A revival is building all along the “Hillbilly Highway.” The history of America’s heartland dates to the late 1700s, when thousands of Scots and Irishmen left Europe to find a better life on the American seaboard. They gathered in the mountains of Appalachia, filling the foothills of Tennessee, Kentucky, and West Virginia.
These devoutly religious folks tended to keep to themselves, eschewing outsiders and living in tight-knit extended families. And they worked... hard. The coal industry boomed on the backs of Appalachian working men who put in long hours in dark and dangerous mineshafts. At its peak in the 1920s, more than 700,000 miners worked the coalfields in central Appalachia alone. That is, until the coal industry busted with the Great Depression and the end of World War I... Although coal remained a critical commodity for most of the 20th century... increasing mechanization steadily reduced the number of people needed to work the mines. Starting with the end of World War II, a mass exodus took place... In search of high-paying blue-collar jobs, millions left the mountains, traveled up the Hillbilly Highway (first U.S. Route 23 and later Interstate 75) to Ohio, Michigan, and Illinois, where they found jobs in steel mills
By Dr. David Eifrig
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American Consequences 23
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