The Poco Field : An American Story of Place [1 ed.] 9780252093777, 9780252036675

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The

Po co Field »

TALMAGE A. STANLEY

Copyright © 2012. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

A N A M E R I C AN S T O RY O F P L A C E

The Poco Field : An American Story of Place, University of Illinois Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Copyright © 2012. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

The Poco Field

The Poco Field : An American Story of Place, University of Illinois Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Copyright © 2012. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved. The Poco Field : An American Story of Place, University of Illinois Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central,

The Poco Field

-

an american story of place

Copyright © 2012. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Talmage A. Stanley

University of Illinois Press Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield

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© 2012 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America 1  2  3  4  5  c  p  5  4  3  2  1 ∞ This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Stanley, Talmage A. The Poco field : an American story of place / Talmage A. Stanley. p.  cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-252-03667-5 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-252-07839-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Middle class—West Virginia—McDowell County—Attitudes. 2. Middle class—West Virginia—McDowell County— Social life and customs. 3. McDowell County (W. Va.)—Social conditions. 4. McDowell County (W. Va.)—History. I. Title.

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ht690.u6s73   2012 305.5'50975449—dc23   2011030821

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To Susan, David, and Sarah Because of the place we share To Alecia and David Stanley Because of the gift of the first place To the memory of C. T. and Aldah W. Apperson

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Because they lived these stories

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Place your fingers close on this lichened sandstone. With this stone and this grass, this red earth, this place was received and made and remade. Its generations are distinct but all suddenly present. —Raymond Williams, People of the Black Mountains . . . a story that is generations old and has no end in sight . . . the pain of departure . . . the joys of the open larger world, the . . . hope of return to the home place. —Thomas Lynch, Booking Passage:

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We Irish and Americans

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Contents

List of Illustrations  /  ix



Acknowledgments  /  xi

Prologue

Coal Dust under My Feet  /  xvii

Introduction

The Places toward Which I Seem to Bend  /  1

Chapter 1

To Hold Hands with My Kin  /  11

Chapter 2

The Poco Field  /  23

Chapter 3

“On a Plane with the Best in the Country”  /  56

Chapter 4

Moving to Westfield  /  64

Chapter 5

He Saw It Coming  /  98

Chapter 6

Through the Deep Waters  /  128

Chapter 7

“He Always Wanted a Cadillac”  /  154

Chapter 8

The Poco Field: Elegy and Ferocious Hope  /  176



Notes  /  195



Index  /  225

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List of Illustrations

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Figures Figure 1

Mary Farmer Williams with lantern  12

Figure 2

“At Home,” December 3, 1933  18

Figure 3

From Apperson to Aldah, September 20, 1937  24

Figure 4

Bird’s-Eye View of Keystone  48

Figure 5

Main Street, Keystone, 1944  49

Figure 6

Westfield Addition, circa 1920  53

Figure 7

C. T. Apperson’s Koppers Stores Sales Club pin  57

Figure 8

“The Force”  65

Figure 9

Aldah in front of Koppers Number Ten  67

Figure 10

Clowning Around  68

Figure 11

Aldah and Apperson, Keystone, 1932  68

Figure 12

Aldah and Apperson, Newbern, August 1938  68

Figure 13

Aldah and the new car, 1935  69

Figure 14

Apperson at 16  69

Figure 15

Apperson on Main Street, 1939  70

Figure 16

Apperson, on steps of Koppers Number Ten, about 1932–1933  70

Figure 17

Meeting at Koppers Headquarters, 1936  71

Figure 18

Poco field store men, leaving for Pittsburgh  71

Figure 19

Aldah at work, May 1937  72

Figure 20

Koppers’s Stores, Office Personnel, June 1934  72

Figure 21

Koppers Keystone Tipple  74

Figure 22

Produce Counter, Koppers Number Ten, Christmas 1935  75

Figure 23

Exterior, Koppers Number Ten, August 1935  77

Figure 24

Interior, Koppers Number Ten, 1935  77

Figure 25

Pais Home, Westfield  83

Figure 26

Apperson and Alecia, Westfield, 1946  90

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x  /  illustr ations

Figure 27

Alley behind Westfield house, 1946  91

Figure 28

Front porch, Westfield, 1948  91

Figure 29

Front yard, Westfield, 1948  92

Figure 30

Lodge Cards, Furniture Market Pass, 1952  99

Figure 31

Christmas, 1953  129

Figure 32

Cadillac Advertisement, May 1952  155

Figure 33

Aldah to Apperson, August 21, 1940  177

Map The Elkhorn Valley, McDowell County, and surrounding areas  xv Table

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C. T. and Aldah Apperson Income Tax Returns, 1935–1948  89

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Acknowledgments

During the years in which her memories were slipping from her, my grandmother often concluded a recollection or a story with a chuckle, saying, “Someone ought to write a book about us.” She could not have realized how arduous the work or how long the journey for which she called, nor could she have had any idea of the great many people whose companionship would offer sustenance and direction along the way. Nothing that follows would have been possible without the love of Susan and our children David and Sarah. Susan has been careful reader, critic, and counselor. First and last, though, she has been friend. Her questions call me to a clearer and more honest purpose in all the parts of my life. She abides. David and Sarah have not known a time in which the books, boxes, and files for this work have not cluttered at least one room of our home, or the troubles of writing have not occupied more of my mind than they should. Because of these things, this must be put first: thank you is not enough, but it is all I have. My parents, David and Alecia Stanley, spoke of memories it may have been easier to leave unsaid and gave support without stint. As the last living person to remember much of what is recounted here, my mother’s gift of memory was invaluable. All of my life, my father has shown to his children and to his neighbors what it means to practice an honest citizenship of place. Despite their misgivings, my family’s willingness to record their memories was a gift of trust. To talk around the table after Sunday dinner is one thing, to speak of your heart into a microphone, is quite another. I have tried to be true to that trust. I owe a great debt to the people of McDowell County, West Virginia, who shared with me their lives and stories. My association with Big Creek People in Action began on a hot August afternoon in 1994 when I first spoke with Franki Rutherford. Since 2003, I have served on the board of directors for this organization; the struggles through which we have passed together have taught me much about hope and about what it means to be a citizen of a place. Situated along a ridge with sweeping views of the valley and mountains, the town of Newbern, with its stories and history, offers me one part of the map by which I move through the world. In the journey that has been this

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xii  /  acknowledgments

work, friends and neighbors in Newbern were generous with their time and memories, always gracious and supportive. The Newbern Community Improvement Club allowed me access to its treasury of scrapbooks, photographs, meeting minutes, treasurer reports, and newspaper clippings. At Emory University, an Andrew W. Mellon Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship in Southern Studies and a Bandy Fellowship provided opportunities to begin to grapple with these connections of people, places, and history, and the larger implications of those connections. Allen Tullos, Rebecca Chopp, Barbara Ladd, Fred Craddock raised difficult questions, pushing the boundaries of my assumptions, challenging me to think more carefully. Bryan Garman’s decency and our long conversations about the responsibility of scholarship to the people and places little noticed in the academy, helped to make the difference. At Emory & Henry College, Steve Fisher offered me a job in 1996, and since then, because of his trust I have had the privilege and the freedom of work that gives expression to a citizenship of place. Two Emory & Henry College Mellon Fund grants provided time away from work over two summers. Emory & Henry College provided financial support to help bring this book to publication, making it stronger and more effective. As Vice President for Academic Affairs at Emory & Henry, Chris Qualls’s belief in me, in the importance of civic education, and in this book were instrumental. As Chair of the Social Science Division, John Morgan never ceased to offer his encouragement and support. My coworkers in Emory & Henry’s Appalachian Center for Community Service have helped bring to life a place-based model of education and service. Every day, my students challenge me to make these ideas and stories relevant and accessible; they teach me what it means to teach with honesty and courage. The staff of Emory & Henry’s Kelly Library was unfailingly helpful with interlibrary loans and overdue books, and with finding all manner of obscure materials. The staff members at the Eastern Regional Coal Archives in Bluefield, West Virginia, and in Special Collections at Newman Library of Virginia Tech were all welcoming and patient teachers as I worked my way through long days of research. My teaching colleague and friend, Ed Davis offered important advice on the map and the early geologic history of the Poco field and Southwest Virginia. Lily Kay, of the Upper Guyandotte Watershed Association, provided crucial help in the early design for the map. Robert Donnan, Stan Dotson, Steve Fisher, Joe Reiff, Travis Proffitt, and Scott Tate all read versions of the manuscript, offering not only advice, but encouragement, often seeing and sensing more than I could. Andy Kegley,

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acknowledgments  /  xiii

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Meighan Sharp, and Scott Sikes were not only readers with important insights, they are also my teachers and peers in the art and craft of writing, helping me to be a better, more honest writer. Franki Rutherford, Jeff Allen, Marsha Timpson, Dyanne Spriggs, Kem Short, Marcus Wilkes, Darryl Cannady, and Ed Davis read excerpts of the manuscript, offering guidance, correction, and validation. For a long while, this book could not find its home. Laurie Matheson at the University of Illinois Press understood it and saw its potential; her advice and counsel were pivotal, both to the work and for me as a writer. Her encouragement and insight into how to strengthen what was already there, and the support of the staff at the University of Illinois Press together helped bring this journey to its destination. My grandmother and great grandmother and the others of my family probably never realized the truth or the importance of the history they collected in their photographs, clippings, stories, and recipes. To borrow from Sebastian Barry when he writes in The Secret Scripture, together this great wealth of collective memory and stories “lying deeply in the . . . place” are “like layers of shells and sand in a piece of limestone so that they have become the same element.”1 The layered limestone of those memories and stories, that history, is the foundation of this journey.

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WEST VIRGINIA

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East R.

New R.

Maitland Kimball Welch Vivian Northfork Superior Kyle Elkhorn Cr. Landgraff Keystone MCDOWELL COUNTY Elkhorn Maybeury Caretta Switchback War Pocahontas Bluefield

Blue sto

Tug Fk.

