Case Study 1: The Hillbilly Highway — Route 23 and the Road to Detroit

A Friday Evening on Route 23

It is Friday evening, October 1957. The sky over Portsmouth, Ohio is darkening, and the traffic on U.S. Route 23 northbound is building steadily — not the kind of traffic you would expect in a small river town of thirty thousand, but a migration stream, a weekly pulse of people moving from one world to another and back again.

The cars are distinctive. They are older models, mostly — 1948 Fords, 1950 Chevrolets, 1952 Plymouths — because the people driving them cannot afford anything newer. They are loaded beyond what any auto manufacturer would consider safe: mattresses strapped to the roof, cardboard boxes filling the trunk and the back seat, children wedged between bundles of clothing and cooking pots. Some have small trailers hitched behind them, carrying furniture — a kitchen table, a rocking chair, a chest of drawers — that a family could not bear to leave behind.

These are the northbound migrants. New ones, heading to Detroit for the first time. They have left eastern Kentucky that morning — Pikeville, Paintsville, Prestonsburg, Inez — and driven the winding two-lane road through the Big Sandy River valley, across the Ohio River at Ashland, and now they are on the long, flat stretch of Route 23 that will take them through Columbus and on to Toledo and Detroit.

But the traffic is also flowing south — cars equally loaded, but with people who have made this journey before. These are the weekend commuters: Appalachian workers in the Detroit auto plants and Dayton factories who have finished their Friday shift and are now making the six-hundred-mile round trip to the mountains and back. They will drive through the night, arrive in the hollow in the early morning hours, spend Saturday and Sunday with family, and then drive back north on Sunday evening, arriving in time for the Monday morning shift.

This is the Hillbilly Highway. It is not a metaphor. It is a road, and the people on it are real.

The Geography of Departure

Route 23 connected two worlds that could hardly have been more different.

At its southern end, the highway served the coalfield counties of eastern Kentucky — Pike, Floyd, Johnson, Martin, Lawrence — counties where the coal economy was in terminal decline by the mid-1950s. These were places of extraordinary natural beauty and extraordinary economic devastation: narrow hollows between steep ridges, coal tipples standing idle, company houses falling into disrepair, and a generation of young people who could see no future in the place where they were born.

At its northern end, the highway fed into the industrial heartland of the upper Midwest — most importantly, the metropolitan area of Detroit, Michigan, where the auto industry was in the full boom of postwar expansion. Ford's River Rouge plant, General Motors' sprawling complexes, Chrysler's assembly lines — these were the factories that built the American middle class, and they needed workers.

The distance between these two worlds was approximately three hundred miles — a day's drive on the two-lane roads of the 1950s. But the cultural distance was immeasurable. A young man who had grown up in a hollow in Pike County, Kentucky — who had hunted squirrels in the woods behind his family's house, who had hauled water from a spring because the house had no plumbing, who had walked to a one-room school, who had listened to his grandfather tell stories of the mine wars — was now expected to find an apartment in a city of two million, report to a factory where the noise was deafening and the work was relentlessly monotonous, and somehow make a life in a place where the land was flat, the sky was gray with smog, and nobody talked like him.

The Kinship Chain

Nobody made the journey entirely alone. The Hillbilly Highway functioned through kinship networks — chains of connection that linked specific mountain communities to specific urban neighborhoods.

The chain typically began with a single person: a young man (usually) who heard about factory work from a returning migrant, or who saw an advertisement, or who was recruited by a labor agent. He made the journey north, found a job, found a place to live — usually a rooming house or a shared apartment with other single men from the same area — and then sent word home. The word traveled fast in tight-knit mountain communities. Within weeks or months, the pioneer migrant's brothers, cousins, and friends from the same hollow would follow.

As the chain lengthened, the support system deepened. A migrant who arrived in Detroit in 1955 and found a job at Ford could, by 1957, help a dozen relatives make the same transition. He knew which plant was hiring. He knew which neighborhood was affordable. He knew which landlord would rent to Kentucky people without hassle. He knew the route to the employment office, the location of the nearest church that held services in a style that mountain people recognized, and the bar where you could hear country music on Saturday night and feel, for a few hours, like you were back home.

This kinship chain produced remarkable concentrations. A single block in a Detroit neighborhood might house a dozen families from the same county in Kentucky. A church congregation in Dayton might consist almost entirely of families from two or three hollows in West Virginia. The social structure of the mountain community was, to a surprising degree, transplanted wholesale into the urban environment — with all its strengths (mutual support, shared identity, collective care for children and the elderly) and its limitations (insularity, suspicion of outsiders, resistance to change).

What They Found in Detroit

The auto industry paid well, and it paid consistently. This was the fundamental attraction, and for many migrants, it was enough. A steady paycheck from Ford or GM could transform a family's circumstances within months.

But the city exacted its own costs.

Housing was the first challenge. Detroit in the 1950s was a city of rigid racial and ethnic neighborhoods, and Appalachian migrants were slotted into the hierarchy near the bottom of the white working class. They rented in the neighborhoods that other white ethnic groups had vacated — the older, more run-down sections of the city where the housing stock was deteriorating and the services were declining. Landlords who rented to Appalachians sometimes charged premium rates, knowing that the newcomers had few alternatives and little knowledge of their legal rights.

