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2. Immanuel Wallerstein observes, “Somewhere in a remote village at this moment a non-wage worker is producing a surplus in which, via multiple intermediaries, each one of us is partaking, if to different degrees. But this particular transfer of surplus is well hidden from view because its traces are swallowed up, in the obscure facts of the life cycle of the non-wage worker's cousin, the wage worker of the peripheral areas.” Wallerstein, Immanuel, Unthinking Social Science: The Limits of Nineteenth-Century Paradigms (Philadelphia, 1991)Google Scholar, 164 and Capitalist World Economy (New York, 1978), 127–29Google Scholar. Sidney Mintz, “Was the Plantation Slave a Proletarian?” Review II (summer 1978) and “Slavery and the Rise of Peasantries,” Historical Reflections 6 (summer 1979). Perelman, Michael, The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation (Durham, NC, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Political economists tended to obscure their favor for enclosure, but James Steuart stated his outright in An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy (London, 1767).Google Scholar

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5. Medick continues, “The origin of modern capitalism is not in any case to be separated from the specific function, which the ‘ganze Haus’ of the small peasant household carried out in the final, critical phase of its development which was at the same time the period of its demise. This insight … illustrates the essential function which the preservation of pre-capitalist enclaves has had and still has for the evolution and stabilization of capitalist societies.” Medick, Hans, “The Proto-Industrial Family Economy: The Structural Function of Household and Family During the Transition from Peasant Society to Industrial Capitalism,” Social History 1 (1976): 299–300 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cohen, Marjorie Griffin, Women's Work, Markets, and Economic Development in Nineteenth-Century Ontario (Toronto, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 36, quoted in Salstrom, 64. Marx, Karl, Capital, Volume I, trans. Fowkes, Ben (New York, 1976), 717–18Google Scholar. Historian Elizabeth Dore observes of Nicaraguan peasants, their means of livelihood endured in the capitalist periphery, “because it bore most of the costs of survival.” So-called “backward” forms of production, like peonage and sharecropping, could be more profitable than paying wages. Dore, Elizabeth, Myths of Modernity: Peonage and Patriarchy in Nicaragua (Durham, NC, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Perelman, Michael, The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation (Durham, NC, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 20.

6. One lord is quoted as saying, “The management of his little plot, cheerfully and profitably occupies all the leisure hours of the poor man, his wife and family—hours which might otherwise have been ruinously wasted in some one or other of those beer-houses.” Dawson, Edmund, Spade Husbandry; or, an Attempt to Develop the Chief Causes of Pauperism and Distress (London, 1833)Google Scholar, 33. Sinclair, John, Observations On the Means of Enabling a Cottager to Keep a Cow: By the Produce of a Small Piece of Land (London, 1801)Google Scholar.

7. Kane, Robert, Industrial Resources of Ireland (Dublin, 1844)Google Scholar, 378; Naper, J. L. W., Suggestions for the More Scientific and General Employment of Agricultural Labourers (Dublin, 1844), 22–23 Google Scholar. “In every crop of potatoes, it may be expected that some will prove too small for the purposes of cooking; and a portion of the large sized ones is generally peeled off,—and thus after every meal there will be some little refuse for the trough,” cited in “The Poor Man's Garden,” Cottager's Monthly Visitor 10 (1830): 178Google Scholar. One political economist observed that in some countries farmers and laborers made up a single class, “like the miserable cotters of Ireland.” Fawcett, Henry, Manual of Political Economy (London, 1863)Google Scholar, 118.