Iaeger

VIRGINIA

Dublin

WV

Newbern

VA Map Area

0

5

10 mi

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The Elkhorn Valley, McDowell County, and surrounding areas

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Prologue Coal Dust under My Feet

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You do not choose your dreams. Your dreams choose you. —José Saramago

I began graduate school with no acquaintance with the jargon of cultural studies. I did not know how to use effectively terms such as hegemony, counterhegemony, deconstruction, historicism, cultural materialism, structuralism, poststructuralism, postmodernism, and ideology—to name a few examples. This, along with a pronounced rural, southern mountain dialect produced in me an abiding and defining reluctance to speak in seminars and to engage in even informal conversations, for fear professors and fellow students would judge me ignorant and incapable of graduate study. My fears and apprehensions drove me to days and nights of study, of creating lengthy vocabulary lists, of using homemade flash cards to ensure that I could spout the definition of every term I heard and read. Finally, after a year of self-imposed silence and isolated study, I found myself one morning in a discussion of hegemony in a seminar focusing on critical narrative theory, knowing full well that I understood as well as, if not better than, anyone in the room what the issues were. Emboldened to share an idea, I began to talk of Antonio Gramsci’s ideas of hegemony. The room fell silent, surprised to hear from my far and heretofore silent corner. However, when I got to the word “hegemony,” I forgot the pronunciation guide I had made, and uttered the word with an “eh” instead of a short “e” in the second syllable and a long “o” in the third syllable, stressing the third syllable instead of the second; it came out “hedgeeh-moaney.” The silent room was awash in barely suppressed smiles, snickers, and sidelong winks. Following class, the professor, Dr. Rebecca Chopp, stopped me to thank me for my contribution to the discussion. Sensing my self-imposed humiliation, she told me that when she was in graduate school she spent the first two years trying to learn the language, which, in essence, was the purpose of graduate studies—to learn the language. Chopp added that from the content of my observations in seminar discussions and in papers, that it seemed I was well on my way to knowing the language. She was right, of course, the purpose

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xviii  /  prologue

of that education, of knowing that elitist and professionalized vocabulary is not to communicate with others already familiar with the language, but to help understand the life we hold in common in the world, to ask the important questions—questions that are often unasked; to make the necessary connections; to help us so order our lives that we are a more just and tolerant and discerning people. The words themselves are not the important things; rather, the concepts to which they point are the tools with which they equip us to engage with our time. At the same time I was struggling with the social hierarchies, silences, and snickers of graduate school, my family was involved in a far more important struggle. My grandmother, Aldah Larew Williams Apperson, after years of battling Alzheimer’s disease at her home, had to be moved to a long-term care facility. There was in my life at that transition a feeling of remoteness—that my work on seminar papers and discussions, what I was reading, was far removed from, of little import to, the life struggles of the people whom I loved. We always knew that my grandmother was something of an unofficial local and family historian, packing away letters, clippings, photographs, and other material she felt important to our family and community. We knew her as one of the “rememberers,” “tradition bearers,” who carry the stories of a people and a place, sharing them with the young.1 We knew also that in this she followed the example of her mother and grandmother. In the months that followed my grandmother’s move, it fell to my mother to sort and order the boxes and closets and crates and folders and cabinets of things that had constituted Granny’s life, but which she could not take with her to the nursing home. In that effort, our family discovered more material than we had ever suspected. In addition to my natural desire to help with a family task, and my personal inclinations to be one of the rememberers, my homesickness and isolation at graduate school led me to express an interest in the material. Soon, boxes arrived for me to sort through, to discern whether anything needed to be kept and what should be discarded. Late at night, sorting through those boxes, I began to sense the possibility of some kind of connections between what I was reading about culture, conflict, history, and memory and the material of my grandmother’s collection. While I had come to graduate school to explore issues of community and its representations in twentieth-century American history, literature, and culture, this was proving difficult because of the lack of particularity in common uses of the concept of community. I was coming to understand the long history of actual geographic places as a more material, historical way to talk about the issues of community. From much of what I saw in those boxes, I

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Coal Dust under My Feet  /  xix

began to discern that I had in my hands a rich primary resource of place. In my family’s stories, carried in my own memories, and in the letters and documents I had before me, I saw tangible examples of cultural conflicts and power, of the ways that class, gender, and race work in culture. I discerned in that material an American story told in a way that I had never seen or heard it told, but that, I was certain, many hundreds of other families and individuals shared. Appalachian people and places were central to that story. My effort to understand this material for the richness that it offered occurred simultaneously with my efforts to master the language of graduate cultural studies. After living with the material and writing of it for some years, I understood that my grandparents’ lives, my family’s stories and places, offered clear and accessible means to express and discuss the ideas and concepts behind the language of cultural studies. However, instead of an instant awareness and understanding, the process of making these connections was slow, painful, uneven, and arduous; I am not yet through. This book is one result of that still to be finished work. Aside from the analytical and theoretical difficulties and possibilities, this material posed a deeper, more emotional, spiritual dilemma. By this time, I had been in enough seminars and participated in enough conversations to know how graduate students think, how they interact with “texts,” how many understand the discipline of critical thinking is to be carried out. I was not sure that I wanted to or had any right to subject my family’s story, to subject the material that love had led my grandmother to accumulate, to the kinds of scrutiny that I knew and hoped my work would receive. I spent the summer and fall of 1994 collecting oral histories, talking to people who had known my grandfather, visiting all the places mentioned or alluded to in my grandmother’s record. Through all of this, I hoped to find a newsreel showing my grandfather who had died before I was born and was central to the story emerging from my grandmother’s boxes and files. I realize now that I was searching for some word, some final and unquestionable connection that would validate what I understood to be the truth of these stories, giving me the freedom to write the story I knew was there. There was no newsreel. For long months, my writing stagnated; although I wrote every day, it was unproductive. Unsure of what to do or where to go, I considered quitting the project altogether. On an early spring morning in 1995, in the grey time between night and dawn, I dreamed. The vividness of that dream lingers still. I was sitting in a straight chair in the back room of the gas station belonging to the Koppers Company Store, on Main Street in Keystone, West Virginia. Behind the metal

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xx  /  prologue

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desk across from me and in the center of the small room sat my grandfather, C. T. Apperson. He was drinking a beer and having a cigarette; well dressed in a suit and tie, his fedora cocked back on his head, revealing his forehead and widow’s peak. The ruby ring he wore moved in and out of the light as he turned over and over in his hand a pack of Chesterfield cigarettes. In the dream, I thought, “this is real, because I can feel the coal dust under my feet,” I could even hear it as I shuffled my feet under the chair, across the concrete floor, the smell of travel and journey, of oil and gas thick in the air. He was mumbling and I could barely hear him. I leaned forward, asking “what?” desperate to hear what he was saying. Frustrated with his mumbling, with my arms crossed I sat back in my chair and watched him, a man I had never met. Finally, he looked across at me and said, “Aw hell, go ahead and write it.” Never before and never since have I dreamed him. What follows are my attempts to honor his blessing.

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The Poco Field

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Introduction

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The Places toward Which I Seem to Bend

The Poco Field: An American Story of Place is an effort to hear the stories, to understand the places at the edges of a particular family’s history and photographs, and to gain a deeper understanding of Appalachian and American culture. This book is an endeavor to give voice to the experiences and histories that rest behind the silences and assumptions of middle-class American culture and the global economy. The Poco Field encourages a new vision of what it means to take seriously the whole way of life of a place and the people who daily define it. I demonstrate that it is possible and then explore what it means to undertake a critique of contemporary American culture from the complex perspective and experiences of middle-class persons in an Appalachian place, narrating a history of larger economic, political, and social forces and at the same time, in the same place, a “people’s history.”1 In so doing, The Poco Field challenges ideas of Appalachian exceptionalism, that Appalachia is somehow separate and distinct from America, countering ideas and images of Appalachia as metaphor for America. The Poco Field runs counter to many long-held and honored assumptions and understandings, and at the same time deepens and expands much of the current usages of place-based approaches and practices. Not yet twenty-six years old, fresh out of seminary in 1986, I took an appointment in four rural churches in Wythe County, Virginia. In seminary, I received a thorough and careful education in the theology of community, in the importance of inclusive communities, in communities of faith, suffering communities, covenant communities, disciple communities, and the list could go on. I carried this with me when I went to Wythe County. In listening to my neighbors and learning from them, I was able to discern a wide distance between my training to think about community and my neighbors’ understanding of it. In truth, what I learned about community as a seminary student had little bearing on how the communities in which I found myself practiced and experienced their interweaving. My training in community did not allow for the possibility of all manner of conflict, of political struggle, of social exclusion, of social change, of resistance to justice, of the death of

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2  /  introduction

communities, or of defeat. From many of my Wythe County neighbors, I learned that instead of communities, they spoke of themselves as being in that place. They often used the term “community,” but they were talking of something more geographic, more social, and more dynamic than I was first able to understand.2 In the years that followed, I came to understand that theologians, Chambers of Commerce, advertisers, politicians, planners, artists, scholars, essayists, novelists, and playwrights often spoke of community and used the term in the most positive and affirming ways possible. No one had one bad thing to say about community. Likewise, no one had anything historically or culturally specific to say about community either. Community had seemingly become a term that anyone could use for any purpose. With years of learning and reflection, I came to understand what my Wythe County neighbors had perhaps known—because of its particularity, because it acknowledges and owns the reality of social and cultural conflicts, place is a far better way to speak about some of what we mean by community with its avoidance of conflict.3 The Poco Field begins from the observation that any place is the result of a prolonged interaction and interrelationship between three complex realities. The natural environment (topography, landscape, minerals, climate, and water supply, etc. . . . ) helps to determine the type of social relationships and economic systems produced in a specific place. The built environment is the human response to and appropriation of the land, climate, and other natural resources for subsistence, profit, and power. This constitutes the basis for social hierarchies and interac­tions in a place. Human cul­ture and history, the whole way of life of a place, mutually interactive with the natural and built environments, consti­tutes the third element of place. Place is a social process, the product of human relationships lived out in a specific landscape, in the context of social and cultural forces and conflicts known in that place as well as in other places formed in analogous processes.4 Understanding place through the interconnection of oral histories, family stories, and photographs demonstrates that individual identities, family histories, social conflicts, global economics, local culture, social structures, art, politics, and the natural environment are all interwoven and inseparable. Because place is a social process, the human community, the citizens of a place, bear responsibility for continuing and sustaining this interweaving, but also have the potential to destroy, to render broken and torn the place interwoven over a long, long history. These insights make clear that place is always more complicated, more political, more conflicted than what many people have in mind when referring to community and “sense of place.” Because place is largely the continuing result of

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The Places toward Which I Seem to Bend  /  3

the interaction between human culture and the physical environment, every place is defined by deep conflicts of persons, institutions, and processes, both local and global.5 In Saltville, Virginia; Keystone, West Virginia; Sea Island, South Carolina; Manhattan, Kansas; Burlington, Vermont; in the neighborhoods of Brooklyn, New York; in New Orleans’ lower Ninth Ward; and in hundreds of other American localities, citizens concerned about the future of their communities are learning that education, questions of identity, public policies, politics, and cultural analysis undertaken from the perspective of the place are central to building enduring, sustainable communities. Citizens are also learning that the choice for this place-based work requires intellectual, civic, and moral skills that often are not part of the educational process or the development of citizens. Instead, American middle-class culture, in the main, conveys messages and lessons of moving on, of going where the most money is, or the best education is, or the most stylish shopping. One’s place, however central to one’s identity it may be, is of secondary importance to social status, economic success, professional advancement, and full access to consumer goods.6 These lessons of placelessness go to the root of who we are as Americans. Corporations also enact this when the resources of a particular place are depleted or no longer needed, operations are closed, support withdrawn, responsibility denied, and the corporation moves on to the next fashionable or valuable place. The prevailing wisdom seems to be that if citizens have access to the world’s consumer goods, their place is of little value, and places are interchangeable. Little does it matter that consumer goods often work to obliterate or obscure that communities have died and are dying, or that our prospect for full participation in the decisions and policies that affect our places is lost. Fast-food restaurants, national chain stores, and strip malls at an Interstate exit are becoming the standards by which communities judge their success and individuals measure their well-being.7 Because individual lives and the collective life of particular places carry in them history and the global issues of the time, family stories and local histories make clear that these tendencies are part of the very fabric of the varied American cultures, traceable in American history from its beginnings, shaping who we are and how we think both of ourselves and of the practice of citizenship.8 However, these changes and processes acquired intensity and new force in the twentieth century, particularly in the decades after 1945. In these years, one among the many tensions for Americans became on one hand commitment or connection to a place. On the other hand, there is the expectation that to move ahead, to fulfill one’s destiny, to continue to lay claim

