Appalachia is having a moment.
Thanks, JD Vance. Maybe.
Ever since Donald Trump picked the Ohio senator as his running mate, Vance’s memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” has surged back to the top of the best-seller lists — and revived arguments about whether it’s an accurate portrayal of Appalachian culture or unfairly smears the region’s people as lazy and ignorant. Cardinal News has seen some of that renewed interest firsthand: The column I wrote in the summer of 2022 about the book that St. Paul lawyer Frank Kilgore published in response — “JD Vance Is a Fake Hillbilly” — has seen traffic spike again. Last week, it was the second most-read story on our site and we didn’t even push it; all that came through search engines finding us.
You can weigh in on whether “Hillbilly Elegy” rings true or false in our latest installment of Cardinal Way opinion pieces, where we present two sides of a question and invite readers to respond: a “rings true” article by John Massoud and a “rings false” one from Mark Lynn Ferguson.
Today I’ll examine a different aspect of the question: What is Appalachia?
That seems a simple question but has a complicated answer — and that complicated answer helps shape public perception of the region. There’s also a political dimension to this: Is Vance truly Appalachian or is he, as Kilgore contended, a “fake hillbilly”? Let’s see what facts we can turn up, shall we?
Appalachia is ill-defined
Appalachia is much like what former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said about pornography: “I know it when I see it.” Even that definition may be questionable, as we’ll soon see. However, for our initial purposes, Stewart’s description applies to Appalachia.
The Appalachian Regional Commission defines its version of Appalachia as touching 13 different states: all of West Virginia and parts of Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, Maryland, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York (working south to north).
That’s also a political definition, not a cultural one. Not many of us would think of an Ivy League school also being an Appalachian school yet one is — Cornell University is located in Tompkins County, New York, which is an ARC county. Those ARC definitions have also changed over time. In 1998, the ARC expanded to add Montgomery County and Rockbridge County in Virginia, so that means Washington & Lee University is also an Appalachian school. The story is long told that Roanoke didn’t want to be part of the ARC when the commission was formed because being officially part of Appalachia was considered a pejorative. Here in Virginia, we tend to think of a more Southern version of Appalachia, but keep in mind that Pittsburgh is sometimes called “the Paris of Appalachia.”
More impressionistic definitions of Appalachia produce a smaller map but one that still varies depending on whose impression we’re talking about. A study published in the Southeastern Geographer in 1981 asked college students in or near Appalachian states to draw the region on a map. You can see how much those vary:
That smallest circle, by the way, would define Appalachia as simply Mercer County, West Virginia. Meanwhile, historian John Alexander Williams at Appalachian State University has come up with not one but two different maps of what Appalachia is, both shown in The Journal of Appalachian Studies:
This is what he calls “Core Appalachia” — you’ll see it excludes the Roanoke Valley, the Shenandoah Valley, anything east of the Blue Ridge as well as parts of western West Virginia.
Meanwhile, this is what he calls “Consensus Appalachia” — it brings in the Roanoke Valley and the Shenandoah Valley and adds a few more counties here or there in other states.
For our purposes, the main difference between “core Appalachia” and “consensus Appalachia” is that the former excludes the Roanoke Valley and the Shenandoah Valley while the latter includes it. Sorry, Pittsburgh, you’ve been kicked out. Do we have a new contender for the Paris of Appalachia? That could have been Roanoke if it had done more to embrace its Appalachian heritage.
This map, from “Mapping America,” overlays multiple definitions of Appalachia. You’ll see that some definitions even count Loudoun County — the wealthiest county in the country — as part of Appalachia. By that measure, all those data centers in Loudoun County are really Appalachian algorithm mines!
Note that none of these definitions include Middletown, Ohio, where Vance grew up but a few would include Scranton, Pennsylvania, where Joe Biden grew up. Does this mean Biden is more Appalachian than Vance? I doubt many would agree to that. I note the exclusion of Vance’s hometown not to dispute Vance but to show how widely impressions vary. Parts of southern Ohio and southern Indiana sure feel like they have more in common with both “core Appalachia” and “consensus Appalachia” than, say, Loudoun County.
Appalachia isn’t simply coal country
No matter how squishy the definitions of Appalachia are, this is a demonstrable fact: Appalachia, even in its narrowest construct, is a lot more than just coal. There is coal mined in Appalachia, to be sure, but the nation’s biggest coal-producing state is Wyoming, not West Virginia or anywhere else in Appalachia. The U.S. Energy Information Administration reports that 41.2% of the nation’s coal comes from Wyoming, just 14.0% from West Virginia.
