Tom Eblen
Ronald D. Eller,
Ron Eller’s German and English ancestors were in Appalachia by the mid-1700s, and his Cherokee ancestors were there for millennia before that. As the first member of his family to go to college when he studied at the College of Wooster in Ohio in the 1960s, Eller was puzzled by his Southern history class.
“We haven’t studied anything about my people,” Eller told his professor. “My people didn’t own plantations and slaves.”
Instead of a paper on the plantation system, the professor assigned him to find out what had been written about Appalachian history. “I went to the library and could find absolutely nothing,” Eller said. Well, except for references to hillbilly stereotypes, many of which he had been hearing since his West Virginia family moved to Akron a decade earlier.
Then, on a shelf of new library books, Eller saw Harry M. Caudill’s Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area. “It was the first book I ever read straight through,” he said. “Stayed up all night.”
The next morning, Eller took the book to his professor, who echoed many historians’ criticisms of Caudill as too anecdotal and not “academic” enough. Night Comes to the Cumberlands became a foundation for Eller’s paper—and an inspiration for the rest of his career as an author, historian and Appalachian studies pioneer.
“Harry was writing about the relationship of people and land and how that land has been used over time,” said Eller, who later would replace Caudill as a professor in the University of Kentucky’s history department.
“I wanted to write the history of the region from the perspective of someone from the region,” he said. “History has always been about telling people’s stories. In my case, it has always been countering those popular national images of the mountains.”
Eller was born in 1948 in Annapolis, Maryland, where his father was in the Navy. He and his younger five brothers and sisters grew up in Akron and near Beckley, West Virginia, where their grandfather had walked from his North Carolina farm at the turn of the 20th century to work in the coal mines.
Eller benefited from good public schools in Akron, where his father operated a barbershop. He earned an academic and basketball scholarship to the College of Wooster. But the year he started college, the rest of his family moved home to West Virginia—a place they had driven back to every other weekend, nine hours each way, the whole time they lived in Ohio.
That Southern history class inspired Eller to change his major from physical education to history. He taught school for a couple of years to earn money for graduate school and enrolled in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His professor and first writing mentor was George Tindall, who won the Lillian Smith Book Award in 1969 for The Emergence of the New South: 1913-1945.
Eller met his second writing mentor at Duke University, where UNC history students could take classes. Larry Goodwin had been a writer for the Texas Observer before starting Duke’s oral history program. It attracted many Black and Appalachian students, whose people had been largely ignored by traditional history programs.
“Larry taught me to write from the gut and to express what I really felt and to tell stories,” Eller said. “I could identify with the stories my fellow students were telling about political power, inequality, poverty and social justice. I learned so much.”
Eller’s first book, Miners, Millhands and Mountaineers: The Industrialization of the Appalachian South, won the 1982 Willis Weatherford Award from the Appalachian Studies Association and the 1983 Thomas Wolfe Literary Award from the Asheville Museum of History.
His second book, Uneven Ground: Appalachia Since 1945, is a history of how economic development, exploitation and government programs both helped and failed the region. It also won the Weatherford Award as well as the Southern Political Science Association’s V.O. Key Award for the best book about Southern politics.
“For me, history was my window into understanding why things were the way they were today,” he said. “History has to be re-interpreted by each generation in their own context and their own set of experiences. That’s the way we progress and move ahead.”
Eller also has written more than 70 scholarly articles. He served for 15 years as director of the University of Kentucky’s Appalachian Center and was a Rockefeller Foundation Scholar. He chaired the Governor’s Kentucky Appalachian Task Force, was the first chair of the Kentucky Appalachian Commission and was a member of the Sustainable Communities Task Force of President Bill Clinton’s Council on Sustainable Development. He has won many regional leadership and service awards and was inducted into the University of Kentucky Hall of Fame in 2020.
“Most of what I have written has been an effort to correct the historical perspective,” Eller said. “The mountains were never as isolated as some have suggested. Appalachians were never pure Scots-Irish; they were always a mixed-ancestry people, just as the nation as a whole. Appalachia is not the other America. It is, in fact, America.”