The City and the Hinterland

When we look at cities, we tend to look at their downtowns, their hubs, their built environments, the places where urbanity “is” or “exists.” We want to explain the growth or decline of cities by looking at factors within the sphere of urban life. But for much of American history, urban growth patterns have been shaped as much by what’s happening in non-urban spaces as by what’s happening in urban spaces. Migration out of farming areas thanks to rising farm productivity and rising manufacturing wages drove as much of America’s rising urbanization in the 19th and early 20th centuries as did immigration. One reason the south didn’t urbanize as much is people who had freedom of migration (whites) often benefited from an area experiencing curiously high output per person-with-freedom. Slavery locked the “losers” in the system in place, and gave the “winners” returns that discouraged urbanization. And when the kids of “winners” couldn’t inherit, they just moved west to extend the reach of slavery further thanks to cheap American land policies. The lack of slavery and large-scale plantation economies, meanwhile, helped encourage urban migration in the northern states.

In Kentucky, some of this trend was at work. Kentucky’s agriculture is relatively high value per acre, with lots of cash crops like tobacco, or livestock. Plus, Kentucky was comparatively close to big urban markets. The result was that agriculture in Kentucky remained profitable in a way it didn’t in North Dakota, so while North Dakota experienced declines beginning almost as soon as the foreign-born share peaked, Kentucky saw steady growth. Add in the rise of mining, and voila. Here is Kentucky’s population vs selected other states from 1850 to 1940.

While the Dakotas and Kansas grew faster in the early periods, they quickly flatlined. Virginia’s growth rates were similar to Kentucky’s after 1870, but the 1850–1870 period was awful for Virginia, such that Kentucky became more populous than its mother-commonwealth. Meanwhile, West Virginia experienced quite rapid growth.

What West Virginia and Kentucky shared in common, of course, was coal, and this period saw the rise of mass-labor coal mining and its attendant population boom. Looking at Kentucky’s old county regions for this period, here’s what their growth trajectories look like, indexed to population in 1850:

The fastest growth is in Madison County and Mason County, two of our eastern Kentucky regions. Then comes Indian Territory, which includes far western Kentucky and a bit of SE KY, and then Jefferson County, a major beneficiary of urbanization. All of the other regions lag behind.

But the coal boom didn’t begin in 1850. Data on coal extraction in the US begins in 1870 and rises to an early peak in 1918. So that’s probably the core period of growth. Let’s look at who grew most from 1870 to 1918.

As we can see, Madison County grew like gangbusters. Indian Territory did too, then Mason County, then Jefferson and Bourbon Counties. Fayette County’s performance is looking better, especially in the later years. Fayette County had a very weak 1870s as it dealt with economic disruption from the end of slavery.

The problem with these counties is that they don’t match precisely only what we mean today when we think about eastern Kentucky. Luckily, by 1870, most counties had reached their modern shape and area, and new county formations have a small population impact. So we can redefine our regions to reflect modern economic regions to look at these historic trends. We’ll use this map:

Using that, we can track 1870–1918 population as follows:

So this one speaks for itself I’d say. Appalachia was a major source of growth. And associated with Appalachia came the Ohio River cities like Louisville, Owensboro, and Paducah, who benefited from access to the flood of coal coming down from the mountains. Cities along the Appalachian periphery also benefited from providing services to Appalachians. Corporate governance was rarely headquartered within Appalachia proper. Usually, cities like Lexington, Louisville, or Cincinnati were the hubs of finance, politics, education, and ultimately the place where profits were reinvested.

The rise of mass employment in Appalachia helped boost incomes, as you saw. It also led to some degree of increase in the foreign-born population. Here’s the foreign-born share for modern economic regions, 1870–1920:

In 1920, Inner Appalachia managed to have an above-average foreign-born share, and 1880–1890 saw rising foreign-born shares for both Inner and Outer Appalachia, even as the rate fell for other regions and the state. That is to say, these were episodes where these regions received hundreds or thousands of immigrants. The absolute numbers are not enormous, and the total share is hardly impressive, but it’s also not nothing.

We can look at a few key counties driving these trends.

