Appalachia: A Regional Geography

Land, People, And Development

Karl Raitz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367168315
  9780367018443
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429724213
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Although Appalachia has long been recognized as one of the most distinctive subregions in North America and has been studied widely as an "underdeveloped problem area," this book is the first to provide a comparative and analytical geographical perspective on the entire Appalachian region rather than on portions of it. The authors highlight the div

Part 1
The Boundaries of Appalachia

Chapter 1
Regional Definitions

A basic task in regional geography is delimitation of appropriate boundaries. This essential step in regional study is difficult and often not fully acceptable to all critics. That areas can be carved into parcels as many different ways as there are persons to do the carving is not surprising, since there are an almost infinite number of criteria upon which to base a regionalization. The criteria used, of course, depend upon the purpose of the regionalization. Thus, the boundary lines we create might enclose areas that are somewhat homogeneous in terms of culture, physiography, climate, agriculture, or planning jurisdiction. In short, a region is a mental construct: an area that has been bounded in accordance with the goals of those delimiting the region. In a sense, regions do not have truth—they have only utility.

Some areas seem particularly enigmatic and therefore difficult to delimit. In the United States, for example, the Midwest and the South are two such regions. Joseph Brownell and Wilbur Zelinsky have discussed the difficulties in delimiting these two regions and have provided us with solutions. Zelinsky offered the "settlement landscape" (the aggregate pattern of all structures and assemblages of structures in which people house their activities) as a way to bound the South.¹ The solution given by Brownell for the Midwest was based upon responses from postmasters as to whether or not they considered themselves to be located in that rather nebulous region.² Clearly, the use of other criteria would have provided very differently bounded regions.

Another major American region for which different regionalizations exist is Appalachia. Our ultimate goal in this chapter is to delimit an Appalachian region that will best suit our purposes. There should be some natural basis for doing this, and in that context it seems appropriate that we begin by discussing the various regionalizations of Appalachia that have been introduced by others.

Defining Appalachia as a Region

Many characteristics could be used to set Appalachia off as a separate region in America. The mere mention of the word Appalachia conjures

A segment of a 1719 map by John Senex, titled "A New Map of the English Empire in America," shows the "Apalitean Mountains" extending from north Florida to the Pennsylvania border. The "Large Savana" in western Carolina may be a section of the Great Valley that was reported to have been cleared by Indian burning. (From the American Geographical Society Collection of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.)

up a variety of impressions depending upon one's perspective or purpose: Appalachia has been variously described as a region of mountains, coal mining, poverty, unique culture, tourism, welfarism, isolation, and subsistence agriculture. Any of these characteristics, or others, could be used to define the Appalachian region.

Physical Geographic Definitions

Some of the earliest regionalizations of the United States were based upon one physical feature or a combination of several features. Natural vegetation, climatic patterns, and especially physiography have been used to delimit physical, or natural, regions. That Appalachia is often defined on the basis of its physiography is not at all surprising, given that it has a high relief relative to the areas surrounding it. Indeed, this high relief has been an effective barrier to historic migrations and according to many writers has been responsible in part for some of the region's less desirable characteristics like "isolation, poverty, and a retarded civilization."³

There is evidence to suggest that the Appalachians were first named in the sixteenth century by Spanish explorers (possibly even by Hernando De Soto, one of the first to explore the southern part of the Appalachians) who, so the theory goes, took the name from an Indian tribe (or village), the Apalachee of northern Florida. From that time until the Civil War, Appalachia was simply a term for the physiographic mountain system.⁴ It was not until the latter part of the nineteenth century that Appalachia began to be viewed as a distinctive social, cultural, and economic region.

Physical geographers—more specifically, geomorphologists—have long been interested in the question of regionalization, and they have developed a number of physiographic regions for the United States. All such physical regionalizations include an Appalachian region. The first of these regional delimitations came from "the geographer Arnold Guyot in 1861 [who] is credited with establishing scientific and popular usage for the entire mountain range."⁵ Guyot used the term Allegheny on his map (although his paper is entitled "On the Appalachian Mountain System") and discussed the east-to-west division of the system into parallel mountain ranges.⁶ He also proposed dividing the system north to south into three subregions. The northern one included that area from the Gaspé Peninsula in southeastern Quebec Province (geologically, the Appalachian system extends from Newfoundland through Oklahoma to Texas) south to the Adirondack Mountains of New York; the middle section extended from the Mohawk River south to the New River; and the southern section included the area from the New River south to Alabama. The entire area covered a north-south distance of some 1.400 mi (2.252.6 km).

Another major effort to define the region was that of John Wesley Powell in 1895.⁷ His was the first attempt to divide the entire United States into physiographic regions. Powell delimited three separate regions that, taken together, are generally considered today to be physiographic Appalachia. From east to west Powell named the three subregions the Piedmont Plateaus, the Appalachian Ranges, and the Allegheny Plateaus.

