Where the South Begins: The Northern Limit of the Cis-Appalachian South in Terms of Settlement Landscape

Abstract

ALTHOUGH the cultural individuality of the South has been recognized from colonial times onward, there has never been any serious attempt to determine by scientific means the precise limits of this vast sub-nation. This problem in delimitation merits the time and imagination of social scientists as an aid in filling in a still quite incomplete picture of the cultural landscape of the older portion of our country, for a sound decision as to where the South begins must rest upon a thorough inventory of culture and upon evaluation of a multiplicity of factors. Since the inventory is still highly incomplete and the final evaluation of factors long distant, what is attempted here is a provisional job of boundarymarking based primarily on the one set of data that appear particularly significant and accessible. American social scientists have had to content themselves with the Census Bureau's definition of a South that terminates along the Ohio River and Mason and Dixon Line although there has been some awareness that the Southern Appalachians and Peninsular Florida cannot properly be termed Southern.' For lack of field experience, I cannot challenge the validity of the Ohio River as a cultural frontier, but by almost any criterion the Cis-Appalachian-the eastern-portion of this line requires radical revision. In order to go about redrafting the limits of the South, we must accept some formula whereby the southernness of a locality can be gauged. A set of cultural factors should logically be used since the South is ostensibly a cultural rather than a physical entity, being simply an area occupied by a population that thinks and behaves distinctively.2 In this distinctive culture there are identifiable patterns of speech, diet, dress, gesture, and miscellaneous custom; and the structure of the economy, the manner of worship, recreation, social intercourse, and political behavior all have meaning for the cultural geographer. The mere listing of all the traits that might help define the South would occupy the full space of this paper, but we are limited in our choice of index items to those with a high degree of pertinence and those which may be readily mapped from field data or statistical publications.3 Another severe limitation is the fact that where quantitative data have been published, the unit area-usually the county-is too coarse to furnish the network of values necessary for a realistic boundary line, while the use of manuscript statistics by smaller areas offers grave difficulties. In this analysis the settlement landscape is offered as a feasible device for delimiting the South.4 This term denotes the aggregate pattern