With the stroke of a pen, Appalacian region has expanded

Ollie Grant woke up one morning in the Delta and went to bed that night in Appalachia.

Oh, the Panola County, Miss., woman didn't go anywhere. Appalachia came to her.

President Bush accomplished the feat earlier this spring with a stroke of his pen, when he signed legislation adding Panola to the War on Poverty-era Appalachian Regional Commission's territory. The county's slogan is "where the hills meet the Delta."

"You definitely ain't hillbillies where we're from," says Grant, who runs an event hall in Batesville called, appropriately enough to her mind, the Delta Rose. "The city is only 219 feet above sea level!"

To many outsiders, all of Mississippi -- even the hilly sections -- is the Delta, and all of Kentucky -- even the flat parts -- is Appalachia. But what Grant and others don't realize is that Appalachia ceased being just a geographical designation long ago.

And with the new legislation, federal bureaucracy has crossed a geographical, cultural and psychological line -- a border between mountaineers and flatlanders, tobacco and cotton, bluegrass and blues.

"This whole thing of what is Appalachia has been so politicized," says Ron Eller, former head of the Appalachian Center at the University of Kentucky. "The definition of Appalachia has broadened way beyond the physical geography of the region itself."

Hopped on gravy train

When Congress created the ARC in 1965, it covered 360 counties in 11 states. The territory stretched from Alabama to Pennsylvania with its core comprised of the mountainous regions of eastern Kentucky and Tennessee, and West Virginia -- the only state wholly within the ARC's defined area.

Almost immediately, others hopped on the gravy train. As a senator from New York, Robert Kennedy succeeded in getting 13 New York counties added later that year. In 1967, 20 mostly hilly Mississippi counties were included, along with four other counties from Alabama, New York and Tennessee.

Mississippi? That state has no mountains, said the skeptics. Wrong, said the late John Whisman, founding father of ARC. The state had two rather formidable peaks, he said: "Mount Whitten and Mount Stennis" -- U.S. Rep. Jamie L. Whitten, future chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, and U.S. Sen. John C. Stennis. (The southernmost piece in "Appalachian" Mississippi is Stennis' home county.)

Two more counties were added in 1990-91, and seven more signed on in 1998. With the addition this year of Mississippi's Panola and Montgomery counties and two in Kentucky -- decidedly unmountainous Hart and Edmonson -- the region has now swollen to 410 counties spanning 200,000 square miles.

James Still, the late Kentucky poet laureate who grew up in the hills of Alabama, described Appalachia as "that somewhat mythological region, with no known boundaries." He questioned "if such an area exists in terms of geography. ..."

'Blatantly political swaps'

That amorphous quality continues to trouble people who write about the region.

"One problem with attempting to view the region whole is that Appalachia has no agreed-upon boundaries -- nothing comparable to the Mason-Dixon Line," which clearly marks a separation between regions, John Alexander Williams writes in his just-published "Appalachia: A History." His book will deal only with "core" areas of Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia.

Al Smith, ARC co-chairman in the Carter and Reagan administrations, says the region's shape has more to do with patronage than plate tectonics.

"A lot of those counties were blatantly political swaps," Smith said.

Eller recalls a time when counties were asking NOT to be included in Appalachia, a term that "connoted poverty and violence and distress."

"I remember lecturing up and down the region in the 1960s, and no one wanted to be associated with Appalachia," he says. "If you talked in West Virginia, Appalachia was in east Kentucky. If you spoke to a group in east Kentucky, they said, 'Oh, yes. That's over in east Tennessee somewhere.'"