Part of a 1732 map by Zacharie Chatelain, titled "Carte De La Nouvelle France . . . shows the "Mont. d'Apalaches" in Northern Florida reaching north to "Mariland." River names and place-names north of Ste. Marie d'Apalaches on Florida's Gulf Coast may have been derived from local Indians. (From the American Geographical Society Collection of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.)

Detail from "A Map of the British Empire in America ..." by Henry Popple, 1733. The "Apalachean Mountains" are shown in western North Carolina and extend north into Pennsylvania. The Potomac River rises west of the mountains, and the "Hohio River" apparently originates just south of Lake Erie. (From the American Geographical Society Collection of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.)

Together they encompassed an area that extends southwestward from the Hudson and Mohawk valleys in New York to northern Georgia and Alabama.

To geographers perhaps the best-known physical regionalxzation of the United States is that by Nevin Fenneman. Originally discussed in 1913 at the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers, the culmination of Fenneman's regional work came with the publication of his Physiography of Western United States in 1931 and Physiography of Eastern United States in 1938.⁸ Basically, Fenneman's geomorphic regions of the United States are defined by existing differences in topography and elevation as affected by the three control factors of structure, process, and stage. Simply stated this means "that given a certain geologic framework [type of rock], the topographic condition or expression of an area is largely determined by its geomorphic history."⁹ Fenneman included eight major physiographic divisions in the United States; one of them he called the Appalachian Highlands. This region includes six provinces and extends from the Gulf Coastal Plain to the St. Lawrence River (including the Adirondacks and New England) and from the Atlantic Coastal Plain west to the Central Lowland (Figure 1.1). The Appalachian Highlands takes its name from its most prominent features, but it is by no means all high altitude. Indeed, subdivisions of the region differ greatly and each of these has considerable internal diversity as well (see Chapter 2). As Fenneman stated, "So far as this extensive region has unity, it is found in the results of repeated uplifts, involving for the most part greater altitude and stronger relief than that of adjacent regions."¹⁰ Although Fenneman included six provinces within the Appalachian Highlands, our discussion of physiographic Appalachia will be limited to four of these: the Piedmont, the Blue Ridge, the Ridge and Valley, and the Appalachian Plateaus provinces. These provinces conform more closely with other regional delimitations of Appalachia, including our own (see the last section of this chapter).

Other physiographic, or natural, regions of the United States that have been introduced by geologists and physical geographers correspond very closely to the regional delimitation devised by Fenneman. Two such examples include the physiographic provinces of Atwood and the natural regions discussed by Hunt.¹¹

Our review of twelve regional textbooks on North America and the United States published between 1934 and 1979 revealed how geographers have delimited the Appalachian region for heuristic purposes. Virtually all of the works include a map showing the physiographic regions of the United States, and in each case Appalachia appears as a distinct, major physiographic region. Generally, these physiographic regions closely follow the Fenneman definition and include the Piedmont, the Blue Ridge, the Ridge and Valley, and Plateau provinces as the major subregions.

There is much less agreement among these twelve regional texts as to the way in which the United States is carved into the geographic

Figure 1.1 After Nevin M. Fenneman, Physiography of Eastern United States (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1938), Plates I, II, and III.

regions that are ultimately discussed. Only six of the twelve books included Appalachia as a major region for discussion and devoted at least one entire chapter to the region. Of these six, four texts apparently delimited Appalachia principally on the basis of physiographic criteria, although it is evident that other, nonphysical criteria were considered as well.¹² A fifth delimited Appalachia and the other regions of the United States based on "the total environment both physical and cultural."¹³ It was not possible to determine Appalachian regional boundaries for the sixth text because no map of the regions discussed was included. The regionalization in this case was based on the author's selection of whatever criteria he felt best expressed the "personality" of a region. Thus "cultural origins, climate, space relationships, and livelihood are likely to be involved and are given coherence by the writer's perception that they compose an entity."¹⁴

A composite map comparison of four of the five different Appalachian regions delimited in the texts clearly demonstrates significant variations in boundary definition, even among the three that bound a physiographic region (Figure 1.2).¹⁵ The region used for comparison here was the smallest area that was labeled "Appalachia." The boundary used by Birdsall and Florin excludes the Pittsburgh metropolitan area, which is included in most other regional delimitations of northern Appalachia. The eastern boundary of this regionalization generally lies farther we...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• List of Photographs
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART 1 THE BOUNDARIES OF APPALACHIA
• PART 2 REGIONAL DIVERSITY AND THE BASES FOR DEVELOPMENT
• PART 3 ISSUES, PROBLEMS, AND SOLUTIONS
• Bibliography
• Index
• Other Titles of Interest from Westview Press
• About the Book and Authors