What is life like in an Appalachian “holler” or hollow?
Posted by tacobellgittcard@reddit | AskAnAmerican | View on Reddit | 46 comments
Are they usually inhabited by an entire family? Is it still common to live in them?
I’ve only been to Appalachia a couple times and admittedly would never drive up into one of these (it feels intrusive since they are so private).
vingtsun_guy@reddit
You know why they call it the holler? Because way back when, the phone lines didn't go far enough, and memes and them had to holler at each other.
Life can be simpler in some ways, harder in others, when you live in Appalachia. The holler is just what we call the valleys.
LittleMtnMama@reddit
Usually there's a crick, what carved the holla. 😂
I had a wonderful terrible/childhood I think. I grew up right by a mountain on a family plot. We had several waterfalls, a creek with a car and footbridge (both washed out and had to regularly be maintained/replaced), fields, gardens, and a wooded mountain. I lived by my paternal grandparents and grandmother's sisters. My aunts and my mom were what saved me. Granny and gramps were religious assholes.
The schools sucked. I was the only gifted nerd in my class and I was bff's with the only black and only mixed race kid because we were all outcasts. I was also autistic but no one knew. The teachers didn't know wtf to do with me.
We grew our own food and shopped at "the black grocery store" (everything was like... probably not voluntarily segregated. I had family members we never saw I later learned were in the klan, which had a chapter up about every 3rd holler). Going up the holler there were fancy white houses, fancy black, mid white, mid black, po'white, po'black, and finally the McPoyles from Always Sunny. Once we drove as far as we could to see what it was like and saw a kid swimming with chickens in a giant pothole with water wings. If my friend hadn't been there to verify i'd have thought I was hallucinating.
My dogs went over the mountain one year and stayed a while with the McPoyles. Swear to fuck they would not eat out of a bowl afterward. They'd dump it. Idefk. That place was a mine runoff vibe. You don't want to have a glitchy gps where I'm from. 😂
My parents weren't hardcore racists but theirs were. My mom had black friends and my grandpa fucking harassed them when they drove by.
There were way too many aunts and uncles who'd come to visit and tell us bumpkins how to live. From their lofty cities like Beckley. 😂
I had zero supervision once I was old enough to run off. I'd say I was going to an aunt's and then tell that one I was going to the other one's...then I'd go up the mountain or down the creek and have hours before anyone looked for me. I was also a terrible firebug bc they left matches out. I burned shit on the creek bank for fun. 😂😂
Everyone fished or hunted or gardened. Plus there were bears. We had one regular every year eating apples. I learned how to shoot a BB gun probably in kindergarten and I remember my dad taking me clay pigeon shooting when I was about eight. We target practiced all the time. There was zero gun control either. I pulled a rifle on good ol sis several times to settle arguments.
It was pretty Lord of the Flies-y ngl.
Gladyskravitz99@reddit
I loved this, thank you.
PsychoFaerie@reddit
American Hollow is a 1999 Documentary about a family living in Appalachia
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDAFy3ASNOo
Jumpy_Lettuce1491@reddit
It’s a little bit of everything. My wife’s family holler was called Butcher holler, the family name. It wasn’t all family but mostly. Maybe 15 “homes”. The Butcher family home was owner built with rooms being added as kids were born. Stuff didn’t match and it was way off level but it was home.
As you drove up the holler there was a burned out trailer home right next to a professionally built new home. It was a patchwork quilt of things.
Successful_Fish4662@reddit
The same Butcher Holler as Loretta Lynn sings about?
Jumpy_Lettuce1491@reddit
Coincidence
rimshot101@reddit
Was your daddy a coal miner?
Jumpy_Lettuce1491@reddit
Her grandfather had a non-Union mine with a 3 foot seam of coal running through it. They mined, by hand, that 3 foot seam of coal for 20-30 years. Can you imagine? Her grandmother survived on the black lung settlement for probably 25 years
Lubricatedfish@reddit
Good ole Kentucky baby. Nothing beats it down here where we’re at except it’s just so poor :(
prometheus_winced@reddit
Watch Winter’s Bone with Jennifer Lawrence.
SpunkySideKick@reddit
North Carolina, born and raised, now out in the west.
Come visit, we'll give you a glass of sweet tea and set you up on the porch for story time. My home town is on the Appalachia trail so we get a lot of random folks coming out of the woods (literally). We lived on the edge of the Valley and three generations have lived in my grandparents' home.
We had gardens, each new child or married in kin would add a favourite veggie to the vegetable patch. We didn't have animals other than the chickens, and the dogs and cats.
Probably the same where you grew up. Just wetter (more rain).