Virginia has 25 counties and eight cities that are part of the ARC’s definition of Appalachia, but the Energy Information Administration reports that only six of those counties produced coal in 2022. I’ve written columns lately about people haggling over what constitutes Southwest Virginia. We won’t resolve that any more easily than we’ll settle on a definition of Appalachia, but please note that even with the most narrow definition of Southwest Virginia, most of Southwest Virginia doesn’t produce coal, either.
Appalachia is not uneducated
Yes, educational attainment rates are lower in rural areas generally. However, in Virginia’s portion of Appalachia — as defined by the ARC — there are eight four-year colleges (Bluefield University, Emory & Henry College, Southern Virginia University, Radford University, the University of Virginia’s College at Wise, Virginia Tech, Washington & Lee, Virginia Military Institute) plus seven community colleges (Mountain Empire, Mountain Gateway, New River, Patrick & Henry, Southwest Virginia, Virginia Highlands, Wytheville). If we go with a more expansive definition of Appalachia, we pick up even more four-year schools, such as Ferrum College in Franklin County and Hollins University and Roanoke College in the Roanoke Valley. Even without those, there are more four-year college students in Southwest Virginia than there are in Northern Virginia, the part of the state with the highest educational attainment levels. In fact, there are more four-year students going to school in Appalachia than there are in either Hampton Roads or Richmond.
Yes, many of those students are simply passing through — figuring out ways to retain them is a high priority for many localities in the western part of Virginia — but they are there. If you want to imagine Virginia’s portion of Appalachia, you ought to imagine a college campus before you do a coal mine, because there are more of the former than the latter.
Appalachia is overwhelmingly conservative — but also politically dynamic
Those two things may seem in contradiction, but consider this: One of the biggest political phenomena of the past three decades or so — even just the past two decades — has been the realignment of Appalachia. Parts of it once were strongly Democratic and now are strongly Republican. These maps tell the story (and also, through their shading, show how politically polarized the nation has become along geographical lines).
Here’s a county-by-county look at the presidential results in the 1980 presidential election — the more red a county is, the more Republican it is; the more blue, the more Democratic.
Now here’s the 2020 map:
West Virginia, once a Democratic mainstay, is now a Republican one. In Southwest Virginia, Lee County voted 53.3% for the Democratic candidate for governor (Mark Warner) as late as 2001. In 2021, it voted 87.6% for the Republican candidate (Glenn Youngkin). The question is whether the current political alignment is permanent. History suggests few alignments are.
Historically, Appalachia has been one of the most open-minded parts of the country
This runs counter to the perception of a region steeped in prejudice, but consider this (and my focus here is Virginia because that’s what I know best):
Women won the right to vote in 1920. The next year, two places in Virginia promptly elected the first women to the General Assembly. One was Norfolk (Sarah Fain), but the other (Helen Henderson) was Buchanan County. In the decade that followed, three other women were elected to the General Assembly, all from the western part of the state (Helen Ruth Henderson of Buchanan County, the first Helen Henderson’s daughter; Sallie Cook Booker of Martinsville; Nancy Melvina “Vinnie” Caldwell of Galax).
The first integrated Little League team in the South was in Virginia — and not just any place in Virginia, but in Norton, squarely part of Appalachia. When Charlottesville refused to host the Norton team for the state championship, the game was moved to Norton — and Norton won decisively. A few years ago, Norton erected a marker to this history. The first Black baseball player to play a professional game in the South may have been Bob Bowman, who was born in Lee County and took the mound as a pitcher just over the mountains for the Middlesboro (Kentucky) Athletics in 1951. Last year I documented how some counties in Southwest Virginia — the whitest part of the state — have voted for Black candidates as often Fairfax County, one of the most diverse.
We think of Appalachia as a place that’s not very diverse and, in many places, it is overwhelmingly white. Vance is hardly the first writer to celebrate his Scots-Irish heritage; so did Virginia’s former U.S. Sen. Jim Webb (and many of my own forebears have the lineage, as well). However, let’s not forget that Appalachia was once a magnet for immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, who came to work in both mines and timber, back when both were booming. You can still find gravestones in Pocahontas in Hungarian, Italian, Polish and Russian. That’s part of why the General Assembly last year took the unusual action of appropriating funding to repair that cemetery (see this story we published on the cemetery).