8. On Malthus, Marx, and the working class, see Foster, Marx's Ecology, chap. 3.

9. Robert Owen, The Economist (August 18 and 25, 1821), 75–77. Owen did not reject industrialism. He saw the spade husbandry as a kind of marriage to the factory, a way of taking the best of both and fusing them in a socialist laboratory into a hybrid system that would employ the powers of nature in sustaining human communities. Also see Dawson, Spade Husbandry, 24. Young, Arthur, Annals of Agriculture 1 (1790): 60Google Scholar. Owen's notion took actual form as allotment gardens. According to Jeremy Burchardt, allotments became viable during the Napoleonic wars as a response to food shortages and starvation among the poor. Burchardt found four stated reasons in the economic literature of the 1790s for granting workers access to land: “increasing the material welfare of the labourer, improving his or her morals, saving money for those of higher social status and benefiting the country at large.” Burchardt, , The Allotment Movement in England, 1793–1873 (London, 2002), 15–16 Google Scholar.

10. For early examples of cottars in Pennsylvania, see Clemens, Paul G. E. and Simler, Lucy, “Rural Labor and the Farm Household in Chester, County, Pennsylvania, 1750–1820,” in Work and Labor in Early America, ed. Innes, Stephen (Chapel Hill, NC, 1988), 106–8Google Scholar, quoted in Henretta, James A., The Origins of American Capitalism: Collected Essays (Boston, MA, 1991)Google Scholar, 257. For the antirent war in the Hudson River Valley, see Huston, Reeve, Land and Freedom: Rural Society, Popular Protest, and Party Politics in Antebellum New York (New York, 2002)Google Scholar. On the National Reform Association, see Lause, Mark A., Young America: Land, Labor, and the Republican Community (Urbana, IL, 2005)Google Scholar. The Homestead Act of 1863—long demanded by working-class reformers—came about for reasons other than their urgings but as a war measure to siphon off Confederate soldiers and as a means of occupying the Great Plains, thus supplanting the Plains tribes.

11. The story is significantly more complex than this. Overlapping claims, stemming from two (or perhaps three) landholding systems, came into conflict during the 1880s and 1890s. Yet the sources of this story rarely include documents written by mountain families. At the Eastern Regional Coal Archive in Bluefield, West Virginia, and at the West Virginia State Archives in Charleston, I found three letters by members of a single family in McDowell County during the 1880s among the hundreds of documents I reviewed. Handwritten deeds are more abundant, but they only define a given piece of land by elements in the landscape.

12. Sohn, Mark F., Appalachian Home Cooking: History, Culture, and Recipes (Lexington, KY, 2009)Google Scholar, 42: “Mountaineers don't look for the greenest, straightest, cleanest beans. In some cases it seems that the worst looking, most mottled beans are the old varieties that have the best flavor … brown spots, shriveled ends, large seeds, stems, and leaves.” Maury, Mathew Fontaine and Fontaine, William M., Resources of West Virginia (Wheeling, 1876)Google Scholar, 63; Richard Westmacott, African-American Gardens and Yards in the Rural South (Knoxville, TN, 1992).

13. Exactly how and why local deeds were insecure is beyond the scope of this essay. Judges sometimes upheld local deeds against prior claims, stemming from colonial grants or purchases invalided by adverse possession. Companies resorted to many tactics to overcome ownership. For logging and its effects see Summers, George, The Mountain State: A Description of the Natural Resources of West Virginia Charleston, WV, 1893), 97–98 Google Scholar. Among the most significant histories of economy and dispossession in Appalachia include, Dunaway, First American Frontier; Salstrom, Appalachia's Path to Dependency; Lewis, Ronald L., Transforming the Appalachian Countryside: Railroads, Deforestation, and Social Change in West Virginia, 1880–1920 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1998)Google Scholar; Billings, Dwight B. and Blee, Kathleen M., The Road to Poverty: The Making of Wealth and Hardship in Appalachia (New York, 2000)Google Scholar; Eller, Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers.

14. Brooks, Alonza, Forestry and Wood Industries (Morgantown, WV, 1910), 44–46 Google Scholar; Williams, Michael, Americans and Their Forests: A Historical Geography (New York, 1989), 357–60Google Scholar; Summers, Mountain State, 97–98; Otto, John Solomon, “Forest Fallowing in the Southern Appalachian Mountains: A Problem in Comparative Agricultural History,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 133 (1989): 33Google Scholar; Pruitt, Bettye Hobbs, “Self-Sufficiency and the Agricultural Economy of Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts,” William and Mary Quarterly 41 (1984): 335CrossRefGoogle Scholar; John Fox, Jr., “The Future Kentucky Feuds,” Collier's (June 15, 1904): 15.

