Mode of Program Participation
Academic Scholarship
Participation Type
Panel
Session Title
Extreme Early Appalachia
Session Abstract or Summary
This panel demonstrates the diversity of the early Appalachian experience through the migrations and settlements of varied groups and their “extreme” connection to place and identity. Jim Glanville’s paper offers a sketch of the Yuchi people, who are arguably the first Appalachian peoples we can identify. Glanville examines their interactions with Spanish and English colonists, their involvement in the Indian slave trade, and their continued existence in the Appalachian region through the nineteenth century. Anna Kiefer’s paper considers Germanic settlement in eastern Appalachia and the impact those migrations had on the region’s development. While many immigrant groups soon lost the cultural elements that distinguished them from other groups, eastern Appalachia’s Germanic settlers were known for their retention of identifiably Germanic elements for generations after settlement. Sarah McCartney’s paper examines the Botetourt County Resolution as a window into the region’s settlement and development during the Revolutionary-era. McCartney considers the ways the Resolution’s fiery language revealed the challenges settlers faced and their seemingly unwavering connection to place as they pledged to defend hearth and home against all foes. Jamie Mize’s paper stretches Appalachian geography to its southern edge as it examines reported household improvements among the Cherokees. Mize demonstrates how Cherokee household organization demonstrated both change and continuity in Cherokee gender ideals and identity. This panel explores early Appalachia’s diversity through a shared “extreme” element that speaks to the conference theme that recognizes “the impassioned commitments people have to the region, the land, and Appalachian communities, ways of life, and livelihoods.”
Presentation #1 Title
The Yuchi Indians of Appalachia
Presentation #1 Abstract or Summary
This presentation offers a many-century sketch of the American Indian Yuchi people. Arguably, the Yuchis are the first Appalachian people we can name. The American Indian history of Appalachia is relatively poorly known and the region has long taken a back seat in American archeology. Interest in the sixteenth-century Spanish period of Appalachian history has only recently emerged. Oral tradition tells that the Yuchi Indian people originated at Cahokia on the Mississippi River near present-day St. Louis, were in western Tennessee by the fourteen century, and in eastern Tennessee by the fifteenth. The Spanish De Soto expedition encountered the Yuchis in Southwest Virginia in 1541, as did the Pardo expedition in 1567. The Yuchis left a fabulous archeological record in the Middle Appalachian region. In Virginia, this record remains even today undocumented by professional archeologists. English speakers first encountered the Yuchi people during trading explorations in the late seventeenth century, and by the early eighteenth century the Yuchi were heavily involved in the English-driven Indian slave trade. In 1714, the Yuchi lost out to larger tribes in the slave trade competition and suffered wide dispersal across the Southeast, with remnants remaining in Appalachia. Indian removal in 1838-39 took most Yuchis to Oklahoma as dependents of the Creek Nation. Nonetheless, despite removal, Remnant Yuchi settlements remained in Appalachia and in east Tennessee where they became the leaders of a post-removal coalescent Indian movement. This presentation will include documentary evidence of the leadership role taken by the Yuchis of Appalachia in 1857.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #1
Jim Glanville is an Independent Scholar and retired Emeritus Associate Professor of Chemistry at Virginia Tech. His research focuses on the pre-1850 history of Southwest Virginia. He has many publications including works in Virginia Tech’s own Smithfield Review. He is also the author of “Local Historian,” a column published monthly in the Christiansburg News Messenger and the Radford Journal and he publishes and maintains the history websites www.holstonia.org and www.lynnside.org.
Presentation #2 Title
“Alles Ist Ganz Anders Hier:” The German Immigrant of the 18th Century Backcountry, 1730-1775
Presentation #2 Abstract or Summary
Recent scholarship on the peopling of the Virginia backcountry of eastern Appalachia during the colonial period focuses mainly on the British element with a brief overview of Germanic culture, as seen in Warren Hofstra’s works on the region. While Germanic migrations into the eastern reaches of Appalachia were not nearly as numerous as their British counterparts, Germanic contributions to the social, political, and economic culture of the newly-emerging backcountry were no less important.
This paper seeks to provide a comprehensive overview of those Germanic settlers who settled in waves of migrations into the Appalachians, between 1730 and 1775. I will utilize both old (John Walter Wayland, The German Element of the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia) and new (Aaron Spencer Fogleman, Hopeful Journeys: German Immigration, Settlement, and Political Culture in Colonial America, 1717-1775) monographs, unpublished dissertations and diaries, and German contemporary art to gain a perspective on those Germanic settlers who noted that “everything is very different here” and were notorious for retaining their European ways well after other immigrants had acculturated.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #2
Anna Kiefer is an Instructor at Lord Fairfax Community College, an Independent Scholar, and a Public Historian. She has an M.A. in Early American History from the University of New Hampshire. Her research areas include Germanic settlement and culture in the Shenandoah Valley, the material culture of campfollowers of the British Army through the American Revolution, and the Women’s Land Army of America in Virginia and North Carolina during the first World War.
