Country People in the New South: Tennessee's Upper Cumberland

COUNTRY PEOPLE IN THE NEW SOUTH

STUDIES IN RURAL CULTURE

JACK TEMPLE KIRBY, EDITOR

COUNTRY PEOPLE IN THE NEW SOUTH

TENNESSEE’S UPPER CUMBERLAND

JEANETTE KEITH

THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS

CHAPEL HILL AND LONDON

© 1995 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Keith, Jeanette. Country people in the New South: Tennessee’s Upper

Cumberland / by Jeanette Keith. p. cm. — (Studies in rural culture)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8078-2211-6 (alk. paper). — ISBN 0-8078-4526-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Dayton (Tenn.)—Rural conditions. 2. Upper Cumberland Region (Tenn.)—Rural conditions. 3. Scopes, John Thomas—Trials, litigation, etc. I. Title. II. Series.

HN80.D314K45 1995      307.72’09768’834—dc20

94-39346 CIP

99 98 97 96 95 5 4 3 2 1

www.uncpress.unc.edu

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Social Background of the Tennessee Monkey Law

1. Making Do: The Upper Cumberland Farm Economy in the 1890s

2. Families and Communities

3. The Old-Time Religion: Churches in the Upper Cumberland

4. Jeffersonian Government in Action: Politics and Social Order in the Upper Cumberland

5. Railroad Dreams: Cash Comes to the Cumberlands

6. Progress and Resistance, 1900–1917: The Struggle for Good Roads

7. The Battle for the Schools

8. Sergeant York’s Home Front

9. Persistence, Poverty, and Politics

10. Following the Old Paths: The Family, Religion, and Politics in the 1920s

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

A section of illustrations begins on page 91.

TABLES, FIGURE, AND MAPS

TABLES

1. Household Types, 1900 28

2. Selected Regional Religious Groups, 1890 46

3. Tennessee Central Freight 83

4. Tenancy Rates by County, 1890–1910 85

5. School Enrollment by County, 1900 127

6. School Enrollment by County, 1912 137

7. Farms and Farming, 1890–1925 176

8. Pupils Starting and Completing Elementary School, 1920 201

FIGURE

Tenure by Age, 1920 175

MAPS

1. The Upper Cumberland 6

2. Macon County, 1899 43

3. The Upper Cumberland, 1903 82

4. The Upper Cumberland, 1926 181

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The people that I write about in this book survived by cultivating a web of family and community ties that sustained them in good times and bad. Like them, I have depended on family and friends to get me through hard times. However, unlike most country people, I have been unable to avoid debt. I am beholden to the following institutions and individuals:

Since I began work on this project I have been employed by three universities: Vanderbilt University, Tennessee Technological University, and Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania. Vanderbilt provided a nurturing environment for a graduate student—and a much needed dissertation improvement grant. At Tennessee Tech a group of historians shared their research into the Upper Cumberland past; I thank them for their generosity. I am especially grateful to James Sperry, chair of the Department of History at Bloomsburg, who for five years scheduled my classes in such a way as to give me time for research and writing. His encouragement meant a lot.

Like all historians, I owe a debt to those individuals who preserved local history. In this work I cite the research of many local historians. Without their books this book would have been almost impossible to write. Of these historians, by far the best is Mary Jean DeLozier. Mrs. DeLozier, who taught Tennessee history for years at Tennessee Tech, was commissioned by Putnam County to write the bicentennial history of the county. Her book on Putnam County, carefully and exhaustively researched, is surely the secondary source I turned to most often. I owe her and other local historians thanks.

Historians are always in debt to archivists and librarians. I would like to thank the people at the Tennessee State Library and Archives; the Disciples of Christ Historical Society; the Southern Baptist Convention Historical Library and Archives; the National Archives in Washington and at the Record Center in East Point, Georgia; the Special Collections of the Hoskins Library at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville; the Jean and Alexander Heard Library at Vanderbilt; the Vanderbilt Divinity School Library; the Jere Whitson Library at Tennessee Tech; and the Clara Cox Epperson Library, Cookeville, Tennessee.

