“The First Anarchist That Ever Came to Atlanta”: Hiram F. Hover from New York to the New South

Abstract

When Hiram F. Hover walked out of jail onto Watauga Street in Hickory, North Carolina, near the end of 1889, he must have known that he was leaving behind the work that had consumed him over the past four years, ever since he arrived in Knoxville in late 1885. This passion had cost him his wife, his friends, his right eye, and nearly his life. Hover had come to the South amid the tumult of the 1880s, and the South brought to the surface ideas for which he had long found little use. With these ideas, acquired during his childhood in New York’s Hudson River Valley, Hover tried to change the South to stem forces that were turning landholding farmers into tenants and pushing them into the brick mills sprouting up out of the Piedmont soil. Hover’s plans inspired hundreds of workers in the Carolinas and Georgia, but they also inspired armed opposition from white landlords and employers. The changes Hover tried, and failed, to bring to the South provide an important link between two better-known periods of radicalism in the South—Reconstruction and Populism—and they also help us rethink the role of indigenous and outside sources of radical thought in the late-nineteenth-century South.¹