Mountains on the Market by Randal L. Hall

Author:Randal L. Hall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2012-04-08T04:00:00+00:00

Selling Mountain Culture

Residents of the upper New River counties had varied reactions to the changes of the twentieth century. Some responses took extreme forms. Floyd Allen (1856–1913), a Carroll County merchant and farmer, had a long-standing reputation for using force to get his way, whether in political tussles in behalf of Democrats or in business disputes with his brothers, one of whom he engaged in a gun battle in 1899. In the 1880s, he fought against a railroad proposed for the county. After the turn of the century, the local Republican Party began winning the county-level offices, and the state’s 1902 constitutional revision modified the court system to cut down on local cronyism. Allen continued to trip on the line between order and disorder. He served as a constable at times, and in 1911 he was asked to help keep the peace at the New River site where workers were building the Appalachian Power Company’s dams. But he also went on challenging the primacy of the law. On March 14, 1912, Allen was convicted in Carroll County’s courtroom of interfering with police officers who had arrested his nephews. He refused to accept the verdict, however, and he and several members of his family drew pistols and killed the judge, the sheriff, the prosecuting attorney, a juror, and a witness. Allen and one of his sons died in the electric chair, several family members served long prison terms, and their exploits were recorded in folk songs still played today.54

Despite arriving by train at Galax or Betty Baker and passing factories and mines owned in part by East Coast financiers, northern journalists who covered these events nonetheless labeled the New River valley a savage cultural anachronism. The Baltimore Sun reacted to the killings with particular vehemence: “There are but two remedies for such a situation as this, and they are education and extermination. With many of the individuals, the latter is the only remedy. Men and races alike, when they defy civilization, must die. The mountaineers of Virginia and Kentucky and North Carolina, like the red Indians and the South African Boers, must learn this lesson.”55 Most people of the area neither responded to twentieth-century life with the violence of a Floyd Allen nor accepted the degrading stereotypes that still evoked the outrageous characters of Hardin Taliaferro’s antebellum tall tales. In fact, some enterprising Blue Ridge natives exploited those same stereotypes, paving the way toward a new kind of industry, one based on rural culture. Fries’s town planners hoped to rekindle that particular tradition after their textile mill died.

In the 1920s, a group of industrial workers from Grayson and Carroll counties, among them Henry Whitter (1892–1941), Kelly Harrell (1889–1942), and Ernest V. “Pop” Stoneman (1893–1968), took advantage of their citizenship in two worlds: knowing industrial life and commerce while living in what others saw as the backwoods remnants of the Elizabethan age. These men helped create commercial country music. In the spring of 1923, Henry Whitter took a break from his textile factory job in Fries and went to New York.

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