Books: Appalachian Valley

Modernity comes to rural America

“Little Laurel Valley” — not its real name — is a region in the mountains of western North Carolina. In 1965, it had a population of around 1,300.

Anthropologist George Hicks didn’t set out to study the people of the Little Laurel. He came to the valley in 1965 to do his dissertation on a group of former urbanites who had moved there to join a planned cooperative community. When he first tried to interact more with the locals — to get a better sense of their relationship to his co-op people — rumor had it he was an “FBI man…a term of special scorn in Little Laurel.”

Since most locals didn’t know what an anthropologist was, Hicks described himself as someone interested in local history. Eventually he convinced them that his interest was genuine, and they became as much his research subjects as the co-op people he’d originally come to observe. The result was his 1976 book, Appalachian Valley, a collection of material from his 1966-1967 stay among the people of Little Laurel.

The book is an ethnography — a description of various facets of a people’s way of life. As such there’s no overarching thesis or historical narrative. But the book does have a strong theme of social change. In isolated American communities like this, modernity came later than it did elsewhere.

Note: I’ll follow the ethnographic convention of describing 1967 Little Laurel in the present tense.

The End of Isolation

The Little Laurel Valley sits surrounded by mountains on all sides. Prior to the 1930s, a trip from the valley to the nearest trading town meant a taxing 3- to 4-day journey over mountain passes with horse and wagon. After 1930, the valley was connected by highway to the rest of America’s road network. Now the nearest urban center is merely an hour’s drive by car.

The advent of telephones, televisions, and tourists also broke down the social distance between locals and outsiders. The area got its first electrical service in 1948. In the late 1950s there were still only five telephones in the valley, but in 1967 there are 146. By 1958 there were ten television sets in the entire valley; in 1967 there are 200 and almost everybody watches TV weekly. During the mid-1950s, Little Laurel started getting tourists from New York and New Jersey, who came to vacation in summer cabins. Now tourists are a major part of the economy, and some visitors — like the co-op people Hicks originally came to study — turn into long-term residents.

Economic integration with the outside world has also grown via the increasing number of locals who commute to work in mines or mills outside of the valley.

The increase in intimacy with the outside world is staggering. And so are the economic and cultural changes that come with it.

The Pace of Change

Hicks says that calling the pace of recent social change “rapid” is an understatement:

There are many older adults who remember, from their first ten years of marriage and parenthood, loading a wagon for the three-day trip over Sourwood Mountain to trade home-cured pork for salt and flour. As late as 1942, “acid wood” and “tan bark,” both used in tanning leather, were being hauled out of the valley to tanneries across the mountains. Similarly, the memory of the painful experience of breaking in a new pair of wooden-soled workshoes, put together by a local part-time cobbler, provides many older men with a reference point from which they can “study about” changes wrought in their lives in a few decades.

One result is that old times and “how it used to be” is a frequent topic of conversation among people of the valley. Local opinion is nearly unanimous that change didn’t begin in earnest until after World War II. Locals use the phrase “before the war” to refer broadly to the period from 1910 to 1940.

Many residents view the changes negatively and say that World War II “ruined” the place. Hicks notes this might not be entirely genuine, though I think it’s possible to make a materially good trade and still miss some of the things you traded. And social change has a compulsive quality — it’s hard to hold yourself aloof from it even if you want to.

For many Little Laurel residents, the most negative aspect of the change is its sheer swiftness. They suffer from culture shock, as their old traditions fade into extinction and their folk knowledge becomes irrelevant. Several express confusion at modern times. As one informant remarked: “A man don’t hardly know where he stands no more; there don’t seem to be anything steady.”

Hicks mentions another man who has a religious conviction that God will not allow humans to travel to the moon. When three Apollo astronauts perished in a fire on the launch pad, the man attributed it to God’s punishment for the attempted creation of a new Tower of Babel. But even this man hedged his belief that a moonshot was impossible by saying, “’Course, none of us ever thought they’d be a highway right up there on the top of them mountains. Or such a thing as television, either.”

Economy and Interdependence

Since pioneer days, the rough terrain precluded large-scale agriculture. The people of Little Laurel historically made their living off forest products, including timber, as well as small-scale mineral mining for mica, kaolin, and feldspar. There was also a short-lived boom in harvesting wild ginseng.

