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production methods has left some bitter legacies. The great Appalachian out-migration ranks high among them. Between 1940 and 1960, more than 1 million Appalachians left the region. Disproportionately, they were the uprooted families of coalminers heading for urban factory jobs in the Midwestern cities. 37
    Finally, the shift from human labor to high-technology mining has had a devastating impact on the environment. Old workings continue to seep orange acid mine drainage into the streams, and coal companies increasingly lop off the tops of mountains to extract coal seams. Few knowledgeable people doubt that the environmental and social costs of filling valleys and streams with overburden will present subsequent generations with an extraordinary financial burden.
    During the industrial era, when so many central Appalachian families depended on the coal industry for employment, most were willing to tolerate the disadvantages that inevitably accompany a dependency on coal. But how long they will accept these heavy environmental and social costs in the face of shrinking benefits remains an open question.
    NOTES
    1. Will Wallace Harney, “A Strange Land and Peculiar People,”
Lippincott Magazine
12 (Oct. 1873): 430–31. See also Henry D. Shapiro,
Appalachia on Our Mind: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870–1920
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978); Allen W. Batteau,
The Invention of Appalachia
(Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1990).
    2. For some recent examples, see Dwight B. Billings and Kathleen M. Blee,
Road to Poverty: The Making of Wealth and Hardship in Appalachia
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Mary Beth Pudup, Dwight B. Billings, and Altina L. Waller, eds.,
Appalachia in the Making: The Mountain South in the Nineteenth Century
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Wilma A. Dunaway,
The First American Frontier: Transition to Capitalism in Southern Appalachia, 1700–1860
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Robert Tracy McKenzie,
One South or Many? Plantation Belt and Upcountry in Civil War Era Tennessee
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); John C. Inscoe,
Mountain Masters, Slavery, and the Sectional Crisis in Western North Carolina
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989).
    3. Dunaway,
First American Frontier
, 145.
    4. Ibid., 157–64, passim.
    5. Fletcher M. Green, “Georgia’s Forgotten Industry: Gold Mining,”
Georgia Historical Quarterly
19 (1935): 93–111, 210–28; Green, “Gold Mining: A Forgotten Industry of Antebellum North Carolina,”
North Carolina Historical Review
14 (1937): 1–19, 135–55; David Williams,
The Georgia Gold Rush: Twenty-niners, Cherokees, and Gold Fever
(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993).
    6. Dunaway,
First American Frontier
, 182–83, 185.
    7. For early ironworks, see Kathleen Bruce,
Virginia Iron Manufacture in the Slave Era
(1930; reprint, New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1960); Lester J. Cappon, “History of the Southern Iron Industry to the Close of the Civil War” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1928); J. P. Lesley,
The Iron Manufacturer’s Guide to the Furnaces, Forges, and Rolling Mills of the United States
(New York: John Wiley, 1859); Eugene B. Willard, ed.,
A Standard History of the Hanging Rock Iron Region of Ohio
, 2 vols. (N.p.: Lewis Publishing, 1916); R. Bruce Council, Nicholas Honerkamp, and M. Elizabeth Will,
Industry and Technology in Antebellum Tennessee: The Archaeology of Bluff Furnace
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992).
    8. Ronald L. Lewis,
Transforming the Appalachian Countryside: Railroads, Deforestation, and Social Change in West Virginia, 1880–1920
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 43–44;Lewis, “Beyond Isolation and Homogeneity: Diversity and the History of Appalachia,” in
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