FinalCalendar5631@reddit
Oh my goodness, those gardens were life. One of my sets of great grandparents had a household of 15 including the parents. All 13 children were brought up from birth at the onset of the Great Depression, and I remember noting my family thrived during that by all appearances. I mean, did they suffer and go without food? Not once. Did all the children get a HS (and some went on to college) diploma? Yes, including every daughter. Each child had an abundance of fresh garden food they tended daily with mama. When I say thrive, I mean the girls all turned out sharp as any of the smartest men I’ve met in my generation and lived well into their 90’s in good health. I’d suggest that they found more great (in every way that truly counts) growing up than depression, especially since every son grew to his full 6’0-6’2 potential, same as both my brothers raised way outside appalachia having had every millennial era comfort you can imagine.
My grandmother (one of those 13 children turns 100 years old soon). Born and raised in Harlan, Ky
amizeing@reddit
Just a normal family who either likes to be secluded, or their family has lived there for ages and they inherited the land. You're going to get some weird looks if you come up the road in a vehicle that nobody recognizes, but for the most part if you mean no harm you will receive no harm.
awarepaul@reddit
This is bad advice. Do not drive up random unpaved roads in this part of the country. Especially at night.
Strangers are often regarded as trespassers because there really is no reason for you to be there.
trinite0@reddit
If you drive up into some dead-end family holler, you'll get weird looks not because you're a "stranger," but because there's normally no reason for anybody to drive up in there unless they live there, you're visiting somebody who lives there, or else have some kind of unusual business with somebody who lives there. It's not on the way to anything, so if you drive in, people naturally wonder why you're there.
It's no much different from driving all the way out to a ranch house in the middle of the Wyoming plains. People are naturally going to assume that you're there for some reason, and are going to be either curious or suspicious about what that reason is.
UnfairHoneydew6690@reddit
Yeah we usually just assume you’re lost if we see an unfamiliar car. My uncle lives “near” a popular Appalachian park and he gets lost tourists pretty often.
The_Real_Undertoad@reddit
Ask on r/Appalachia.
WashuOtaku@reddit
What do you mean what is life like, it is like any other place honestly. They are just homes in a small valley up a small road. Nothing mythical.
tacobellgittcard@reddit (OP)
I’m not saying it’s mythical, I’m curious how it’s different from what I’m used to. I’m sure it can’t be identical to the suburban Midwest where I grew up
Sea-End-4841@reddit
You make it sound like some ashram. It’s just a geographical feature either houses.
G00dSh0tJans0n@reddit
It's the rural version of a cul-du-sac.
SonofBronet@reddit
I think I know where they might have gotten that impression. I’ve seen a lot of posts over the last couple years that seem to be taking Appalachian folklore and the fact that the woods in general can be spooky sometimes and implying (or outright saying) that Appalachia is some kind of supernatural hotspot. It probably started as tongue in cheek jokes by locals but then the type of person who unironically thinks Skinwalkers are real started running with it.
Kestrel_Iolani@reddit
Sure. That's just what Big Fae pays you to say. ;-)
Psychological-Art510@reddit
My Papa was a Kentucky native. He taught us that "you never go up another man's holler." It's good advice.
TR3BPilot@reddit
When I lived in Tennessee I did my best to avoid these places because I just assumed they were doing something like making moonshine (oh, yes, they still do that), and I didn't want any trouble. Deep, dark, incredibly overgrown.
Acceptable-Baker8161@reddit
It’s like being poor, inbred, and high on stolen oxy. Did you think they’re sitting around discussing early French literature?
Krishnacat7854@reddit
Not sure what exactly life is like but the one I went to had a school bus people were living in. The area looked extremely poverty ridden with the homes being rundown and the yards full of junk cars and junk and just dirt
Jumpy_Lettuce1491@reddit
Yeah, my wife’s cousin raised 3 kids in a school bus. They got the house when grandma died.
I loved my wife’s family. They were very generous and kind. Mostly they are gone and I don’t have contact.
OK_Ingenue@reddit
My uncle once took me through an Appalachian hollow in Kentucky in the middle of nowhere. The thing that stuck out the most was the poverty. Houses where tarpaper was showing, a lot of mobile homes in disrepair, junky cars, some people standing around, dirt roads. It was sad. There are also some remote Appalachian communities way up in the mountains where no one goes. People “come down” a couple times a year to buy supplies. A lot of hollows though are close to a town where people hold very low level jobs. Loses of unemployment too. Poverty that most people don’t pay attention to.
Appalachian hollows are so romanticized but that romantization usually does not apply.
