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An
Archaeology of “Ozarkness”
Beyond Historical Tropes and Toward Lived Experience
Jamie C. Brandon Presented to the 2003 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In "Revisiting Rural Contexts: Dispelling Agrarian Myths in HIstorical Archaeology," Deborah L. Rotman and Lou Ann Worst, organizers. Friday, January 17, 2003, Providence, RI. Draft
Copy: Do Not Cite Without Permission from jcb
©2003
[Title Slide] The Ozarks, like their cousins the Appalachian Mountains, hold a particular place in our cultural memory and imagination. [Map Slide] That “place” is uniquely “American”, decidedly rural, anti-modern and white. [White River View] The Ozarks and Appalachian Mountains seem wholly subsumed under, and conflated with, what it means to be “rural” in America--perhaps more so than any other regions in the country. [Ozark Farm Family:FSA] The historical narratives of the Ozarks stress their “otherness” and rely on a series of tropes that enhance their place as a foil to an increasingly urban America--an othering process that slowly began to take form in the middle of the nineteenth century only to fully emerge after the turn of the twentieth. This othering is so powerful and accepted by the 1930s that most readers would have not batted an eye at pioneer folklorist J. Vance Randolph’s claim that the Ozarks were “the most backward and deliberately unprogressive region of the United States” populated with people differing “so widely from the average urban American that when the latter visits the hill country he feels himself among an alien people” (Randolph 1931:4-5). But, as any historical archaeologist working in the Arkansas Ozarks can tell you, the historical subjects one comes across while working on historical sites undermines this narrow conceptualization of Ozark history and points toward the very processes that etched images of the “homespun, rustic quaintness or wretched backwardness” of the Ozark hillbilly into the American consciousness “while they obscured the history, diversity and complexity of the Ozark region” (Blevins 2002:1; Brandon and Davidson 2000, 2003; Brandon et al. 2000:8-10; Stewart-Abernathy 1992). [Peter Van Winkle] Figures such as David Walker; a prominent Northwest Arkansas judge who enslaved a sizeable labor force to work his upland plantation prior to the Civil War; Coin Harvey, the finical guru and advisor to Democratic presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan who founded the lavish Monte Ne resort community at the turn of the century; Peter Van Winkle (see in this slide) , the New York-born wagon maker who became the first “Lumber King” of the Ozarks using both enslaved and free labor in his substantial industrial endeavors; George Ballard, a African-American barber turned poet in 1920s Fayetteville, Arkansas; and countless others testify to the economic, social and racial diversity of the region (Brandon et al. 2000; Blevins 2002; Hilliard 1983). Randolph himself, in his introduction to his 1931 book, The Ozarks: An American Survival of Primitive Society, warned the reader that his subjects were not “the progressive element in the Ozark towns, nor. . . the prosperous valley farmers” but the “diverting and picturesque” residents of the backwoods, the “hillbilly” and the “ridge runner” (Belvins 2002:1; Randolph 1931:v). Yet this caveat is lost in an avalanche of popular culture that stresses the hillbilly trope as the main source for our understanding of the Ozarks--the archetypical impoverished rural other at once idyllic and violent, ignorant and noble, and ambivalently white.Narrative Tropes and Ozark History
[Subtitle: Arkansas Traveller Currier & Ives] Several narrative tropes are at play in the narrow hollows of the Arkansas Ozarks--the Ozark hillbilly, the Ozarks as “frontier”, as the Ozarks as stalwart member of the Confederacy all have strong implications for the way cultural memory and history play out in relation to the Ozarks as “place.” The “hillbilly” image is, in my opinion, a vastly interesting and complex one. The moonshining, feuding, backward mountaineer can be seen as savior of an American tradition, simpleton amusement which shores up middle-class legitimacy (i.e., the Beverly Hillbillies and Ma and Pa Kettle) and, at times, an actual threat to civilization (think Deliverance). Travel logs in the nineteenth century, helped play into the hillbilly construction within the western portion of the southern highlands. Popular culture enters into the fray in 1847 with the introduction of the Arkansas Traveller as a music piece (this piece of pop culture get continuously rearticulated with a myriad of variations of these “one line” “Hey, Farmer” jokes in which a cleaver but backward rural Ozark farmer/trickster gets the better of a urbane traveler). It was following the Civil War and the subsequent industrialization of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century America, however, that the icon began its slow codification through the local color literary movement. [Railroads in the Ozarks: List & Pic] Interestingly, the codification