move back

Oak Hill, W.Va. -
Michelle Nottingham, a city-raised young woman with a deepening drawl, is not enthusiastic about her career prospects in this mountain community. She sighs to think that her husband, Kelly, is earning half his Cleveland salary driving a coal truck.

She does not like the narrow roads on the ridge tops or the poisonous snakes in the hollows, which she calls "hollers," and she terribly misses mom and dad back on West 61st St.

But when she stands outside of her suburban-style home at the top of a hill, she scans a world ringed by misty green mountains. She thinks John Denver got it right in that song that everyone in these parts knows by heart. Almost heaven, West Virginia.
"Almost," she says softly. "Almost."

A generation after their parents brought them out of the Appalachian Mountains for a better life in Cleveland, Michelle and Kelly Nottingham moved back, resolved to raise their children in the hills whence they came.

They anguished over the decision, as did other members of their families. In recent years, four households of Nottinghams or their relations have left West 61st St. on Cleveland's West Side for rural West Virginia.

They joined a quiet, steady migration that may steal the mountain twang from city neighborhoods and repopulate former coal towns in some of America's poorest counties. By the tens of thousands, Appalachian people are leaving Midwestern cities and moving back to the mountains. . .

Historic movement of people

The reverse migration introduces a new chapter in a great trek-one of the largest movements of people in American history. Last century, millions moved from played-out coal towns and isolated farms in Appalachian states toward jobs in the industrial heartland.

People from Appalachian counties still move to Northeast Ohio. But for the first time, more are going than coming, a tidal shift that attests to a little-known fact: They never really liked it here.

"Many still see the hills as home," said the Rev. Neal Wilds, pastor of Brooklyn Memorial United Methodist Church, who describes himself as a hillbilly preacher from Tennessee. "If they can afford to go back, they will."

Not every former mountaineer feels the tug. Many assimilated into flatland communities and raised children more comfortable in shopping malls than mountain hollows. Wilds is mulling over whether to retire back to the hills, but he knows his two grown children won't be coming. "They have no comprehension of Tennessee as home," he said.

People shaped by the land

Still, some argue that Appalachian Mountain states possess a special allure. They say the rugged land shaped a resourceful, independent people who developed a camaraderie as the butt of hillbilly jokes and stereotypes.
"There is that sense of home- everyone has it," said Fayette County, W. Va. Commissioner Matthew David Wender. "I really think it's stronger for West Virginia people."

. . . In recent years, the stars aligned to encourage a homecoming. The industrial jobs that many Appalachian families came for in Cleveland, Akron and Chicago disappeared. Savings and early retirements offered the chance to return. Meanwhile, the Appalachia they left 30 and 40 years ago is a different place today.

Poverty and illiteracy remain the curse of a 13-state region once called a separate America. But coal mining is automated, modern highways thread the mountains, and tourism is booming in places like Fayette County, where the rapids of the New River draw white-water rafters.

Meanwhile, crime remains low and folks still know and trust their neighbors. It's enough to make people like Michelle Nottingham start thinking about where she belongs.
"We did the opposite of what our parents did," she observed. "They thought they did the best for me by moving to Cleveland, and we think we're doing the best for our children moving here."

Between 1940 and 1970, some 7 million people moved out of the Appalachian states and about one million came to Ohio, said Stuart Hobbs, a historian who examined the migration for the Ohio Historical Society. They followed the highways, from West Virginia to Akron and Cleveland, from Kentucky to Cincinnati and Dayton. . .
Wender said the returning mountaineers, often early retirees, bring new wealth and fresh ideas. Fayette County is considering its first retirement community.

'Blue collar' jobs disappearing

Hobbs, a migration researcher, observes the Appalachians are leaving as their blue-collar role is ending. "They made maybe the bulk of their economic contribution to the state," he said.

Juanita Nottingham was content to stay, but her husband wanted to move back and that was enough for her. In 1997, 33 years after coming to Cleveland, the couple returned to Fayette County, into the house her husband's father built a few years before.
Other family members started following, settling nearby, and that pushed Kelly and Michelle Nottingham toward a decision.

They grew up across West 61st St. from one another and graduated from the same high school. Both worshipped at Wild's church. When they married three years ago, they moved into the house next door to Michelle's parents.

"A very hillbilly thing to do," Kelly Nottingham III says, and he smiles. . .

'Together we could make it'

Michelle said she understands why Appalachian families are bound so tight. "We didn't have a lot," she said. "We all moved to Cleveland and piled up on top of each other because we didn't have anything else. We didn't know how to handle the crazy crime. Together, we knew we could make it."

Now, she wants her son to go to the elementary school up the road from Nottingham Hill, the school his grandmother attended.

When she visits Cleveland, friends tell her she's talking funny. She's developing a drawl. "It was my decision and I made it," she said. "I'm where I belong."