Who Owns the Mountains?

When the Tug River flooded in the spring of 1977, it swept away thousands of homes in the rural Tug Fork Valley, across parts of Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia, and Tennessee. Years later, residents would recall that the emergency response was lackluster. In the pre-FEMA era, the Federal Disaster Assistance Administration and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) were left to manage the federal disaster response and find homes for displaced people. Unprepared for a flood of this scale in a mountainous region like Appalachia, they arrived days late and set up headquarters hours away from the valley. The state government promised to purchase corporate-owned land and develop housing on it for people whose homes had washed away, only to drag its feet; some mobile homes sat unused for weeks because there were no federal contractors to set them up.

“Appalachians have learned that the bitter price of these mindless practices will not be paid by the power conglomerates, but by innocent people in the region and by all American taxpayers,” the Tug Valley Recovery Center, a local volunteer organization and activist hub that directed the distribution of supplies, wrote in the aftermath. “Are we to become the sacrificial lambs of energy independence?” They knew who was to blame: the coal companies, like Island Creek Coal and US Steel, that since the 1960s had been strip-mining the surrounding mountains, which left them vulnerable to mudslides and flooding, and the government that had let such companies buy up the land. “Seems to me like so many people think that as long as the businesses are going top notch, everything’s all right. Well, they’re wrong,” one flood victim told a journalist the next year.

Over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, corporations and in some cases wealthy individuals bought up immense acreages of mountain land in southern Appalachia, planning to extract value from them in the years to come. Two industries predominated: mining and tourism. In some places the land would be strip-mined, in others clear-cut, in others used as the site of a ski resort or second-home development. In the aftermath of the Tug River flood, some organizers, scholars, and writers identified these patterns of consolidated land ownership as issues of vital concern for economic justice and democracy in the region. To understand how political and economic power manifested in Appalachians’ lives, they believed, they needed to understand who owned the mountain land, and what it was being used for.

Their research is worth revisiting as the region contends with the catastrophic effects of Hurricane Helene—a disaster on a scale not seen in living memory in Appalachia, and almost certainly worsened by the changes that strip mining, clear cutting, and burning fossil fuels have wrought on the climate. In western North Carolina more specifically, consolidated and absentee landownership—the basis of a tourist and recreation economy—has brought dramatic economic and demographic growth. It has also driven up housing costs, strained local infrastructure, and priced people out of safe places to live—or any place to live at all.

And that was before the hurricane. Helene destroyed or damaged more than 100,000 homes and caused over $50 billion in damage in North Carolina alone—much of it to homes without flood insurance. Ninety-eight people died in the state; the total death toll is at least 215. Those with financial resources may be able to rebuild; in the meantime, those without them—including renters and mobile-home owners—may be forced to pick up and leave.

In the middle of the twentieth century, Appalachia was largely—though not entirely—white, very poor, and dependent on extractive industries. There was comparatively little manufacturing. Since the nineteenth century, the regional economy in many places had instead been centered on coal mining. Following the Civil War, coal companies had acquired land in West Virginia, Kentucky, and eastern Tennessee; much of the mountain population worked in the mines, earning low wages and often suffering deadly illnesses, like black lung, for which the companies took no responsibility until their hands were forced by militant organized miners and the federal government.

Elsewhere, in areas like western North Carolina, the economy had depended on logging, for which timber companies purchased extensive tracts of land starting in the late nineteenth century. In the early twentieth century, the federal government, pushed by the burgeoning conservation movement, began buying up such land through the United States Forest Service. Around the same time, it also started acquiring land through the National Park Service for both environmental conservation and public recreation. In some places, as the historian Kathryn Newfont has written, these acquisitions maintained a de facto “Blue Ridge commons” where hunting and foraging went on as it had before; in others they displaced residents, many of them small farmers.¹

In the 1960s, as a part of the War on Poverty, the federal government created an agency called the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) to help address the region’s high rates of poverty and unemployment. That same decade, local and regional organizations began pushing back to a new degree against corporate capture. The Highlander Center, in Tennessee, was a central node. White organizers with ties to the civil rights movement were returning to the mountains from the Deep South, working to build new infrastructure for what they hoped would be a resurgence of organizing around labor and economic justice. And a new generation was coming of age in the region’s universities under the influence of the New Left. Some of these academics and activists came to see Appalachia as an internal colony—a place peripheral to America’s capitalist development, where coal magnates from outside the region extracted natural resources, paid locals poverty wages, and left open wounds on the mountain landscape.

