• Coming of an Industry

  If the Appalachian settlers had more concern for what lay on the surface of the hills than the coal beneath their feet, the same could be said for the rest of the nation. Whereas European countries, particularly Britain, had steadily increased their use of coal from the 1500s to the 1700s, America at the time of the Revolutionary War fueled its economy with wood. Nonetheless, aristocratic speculators (including George Washington) recognized the potential worth of Appalachia’s minerals, and early on ensured their continued control of this resource by separating “mineral rights” from land ownership.

  Coal was the fuel of the industrial era – one economist called the mineral “the mainspring of modern material civilization” – and coal production increased in the United States from a little over 100,000 tons in 1800 to one million tons in 1832, ten million tons in 1851, and twenty million tons in 1860. Railroad locomotives began to burn coal after the Civil War and pig iron and steel mills, which used coal to fire their furnaces, expanded. In 1885, production topped 110 million tons and coal surpassed wood as the nation’s prime source of energy. In 1899, the United States replaced Britain as the world’s leading coal producer.

  Coal was first taken from Pennsylvania and Ohio – near the growing iron and steel factories and accessible to barge and rail lines. By the late 19 th century, the search for raw materials brought the investors of the industrial revolution to the Appalachians. There they found the product of the millennia: from north Georgia to New York stood one of the largest growths of virgin hardwood on the continent; in central Appalachia, beneath the trees, lay billions of tons of high grade coal.

  Much of Appalachia’s land was already controlled by wealthy easterners, who leased the land to sharecroppers. Those who owned their land had little knowledge of, or use for, the minerals lying beneath. Agents for Northern financiers came with broad term leases and cash-in-hand for homesteaders who would sign over the timber and mineral rights to their land. Not comprehending the value of these resources, they often sold their land for as little as twenty-five cents an acre. In many counties, where property deeds were sketchy and boundaries uncertain, mineral and surface rights were transferred fraudulently.

  It is important to note that Appalachia has not always been poor. Prior to the Civil War, the region was prosperous. Appalachian agricultural produce fed the eastern cities. Mountaineers provided whiskey for eastern saloons, and mined the salt that settlers heading west required for food preservation. The Civil War, however, took a terrible toll -- disrupting the social structures with intercine warfare, and destroying much of the region’s infrastructure. The region also lacked capital, as no Federal Reserve Bank was placed in the region after the war.

  Dependent upon outside capital, three-fourths of Appalachia's timber and eighty percent of the mineral reserves were owned by outside investors by 1910. Railroads pushed into the remote corners of the region to haul in machinery and carry out the coal. County populations tripled as blacks from the South and newly arrived European immigrants were brought in to work the new coalfields. Many mountaineers left their small farms to join the new arrivals in the mines and mining camps. At the same time, the political control of local and country governments became increasingly dependent upon, and under the control of, the outside investors.

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