The Hillbilly Highway: Akron's Appalachian Migration
Near Akron, Ohio
Between nineteen ten and nineteen twenty, Akron's population tripled. The city went from sixty-nine thousand people to more than two hundred eight thousand in a single decade, one of the fastest rates of urban growth in American history. The rubber companies needed workers. They went looking in Appalachia.
Agents traveled through the hill counties of West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee, promising seven dollars a day, a fortune compared to what a man could earn farming a mountain hollow. The workers who came were quickly labeled "hillbillies" by Akron's established residents, a word used to dismiss them even as the companies depended entirely on their labor. Estimates suggest that as many as seventy-seven thousand West Virginians alone were living in Akron by nineteen twenty.
The rubber companies had a specific preference for Appalachian workers. Factory managers said, approvingly, that these men were hard workers and fiercely independent. What managers meant, though they were less direct about it, was that individualistic, non-union workers were easier to control. The companies counted on migrants with no organizing tradition to keep wages down.
At the same time, Black workers from the South, who came north in the Great Migration seeking better work and freedom from Jim Crow, were largely barred from the rubber factories. Black men and women who arrived in Akron during those boom years were channeled into domestic work and lower-wage jobs, segregated into specific neighborhoods, and denied the factory wages that the Appalachian migrants earned. The booming rubber economy was not distributed equally.
The turnover was staggering. One company reported hiring six hundred forty-two new workers in a single week of nineteen sixteen, while six hundred fifty-two others quit. Workers poured in and out of the city in a tide driven by production cycles, layoffs, and the grinding pace of factory life. Many stayed and built the neighborhoods, Firestone Park, Goodyear Heights, Kenmore, that still define Akron's residential geography.