All this extraction and poverty left the area particularly vulnerable to natural disasters. Appalachia was no stranger to floods. The Great Flood of 1916 had inundated the French Broad River, which runs through Asheville, and triggered landslides throughout the region, killing several people and causing millions of dollars of damage. The memory of these floods and their consequences has persisted through song and story. Joe Penland, a North Carolina folk singer whose home in downtown Marshall was damaged in Helene, wrote a song years ago, “Roar Old River,” based on the memories his elders shared with him about the 1916 flood:

You know I can still hear that rooster
crowing so proud
as he floated right through our town
like a train on a track
that ain’t coming back
and, God, that’s a lonesome sound.

After the Tug River flood, citizens’ groups, activists, and academics from across the region formed a group called the Appalachian Alliance, which quickly identified land ownership as an urgent area of inquiry. Why was it that corporations held so much of the region’s land but had so little responsibility to its people? The alliance reached out to regional arms of the federal government for help. In 1978 it petitioned the ARC to include land ownership in a forthcoming study.

A year later, to the Alliance’s surprise, the ARC agreed, and asked the Alliance to conduct a study devoted to the topic. To lead the initiative, the group chose two of its members, Billy Horton and John Gaventa. The latter was a native Tennessean and Highlander staffer who, as an undergraduate at Vanderbilt, had been part of the radical Student Health Coalition, and whose book-in-progress, Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley, would become a foundational text in the burgeoning field of Appalachian Studies.

The study had a wide scope. It gathered data on several Appalachian counties in six states—Kentucky, Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, West Virginia, and Alabama—and compiled socioeconomic profiles of each one, including resident surveys and property and tax records. Most of the counties were coal-producing. The challenges they faced due to outside ownership were obvious: the companies paid little in local taxes, displaced small-scale agriculture, and polluted the environment. But there were also places like western North Carolina and east Tennessee, which were transitioning from agriculture to recreation, tourism, development, and manufacturing.

There was no coal in western North Carolina, yet large landowners abounded. The largest was the federal government, which—through the United States Forest Service, the National Park Service, and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA)—owned well over 600,000 acres in just the twelve North Carolina counties surveyed, including 80 percent of all land in Swain County. Some of this was used for conservation; much of it, like that owned by the National Park Service, was for public use. But corporations and out-of-state investors also owned thousands of acres, which they used in some cases for agriculture and industry but more often to build resorts, second-home developments, and recreation—golf courses, ski resorts, and places like the privately owned Grandfather Mountain, which features  a “mile-high swinging bridge” and hosts events like the Highland Games, a dayslong festival of Scottish culture.

Tourism was a more complicated industry than coal. It was not extractive in the same visceral way. It didn’t produce a class of workers who were endangered daily. As the region’s agricultural production—particularly tobacco—began to decline, combining recreation with investments in manufacturing could in theory have been a way to develop a strong economy. But the North Carolina researchers found causes for worry.

In the developing tourist counties, like Watauga and Avery, outside ownership was starting to dominate. Companies were not just developing mountain resorts like Grandfather Mountain but also buying large agricultural plots and turning them into second-home developments with little concern for the environmental consequences—among them “erosion, sedimentation, and water quality problems.” The researchers found that 82 percent of the North Carolina parcels they surveyed were held by non-local owners—45 percent by out-of-state residents. They interviewed residents who worried about whether regional infrastructure and utilities could withstand more industry and tourism.

Local tax structures did little to disincentivize concentrated ownership. Nor did the region’s mostly Democratic state and federal representatives. Some local governments supported the growing tourist economy but paid less attention to public infrastructure like roads, transportation, public services, or water and sewer facilities—in part because North Carolina’s state and local tax systems didn’t give them enough money to maintain those systems properly. In revenue-richer Watauga County, home to Appalachian State University and an influx of subdivisions, second-home developments, and resorts, researchers found that even as the demand for public services increased, most of the planned budgetary spending on infrastructure and capital improvements was “geared toward the maintenance and future growth of the recreation industry.”  

Federal landownership, too, constrained development and industrial employment. In the 1930s, for instance, the TVA and the Department of Interior acquired previously privately owned lands—on which entire communities lived—for the Fontana Dam and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. When the TVA constructed the dam, it flooded some of the most important roads connecting Swain County to Tennessee, as well as roads used to access cemeteries. It promised to build replacement routes, but as of the land ownership survey had not completed them. Parks land, meanwhile, was hard to access or travel through.

“The people of Swain County have very little control over their futures,” the researchers wrote. That the federal government doesn’t pay local taxes left some counties, one Swain County official said, without many options. “We are always suffering,” he said. “You never have enough money. The biggest problem is that we don’t have the land to expand.”

