| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Dwight B. Billings and Kathleen M. Blee. The Road to Poverty: The Making of Wealth and Hardship in Appalachia. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2000. Pp. xiv, 434. Cloth $59.95, paper $24.95.

In this important and valuable study of the origins of Appalachian poverty, Dwight B. Billings and Kathleen M. Blee use a variety of materials—especially census, court, and land records—to examine Clay County, Kentucky, over the course of the nineteenth century. One of America's poorest counties, Clay County lends itself to a new analysis of this subject; contrary to common assumptions about the mountain South, it never was dependent on coal, nor was it always poor or socially homogeneous. The authors demonstrate that, until the 1840s, the manufacture of salt had supported a prosperous, influential gentry, while antebellum farms had rivaled their midwestern peers in productivity. From early settlement, there had been a diverse human landscape, free and slave, entrepreneurs and subsistence farmers. Clay County also lends itself to rethinking because it had been the locus of James S. Brown's pioneering historical ethnographic studies of Beech Creek, conducted from 1942 into the 1970s (see Brown, Beech Creek: A Study of a Kentucky Mountain Neighborhood [1988]); Billings and Blee celebrate the importance of his work while expanding on his findings. In sharp distinction from much of the county, Beech Creek was, even in the 1940s, largely outside markets, providing a valuable analytic contrast. . . .

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