Hillbilly Highway

U.S. Route 23 (top) and Interstate 75 (bottom), roadways that have each been dubbed the "Hillbilly Highway"

In the United States, the Hillbilly Highway is the out-migration of Appalachians from the Appalachian Highlands region to industrial cities in northern, midwestern, and western states, primarily in the years following World War II in search of better-paying industrial jobs and higher standards of living. Many of these migrants were formerly employed in the coal mining industry, which started to decline in 1940s. The word hillbilly refers to a negative stereotype of people from Appalachia. The term hillbilly is considered to be a modern term because it showed up in the early 1900s.^[1] Though the word is Scottish in origin, it does not derive from dialect. In Scotland, the term hill-folk referred to people who preferred isolation from the greater society and the term billy referred to someone being a "companion" or "comrade". The Hillbilly Highway was a parallel to the better-known Great Migration of African-Americans from the south.

Many of these Appalachian migrants went to major industrial centers such as Detroit, Chicago,^[2] Cleveland,^[3] Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Milwaukee, Toledo, and Muncie,^[4] while others traveled west to California.^[5] Many of the Appalachians lived in concentrated enclaves, an example being Uptown, Chicago, which was nicknamed "Hillbilly Heaven" in the 1960s. 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,^[6] or Interstate 75.^[7] The participants in the Hillbilly Highway are known as Urban Appalachians. The migration was not a finite process, as it is continuing today and the migrants commonly moved back to their home states in retirement, or relocated only temporarily.