Appalachian Facts

What we think of as traditional Appalachian culture is a land-based, skill-based, coal mining culture. We are a people tied to the land. It is what has given us our lumber for cabins, our bountiful gardens, our drinking water, and, for better and for worse, the industry. The fact that we are money poor has shown us that we have wealth in other ways. Our crafts–quilts, baskets, pottery, canning–coupled with our resourcefulness–have helped us to thrive. And anyone who has ever heard an old time band knows that we have great music.

Geographical Info

Appalachia is a region whose geographical boundaries exist not because of any legal boundaries, but because of the shared history, culture, and environment of mountain people in eastern North America.  It is a cultural region in the Eastern Untied States that stretches from the Southern Tier of New York to northern Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia.   While the Appalachian Mountains  stretch from Belle Isle in Canada to Cheaha Mountains in Alabama, the cultural region of Appalachia typically refers only to the central and southern portions of the range. As of the 2010 census, the region was home to approximately 25 million people, containing the major cities of Pittsburg, Pennsylvania; Charleston, West Virginia; Knoxville, Tennessee; Chattanooga, Tennessee; Birmingham Alabama; Huntsville , Alabama, and Asheville, North Carolina.

Locations

 As noted above, Appalachians are spread through the Appalachian Mountains in nine states. This area consists of three physiographic regions. The Blue Ridge Mountains, with the highest peaks in the area, constitute the eastern region; the central, southern, East Tennessee, and Southwest Virginia valleys and their ridges constitute the central region; and the Appalachian plateau forms the western region. Settled areas and cultivable land are scattered along streams and their basins, coves, and hollows.

Areas of Early Settlers

The areas from which the earliest European settlers in Appalachia came and the routes they took into the back-country helped form Appalachian culture. There were three major reservoirs of population from which people flowed into the Appalachian region in the eighteenth century: the central valley of Pennsylvania, the Piedmont of North Carolina, and western Pennsylvania. The earliest European immigrants into the Appalachian frontier came from eastern Pennsylvania. Around 1720 the German and Scotch-Irish populations around Philadelphia began to move first into central Pennsylvania, then southward into the Shenandoah Valley. Over time they and their descendants pushed south toward the New River, but instead of crossing the mountains into Indian country, they turned southeastward toward the Carolina Piedmont.

Second Wave

By 1763, in clear violation of the English Proclamation of 1763, settlers began to migrate into the western reaches of North Carolina, the river valleys of the Tennessee-Virginia border country, and, just a few years later, even into central Kentucky. The most important of the communities they formed were the Watauga settlements in eastern Tennessee, the Holston settlements of far southwestern Virginia and western North Carolina, and the Boonesborough and Harrodsburg settlements laid out by Daniel Boone after he traversed the Cumberland Gap in 1775. Although many of these people did not own the land they lived on, and acted as agents for absentee owners, it is nonetheless significant that on the eve of the American Revolution there were scattered settlements deep in the American frontier. The population of the southern mountains grew steadily from the 1760s until the 1820s.

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