The Homeplace is a recurring theme important to all of our Appalachian texts this semester, and it is important in many ways.  The homeplace is at first the family homestead – the log cabin, the corn crib, the salt house, the garden; but it's also the surrounding land.  It’s the creek bed in the holler and the bald on the mountain peak.  It’s the particular way the wind blows or the smell of mountain laurel.  And the homeplace is a place of memories.  It’s the symbol of a hard life eked out of working the land.  The homeplace, especially in River of Earth, is a way of life.  The homeplace represents subsistence farming and cultivating the land.   It’s a place of life and death, where generations are born and buried on the same plot of ground.  More than anything, the homeplace represents the Appalachian rural way of life.  The homeplace is a metaphor for their struggle and understanding the homeplace and the way it has changed is to understand the transformation that disrupted life in the mountains. 

    Jack Weller, in his description of Appalachian culture in Yesterday’s People, speaks about Appalachian culture as being backward oriented, towards remembering a better time, looking back to the “good old days.”  Mountain music, he describes, is nostalgic and melancholy, and mountain ballads sing of “friends, family and situations of a time now past” (Weller 34).  And folk stories paint the picture of the folk hero returning home, to find “security again around the fireplace or front porch, or else to find it gone, while memories flood in” (Weller 35).  Indeed, Weller is correct that Appalachian culture is centered around looking back to better times. 

   A study of the homeplace is to study the Appalachian experience, and especially with the texts read this semester, one can trace how life in the mountains has changed.  Most notably, this change of lifestyle can be traced to the introduction of industry into the mountains.  Coal mines, salt mines, and copper mines dominated the industrial mining of the Appalachian mountains and their subsequent environmental burden on the land and recruitment of local workers significantly altered the physical and social landscape.  As a result, social patterns of Appalachian culture as well as ideas of the homeplace underwent similar transformations.  The texts of this semester have covered a breadth of the meanings of the homeplace.  River of Earth offers a particularly good study of the homeplace because it discusses the conflict of the Appalachian people caught between two competing ways of living: in the camp towns of the mining industries, or to remain on the family farm being self-supportive.  The metaphor of this struggle is captured in the marriage of Alpha and Brack Baldrige, and their competing beliefs of the importance of the homeplace locate a major conflict in Appalachian culture. 

"The consolidation of land into large private and federal timber holdings had a profound impact on the subsistence economy of the mountain region.

-from "Where There Are Mountains:  an environmental history of the Southern Appalachians

 

But what the homeplace means to Alpha Baldrige is not necessarily the same homeplace to the other characters from texts this semester.  Here are links to the other texts from this semester that discuss different interpretations of the homeplace.