15. Still, James, River of Earth (Lexington, KY, 1940), 50–51 Google Scholar.

16. Letters from Justus Collins to Glen Jean (July 20 and 22, 1905), Justus Collins Papers, West Virginia University, West Virginia Collection; Bert Wright, diary (August 16, 1898), Pocahontas Land Company Papers, Eastern Regional Coal Archives, Bluefield, West Virginia; Fowler, George L., “Social and Industrial Conditions in the Pocahontas Coal Fields,” Engineering Magazine 27 (1904): 387Google Scholar. The miners had contracted to be paid by the car, and then the company brought in larger cars, thus lowing the cost of loading a ton of coal. Mary Harris “Mother” Jones saw the practice first hand. She quotes a miner at the Dietz mines in Virginia: “Well, we made a contract with the coal company to fill those cars for so much, and after we had made the contract, they put lower bottoms in the cars, so that they would hold another ton or so.” Jones, Mary Harris, The Autobiography of Mother Jones (Chicago, 1925)Google Scholar, 9. Notes Ronald Eller, “By ignoring work schedules, mining routines, and other innovations which worked at cross-purposes with their traditional way of life, they sought to maintain their individualism and freedom from authority. In this manner, they hoped to benefit from the economic rewards of industrialization without sacrificing their long-held cultural values.” Eller, Ronald, Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers: Industrialization of the Appalachian South, 1880–1930 (Knoxville, TN, 1982)Google Scholar, 167.

17. The term “Hungarians” for foreign workers seems to have been common usage. See “From Sewell [West Virginia],” United Mine Workers Journal (June 12, 1902).

18. Referring to a strike among mine workers throughout the bituminous coal regions of Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, one observer explained, “The causes which led up to the strike were various; but at bottom it was due to one—the constant reduction in wages through several years, which had brought the miners and their families to the verge of starvation.” Wages per week ran from $3.00 to $4.00. Rent on company house: $2.00 to 2.50 per month. One coal company reported paying thirty-nine men a total of $228.98 for two weeks or $2.87 per man, per week. See George, J. E., “The Coal Miners' Strike of 1897,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 12(1898), 186–208 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Letters from Justus Collins to Glen Jean (July 20 and 22, 1905), Justus Collins Papers, West Virginia University, West Virginia Collection; Fowler, George L., “Social and Industrial Conditions in the Pocahontas Coal Fields,” Engineering Magazine 27 (1904): 387Google Scholar.

19. Raine, James Watt, The Land of Saddle-Bags: A Study of the Mountain People of Appalachia (New York, 1924), 237–40Google Scholar; “Imported Workers,” United Mine Worker's Journal (May 17, 1891).

20. Marx, Capital, 717–18. On debt in its many forms, see Graeber, David, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (New York, 2012)Google Scholar. Issued currency always creates opportunities for putting people into debt. Williams, John Alexander, Appalachia: A History (Chapel Hill, NC, 2001)Google Scholar; Pudup, Mary Beth, Billings, Dwight B., and Waller, Altina L., Appalachia in the Making: The Mountain South in the Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill, NC, 1995)Google Scholar; “Persuasion by Starvation,” United Mine Workers Journal (June 12, 1902). Companies attempted to force miners to use only their stores: “If you don't deal in the store, you run the risk of being discharged. When men are paid a little money they are watched, and if they are seen going into any other store than the one owned by the company for which they work, they as a rule are discharged.” A. B. Smoot, United Mine Workers Journal (June 4, 1896).