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4  /  introduction

to an idealized American Dream, one must always be willing to move on to claim the opportunities America is believed to offer. Citizens working for sustainable communities are also often finding that the same family stories and local histories that point to tensions and losses can also point the way in building new, democratic futures in a place. For citizens engaged in this work, the concepts and methodologies of cultural studies prove helpful. Moreover, the stories of families and places are giving new relevancy to the concepts and ideas of cultural studies, moving us beyond jargon and passing trends, demonstrating the power of cultural theory to help us understand our lives and to question long-held assumptions.9 However, much more is needed to equip us for the important work of building stronger communities. We must have a clear idea of the difference between working for a community and working for a place. We need a precise understanding of what constitutes places—geographically, geologically, historically, socially, culturally. We need a working and growing acquaintance with the dynamic interconnection between place and identity and the longterm political, social, and cultural importance of place. There must be for us a deepening and broadening awareness that the cultural and social processes that have brought us to this point are so common as to be embedded in one way or another in all families’ stories and all places’ histories.10 This requires a scholarship, educational practice, and civic life theoretically and practically grounded in specific places. Understanding American culture from the perspective of particular places, especially many Appalachian places, becomes a definitive political act by using the usually unrecorded, lived experiences of places to make connections between personal stories and local histories and the events and social practices of larger cultural and social history. Taking a place’s perspective to understand our lives and times helps create the conditions of possibility in which people can think and act in new ways, supporting the emergence of new social structures and practices. The interdisciplinary practice of focusing on particular places and lives to tell American stories can contribute to the work of enabling young Appalachians and persons from other regions to see their places and families in new ways, not so much as something to escape, but as a source of identity and strength, informing the practice of a daily, engaged citizenship. We must be mindful, however, that working to give voice to a place is often a painful and unsettling undertaking, forcing us to acknowledge in our own identities and families the historical processes and deep rootedness of geographic, race, gender, and class biases. Moreover, by engaging in this kind of

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The Places toward Which I Seem to Bend  /  5

work, we are sometimes brought to realize our unconscious complicity in and conscious acceptance of the devaluation of Appalachian places and histories. The Poco Field offers a journey into these questions and possibilities. As such, it is a journey to two particular places, but also a journey toward deeper understanding of the complexities and issues interwoven with them. This journey provides vistas and perspectives, not just across landscapes and streetscapes, but also on larger issues and questions of places and structures of values and practices, of who we are as Americans and questions of citizenship. This is a journey mapped in daily life, in routine work, in shared family stories, in difficult decisions, in loss, and in places scarred and passed by in other journeys to the American Dream. In the first chapter, “To Hold Hands with My Kin,” I begin my family’s story, suggesting that there is more to the story than is apparent at first. I argue that place becomes a way to understand, to gain entry to, that larger story. This chapter builds on the understanding that individual lives and particular places carry in them larger histories and broader questions. In chapter two, “The Poco Field,” I explore the first two elements of place, the natural and built environments in what came to be the Pocahontas coalfields. I begin this thick description by taking the long view of the geology of McDowell County, West Virginia, sketching that history from the earliest formations of earth and water. These elemental realities are at the core of what has made McDowell distinctive in the history of industrialization in the United States. I then move to the long human history through what we now know as the Elkhorn Valley and the larger area of McDowell County. This is a history of valuable hunting grounds, settlement, and travel along the creeks and rivers of the region, recurring conflicts and ongoing struggles for control of the land and its resources, not just between the Native peoples and Anglo settlers, but within these groups as well. Because other historians and persons engaged in cultural studies have already covered much of the history of West Virginia’s secession from Virginia during the Civil War, I do not focus as much attention on this portion of McDowell’s history. Instead, I look to the ways the conflicts of the Civil War and Reconstruction created the conditions of possibility for the racial diversity that defined life in the Pocahontas coalfields in the twentieth century and continue now. By focusing this journey on the towns of the Elkhorn Valley and particularly on Keystone, and the pioneering coal operator Thomas Edgar Houston, I give attention to the social and cultural conflicts that have defined that place since the advent of coal mining. Connected to the early social conflicts defining this place,

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these more contemporary conflicts have their roots in the great wealth the extraordinary geological resources lying just below the surface promised to those who controlled those resources. Building on this work, Keystone and its two neighborhoods of Cinder Bottom and Westfield offer a way to speak of the intersections of place, culture, and politics in America. Because it was an incorporated, independent town, and not a company town, from its earliest establishment Keystone was a commercial center for the surrounding company towns. “Playing a multifaceted role,” Keystone was a “way station between the Pocahontas coalfield and the nation as a whole.”11 The third chapter, “On a Plane with the Best in the Country,” provides a larger cultural and social context to the transition from the Houston Company to the Koppers Company, the coal company operating in Keystone during the 1930s and 1940s. Here, I trace the issues of conflict and control as they defined the Poco field. This chapter highlights the ways in which Koppers worked to rehabilitate the image of the company store, at the same time setting itself against federal policies and programs designed to address the economic crises and human suffering of the Depression of the 1930s. The same day my newlywed grandparents returned from a family gathering in Newbern, Virginia, in that place and other places throughout Appalachia there were many people for whom the disparity­between their daily circumstances and the American standard of success was painfully widening. In Keystone, there were persons for whom the hardscrabble struggle to claim the same sort of respectability my family sought resulted in loss and frustration.12 In the Koppers Company, there were men and women, whites and persons of color, who worked just as hard as my grandparents but whose names are now lost to all but a few. The chapter’s name derives from the 1930 West Virginia Review article in which first appears the recurring company brag that Koppers had put its Poco field operations “on a plane with the best in the country.”13 The measures of this standard were the top-quality consumer goods and customer service made available in the Koppers company stores. Koppers used advertising images, the abundance of consumer goods, and its self-touted reputation for fair business dealings to mask its efforts at control: racist practices as well as systematic, executive-sanctioned injustices toward other employees. The fourth chapter, “Moving to Westfield,” explores human culture and history as the third element of place, using the whole way of life of a particular neighborhood as a means of talking about American middle-class culture, alignments, and divisions. Westfield is the neighborhood, a physical place on the west end of Keystone, where the Appersons purchased their first home in August 1945. For them, this neighborhood and their home came to symbolize

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their arrival at the American Dream. However, in The Poco Field, Westfield is more than a neighborhood, but a way of thinking and speaking of the convergence of values, assumptions, expectations, beliefs, practices, silences, and contradictions embedded in a global consumer culture and American middleclass identity, particularly in relationship to place. Building on and extending the work of other studies of the American middle class of the same period, with the neighborhood as both a portal of entrance and a place of departure, The Poco Field employs Westfield to examine the American middle class culture, its values of consumerism, and its ideals of placelessness.14 Westfield offers a way to examine tangibly and historically the cliché of an American Dream, adding to it a greater specificity and particularity that these earlier studies often lacked. The use of Westfield is also a means of going beyond those earlier studies of middle-class America to explore and question the ambiguities and costs of claiming a place identity, and at the same time being a part of a larger culture that does not honor or validate that identity or those choices. This approach to Westfield as a means of speaking of a network of values and assumptions, depends on my grandparents’ story, their efforts to claim what they saw as the American Dream, and the costs those efforts exacted. The fifth chapter, “He Saw It Coming,” discusses the implications of this idea of Westfield as structure and network of practices and contradictions. This part of the journey builds from the importance of place to my grandfather’s identity and how after leaving the Pocahontas coalfields, that place continued to shape him. My grandfather’s place identity was in deep conflict with the Westfield structures to which he had committed his life.15 The ongoing contradictions between place and Westfield as a collection of values that enact placelessness have taken their toll in staggering ways in the years since my grandparents left the Poco field. In this part of the journey to, and in, a place, I will explore how Westfield has been relentless in its own trek across the McDowell landscape and the damages it has exacted on the people of that place. Here, it is important to note that The Poco Field undertakes a dual work. This journey suggests the experience of Westfield in McDowell is unique and distinctive from American culture, history, and society and at the same time commonplace and emblematic of American culture, history, and society. The county’s history of industrial development, the unbridled power that sought, and seeks, to control the wealth to be made there and to reduce the place to its value in the market, and the examples of corruption, environmental destruction, and civic malfeasance all suggest a place somehow divergent and set apart from other places in America. However, this book will make

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clear that arguments for the dissimilarity of the Poco field from the rest of America engage in the same Westfield practices and assumptions that have wrought so much damage in this place. Rather, my grandparents’ lives, their aspirations for Westfield, their hopes and hard work all suggest a deep and enduring resonance between this place, even with its distinct history, and all American places and the wider American culture and society. In chapter six, “Through the Deep Waters,” my grandmother’s life, work, and choices beyond the Poco field, in her homeplace of Newbern, Virginia, serve as the map for this part of the journey, suggesting ways that persons, guided by a place-based citizenship can and do work for change and for new futures for their places, beyond Westfield’s boundaries and limits. This part of the journey also depends on the stories of the people of Big Creek People in Action, located in Caretta, West Virginia, as they struggle with the difficult decisions about staying in a place, and confronting ongoing, enduring resistance and disappointments.16 These stories demonstrate that the gifts and talents, the vision and the driving force persons bring to the work of a placebased citizenship are quite apart from any values Westfield attaches to those persons or denies to them.17 The chapter also offers opportunities to hear the stories of persons outside the boundaries of my grandparents’ Westfield who have remained in McDowell County, working for that place. The seventh chapter, “He Always Wanted a Cadillac,” examines the divisions Westfield culture exacts among people, and how the stories people tell of their places express those divisions. This part of the journey draws on a considerable range of oral histories to explore the dynamics of class identity, place identity, and understanding of what it means to be Appalachian in America. Depending on this work, The Poco Field traces the contours and processes of place-based education and scholarship, arguing that the skills and choices that make possible a deeper knowledge of place and effective connections between people can prompt a place-based citizenship and are available through particular educational practices. Central to this discussion is a refusal of the traditional definitions of classroom and teacher, replacing them with the principles of democratic education practice and relational learning. In this educational work, my grandmother and her neighbors, and the people working in McDowell today are our teachers and our cartographers, providing us with new maps and new resources for alternative journeys. Chapter eight, “The Poco Field: Elegy and Ferocious Hope,” serves as a conclusion to The Poco Field, suggesting that the point has not been so much to mourn the losses and to grieve the past, but to equip us for a more engaged and effective citizenship of place. This final part of the journey traces the shape

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The Places toward Which I Seem to Bend  /  9

of a citizenship that responds to Paul Theobald’s concept of intradependence, or the choice “to exist by virtue of necessary relations within a place.”18 The intradependence of a citizenship of place asks us to struggle with the pressing issues and questions of our places, questions that quite often defy easy or right answers, requiring instead honest responses. This is a citizenship defined in listening and negotiation and in the restoration of a place to its deep complexity. A citizenship of place abides the contradictions and ironies of place, interweaving our lives with one another and with the place. From this, in the face of every reason to abandon our places, my grandmother, as well as persons now working and serving in McDowell offer ways to envision remaining in and serving a place and its people, suggesting the values and alliances that are necessary to sustain those choices.19 Throughout this journey, I work to maintain a material, social definition of place. I understand place as both shaped by and shaping social conflict and change, and I refuse to accept a false and dangerous separation of these ongoing realities. From this refusal grows a deep knowledge of a place, beginning with geological and geographic factors that are its foundations. This deep knowledge also entails connecting the long human history that has transpired across a landscape to its geography and geology and demonstrating the material roots of the human culture in a place. The prevailing demographic and social patterns of the place, the ways in which global economic and political forces affect its economic work, are also a part of this history. Placed scholarship demonstrates the connections between people’s daily experiences, values, choices, and relationships and a place’s long, long history. One family’s stories connect with another’s, and together they are connected to and can point to all that has shaped that place over time. Family stories, oral histories, old photographs, the daily work of kitchen and home and mine and factory and barnyard, the history of human struggle in the place, combine to represent individual lives and choices in their fullness, a representation unavailable through means that are more traditional.20 In his novel, Ireland, Frank Delaney tells of an old, itinerate storyteller and his grandson, a scholar and historian. As the grandson comes to know his grandfather through his stories and the places and the history about which he tells his stories, the novel makes clear there is little distance and no geography between the storyteller’s craft and the scholar’s work; they both serve the place. For Delaney’s storyteller and historian, that place is Ireland. Toward the end of the novel, the grandson has gone in search of his grandfather, seeking to restore connections that have been lost. On his journey across Ireland, by foot, the grandson comes to know the places of his grandfather’s stories, and

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the grandfather, suspecting that his grandson will follow, leaves for him letters telling of his life and understandings, his struggles and doubts. In one letter, the grandfather storyteller writes to his grandson telling of the journeys he has made, “I seem to bend myself in the direction of places where history gleams brightest.”21 The places toward which I have seemed to bend in this journey are Newbern, in Pulaski County, Virginia, and the Elkhorn Valley, Keystone, and Caretta, in McDowell County, West Virginia, places where history, and even hope, brightly gleam.