By the 1960s, the old growth forest and ginseng were long gone, and the minerals were depleted as well. To the extent people still make a living off the forest, it is from pulling galax.

Galax is a low growing evergreen plant used in floral arrangements. Locals first started gathering and exporting it in the late nineteenth century. The work is communal: “Galax is pulled by small groups of people, usually kinsmen, and collected in large burlap bags dragged behind the ‘puller.’”

In 1967, many people still pull galax for supplementary income: “Women often spend several hours a week pulling galax to earn money for luxuries they could not otherwise afford.” But it’s only a major source of income for the poorest families. And the activity “has acquired a symbolic connotation”:

This work is considered, by local people who earn their living as industrial employees and at various white-collar jobs, the occupation of “backward, ignorant hillbillies.” Certainly it…appeals to those who are oriented more to the traditional way of life….the tasks…can be begun and ended at the discretion of the individual family, the work is unsupervised, payment is almost immediate, and one need not work among strangers.

Wild food sources are also still an important supplement for the poorest families in the valley. On fishing, Hicks writes:

As part of the promotion of the valley as a summer resort and recreation area, the state government stocks the river with trout each month during the summer. Local inhabitants know when stocking will occur and eagerly wait downstream for the fish, their lines baited with whole kernels of canned corn. Within a week the river is virtually emptied of all but the most recalcitrant native trout.

You might notice a theme of people in the valley stripping the wild commons of its resources.

People in 1967 increasingly rely on industrial employment outside the valley, at nearby mines and textile mills. The pull of these opportunities induces some to move out of the community entirely. In a pattern seen in small towns and rural areas throughout the US, the population of Little Laurel began declining at midcentury, as more and more people moved away to growing urban centers. And local shopkeepers became increasingly dependent on tourists for business.

The general contours of interdependence thus changed. Prior to the 1940s:

Extensive cooperation, particularly in economic projects, was a feature of daily life. Barnraisings and husking bees provided occasions for technical cooperation and sociability until quite recently….more and more, however, as the valley’s residents find themselves involved in wage labor in the increasing numbers of factories in the adjacent region, opportunities for such cooperative activity decrease.

Even death has changed: In the old days, when someone died, his family and friends constructed his coffin. Nowadays coffins are purchased from a professional mortician.

It’s a pattern that prevails everywhere in the modernizing world. People become less economically interdependent on local networks of kith and kin, and more dependent on strangers, corporations, and professionals.

Cultural Distance and Homogenization

The people of Little Laurel are still culturally distinct from outsiders, and they know it. The people “readily relate tales of their ineptness in adapting to the expectations of people as geographically near as towns in the South Carolina piedmont.” For instance, one storekeeper recalled being mocked for accidentally using the segregated Negro toilet when working construction there. He added, “It’s interestin’…the way people act in different places. I reckon that’s why I never left this place for very long: I’m scared I wouldn’t know how to act any place else.”

Even the younger men have trouble adjusting. Hicks mentions three men who left for what they intended to be permanent moves to a nearby urban area, only to move back within a year. One remarked that “I just couldn’t stand the people’s way of doing.”

The cultural distinctiveness of Little Laurel includes its dialect, featuring many terms that seem more at home in the 19^th century than in the late 1960s:

The county sheriff, for example, is known as the “high sheriff.” A number of terms are locally used to refer to illegally distilled whiskey: “blockade” is the most common… Certain shrubs and plants have, as they well know, both local names and “book names.”

It was similar in my own hometown, a barrier island off Virginia’s Eastern Shore. A lot of fish and bird species had their own local names, like “black will” for black sea bass. Some are still current. My uncle recalls other, now largely extinct terms used by the old-timers when he was young.

In both cases, local distinctiveness begins to fade as the culture of the outside world pours in.

One route for the flow of culture in Little Laurel is the summer tourists. Given their dependence on the outsiders, local shopkeepers increasingly change their behavior to meet the expectations of the urbanites. The biggest change is from the traditional model of business, in which goods were kept behind the counter and customers had to ask the owner for each wanted item — usually with bouts of conversation between requests. Nowadays most owners have switched to the self-service model of letting customers browse for goods on shelves. Store owners have also become far more conscious of keeping their stores neat and tidy, with clean-swept floors and attractively arranged items.

