Uneven Ground (8 page)

This political and economic system formed the backdrop for the emergence of a new form of mining enterprise in the 1950s that would leave a deep and permanent mark on the politics and landscape of the region. Surface mining, or “strip” mining, as it was pejoratively called, was not feasible on a large scale in Appalachia before the war, but the development of diesel-powered earth-moving equipment, giant screwlike augers, and more powerful explosives made it possible to extract great quantities of coal from outside the mountain rather than penetrating the seam using traditional, deep mining methods. A local entrepreneur, backed by a loan from a supportive banker, could open a seam of coal with minimal investment and only a fraction of the labor costs of a deep mine. After paying the cost of trucking the coal to a nearby tipple, the strip operator could sell his product more cheaply than that produced by underground mining and, within a year or two, could pocket millions of dollars in profit.

During the 1950s, hundreds of small coal operators and a few larger companies cut into the outcroppings of mountainside coal seams utilizing the new technology. In flat country, surface mining simply involved making a series of parallel cuts into the earth to uncover the coal and dumping the surface dirt and rock back into the previous cut as the process moved along. In the mountains, however, surface miners were forced to follow the contour of the coal seam as it wound around the mountainside. Contour mining removed the soil and rock from above the seam, gauging a shelf around the hillside to get at the coal below. This process not only left a forty- to ninety-foot “highwall” exposed on the inside of the cut but pushed most of the dirt, rock, and tree stumps from above the coal over the hillsides along the outer edges of the seam. This “overburden” created a loose, unstable mass that oozed down the hillside and sometimes broke loose, roaring through
the hollow with the first heavy rains and destroying everything in its path. The coal left in the seam underneath the highwall could be further exploited by using giant augers to drill horizontally into the hillside at regular intervals, leaving the mountain ringed by a series of ledges and holes. A seam that was located near the top of the ridge could be reached by removing the crest of the mountain, decapitating it and creating a huge mesa of barren, flat land.

Surface mining not only added to the competition in an already overexpanded industry, further stimulating mechanization and unemployment in the deep mines, but it left the mountains disfigured and the environment altered in ways previously unimagined in the region. The practice of contour mining cut into the hillsides ugly scars that ran for miles along the ridges. Mountaintop removal leveled thousands of acres, filling in the hollows between the hills and creating vast, inaccessible stretches of barren land. In a region once known for the purity of its water, surface mining altered water tables, polluted nearby creeks and streams, and contaminated local wells. When it rained, sulfur in the exposed coal produced sulfuric acid that filtered into the creeks, killing the fish and most plant life. “Gob piles” of mine waste clung to the hillsides, and huge rocks and tree stumps loosed by the mining process were sometimes sent flying down the hillside, destroying fields and gardens below and occasionally crashing through residences and barns.

Mining companies were required by law to replace the soil and to replant the ravaged hillsides, but small operators seldom took the time and expense to reclaim the land. Even where meager efforts at reclamation were undertaken, the absence of topsoil and the composition of the fill itself meant that little vegetation grew on the disturbed site. Given the need for jobs and the political power of the coal industry, state governments were slow to enforce existing regulations. As a result, the heavy mountain rains washed acres of rocks and topsoil into the streams each year, choking and silting over rivers and flooding the farms and communities below. One study by the U.S. Geological Survey found that in strip-mined areas, the rains washed away 27,000 tons of earth per square mile each year, in contrast to 1,900 tons in areas where strip mining had not occurred.
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The social cost of the new industry was as appalling as the cost to the land itself. In much of Appalachia, mineral rights had been severed
from surface rights by the actions of mineral buyers at the turn of the century. For as little as twenty-five cents per acre, hundreds of thousands of acres of coal were sold to absentee land companies, whose intricate deeds granted them use of the timber on the surface for mining purposes and access to the coal at some future date. The ownership and use of the surface land remained with the mountain farm family. These “broad form” deeds, as they were known in eastern Kentucky, effectively transferred to the land company all of the mineral wealth and the right to remove it by whatever means necessary, leaving the original owners and their descendants the semblance of landownership and the responsibility for paying the taxes.
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With the advent of surface mining in the 1950s, however, these old deeds took on new meaning as the mining companies sought access to their mineral property without regard to the rights of the surface owners. Roads were cut across pastures, forests devastated, fields ruined, and water supplies polluted to get at the coal, and the state courts upheld the right of the miners to remove the coal “by any means convenient or necessary.”
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Increasingly, farm families found that they had little control over their own land and that their meager hopes for subsistence on it were destroyed. Many believed that they had no recourse but to abandon the farmstead to the mining company and to join the growing numbers of landless migrants and unemployed workers that roamed the region or left the mountains entirely.

