Appalachian Aspirations

In the fall of 1865, two Union officers stationed in East Tennessee during the Civil War - Hiram Chamberlain and John Wilder -- decided to stay in the South to pursue business careers. They recognized potential in the "untapped" resources they had seen during military operations in this part of the state. Within the space of four years, Chamberlain and Wilder had recruited business partners, built an operating iron furnace in the Upper Tennessee River Valley (the Roane Iron Company), and established a company town at Rockwood, Tennessee. Twenty years later, in some parts of Appalachia, new planned towns were being established by land companies that wanted to develop model industrial real estate ventures. In the Upper Tennessee River Valley, these new towns - Cardiff, Harriman, and Lenoir City, Tennessee - were planned to be the quintessential places for industrial production and urban living as they were characterized by urban/sanitary reform ideals, temperance tenets, and distinctive urban landscapes. In Appalachian Aspirations, John Benhart presents the story of the evolution of capitalism and regional development in the Upper Tennessee River Valley in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Owsley County, Kentucky, is well known by journalists, academics, and local historians as a quintessential example of rural poverty in Appalachia. This study identifies several reasons behind Owsley County's ongoing struggle with poverty, including the county's lack of natural resources, a poor transportation system, and a centralized socio-political power structure controlled by the entrenched elite. The author asserts that Owsley County's economic hardships are far from unique, but rather are representative of a significant number of Appalachian counties and towns. Several tables and appendices provide useful demographic, legislative, and agricultural data.

On the morning of August 21, 1861, John T. Wilder, a brash young colonel of a Union mounted infantry unit nicknamed the “Lightning Brigade” ordered his men to open fire on the city of Chattanooga, Tennessee, damaging buildings, sinking steamboats along the riverfront, and injuring men, women, and children. In the midst of Reconstruction and an emerging new South a mere eight years later, Wilder was elected mayor of Chattanooga. While Wilder is most closely associated with the Lightning Brigade, which helped to pioneer the use of both mounted infantry and repeating firearms during the American Civil War, his military accomplishments occupied only five years of his eighty-seven year life. His immense postwar success, however, left a permanent mark on the industrial development of the war-torn South in the second half of the nineteenth century. It is the comprehensive picture of Wilder’s nearly nine decades that Maury Nicely seeks to capture in Forging a New South: The Life of General John T. Wilder. “For many war heroes, there was not much beyond the war worth telling,” Nicely writes. “Such was not the case with Wilder.” A successful entrepreneur and industrialist, after the war Wilder relocated to East Tennessee, where he created dozens of businesses, factories, mines, hotels, and towns; was elected mayor of the city he had shelled during the war; and cultivated close personal and business relationships with Federal and Confederate veterans alike, helping to create a new South in the wake of a devastating conflict. Presented in two parts and accompanied by more than sixty detailed photographs and maps, Nicely’s balanced study fills a significant void—the first complete biography of General John T. Wilder.

The Southern Appalachian Region is the largest American "problem area" -- an area whose participation in the economic growth of the nation has not been sufficient to relieve the chronic poverty of its people. The existence of the problem was recognized a generation ago, but in the past decade the resistance of such areas to economic advance has acquired a more urgent significance in American thought. In 1958, a group of scholars undertook to make a new survey of the Southern Appalachian Region. Aided by grants from the Ford Foundation ultimately amounting to $250,000, they set out to analyze the direction and extent of the changes which had taken place since the last survey (in1935), to define the problem in terms of the present situation, and -- if possible -- to arrive at recommendations for action which might enable the leaders of the Region and the nation to attack the problem with practical measures. In this volume are presented their comprehensive reports on the Region's population, its economy, its institutions, and its culture. The problems defined by this survey are a challenge to the whole nation, for the consequences of success or failure in solving them will not be limited to the Southern Appalachian Region.