After the Backcountry: Rural Life in the Great Valley of Virginia, 1800-1900.

Edited by Kenneth E. Koons and Warren R. Hofstra. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2000. Pp. [xxx], 314. $48.00, ISBN 1-57233-072-4.)

The history of the Shenandoah Valley, like that of other regions in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Virginia, has suffered from neglect. While the frontier settlement of the valley has received some scholarly attention, the same cannot be said for later periods. This volume of essays, the product of a March 1995 conference held at the Virginia Military Institute, represents a worthy effort to correct the deficiency. Together, these essays tell the story of a region defined by agriculture. From the late eighteenth century until well into the twentieth, the editors argue, "This was a world made by wheat" (p. xix).

The book's nineteen essays are organized into four sections. The first group of essays, focused on economic development, collectively offers the most coherent treatment of a regional economy yet produced for post-eighteenth-century Virginia. Separate essays by Kenneth E. Koons and Kenneth W. Keller trace the development of a grain economy in the valley. Contributions from Robert D. Mitchell, and Warren R. Hofstra and Clarence R. Geier, discuss the evolution of the valley's distinctive rural and urban landscapes. An innovative essay by Joseph T. Rainer delineates the structure of itinerant peddling enterprises in antebellum Virginia. These articles describe a society defined by cereal and livestock production (with wheat as the main cash crop) that was deeply enmeshed in national and international markets while at the same time committed to slavery.

Later sections explore the social implications of this economy. The second group of essays focuses largely on the historical landscape of the valley. An essay by Judith Ridner, oddly out of place in the collection, analyzes the penetration of metropolitan ideals of refinement in the built environment of Carlisle, Pennsylvania. A similar essay by Ann E. McCleary traces the evolution in form of the "classic Shenandoah Valley home" (p. 92) between the 1780s and the 1850s. Tonia Woods Horton's discussion of the kitchen gardens of Lexington, Virginia, uses the correspondence of Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson to illuminate the function of the kitchen garden as a projection of individual identity. Kurt C. Russ, John M. McDaniel, and Katherine T. Wood offer a brief overview of the rural iron industry in the valley, as well as a description of archaeological work at several mining sites. Finally, Audrey J. Horning's superb reconstruction of three mountain hollow communities in the Blue Ridge reveals that, far from being culturally isolated or mired in Appalachian poverty, Virginia's mountain people participated in an integrated regional economy.

A third group of essays concentrates on social institutions in the valley. Three, by J. Susanne Simmons and Nancy T. Sorrels, Ellen Eslinger, and David W. Coffey, focus on race or slavery, demonstrating the deep integration of slavery and slave hiring within the region's economy, the dependence of free blacks on local white patrons, and the determination with which local elites "redeemed" their polity from assertive freedpeople after the Civil War. A fourth article, by Stephen L. Longenecker, contrasts the response of three pietist religious faiths to the problem of slaveholding, showing a connection between antiworldly religious practices and continued commitment to a strong condemnation of slavery. The final essay in this section, by Joan M. Jensen, offers a prospectus for future research on the history of rural women in the Shenandoah Valley.

The final group, collectively the book's weakest, investigates the political life of the valley. A discursively argued essay by L. Scott Philyaw locates the settlement of the valley within the context of a long and ultimately failed effort by Virginia's Tidewater gentry to replicate their society and values. A similar focus informs Lynn A. Nelson's meticulous study of the effort of one piedmont planter, William Massie, to preserve the authority of the gentleman farmer in the face of thoroughgoing market change. David A. Rawson's suggestive analysis of the distribution of periodical subscriptions in the town of New Market argues, ultimately unconvincingly, that periodical subscribers used control of information to attain and sustain elite status. Michael J. Gorman's compelling study of Frederick County's politics in the years leading up to the secession crisis of 1861 demonstrates the strength of Virginia's eastern-dominated political system in the valley.

If, as the editors of this volume persuasively argue in their introduction, the regional distinctiveness of the Shenandoah Valley derived ultimately from its economic base, this collection is frustratingly incomplete. Wheat defined the economy of Virginia's "Great Valley" until at least the 1930s, yet the focus of most of these essays is on the period prior to 1860. Moreover, as Hal S. Barron suggests in his epilogue to this collection, the valley "offers a unique historiographical opportunity" (p. 292) to study the evolution of Jeffersonian agrarianism in a distinctively Virginian setting, an opportunity that few of these essays directly address. Nonetheless, given the meagerness of social and economic history for post-eighteenth-century Virginia, this volume makes a considerable and very useful contribution.

KEVIN R. HARDWICK
James Madison University