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To Hold Hands with My Kin

They came by the scores of hundreds. On their way to the Old Southwest and Old Northwest territories, toward Kentucky and Tennessee, toward the Ohio, the Mississippi, and beyond, down the Valley of Virginia, they followed what has been variously described as the Great Road, the Great Wagon Road, the Wilderness Road, the Baltimore Turnpike, the Valley Pike, even known derisively as the Irish Road, for the great number of Irish immigrants who journeyed over it.1 From where it entered Virginia below Hagerstown, Maryland, the route ascended to the upper valley, at its southern end. After crossing the New River at Ingles Ferry, the road climbed steadily. Eight miles west of the river crossing, approaching the summit of a long ridge, the teams of horses and oxen would have strained in their harnesses and yokes against the backward pull of the climb, and those afoot would have leaned into the effort. Reaching the crest, the road descended through the town spread along the road. North and west of the town, the surrounding country is rich with limestone soil, upland pastures, and fields of small grain. Here, the farms were large and productive, but there are few springs. South and east of the town, the land is broken and uneven, with stone outcroppings along the ridges and hills, all the way to the New River, some two-and-a-half miles distant. Across this rough and broken country, there is an abundance of bold, clear springs and creeks, carving their way to the river. At the river, there are stretches of limestone bluffs, some as much as three hundred feet high, forcing the river into long, sweeping bends. South of the river, before the land begins its rise to the Blue Ridge, a broad bottomland was productive in wheat.2

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Figure 1. Mary Williams at the door to the front room, late 1950s. Williams-Apperson Collection.

From the town’s “high and airy” position on the ridge, this varied country was visible in all directions.3 Established in the third decade of the nineteenth century, the Germans who settled and built the town called the place Newbern, because the broad views the place afforded of the surrounding mountains and ridges were reminiscent to them of the Swiss city of Bern. Then the only town in the sixty miles between Wytheville and Christiansburg, major stops on the road west, Newbern derived its initial life from the farmers of the area and the commerce associated with the Great Road. Along this road, through this place, journeyed all of the contradictions and complications of American society. Through Newbern came members of the first waves of immigrants to America. For many, these were journeys to stake a claim in a new Promised Land, to become somebody, to have more than they had in their earlier lives and their former places. Their journeys would lead them to places where they and their children after them would prosper. There were persons journeying along this road whose ambitions were more modest; carrying very little with them, they hoped to reach some place, any place, where they would have a small plot of ground with its assurances of enough to eat, of shelter, and of clothing. Through this place came those whose long-held hopes propelled their journeys to that American Promised Land, only to have their hopes dashed and crushed time and again—for themselves, for their children, and for their grandchildren. Others, wives and daughters mostly,

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To Hold Hands with My Kin  /  13

had no choice and made their way from homes and neighbors, uprooting families because the head of the household had determined it so. Still others came along this road as chattel. With the depletion of the soil from the farming of tobacco on the plantations of Piedmont and Tidewater Virginia, planters sold surplus slaves in order to settle overwhelming debts. White owners separated families by the thousands, selling individuals to the burgeoning slave trade in the new cotton plantations of Alabama and Mississippi. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, Virginia was the leading exporter of slaves to the Deep South. Along the Great Road, these women, children, men, young and old, torn from family and friends, came in groups, chained, manacled, and bound together, walking, and stumbling, weeping. Their white drivers rode in wagons and on horseback. In 1834, an Englishman noted a coffle of three hundred slaves wading, stumbling, and dragged across the New River, at Ingles Ferry, on its way to Tennessee.4 Somewhere in Newbern, probably on the lower end of the town, as in every town along the Great Road, there was a pen, without shelter from the weather, stinking of human excrement and misery, where these people were chained and kept, allowed only enough movement to fix their meal and go to bed for the night before pushing on. Regardless of the reasons for their journeys, all of these people passed Newbern’s assortment of houses and businesses, fronting and opening directly on the road. Most of the houses were of log construction, built according to the codes the town’s founders had established: at least one-and-a-half stories, with a minimum of two window “lights.”5 Taverns, hotels, harness makers and saddleries, wagon makers and repair shops, liveries, wheelwrights, blacksmiths, cobblers, coopers, and a host of other craft artisans did business in Newbern, catering to the demands of the journeyers. Yet as they approached Newbern from the east, after the long uphill pull from the river crossing, the first structures the travelers passed were those located at the ridge’s highest point. Here, the founders situated the Methodist Church and, across the road, a log structure that served as a school for the children of the town who could afford the cost of tuition, there being no universal education. After the advent of public education, and the building of a larger public school on the lower end of the town, my great-great grandfather, Francis Marion Farmer, acquired the old school building. Disabled from wounds received as a young man in the Civil War, unable to maintain the family’s farm on the New River, and suffering significant economic difficulties in the postreconstruction economy, Frank Farmer moved his family to Newbern where he would work as a general laborer and carpenter, doing odd jobs and small-scale construction. In increments, as they had the money, Frank modified the old school to serve as their home. Adding rooms and partitions,

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Frank’s work echoed the topography and geology of the place, building over and around rock outcrops. Eventually a six-room house, with a second-story loft on one end, each room was on a different level, requiring steps up or steps down to go from room to room. There not being ground free enough of large rocks to dig a deep or large cellar, he wedged the cellar into the hill, beneath the back corner of the house, its rough walls of limestone rock fitted and mortared together, rising five feet above the ground level of the sharp gradient of the ridge. Many of those rocks weighed more than a man, leaving the next generations to wonder how he had done it. My mother’s family had occupied the house since. When I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, it was over one hundred and forty years old. My great grandparents, Mary Farmer and E. C. Williams reared their eight children here, and my grandmother, their sixth child, lived here in the last thirty years of her life. Taken sometime after 1955, the photograph of Mary Williams (Figure 1) is one of a series of photographs constituting a photographic essay of Mary in several rooms of the house at Newbern, carrying a lantern. The photographer was an employee of the Appalachian Power Company, and the photographs helped illustrate a promotional campaign for the company.6 Just as the journeys through this place speak of the contradictions and tensions in American culture and history, these photographs point to tensions and conflicts in contemporary American culture and to the ways that these same tensions and conflicts also underwrite many understandings and appropriations of place in America, particularly many Appalachian places. To discern these tensions, conflicts, and ambivalences requires the perspective of the place, lived and known. The oral histories of her family and neighbors give place to this photograph of Mary Williams at the door of her home. From that place, what is most striking about this photograph are its silences. The photograph compresses a family’s history, the places they knew, the complex and difficult choices they made, their social aspirations, their economic strug­gles, and their journeys into a few images of Mary Williams as a repre­senta­tive of the past and an ornament for the present. Yet the oral histories from Mary’s family and neighbors also help to give voice to the fragments of stories residing beyond the silences of those images of Mary with the lantern. When asked what comes to mind when they look at that photo­graph, Mary’s surviving children and grand­children responded with a flood of stories and memories, conveying a life that the photograph cannot total and keep bound within its limits.7 In the photograph, Mary holds open the door with one hand; in the other hand, she holds a lighted kerosene lantern. To the left of the door is the wicker

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flower container with the geranium plants she saved from year to year and a stem of Mountain Fleece she had placed in a jar. To the right is the wire frame for delivery of the county paper. The door she is holding open is not the parlor door, but her bedroom door—“the center of every­thing in that house, that’s where we would gather and visit when we were there.” “She loved that house; she made it a good place for us.” “That house was the one security she knew she could keep; she worked to hold on to it.” “See her hands, they used to hurt her something awful when the weather got bad; you could tell she had worked.” “That bruise on her arm is from where one of her hens had flogged her; she always kept a bruise right there on her arm as long as she had chickens.”8 That she is in this house at all in the late 1950s is a witness to Mary’s refusal to move with her husband, Everett, in 1921 from Newbern seventy miles away to Keystone, West Virginia. While her husband and half of her children were eventually to move to the Pocahontas coalfields in order to find work, Mary refused to go. The family attributes her resistance, uncharacteristic of someone so deeply steeped in the traditional roles of wife, to an implicit fear of losing what little economic security she had once she left that place and that house.9 Later, when the post–World War II deindustrialization and depopulation of the coalfields began to intensify, foreclosing economic possibilities, “Granny’s house” was the place to which several members of this family returned.10 Bearing witness to the silences and contradictions of the photograph, the journeys that had passed in front of this door, and other journeys just beneath the image’s surface, the bare light bulb hanging behind her in the shadows of the room renders ridiculous the lantern Mary Williams is holding and the tradition it supposedly constructs. There had been electric service in the house for over thirty years. That she had need of the lantern is only the contrivance of the photographer.11 While Mary certainly offers important connections with the past and with traditional arts, the social migrations and upheavals produced in the successive boom and bust cycles of industrialization, economic restructuring, and the appropriation of places in Appalachia profoundly shaped the choices she and her family made and the journeys they undertook.12 When understood from and within the place, this family’s lives and their journeys were firmly set within the contradictions and conflicts of that history as they lived through it. This photograph and its contrived tradition ignores the importance of and removes Mary and her family from the experiences, silences, and social interactions that helped to constitute their lives and places, and that they assumed to be the normal requirements of living in the world. As Appalachians, Mary Williams’s family is not exceptio­nal; their very ordinariness makes their history valuable for a study of place and culture