of the hillbilly trope runs parallel to the Ozarks’ own development into a region fully articulated with modernity (following Flores 2002:32 and Harvey 1990:10–38; Jameson 1991:53–66; Soja 1989:10–42). Although certainly more isolated than the vast majority of Americans, the Ozarks witnessed the “coming of the steamboat, the introduction of cash crops, the construction of railroads, [and] the harvesting of hundreds of thousands of acres of virgin timber” all between the war of 1812 and the American Civil War (Belvins 2002:5). In 1840, the first Arkansas US Census records over 20,000 inhabitants in the eight counties that made up the Arkansas Ozarks--including almost 2,000 enslaved African-Americans. By the late-nineteenth century, the Ozarks were home to nearly a quarter of a million settlers with the majority of farmers participating in cash-crop economies (as opposed to the subsistence farmers stressed in the hillbilly image), shipping crops via steamboats down the White River or on railroads such as these listed on the slide--all connecting Ozark communities with each other and the outside world through regional hubs such as Memphis and St. Louis. [Eureka Springs Postcard] Period local histories and newspapers make it clear that many Ozark inhabitants saw the region as a “land of opportunity” (a state advertising motto until the 1980s when it was changed to “the natural state”) and actively worked to bring the “progressive” trappings of modernity and full-blown capitalist economies into the region. Towns like Eureka Springs were quite cosmopolitan--attracting visitors from all over the United States to bathe in its healing waters by the 1880s (Blevins 2002:123). [Monte Ne: Various Views] In a similar vein, Coin Harvey’s Monte Ne was founded in 1900 as a resort with its own railway spur, small lake with Venetian gondolas, palatial hotel, golf course, swimming pool, auditorium, and a dance pavilion (Blevins 2002:126). [Ozark Farmer:FSA] There is, therefore, a great amount of unseen diversity within the Ozarks. Some people did toil away at subsistence farming in the unfertile uplands while others [Captain John B. Steel looking dapper] shipped cotton, apples and other crops via steamboat, bought goods shipped on the railroads, speculated on land development and resided in the major Ozark towns of Fayetteville, Bentonville or Batesville--towns that were decidedly urban in character by nineteenth-century standards. [Ozark Farmer: FSA] Of course, the trope of the “hillbilly” is working on various levels in the region and is not solely a negative stereotype that has been thrust upon the inhabitants of the upland South (although those inhabitants were writing against the hillbilly image as early as the 1890s). It is, in truth a much more nuanced, complicated and conflicted issue of representation. It seems a truly “ambivalent” figure functioning in an “attractive and repellant” way to both those who self-identify as inhabitants of the upland South and those who wish to mark those who do (Bhabha 1994:66-67; 129-38; Limón 1998:110). This enables us to make sense of the way that “hillbilly otherness” has gotten successfully deployed to win regional political battles with Little Rock, or why the state’s academic flagship (the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville) would actively embrace “hillbilliness” by adopting the name Arkansas Traveller for its daily newspaper in 1927. Turning to historical archaeology . . . Historical Archaeology
and the Arkansas Ozarks
[Subtitle] There is certainly an established tradition of historical archeology in the Ozarks (see Cande 1995a for a recent overview), and although some researchers have stated (quite rightly) that much of it may have been “poorly handled theoretically, analytically and managerially” in the past (Stewart-Abernathy 1999:228), there are some important projects which have quite satisfactorily added to our understanding of life in the nineteenth and twentieth-century Arkansas Ozarks (e.g., Cande 1995b; Sabo et al. 2001; Stewart–Abernathy 1986) and, moreover, contributed to a broader theoretical conceptualization of Ozark history (e.g., Stewart-Abernathy 1987, 1992). [Historic excavation list] This slide shows the mitigations and large-scale excavations have been conducted on historical sites in the Northwest Arkansas Ozarks. These excavations have concentrated on what has been termed “late historic rural domestic sites,” or LHD sites (Davis 1995; Jurgelski et al. 1996). In contrast to the diversity we examined earlier, little economic or temporal diversity is reflected in the historical archeology of the Northwest Arkansas Ozarks. With the exception of the early domestic sites of the Ridge House, McGarrah-Reed and the Yell House most excavations have occurred on postbellum sites in Northwest Arkansas and likewise, with the exceptions of sites like Mt. Comfort Church and Van Winkle’s Mill they have occurred exclusively on rural domestic farms and plantations. Moreover only excavations at two sites, Wilson Plantation and Van Winkle’s Mill, attempt to directly grapple with racial diversity in the Ozarks and the troublesome topics of slavery and racism in Northwest Arkansas. [Farmstead: FSA] This concentration on rural domestic sites plays into Hillbilly trope (what Stewart-Abernathy has called the “Ozark Traditional Myth”) and places emphasis on the stereotypical protagonist of this myth—the rural, white, yeoman farmer (cf. Stewart-Abernathy 1986, 1987, 1992). Furthermore, this disparity goes a long way toward upholding the stereotype of the Ozark region as backward, non-industrial, poor, and exclusively white. The most successful historical archeology in the Ozarks has directly engaged this mythic tradition.