Jobs in the tourist economy were often seasonal and low-wage. Meanwhile, rapid development and speculation were driving up land prices. Some parts of the region had seen a tenfold increase in property values within just a few years. “It is very difficult for local residents to afford homes in the same market that sells luxurious second-homes to wealthy non-local residents. As a result, many local residents rent homes that are often sub-standard,” the researchers wrote, and “find themselves ‘land rich’ and ‘pocket poor’ with increasing pressure to sell all or part of their land.”

The land ownership survey published a full report on its findings in 1981. Among its recommendations were short-term fixes: progressive property taxation, community-led land use boards, the development of publicly owned state or regional land banks to create local capital reserves. But the study included a more ambitious proposal: land reform. Targeted at large absentee landowners, such reform could, the authors wrote, take a number of forms: redistribution programs, community land trusts, “eminent domain for meeting community needs,” limiting excessive corporate ownership of unused land. “For too long there has been a pervasive myth that land reform is only needed in countries of the Third World, ignoring the urgent need for land reform in the rural areas of this country,” they argued in Who Owns Appalachia?, a book that gathered some of their findings two years later.² “Nowhere is the need for such reform more obvious than in Appalachia.”

These were the Reagan years; federal and state policies never changed on the scale the coalition hoped. But nor did the issue of land ownership ever go away. Another study published in the 1980s by the Institute for Southern Studies (where I am on the editorial staff) and its magazine, Southern Exposure—edited and researched by civil rights and labor movement activists based in North Carolina—took stock of every county in the state. It found that concentrated landownership was a problem across North Carolina.

In 1989 the Asheville Citizen-Times joined the debate with a series titled “Who Owns the Mountains? Private Land, Public Vistas.” In the opening editorial, the paper’s managing editor wrote that the question was not just about who owned the property: “there also was a question of philosophy.” For the newspaper’s editors, the questions largely concerned environmental stewardship and conservation of natural resources: “How can we protect the region’s quality of life, while ensuring economic health? How can we preserve the mountains’ scenic vistas, while not being victimized by their attraction?”

But we might also imagine other philosophical questions regarding “who owns the mountains.” The “locals” labeled as such by the ARC’s initial studies were themselves descendants of outsiders, who in the first half of the nineteenth century had expelled the native Cherokees from the mountains alongside the federal government that many of them now assailed. The study reported that in Swain County, the descendants of those settlers viewed the remaining Eastern Band of Cherokee as little more than leeches receiving benefits from the federal government that in the 1920s and 1930s had re-requisitioned settler land for national parks.

The study also made little mention of western North Carolina’s Black residents, descended from enslaved people across the region, who worked in agriculture and tourism service jobs like their white counterparts—and who were systematically discriminated against. Since the nineteenth century, tourism boosters in Asheville, as elsewhere in the South, had promoted the town as a place of racial harmony, where enslaved Black people were happy to work for the town’s wealthy white people—a false image that persisted through the rise of the post-slavery tourist economy.³ In most western North Carolina towns, the Black population was under 5 percent, but in Asheville, it was closer to 10 percent. Between the 1960s and the 1980s, half of the city’s Black residents—four thousand people—were displaced in an urban renewal project, perhaps the largest in the southeastern US. (Buncombe County, home to Asheville, was not included in the land ownership survey.)

Tourism, for its part, marched on. By the time a landslide blocked I-40 near Pigeon Forge in the summer of 1997, huge parts of western North Carolina depended on it. The response to the disaster made this clear, as the historian Richard Starnes has written.⁴ The Asheville Chamber of Commerce took out newspaper ads across the South to let people know that they could still travel to the region; local media took the federal department of transportation and state relief workers to task for not cleaning the landslide up by the end of the tourist season. There was little said about farmers moving goods to market, or about residents who needed to get from one part of the area to another. “The focus,” Starnes writes, “was on tourists, the lifeblood of the regional economy.”

The hope for an economy built on dual pillars of industry and tourism had essentially bottomed out. By the 2010s even towns like Marshall, once on the margins of North Carolina’s tourist economy, were growing dependent on it, moving away from agriculture. Manufacturing was collapsing; firms circulated in and out of regional factories at dizzying speeds. The number of western North Carolinians employed in manufacturing plummeted in the years following the passage of NAFTA, and again during the 2008 recession. About 50 percent of the region’s manufacturing jobs disappeared, especially in the furniture and textile industries, lost to offshoring. Meanwhile, employment grew substantially in industries related to tourism and second homes: arts and recreation, real estate and construction, accommodations and food, retail.

