n his 1892 inaugural address, governor William MacCorkle warned that in the coming years West Virginia would find itself occupying the same “position of vassalage” that Ireland held in relation to England, and for similar reasons: “But the men who today are purchasing the immense areas of the most valuable lands in the State, are not citizens and have only purchased in order that they may carry to their distant homes in the North, the usufruct of the lands of West Virginia, thus depleting the State of its wealth to build grandeur and splendor in other States.” Over the previous century, the Scots-Irish smallholders of Appalachia—a region that stretches more than 2,000 miles from western New York to northern Alabama—had been systematically dispossessed of their land and their makeshift livelihoods by a dysfunctional patchwork of property laws, by an influx, historian Steven Stoll compares the plight of the region to that of a colonized people: “The question we need to ask of every migration from country to city is whether it originated from a government scheme or corporate gambit that so degraded a people’s autonomy as to give them no choice.”