Mass media, especially television, is another avenue for culture:

Outsiders add to the growth of knowledge and tolerance for urban mannerisms and attitudes, although much of the breaking down of provincialism appears to be due to television. As local people see the “impossible” repeated as a matter of routine, showing up dramatically in technological feats such as space travel, their doubts about the literal truth of the Bible and the durability of folk wisdom multiply.

With increasing intercourse with the outside world comes increasing assimilation to its culture:

Popular songs pour from the radio stations in the area; “TV dinners,” become more and more popular, particularly in those families where the wife is employed; clothing cut in the latest fashion is seen more frequently; sedans, rather than pickup trucks, are preferred by younger families. Profanity is heard more often when men converse…serving late-afternoon cocktails to guests, contrary to traditional usage, is characteristic of several households.

Here again, the pattern is one we can see in many places: Local cultures increasingly melt into a regional or national mainstream.

Stratification

In Little Laurel, the concept of “career” has little relevance, and social status is less closely tied to occupation than in urban areas. Instead, status hinges on various facets of a person’s financial situation and personal reputation, including “family background, knowledge of past behavior, use of leisure time, indebtedness, estimate of honesty and generosity, as well as stability and amount of income.” For instance, a man who makes an above-average income but spends much of it on drink rather than keeping his home repaired or kids in clothing is considered “sorry” rather than “better off.”

Reputation comes from family as well as personal history: “If a person belongs to a kin group generally regarded as honest, then the person himself, until evidence proves otherwise, is presumed honest.” People do recognize exceptions to family reputation, though, with statements like, “You have to wonder how a man as honest as Tom…could come out of a family like that.”

While reputation is important, time in jail or prison for drunken brawls and similar behavior isn’t necessarily considered serious deviance. If the man in question appears to have since become respectable, the incidents are chalked up to youthful recklessness and only brought up as amusing anecdotes.

While locals will, if pressed, openly recognize such status differences as “sorry” and “better off,” they generally avoid status comparisons, and an ethic of egalitarianism prevails. All people are, in theory, considered equal. This is emphasized culturally with a pattern of informal dress and behavior at public gatherings.

Locals will condemn anyone who they see as “putting himself above everybody else.” A few men who’d move away to urban areas were criticized for talking of the “good life” there when they returned to visit, as it was seen as putting down “this country here.” Contrariwise, one of the highest compliments paid to a relatively wealthy person is to describe him as “just as common as you and me,” meaning he has a lack of pretension.

These people are thus sensitive to what sociologist Donald Black calls overstratification, and are prone to censure one another for claiming any sort of social superiority.

This tendency extends to work relations:

A man agrees to accept employment in order to “help out” his employer, and he speaks of his job as “helping” rather than “working for” or “being hired by” his employer. He expects the relationship to be carried out as between equals, just as are relationships with kinsmen and friends….With some limitations, he considers himself free to come to work or not as he pleases. In addition, he expects to be given a task and left relatively free to accomplish it on his own.

One local man explains why he quit an industrial construction job and returned to the valley to do logging work with his kin: “I just never did like for nobody to point his finger at me and order me around — nobody.”

Sex Roles

Most families more or less follow a traditional division of labor where women are expected to cook, clean, and tend to small children, while men go hunting, fishing, and do heavy manual labor. The sexual division of labor is greatest in the middle classes. Wealthier families are already assimilating to the more interchangeable division of modern urban society, while in the poorest families, men and women are likely to work side by side picking galax.

Women have some authority within the household, and in both house and community they stand out “as a moral force, as keepers of traditional moral rules.” For instance:

They are expected to, and do, attend church more than men, and they take the rules of fundamentalist Christianity more seriously as guides to daily action. Younger women receive no condemnation for smoking cigarettes, nor older women for using snuff, but their position with regard to alcoholic beverages is far more rigidly proscribed. They are considered “watchmen” over the morality of their households, and it is assumed that women neither drink nor allow drinking in their homes.

Of course, moonshine is readily available in the community and men drink somewhat regularly. This points to an interesting feature: By the standards of moden urban society, the degree of sex segregation is extreme.