21. O'Toole, Edward, “Colliery Yards and Gardens,” Coal Age 2 (1912): 201Google Scholar. The Board of Agriculture drew attention to the invisible value of household gardens in general, without specific mention of miners' gardens: “Every farmer and farm laborer has his kitchen garden, which yields a considerable percent of the family support. If an accurate computation of the actual value of these kitchen gardens could be made the magnitude of the figures would astonish most of us.” Quoted in Atkeson, Thomas Clark, “Horticulture in West Virginia,” Fifth Biennial Report of the West Virginia State Board of Agriculture (Charleston, 1900)Google Scholar, 352. The First World War made food procurement even more difficult and increased interest in household gardens. “The problem of transporting perishable foods, such as garden truck, has even in normal times been difficult, and now with every carrier loaded to capacity with staple foods, munitions for war and materials for their manufacture, it will be impossible to transport perishable foodstuffs in quantities sufficient to meet our needs.” Quoted in C. A. Matheny, “Food Conservation,” Our Own People (August 1918 and September 1919), 17. Company interest is well illustrated in coal-company publications: “The Garden Contest,” Our Own People (October 1918); “Gardens and Playgrounds in Mining Towns,” Coal Age 2 (1912): 336–37Google Scholar; Whiteside, Frederick W., “Beautifying A Coal Mining Camp,” Coal Age 2 (1912): 549Google Scholar; “Frick Coke Co.'s Welfare Work,” Coal Age 2 (1912): 470Google Scholar. In 1924 the West Virginia Coal Association estimated that fifty percent of the state's miners planted vegetables and kept some livestock. The number was as high as seventy percent in some counties. See Corbin, David, Life, Work, and Rebellion in the Coal Fields: The Southern West Virginia Miners, 1880–1922 (Urbana, IL, 1989), 33–34 Google Scholar, 123. On money transfers between companies and banks, see Salstrom, Appalachia's Path to Dependency, 30–34.

22. “Gardens and Playgrounds in Mining Towns,” Coal Age 2 (1912): 336–37Google Scholar. Nettie McGill investigated mining communities in West Virginia in order to evaluate the quality of life for children. She reported that seven-tenths of residents planted at least beans, corn, potatoes, tomatoes, and cabbages. McGill found that residents who managed to live outside coal camps felt more strongly about their autonomy and had larger and more robust gardens. Among these families, “Some commented on the difference the produce made in their standard of living and in their ability to save money; others spoke of the enjoyment which they derived from working in their gardens, especially as a change from work inside the mines. In fact, the possibility of having more land to cultivate was frequently given as one of the great advantages of living outside the mining towns.” McGill, Nettie, The Welfare of Children in Bituminous Coal Mining Communities in West Virginia(Washington, DC, Children's Bureau Publication No. 117, 1923)Google Scholar, 53, 75.

23. Marx, Capital, 718. Ex-Secretary P. McBryde speaking to Tom Farry. “West Virginia,” United Mine Workers Journal (June 4, 1896). Paul Saltrom notes of the subsistence economy, “By continuing alongside outside-controlled industrialization, the continuing networks of mutual aid served to reduce wage demands and thus to transfer Appalachia's wealth (in the form of labor's products) outside the region. The long-term effect of continued low-money networking among industrial workers was that the workers subsidized U.S. industry at their own eventual expense.” Salstrom, Appalachia's Path to Dependency, 127. Letters from Justus Collins to Glen Jean (July 20 and 22, 1905), Justus Collins Papers, West Virginia University, West Virginia Collection.