Mr. and Mrs. Huber Butler of Carthage, Tennessee, spent an afternoon talking to me about Mr. Butler’s father, John Washington Butler. I am grateful to them for their time, their information, and their gracious hospitality.

This book began as a paper in Don H. Doyle’s social history seminar at Vanderbilt. At every stage of the long process by which paper became dissertation became book, Don’s enthusiasm, encouragement, support, and guidance have been unfailing. I consider myself fortunate to have had such a mentor and to have worked with the excellent graduate students, among them Doug Flamming, Mary DeCredico, and Mel McKiven, who came to Nashville to study with Don Doyle. Collectively, in the Southern Social History Seminar, they critiqued major portions of this book; individually, they were extraordinarily kind and helpful to the older housewife in their midst. David Carleton provided useful criticism and help at each stage of the project. Paul Conkin read the dissertation as a historian and as a former farm boy from East Tennessee; both perspectives were immensely useful. Then he read it again as a writer and made me rewrite to avoid most (not all) passive voice. I also thank Dewey Grantham for his insights in southern politics and political culture.

Parts of this book first appeared as papers at various conferences. I am grateful for the comments and critiques offered by panel members and by audiences; special thanks to Cynthia Bouton for her comments at the 1990 Duquesne Forum, and to Jack Hurley and Mary Neth for their comments at the 1991 meeting of the American Historical Association.

Jack Kirby, acting as series editor for UNC Press, sponsored the book to the press when it was an unrevised dissertation. His suggestions during the revision process have been invaluable, as has his consistent support. Edward Ayers reviewed the book before publication. His criticisms sparked a chain of e-mail messages between the two of us and resulted in my making revisions that sharpened and focused my argument. I am grateful for his willingness to debate. Thanks also to Lew Bateman and the staff at UNC Press.

I am blessed with good friends beyond my due. I owe debts of friendship to Tom Furtsch, Linda Furtsch, Albert and Pat Wilhelm, Jesse B. Garner, Mike Birdwell, Calvin Dickinson, Larry Whiteaker, Nancy Anderson, Anne Romaine, Mel McKiven, Anastatia Sims, Susan and Michael Carrafiello, Robert Hall, Paul and Bonnie Freedman, Nancy Gentile Ford, Susan Stemont, Michael Hickey, Margaret Gustus, and Vera Viditz-Ward. Over the past ten years these people have, respectively, taught me word processing, counseled me, bought me meals, provided me with places to stay while doing research, talked history with me, and fed my cats. As a group, they bear out the adage that friends will get you through times with no money....

A special thanks to Tony Allen, most severe critic and best friend.

Any resident of the Upper Cumberland one hundred years ago would have known that family is the best support system of all. I owe more than I can ever repay to my son Ryan Denning; my sister and brother-in-law, Martha and Russell Brown; my brother and sister-in-law, Gary and Jenna Keith; and to my parents, Robert and Melba Keith. To my family, country people all, this work is dedicated.

COUNTRY PEOPLE IN THE NEW SOUTH

INTRODUCTION

THE SOCIAL BACKGROUND OF THE TENNESSEE MONKEY LAW

In the hot summer of 1925, a motley collection of people rarely seen in small southern towns shuffled along the dusty streets of Dayton, Tennessee. Professionally cynical big-city reporters brushed by Hebrew scholars. Scientists and Christian ministers of all denominations lined up next to famous criminal lawyers and local Democratic politicians for lemonade at the local drug store or stopped to listen to street-corner evangelists shouting their message above the crowd noise. They were all in Dayton for the trial of John T. Scopes for violating the Tennessee Anti-Evolution Law.¹

Making his way through the crowds, the author of that law almost escaped notice. John Washington Butler, state representative from Macon County, was having the time of his life. Butler had expected to follow the trial from his home in the hills of Tennessee’s Upper Cumberland, about 100 miles west of Dayton, but when a press syndicate offered to pay his way to Dayton, Butler jumped at the chance. He left behind in Macon County an indignant nineteen-year-old son, who suddenly found himself in charge of his father’s wheat-threshing business in the middle of the summer harvest.²