Some of this is looks like shielding women and children from vice, and/or women policing vice in the home. Men are not to drink, curse, nor tell off-color stories in the presence of women or children. Thus men stash their bottles of liquor and cases of beer in the woods, and it is in the woods they go to drink with their friends.

The rule against cursing in front of women and children conveys a degree of gentility lacking in 2025 culture, where you can’t take your kids to the bookstore without seeing prominently displayed books with “fuck” in the title or hearing the song “Tonight I’m Fucking You” playing over the piped in music. The hillbillies of the 1960s were in at least one sense more civilized than contemporary society.

But the sex segregation of conversation in Little Laurel goes further than gentility. For it is also the unwritten rule that men do not discuss business or politics in front of women. If a man wants to visit another man’s house to talk about such matters, he parks his truck outside and honks the horn. The other man will come out and the conversation takes place in the vehicle. If a group of men is having such men’s talk in a public space and a woman approaches, they often fall completely silent until she leaves.

Men and women generally socialize in different spaces. Men gather and converse at the general store, gas pumps, and in front of the courthouse on election days. Women, on the other hand, socialize around the home, and their interactions are mostly restricted to close kin. When the extended family gathers at someone’s home, the men and women gravitate toward opposite sides of the porch, and the men often wander off “to look at the sow” or on some other errand or pretext.

At church, not only are there separate Bible study groups for men and women, but during the sermons men and women sit on opposite sides of the church, separated by an aisle. Voluntary associations and political organizations follow the same basic pattern, with separate men’s and women’s committees.

The idea of a close platonic relationship between unrelated men and women is unknown. A man going into an unrelated woman’s house is assumed to be for sexual purposes. Thus, even if the woman is elderly and several decades the man’s senior, any visit takes place on the porch in plain sight of passersby.

Girls are generally supervised much more than boys, and boys have more opportunities to socialized with age-mates away from parents and grandparents, particularly after age eight. Young boys who ask their fathers to show them how to do adult male activities like work mowers or shoot guns are readily taught. Most boys know how to shoot a rifle by the age of twelve. Children of box sexes are doing household chores by the time they’re eight.

Fathers are more inclined to give their boys freedom and will clash with mothers over allowing the boys to stay away from home until late in the evening. The exception that proves the rule was one family that was “noted for its urban manner” who grounded their son for coming home fifteen minutes late. Other locals thought the punishment too harsh, since the parents wouldn’t let their son be like the other boys. When the same boy feared getting in trouble for a C grade on his report card, a local storekeeper helped him forge the mark into a B because he “thought boys shouldn’t be punished for making low grades.”

The General Store

One of the most important institutions in Little Laurel is the neighborhood general store. These stores are not merely places for purchasing goods, but also major social arenas. The stores are perpetually full of a revolving group of men who loaf about discussing business, politics, and gossip. Locals also post flyers about various community events and activities for public display there. Stores and storekeepers play an important role in spreading information.

In older times each general store also doubled as a post office, with the storekeeper as postmaster. Stores are still sites for registering voters and for holding meetings with the tax assessor. And for many residents, the nearest store is their only access to a telephone. The general stores are in many ways a bigger community center than the churches or the school.

Kinship

In Little Laurel as in other parts of America, the basic kin group is the nuclear family household. The main difference compared to more modernized settings is “the emphasis put on maintaining close relationships with an extended network of kin.” In earlier times, this was necessary for survival, as one needed help from kin to carry out work and render aid in tough times.

Kinship still shapes economic activity:

The general rule of loyalty to kin means that one should patronize stores owned by kinsmen and should not cheat them by charging unfair prices or shortchanging. Kinsmen are expected to, and often do, sell land and automobiles at lower prices to their relatives than they would to nonkin. Cooperative projects frequently are limited to kinsmen, or kinsmen are asked to participate in such projects before others.

The same goes for politics: “one should not vote against kin in elections and one is expected to vote, if not actively campaign, for kinsmen in political contests.”

And so too for residence: Newly married couples tend to settle next to one set of their parents or the other. It’s customary for the parents of the husband to offer land if they have it to spare, and if not, the family of the wife makes the offer. The result is that the homes of kin tend to be clustered together.

