The Ozarks, Highland Culture and the Myth of Isolation

The Ozarks have always attracted myth. From the moment outsiders began writing about them in the nineteenth century, the mountain people of northern Arkansas were cast as relics, survivors from an earlier America, speaking a near-Elizabethan English, making their own whiskey, settling their own disputes. The myth was attractive partly because it was partly true and mostly because it was useful.

It let the rest of America tell a story about itself: somewhere in the hills, the old ways persisted. The reality was more complicated and more interesting. The Ozark Plateau was settled primarily by migrants from the Upper South, Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, in the early nineteenth century.

They brought hogs, corn, fiddle music, and a land-use tradition adapted to thin, rocky soils that could not support the plantation system. That difference from the Delta was real and consequential. The Ozarks never had a significant enslaved population, and many of their delegates opposed secession in eighteen sixty-one.

Much of northwestern Arkansas remained contested or actively Unionist territory during the Civil War. But isolation was always overstated. By the eighteen-eighties, railroads were threading into the hills.

By the early twentieth century, the region had colleges, towns with electricity, and connections to the wider economy through timber, fruit-growing, and eventually tourism. The Ozark Folk Center at Mountain View, established in nineteen seventy-three, was a conscious project of preservation and recovery, an acknowledgment that the old ways were indeed fading and worth recording. The Ozarks today contain some of the fastest-growing communities in Arkansas, Bentonville and Fayetteville among them, proof that the isolation was always more romantic idea than lived reality.