Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Mixing in the Mountains

Mixing in the Mountains ESSAY by John Shelton Reed ^^ ne January day in 1996,1 1 picked up the WallStreetJournalto find a story headlined "Rural County Balks atJoining Global Village."2 It told about Hancock County, Tennessee, which straddles the Clinch River in the ridges hard up against the Cumberland Gap, where Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee meet. This is a county that has lost a third of its 1950 population, which was only ten thousand to begin with. A third of those left are on welfare, and half of those with jobs have to leave the county to work. The only town is Sneedville, population 1 300, which has no movie theater, no hospital, no dry cleaner, no supermarket, and no department store. I read this story with a good deal of interest because the nearest city of any consequence is my hometown of Kingsport, thirty-five miles from Sneedville as the crow flies, but an hour and a half on mountain roads. (If you don't accept my premise that Kingsport is a city of consequence, Knoxville's a litde further from Sneedville, in the opposite direction.) The burden of the article was that many of Hancock County's citizens are indifferent to the state of http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Southern Cultures University of North Carolina Press

Mixing in the Mountains

Reed, John Shelton.
Southern Cultures , Volume 3 (4) – Jan 4, 1997
Download PDF
12 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/university-of-north-carolina-press/mixing-in-the-mountains-3h0xU3S9L0

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
University of North Carolina Press
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of the American South.
ISSN
1534-1488
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

ESSAY by John Shelton Reed ^^ ne January day in 1996,1 1 picked up the WallStreetJournalto find a story headlined "Rural County Balks atJoining Global Village."2 It told about Hancock County, Tennessee, which straddles the Clinch River in the ridges hard up against the Cumberland Gap, where Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee meet. This is a county that has lost a third of its 1950 population, which was only ten thousand to begin with. A third of those left are on welfare, and half of those with jobs have to leave the county to work. The only town is Sneedville, population 1 300, which has no movie theater, no hospital, no dry cleaner, no supermarket, and no department store. I read this story with a good deal of interest because the nearest city of any consequence is my hometown of Kingsport, thirty-five miles from Sneedville as the crow flies, but an hour and a half on mountain roads. (If you don't accept my premise that Kingsport is a city of consequence, Knoxville's a litde further from Sneedville, in the opposite direction.) The burden of the article was that many of Hancock County's citizens are indifferent to the state of

Journal

Southern Cultures – University of North Carolina Press

Published: Jan 4, 1997

There are no references for this article.