24. Of course, that is not the end of the story. At that point the miners called in their own reinforcements—kin and other allies from other counties described in the press as “backwoodsmen.” “Political ecology,” indeed: Said one reporter, “Every ravine affords ground for a deadly ambush.” The guards and other military men, “unaccustomed to the guerrilla warfare of the backwoodsmen cannot hope to cope with the situation.” United Mine Workers Journal (July 11, 1912); “Terror Reigns in West Virginia,” United Mine Workers Journal (August 1, 1912). Congress concluded any workingman constantly robbed of his wages by the company store, subject to rents he must pay in every season, whether working or not, and under the gun of hired security guards, “armed as the corporations see fit with army revolvers, or Winchester rifles, or both, made detectives by statute … provoking the people to riot and then shooting them legally … is virtually a chattel of the operator.” Quoted in “Coal Industry,” Encyclopedia of Social Reform (New York, 1897)Google Scholar, 303. At exactly the same time three counties to the south of Paint Creek, the superintendent of United States Coal and Coke, at Gary, West Virginia, personally awarded prize-winning gardens, stating, “The vegetable patches are almost invaluable to those who tend them for they assure them of fresh vegetables throughout the greater part of the year.” Quoted in O'Toole, “Colliery Yards and Gardens.” Lynch, Lawrence R., “The West Virginia Coal Strike,” Political Science Quarterly 29 (1914): 630–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25. Corbin, Life, Work, and Rebellion, 33–34. According to Corbin, other miners said, “We needed a garden … we didn't always have enough [money] for food even when I was working.” Said another, “Our garden saved us during all those depressions, and when I was out of work.”

26. General Information concerning the Purposes and Policies the Division of Subsistence Homesteads, Circular No. 1 (Washington, DC, 1933)Google Scholar, 4; Ross, Malcolm, “Permanent Part-Time,” Survey Graphic 22 (1933)Google Scholar, 266; “Quaker Relief Efforts in Europe, 1914–1922,” http://www.swarthmore.edu/library/friends/AFSC/lanternslides.htm (accessed November 4, 2013).

27. Committee for Economic Recovery, Arthurdale: A Partial Pattern for the New American Way of Life (Washington, DC, 1937)Google Scholar; Millard Milburn Rice, “Footnote on Arthurdale,” Harper's Magazine (March 1940), 441; United States Department of the Interior, Division of Subsistence Homesteads, General Information concerning the Purposes and Policies the Division of Subsistence Homesteads, 4; Tate, “Possibilities and Limitations of Subsistence Homesteads,” Journal of Farm Economics 15 (1934): 530Google Scholar.

28. “Shotgun Gardens,” Pittsburgh Press (August 30, 1931); “Stirred up by Henry Ford's ‘Shotgun Gardens,’” The Literary Digest (September 12, 1931), 10; Orville Merton Kile, The New Agriculture (New York, 1932)Google Scholar, 151; Zeuch, William E., “Social and Economic Significance of Subsistence Homesteads,” Journal of Farm Economics 17 (1935): 711Google Scholar. And see Business Week (September 2, 1931), 23. For an article by an industrialist, see Henry I. Harriman, “Factory and Farm in Double Harness,” New York Times Magazine (October 15, 1933). Crowther, Samuel, Taylor, Myron C., Sloan, Alfred P. Jr., and Ford, Henry, A Basis for Stability (Boston, MA, 1932)Google Scholar, chap. 13. This work has a chapter dedicated to decentralized production.

29. Clark, Noble, “Will Back-To-The-Land Help?” Survey Graphic 22 (1933): 456Google Scholar. Clark held various positions in the experiment station at the University of Wisconsin. Wilson, Milburn, “The Place of Subsistence Homesteads in Our National Economy,” Journal of Farm Economics 16 (1934): 73–84 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Committee for Economic Recovery, Arthurdale: A Partial Pattern for the New American Way of Life.