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in America. Before her father moved his family to the converted schoolhouse, Mary’s forbears—the Godbys, Woolwines, and Farmers—were largely subsis­tence farmers and craft-arti­sans living and working within two miles of Newbern. While Mary’s great uncles, Philip and Robert Woolwine, and her great grandfather, William Godby, were slave owners, most of this extended family, and certainly those of Mary’s generation, born in the years after the Civil War, would now be described as people of poverty.13 The social history shaped and influenced by Appalachia’s topographies, in the pressures and fluctuations of global economic, political, and cultural forces, as well as their person­al choices made within the varying limits of possibilities have shaped all the genera­tions of Mary’s family. Mary, her husband, Everett Cox Williams, and their children lived in industrial villages, rural towns and hamlets, coal towns, and shipping centers depen­dent on the railroad. The generation of her great­gra­ndchil­dren is widely scat­tered, and only a few of that genera­tion can claim any sort of Appala­chian identi­ty. After dinner on Sunday after­noons, and before excusing ourselves from the table to play, we listened as my mother, grandmother, and a whole connection of this family told stories of places, work, and people they had known. Together my family’s memories, stories, fragments of stories, letters, legal records, and photographs compel an understanding of place as a complex material, social reality and as a fundamen­tal element in shaping personal and family identity. In their stories and choices, this family makes clear that place is more deeply multifaceted and more expansive than this photograph suggests. Although they never described themselves as Appalac­hians, Appalachian plac­es were among the steady sources of their identity.14 Everyday occurrences often evoked place associations: “these flowers have always reminded me of the railroad bank in Burke”; “that looks like a Newbern sunset”; “that road reminds me of West Virginia.”15 Places and their associations helped identify favorite recipes: “that’s a West Virginia choco­late cake,” “this is an old West Virginia recipe”; “I got that recipe from somebody in Keystone,” “that tastes like Jewell Ridge,” “that’s laripin’ good truck.”16 Of the dozens of photographs taken from the late 1890s through the middle 1980s and mounted in the family’s albums, only a few identify the individuals pictured. Instead, almost universally this family labeled photographs according to the places in which they were made: kin people, friends, civic events, houses, flood-damaged buildings, landscapes, and workplaces are all identified in terms of the place in which the family was living at the time. In their letters and oral histories, Mary’s family further substantiates that personal identity was closely related to experi­ences of places and that they saw

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these places in terms of work and relationships.17 The historical record left by the generations of this family indicates that while they never articulated it precisely, they understood these lived places to be the result of an inter­ac­tion between the physical geography, econom­ic work, and an inter­connec­ted social network. Connecting this family’s history to the record of industrialization, migration, and deindustrialization in Appalachia, enables us to discern more easily the ways in which people and corporations have worked to dominate and control place, steadily incorporating all of the elements of social life into the practices and structures of the market and the American industrial engine. The historical records my grandmother and great grandmother preserved cover the same time that the social values of the market have penetrated all aspects of society and culture, so that it is increasingly difficult to have any awareness outside that reality. “Old Places have to be devalued, destroyed, and redeveloped while new places are created . . . the mining community becomes a ghost town, the old industrial center is deindustrialized . . .,” all in the interest of “new styles of production and consumption.”18 The root of this issue is the necessity for wealth always to grow and to be mobile in order to maintain its power. Often obscured under a language of progress and betterment, ignored in civic boosterism, this process of growth and mobility reduces places to objective commodities; largely forgotten are a place’s people, their journeys, and their struggles. The oral histories from other Appalachians, the stories­, letters, and photographs from my family, histories of industrialization in Appalachian places all converge to illustrate that these processes have deep roots, influencing lives for hundreds of years. The historical record my family has preserved offers a basis for understanding this history in its personal terms as well as the opportunity to propose collective responses to the processes by which all the world is consumed in the interests of the economic control of a place.

December 3, 1933, “At Home” With copies pasted into albums, saved between the pages of Bibles, and tucked into the corners of dresser mirrors, each of my grandmother’s siblings held a special and enduring regard for this photograph (figure 2). In her photograph album, Mary Williams identified the image with the phrase, “At Home.” From the perspective of the intervening years, a large part of the significance of this photograph derives from this family’s connections to each other and their shared sense of mutual belonging. This family’s relationships also point to that tradition of “taking care of each other,” which community organizers

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often cite as one of the sources for place identity and activism.19 To regard this photograph from a deep knowledge of that place also helps to discern the limited economic and social choices available to these people as they came of age, and the ways global forces helped to define the limits of their lives and those feelings of family solidarity. Taken Sunday, Decem­ber 3, 1933, in the front yard at “home” in Newber­n, Virginia, part of the reason this family attached such significance to this photograph was that it records the last time that all of Mary and Everett Williams’s children were togeth­er before the death of the youngest son, Wilbur.20 There are also other, larger reasons to find significance in this photograph. On this Sunday afternoon, after they had come from church and had their dinner, after the pictures and goodbyes, most of them would go back to work the next day. With the national nonfarm unemployment rate at 37.6 percent and the unemployment rate in McDowell County, West Virginia—the center of the Pocahontas coalfields—at more than 50 percent, that all of the secondgeneration adults in this photograph would have jobs in the middle of the Great Depression is remarkable.

Figure 2. December 3, 1933, “At Home.” Children, left to right: Harold Patteson, Ruth Evelyn Williams, Tom Patteson, Betty Patteson, Mary Lee Williams. Front row, adults kneeling: John Williams, Ruth Williams, Wilbur Williams. Second Row: Aldah Williams Apperson, Mary Williams (daughter), Mary Farmer Williams (mother), Thelma Williams Patteson, Emma Williams, Mildred Williams, Byron Williams. Back Row: Tal Apperson, Everett C. Williams, Harry (Pat) Patteson. Williams-Apperson Collection.

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To Hold Hands with My Kin  /  19

On a Saturday later in that same month, more than four hundred men, women, and children would stand in the West Virginia statehouse, under police guard, demanding relief money for jobs, food, shelter, and clothing.21 In the banking crisis that had swept over the country earlier that same year, the Board of Supervisors in Pulaski County, Virginia, the county in which Newbern is located, authorized the county’s treasurer to issue to individuals promissory certificates, equal to the amount of money persons had on deposit in county banks. Backed by the county’s treasury, the certificates ensured that the people of the county would have enough money to buy food and other necessities, forestalling runs on the banks.22 Despite all of this, these young adults had begun to identify whatever economic security they had as well as any possibili­ty for a middle-class future with the places in which they lived.23 Five of the persons in this photograph were working as clerks, bookkeepers, store managers, and shopkeepers in the Pocahontas coalfields of Tazewell County, Virginia, and McDowell County, West Virginia. Even with the crises of 1933, for most of Mary and Everett’s children, the Pocahontas coalfields offered the best possibility for the future.24 Also pictured here are the first members of the third generation of this family, who would come of age in the region during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. For most of the members of this third generation and the next, prolonged deindustrialization and depopulation foreclosed possibilities of remaining in the Pocahontas coalfields, or even in Appalachia. Resonating with many of those first journeys through Newbern on the Great Road, for all of the people in the photograph, this continuing journey from one place to another, this uprooting was part of a lifelong, hardscrabble struggle “to make something of themselves and be somebody,” to have more than they had known as children.25 Looking at this photograph six and seven decades after that day in December 1933, several of Mary’s grandchildren re­marked about how well dressed their parents and grandparents were.26 Mary’s children and grandchildren tell of Mary and her daugh­ters “making do,” plucking feath­ers from the family’s Dominique rooster to refash­ion their hats, remaking secondhand clothes according to the latest style, saving spare change for a year to purchase a specif­ic brand of cloth, using and reusing from one dress to another specially ordered buttons purchased at considerable financial sacrifice.27 Those who were their neigh­bors recall the pride these sisters took in cooking, in the cleanliness of their homes, in attractive tableware for their guests, and in “treating every­one the same.”28 They often lived in places in which their social worth and class status were judged by how well they were

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able to do battle daily with coal dust and soot where the air was dark and heavy with the filth of coal mining and railroad locomotives. In addition to their almost single-minded war on coal dust, by their tastes and relationships, Mary Williams’s daughters demonstrated that to be respectable also entailed adhering to certain rules of social interaction. Many times for these women and their daughters, the keeping of social respectability and “remembering who you are” became a matter of to whom you did not talk and the places you did not go. In oral histories from several of Mary Williams’s grandchildren, gender accounts for a significant divergence in how places are experienced and how this family remembers their struggles to claim the American Dream. In unguarded moments, some of Mary’s granddaughters told stories of the costs of trying to meet some vaguely defined standard of success. They described isolation from their neigh­bors, fights with companions, and verbal ridicule from children from working-class backgrounds. Mary’s grandsons remembered the places of their coming of age by talking of football games, camaraderie, and community, while a sister or female cousins spoke of loneliness, fear of the conflicts and tensions in those places, and deep hurt from the class-enforced silences and distances.29­ My grandparents, Calvin Talmage Apperson Jr. and Aldah Williams Apperson, are the couple on the back row in the far left of the photograph. Four days previous, on Thanksgiving Day, Thursday, November 30, they were married in the front room of the home belonging to their work supervisor in the Koppers Company Store in Keystone, West Virginia, in the heart of the Pocahontas coalfields.30

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Granny’s House After Mary Williams’s death in 1965, my grandmother and her sister remodeled the old house. In the late summer of 1966, they moved back into the house that they, their siblings, and their neighbors considered the family’s homeplace. A source of great pride for my grandmother, she never tired of taking guests to the basement to show them the logs and stones on which the house rested. Her tours of the house always included showing her guests the partition and railings her mother had made from scrap lumber, which they had saved from removal when remodeling the homeplace.31 As children during the 1960s and middle 1970s, my brothers, sisters, and I often played in the upstairs room of that house in Newbern. After dinner on Sunday afternoons, we entertained ourselves, with Granny’s guidance and help, plundering the room’s closets and drawers that contained the historical

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To Hold Hands with My Kin  /  21

record my family had collected over one hundred and fifty years in Newbern and in other places. There were hundreds of photographs of kin, neighbors, stores, houses, mines, towns, and villages. These were photographs of people and places about which we had heard stories all of our lives. We found ledger sheets, store receipts, check stubs, and clipped and folded advertisements for automobiles, mechanical washers, toasters, and other household appliances. There were church and community records. We found newspaper articles from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s about our grandmother and great grandmother, featuring their cooking skills and creative artistry with handwork. In a corner of that upstairs room, stood a black-varnished chest of drawers. The bottom drawer was crammed with memorabilia, letters, clippings, and photographs, from C. T. and Aldah Williams Apperson’s life and work from the middle 1920s through the late 1940s in Keystone, McDowell County, West Virginia. My grandmother had saved most of the letters my grandfather sent to her during their courtship and the nineteen years of their marriage. My grandfather wrote those letters on the back of sales slips from company stores, on torn scraps of paper, on postcards from Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Cincinnati. He wrote them in railroad stations, late at night in the office of a company store, and from hotels full of his fellow “store men.” Those letters convey the thoughts, life, and consciousness of a man whose name I carry, but whom I know only through the stories his family could tell from their memory. From those stories and fragments of stories told and retold over dinner tables, in vegetable gardens, at ironing boards, and at kitchen sinks, I had come to associate my grandfather with a particular place and a particular time: the twenty-two years between 1926 and 1948 that he lived and worked in the Pocahontas coalfields of McDowell County, West Virginia. One Sunday afternoon we opened that drawer; I was just learning to write in script, my handwriting following the dictates of convention and the regime of a third-grade teacher. My grandfather’s handwriting, dark and heavy with the ink of a fountain pen, was all flourishes, curls, and boldness— self-confidence and assuredness, a man whose journey had brought him to a good place. I had never seen handwriting like that before and I wanted to emulate it. Slipping one of the letters into my pocket, I took it home with me and for three weeks secretly kept it in a book in the bedroom I shared with my brother. Every day after school, I retreated to our room, closed the door, and tried to force my script into the same lines and flourishes as my grandfather’s, covering whole sheets of lined notebook paper with my efforts to make that same distinguished “A.” As I have come of age, I understand that

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more was involved in that effort than a young boy’s ambition for a distinctive handwriting style. In her novel, The Unquiet Earth, Denise Giardina writes of Jackie Honaker, who, at approximately the same age I was when I endeavored to trace the lines of Apperson’s “A,” looks at her grandmother’s photograph album. The old photographs evoke not only people whom Jackie knows, but the long connections of people and places in the coal camps of Giardina’s fictional Justice County, modeled closely on Giardina’s native McDowell County, West Virginia: “After supper I look at . . . [the] photograph album. I love the pictures all faded and brown and pasted on the black pages of the photo album with white stickers at each corner. . . . The names under the photographs are familiar. . . . They stand in front of the old Homeplace. . . . I try to wish myself into the pictures, fall asleep. . . . When I wake up I will be inside the pictures and hold hands with all my kin.”32 To hold hands with a man whom I never knew, I must know a place and the journey he made to that place. In that effort, I also come to understand an American story—its conflicts, contradictions, and its costs. In my own journey to discern, to know, and to understand, place also offers a new map for building a ferocious hope.