Ironically, the human and environmental destruction levied on Appalachia by surface mining was fed by a public agency created during the Depression to conserve the land and to promote economic recovery. The energy development policies of the TVA in the 1950s spurred demand for cheaper coal at a time when surface-mined coal was just beginning to enter the market. The TVA was established in 1933 to coordinate flood control, reforestation, and economic development along the Tennessee River and its tributaries, but by World War II the agency had moved away from many of its initial efforts at human development, conservation, and regional planning in favor of a policy that concentrated on the generation of cheap electric power for domestic use and industrial expansion. Anticipating future power demands in growing urban centers along the river and pressed by the cold war concerns of the Atomic Energy Commission for more power
to fuel the uranium enrichment plants at Oak Ridge and Paducah, the TVA constructed seven of the world's largest coal-fired power plants between 1949 and 1953 and created a huge market for cheap, locally produced coal.

The generation of electricity from coal rather than from hydroelectric facilities on TVA dams reflected the public utility's commitment to cheap power as the centerpiece of its survival strategy in the conservative political environment of the 1950s. Armed with the development of new technologies that allowed for the efficient burning of low-grade coal, the TVA turned to lower-quality, surface-mined coal to fire its new generators. Although dirtier and often higher in sulfur content, surface-mined coal from Appalachia and western Kentucky could be delivered to the TVA furnaces at a fraction of the cost of deep-mined coal, and agency buyers quickly signed long-term contracts with the small, nonunion, and independent coal firms that had begun to strip the hills. The TVA's cheap-power policy inspired other power companies to modernize their furnaces and to shift to the burning of low-cost coal rather than other fuels. This trend not only increased the amount of sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere, adding to future environmental problems from acid rain, but effectively revolutionized the steam coal market and further spurred the production of surface-mined coal throughout central Appalachia. By the end of the decade, the TVA itself had purchased the mining rights to almost 100,000 acres of coal in eastern Kentucky and east Tennessee, and power plants and other consumers across the Midwest had turned to burning cheap, surface-mined fuel.
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Thus the agency that had been created to conserve the soil and improve quality of life through cooperative regional planning contributed both directly and indirectly to the further desolation of the mountains.