Butler believed himself a participant in a highly important event; historians have agreed. The Tennessee monkey trial is one of the great set-pieces of twentieth-century American history, a story told in every textbook, with an agreed-upon symbolic meaning. With evolution as a pretext, modern, secular, urban, dynamic America confronted conservative, religious, rural America at Dayton. As the story goes, the forces of modernity lost in the Tennessee court but won in the national court of public opinion, and the trial signifies the emerging cultural dominance of urban secular values in American life.³

This book asks the reader to see the story from a different angle: not as the urban journalists and social critics who poured scorn on the Tennessee anthropoids that summer at Dayton saw it, but from the point of view of country people like J. W. Butler and his neighbors in the Upper Cumberland.

Although geography made the Upper Cumberland an isolated backwater, like many other southern hill-country regions, the area was not immune to the economic transformations that swept through the South in the late nineteenth century. However, the New South arrived in the Upper Cumberland several decades late. Until the 1890s the Upper Cumberland was a bastion of independent small farmers, still largely self-sufficient and dependent on family labor and local barter for sustenance. Traditionally folks in the region favored low taxes, minimal government services, and local control of institutions such as churches and schools. In 1890 a Nashville entrepreneur built a railroad through the region. By 1925 the Upper Cumberland had experienced three decades of economic development that radically changed the pace and the context of doing business in the region. During the early twentieth century, farmers and town folk fought repeated political battles over the meaning and the costs of progress and over who would control local institutions. These political divisions affected World War I mobilization in the region, pitting progressives against country people whose primary loyalty was to place and family. By the 1920s, men in the Upper Cumberland found their patriarchal control over wives and children threatened, as young women demanded a new dispensation in gender roles and young men left the farm for work in the cities. Improved transportation and communication began to integrate the region into the national consumer culture.

In this context, support for the Tennessee Monkey Law allowed Butler and his constituents to unite in affirmation of religious values at a time when politics, economics, and changing social mores increasingly divided people in the Upper Cumberland. Although people in the region belonged to diverse Protestant denominations, most could join in upholding the Bible as God’s authoritative word. Indeed, as everything around them changed, religion became all the more important to country people, enabling them to maintain continuity with the world of their fathers. Thus religion facilitated adjustment to other aspects of modernity. Belief in the eternal Word of God offered shelter from the transient nature of twentieth-century life.

Even hill-country regions in the South have their history. But why bother looking closely at a place admittedly out of the mainstream of southern life, let alone the nation’s? First, because such isolated regions all over the nation nurtured millions of people who migrated from the hinterlands to the cities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; it was in places like the Upper Cumberland that their values were formed. When people from the southern countryside moved into town, they brought with them their attitudes toward authority, gender issues, politics, and the proper way to live. These country ways still persist in southern ethnic enclaves from Cincinnati to Chicago to Bakersfield. (Southern immigrants also, of course, brought their music, their food, and their tastes in entertainment to town, with results still traceable in American popular culture.) To understand the mainstream, we need to know more about the history of the hinterland.

The Butler law indicates that the relationship between rural and urban in American culture also could benefit from a closer look. Conventionally we assume that mass culture (seen as urban, dynamic, secular, tolerant, fast paced, and consumerist) achieved national hegemony in the 1920s; ever since, rural ways have been under attack and in decline. But the present-day national culture wars echo conflicts about gender roles, parental control over education, and religion that were fought in remote Tennessee counties at the beginning of this century. In these earlier conflicts the people from the country often won: J. W. Butler’s use of legislation to protect the Bible wrote the religious values of the countryside into the legal code of Tennessee and had a chilling effect on textbook publishers for decades. In short, the relationship between urban and rural in America is not a one-way street, with influence running from the cities out to the countryside. Rather, urban and rural participate in a dialogue.