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The Poco Field 9–20–37 9—p.m. Dearest Aldah, Just a note to let you know that so far I’m perfectly “sober.” Haven’t really had time to c much yet since I’ve been in on all sessions. Mr. Staples is kinda “steppin” out tonight into society. Went to the “Duesque” Club as guest of the tire co. This is best convention yet. Seems to be strictly business tho not much “Big Trimming.” Not many store men here from Poco field. Sent you a wire today thru the courtesy of Swift & Co.—spose you got it o.k. I have a very good chaperone—Mr. Drinkard.

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Lots.o.Love Apperson When Apperson wrote of the Poco field and his fellow store men in 1937, he did not have a consciousness of Appalachia. Likewise, he was not thinking of the hundreds of millions of years of history, conflict, and change that had transpired across that landscape. Instead, what he knew was Keystone, West Virginia, a town built on the banks of Elkhorn Creek, the Koppers Company that operated the mine and company store in Keystone and other towns along the Elkhorn Valley, and that Koppers offered him and Aldah a chance at “making something of themselves” and “to be somebody.” Born ten years after the start of the twentieth century, he understood himself to be on the way up. For eleven years, since coming to the Elkhorn Valley as a sixteenyear-old, Apperson had been on a journey that he was confident would bring

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Figure 3. From Apperson to Aldah, September 20, 1937. Williams-Apperson Collection.

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him into the American middle class. Even in the Depression, working for a company like Koppers, America promised him much. Implied in his use of “the Poco field” is, however, a place older than either Appalachia or America, a place rooted in the foundations of the earth and defined by many journeys.

From the Foundations of the Earth Since the first half of the eighteenth century, European settlers to the colonies had known of the possibilities of coal in the area that would become the Poco field. Surveying the 800,000-acre tract of land that he had acquired in 1749 from the colonial government, Dr. Thomas Walker made notes in his journal of the presence of frequent coal outcrops above streambeds in the heavily wooded, deep valleys. In the western Virginia campaign of 1861, Jedidiah Hotchkiss, Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s cartographer, noted the presence of coal outcrops on the eastern slope of Flat Top Mountain. Following the war, Hotchkiss affiliated himself with several former Confederates

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The Poco Field  /  25

intent on creating in the postwar South a new industrial society for which coal would be essential. Hotchkiss believed that with access to coal, the iron manufacturing industry then active in Pulaski and Wythe counties and along the western slope of the Blue Ridge could compete and even eclipse the nascent industrial development around Pittsburgh. In pursuit of this vision, Hotchkiss hired Isaiah Welch, a former Confederate captain and geologist who was working at the time in a sawmill at Dublin Depot, two miles northeast of Newbern, to determine the extent of the coal in what would become the Pocahontas coalfield. In the late winter and early spring of 1873, Welch journeyed through Tazewell, McDowell, Mercer, and Wyoming counties mapping where and how the coal lay.1 Political boundaries were incidental to Welch’s journey and superficial to the topography over which he traveled. Rather, he traced and followed the millennia-old, furrowing work of the watercourses as they sliced through the stone and earth, exposing edges of an extensive bed of coal. Following from outcrop to outcrop, Welch journeyed along the southeastern slope of Flat Top Mountain following Laurel Creek to its juncture with the Bluestone and then westward across Flat Top. At the watershed divide, he traced the headwaters of the Guyandotte River, traveled the Guyandotte in a westerly direction and then moved upstream along one of the Guyandotte’s tributaries, Indian Creek, toward its source. Crossing Indian Ridge, Welch came down the tributaries of Brown’s Creek, and then along this stream to where it joined the Tug River. Moving upstream, he followed the Tug to Elkhorn Creek, and then up the Elkhorn to a large spring on the western side of Flat Top Mountain. Crossing Flat Top, Welch returned to his starting place in Tazewell County, Virginia, all the way marking and making note of coal outcrops.2 Coming as it did in the late winter and early spring, there may still have been snow on the ground on the northern slopes of ridges and mountains. As is typical in the mountains of Virginia and West Virginia in the long turning of winter to spring, there would have been days defined in stark contrasts and contradictions: sharp wind-driven snow and rain, followed immediately by full sun, melting what little snow had accumulated in the brief, windy bursts. There were probably days when thick clouds above the trees threatened either heavy snow or cold rain, winds moving the tree limbs and scouring the ground at the ridgetops, the woods creaking and moaning with the movement. When Welch set out, there may have been icicles hanging from rock faces, thickened and lengthened by the constant seep of water. In the mornings, eddies at the edges of streams and shallow pools of water in the low places would have been crusted with thin ice. Tracking the coal,

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Welch traveled through what he later described as “an almost impenetrable jungle of hemlock and rhododendron.”3 On his journey, Welch encountered a place little changed from the time the first tribal peoples passed through on their own journeys of hunting and trading. In the bottomlands, at the mouth of the hollows, where the springs and creeks emptied into the Elkhorn, there were individual farmers and small free holds of subsistence farming with an extended family or several families living and working together. Distances of several miles, through rough and heavily timbered country, separated these small family homesteads. Back from the houses, barns, and other outbuildings, further up in the hollows, Welch would have passed through immense stretches of untouched chestnut, white oak, red oak, hickory, ash, hemlock, walnut, maple, beech, and poplar.4 Of these species, the chestnut was the most numerous, dominating the entire forest.5 With a forest canopy thick and high, there was little undergrowth and Welch could have seen long distances, following with his eyes the coal outcrops, its exposed face bearded with humus and moss. Perhaps less noticeable to him because it was not what he had journeyed to see, through the woodland, there would have been evidence of panthers, bobcats, bears, deer, wolves, turkey, foxes, squirrels, elk. In the very early spring, he may have seen the stray elk antler shed in preparation for the coming season, and lying on the forest floor, now a source of calcium for rodents or other small animals. From time to time, he would have heard screech and call, or snorting, rooting, and spring rutting. Beneath the several hundredyear-old chestnuts, turkey and deer would have scratched through moss, leaf mold, and opened burrs to get to the chestnuts that lay thick throughout the late autumn, winter, and early spring. He would have encountered hogs and a few cattle the farmers had allowed to roam, feeding on the mast.6 There would have been the sounds of birds, the first harbingers of the approach of the mating season. Later in the season, the calls and songs would have defined the morning throughout those woods. Welch could have seen hawks, eagles, and other birds of prey nested on the ledges and boulders at the top of ridges, in the highest trees, hundreds of feet above the valley floor. In places, there may have even been signs of passenger pigeons, once the most numerous birds in North America, but by the 1870s, their numbers were already on the decline from hunting in other regions of the continent. If there had been a small vanguard of passenger pigeons on their northward migratory route, and he had noticed them, he would have seen the striking blue and red plumage that contrasted them against the brown and grey of the early spring mountains.

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Everywhere were the seeps and freshets, the creeks and springs. Flowing clear, the spring water came filtered through layers of topsoil and rock, gentled and filtered by humus, moss, fern, and the spreading canopy. The deeper and larger watercourses were home to fish of various kinds, muskrat, otter, and beaver. Shaded by laurel and rhododendron, the water caught the late winter sun in dapples and diagonals of light. In the bottoms, there would have been canebrakes dense and thick enough as to be impassable to everything but beaver and the smallest animals and birds.7 While he passed through a place of stunning ecological diversity and complexity, rich with life even at the end of the season of dormancy, and a long history of change and human interaction with the land, Welch was hired to investigate what lay just below the surface of all this. Welch’s surveying journey confirmed all of the earlier reports about the presence of coal in the area, but made clear that the extent of the coal measures was vaster and at much easier accessibility than anyone had yet realized. Upon returning to Pulaski County, Welch made his report to Hotchkiss, pointing to coal outcrops marked on a map, describing the watersheds and the places at which the streams had converged. He offered one caveat. While the coal was of a remarkable extent and offered great potential for investors, the ruggedness of the terrain and the remoteness from major industrial markets made transportation the central issue.8 Hotchkiss used the report to increase his promotional efforts, working to attract land speculators, railroads, and other investments. Convinced of the potential of their own vision, Hotchkiss, Welch, and others began acquiring tracts of land. Welch bought several large parcels of land in the area where the Elkhorn joins the Tug, which later became the town of Welch, the county seat of McDowell County. Although all of these were entrepreneurs and understood the potential for great wealth, they lacked enough financial capital to bring it to full reality. In May 1881 the man with access to the financial resources required to birth the Pocahontas coalfield, rode on horseback along the “eastward escarpment of the coal region.”9 Hotchkiss had come to know Frederick Kimball, the first vice president of the newly formed Norfolk and Western Railway, as Hotchkiss had lobbied directors of banks and railroads, investors and speculators. Hearing Hotchkiss’s presentation, Frederick J. Kimball became obsessed with visions of his railroad taking advantage of the vast coal reserves that reports and surveys indicated lay along the Virginia–West Virginia border.10 Accompanying Kimball on his May 1881 exploration was Edward T. Steel, a Philadelphia capitalist who shared Kimball’s enthusiasm for building a rail line to bring coal to the world’s expanding industrial markets. Although Welch had traveled the watersheds