Hicks notes that one effect of greater closeness and interdependence with the extended kin network is correspondingly less closeness and interdependence within the nuclear household:

Where, as in the Little Laurel, there are multiple linkages that bind each nuclear family to a number of kinsmen, and these bonds are reaffirmed by economic cooperation, social interaction, and so on, there is a tendency for the nuclear family to be less self-centered.

This is especially evident in the case of spouses. People retain strong ties with their family of origin, and it’s not unusual for a young married woman to leave her husband and go to live with her parents to help out for the winter season. But she is also highly intimate with the family of her spouse. If a husband is out of town for a long period, one of his kinsmen might come and live with his wife and children to take care of them while he’s gone.

The ideal is for couples to devote equal resources to both sets of kin. Managing relations with each spouse’s kindred requires not a little diplomacy. For instance, since political parties are determined by kinship, marriage between supporters of different parties creates a problem of conflicting loyalties. The typical way for a woman to handle this, if she marries across party lines, is to change her voter registration to Independent. In this way she avoids actively siding with either her husband’s or her father’s party.

According to sociologist Donald Black, intimacy is zero-sum. A community that is distant from the outside world has greater overall closeness between its members. But this plays out at various levels, and so close relationships like marriages might be relatively more distant in tight-knit communities than they are in places where life is bifurcated between the intimacy of the home and a cold world of shallow ties.

An Intimate Community

For both kin and nonkin, the community has a high overall level of intimacy. As Black would predict, these people have an ethic of closeness, where solitude is both difficult to find and deviant to seek. This is learned early:

Neither boys nor girls spend much time alone. They are almost always in the company of their friends, kinsmen, or both. Constant association with others is so customary that an individual who does manage to be by himself for any period of time is regarded as “quare” and inexplicably eccentric.

Social closeness includes extensive knowledge of one another’s affairs:

A great deal of information is known about the details of people’s personal lives. Everybody, in the first place, knows almost everyone else….Many daily activities are highly visible….it is difficult in many cases to travel from one neighborhood to another without being seen on the highway. Sharp interest is displayed in what transpires along the highway…Since what kind of car each person owns is common knowledge, as are his associates, kinsmen, and friends, it is usually a simple matter for anyone within sight to ascertain the comings and goings of a large number of residents every day.

People are so interested in observing these comings and goings that they make an effort to cut trees and bushes that might obstruct their view of the roads: “Even those who have to walk to their house across swinging bridges or up steep paths will clip away sufficient forest to obtain a view of the road.” They don’t even consider that this also subtracts from their own privacy.

People are quick to perceive and spread all manner of information about their fellows: “In one case, a local bulldozer operator, hired to dig a new garbage pit for a relatively affluent family, made a quick count of discarded beer cans and passed on the news about how heavily the head of the household was drinking.”

In another case a man’s early morning trips “up the mountain” in a pickup truck with a covered flatbed was enough for all his neighbors to infer he had set up a still to make moonshine liquor.

Gossip spreads fast:

The speed of communication, to one unaccustomed to it, is astonishing. When a fifteen-year-old boy shot his brother-in-law in a settlement located at one end of the valley, men in stores at the other end knew of it within fifteen minutes, before the county sheriff had arrived to begin his investigation.

People know one another’s financial situation and dealings, including the amount a man paid for a recent home or land purchase. They also know of one another’s past deeds and misdeeds.

While modernization is bound to eventually reduce this dense network of intimate ties, its immediate effect is to speed up the flow of information about friends and neighbors. Not only do vehicles and phones make it easier to trade gossip, but cars and trucks also make people’s comings and goings more visible. Vehicles parked by the side of the road now give away groups of men who’ve gone into the woods to drink or gamble.

From Settlement to Community

Modern trade, travel, and communication have also led to greater closeness between the individual settlements within the valley.

The valley has ten distinct settlements, each a cluster of homes that, usually, has its own general store and church.

Each settlement has a name and a local identity and reputation. The poorest and most isolated of the settlements is considered dangerous: “Saturday nights in Stony Branch, people say, are ‘the most un-Christian thing around here.” The people there are considered the most “backwoodsy” of all in the valley.

Before the 1930s, men of the same settlement tended to have the same occupation, as the initial locations of the settlement were determined by access to resources like timber and mica.

