The earliest mention of the school paddle in the USA 83

I pondered above whether the relative availability of wood and leather about the house and school might have influenced the choice of material used to make spanking implements.

It seems that Texas exported cattle hides but imported finished leather in the early days.

https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/drl01

Interest in the leather industry has long been widespread in Texas because of the emphasis given to cattle. The hide and tallow trade flourished along the Gulf Coast from 1840 to 1880; lack of refrigeration facilities made it nearly impossible to ship meat, but hides and tallow were sold until choice beef became too valuable to kill for these byproducts alone. 

Texas, for many years the nation’s largest producer of hides, sent most of its products to New England, where the necessary raw materials needed for tanning were obtained from forests. Subsequently, however, with mineral and chemical tanning, manufacturers of leather products established their plants nearer the hide supply. 

https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/cmask

Arid West Texas was largely treeless while semi-tropical East Texas was initially heavily forested. In regions where trees were available, log cabins were common to Anglo-American settlements as well as those of some European immigrants.

The South and particularly the Bible Belt are distinctly different from the rest of the USA. The first European settlers in this region were the Ulster Scots augmented by other religious non-conformists, most who had been repeatedly marginalised by religion and economics, often for generations. The Bible Belt excludes Catholic southern Louisiana (New France), central and southern Florida, which have been settled recently mainly by immigrants and Americans from elsewhere in the country, and the overwhelmingly Hispanic South Texas.

The English speaking Scots colonised Ulster, the northern province of Ireland in the 17^th century to escape lawlessness, religious persecution and economic pressures at home in Scotland. They started emigrating to colonial USA in family groups a few generations later, in the 18^th century, for the same reasons they had originally left Scotland.  Most of the Ulster Scots migrants to the US sought rural homesteads where they cleared and worked the land.  They had or developed a strong desire to be left alone, to keep their guns and were suspicious of governments and outside interference.

Over the following century some moved repeated west and south as land and opportunities became available, often living insecurely on the frontier waring with Indians, or outnumbered by their slaves. During the late 19^th century industrialization some moved north to the now Rust Belt leaving their less open brethren and traditions behind. (I have previously discussed how winnowing can leave to the concentration of conservatives. [Jun 27, 2017. #690, page 69 above]. )

The American Ulster Scots survived defeat in the Civil War and subsequent carpet bagging by Yankees, the undermining of their literal interpretation of the Bible by Hutton (geology – the Earth very old), Darwin and others, the overthrow of their Jim Crow laws and the election of an articulate and capable Black president.

In the backcountry of Appalachia, it was difficult for college-trained Presbyterian clergy to find attractive employment opportunities. Since Baptists did not require seminary educations for their ministers, their congregational polity [= a form or process of civil government or constitution] enriched by Calvinist theology flourished among the descendants of Irish Protestants, including Ulster-Scots Presbyterians.

Openness, the desire to seek or the ability to tolerate novelty, is the single most reliable indicator of political belief. Liberals are markedly more open than conservatives and much better able to accommodate irresistible change.

I have found nothing to suggest the Ulster Scots had a predilection to use the paddle in preference to the generic “rod” in its diverse forms.  They likely adopted the implement during their successive migrations within the USA.

Note however, Robert Louis Stevenson use of the word “paddled”, Apr 07, 2012,  #227 (page 23 above), possibly suggesting the paddle was known in Scotland.  Alternatively, RLS used the word and loosely in lieu of “whipped” or “spanked” for a US readership but this seems unlikely given RLS’s use of patios.

The Ulster Scots are not to be confused with the Irish Catholics who emigrated to the USA in large numbers in the 1840s and 1850s. The Catholics settled mainly in the urban areas of the Northeast and in Midwestern cities rather than the rural South.

Education in Appalachia

For much of the region’s history, education in Appalachia has lagged behind the rest of the nation due in part to (local poverty and) struggles with funding from respective state governments and an agrarian-oriented population that often failed to see a practical need for formal education. 

Early education in the region evolved from teaching Christian morality and learning to read the Bible into small, one-room schoolhouses that convened in months when children were not needed to help with farm work.

After the Civil War, mandatory education laws and state assistance helped larger communities begin to establish graded schools and high schools. During the same period, many of the region’s institutions of higher education were established or greatly expanded.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, service organizations such as Pi Beta Phi and various religious organizations established settlement schools and mission schools in the region’s more rural areas.

In the 20th century, national trends began to have more of an effect on education in Appalachia, sometimes clashing with the region’s traditional values. The Scopes Trial—the nation’s most publicized debate over the teaching of the theory of evolution—took place in Dayton, Tennessee, in southern Appalachia in 1925.

In spite of consolidation and centralization, schools in Appalachia struggled to keep up with federal and state demands into the 21st century. Since 2001, a number of the region’s public schools were threatened with loss of funding due to difficulties fulfilling the demands of No Child Left Behind.

Original source of above:
Encyclopedia of Appalachia (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2006)
http://utpress.org/title/encyclopedia-of-appalachia/