As western North Carolina in general and Asheville in particular have developed a reputation for arts and culture, outdoor recreation, and breweries, old anxieties have surged back up about gentrification, property and land ownership, and the “questions of philosophy” over who owns the mountains. Buncombe County is growing fast; in the next twenty years, its population is projected to rise by 25 percent. Even before Helene hit, Asheville was dealing with an influx of high-income residents from places like Florida and New York whose arrival was—as in the 1980s—increasingly pricing working-class locals out of housing. In 2017 Asheville ranked at number two on Realtor.com’s list of fastest-gentrifying cities, after Charleston, South Carolina.

Since 2001 single-family home prices have risen 20 percent across the region, while the infrastructure—particularly roads and bridges—has suffered in a state that proudly trumpets its low corporate tax rate. The taxpayer-funded Buncombe County Tourism Development Authority has spent well over $100 million since 2017 on promotional material targeted at potential transplants who make more than $100,000 a year, the Asheville Watchdog reported last year. Buildings that were once long-term rentals for permanent residents have been converted into short-term rentals for tourists; single-family building permits have risen notably, as have the number of homes listed—and sold—for $1 million or more. Between 2015 and 2021, home prices in Asheville rose by 89 percent.

Some efforts to mitigate against the worst impacts of this trend were already underway before Helene. Earlier this year Asheville’s reparations commission recommended its first slate of projects for the city to support, among them an economic development center and a guaranteed income pilot program. This past September the city updated its affordable housing plan for the first time since 2015, recommending a host of policies that it says could help curb displacement and protect BIPOC communities.

But when Helene struck, these efforts had to be redirected. Few people or properties in the area were entirely unscathed by the storm, but some of the most devastated communities are precisely the ones that have been most acutely affected by the housing crisis. A third of Asheville’s remaining missing persons cases are of unhoused people; volunteers suspect the number of missing among that group is much higher. In Rollins, a mobile home community outside the small town of Marshall, a resident named Bruce Tipton died after his mobile home swept away around him, leaving him clinging to a tree in raging floodwaters for hours as his family, generations deep in the area, watched from the riverbank.

Black Ashevillians have told journalists that utility companies have prioritized wealthier, whiter areas in restoring power; some Black renters say they don’t know if or how they’ll return. Another growing population in western North Carolina, especially in the rural counties, is Latine immigrants, who often work in low-wage agricultural or warehouse jobs. Many of them live in mobile home parks. Relief has been slow to reach them, too—information about federal help was not initially provided in Spanish, and undocumented residents are fearful of government interaction.

The recreational economy is already complicating Helene’s recovery. Towns like Chimney Rock and Lake Lure have been wiped out—places that in the off-season have fewer than two thousand residents combined. Many of those year-round residents need the tourist economy to come back: renters depend on it to pay rent, homeowners to pay mortgages, people without flood insurance to rebuild.

Responses to the disaster echoed the political-economic critiques that groups like the Appalachian Alliance had developed decades ago. On Instagram, an Asheville anarchist bookstore and event space called Firestorm Co-Op argued that, for two centuries, Appalachia has been “a national sacrifice zone.”

One hundred thousand people in Asheville are not lacking water because of God’s wrath. We’re without water because corporations and the political class have refused to take action on climate change. We’re without water because the city has systematically under-invested in infrastructure, while pumping money into tourism, for five decades.

Much has been made of Helene shattering Western North Carolina’s reputation as a climate haven for those who can afford it. Even as people begin to rebuild, they wonder how many are gone for good. Those most likely to be displaced aren’t the second home-owners or folks who moved in recently, but renters, mobile home owners, and those “land rich” and “pocket poor” whose homes have been swept away or flooded to the point of ruin. Organizers and relief workers have already seen corporate vultures swoop in to buy up land for cheap, preying on destruction. “They’re going to be shown more money than they’ve ever seen,” one organizer with Down Home North Carolina told the magazine Facing South. “They won’t have had power for months. And the money they’ll be offered will be a fraction of what that land is worth.” Tenant organizing groups are reporting that landlords have started evicting people who lost their jobs due to the storm, and price-gouging the rent of units that are still habitable.

In the aftermath of the original Appalachian Land Ownership Study, community groups began organizing for state-level reforms. Their efforts were most successful in places like Kentucky and West Virginia, where the coal industry was a clear and hostile enemy. It is harder to offer prescriptions for the situation in places like western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee, where the tourism economy defies easy analysis. What does a just economy in a climate crisis look like? What is a just recovery? Perhaps one place to start is looking back to the reforms the Land Ownership researchers recommended. Some local organizations, like BeLoved Asheville, are already thinking along these lines—they recently put out a call for owners to donate or sell land to build homes for people who have been displaced. “It is now long past time for public discussions of land reform options in the region,” the authors of the Land Ownership survey wrote. “The future of Appalachia and its people is too important to do otherwise.”