Evidence of the tragic consequences of the TVA's cheap-power policy came in 1957, when disastrous floods swept the central Appalachian coalfields. Following a week of almost steady rain, streams in southern West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, and southwest Virginia roared out of their banks on January 29–30, 1957, inundating houses, stores, churches, and schools and killing fourteen people. As much as three inches of rain fell on the area in a twenty-four-hour period. Damage was estimated in the millions of dollars, and President Eisenhower
declared the region a federal disaster area. The town of Pound, Virginia, was overwhelmed by twenty feet of water, and in the cities of Pikeville and Hazard, Kentucky, water reached the ceilings of Main Street stores. Rescue boats sailed over the tops of city streetlights. Rural roads were washed away, and deposits of sediment and piles of rocks and splintered trees ruined bottomland fields.
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The mountains had witnessed winter and spring “tides” before, but never with the destruction and loss of life of the 1957 floods. Strip mining and logging had ravaged much of the countryside in the most severely devastated counties, and now there was little vegetation on the hillsides to absorb the water from heavy rains. Surface mining, for example, had shredded tens of thousands of acres of land in Buchanan County, Virginia. “A bird's-eye view of it,” wrote Harry Caudill, “reveals marooned and isolated farmhouses perched disconsolately on high pillars of dirt and stone. Towering high walls make access to them impossible. Much of the county's total land surface has been stripped of vegetation and reduced to jumbles of stone and gullying spoil-banks.”
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Similar conditions existed in neighboring Wise County, Virginia, and Harlan, Letcher, Perry, and Pike counties in Kentucky. A subsequent assessment of the floods by the U.S. Forest Service blamed “poor logging practices” and the “effect of strip-mining” for the increased erosion and sedimentation that had caused the streams to clog and to “have less capacity to carry runoff.” The effects of strip mining “were clearly evident during and after the storm,“ and in the future, the report warned, “the conditions of the area will continue to get worse.”
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The winter floods of 1957 brought a growing clamor for solutions to the human and environmental tragedies in Appalachia. Journalists, educators, and state and local politicians had called for action to alleviate the economic plight of the region for years, but there was little consensus on the causes of Appalachia's poverty or on the resolution of its complex problems. For some, the region's “backwardness” was a result of geographic isolation and insufficient development of modern patterns of transportation and industry. For others, the problem lay in the culture of the mountain people themselves, a culture, they argued, that preserved anachronistic values and prevented people from lifting
themselves out of poverty. One view looked to the development of the region's physical infrastructure, its highways, water systems, and industrial parks. The other sought to uplift mountain residents through education and job training. Both perspectives favored the further integration of Appalachia into the economy and society of the rest of the nation. Both tended to define Appalachia's problems as a lack of resources for development, either physical or cultural, rather than as the result of structural inequalities and the politics of development itself.

To resolve Appalachia's distress, many educators and human service professionals, like those associated with the regional CSM, favored a broad program of educational enrichment and job training to help attract industries to rural communities and to enhance the success of Appalachian migrants in the cities. Modernizing Appalachian culture had been a goal of missionaries and educators in the region for decades, and the annual conference of the CSM provided a venue for leaders from across Appalachia to discuss the need for better schools, health services, improved recreation, and economic growth. At the heart of the council's “program for the mountains” was the idea of “cooperative community development,” a strategy that had underpinned much of the benevolent work of private foundations, settlement schools, and some other educational institutions in Appalachia since the turn of the century. Combining elements of the progressive faith in science, education, efficient planning, and public-private partnerships, this philosophy challenged regional leaders to develop the human capacity of the mountains and to work together to find collaborative solutions to community problems.

Under the leadership of Perley F. Ayer, a rural sociologist from New Hampshire who assumed the role of executive director in 1951, the CSM became the largest organization of human service professionals within Appalachia and the leading proponent of human and community development strategies for regional improvement. During the 1950s, the council held workshops for teachers and urban social workers, sponsored tours of the region, and, after the 1957 floods, pressed state leadership across the region to undertake assessment and strategic planning initiatives for their mountain counties. Throughout its work, the council emphasized the importance of education, the capacity of the individual to overcome cultural and social barriers, the value
of volunteerism in the community, and the role of schools as community-building institutions.
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Whereas members of the CSM focused their efforts on regional cooperation and on improving education, state and local leaders usually advocated economic growth through the expansion of industry and the identification of new uses and new markets for coal, timber, and other natural resources. Many business leaders and local politicians believed that the mountains had been victimized by the underdevelopment of resources that could generate more wealth. As a result of geography and inadequate infrastructure, they reasoned, Appalachia lacked the physical structures to provide employment, raise living standards, and sustain growth in a modern economy. The construction of roads and industrial water systems and the preparation of manufacturing sites that might provide jobs were expensive in mountainous terrain, and, historically, low-country legislators had been reluctant to spend state revenues on internal improvement projects in the Appalachian portions of their states.