Hillbilly Highway

In the United States, the Hillbilly Highway is the out-migration of residents of the Appalachian Mountains to industrial cities in northern, midwestern, and western states, from about 1910 to about the years following World War II. The word hillbilly refers to a negative stereotype of people from the Appalachians.

Many of these Appalachian migrants went to major industrial centers such as Detroit, Cleveland or Chicago, while others traveled west to California. While most often used in this metaphoric sense, the term is sometimes used to refer to specific stretches of roadway, such as U.S. Route 23, or Interstate 75.

Appalachia includes the whole of West Virginia, and parts of Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, Mississippi, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. The Appalachian Regional Commission, a federal-state partnership that currently focuses on economic and infrastructure development, was created in the 1960s to address poverty and unemployment in the region. In FY 2007, the Appalachian Regional Commission designated 78 counties in 9 states as distressed, based on low per-capita income and high rates of poverty and unemployment ≠ (of 410 counties in 13 states included as Appalachian). The ARC notes that some severely distressed areas still lack basic infrastructure, such as water and sewer systems. The 1990 Census indicated that the poverty rate in central rural Appalachia was 27 percent. In West Virginia, the 2000 poverty rate statewide was 17.9%; in nine counties more than a quarter of the population lived below the poverty line, with percentages as high as 37.7%. Un- and under-employment rates are higher than the nation’s average.Breathitt County, Kentucky had a 9.9% unemployment rate averaged over 2001-2003, a 33.2% poverty rate in 2000 (down from a twenty-year high of 39.5% in 1990), and only 57.5% of adults had high school diplomas in 2000.

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