Foreword
Urban people like to ask why rural folks vote the way they do. They say it like it is a mystery that needs solving. Like if we just listened closer to the right speech or saw the right chart, we would come around to their ‘thinking’.
What they miss is the memory. Our rural history. Our rural culture.
Out here, stories get handed down with the biscuit bowl and the cast iron skillet. Stories about land that was worked by hand and lost with a government program. Stories about politicians who brought government and left folks standing in a yard that no longer belonged to them. When that kind of history sits in a family long enough, it shapes how you hear words like ‘new’ federal program or government help.
Sometimes those words sound less like a hand reaching out and more like an Army truck coming up the road.
The story you are about to read is one of those Appalachian memories.
THE LITTLE WHITE SPECKS ON THE MAP
Back in the early 2000s we were running a feed and supply store on our family farm. Folks came by for sweet feed or calf starter or just an excuse to stand around and talk a while. The loggers and forestry contractors were our biggest customers. They bought reclamation grass seed by the pallet and bales of straw by the truckload. All of it came straight from our Powell Valley fields.
One afternoon a professional forester friend of mine came in. He was a fellow Virginia Tech man and knew every acre of the Jefferson National Forest the way a preacher knows his scripture. He laid a map of the Jefferson National Forest on a stack of feed sacks. The green of federal land swallowed almost a third of the county. Scattered through it were tiny white squares that looked like someone had tossed salt across a skillet.
He tapped one. He asked why do these tiny parcels of private property exist surrounded by the National Forest?
I told him what my Great Grandmother always said. She was born in 1897 and lived long enough (1995) to see these hills change more than most folks change in a lifetime. She said the Federal government came into the mountains in the early nineteen hundreds with clipboards and courtroom confidence. They pushed out the families who could not read or write and who had no recorded deed to defend themselves. The folks who stayed were the ones who could read and maybe had a piece of paper tucked in a Bible drawer or stitched inside a coat lining.
The government did not take their land. It took everyone else's.
Those little white specks are the footprints of the people who could read and write, who knew enough to fight with paper and ink.
Reference Links:
The Worst Problem You Never Heard Of: Heirs’ Property Ownership in Appalachia and the South
THE HISTORY THEY DO NOT TEACH
Today most folks think National Forests are wonderful things. They picture families hiking up switchbacks, campers roasting hot dogs, tourists piling into Gatlinburg for taffy and trout souvenirs. It all feels wholesome enough, like something Ken Burns might narrate on a Sunday night. But chances are the very ground folks are enjoying was taken from mountain families who lived there for generations. These forests have a quiet beauty on the surface and a dark history underneath if you know where to look.
Before Washington D.C. came with forms and rules, mountain people worked on memory and earned possession. A man owned what he cleared and fenced and plowed. A family buried their kin on a hillside and that meant the hillside was theirs. You could walk a ridge and know the boundaries by the bend of the creek and the run of the timber. Paper did not matter because work spoke louder.
Then came the Weeks Act of 1911, which let the federal government buy private land across the East to create National Forests. The words sounded simple. What happened was not.
Agents moved through the mountains and told families that if their land was not recorded at the courthouse, it was not theirs. That single sentence took the place of a century of sweat. Many mountain folks signed papers they could not read. Some believed they were selling only timber rights. Others were told the land would be shared. Quiet title actions followed, and condemnation orders when people refused to budge.
Reference Links:
Weeks Act History
THE DAY THE ARMY TRUCKS CAME
When talk did not convince some families to leave, the government turned up the heat. Mountain folks still tell the stories in low voices. G-men arrived with deputies or soldiers and delivered the same line. You do not own this land.
Then they loaded whole families into Army trucks, bounced them down old wagon roads, and carried them off to Knoxville or Cincinnati. Once they arrived, the government told them to get a job. Imagine telling a man who had spent twenty years coaxing corn out of rocky soil that his new life was pushing a factory broom. Imagine telling a woman who raised her entire family on that hillside that she had been trespassing in her own homeplace.
It was not a relocation. It was exile.
THE FORESTS THAT STOOD UP ON THEIR LAND
Look at the hills today and you can see what became of those farms and hollers. Pisgah National Forest in North Carolina spread across places where people had raised families for a hundred years. The Monongahela in West Virginia took hollers where livestock once grazed. The Daniel Boone Forest in Kentucky rose on land that once grew corn and sorghum. And here in our part of Virginia, the Jefferson National Forest settled itself into Wise County and Lee County and Scott County and Dickenson County.
Official histories use soft words like acquisition and public purpose. Mountain people tell it straighter. The government bought the paper. It never bought the land. It bought the gap between knowing and not knowing. It bought the courthouse fires that burned the deed books. It bought the poverty that kept families from hiring lawyers. It bought the silence of folks who did not understand what they were signing.
Reference Links:
Pisgah National Forest
Monongahela National Forest
Jefferson National Forest
Ronald Eller, Miners Millhands and Mountaineers
WHAT THE MAP STILL SAYS
Those little white squares on that forester map are survivors. They are the deeds that did not burn. They are the families who could read the contract. They are the people who asked the right questions at the right moment. They are the stubborn few who did not scare easy when a man from Washington D.C. came around with official looking papers and a quick tongue.
They are not accidents. They are scars.
My Great Grandmother said it plain. The folks who could read stayed. The ones who could not lost everything. You can look at the map today and see the truth without anyone needing to explain it.
This is just one story, and there are hundreds more like it across rural America. So when a political candidate talks about a bigger government or a government program coming to help us, now you know why some rural folks hear a truck engine in low gear headed our way.
Be curious, not judgmental.
Till next time, that’s the story from the ‘Back Forty’. — John W. Peace II
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John W. Peace II is a fifth-generation farmer from Big Stone Gap, Virginia, where he grew up on his family’s dairy, Clinch Haven Farms, and still lives today. He’s a proud father to Trey and Shelby Peace, and partner in life to Cathy Swinney. A Virginia Tech graduate with graduate studies at Penn State, he served as the youngest Chair of the Wise County Board of Supervisors (2004–2008). John co-owns urTOPIX LLC (urTopixLLC.com), a Democratic campaign training firm focused on reaching rural voters that is sponsored by www.RuralAmericaRising.com PAC. He’s also a two-time Amazon bestselling author. Learn more at www.JohnWPeace.com.
Contact: https://linktr.ee/JohnWPeace