Presentation #3 Title
“the original purchase was blood, and mine shall seal the surrender:” Revolutionary-era Settlement and Sentiment in Botetourt County, Virginia
Presentation #3 Abstract or Summary
In 1775, Botetourt County freeholders expressed their support for the Second Virginia Convention with a resolution filled with fiery language that emphasized their connection to the Appalachian place they called home and the ideology of the Revolutionary-era. This paper analyzes the Botetourt Resolution and traces its “extreme” language to its root in the events surrounding the county’s settlement. It considers questions about the identity of the Botetourt freeholders who authored this document as, unlike the resolutions of nearby backcountry counties, surviving copies of the Botetourt resolutions are unsigned. It also examines the use of similar “extreme” language and Revolutionary-era ideology in other backcountry counties, and the ways that the individual and shared lived experiences of Virginia’s backcountry settlers informed their statements.
This paper draws on the scholarship of historians Rhys Isaac, Woody Holton, and Michael McDonnell who emphasize the influence of non-elite white Virginians in the push for Revolution, and parallels research on the Fincastle County resolutions by Thad Tate, Jim Glanville, and Mary Kegley. It utilizes documents from the Virginia Gazette, county records, the Draper Manuscripts, and the records of the Greenbrier Company.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #3
Sarah E. McCartney is a Doctoral Candidate in United States history at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro with specializations in early America and the Atlantic World. Her dissertation examines connections between community and commerce in the eighteenth-century Virginia backcountry. The project brings together economic history, social and cultural history, and material culture as it situates the Greenbrier Valley region of West Virginia within the Revolutionary era and wider Atlantic World.
Presentation #4 Title
Cherokee Gender in Southern Appalachia
Presentation #4 Abstract or Summary
At the turn of the nineteenth century, political power in the Cherokee Nation shifted from towns in present-day Virginia and North Carolina to extreme southern Appalachia. These new towns in present-day Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama, settled by the Chickamauga Cherokees, marked not only a political shift, but also other broader cultural changes. The Cherokee towns in extreme southern Appalachia became a staging ground for new expressions of Cherokee identity and gender. This paper will highlight patterns of lived gender expressions through the interpretation of reported household improvements among the Cherokees. I argue that differences over lifestyle, represented by the organization and contents of the Cherokee home, were actually contestations of gender ideals and Cherokee identity more broadly. After the American Revolution, a new United States government encouraged “civilization” programs within American Indian communities, which encouraged the reorganization of Native homes. Cherokees incorporated “civilization” policies into their lives in varying degrees. The former Chickamauga towns in extreme southern Appalachia proved the most “advanced” in their adoption of prescribed Anglo-American culture. It is my interpretation that these decisions were made with gendered power in mind, and through this project we gain a better understanding of the active role that Indians played in shaping their own identities in the wake of colonialism. This paper draws on the scholarship of gender and power by Theda Perdue, Tiya Miles, and Susan Abram.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #4
Jamie Myers Mize is a Doctoral Candidate of United States history at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her specialty area is ethnohistory in the Native American Southeast. Jamie’s dissertation, “Sons of Selu: Manhood and Gendered Power in Cherokee Society, 1775-1846” examines patterns of change and the existence of continuity regarding ideals of manhood and expressions of gendered power in Cherokee society during the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries.
The Yuchi Indians of Appalachia
This presentation offers a many-century sketch of the American Indian Yuchi people. Arguably, the Yuchis are the first Appalachian people we can name. The American Indian history of Appalachia is relatively poorly known and the region has long taken a back seat in American archeology. Interest in the sixteenth-century Spanish period of Appalachian history has only recently emerged. Oral tradition tells that the Yuchi Indian people originated at Cahokia on the Mississippi River near present-day St. Louis, were in western Tennessee by the fourteen century, and in eastern Tennessee by the fifteenth. The Spanish De Soto expedition encountered the Yuchis in Southwest Virginia in 1541, as did the Pardo expedition in 1567. The Yuchis left a fabulous archeological record in the Middle Appalachian region. In Virginia, this record remains even today undocumented by professional archeologists. English speakers first encountered the Yuchi people during trading explorations in the late seventeenth century, and by the early eighteenth century the Yuchi were heavily involved in the English-driven Indian slave trade. In 1714, the Yuchi lost out to larger tribes in the slave trade competition and suffered wide dispersal across the Southeast, with remnants remaining in Appalachia. Indian removal in 1838-39 took most Yuchis to Oklahoma as dependents of the Creek Nation. Nonetheless, despite removal, Remnant Yuchi settlements remained in Appalachia and in east Tennessee where they became the leaders of a post-removal coalescent Indian movement. This presentation will include documentary evidence of the leadership role taken by the Yuchis of Appalachia in 1857.