This book focuses on the country voice in that dialogue and is concerned with rural life in one small region in Tennessee from 1890 to 1925. The Upper Cumberland in 1890 was a white farmer’s world. Although the small farmer—legendarily self-sufficient and independent—is still a potent, if fading, American political icon, until recently relatively little historical research had been devoted to describing the farming world that was the common experience of the American majority until the twentieth century. In the past ten years social historians have begun the difficult task of describing the lives of people who lived on the land. In the past decade new studies have examined the economic strategies, politics, and family life of family farmers. Most of these studies argue that the advent of commercial farming transformed a relatively static farming economy in which each farming family was largely self-sufficient. Historians differ as to the precise impact of the market, but all agree that money—the substitution of a cash market for the old systems of barter and community interdependence—changed everything.⁴

This heavy concentration on the market sometimes leaves the impression that the disappearance of the self-sufficient family farm was predestined, that the market’s effects were always, inevitably, corrupting to the traditional farmer. Let the market appear in an isolated rural region and offer profits, and farmers immediately jettison self-sufficiency and become agricultural capitalists. Sometimes the outcome is basically positive, as it was for the midwestern farmers described by John Mack Faragher. Sometimes yeoman farmers gamble on the market and lose. Stephen Hahn’s north Georgia yeomen, pushed out of self-sufficiency by the necessity of recouping losses caused by the Civil War, plunge into the downward spiral of the cotton market, lose self-sufficiency, and often even give up their land.

Market choices were not predetermined, nor were they made in a vacuum. Instead, culture influenced economic choices made, for good or ill, and the same economic choices, made repeatedly over generations, became part of a cultural pattern, so that economic change would affect everything from religion to marriage to education. To understand the rural transformation, it is necessary to study the context out of which economic decisions emerged. What happened in rural America reflects market influences. But it also reflects the individual choices of millions of farm men and women, operating out of their own particular cultural context. In the Upper Cumberland the market came calling and was not welcomed with open arms. Market access did not lead to a transformation of agriculture: three decades after the railroad appeared, most Upper Cumberland farm families still valued their self-sufficiency and still produced the same crops their fathers had years before. However, the railroad brought other economic changes, which in turn affected regional politics and institutions.

The story opens with a geography lesson, since the history of the Upper Cumberland grows from its difficult, rocky, hilly terrain. First there are the rivers: the Cumberland rises in southeastern Kentucky, loops southeast into Tennessee, then flows off to the northwest to join the Ohio. When steamboats plied the river, the reaches northeast of Nashville were called the upper river, and the countryside along the banks shared the appellation, Upper Cumberland. By strict application, the Upper Cumberland region includes counties in Kentucky. This work will focus on eleven counties in northeastern Middle Tennessee: Clay, Cumberland, DeKalb, Fentress, Jackson, Macon, Overton, Pickett, Putnam, Smith, and White. The area comprising these counties runs from the Cumberland Plateau in the east to the central basin in the west, from the Kentucky line in the north to the Caney Fork River in the south.⁵

The plateau, a wide ridge that runs from Kentucky to Alabama, divides East from Middle Tennessee. Upper Cumberland people call it the mountain. The Upper Cumberland’s tributary rivers, the Obey and the Wolf, Roaring River, and the Caney Fork, originate on the plateau. The Obey flows from Fentress County northwest to join the Cumberland at Celina in Clay County. Roaring River drains Overton County and unites with the Cumberland at Gainesboro in Jackson County. The Caney Fork, large enough to have as tributaries the Calfkiller and Falling Water Rivers, rolls down from Cumberland County on the plateau, west across White County and northwest across DeKalb, Putnam, and Smith Counties, to join the Cumberland at Carthage. From their headwaters in the plateau, the region’s rivers flow west through Tennessee’s Highland Rim. There the mountain breaks down into ridges and valleys and finally into steep-sided hills and deep hollows drained by creeks that meander down to the Cumberland. The Cumberland itself cuts through the Highland Rim from Clay County on the Kentucky border, through Jackson and Smith Counties, and on out through the central basin to Nashville.

