Rise up and call us blessed : from farm to factory in the Tri-Cities, Tennessee-Virginia, 1900-1950

This dissertation is a case study of socio-economic development in the area of northeastern Tennessee and southwestern Virginia dominated by the Tri-Cities, I Tennessee-Virginia. Bounded by natural barriers to trade, the Tri-Cities area fell behind other areas of the nation in the early nineteenth century. When tardiness and lack of local capital kept the Tri-Cities area from benefiting fully from the industrialization that swept Appalachia in the latter nineteenth century, business and civic leaders in the Tri-Cities turned to the recruitment of manufacturing firms. Other than an abundant supply of labor, subsidies, and an hospitable business climate, the area had little to offer prospective plants. As a result, the firms lured to the Tri-Cities tended to find a cost advantage in the low labor costs available in the area. As residents of the Tri-Cities area moved from farm to factory in ever increasing numbers, business and civic leaders in the Tri-Cities worked to maintain a precarious control over the discordant forces that threatened to undermine the low-wage, lowskill plants upon which their own fortunes depended. By the Second World War, however, labor market pressures and national and international competition were eroding the advantages that once appealed to prospective industrial recruits. Once dependent on the availability of low-wage employers, workers and business leaders alike found that the plants on which they had come to depend no longer found the Tri- Cities area enticing. What was worse, decades of bowing to low-wage, low-skill manufacturing left the people of the Tri-Cities area poorly prepared to adjust to a new path of economic development.