Work was available but grueling. The assembly line was a world of noise, speed, and repetition. A man who had worked in a coal mine — dangerous, yes, but varied and requiring skill and judgment — found the assembly line's relentless sameness difficult to endure. The factories were hot in summer and cold in winter. The pace was set by the line, and the worker had no control over it. Injuries were common. The work was well-paid alienation.

Social life centered on the church and the tavern — the same two institutions that had anchored social life in the coalfields. Appalachian migrants in Detroit established Baptist and Holiness churches that maintained the preaching style, the hymnody, and the emotional intensity of mountain worship. These churches served the same multiple functions that churches had served in the mountains: they were places of worship, but also community centers, mutual aid societies, counseling services, and gathering places where the dispersed members of a transplanted mountain community could find each other and feel known.

The taverns — the country bars and honky-tonks of the working-class Detroit neighborhoods — served the secular counterpart of the same function. They were places where country music played on the jukebox, where the accents were familiar, where a man could drink a beer after his shift and talk about home without being mocked for the way he talked. These establishments were social institutions, not merely drinking establishments, and their role in sustaining migrant community life should not be underestimated.

The Drive Home

The most remarkable feature of the Hillbilly Highway was not the initial migration but the weekly commute — the astonishing ritual of driving six hundred miles round trip, every weekend, to maintain the connection to the mountains.

A typical weekend commute looked like this: a factory worker finished his Friday shift at 3:30 p.m., drove to his apartment, changed clothes, loaded the car with groceries and gifts for the family back home, and hit Route 23 south by 5:00 p.m. He drove through the evening and into the night — through Columbus, through Portsmouth, across the river into Kentucky, up the winding road into the coalfield counties. He arrived at his parents' house at 2:00 or 3:00 a.m., exhausted, and slept until midmorning.

Saturday was family time. Meals with parents and siblings. Visits to relatives scattered through the hollow and the neighboring hollows. Repairs to the family home — fixing a leaking roof, splitting firewood, mending a fence. Saturday evening might bring a visit to the country store, a church social, or just sitting on the porch talking as the dark came down over the ridges.

Sunday morning was church. Sunday afternoon was the meal — the big family dinner that was the emotional center of the weekend visit. And then, in the late afternoon, the migrant loaded the car again, said goodbye to parents who were getting older and siblings who were getting thinner, and drove back north through the darkening Sunday evening, arriving in Detroit in time to sleep a few hours before the Monday morning shift.

This was not a sustainable way to live. The exhaustion, the expense, the danger of driving hundreds of miles on insufficient sleep — all took their toll. Car accidents on Route 23 and the other migration corridors were alarmingly common. Some migrants made the trip every weekend for years. Others could manage it only monthly, or less. But the impulse was universal: the need to go home, to touch the land, to be in the presence of the people and the place that defined who you were.

The Legacy of the Highway

Route 23 is quieter now. The great wave of Appalachian migration crested in the 1960s and subsided through the 1970s and 1980s as the auto industry itself declined and the factory jobs that had drawn the migrants north disappeared. Detroit, which had been the city of promise, became its own cautionary tale — deindustrialization, population loss, urban decay. The irony was not lost on the Appalachian migrants who had come to Detroit to escape exactly those conditions.

But the Highway's legacy is permanent. The descendants of the people who traveled Route 23 number in the hundreds of thousands — perhaps millions — across the cities and suburbs of Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana. They carry Appalachian surnames, Appalachian food traditions, Appalachian patterns of speech and family life, and, in many cases, an Appalachian identity that persists across generations. They are the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of people who left the mountains because they had to, and who never stopped missing them.

The road itself has been memorialized. Kentucky's section of Route 23 was renamed the Country Music Highway in 2004, honoring the musicians from the counties along its route — a fitting tribute, since country music was born in these mountains and traveled north along this road to the radio stations and record companies that would bring it to the world. Dwight Yoakam, who grew up in Columbus as the son of Kentucky migrants, wrote songs about the highway and the world it connected. His music — sharp, restless, nostalgic — is the sound of the Hillbilly Highway.

Discussion Questions

1. The weekly commute between Detroit and eastern Kentucky — six hundred miles round trip, every weekend — seems almost unimaginable today. What does this practice tell us about the depth of Appalachian attachment to place? Is there a modern equivalent?

2. The kinship chain that linked specific mountain communities to specific urban neighborhoods is a well-documented pattern in migration studies. What are the advantages and disadvantages of this kind of chain migration for the migrants themselves? For the receiving communities?

3. Route 23 has been renamed the "Country Music Highway." Is this an appropriate memorialization, or does it romanticize a history that was fundamentally about economic displacement? What would a more complete memorialization look like?

4. The factories that drew Appalachian migrants to Detroit have themselves largely closed. How does the deindustrialization of Detroit complicate the narrative of the Hillbilly Highway? What happened to the migrants and their descendants when the industrial economy they had migrated to collapsed?