a.k.a. V.J.

A few weeks ago, I stated binge-watching Justified, a crime series set mostly in the coal country of Eastern Kentucky. The show leans into a lot of the familiar tropes associated with that part of the country: opioid abuse, rural poverty, moonshine, bluegrass music, and multi-generational feuds, just to name a few. It conforms very closely to what I, and probably most Americans, think of when we hear the term “Appalachia.”

Last weekend, Jen and I took a trip to Chautauqua County, New York. On the way home, we took the southern route, bringing us through Cattaraugus, Allegany, and Steuben Counties before swinging north into the Finger Lakes region. Those Southern Tier counties are all part of the Appalachia region, according to the Federal government. Said region reaches as far north as Cortland County, less than an hour’s drive from my home. That fact strikes me as odd.

Actually, I bet a lot of people would be surprised at the scope of this official definition of the region:

Appalachia is made up of 423 counties across 13 states and spans 206,000 square miles, from southern New York to northern Mississippi. The Region’s 26.3 million residents live in parts of Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, Mississippi, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia, and all of West Virginia.

The Region also comprises three federally recognized and five state recognized Native American Tribal Communities, with Tribal entities in Appalachian Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, New York, and North Carolina.

About the Appalachian Region – Appalachian Regional Commission (arc.gov)

Since around fourth or fifth grade, I’ve known that the Southern Tier of New York and much of Pennsylvania were in the Appalachian mountain chain, yet I never thought of them as part of Appalachia per se. The latter is a concept I associate with the South. And I certainly never thought of nearby Cortland as being part of a coherent geographic and cultural entity that stretched all the way to Mississippi.

That is not to argue with anybody’s definition of Appalachia, but merely to confess that I am largely ignorant about that sizeable swath of America. There’s really no excuse for that ignorance. I have travelled through the Appalachian parts of Pennsylvania on I-81 and the northeast extension of the Pennsylvania Turnpike my whole life. Various road trips have taken me to/through the Maryland panhandle, West Virginia, the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia, the western portions of North Carolina, and Upstate South Carolina. The landscapes in those areas are beautiful and made a big impression on me, but I never gave a lot of thought to the culture or history of the region as a whole.

I know a smattering of details: the early Scots-Irish settlers, the role of the Overmountain Men in the American Revolution, the fact that the Appalachian regions of the South tended to be pro-Union during the Civil War, the Trail of Tears, Hatfields and McCoys, company mining towns, etc. But I suspect the vast majority of what I know, or think I know, about Appalachia is tinged by centuries of negative stereotypes and biases passed down through popular culture. Appalachia has long been an American cultural and economic punching bag. A lot of the dismissive jokes about “hillbillies” and the perceived backwardness of the region strike me as forms of victim-blaming.

I’d like to fill in some of the considerable gaps in my knowledge and understanding of this entity that spans from practically my back yard into the Deep South. Perhaps there is a good documentary or single-volume history book that could get me started down that path. I’m sure something worthwhile would pop up after a little searching around. Until then, I’ve still got a season-and-a-half of Justified left to watch and keep me engaged with the Hollywood version of Appalachia. I see them long hard times to come...