These are tell-tale waves of migration by foreigners, though whether it’s immigration by fresh-off-the-boat migrants, or domestic flows of foreign-born who’d been in the US for a while, is less clear.

But the point is, the Appalachian region grew quickly, and not just through fertility. It received thousands of foreigners during the coal boom, and almost certainly tens of thousands of domestic migrants as well. Unfortunately I can’t get state-of-birth-by-county between 1880 and 1930, so I can’t directly inspect the role of migration. Furthermore, readily-available age data isn’t complete or detailed enough to reasonably approximate a residuals-based migration estimate, especially given county subdivision during the period. So all we can really do is look at residual growth rates.

The above chart should give us an idea of what migration patterns looked like, relatively speaking. Fertility and mortality differences matter as well, and it’s likely Appalachia did have higher fertility, but it’s also likely that Appalachia had higher mortality. What we can see is some areas reliably having sub-par growth performance: the Western Pennyroyal, the Bluegrass, Northeastern Kentucky. Others have stronger growth performance, like Louisville, the Eastern Pennyroyal, or the Jackson Purchase. Then we get the big winners, Inner Appalachia, and Outer Appalachia before the 1910s.

Now, look. We know some of this really is migration. We know the foreign-born share spikes coincident with the growth spike in Inner Appalachia, and coincident with the 1880–1890 strength in Outer Appalachia. We don’t know so much about domestic migration, but this should give us a sense of where any migration was favoring Kentucky.

Well, we do have ways to estimate statewide domestic migration. I won’t waste time on the details of that here, but if we add/subtract these excess growth rates (which give a statewide excess growth rate of 0) to the statewide net migration rate, we may actually be able to guesstimate the net migration for each region.

The important thing to recognize here is Kentucky had negative total net migration for this whole period. That makes Appalachia’s positive migration all the more impressive.

And, to be clear, a 60-year period of fairly consistent 2% net migration is extremely robust and impressive.

Inner Appalachia’s migration from 1870–1930 was comparable to that of Texas or Florida today.

It was a region of movers, not, as popular lore portrayed it, a region set in its ways, time-out-of-time, untouched since first settlement. Yes, it was isolated, so it had low migratory churn, i.e. probably low gross rates, just as is the case today. And, being isolated, it was technologically backwards, slow to adopt new lifeways and practices. But it wasn’t actually as demographically or genetically isolated as stereotypes made it seem; certainly not by the 1920s. By the 1920s, Appalachian Kentucky was the beneficiary of radical cultural and demographic alterations as a result of migration.

We can also look directly at Fayette County to see what was happening there:

There were outflows in the 1870s, then inflows in the early 1880s; though note I have this as a dotted line because these county-level estimates get more erratic the smaller a region I define. Then we see migration decline into negative territory, then a rise into positives in the 1920s.

The first thing to make clear is that although Fayette County had negative net migration most likely, it was almost certainly getting positive net migration within the Bluegrass region. That is, Fayette County’s nearby hinterlands were sending population into Fayette County, and into Lexington.

That explains a substantial question about Lexington’s growth. How did Lexington grow while surrounding areas were stagnant?

Simple Answer: Surrounding areas were stagnant BECAUSE Lexington grew.

Lexington was growing via migration at a time when the state and area had negative net migration. And who was leaving?

Weeeeeellllll, lots of people were leaving as the northern states industrialized faster than the southern states, but the real story here is about race. In 1870, Kentucky had 222,000 black people. In 1900, it had 285,000. In 1930, it had 226,000. Even that 1900 figure is actually a lower share of population than in 1870.

Fayette County, meanwhile, had 12,500 blacks in 1870, 15,400 in 1900, and 16,400 in 1900: consistent growth. But in the remainder of the Bluegrass region, the black population went from 51,000 to 55,000 to 32,000.

Here it all is in percentages:

So Fayette County also saw a decline in the black share, despite a rise in the nominal black population. But broadly speaking, all these areas were experiencing black outflows alongside less severe white outflows, and, by the later part of the period for Fayette County, almost certainly strong net inflows of whites.

Where did those net inflows come from, though?

If Fayette County got its growth 1870–1930 from the Bluegrass hinterland, where did it come from after that?