The same forces of modernization that will inevitably lead Little Laurel to lose its distinctiveness vis a vis the American mainstream have had a similar effect internally, helping blend the individual settlements into a larger community. This community is on its way to supplanting the settlements as the main social unit and salient identity.

Such a change goes hand in hand with political consolidation. The various settlements are now a single township. Rather than each storekeeper acting as his own settlement’s postmaster, there is now a single post office, and all settlements are served by the same delivery route.

Before the 1940s settlements had their own one- or two-room schoolhouses, but by 1953 there was a consolidated elementary school attended by all students in the valley. High school is even more centralized, with kids bussed to a school in the county seat that includes 500 students from five different townships.

The change following the consolidation of schools was especially rapid. Students from the most isolated settlement joined the school in 1953, a year later than the others. Students from there were considered “bashful and clannish” as well as “hickey or backwoodsy.” They had obvious cultural differences, like tending to go barefoot or wear bib overalls. Within half a year, however, their dress and conduct conformed to that of the other students.

But even without schooling, internal mobility wears down neighborhood distinctiveness:

People turn to factory jobs, commuting daily or weekly from home to work and back again, they become less attuned to the minutiae of daily life in their own neighborhood. Seeing people from other parts of the valley more frequently, the commuter is more likely to consider them as potential neighbors, and can easily bring himself to move to another part of the valley.

One man gives a sense of the former separation of settlements by referring to the woman he married 40 years ago:

Why I didn’t even know she was in the world. Never even heard tell of her. But they’d been living up there on Big Ridge for longer than mine had been down here. People in them days just didn’t get around the way they do now.

I recall similar, if less extreme, stories from my grandfather about the distinctiveness of local neighborhoods in my little 8- by 3-mile island hometown. Even my mother, married in 1979, joked of moving in with a bunch of superstitious heathens when she came to my father’s neighborhood, within sight of the homes of his aunts, uncles, and cousins.

Conflict

Conflicts between locals and outsides arise from different understandings of property and rights to land use.

In local view, people have unlimited rights within the land they own. This includes causing negative effects for the property of others, as when a man dumps trash and sewage in a creek that runs through his land. On the other hand, locals also maintain a right of free access to the land of others — in their hunting and gathering, people are allowed to freely cross property lines. While no one may cut a tree on someone’s property without first buying it, gathering fallen limbs for firewood is allowed, and so is gathering galax and wild berries. The summer vacationers, though, fence in their property to keep out trespassers, and locals frequently criticize this practice in their own conversations.

These issues also cause conflicts between locals and the government. For instance, the people consider “public” — that is, state-owned — property to be collectively owned in a much more immediate sense. Thus each man ought to be able to, say, cut a Christmas tree from the national forest without permit or fee. The government sees things differently.

Other sorts of cultural differences cause conflict as well. Locals complain about the way that summer people locate their cabins, even though it has no impact on them financially. Building on high hillsides or mountain peaks makes sense for vacationers who want nice views and don’t have to worry about winter winds and snow-covered roads. But it goes against local norms of where it is appropriate to build.

When dealing with their own, locals hesitate to bring conflicts before the law. Among kinsmen, “only the most extreme provocation leads, or should lead, one to ‘law’—bring to legal contest — one’s relatives.” One result is that “conflicts that in an urban area involve police and courts can often be settled in informal ways in the Little Laurel.” This extends to draft dodgers and moonshiners being protected from the law by the silence of their kinsmen.

Kinsmen do have fallings out, but kin ties tend to mitigate extremes of either avoidance or aggression. Hicks gives one example: His informant was at a logging job and it started to rain. The loggers took shelter and passed the time by playing cards and drinking “white likker” (moonshine). After the liquor was all consumed, the informant’s ill-tempered uncle Ransom exploded at another main, accusing him of calling him “a sonafabitch!” Per the informant:

Well, Ransom grabbed the likker bottle and started to hit the other’n with hit, and I grabbed the bottle and told Ransom that nobody had called him no names. Ransom’s hand went in his pocket quick as you please. He’s after his knife. Hit looked like he was goin’ right on and pull out his knife and I was into hit! I had to stop him but he’s my uncle, so I just didn’t know what to do. Well, Ransom just kept his hand in his pocket and stood there shaking for a while, mad as he could be. Ransom stayed sulled up [sullen] at me for a long time after that. One Sunday, I guess hit was a month or two after that, I was drunk and went up to his house and told him I didn’t mean to make him mad that day. He said, ‘Ah, Fate, I done forgot about hit. Don’t [you] think no more about it.’ But I knowed he hadn’t forgot hit neither. He didn’t act sulled up at me no more, though.

