Mountains, Land, and Kin Networks: Burkes Garden, Virginia, in the 1840s and 1850s

Abstract

BURKES GARDEN IS AN OVAL LIMESTONE VALLEY OF ABOUT FORTY SQUARE miles on the southeast edge of Tazewell County in mountain southwest Virginia. The highest valley in Virginia, it is completely surrounded by the unbroken wall of Garden Mountain, which contains only one natural opening, a water gap cut by Wolf Creek to the north. This natural barrier kept the Garden from being actively settled until early in the nineteenth century, although whites first explored it and entered land claims in the 1750s. The topography of Burkes Garden necessitated community cooperation and limited agricultural development. Despite its geographical isolation, the Garden was touched by the outside world, primarily in the form of county courts and officials and a thriving livestock market. A speculative market in real property divided society into the landed and the landless and enabled the members of a recognized elite to hold power over many of their tenant neighbors-despite rhetoric, then and since, about Appalachian egalitarianism. Commerce in cattle intersected neighborhood commodity exchange rooted in credit and barter. Husking bees coexisted with suits for debt, kinship obligations with competition for grazing land. The people of antebellum Burkes Garden lived partly in a traditional world imposed and protected by the mountains and partly in a modern world of courts and capitalism. Burkes Garden, then, was neither completely isolated nor structurally egalitarian. Its landless deferred to the landed and its poor to the less poor, but the differences in behavior and social power were not nearly as great as the differences in wealth and landholding might lead one to expect. Through kin and neighborhood networks, the Appalachian people maintained an egalitarian identity in a manifestly unequal society. In describing societies in which landlord-tenant relations are central, scholars often explain social dynamics in terms of patron-client