Towns are set primarily in short steep valleys or on the narrow ridges between them which can promote a great sense of togetherness within the communities, but not so steep as to make movement throughout the region difficult, as in the Appalachians. It’s probably an ideal environment for community organizing,

Though it is mostly small towns in an agricultural landscape, it is not primarily agricultural, there is at least as much employment in light industry and there always has been. I’ve often wondered if this is what the Northeast was like in the late 19th century, just on the brink of the towns gentrifying the farmland.

And everyone is related, of course, the Mississippi river down the middle is no barrier at all in this.

That article may say the Anomaly dates back only about a dozen years, but the Driftless region’s idiosyncrasy is much older than that. I have the impression the German element contains more Swiss and Austrian than German elements elsewhere.

I think the recent electoral results are part of the phenomena of self-coherent regions becoming more defined, the way, as I have read, accents are becoming more regionally distinct (and accents in the Driftless region can be highly distinct and often quite incomprehensible. One person will sound like he’s gargling, smoking and imitating James Cagney simultaneously, and the next, from a few miles north, will sound like a turkey having an unexpected prostate exam, with facial expressions to match. Where I live it will be either a German-Irish working class accent, or newscaster-speak. And in southwest Wisconsin they can throw in some remains of Welsh to really mess it up; ‘armageddon’ comes out like ‘ahmagkyethyin’, as if your personal doom were found wrapped in a clammy and putrid foreclosure and left everyone else with a great suffering).

You can see the Driftless region in the David Lynch movie The Straight Story, though that guy obviously took care to map out the flattest route he could find.