The overall intimacy of the community mutes reactions in other situations as well. Storekeepers run lines of credit, and all have the experience of customers who use up their line of credit and, rather than paying, simply open a line of credit at a competing store. But to aggressively pursue debt collection, through law or otherwise, would risk alienating all the friends and kinsmen of the debtor and thus losing the business of many customers. Thus a great deal of unpaid debt is tolerated.

The web of close ties makes the collectivization of conflict a real danger. An open breach always risks alienating a large swathe of others and severely damaging one’s place in the community. For this reason, Hicks thinks, the locals obey what he calls an “ethic of neutrality” with the unwritten rules that:

1. One must mind his own business

2. One must not be assertive, aggressive, or call attention to himself as separate from the group

3. One must not assume authority over others

4. One must avoid argument whenever possible and seek agreement.

He sees this ethic at work in the local conversational style, in which people avoid direct questions and seek information by dropping hints about their interests. Men also avoid giving explicit advice, which might be taken as an assertion of superiority, and express suggestions as indirectly as possible.

Locals exercise caution when speaking about topics likely to cause controversary. Men are hesitant to express opinions that contradict their fellows, so that “a process of ‘feeling out’ the views of each other frequently occupies the men’s groups for several hours, or even days, or repetitious hemming and hawing.”

Since everyone knows so much about everyone else, men will tailor what they say to avoid accidental insult to a man or his friends and kin. Thus these men often find themselves at a loss when confronted with someone they don’t know: “When an outsider suddenly enters a group, the response is a period of silence, quite understandable in view of the unplumbed nature of the stranger’s kin ties, occupation, and tolerance for disagreement.”

One result of all this is that much community conflict is subtle and indirect, leaving people to infer the grievances of others. For example, when a family stopped waving to the local school principal as they passed him on the road, he surmised they were irritated about him not allowing adults to use the school gym at night.

In another case, the school principal punished a student for fighting by giving him several “licks” with his belt. The boy’s father responded with legal charges, though the principal attracted many supportive witnesses and the case was dismissed. Local opinion was that the suit wasn’t really over the corporal punishment of the boy, but an indirect expression of the father’s grievance against his brother-in-law, the school janitor: The father was envious of his kinsman’s success, and liability for his grievance was displaced onto the school and its “chief figure.”

Even for severe and longstanding grudges, the sanctions are mostly covert:

A man might awake to find his dog shot or poisoned; a storekeeper will see some of his customers quietly disappear after he has sued to collect debts; a wooded area suddenly flames in the night, fired by a grudge-holder.

The Real Little Laurel

Shortly after I finished this book, Hurricane Helene devasted the mountains of North Carolina, destroying homes and roads and power stations. There were reports of communities knocked back into the pre-war era, lacking power and water and accessible only by pack mule.

I wondered how the people of Hick’s community faired in that, and more generally what the Little Laurel Valley had become in the sixty years since his fieldwork.

It took me an embarrassing amount of searching before I figured out that Hicks had mixed up all sorts of place names to try to maintain the confidentiality of his subjects. There is no Little Laurel Township in North Carolina, though the state has several Laurel placenames. The county name Hicks gives, Kent, is also a pseudonym.

Eventually I found this bibliography by the Yancey History Association that identifies Little Laurel as South Toe Township in Yancey County. It is in the Toe Valley.

As of 2025, it is still a rural community, and hasn’t wholly been swallowed by nature parks, summer rentals, and hippie music festivals — which is the impression you would get Google searching for the term “Laurel, NC.” Though, according to ChatGPT, South Toe is now home to a “vibrant arts scene” that includes painting and glassblowing. And South Toe is still home to the Celo intentional community, the original subjects that brought Hicks to the region. But that’s a book for another day.

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