[Moser Info (Dates Occupied, Site Type & Level of Investigation) & Pic] The first and most direct of these is Skip Stewart-Abernathy’s work at the Moser Farmstead--the monograph and series of articles resulting from this mitigation cites Ozarkian participation in the consumption of “the latest” popular goods from the global market to refute the “isolated” nature of the region--this is a good example of excavations on a LHD site which does much service in problematizing our preconceived notions of Ozark history (Stewart-Abernathy 1986, 1987, 1992). Of course the archaeological picture is more complicated than simply refuting or bolstering the Ozark Traditional Myth. While some of the materials recovered from the Moser farmstead belong in the “Agrarian Ozark Order,” other recoveries offer contradictions--[Plates] such as the constant replacement of entire dish sets every few years, keeping up with the decorative fashions, or [Badge] a souvenir from the 1893 Chicago’s World Fair. [Lee Creek Info & GIS Map] Conversely, Sabo and Lockhart’s GIS landscape analysis of the Lee Creek area has demonstrated the ways Ozark inhabitants may have used the physical landscape to actively create isolation when it was to their advantage (Sabo et al. 2001). [GIS Map] A least cost path analysis between Ozark settlements reveal that while period roads between smaller settlements do, in fact, roughly follow the least cost path, roads to county seats seem to go out of their way to create distance. [Lambert-Dement Info. & Picture] Kathleen Cande’s work at the Lambert and Dement farmsteads in Crawford County has explored the multiple, contrasting ways people experience the Ozarks through time. (e.g., Cande 1992, 1995). Taking the “Ozarks as destination” as her theme she examines multiple generations of Ozark settlers: the first from the eastern portions of the Upland South, a second group, largely city-dwellers returning to the Ozark country-side seeking a subsistence living during the Great Depression, and finally a wave of “weary urbanites” seeking an Acadian get away--kicking off the new tourist economy and spawning an early version of the “back to the land” theme which would constantly repeat in the Ozark region. This conceptualization, of course, points to the interconnectedness of the so-called urban and rural populations and blurs the lines between the two. [Van Winkle’s Mill Info & Pic] My own work at Van Winkle’s Mill, has likewise attempted to get at a large cross-section of this Ozark diversity (Brandon and Davidson 2003; Brandon et al. 2000). Peter Van Winkle used enslaved labor in his [Mill] saw and gristmill operations before the war, and freedmen stayed on following the war to help make Van Winkle’s Mill the most dominate lumber provider for the rebuilding of Northwest Arkansas in the postbellum period. With its combination of industrial facilities, [VW Home] upper class residences, worker’s quarters, and possible slave quarters (not to mention all of the dependencies and outbuildings), the site provides archeologists a unique look into how industry, class, and race all functioned in reference to one another in nineteenth-century Northwest Arkansas. Following some of the comments that Dr. Wurst made during her plenary session paper yesterday, we need to begin to examine sites like Van Winkle’s Mill in order to dispel the “rural to urban” evolutionary model of the American landscape. These sites make it clear that “rural industrialization” is clearly an important and essential component of the history of industrialization. The Ozark Hillbilly &
Whiteness
[subtitle] Although these investigations have engaged various aspects of the Ozark traditional myth, a little explored theme--the connections between modernity and the construct of whiteness--remains to be examined in the Ozarks. We have already examined the connections between modernity and the construction of its foil, the Hillbilly trope. But the conceptualization of whiteness itself has also been linked to this transition to modernity (e.g., Flores 2002; Ignatiev 1995; Jacobson 1998; Roediger 1991). Having lived through this transition, W. E. B. DuBois made the bold statement that “[t]he discovery of personal whiteness among the world’s peoples is a very modern thing--a nineteenth and twentieth century matter, indeed” (DuBois 1920:17).Some strands of this entanglement have already been examined. At its most basic level, the trope of the Ozark hillbilly masks the diversity inherent in the region--this, of course