Map 1. The Upper Cumberland

The region’s geography prohibited plantation agriculture. Most early settlers were semisubsistence farmers. In the 1780s settlers moved up from the Nashville basin, following the river and its tributaries into the hills. The oldest communities in the region are in the west, along the banks of the Cumberland. In 1802 the east-west Walton Road was completed, linking Kingston on the Clinch River with Carthage on the Cumberland. The Walton Road crossed the plateau, but most settlers preferred to pass over the scrubby mountain land in favor of settlement in the fertile river and creek bottoms to the west. The plateau remained sparsely settled until the mid-nineteenth century.⁶

As the population increased, residents clamored for easier access to county governments, which had the all-important function of keeping land titles in order. Accordingly the state created new counties, roughly following lines of settlement and transportation, and tiny county seats grew around courthouse squares. Smith County was formed first, in 1799, and Carthage, at the juncture of the Caney Fork and the Cumberland, became the Upper Cumberland’s first county seat. Jackson County, farther up the river, was incorporated in 1801, followed by Overton and White Counties in 1806, Fentress in 1823, DeKalb in 1837, Macon in 1842, Putnam in 1854, Cumberland in 1856, Clay in 1870, and Pickett in 1879.⁷

The settlers who moved into the Upper Cumberland in the first half of the nineteenth century typified that group of southerners Frank Owsley called plain folk. Of English and Scotch-Irish ancestry, with a sprinkling of French and German, most came to the Upper Cumberland from Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas. Most farmers did not own slaves. Few regional slaveholders qualified as planters. Yet economic differences deriving from landownership did divide Upper Cumberland farmers. The early settlers who acquired property in the bottom lands beside the Cumberland and Caney Fork had more productive farms than their neighbors on the ridge. They were more likely to own slaves, to maintain business and social ties with Nashville, and to feel ties of loyalty to the plantation South. The farmers on the ridge, or farther east on the mountain, owned less productive lands, were less likely to own slaves, and often made their cash money by fattening cattle or hogs on the common range and driving them to market on the Old Kentucky Stock Road, which ran from Danville, Kentucky, to Huntsville, Alabama, through the plateau.⁸

When the Civil War came, the river counties favored the Confederacy; the ridges, the Union. In a June 1861 referendum on secession, Smith, DeKalb, White, Putnam, and Jackson Counties voted to leave the Union. Fentress and Cumberland Counties, off to the east, voted against secession, as did Macon County, in the extreme northwest of the region. Even within counties with Confederate or Unionist majorities, however, sizable minorities dissented. In Macon County, according to a local historian, the split reflected the ridge and creek divisions in the county: farmers who lived along the creeks favored the Confederacy; those on the ridges, the Union. But in DeKalb County the division followed political lines. Former Whigs, including some of the most prosperous slaveholders in the county, were Unionists, while the Democrats voted for secession. As the Confederate counties raised troops for the army, men slipped off to Kentucky to join the Union forces there. One Union general, Alvin C. Gillem, came from secessionist Jackson County.⁹

From 1861 through 1865 the people of the Upper Cumberland fought their own internal civil war. In Fentress County the war began with brawls on the assembly grounds on the day of the secession referendum; that set the pattern for the next five years. The region divided, Confederate against Unionist, county by county, farm by farm. The normal forms of governance disintegrated. Guerrillas, nominally in the service of the Confederacy or the Union, attacked supporters of the other side and used the war as an excuse for settling personal feuds. Mail deliveries stopped, schools closed, public offices shut down, and churches posted guards outside their services. In the Upper Cumberland the war would be remembered not as a glorious and gallant Lost Cause but as a time of hunger and fear. The guerrillas stole or destroyed food supplies and tortured and killed without regard to age or sex. For years after the war the violence lingered, occasionally erupting in revenge killings.¹⁰

By the 1890s, as memories of the war faded, the conflict could be safely cloaked in nostalgia. People in the river counties talked of putting up Confederate memorials, but nothing much came of it. Old soldiers of the Blue and Gray marched (in separate units) in Fourth of July parades. The war did have a lasting impact on politics. As a last resort politicians called on voters to be loyal to the memory of their illustrious ancestors. Confederates and their children voted Democratic. Unionists and their descendants voted the Republican tickets.¹¹

