You Can’t Eat Scenery

Abstract

The second of three chapters exploring the history of homesteading in the area around Berea, Kentucky, chapter 3 presents the story of rural subsistence from the late 1800s up to the economic boom generated by World War II. The chapter is framed in terms of the “parable of enclosure”--the idea that yeoman farmers would not voluntarily trade independent livelihood for capitalist wage labor--and argues that as industry and technology generated ever more advanced consumer goods (for example, refrigerators, radios, antibiotics), the peasant way of life became outmoded; once wage labor became available in the factories of the north, millions of Appalachians left the mountains. But, as the chapter documents, some chose to return to a homesteading life, forming an overlooked back-to-the-land movement.