Upland South Settlement and Culture

Key Principle

The Salt Creek Valley was not generic rural Midwest. It was culturally Appalachian -- its folklife, speech, architecture, and social organization trace to Upland South traditions carried by Scots-Irish migrants from Kentucky and the Carolinas. The geological accident of glaciation created and preserved this cultural identity: glaciers leveled northern Indiana into Midwestern Plains country while leaving southern Indiana's hilly, pre-glacial topography intact. The terrain that kept the community traditional is the same terrain that made it a target for reservoir construction.

Why This Matters

Every claim the dissertation makes about folk practices, communal labor, and transmission depends on this cultural lineage. Without it, the Salt Creek Valley appears to be a pocket of rural poverty. With it, the valley is a living extension of Appalachian folk culture happening to exist inside Indiana's political borders. Folk culture regions follow terrain and migration, not state lines.

Good Examples

• The migration chain: Delaware ports (1724+) to Cumberland Cradle to Kentucky/Tennessee to southern Indiana. Each stage driven by land scarcity -- Scots-Irish found coastal areas already claimed by English and German settlers, pushing them into interior hill country.
• The cultural isogloss: South central Indiana sits at the boundary where northern and Upland South folk traditions overlap. Corn harvesting and hay stacking show mixed methods locally, making the valley a living laboratory of cultural negotiation.
• The hollow as settlement unit: The "holler" is both geography and community. Hilly terrain dictates where people can farm and therefore where communities form. Flooding a valley destroys the geographic structure that made community possible.
• The corn-hog economy: Not merely an economic arrangement but a cultural inheritance from the Upland South. The reservoir severed an inheritance chain stretching back through Appalachia to the colonial period.
• Communal tool ownership: Specialized tools (e.g., the large copper kettle for apple butter) were communally owned and circulated family to family -- a folk commons maintained by reciprocity rather than regulation, invisible to bureaucratic cost-benefit analyses.
• The huckster system: Itinerant wagon merchants exchanged groceries for eggs and chickens on weekly routes, carrying a chicken coop underneath the wagon -- a mobile marketplace adapted to dispersed settlement that persisted alongside cash-based retail.
• The livelihood inversion: The three-stage economic transition -- from full-time subsistence farming + part-time crafts, to transitional industrial employment (limestone quarries, Showers Furniture Factory), to full-time industry + part-time farming -- was catalyzed by specific local employers beginning c. 1875. The reservoir struck a community already in a fragile transitional state.
• Post-WWII as the decisive rupture: "When the post-World War II modernizations (including mechanization of farming, availability of electricity and home conveniences, incorporation of local one-room schools) finally reached into every rural hamlet of Southern Indiana, many of the archaic features of farm and community life...disappeared." Not the Industrial Revolution broadly, but post-WWII specifically, was the break point.

Counterpoints

• German enclaves in Dubois County (1836-1850) resisted assimilation through deliberate ethnic clustering, proving that the law of initial occupance could be overridden by concentrated settlement.
• In Indiana, topography appears as influential as ethnic heritage: Germans in southern hilly areas practiced general farming like their Anglo and Scots-Irish neighbors. A purely culturalist explanation does not hold.
• The Scots-Irish were not "bad farmers" but versatile quasi-farmers whose Ulster heritage of diversified livelihood let them thrive on marginal land. Their consistent choice of highland terrain was cultural affinity plus practical wisdom, not incompetence.

Key Quotes

"The rural inhabitants of south central Indiana are for the most part descendants of immigrants from the Upland South region (Kentucky, Tennessee, and the western parts of Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina) during the early nineteenth century." (Ch. I)

"Hills and valleys, or hollows ('hollers'), dominated by the Appalachian mountain chain, which characterizes the culturo-geographic region designated as the Upland South, to which Southern Indiana also belongs." (Ch. I)

"The earliest dominant inhabitants of an area seem to establish the base of cultural traits of that area, even when there are significant later infusions of other culture groups." (Ch. I, endnote 14)

"I don't think anybody can make it without they have a variety. ... Like the saying, 'don't put your eggs all in one basket.'" -- Fred Pennington (Ch. I)

"While every farmer was at least a rudimentary craftsman, able to produce and repair some of his own tools, most depended on skilled and specialized craftsmen as well." (Ch. I)

Rules of Thumb

• State boundaries are not cultural boundaries. Southern Indiana is Appalachian by culture, not Midwestern.
• The unit of self-sufficiency was the community, not the individual farm. Warren Roberts: early agrarian settlement was "a system of self-sufficient farm communities," not self-sufficient farms.
• Terrain that preserves folk culture also makes it vulnerable to engineering projects. The same valleys that sustained community became targets for flooding.
• When hilly terrain makes mechanization impractical, folk practices become the rational economic choice -- tradition and pragmatism converge.
• The livelihood inversion (full-time farming + part-time crafts becoming full-time industry + part-time farming) was already underway before the reservoir. The dam accelerated a transition already in progress.

Key Concepts

• Law of initial occupance: The earliest dominant inhabitants establish the cultural baseline, even when later groups arrive. Explains why Upland South folklife persisted as the dominant layer despite German, Irish, Italian, Belgian, and French immigration. (Ch. I, endnote 14)
• Glassie's folk-nonfolk continuum: "The continuation of pioneer conditions on the small nearly self-sufficient holding left a man standing up against the folk end of the folk-nonfolk continuum, economically and physically isolated from progress, and reliant upon tradition." Isolation was the preservation mechanism. (Ch. I)
• Subconscious landscape replication: Scots-Irish settlers unconsciously chose highland terrain resembling their Ulster and Appalachian origins. The irony: first-comers took hills; latecomers got the "leftover" bottomlands that proved the richest farmland. (Ch. I)

Related References

• memory-community-transmission.md -- what happened to this community after displacement
• ethics-of-progress.md -- the global pattern of folk community destruction
• key-informants.md -- oral testimonies from community members