the factory floor for eight or ten hours a day and no family within hundreds of miles, faced an isolation that was qualitatively different from anything she had experienced in the mountains.

Some women thrived. They found jobs — in factories, in hospitals, in the service economy that supported the industrial workforce. They discovered freedoms that the mountains had not offered: the freedom to earn their own money, to move through a city anonymously, to access services and entertainment that did not exist in the hollows. For women who had felt constrained by the gender expectations of mountain culture, the city could be liberating.

But for many, the migration was a trade of one set of hardships for another. The economic improvement was real — indoor plumbing, electric heat, regular wages. The social and emotional cost was also real — loneliness, cultural dislocation, the loss of the landscape and the community that had defined their sense of self.

Women were also the primary keepers of the connection to home. They wrote the letters. They made the phone calls. They organized the weekend trips and the summer visits. They packed the car with gifts for the family back in the mountains — store-bought clothes, toys for the nieces and nephews, the small luxuries that the mountain economy could not provide. They were the bridges between the two worlds, and the weight of maintaining that bridge fell disproportionately on them.

Black Appalachians and the Double Migration

For Black Appalachians, the out-migration was layered on top of the broader African American Great Migration — the movement of millions of Black Americans from the rural South to the urban North between approximately 1910 and 1970. Black families leaving McDowell County, West Virginia or Harlan County, Kentucky joined a migration stream that included Black families from Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and every other state in the Jim Crow South.

But the Black Appalachian experience was distinctive. As we documented in Chapter 19, Black miners in the coalfields had achieved a degree of economic standing and institutional life that was unusual in the Jim Crow South. They had owned homes (in some cases), built churches, organized fraternal lodges, and exercised political power through voting. The migration meant leaving behind not just a place but a set of hard-won institutions and a community life that, for all its limitations, had provided a degree of dignity and autonomy.

In the cities — Cleveland, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Baltimore — Black Appalachian migrants encountered both the opportunities and the barriers that characterized urban Black life in the mid-twentieth century. They had access to industrial jobs, but they faced racial discrimination in housing, employment, and education that compounded the class discrimination experienced by all Appalachian migrants. A Black miner from McDowell County arriving in Cleveland was doubly marked: by his race and by his mountain origins.

Black Appalachian migrants often settled in the same neighborhoods as other Black migrants from the rural South, and their specific Appalachian identity was sometimes subsumed into the broader category of "Southern" or simply "Black." The institutions they had built in the coalfields — the churches, the lodges, the social clubs — did not always transplant easily to the urban environment, where existing Black institutions had their own traditions and power structures.

The Eastern Kentucky Social Club and similar organizations — social clubs formed by Black migrants from specific Appalachian counties — served as bridges between the mountain communities and the urban destinations. These clubs held annual reunions, maintained contact lists, and organized mutual aid among the dispersed members of former coalfield communities. They were, in effect, the kinship networks of the migration formalized into institutions.

"No Dogs, No Hillbillies": Discrimination in the Cities

The Appalachian migrants who arrived in the industrial cities of the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic were not welcomed. They were, in many cases, actively despised.

The discrimination took multiple forms. The most visible was the "hillbilly" stereotype — the image of Appalachians as ignorant, dirty, lazy, violent, and culturally backward. This stereotype, whose construction we traced in Chapter 14, followed the migrants from the mountains to the cities and was weaponized against them by established urban residents who saw the newcomers as a threat to neighborhood stability, property values, and social order.

Signs reading "No Dogs, No Hillbillies" were posted in some rental properties and businesses — an echo of the "No Irish" signs of an earlier era and the "Whites Only" signs that governed the Jim Crow South. The historical evidence for these specific signs is debated by scholars — some argue they were widespread, others that they were rare and may be partly apocryphal — but the sentiment they expressed was real and well-documented. Appalachian migrants faced housing discrimination, employment discrimination, and social contempt from urban neighbors who viewed them as backward and uncivilized.

Primary Source Excerpt — Albert N. Votaw, "The Hillbillies Invade Chicago," Harper's Magazine, February 1958: "The term 'hillbilly' is used here to describe the southern white migrants who have poured into Chicago in recent years... They are displacing Negroes as the city's number one migration problem... The mountaineer from the South brings with him his old customs and habits... He doesn't have any idea of sanitation or personal hygiene. He doesn't understand what a fire escape means..."

Votaw's article, published in one of America's leading magazines, is a remarkable document of anti-Appalachian prejudice — characterizing migrants as a "problem" and attributing to them virtually every negative stereotype associated with poverty and cultural difference.

The discrimination was not limited to stereotypes. It had material consequences. Appalachian migrants were often steered toward the worst housing — the most run-down neighborhoods, the most overcrowded apartments, the least desirable rental properties. Landlords charged them higher rents, knowing they had few alternatives. Employers, while willing to hire them for factory work, were less likely to promote them into supervisory or white-collar positions. Schools were often hostile to Appalachian children, whose accents, clothing, and cultural manners marked them as outsiders.

The accent was a particular liability. As we explore in Chapter 31, Appalachian English carries enormous social stigma in the United States. In the cities, an Appalachian accent was an immediate marker of class and regional origin — a signal that the speaker was, in the listener's estimation, uneducated, unsophisticated, and probably not very bright. Many migrants learned to suppress their accents, adopting a more neutral Midwestern or general American speech pattern in professional settings while reverting to mountain speech at home and among other Appalachians.

Children were particularly affected. Appalachian children in urban schools were frequently mocked for their speech, their clothing, and their unfamiliarity with urban customs. Teachers sometimes treated them as slow learners — not because of any actual cognitive deficit but because their accent and vocabulary differed from the urban norm. The psychological toll of this daily humiliation — the message that the way you talk, the way your family lives, the place you come from are all wrong — is documented in decades of studies on urban Appalachian children and echoes across generations.

The Emotional Geography of Leaving

The Appalachian out-migration was not just an economic event. It was an emotional catastrophe — a mass experience of loss, displacement, and longing that shaped the culture of both the migrants and the communities they left behind.

The songs tell the story. Country music in the 1950s and 1960s is saturated with the experience of leaving the mountains. "Detroit City" (Bobby Bare, 1963): "I wanna go home, I wanna go home, oh how I wanna go home." "Streets of Baltimore" (Bobby Bare, 1966): a story of a mountain couple who move to the city, where the husband works and the wife is seduced by urban life, and both are destroyed. "Coal Miner's Daughter" (Loretta Lynn, 1970): a memoir of mountain childhood that is also, implicitly, an elegy for a way of life that migration ended. "Appalachian Memories" (Dolly Parton, 1983): "Appalachian memories keep me strong."

These were not just songs. They were the emotional language of a displaced people. Millions of Appalachian migrants in the industrial cities of the Midwest listened to country music on the radio and recognized their own experience: the homesickness, the alienation, the sense that the city was a necessary evil endured for economic survival but never truly home.

The weekend trips were a defining feature of migrant life. On Friday evenings, the Hillbilly Highway reversed its flow. Cars packed with families headed south — back to the mountains, back to the home place, back to the parents and grandparents and cousins who had stayed. The weekend trip was a ritual: the long drive south on Friday night, arrival in the hollow in the early morning hours, two days of family meals and church services and sitting on the porch, and then the drive back north on Sunday evening, arriving at the factory just in time for the Monday morning shift.

For many migrants, these weekend trips were the only thing that made city life bearable. They maintained the connection to place that was, for Appalachian people, as essential as food and water. They allowed grandparents to know their grandchildren. They allowed migrants to tend the family cemetery, to check on aging parents, to reassure themselves that the mountains were still there. And they imposed an extraordinary physical toll — hundreds of miles of driving every weekend, on winding two-lane roads, in cars that were not always reliable, by people who were chronically exhausted from factory work.

The migrants who could not make the trip — those who lived too far away, or who could not afford the gas, or whose factory schedules did not permit weekend absences — suffered most acutely. The letters home, the long-distance phone calls (expensive and brief in the era before cheap long-distance service), the rare vacation trips — these were inadequate substitutes for the physical presence of the mountains and the family that remained in them.

What Happened to the Places They Left

The out-migration devastated the mountain communities. The departure of the youngest, most productive generation hollowed out the demographic structure of rural Appalachian counties, leaving behind aging populations with declining tax bases and diminishing political influence.

The numbers tell the story with brutal clarity.

McDowell County, West Virginia — our anchor example for the extraction pattern — had a population of approximately 98,887 in 1950, at the peak of the coal economy. By 1970, it had fallen to 50,666. By 1990, it was 35,233. By 2020, it was approximately 18,000. A county that had been one of the wealthiest in West Virginia (measured by coal production) lost more than 80 percent of its population in a single lifetime. The people who left were young, healthy, and employable. The people who remained were, disproportionately, elderly, disabled, or otherwise unable to make the move.

Harlan County, Kentucky followed a similar trajectory. Its population peaked at approximately 75,275 in 1940 and fell to 33,202 by 1990 — a loss of more than half its people. The county that had been the site of the bloodiest labor battles in American history, that had represented the very essence of coalfield Appalachia, was emptying out.

The same pattern repeated across the coalfield region. Letcher County, Perry County, Floyd County in Kentucky. Mingo County, Logan County, Boone County in West Virginia. The curves were all the same: a peak in the 1940s or 1950s, followed by a decades-long decline that has not, in most cases, reversed.

The consequences of depopulation cascaded through every aspect of community life. Schools lost students and closed. Churches lost members and could no longer afford to pay ministers. Businesses lost customers and shuttered. Tax revenues fell, reducing the capacity of local government to maintain roads, provide services, and invest in infrastructure. The property that remained was often owned by people who no longer lived there — absentee ownership of a different kind than the corporate land grabs of the coal era, but with similar effects: land and houses maintained poorly or not at all, crumbling into the landscape.

The brain drain was particularly devastating. The out-migration took precisely the people that a community most needed for renewal: the young, the educated, the ambitious, the healthy. The ones who stayed — and this is not a judgment on their character but a description of the structural reality — were disproportionately those who had the fewest options for leaving: the elderly, the disabled, those with deep family obligations, and those whose attachment to place was so profound that they chose poverty in the mountains over wages in the city.

The People Who Never Adjusted

Not everyone who left the mountains found a better life in the cities. For some, the migration was a wound that never healed.

The literature on urban Appalachians documents a persistent pattern of cultural dislocation — migrants who lived in cities for decades but never fully adapted, who maintained mountain ways in urban settings, who returned home at every opportunity and planned, always, to go back permanently "someday." For these migrants, the city was a place of exile, not a new home.

The adjustment difficulties were compounded by the discrimination described earlier. A man who already felt displaced was further alienated by a culture that mocked his accent, dismissed his background, and treated him as an object of ridicule or pity. The result, for some, was withdrawal: a retreat into the private world of family and fellow migrants, a refusal to engage with the urban culture that had rejected them.

Alcohol became a coping mechanism for some migrants, just as it had been in the coalfields. The honky-tonks and bars of urban Appalachian neighborhoods served the same social function as the taverns of the coal camps — places where working men gathered after their shifts to drink, socialize, and temporarily forget the gap between where they were and where they wanted to be. The social costs of alcohol abuse — family disruption, domestic violence, lost employment — rippled through urban Appalachian communities just as they had through the coalfield communities from which the migrants came.

Mental health was another casualty. Depression, anxiety, and the constellation of symptoms that we would today recognize as adjustment disorder were widespread among Appalachian migrants, though rarely diagnosed or treated. The stigma around mental illness was at least as strong in Appalachian culture as in the broader American culture, and the idea of seeking professional help for emotional distress was foreign to most migrants. They endured. They pushed through. They worked. But the toll was real.

The Success Stories

It would be dishonest to tell only the stories of dislocation and suffering. Many Appalachian migrants built good lives in the cities — lives that were, by any material measure, better than what the mountains could have offered.

A man from Floyd County, Kentucky who started on the assembly line at General Motors in 1954 and retired in 1984 with a union pension, a paid-off house in the suburbs of Dayton, and children who went to college — that man had achieved something real. His life was not tragic. It was a success story of the American working class, built on hard work, union protection, and the willingness to leave everything familiar in search of something better.

The second generation — the children of migrants, born in Detroit and Cincinnati and Chicago — often achieved the upward mobility that their parents had sought. They attended better schools than the mountains could offer. They entered professions — nursing, teaching, law enforcement, skilled trades — that represented genuine advancement. Some went to college, becoming the first in their families to do so. They built lives that honored their parents' sacrifice even as they moved further from the mountains with each passing year.

These success stories are part of the migration narrative too. The out-migration was not simply a disaster. It was also an escape — an escape from an economy that was collapsing, from communities that could not sustain their populations, from a future that the mountains could not provide. For many migrants, leaving was the best decision they ever made. That this is true does not diminish the pain of the leaving or the devastation of the communities left behind. Both truths exist simultaneously, and a honest history must hold both.

Return Migration: The Ones Who Came Back

Some came back.

Return migration — the movement of migrants back to their communities of origin — was a consistent, if smaller, counterflow to the great outward stream. People returned for many reasons: retirement (they had spent their working lives in the city and wanted to spend their final years in the mountains), disability (they could no longer work and wanted to be near family), family obligation (an aging parent needed care), or simply homesickness so acute that no amount of factory wages could compensate for it.

Return migrants brought resources that the mountain communities desperately needed: savings, pensions, skills acquired in urban workplaces, and connections to the outside economy. A retired autoworker who returned to Harlan County with a UAW pension and a paid-off house in the hollow was, by local standards, comparatively wealthy. These return migrants often became community leaders, church deacons, volunteer firefighters — people whose experience in the wider world and whose financial stability made them pillars of communities that were otherwise struggling.

But return migration was never large enough to offset the outflow. For every family that came back to the mountains, dozens stayed in the cities. And the communities to which the returnees came back were not the communities they had left. The hollow was emptier. The school was closed. The neighbors had moved away. The coal tipple was rusting. Coming home was not a return to the past — it was a confrontation with the present, and the present was often a diminished version of the world the returnee remembered.

Then and Now: The Hillbilly Highway in Perspective

Then: On a Friday evening in 1960, Route 23 between Portsmouth, Ohio and Detroit, Michigan was a river of southbound traffic — cars packed with Appalachian migrants heading home for the weekend. The road was narrow, winding, and dangerous. Accident rates were among the highest in the state. The cars were old and overloaded. The drivers were tired from a week of factory work. But the pull of the mountains was irresistible, and the traffic flowed south every Friday and north every Sunday, as regular as a tide.

Now: Route 23 has been largely bypassed by the interstate highway system. The journey from eastern Kentucky to Detroit, which once took twelve or fourteen hours on two-lane roads, can now be made in six or seven hours on the interstate. But the traffic has thinned. The great wave of migration is over — not because the mountains have recovered, but because the factories that drew the migrants north have themselves closed. Detroit, Dayton, and the other industrial cities that once offered salvation to mountain people have experienced their own economic collapses. The irony is complete: the places that Appalachian migrants fled to have, in many cases, come to resemble the places they fled from.

The descendants of Appalachian migrants are now several generations deep in cities across the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic. Many have fully assimilated into urban culture, their Appalachian origins detectable only in a family name, a food tradition, a faint echo of mountain speech in an otherwise neutral accent. Others maintain active connections to the mountains — visiting family, attending homecomings, identifying proudly as Appalachian even though they have never lived there.

The migration changed both the mountains and the cities. The mountains lost their most productive generation and have spent decades trying to recover from the loss. The cities gained a workforce that helped build the postwar industrial economy, absorbed a rich cultural tradition, and — in the case of country music, religious practice, food, and language — were permanently altered by the mountain culture that the migrants brought with them.

Whose Story Is Missing?

• Women's migration experiences differ from men's. Women migrants often faced a double displacement — removed from the kinship networks that had supported them in the mountains and thrust into urban environments where their domestic skills (gardening, canning, quilting) had less application. Women's stories of adjustment, work, and community-building in the cities are underrepresented in the migration literature.

• Black Appalachian migrants experienced the out-migration through the additional lens of race. A Black family leaving McDowell County, West Virginia for Cleveland faced both the cultural dislocation common to all Appalachian migrants and the racial discrimination that governed Northern cities. Their story intersects with the broader Great Migration and deserves specific attention.

• Children of migrants — the generation born in the cities to parents from the mountains — occupied a liminal space: Appalachian at home, urban at school, fully at home in neither world. Their experiences of identity negotiation are captured in some oral history projects but rarely centered in the narrative.

Community History Portfolio Checkpoint

For your county portfolio, investigate the following:

1. Population data: Track your county's population from 1940 to 2020 using census data. Graph the changes. When did the most dramatic decline occur? What caused it?

2. Migration destinations: Can you determine where people from your county went? Are there urban Appalachian communities associated with your county? (Check newspaper accounts, family histories, reunion announcements.)

3. Routes: What highway or transportation route connected your county to the major migration destinations? Was there a local equivalent of the Hillbilly Highway?

4. Consequences: What institutions (schools, churches, businesses) closed as a result of population decline? What evidence of the out-migration's impact can you find in your county today?

5. Return migration: Is there evidence of return migration to your county? Retired workers who came back? Families who returned? What impact did they have?

Chapter Summary

Between the 1940s and 1970s, approximately three million people left the Appalachian region in one of the largest internal migrations in American history. The primary causes were the mechanization of coal mining, the decline of small-scale agriculture, and the pull of high-paying industrial jobs in cities like Detroit, Cincinnati, Chicago, and Baltimore. Migrants traveled specific routes — most famously Route 23, the "Hillbilly Highway" — and settled in specific urban neighborhoods where they built community institutions that replicated mountain social life. They faced systematic discrimination in the cities, stereotyped as ignorant and backward by established residents. The out-migration devastated the mountain communities left behind, stripping them of their youngest and most productive residents and triggering a population collapse from which many counties have never recovered. The emotional dimension of the migration — the homesickness, the weekend trips home, the songs of leaving — is as important as the economics, because it reveals the depth of Appalachian attachment to place and the human cost of displacement. The migration changed both the mountains and the cities permanently, and its consequences continue to shape both.

In the next chapter, we turn to the darkest consequence of coal extraction — the cost measured not in dollars or demographics but in human bodies: the epidemic of black lung disease, the disasters that killed thousands, and the movements that forced America to acknowledge the price of cheap energy.