For more about these aspects of Appalachian history, I refer you to Kilgore’s book. Despite the catchy title, it’s not really about Vance; it’s almost entirely about Appalachia, with emphasis on Southwest Virginia. Appalachia is certainly not without its faults, but it seems more than a coincidence that all these firsts were recorded there and not elsewhere. That brings us to this:
Appalachia is not monolithic
Politically, Appalachia doesn’t look very diverse, but that’s because elections are usually binary choices — the next president will either be a Democrat or a Republican. Period. Full stop. Appalachia is overwhelmingly, white, conservative, Protestant — you can go on and on. Let’s not confuse the dominant culture, though, with the entirety of the culture. We don’t do that in other places, so why should we do it here?
Using the results of the last governor’s race as our baseline, the least politically diverse locality in Virginia is Lee County, which voted 87.6% Republican and 12.1% Democratic. In politics, that’s a landslide, but it still means that more than 1 out of every 10 voters in Lee County doesn’t fit the stereotype. If you start looking at the world that way, things start looking a lot different. Yes, Appalachia is overwhelmingly white, but there’s a group called Black in Appalachia that’s devoted to telling the history of Black residents of the region. The U.S. Census Bureau doesn’t ask who is straight or who is gay, but it has counted that there are married same-sex couples in every county of Virginia except for tiny Highland County (population less than 2,500). Appalachia may lean strongly one way, but it doesn’t lean all the way — no place does, so let’s not paint Appalachia with just one brush.
Appalachia is still easy to stereotype
Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy” begins with a stereotype before his very first word: The cover shows a picture of what appears to be a decaying old barn beside a gravel road. It’s undoubtedly a real place. I’ve seen plenty of such places in my time. In artistic terms, that photograph does a perfect job of saying “Appalachia.” Unfortunately, it only says part of Appalachia — and not even the main part. I’m focused here on the photo, something Vance probably had no role in choosing, but his New York publishers did. That cover photo plays up a backwards stereotype of Appalachia that isn’t supported by facts.
Reality: The state with the highest percentage of unpaved roads isn’t in Appalachia, it’s in the Midwest — Iowa, where only 61% are paved, according to the Asphalt Institute (which has a vested interest in knowing where those unpaved roads are). The state with the second-highest share of unpaved roads? Massachusetts! The state is at 76%.
In the states most closely associated with Appalachia, here’s what percentage of the roads are paved: 99.73% in Tennessee, 98.4% in West Virginia, 98.1% in North Carolina, 97.8% in Kentucky, 97.2% in Ohio. Only Virginia is an exception — 81.4% of our roads are paved.
That cover photo is less representative of Appalachia than a picture of a Democratic-voting same-sex non-white couple would be.
I realize some readers both left and right may think I’m focused on the wrong thing — Vance’s book isn’t about the state of our transportation network. However, I cite this as an example of how easy it is to stereotype the region. There are plenty of ways in which Appalachia lags behind the rest of the country — in income, in education, in opportunity in general — and we should welcome any discussion of how to fix those things. (I wrote a column last week that marshaled some statistics that showed how much Southwest Virginia has been left out of Virginia’s overall economic growth.) However, we’re not a bunch of backwoods bumpkins driving around on gravel roads. That’s the default portrayal from Hollywood (or New York publicists).
Some stereotypes are true but harmless. Vance made a joke about drinking Mountain Dew — yes, Kentucky used to consume more Mountain Dew per capita than any other state. (Now Kentucky’s top soda is Dr Pepper, while Mountain Dew is the most popular soft drink in — checks notes — Bernie Sanders’ Vermont.) No harm done, except maybe to your A1C levels. Other stereotypes may draw on a fact (yes, there are unpaved roads) but paint an inaccurate picture. This is one of them, and there are plenty of others, from “Deliverance” to Saturday Night Live’s “Appalachian Emergency Room” comedy feature.
Here are a few random facts that don’t fit into those stereotypes:
- In Virginia, the lowest broadband-access rates are not in Appalachia, they’re in Southside, according to Broadbandnow.com.
- Norton has better broadband access (99.3%) than Loudoun County (96.9%). Most of Virginia’s Appalachian counties have better broadband access than Fauquier County (73.2%) on the edge of Northern Virginia. (Yes, I realize it’s easier to hit a higher percentage in a smaller place, but you see the point I’m trying to make.)
- The Virginia High School League each year crowns its Scholastic Bowl champions. This year, half of them came from counties officially in Appalachia.
Finally, here’s my favorite fact of all. It’s not based in Virginia, but close enough. If we ever make contact with aliens, the first message from somewhere out in space may come through Appalachia — the radio telescope in Green Bank, West Virginia.
Want more political news and analysis?
I write a weekly political newsletter, West of the the Capital, that goes out Friday afternoons. This week I’ll be attending the recount of the 5th Congressional District Republican primary and hope to have some insights from that. You can sign up for that and any of our other free newsletters here: