Cincinnati’s Appalachian Roots Don’t Stop at the County Line

Article summary:
Cincinnati’s 1992 Human Rights Ordinance, with Appalachian-ancestry definitions added to Chapter 914 in 1995, protects anyone with a parent or grandparent born in the Appalachian region regardless of where they currently live. That supports JD Vance’s own documented family history, though it doesn’t settle whether his account of Appalachian culture speaks for the whole region. Cincinnati’s Appalachian population has been measured anywhere from 12% to 40% of city residents depending on how many generations are counted.

JD Vance stood behind the bar at Price Hill Chili, pouring beer and passing out cheese coneys after a speech at the Middletown steel mill where his grandfather worked for nearly 40 years.

The vice president’s route that day, from Armco’s old mill floor to a west-side chili parlor, followed a path familiar to thousands of Greater Cincinnati families.

Vance’s grandparents made a similar migration a generation earlier. They left eastern Kentucky for Middletown, part of the wave that built Cincinnati’s urban Appalachian identity. Other families came to Price Hill, Over-the-Rhine, Camp Washington, and the Mill Creek Valley. Those were different addresses in the same current of migration that has always shaped Cincinnati’s identity.

Then came the argument over whether Vance could call himself Appalachian at all.

Middletown is outside the federal boundaries of Appalachia. So is Cincinnati. For critics who treat residency inside those boundaries as the qualification, Vance is an Ohioan borrowing an identity from his grandparents and childhood visits to Kentucky.

That rule would exclude much more than one politically divisive figure. It would write Cincinnati’s urban Appalachian population out of its own history.

Urban Appalachian Identity Arrived With the Factory Trains

Migration from the mountains into Cincinnati began well before World War II. It accelerated dramatically during the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s, as mechanization eliminated coal-mining and small-farm work. Midwestern factories needed labor instead.

The Urban Appalachian Community Coalition estimates that Appalachia lost a net 4 million residents during that period. They left for industrial cities including Cincinnati, Dayton, Detroit, Chicago, and Baltimore.

Cincinnati offered machine-tool plants, soap factories, and industrial work along the Ohio River and Mill Creek. Armco Steel drew workers to Middletown. Some employers recruited directly from mountain counties. Once one member of a family found a job and a place to stay, siblings, cousins and neighbors followed.

Many migrants arrived by train carrying little more than clothing, an address and the name of a relative already here. They settled near industrial jobs and inexpensive housing in Over-the-Rhine, Lower Price Hill, the East End, South Fairmount, Camp Washington and Carthage. Across the river, similar communities formed in Newport and Covington.

Families who found steadier work often moved outward or uphill: to East and West Price Hill, Norwood, Lockland, Elmwood Place, Hamilton and Middletown. The addresses changed. The kinship networks remained.

Cincinnati Struggled to Count Its Own Appalachian Population

The Urban Appalachian Community Coalition’s own historical estimates put Cincinnati’s Appalachian population at 48,171 in 1970. An analysis covering 2005 through 2009 identified 35,637, about 12% of the city’s population at the time. The 2000 Greater Cincinnati Survey found that first- and second-generation Appalachians accounted for approximately 20% of Cincinnati residents.

Researcher Michael Maloney estimated the share could reach 40% once he counted third- and fourth-generation descendants. That broader number is an estimate rather than a census count, but it illustrates the difficulty of defining urban Appalachian identity through birthplace alone. Each generation becomes harder to measure even while family ancestry remains.

Lower Price Hill Became Cincinnati’s Appalachian Anchor

Lower Price Hill grew into one of Cincinnati’s most recognizable Appalachian neighborhoods during the postwar migration. Families lived in inexpensive, crowded, aging houses close to factories, rail yards, and industrial pollution.

A UACC neighborhood history reports that about 90% of Lower Price Hill residents still traced their families to Appalachia in 2009. The neighborhood remains home to the coalition’s offices and Frank Foster Library.

Cincinnati’s organized Appalachian movement reaches back to 1964. That year, eastern Kentucky native Ernie Mynatt opened the Main Street Bible Center at Main and Woodward streets in Over-the-Rhine. The storefront provided tutoring, recreation, and assistance to Appalachian families living in nearby tenements.

That work continued under several organizational names before the Urban Appalachian Council incorporated in 1974, with Maloney as its first director. Its stated purpose was to promote “a decent quality of life for Appalachian citizens of Greater Cincinnati.”

The council’s programs included community-based education, GED instruction, youth activities, employment assistance, cultural events, and neighborhood advocacy. It contributed to the development of community schools and got involved in environmental and housing fights affecting Appalachian neighborhoods.

The council closed its direct-service operation in 2014. Other organizations absorbed portions of the work, while former leaders and community members reorganized as the Urban Appalachian Community Coalition. The smaller coalition now focuses on advocacy, research, cultural preservation, and story-gathering.

That institutional history matters because Cincinnati’s Appalachian organizations did more than celebrate music and food. Migrants faced employment discrimination, hostile schools, poor housing, and the dismissive designation SAM, short for Southern Appalachian Migrant. Employers, landlords, and public institutions classified them as white on paper but often treated them differently than established white Cincinnatians.

The city eventually acknowledged that discrimination in law.

Cincinnati Law Recognizes Ancestry, Not Just Residence

Cincinnati adopted its Human Rights Ordinance in 1992, prohibiting discrimination in housing, employment, and public accommodations based on “Appalachian regional origin.” The city added the specific definitions of Appalachian regional origin and ancestral origin to Chapter 914 of the Cincinnati Municipal Code in 1995.

The wording matters. Chapter 914 defines Appalachian regional origin as birth or ancestral origin in the Appalachian region. It further defines ancestral origin as a maternal or paternal relationship to a parent or grandparent born there. That is the city’s own working definition of urban Appalachian identity for anti-discrimination purposes.

The Ordinance and the Federal Map Disagree

The Appalachian Regional Commission gives Cincinnati one map. Cincinnati law supplies another.

The federal commission includes 32 of Ohio’s 88 counties. Clermont, Brown, Adams, and Highland are inside its territory. Hamilton and Butler counties are not.

That map serves an important administrative purpose. It determines eligibility for federal economic-development programs and measures economic conditions. It does not purport to measure whether a family’s culture survives migration.

If the commission boundary controlled identity, a person born in Clermont County could claim to be from Appalachia. Someone raised several miles away by two eastern Kentucky parents could not. A family would cease being Appalachian when it crossed into Hamilton County for a factory job. It would become Appalachian again whenever it visited relatives in Brown County.

Cincinnati’s migration record does not work that way. Neither does its ordinance.

Vance fits a documented version of that experience. His maternal grandparents left Jackson, Kentucky, for Middletown, where his grandfather worked at Armco. Vance grew up among Kentucky transplants and spent time with relatives in Breathitt County. He has said publicly that five generations of his family rest in a small Eastern Kentucky cemetery.

Those facts support an Appalachian family identity. They do not appoint him spokesman for an entire region.

Vance’s Critics Have a Better Argument

The strongest criticism of Vance does not accuse him of fabricating his family history. It accuses him of turning one family’s experience into an explanation for a vast and varied region.

In Hillbilly Elegy, Vance wrote about addiction, family instability, idleness, and social decline. Critics argued that his cultural diagnosis gave too little weight to disappearing industries, corporate extraction, public policy, and the institutions that helped him succeed.

Historian Elizabeth Catte responded with What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia, objecting to the projection of Vance’s experience onto millions of other people. The anthology Appalachian Reckoning brought together more than 40 writers and artists who challenged the book’s portrayal of the region and its bootstrap conclusions.

That objection deserves a fair hearing. Appalachia is not exclusively rural, white, conservative, or tied to coal. It contains cities, Black communities, tribal lands, college towns, immigrants and a labor history that includes some of the country’s fiercest battles against corporate power. No memoir can represent all of it.

There is also a legitimate reason for residents to guard urban Appalachian identity. Outsiders have long treated Appalachia as a storehouse of useful images: coal miners during campaigns, abandoned houses in poverty documentaries, and misty ridgelines in tourism advertising. A politician should not gain unquestioned authority over the region merely by mentioning a family cemetery.

But representation and identity are separate questions. “Vance does not represent my Appalachia” challenges his politics and his conclusions. “Vance is not Appalachian” requires ignoring the same migration history Cincinnati invokes when describing tens of thousands of its own residents.

He can be Appalachian and still be wrong about Appalachia.

Gatekeeping Erases the Families Who Left

A strict residency test would disqualify the children and grandchildren of migrants who supplied Cincinnati’s industrial labor. Those same families established west-side neighborhoods and created organizations to defend their culture. That test would treat departure as a kind of betrayal, even though departure became one of the defining Appalachian experiences of the 20th century.

The migration did not end when the factories began closing. Its consequences changed.

Deindustrialization struck many of the same neighborhoods where Appalachian workers had settled. Lower Price Hill confronted unemployment, pollution, and population loss. The foreclosure crisis and opioid epidemic added new damage. Families with the resources to move dispersed farther into the suburbs, making the community less geographically concentrated and harder to count.

Assimilation also worked unevenly. A third-generation descendant might lose the accent while retaining the recipes, music, family stories, and regular drives down the AA Highway. Another might shed the identity altogether. There is no government form capable of measuring precisely where inheritance ends and nostalgia begins.

UACC’s current work reflects that ambiguity. Its Kith & Kin project preserves photographs, oral histories and interviews with Greater Cincinnati’s urban Appalachians. Some participants retain living memories of the migration. Others are grandchildren and great-grandchildren who know the mountains primarily through stories their elders share.

The coalition includes those later generations because inherited memory is part of the Cincinnati Appalachian experience, not evidence against it.

The Test Cannot Change With the Politician

That does not mean every distant ancestor creates an unlimited claim. Identity weakens when it becomes nothing more than a decorative label, especially when someone invokes it for cultural authority while showing little connection to living communities. Gatekeeping begins with a legitimate desire to prevent that kind of exploitation.

The problem arises when the test changes to suit the claimant’s politics.

For decades, institutions in Cincinnati argued that Appalachian ancestry remained consequential after migration. The city built programs around it, recorded discrimination attached to it, and eventually wrote it into law. Rejecting that principle only when a disliked politician invokes the same ancestry turns urban Appalachian identity into a credential opponents can revoke.

Vance left Price Hill Chili after the cameras had recorded the beer taps, cheese coneys and handshakes. A few miles away, the Frank Foster Library in Lower Price Hill still holds the records of those families. Their Appalachian identity survived the same trip his grandparents made.

The federal map stops at the Hamilton County line. Their history does not.

FAQs

What does Cincinnati's law say about who counts as Appalachian?

Chapter 914 of the Cincinnati Municipal Code, added to the city’s 1992 Human Rights Ordinance in 1995, defines Appalachian regional origin as birth or ancestral origin in the Appalachian region and defines ancestral origin as a maternal or paternal relationship to a parent or grandparent born there. The ordinance protects Appalachian regional origin from discrimination in housing, employment and public accommodations, making urban Appalachian identity in Cincinnati a matter of documented ancestry for anti-discrimination purposes, not a cultural certification.

Is JD Vance actually Appalachian?

Cincinnati’s ordinance defines ancestry for anti-discrimination enforcement, not as a legal ruling on anyone’s cultural identity, but Vance’s family history does meet that ancestry standard. His maternal grandparents left Jackson, Kentucky, in Breathitt County, for Middletown, where his grandfather worked at Armco Steel for nearly 40 years, according to Vance’s own account of his family history. That documented ancestry fits the same definition Cincinnati uses to describe its own urban Appalachian population, even though Middletown sits outside the Appalachian Regional Commission’s residency-based boundary.

How large is Cincinnati's urban Appalachian population?

Estimates vary by method and generation counted. Cincinnati had an estimated 48,171 Appalachian residents in 1970. A 2005-2009 analysis found 35,637 residents, about 12% of the city. A 2000 survey put first- and second-generation Appalachians at 20% of Cincinnati residents, and researcher Michael Maloney estimated the share could reach 40% once third- and fourth-generation descendants are counted.