The Industrialist and the Mountaineer
eBook - ePub

The Industrialist and the Mountaineer

The Eastham-Thompson Feud and the Struggle for West Virginia's Timber Frontier

  1. 311 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

The Industrialist and the Mountaineer

The Eastham-Thompson Feud and the Struggle for West Virginia's Timber Frontier

About this book

In 1897 a small landholder named Robert Eastham shot and killed timber magnate Frank Thompson in Tucker County, West Virginia, leading to a sensational trial that highlighted a clash between local traditions and modernizing forces. Ronald L. Lewis's book uses this largely forgotten episode as a window into contests over political, environmental, and legal change in turn-of-the-century Appalachia.
 
The Eastham-Thompson feud pitted a former Confederate against a member of the new business elite who was, as a northern Republican, his cultural and political opposite. For Lewis, their clash was one flashpoint in a larger phenomenon central to US history in the second half of the nineteenth century: the often violent imposition of new commercial and legal regimes over holdout areas stretching from Appalachia to the trans-Missouri West. Taking a ground-level view of these so-called "wars of incorporation," Lewis's powerful microhistory shows just how strongly local communities guarded traditional relationships to natural resources. Modernizers sought to convict Eastham of murder, but juries drawn from the traditionalist population refused to comply. Although the resisters won the courtroom battle, the modernizers eventually won the war for control of the state's timber frontier.
 

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Yes, you can access The Industrialist and the Mountaineer by RONALD L. LEWIS in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in History & North American History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Series Page
  3. Title Page
  4. Copyright
  5. Contents
  6. Acknowledgments
  7. Introduction
  8. 1. The Incorporation of West Virginia
  9. 2. Modernizing the Law
  10. 3. Robert W. Eastham, the Early Years
  11. 4. Eastham in West Virginia
  12. 5. Who Were the Thompsons?
  13. 6. Setting the Stage for Trouble
  14. 7. The Struggle for Control
  15. 8. The Shoot-Out and “Lawyers by the Dozen”
  16. 9. Jury Selection and the Appeal
  17. 10. On Trial for Murder
  18. Epilogue
  19. Notes
  20. Bibliography
  21. Index