Southwestern Virginia's Railroad

360 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE The authors are primarily interested in how people at construc­ tion camps lived and not so much what they actually did in building dams. Thus, readers will not find this to he a particular revealing source in regard to dam technology or the process of dam construc­ tion per se. (On p. 109, e.g., the authors exhibit a weak understand­ ing of how the manufacture ofcement at Roosevelt always depended on the importation of expensive fuel oil.) But as an exercise in pub­ lic history it offers a convincing, well-written demonstration that transitory communities of wage-earning laborers have long played a significant role in Western history. As such, Raising Arizona’s Dams deserves both popular and scholarly attention. Donald C. Jackson Dr.Jackson teaches at Lafayette College. He is the author of Building the Ultimate Dam:John S. Eastwood and the Control of Water in the West (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995). Southwestern Virginia’s Railroad: Modernization and the Sectional Crisis. By Kenneth W. Noe. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994. Pp. 221; tables, notes, bibliography, index. $27.95. Everyone who has studied Virginia is well aware of its multitude of regions and subregions. Kenneth W. Noe’s Southwestern Virginia’s Railroad: Modernization and the Sectional Crisis focuses on one of the least-studied of these. Starting from the basic premise that the Vir­ ginia and Tennessee Railroad changed southwestern Virginia by connecting it to Richmond, thus encouraging and strengthening economic and political links to the capital, Noe also considers the railroad the agent of modernization. Utilizing an impressive variety of sources, most notably a large cache of family papers, Noe brings to life the story of this region from 1848 through 1865. As a history ofsouthwestern Virginia, the book achieves its greatest success. How­ ever, when it focuses on modernization and the role of the railroad, the work is less compelling. The first chapters review the political, economic, and transporta­ tion history of southwestern Virginia. This includes a heavy dose of state politics and political maneuvering in Richmond. Much of this section is a successful attempt to balance the work of Charles H. Ambler, who portrayed all of western Virginia as a unified area. As Noe clearly demonstrates, mountains alone do not unify regions. The work would have been aided by stronger demonstrations of the effect of the railroad beyond simple transportation. Perhaps part of the problem in determining its impact was that, even though the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad goes through southwestern Vir­ ginia, it was controlled by Richmond interests—as Noe himself notes. The railroad was built to enhance Richmond’s commercial TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 361 position, and while there was local support for the road, it really was no more southwest Virginia’s railroad than the Baltimore and Ohio was northwestVirginia’s railroad. Noe’s thesis would thus have been more compelling if it had incorporated a clearer understanding of the road’s operation. What products were the Richmond capitalists most interested in attracting from the west? What, if any, policies did they implement to encourage this trade? Noe documents an in­ crease in tobacco cultivation in the region: was this encouraged by the railroad’s policies, or did the railroad simply offer an improved mode of transportation for this product? In his discussion of the region’s three primary established industries (iron, salt, and lead), he fails to show how their operations were changed by the railroad. He points to several new industries, including cotton and woolen mills, as evidence of the railroad’s modernizing effect, but never clearly shows how these industries were changed or how significant they were to the region’s economy. The numbers from the census materials that Noe marshals so well in earlier sections are lacking for the industrial and urban transformations he claims were caused by the railroad. After this uneven start, the book moves into a fascinating section on the Civil War, and here the impact of the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad is tragically apparent. Noe details the strategic importance of the road to the Confederacy. He vividly depicts the numerous battles, skirmishes, and

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