extends not only to class and the rural/urban dichotomy but also to race. The fact that the backwoods yeomen farmer of the trope is invariably white erases any African-American heritage in the Ozarks. The 2,000 enslaved people listed in the 1840 census and the freemen who stayed in the region following emancipation are invisible to cultural memory--[Aaron in 1901] people like Aaron Anderson Van Winkle, the foreman at Van Winkle’s Mill following its 1870 rebuilding, and the Fayetteville poet George Ballard. More than that, removing racial diversity from Ozark history erases racism--such as the racially motivated mob violence in 1905 and 1909 in Harrison, Arkansas which caused, through death and fear of further violence, the complete depopulation of Harrison’s African-American communities which had numbered at least 115 in 1900 (Froelich and Zimmermann 1999). An event many still have difficultly “seeing” today through the haze of historical memory. Of course, archaeologists and historians have, in fact, already begun to examine African-American heritage in the Ozarks--such as the previously mentioned work at the Wilson Plantation and Van Winkle’s Mill--but it has not yet examined the construction of whiteness in the region. This is all the more important as whiteness in the Ozarks plays on a national stage entangled with the stabilization of the modern conceptualization of whiteness and the hillbilly trope itself. That is to say that the trope of whiteness in the Ozarks is more powerful than simply erasing diversity. Within some discursive regimes the Ozarks become a bastion of whiteness, and in fact, the savior of the American white race. [Kingston
Church] For instance, when a Presbyterian mission was established
in Kingston, Arkansas in 1917, the Rev. Elmer J. Bouher would write
copiously to his patron church in Rochester, New York that Kingston
was a “cultural seed-bed” of “Anglo-Saxon and Elizabethan
culture” and that the dialect and customs of the Ozarks were
“virtually unchanged from those in England in the sixteenth century.” He would write to one local that “You
and your family have maintained the British character exemplified
when their ancestors first settled on the Atlantic seaboard. There is no melting pot in these mountains. Your people have maintained your integrity,
habits and racial purity.” (Burnett 2000:38-39, emphasis added). These sentiments are directly tied to the eugenics movement that was gaining popularity as a “solid field of science” following the turn of the century--a field which, of course, can be tied in a reactionary way to the increased immigration of “less fit” eastern and southern Europeans who were mingling with the still unstable construct of whiteness (Kevles 1985:57-69). The Presbyterian mission to the Ozarks was clearly in agreement with eugenic-leaning sentiments as Rev. Bouher would be quoted in a 1920s human-interest story in the Madison County Record: “America’s
greatest problem today is in the flood of immigration from the lower
levels of European society that is threatening to submerge and destroy
our American ideals. Sociologists
tell us that there remain in America only two great seedbed of Anglo-Saxon
intellect, and they are in Southern Appalachians and in the Ozark
uplift. Right here in these Ozark hills is a greater wealth of native Anglo-Saxon
intelligence than in any other section of the United States. In my opinion there are 2,000 descendants the
pure clean-bred, sturdy stock that settled America and founded our
government, the same stock that produced such men as Jackson and Lincoln.”
(Burnett 2000:187-186) Thus, by the turn of the century, the “backward Ozark hillbillies” were seen not only as a “problem”, but also a solution--as the end of the century saw the closing of the frontier and streams of urban immigrants a clamoring for an decisively America nostalgia began. To those seeking American nostalgia, what was appealing about the hillbilly was his whiteness and the possibility of a genetically pure remnant of a tradition that was uniquely American. [Pop
Culture] It is this romantic/nostalgic, if not racialized, aspect
of the image of the Ozark hillbilly that causes it to become the constant
focus of folklorists from Randolph (beginning around 1915) to the
present. It has existed side-by-side--sometimes
in conflict, sometimes in harmony with--negative aspects of the
stereotype such as those generated in by the early “mountaineer”
films of D. W. Griffith (the same director who brought you Birth
of A Nation) and continued into the 1930s and 1940s via pop phenomena
such as Lil’ Abner, Snuffy
Smith and “hillbilly” music (retitled “country
and western” by the 1950s).
And these stereotypes continue to exist, I might add--witness that a major network
is currently marketing a new reality-based TV show which picks up
on the Beverly Hillbilly theme by selecting a rural Ozark family
(after careful selective casting, I imagine) and giving them a wad
of cash and a Beverley Hill mansion and watching what happens (yes,
they targeted the Ozarks specifically). Conclusions:
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