After the war the area’s black population, always small, began to dwindle. Although some freedmen stayed in the region and managed to buy land, many left for Nashville. By 1890 over 90 percent of the population of the Upper Cumberland was white. Only in Smith County did the black population exceed 10 percent of the total. (Just over 16 percent of Smith County’s 18,404 people were black.) In Fentress and Cumberland Counties over 95 percent of the population was white. In Pickett County 99.7 percent of the population was white.¹²

Until the 1890s the river and its tributaries mediated the connections between the land and the people. Commerce traveled on the river, and the best farmland lay along the river banks. The region’s terrain made travel by land difficult. Although the center of the region was only eighty miles from Nashville, the Upper Cumberland, like other southern hill-country regions, was outside the mainstream of the southern economy, existing on the periphery of the plantation South before the Civil War and on the periphery of the New South after.

The postbellum economic development that brought trains and towns, factories and mines, and accompanying transformations in social relations to much of the South did not reach into the hills northeast of Nashville until the end of the nineteenth century. The Upper Cumberland remained as it had been, a stronghold of small family farms. Though geographically close to Nashville, the region was isolated by its terrain. A land of steep hills and ridges, the Upper Cumberland had few good roads. Before 1890 the Upper Cumberland’s only rail connection was a small branch line of the North Carolina and St. Louis, built from McMinnville to the coal fields northeast of Sparta in White County. For most of the region the Cumberland River still served as the main thoroughfare for commerce with Nashville, and the river could not be navigated during dry seasons. Within the region, agriculture dominated the local economy. In 1890 only 467 of the region’s 118,925 people were operatives in local manufactures. Over 90 percent of the population lived outside the towns. There were numerous artisans such as blacksmiths, carpenters, millers, and potters; there were sawmills, small coal mines serving the local market, and at least one cotton mill. But most people either lived on farms or were dependent on the farming community for business, and the New South remained only a promise.¹³

The persistence of semisubsistence farming in the Upper Cumberland grew from the culture of the region, which in turn reflects the region’s geographic isolation. By 1890 the region’s population was comprised largely of traditionalists, whose fathers and grandfathers had stayed in the Upper Cumberland while others moved to western lands where commercial farming would be the norm. It was a region populated by those who stayed behind, to borrow Hal Baron’s phrase. Residents in the region were, in effect, self-selected by their preference for traditional ways. Those ways included aspects of family life, education, governance, and religion that affected, and were affected by, economic choices.¹⁴

That culture and economy were inseparable in the region was well understood by the rural progressives who, in the early twentieth century, began a long series of campaigns aimed at regional transformation. As rural reformers understood it, progress included commercialized farming, better roads, better schools, and a more orderly society. Reformers believed that cultural reforms would lead to economic progress: good schools, good roads, and good (that is, commercial) farming were all part of the same reform agenda and were inseparable.

Rural progressive reformers had but limited success in the Upper Cumberland. They succeeded in modifying structures of governance so as to remove control of roads and schools from local hands. However, modernized structures did not transform local culture in ways foreseen by reformers. Locals took from reformed institutions what seemed useful for the maintenance of traditional culture and ignored those aspects of progress deemed irrelevant. Instead of transforming culture, rural progressivism had provoked a backlash against reform by the 1920s. The country people proved to be resilient, adaptable, and capable of co-opting for the service of traditional values techniques and institutions pioneered by progressives. Indeed, after twenty years of social conflict over development and progressive reform, traditional religious values, such as those expressed by J. W. Butler’s antievolution laws, served to unify conservative country people—and their progressive neighbors.

This is not a story about uplift and progress: the progressives lost their battle to change Upper Cumberland culture. Neither is it a story about how the canny natives won out over misguided missionaries, kept their souls, and lived happily ever after. In a sense, nobody won the long battle between progress and tradition in the region—or the traditionalists lost by winning. In their assessment of the economic consequences of traditionalism the progressives were largely correct: in clinging to old ways, traditionalists inadvertently chose poverty.

1

MAKING DO

THE UPPER CUMBERLAND FARM ECONOMY IN THE 1890S

Upper Cumberland farm families, conditioned by years of poor access to distant markets, by 1890 had learned to provide for themselves. They grew most of what they consumed and produced a small surplus for sale or exchange. The necessity of supplying most family needs at home became the basis of a much lauded virtue—independence. Rather than change the operation of their farms in ways that might endanger family security and independence, members of farm families tried to make money through nonfarm enterprises or sought temporary or seasonal employment off the farm. This strategy involved no risk to the family’s ultimate security, since the farm was always there to fall back on. Farmers tried to avoid debt. Being in debt constricted the economic choices open to farm families and might lead to modifications in farm operations that threatened family security. Debt also involved social relationships. Wealthy individuals, not institutions, made most loans. Debt thus threatened both social and economic independence.

In the 1890s the Upper Cumberland was on the periphery of a national exchange economy. Merchants and produce houses acted as middlemen between farmers and Nashville markets. Steamboats from Nashville provided stock directly for the shelves of stores in Carthage, Gainesboro, and Celina and pulled over at landings all along the upper river with cargoes for the waiting wagons of merchants from villages deep in the hills. The produce of the region—corn, wheat, hogs, poultry, hides, feathers, beans, fruit, and tobacco—returned downriver to Nashville. The river defined the economy as it did the region. Since the Cumberland was too shallow for navigation during the dry months of the year, commerce waited on the tides, as business with Nashville grew only slowly.¹

Upper Cumberland farm families tried to participate in the market economy without becoming dependent on it. The household economy of a hill-country farm interconnected, by necessity, with the national market. In order to buy land, the very basis of family security, families had to have money. In order to keep their land, families had to pay taxes. Farm families had to earn money. But the farms of the Upper Cumberland were not agribusinesses in the contemporary sense. They were households in which the primary goal was family survival, not profits.

Imagine the commercialization of agriculture as a spectrum. On one end is total family subsistence, with no commercial exchanges. (Examples of this are hard to find; even neolithic farmers traded some products.) At the other end of the spectrum are present-day highly specialized farmers who invest capital in farming with an eye to the world market and who produce crops as manufacturers produce widgets. These farmers sell their crops and buy their food in supermarkets, just like urbanites. On this spectrum the farm families of the Upper Cumberland in the 1890s were somewhere in the middle. They were accustomed to trade. They bought and sold or bartered goods and services. Many prided themselves on their skill as traders. But they were not completely dependent on any market. Any Upper Cumberland farmers in 1890 who tried to live only by what they sold would have gone broke or starved in short order. The cost and the difficulty of transporting goods—the very slowness of commerce along the river—worked against agricultural entrepreneurship. Risk taking, in the form of diverting land and labor resources, might pay off; but it might not, and then how would the family get through the winter? Given the region’s isolation, placing family subsistence ahead of market production made common sense.

But self-sufficiency meant more than that. By the 1890s the Upper Cumberland was populated by the descendants of generations of farmers who had chosen to stay in a region where access to agricultural markets was difficult. This promoted the development and survival of a yeoman farmer worldview, in which economic independence was highly valued in and of itself. Throughout the nineteenth century many people left the Upper Cumberland to farm lands in the West. Local newspapers often ran letters from former residents who described economic conditions in their new homes. Anyone who really wanted to practice farming as a business had to know that he or she could make better profits elsewhere. Out-migration acted as a process of selection. In every generation, the more market-oriented farmers, especially those who did not own land, left. Those who stayed were basically satisfied with the status quo; they were traditionalists and passed on their values to the next generation.²

Consider H. A. Whitefield, a Jackson County native who left the region for Texas, where he became agent to a furnishing merchant. In a 1906 letter to his hometown newspaper Whitefield undertook to explain why western farmers had such a hard time. They bought too much, he said, and of that too expensive a