Ramp Hollow (Mountaineer Media Book Review)

“Seeing the world without the past would be like visiting a city after a devastating hurricane and declaring that the people there have always lived in ruins,” Steven Stoll writes in his 2017 nonfiction work Ramp Hollow. This book takes a macro look at the economic and political forces that have shaped Appalachia, especially West Virginia, into the region it is today. This place has consistently been at the bottom of health and education standings for most of its statehood. Stoll makes a case about how this plight came to be. From the impacts of early agrarians, absentee landowners, extraction industry giants, wayward politicians, and the country’s capitalist system altogether, Stoll paints a damning picture of the forces that have shaped the region since its inception.

Group of striking union miners & the familys [sic] living in tents, Lick Creek, West Virginia, April 12, 1922. Glass negative by unknown creator. Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, loc.gov/pictures/item/2016852472.

Ramp Hollow offers a look at what citizens of West Virginia and the region at large were like pre-statehood, comparing it to many of the modern agrarian societies that existed at the time. He draws a great comparison throughout to what agrarians faced in England many centuries before, enclosure: when the lords decided to divvy up public lands used for hunting, herding, and planting into private real estate ventures and industrial hubs. This, he explains, is essentially what happened to the Appalachian region and West Virginia specifically.

This enclosure began early on in the country’s founding, with even our first president owning land in modern-day Charleston that he would never set foot in during his life. Although he and others held a majority of this land, early settlers still occupied the region and lived and worked it until someone came along and told them it wasn’t there’s. 

Title map of the coal field of the great Kanawha Valley, West Virginia, 1867. Map by John S. Swann and G.W. & C.B. Colton & Co. Courtesy of the Library of Congress Geography and Map Division, loc.gov/item/00561201.

At the heart of this book is dispossession, the total and complete extraction and exportation of the region’s natural resources and wealth that have flowed away these past centuries. This dispossession is not unique to the lowly white farmer in the area but extends to the African Americans and Native Americans that called these lands home for so long. Ramp Hollow is an essential read for those in West Virginia to understand how we got here and where we should be headed.