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and valleys during the late winter and very early spring, when Kimball and Steel explored the place eight years later in the new green of May, the place was unchanged. With spring fully in place, the virgin forests and stream banks would have teemed and throbbed with life. Depending on Hotchkiss’s recommendations, and the maps and notes from Welch’s journey, Kimball and his companion traced the coal outcrops along the greening ridges and above the clear water, devising plans as they went.11 Based on what Kimball saw and the plans formulated on his journey, “the Flat Top region became the immediate objective of the Norfolk and Western.”12 A vision of place as an economic instrument solely for appropriation of private wealth had motivated the life and work of many in the valley, including some with whom Welch and then Kimball might have visited on their journey.13 However, Kimball had the capital resources to bring that vision to stunning reality. Returning to Philadelphia, Kimball and his backers set in motion the process that would reduce the living complexity of the place they encountered to an individual component part in American industrialization, marking a dramatic shift in the fortunes of the Elkhorn Valley and causing the place to conform to their vision. In fewer than five years after Kimball’s journey, African Americans, native whites, and European immigrants would work as the employees of coal companies to fell the stands of timber, and the May green of the valley and woods would be tinged gray and black, every surface made gritty with the settling dust of coal brought from the very foundations of the earth. Hundreds of millions of years before Welch and Kimball journeyed by horseback through the woods, the landmasses geologists describe as Laurentia and Gondwanaland and other smaller landmasses incrementally shifted and drifted across the globe, joining and breaking apart, forming and reforming other landmasses.14 These successive periods of continental suturing and fissuring caused hundreds of miles of ripples and folds in the earth’s surface, mountains to form and erode, and land to emerge and recede. Over time, these changes resulted in what we now describe as the Blue Ridge, Ridge and Valley, and the Allegheny Plateau geologic provinces of Appalachia.15 The Ridge and Valley province, where Newbern is located, was at one time the site of an inland sea extending hundreds of miles. The floor of this landlocked sea became a bed for decaying plant and animal remains. This sedimentary process became the province’s limestone and sandstone bedrock, the outcroppings of which are visible beneath Mary William’s house and in the backyard, influencing the multilevel structure of the house. In this bedrock

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of layered limestone and sandstone developed the underground lakes and caverns that run throughout the province.16 In the area through which Welch traveled in 1873, there had been periods when the landlocked body of water washed against the Allegheny Plateau. There were also periods in which the sea itself moved against the Plateau. During these hundreds of millions of years, the Allegheny province sank toward sea level, occasionally falling below it. Through it all, streams and rivers flowed to the seas, forming vast delta systems in what are now McDowell County, West Virginia, and Tazewell County, Virginia, and the adjacent territories to the northeast and southwest. Given its location close to the Equator, this delta area produced an immense, dense, swampy forest. For nearly thirty million years, mud, water, and decomposing plant and animal matter accumulated in this marsh, eventually forming thousands of feet of peat. As other deposits of plant and animal matter and then beds of rock, clay, and soil formed atop this peat, the resulting overburden exerted great downward pressure, resulting in a sequence of different layers or seams of coal. This was the beginning of the coal classified as Pocahontas.17 Approximately 286 million years ago, there began a general drying of the climate and the swamps and equatorial forests began to wane. Some 225 to 270 million years ago, Gondwanaland and Laurentia drifted and locked against each other to form the supercontinent Pangea.18 The energy resulting from the collision of these huge landmasses resulted in a general uplifting of the Allegheny Plateau above sea level and the development of the Blue Ridge chain to the east. The successive thrusting and folding from the coast inward to the interior dissipated as it reached the southern West Virginia area. In the Ridge and Valley province, stone outcroppings in pastures, bluffs, and sheer rock faces along the New River; highway-cut banks; and excavations at construction sites reveal stone ledges and beds set on edge complexly folded and faulted, giving evidence of the tremendous energy and force that moved through the earth’s surface. As the earth’s surface buckled and folded in successive waves, with the limestone and sandstone bed beneath, long ridges and valleys emerged on a southwest-northeast axis.19 Newbern sits at the crest of one of these ridges, within sight of many others. From the back porch of Mary Williams’s house in Newbern, the Blue Ridge Mountains, rising in the blue distance beyond the New River, bear witness to those same tectonic forces. North and west of Newbern, in the areas that would become McDowell County, West Virginia, and Tazewell County, Virginia, highway cuts and

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excavation sites reveal orderly sedimentary rock beds and ledges. A largely horizontal orientation to the layers of rock below the surface suggest that the energy produced in the collision of landmasses had subsided somewhat at this place and that little or no folding and faulting of the earth’s surface occurred. While the tableland remained unbroken, the same tectonic forces lifted and tilted it. Across this tableland, there developed at this same time hundreds of thousands of streams and watercourses. Following the slope and tilt of the land, these streams began to make their own journeys to the seas. Rising from high upon Flat Top Mountain, at an elevation of slightly more than 2,600 feet, shaded by thickets of laurel and rhododendron, the headwaters of one of these watercourses mark the easternmost edge of today’s Big Sandy watershed. Long before Isaiah Welch rode his horse along this spring-fed watercourse, the people of the place called it Elkhorn Creek. By the time the Elkhorn arrives where it joins the Tug Fork River on its way to the Big Sandy, it travels twenty-one miles, descending to an elevation of 1,329 feet. Over its journey, the Elkhorn and its tributaries carve a narrow, twisting valley, broader at the mouths of hollows where tributary streams join it, narrower where it bends around the buttressing ridges the Elkhorn and its tributaries formed and eroded along the sides of the hollows. In many places, as they descend to the stream banks at the valley floor, these ridges are nearly vertical.20 Because of the narrow crevices, sharp gradients, and confusing maze of hollows the watercourses have carved, these remnants of a once broad and unbroken tableland are described as mountains. Geologists more accurately understand this terrain as a dissected plateau. As it cut through the layers of earth, dissecting the plateau, the Elkhorn exposed the coal that lay deep below the surface.21 The twenty-one-mile valley the Elkhorn has wrought from the tableland and the coal it exposed on its journey were the object of Welch’s and Kimball’s ambitions, and became the cultural and commercial center of Apperson’s Poco field.

“A Remarkable Vein” The coal seam Welch tracked and mapped through the wilderness was afterward found to contain the world’s highest grade of bituminous coal. Described as the Pocahontas Formation, the coal beds lie at the far southeastern corner of the great plateau, the southern boundary of which is in Tazewell and Buchanan counties in Virginia.22 From there it extends northward into Wyoming County and then west of Welch in McDowell County. The eastern

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boundary of the coal bed is along the eastern base of Flat Top Mountain. Over the millennia, the streams of four watersheds—the New, the Clinch, the Guyandotte, and the Big Sandy—flowed across this plateau dissecting and slicing deep through the surface to expose the coalface in many places.23 The Pocahontas coalfield lies on the eastern edge of the larger bituminous range of the Appalachian coal measures. The Pocahontas seams contain coal of the highest quality and most purity, of the seams found in this region. The eastern edge of the Pocahontas seams, the portion the Elkhorn worked to expose, is that portion of the coal most pure, most abundant, and most desirable for industrial purposes.24 A low-moisture, soft, but also very dense coal, Pocahontas coal was determined early on to be “a remarkable vein” for both coke production and domestic consumption.25 Because it has a high percentage of fixed carbon and less volatile matter (impurities), it produces little smoke when burned, hence its nickname “smoke­ less coal.” Resulting from its high hydrogen content, it rapidly produces a very high heat. That, along with its other characteristics, made it ideal for use in households, steamships, and locomotives, where high heat and little smoke were necessary.26 All of these qualities also combined to recommend Pocahontas as a coking coal, increasing its value to industries such as steel manufacturing that used great quantities of coke for production. Following the First World War, the coal “won” from these seams came to be highly valued for its possibilities in chemical produc­tion and synthetic refine­ment. In addition to its desirability for a variety of purposes, promoters nearly deified this coal for its seemingly inexhaust­ible abundance and the ease with which miners brought it to the surface. On the eastern slope of Flat Top Mountain, in Po­cahontas, Virginia, the Number 3 seam, the largest of the nine seams, mea­sured twelve to seventeen feet high.27 In Key­stone, the same seam measured between six-and-a-half feet to over eight feet in height.28 In the years after Kimball and Welch, miners working at the coalface, deep beneath Indian Ridge or Flat Top Mountain, would marvel at how the coal would break away, the purity of the black seams, and the money a man could make loading coal. As Kimball knew, with the face of coal seams at such easy accessibility, and with outcroppings so near the surface as to be visible, very little capital was required to open operations and begin shipping and selling high-grade coal. Standing in the light, vibrant green of the May shade of those chestnuts and oaks, next to the creek that ran cool and clear at his feet, Kimball’s mind would have raced to the nearly unfathomable wealth to be made from those reserves.

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A Peopled Place Between 13,000 and 10,000 bce, long after the Elkhorn began to carve its valley, humans began to appear in the Allegheny Plateau and Ridge and Valley provinces, living and working in small nomadic bands of hunters and gatherers.29 Throughout this area, by the eighth or ninth centuries ce, numerous hunting groups began living in caves and under rock overhangs above creek banks. Later, these nomadic bands developed small agricultural villages, usually along riverbanks and larger streams. Only much later, in the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries ce, and for a very brief time, did these wandering groups form larger, more organized villages. In some instances, the people built these later villages in the same location as the earlier communities, and not far from the first cave and rock overhang habitations.30 Very near the site of the first mine in Abb’s Valley, archeological evidence exists for several palisaded, circular villages of varying size, some with as many as one or two hundred inhabitants, the primary one being the Crab Orchard site on the banks of the Clinch River. At this site, in the middle of the compound, there was a central plaza around which were located one or two rows of circular houses.31 In this village, archeologists have identified 168 burial sites. Archeologists have determined that fifty-six of the people buried here died before their twenty-first year and thirty-eight more died before they reached twenty-five years old. Only two lived to be between forty-five and fifty years old. That many of the remains point to violent death, and that the villages were palisades, and there were in some villages what would appear to be gatehouses at the entrances, together suggest a prolonged era of conflict. Because the deaths predate the incursion of whites in the area, these deadly conflicts were probably between competing groups vying for control of hunting privileges; for these reasons, the Native people of the region had reason to seek security in larger communities. Folk knowledge in McDowell suggests there were several battles between Shawnees and Cherokees or other tribal groups. Peeled Chestnut Mountain and the valley in which the town of War is located are both reputed to be places of intertribal battles.32 A southern band, known as the Cherokees, settled along what geographers now describe as the Tennessee watershed and in western North Carolina. A northern band, known as the Shawnees, moved into today’s Scioto and Ohio valleys. The bands held in common the rich hunting territory of the Ridge and Valley and immediate environs, including McDowell, a resource shared but not occupied. Historical and archaeological evidence suggests the Shawnees, Cherokees, Iroquois, and

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Delawares had a presence in the area of McDowell, but the Shawnees seem to have had predominance.33 The territories of permanent residence offered abundant and fertile land for settled farming and community life. By the time of European settlement in the area in the early eighteenth century, the tribal villages were gone and there were no permanent inhabitants. In many cases, the first European settlers established homesteads and farms on the same ground that several generations before the Native peoples had cleared, inhabited, farmed, and hunted, and through which they traveled frequently.34 McDowell County occupies a critical juncture of primary travel routes between tribal communities as far north of the Ohio River as present-day Detroit and the Great Lakes and places in the south and east, providing trade and communication between the continental coast and in the interior. Native peoples traveled the Big Sandy River from its convergence with the Ohio, up the Tug Fork River through present day Iaeger in western McDowell, passing then up the Dry Fork branches into the area that is now Tazewell County. Alternatively, travelers followed Elkhorn Creek upstream from where it joined the Tug in present-day Welch, through what was to become Keystone, crossing the southern portion of Flat Top Mountain before descending to the Bluestone and East rivers, tributaries of the New. The Shawnees were the principal travelers along both routes.35 By the middle of the eighteenth century, Virginia’s colonial government’s land grants and the promise of wealth propelled European settlers to move into the mountains and valleys of western Virginia, threatening expansion into nearly all other areas of Shawnee hunting and settlement. In response, instead of groups of Native peoples moving through and into the area for seasonal hunting, reconnaissance parties, diplomatic emissaries, and bands of warriors moved along the border with European encroachment. Tribal raiding parties were both active in and passed over the Elkhorn and Dry Fork routes to the more populous areas to the south and east, to the area around Newbern, and along the New, Clinch, and Holston rivers, often taking prisoners back to the settlements along the Ohio, retracing their treks along the Elkhorn. When whites went in search of family the Shawnees had captured, or were executing raids against the Shawnee settlements, the Elkhorn provided passage to the Ohio territory.36 By most accounts, the last raids by Shawnees into the area occurred in the early 1790s. By 1817, the Shawnees had ceded their lands along the Ohio and its tributaries to the United States and were removed to west of the Mississippi.37More than two hundred years after the last casualty from the

