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.