30. Roosevelt, Eleanor, “Subsistence Farmsteads,” Forum 91 (1934): 199–201 Google Scholar.

31. Ware and Powell showed that the government wanted homesteaders whose suffering “could be attributed to the depression,” rather than those who were destitute before 1929, in order to exclude those thought to be endemically poor. No African-Americans were allowed, regardless of their qualifications or need. Those chosen to participate did not come from the most destitute among the stranded miners at Scotts Run but from a middling sort with some means. Lack of cash incentivized families to send members out of Arthurdale for work in other states, depriving the community of needed labor. One government agent summed up the government's position regarding another community—“Cumberland homesteads cannot be called a success; neither can it justly be called a failure.” Yet Arthurdale, along with the more than thirty other subsistence communities (in Minnesota, Alabama, Iowa, Ohio, and California), lessened the suffering of approximately one thousand people. It says something that many residents considered the years they spent there the best and most privileged of their lives. For a positive view of the Division of Subsistence Homesteads and a community in Minnesota, see Garvey, Timothy J., “The Duluth Homesteads, A Successful Experiment in Community Housing,” Minnesota History 46(spring 1978), 2–16 Google Scholar; Lord, Russell and Johnstone, Paul H., A Place on Earth: A Critical Appraisal of Subsistence Homesteads (Washington, DC, 1942), 49, 177–185 Google Scholar; Ware and Powell, “Planning for Permanent Poverty,” 517. Congress heard testimony on January 24, 1934.

32. Ware and Powell, “Planning for Permanent Poverty,” 513–24; Davis, , “A Black Inventory of the New Deal,” The Crisis 42 (1935), 141–42Google Scholar. Harold Ware lived between 1889 and 1935 and was the Communist Party's top expert in agriculture. He died in an automobile accident. In 1952 Whittaker Chambers accused Ware of being a Soviet spy.

33. Peter F. Drucker, “The Industrial Revolution Hits the Farmer,” Harper's Magazine (November 1939); La Follette and American Engineering Council quoted in Clark, Noble, “Will Back-To-The Land Help?” Survey Graphic 22 (1933): 456Google Scholar. Said the United States Chamber of Commerce, “Agriculture might sustain itself on a lower hand-to-mouth level, but it will not sustain the great industrial super-structure we have built upon it.” Also quoted in Clark, ibid.

34. The criticism of business leaders came directly from political economy and in no way expressed an accurate understanding of agrarian people or their economy. On political economy and its conceits, see Perelman, The Invention of Capitalism. On agrarians and their state and market relations, see Dove, Banana Tree at the Gate.

35. The “victory” gardens of the two world wars relied on citizens to grow their own food as an act of patriotism. They assumed access to land and increased the food supply, freeing up food for shipment to soldiers overseas.

36. Luxemburg, Rosa, The Accumulation of Capital (1913; reprint London, 1951)Google Scholar, 365. For examples from the anthropological study of simultaneous modes of production and peasant articulation, see note 4.

37. Gardens continue to be controversial. Two examples make the point. Chinese factories in Shaoxing, in East China's Zhejian Provence (and elsewhere) have rooftop gardens where workers grow vegetables for use in the company cafeteria—an example of corporations using food to subsidize wages. In contrast, consider the South Central Farm, where 350 families (representing about 1,000 people) cultivated fourteen acres of a formerly industrial lot between 1994 and 2006. After allowing the gardens at first, the City of Los Angeles sold the land back to its previous owner, who then evicted the community and bulldozed the farm after a failed campaign to save it. The gardeners felt deeply invested in the space and threatened to defend it. One said, “Just think if we assemble, two from every family, and you know we'll each grab a hoe, and no one will get past us.” South Central Farm is well documented. One study found “a range of 100–150 species across row crops, trees, shrubs, vines, cacti, and herbaceous plants” in cultivation. Devon G. Peña, “Farmers Feeding Families: Agroecology in South Central Los Angeles,” A lecture delivered at the University of California, Berkeley, October 12, 2005, acequiainstitute.org/researchreports.html (accessed November 4, 2013). Two documentary films have been made about the South Central Farm. See especially, Scott Hamilton Kennedy (director), The Garden (Black Valley Films, 2008). Chinese factory gardens are not well advertised, but a few web sites have documented them. See http://www.wired.co.uk/news/wired-aperture/2012-06/aperture-14-june/viewgallery/284940 and http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/photo/2012-06/13/content_15499515_2.htm (both accessed August 2013). Some sources cite food safety as a motivation for gardens at factories, because ground and river water are severely polluted.