Aliens In Southern Appalachia: Catholics In The Coal Camps, 1900-1940

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Aliens In Southern Appalachia: Catholics In The Coal Camps, 1900-1940 by Margaret Ripley Wolfe In November, 1946, Fathers Ed Smith and Joe Dean drove to the town of Norton, located in the heart of the Southwest Virginia coal mining region. A Church historical note outlined the status of Catholicism as the Glenmarians found it: They were now in the center of their new parish, and they were also almost in the geographical center of the great Appalachian region, which extends from western New York to Alabama. Their parish extended thirty miles to the north, sixty miles and three hours driving to the northeast, forty miles to the east, fifty miles to the south, and about eighty miles to the west—a parish which had two churches, one at Norton and the other at Appalachia, and was serving over 175,000 people, of which not more than 150 were Catholics. The Catholics consisted mainly of the few remaining Italian, Lebanese, and Hungarian families of the hundreds who had been enticed here by the promise of high wages from the coal companies. The poor working conditions, low pay, the extremely dangerous work and job insecurity had forced the others to move to the northern cities. Now there only remained a handful, and they were surrounded and almost lost in these thousands of people to whom the Church was a dangerous and foreign intruder which they couldn't understand and had been taught to fear.l An anonymous author at St. Bernard's Abbey during the 1920's had offered a strikingly different description: As to the nationalities that make up the vast congregation at present . . ., there are only four American born families in the whole section; Roda is all Hungarian, Inman half Hungarian and half Slavs, in the other camps the Catholics are about evenly divided between Poles and Slavs. There are practically no mixed marriages among them and while their piety and church attendance would admit of improvement, still they cling faithfully to the faith of their fathers and at occasions like First Communion, Confirmation or dedication of a new church, the outpouring of Catholics is quite a revelation and one would imagine to live for the time in a village of the former Austrian-Hungarian Empire. These excerpts reveal the changes wrought by roughly two decades—from the mid-twenties to the mid-forties—when the fortunes of the coal mining industry in Southern Appalacflia collapsed, diminishing opportunities for unskilled labor and marking a sharp reversal of the trends of the previous two decades. The passing of time has since served to obscure, in human memory and written accounts, the brief heyday that Catholicism enjoyed in the heart of an overwhelmingly Protestant region. Catholicism has never been a major religious force in Southern Appalachia, but it 43 did enjoy an upsurge in the coal camps around the turn of the century until the depression years of the 1930's. In Southern Appalachia, minority groups have been overshadowed by the dominant Anglo-Saxon Protestant influence. Ethnicity and Catholicism, intricately related in the region, have been mutually ignored or unknown not only to the lay population of the area but also to Appalachian scholars. A recent 13,000-entry bibliography of source material on Southern Appalachia published by the Appalachian Consortium, a non-profit, educational organization representing both institutions of higher learning and public agencies in Western North Carolina, East Tennessee, and Southwest Virginia, lists one item for Catholicism; and although the Irish, Scotch-Irish, French Huguenots, Germans, and Negroes are fairly well represented, the "now" immigrants go wanting with only one entry—that for the Waldensian Italians of Burke County, North Carolina.·^ Scholars, studying the region, have concentrated on the obvious and perhaps justifiably so. The mainstream may deserve the most consideration, and the paucity of source material for exceptions can diminish even the most dogged enthusiast. Unfortunately , this can have a snowball effect. One diligent scholar may hold forth on the Anglo-Saxon Protestantism of Southern Appalachia, setting the trend, and soon have his learned facts and opinions echoed forevermore. In recent years, a paragraph written by Dr. Earl D. C. Brewer, for example, encapsulates the basic components of...