Absentee landowning and exploitation in West Virginia, 1760-1920 /

Recent studies of southern Appalachian history have described the emergence of a market-oriented, entrepreneurial society and economy in the southern uplands during the antebellum period. By the 1880s, however, as the industrial revolution began in the region, inhabitants had lost control of their destiny to outside interests and had fallen into a pattern of dependence, poverty, and exploitation that have characterized the mountain region in this century. Rasmussen, an independent Appalachian scholar, focuses on a five-county area of the present-day Monongahela National Forest in West Virginia. She argues that an entrenched pattern of absentee landowning traceable back to the Colonial period made the region unusually vulnerable to penetration and control by outside interests. Rasmussen describes the conflict among absentee owners and local farmers and entrepreneurs, discusses the strategies of external interests that led to the defeat of local inhabitants after the Civil War, and identifies the powerful individuals and corporations that secured control of West Virginia's coal and timber. The argument is interesting though often impressionistic and difficult to follow. It should be read in conjunction with Paul Salstrom's Appalachia's Path to Dependence (CH, Oct'94). Recommended for those interested in West Virginia and Southern Appalachian history. All levels. C. W. Wood Jr.; Western Carolina University