Southern_Blue@reddit
Anyone know the difference between a 'holler' and a 'cove'? I did google it but they seem to be basically the same thing. My grandparents lived in an area of NC known as 'Ward's Cove. It looked like a 'holler' except it was a little bigger and had a creek running through it.
Anyway, a lot of the people there were related, either by blood or marriage. They were pretty much...regular people who lived there, although some were small farmers.
Prior_Lobster_5240@reddit
In West Virginia, literally everyone lives either "up on the hill" or "down in the holler". It's just a geographic description like "down the road."
MrsPedecaris@reddit
Yeah, I was confused by the question. I always thought a holler was a geographic description, like a valley or some sort of dip in the terrain. But I'm not from that area, so it's not a term I really ever use.
Mysteryman64@reddit
It depends a lot on the geography. The Appalachians are old and crumbly and the mountains that hem you in all change a lot.
There are some little tiny single home hollers, but a lot of them are actually large enough to support small towns. The more well-to-do ones usually have some central water way that was used for transport back in the pre-highway days. The ones fed by the Interstate system tend to be related more to local industry (often chemical processing or some sort of resource extraction).
The areas that have neither tend to be reliant on either one or two major corporate players (often Wal*Mart or Dollar Tree) to bring in fresh money as well as a lot of government aid. There's a lot of disability and sickness, in large part because most people who aren't end up leaving to find better prospects.
But going back to geography, the "poor" area of the holler is often dependent on local geography. The biggest threats are flooding and rock slides, and that usually informs where the "cheap" section of town is. If the holler is more prone to flooding, the lower central valley tends to be the poor area. If it's more prone to rockslides, being up on the hillside is.
tacobellgittcard@reddit (OP)
This is helpful, thanks. I didn’t know they were that big. I had the impression that they were just the size of a small neighborhood, like 10 or less houses
BasedArzy@reddit
Grew up in southern WV.
Depends on what you mean by usually. Sometimes yes, often no. A holler/hollow is a narrow valley between two mountains, usually orthoganl to a river or creek. Most of the ones in Wyoming county, WV would have several homes and be just like any other street or alley.
Well you can't really live anywhere else when it's all mountains and rivers. The towns/'cities' in southern WV are growing slightly, but it's still very common to live in between towns -- which leaves you back at 'up a holler' because you can't live on a mountainside or in a river.
fingerbeatsblur@reddit
You better stay away from copperhead road
annacaiautoimmune@reddit
My family is descended from people who migrated over and around the Appalachian Mountains (e.g., Tennessee) or under and around them (e.g., Georgia) and into the Mississippi Territory just before or just after the Red Stick (Creek War) and the War of 1812.
Our natural resource was not coal but timber. Our homeplace was on a RIDGE.
I have always wondered how local economies based on coal mining compared across nations. As a kid I watched a movie - How Green Was My Valley - that showed the struggles of coal miners in Wales. As an adult, I watched Billy Elliot, which showcased the struggles of coal miners in Northetn England.
So, I wonder what all communities formerly based on coal mining are like with the shift to other energy sources. I would hypothesize similarities regardless of the nation.
No matter where I look, pre and early industrial mining is a dangerous and poorly paid way to make a living.
I wonder what life of coal miners is like in OP'S country. The interplay between geography and geology cross nationally. Coal is mined in over 50 countries and is historically associated and with negative impacts on the environment and local communities, whatever they are calked.
Opening-Cress5028@reddit
Really, it depends on the holler
SurpriseEcstatic1761@reddit
We were hillers, not crickers. But:
My car broke down up one holler, some old guys came out and patched me up well enough to drive to the service station.
I was lost in another and found a log cabin with a small garden and a woman on the front porch who never heard of Charleston WV. (I lived in Charleston, and had walked from my house)
Got lost in another, and ripped off the muffler speeding away from the gunshots.
Snoo_33033@reddit
Depends. Often it's multi-generational and people will stare at you if you drive up simply because they look out for each other and know a lot of the same people. School buses, usually, will stop at the bottom and all the kids will walk together. They tend to be close-knit.
Meattyloaf@reddit
This question would be better asked over on r/Appalachia. I mean I don't really know what to tell you. I grew up in Appalachia and it seemed normal to me, outside of the extreme drug abuse in the region.
Glad-Cat-1885@reddit
My mamaw grew up in a holler in breathitt county ky and her whole family lived in the same holler. The only thing she didn’t like about it were the snakes. It’s nice there and there are hills surrounding the holler and it’s very peaceful during the summer when we visit
Theproducerswife@reddit
Youtubers have travelled there to interview people who live there.
AuraCrash78@reddit
Stop watching bad movies...
tacobellgittcard@reddit (OP)
I wasn’t implying anything bad, really not sure what you’re talking about?