Rock Fences and Preadaptation

Abstract

Few nineteenth-century immigrants to the United States went to the South. Some enclaves of immigrant settlement did emerge, often as the product of recruitment by church leaders or plantation owners in search of a labor force. Examples include Italians in Lake Village, Arkansas; German-Swiss in Franklin County, Tennessee; Germans in Cullman County, Alabama; and several groups in eastern and south-central Texas. Roman Catholic Irish immigrants, who differed markedly from the Protestant or Ulster Irish migrants to the upland South during the eighteenth century, also went to the South before the Civil War, but their numbers were seldom large enough to be described as ethnic islands (Kollmorgen 1943). They were often itinerant, listed in a county as laborers in one federal decennial census but gone by the next (Murray-Wooley and Raitz 1992, 86). Although Irish immigrants may have been pushed to the United States by the raw need to survive, they also perceived emigration as involuntary exile - having been forced from their homeland by British and landlord oppression (Miller 1985, 103). Because of that social context, the movement of Roman Catholic Irish to the South, with its biases and slave labor, seems incongruous and begs the question of what attracted them and how they made a living (Belissary 1948; Berthoff 1951; Dunlevy 1982). Were they simply willing to work for wages low enough to allow them to compete with slave labor, or did the Irish bring craft skills or knowledge that preadapted them to enter successfully the antebellum economic and social system (Jordan 1989, 494)? THE REGIONAL CONTEXT Two areas of the South, the Kentucky Bluegrass and the Nashville Basin, attracted nineteenth-century Irish immigrants (Vedder and Gallaway 1972). These areas share several geomorphological and settlement characteristics and are the case study of the cultural and environmental context that attracted the Irish. Both areas lie in states whose traditional cultural institutions and heritage are generally regarded as southern and so provide the opportunity to assess whether the Irish cultural heritage preadapted the immigrants to be successful as temporary or permanent residents and to evaluate the contextual circumstances that extended their choice of destination on arrival in the United States. During the eighteenth century southerners from Maryland to the Carolinas knew the Bluegrass and Nashville basins by reputation - an Elysian country with fertile, limestone-floored lowlands that became the locus of early trans-Appalachian pioneer travel routes. The basin is part of the Cincinnati Arch, a low anticline whose axis trends from Michigan south and west to middle Tennessee. Each basin is the product of streams eroding geologic domes that make up the arch's southern reach (Thornbury 1965, 185-187). As the Kentucky and Licking rivers and their tributaries removed the top portion of the northern or Jessamine Dome, the effect was rather like slicing the top third from a Cyclopean onion. A small-scale geologic map of the Bluegrass basin shows layers of Ordovician-age limestone exposed at the surface, the differing strata arranged in three concentric rings, each in turn comprised of individual beds dipping outward from the center [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]. The rock in the center was the oldest and, as early settlers found, yielded the most fertile soils. This area would become known as the Inner Bluegrass. The second ring contained shale interbedded with limestone and siltstone. Streams sliced this surface into steeply sloped hills - it is sometimes called the Eden Shale Hills - and the shales weathered and synthesized into tight, infertile, ocherous clay soils. The outer ring, the Outer Bluegrass, girdles the basin with a belt of young Ordovician limestone on which soils of moderate fertility have formed. The entire Bluegrass basin is set off from the surrounding country by an encircling escarpment of Mississippian and Pennsylvanian rocks on the west, south, and east. …