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border war between white settlers and Native people in western Virginia, it is difficult to imagine the horrific social and cultural upheavals wrought among Native peoples by competing English and French claims to control interior lands. Shifting alliances, broken treaties, ignored covenants, lies and counter-lies, recrimination, revenge, bloody death, arrogance, racism, cruelty—all created an apocalyptic atmosphere that permeated the place for nearly the entire eighteenth century. In the Elkhorn Valley, as across all of western Virginia, one way of life systematically displaced and obliterated another, a pattern soon enough repeated along the Elkhorn in the wake of Welch’s journey. The conflicts that have in part defined this place were not limited to the bloody struggles between European settlers and Native peoples. For most of McDowell County’s existence, its history is a conflicted and contested legacy. Because of the remoteness of the area from the county seat at Tazewell Courthouse, in 1858 the Virginia General Assembly divided the area of Tazewell County and named the new county McDowell in honor of the twenty-fifth governor of Virginia, James McDowell, serving from 1843 to 1846. McDowell had advocated for a strong public education system for Virginia, and ardently supported the abolition of slavery in Virginia and the nation.38 In 1860, the population of the newly formed county stood at 1,535 persons and there were no slaves or free persons of color in the county.39 Nonetheless, as the sectional crisis deepened and turned white-hot, citizens of the new county maintained a strong commitment to and identity with the rest of Virginia. In the May 23, 1861, referendum on secession, voters in the new county supported secession from the Union by a vote of 196 to 17.40 During the ensuing war, there were instances of “lawlessness” as persons deserting from either side found refuge in the area and lived by theft and intimidation. Despite the popular strength of the loyalty to Virginia and its position in the war, there was fighting between neighbors, and marauding bands of deserters and outliers exacted retribution against persons for taking one side or another.41 Following the war, people who inhabited McDowell County were alienated from their neighbors to the south because of West Virginia’s secession from Virginia and entry into the Union. The people of the place were geographically, politically, and philosophically distant from the Republican minority in the northern part of the state that had successfully pushed for secession from Virginia and joined the Union to advance their own economic interests. When West Virginia gained admittance to the Union in 1863, McDowell County was not within its borders, and there was considerable uncertainty about McDowell Countians’s civil status in either state. For all these reasons,

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and availing themselves of the terrain in which they lived, the people of McDowell withdrew to themselves. Compounding the ambiguity, West Virginia had entered the Union as a slave state, but the legislation determining that the state’s alignment with the federals called for the gradual emancipation of slaves. The same legislation denied the franchise to former Confederates, but extended the franchise to persons of color, prohibiting most citizens of the Elkhorn Valley and McDowell from participating in all elections. Further stipulations prohibited the bringing of slaves into the new state and disallowed the admission into West Virginia of any free black. In 1870, an amendment to the state’s constitution returned the franchise to former Confederates, ensuring the Democrats’ return to power; however, the Democratic Party was the party of the South and African Americans knew it was not a friend. In a compromise with Republicans, whose hold on power had always been tenuous, African Americans retained the right to vote, ensuring dependable allies for the party of Lincoln. This compromise also entailed that while former Confederates and persons of color could vote in West Virginia, and all voters could hold public office, blacks could not sit on juries and whites and blacks could not attend the same public schools. However, the Jim Crow laws passed in Virginia and the other states of the former Confederacy did not prevail in West Virginia, and there was no segregation of the races on common carriers.42 In their journeys, Isaiah Welch and Frederick Kimball represented in themselves this thick layering of the larger conflicts of the time. Welch was a former Confederate employed by the corporate predecessors of the Norfolk and Western, a corporation whose directors and investors where predominately Philadelphia capitalists. Jedidiah Hotchkiss, a former Confederate cartographer who had drawn the maps Lee used at Gettysburg and had become convinced of the economic potential of the coal Welch had mapped, convinced Frederick Kimball, a Pennsylvanian, to see for himself the coal beds. In their separate journeys, Welch and Kimball passed by small farms and homesteads that were decidedly sympathetic to southern ideas and understandings, but by the time of these men’s journeys, were definitely within the boundaries of a state aligned with the Democratic Party, but created through the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln, and the Federal Union. McDowell was a Democratic county and the Democratic Party was the white man’s party. With the resurgence of the Republic Party as industrialists came to control the state in the late nineteenth century, the Republican Party came to define power and social relationships in the county, depending in the voting booth on the support of an ever-increasing influx of African Americans.

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Ignoring the political conflicts and confusion that prevailed for the people living along the Elkhorn, in May 1881, Kimball’s mind probably focused on other issues as he rode east from what would become the Poco field. In order to conform the Elkhorn Valley to his vision of the place as an engine of wealth, and despite the great wealth the coal itself promised, Kimball knew two problems would need to be solved before the railroad realized any of that wealth. The first problem was that of controlling the land. Kimball wanted the Norfolk and Western to have monopolistic control over the coal measures, denying any foothold to competitors or rival railroads. The second problem was one of access. Even though the Norfolk and Western might exercise complete control over the land and the coal reserves beneath, unless the N&W could transport the coal to markets easier and more economically than could any other railroad, such control would be useless. On returning to Philadelphia, Kimball gathered the capital and set in motion the processes that would lead to the railway’s unchallengeable control of the land along Elkhorn Creek. Beginning in the 1870s, friends and associates of Kimball had been involved in securing tracts of land that provided access to the coal seams. Given the confusion of land titles and claims and that many landholders did not share Kimball’s expansive vision, the acquisition of property was a “vexatious” process, proceeding by means both legal and illegal.43 Paying $1.50 to $5.00 per acre, by 1888, the Flat Top Coal Land Association and the Crozer Land Company had together acquired 77,000 acres of land in the Elkhorn Valley.44 By 1900, the Flat Top Coal Land Association controlled over 230,000 acres. In 1901, the Norfolk and Western, always closely aligned with the stockholders of the Land Association, purchased the entire land holdings of the Flat Top Coal Land Association and its corporate successors.45 Since that transfer of titles to the Norfolk and Western in the first year of the twentieth century, there has been no change in the ownership of the majority of lands in the Poco field.46 Needing an easy link between Pocahontas coal and industrial markets, in the summer of 1881 Kimball dispatched surveyors, engineers, and land agents to the Flat Top area, demanding from them urgency in securing rights of way and laying track. In less than two years, on March 10, 1883, the railroad reached the new town of Pocahontas, in Tazewell County located along Laurel Creek on the eastern slope of Flat Top Mountain, and began immediately shipping coal to Norfolk.47 Completing the rail line to the new town of Pocahontas was a relatively easy engineering project, following the New River from Radford to a point just north of Narrows and then following the East River upstream until it reached the Bluestone River, through what is

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now Bluefield. Reaching the more extensive coal reserves along the Elkhorn would prove more daunting, however. Even on foot or horseback, crossing Flat Top Mountain had always been difficult, but engineering a rail crossing had stymied other railroads that had coveted the wealth that Kimball and Welch saw available. Once the mountain was crossed, the narrow valleys, the near-perpendicular mountainsides, and the scarcity of available building space in the Elkhorn Valley would challenge the skills of any engineer. By 1886, Kimball’s engineers had determined that the most economical, easiest route into the Elkhorn Valley was by tunneling through Flat Top Mountain. In the late summer of 1888, the Norfolk and Western completed the 3,100-foot Flat Top Tunnel, nearly the entire length of which was directly through the Number 3 seam of Pocahontas coal.48 Once through Flat Top Mountain, the rail line followed the banks of the Elkhorn, the same route traveled by Native peoples and replicating nearly exactly the path of Welch’s journey of 1873. With rail bed and stream competing for all the limited space in the valley, engineers designed the rail line with considerable curvature to economize on construction. Still, the terrain shaped over the millennia of the Elkhorn’s passage across the plateau necessitated frequent bridging of the stream. In the twenty-one miles from the western portal of the Flat Top Tunnel to the Tug, there were thirteen bridges built across Elkhorn Creek.49 Even before construction on the Flat Top Tunnel had begun, Kimball began persuading investors of the advisability of extending a rail line to the Ohio River. The argument Kimball put forward speaks clearly of the wealth Kimball understood would flow to those who reduced the place to their ambitions and control. In the company’s Fifth Annual Report, published in 1885, Kimball wrote of his proposal for a line to the Ohio and beyond: “Such a line, if constructed . . . would . . . open up an additional area of steam and coking coal . . . [and] also penetrate virgin forests.”50 With construction crews working from the east and from the west, on September 10, 1892, north of Williamson, the new line was completed from the headwaters of the Elkhorn to the Tug and then to the Ohio, and by extension and connections with other lines, to Cleveland, Lake Erie, and Chicago.51 The Ohio extension used the same routes as the Shawnees; the line between Portsmouth and Columbus followed the Scioto River, laid on the ground of the Shawnee villages. The total costs of land acquisition and construction of the Ohio extension exceeded $8,000,000.52 Isaiah Welch and Frederick Kimball journeyed through a place that was largely untouched, offering a pristine continuity with its earliest formation. As coal companies began operations on the leases secured from the land compa-

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38  /  chapter 2

nies, these leases gave them unfettered use of the timber on the ridges above their mines, clear-cutting the forests for building materials and supplementary income. With the opening of the Flat Top Tunnel, the virgin stands of timber and the vast measures of the world’s purest coal began to leave that place by the trainloads heading east to the Atlantic seaboard. With the completion of the line west to the Ohio and Lake Erie, the processes of taking away the coal and leveling the forests more than doubled in their intensity. What had been formed from the foundations of the earth was converted to cash and the wealth made from that coal and timber flowed to the men of the Gilded Age. As the Poco field emerged as a fixture on the American industrial landscape, the natural and built environments and the long human culture and history along the Elkhorn and throughout McDowell County, the three elements of place, were secondary to the struggle to control and convert to personal wealth one geological formation: Pocahontas coal.

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The Nation’s Coal Bin The Gilded Age in America gave rise to men who would embody what it meant to be successful in industrial America. One of these men was Frederick Kimball; another was Thomas Edgar Houston. Born in eastern Pennsylvania in 1866, the son of an iron merchant and ship builder, Houston was college educated as a chemist, specializing in the processing of iron. Immediately after college, Houston went to work as the chief clerk for the Norfolk and Western where he acquired much of his initial knowledge of the extent of the railroad’s growing holdings in the Pocahontas coalfields, particularly in the Elkhorn Valley.53 As the Norfolk and Western pushed into southern West Virginia, Houston’s father and brother began leasing and purchasing land in McDowell County. The first lease the Houston family acquired was for 1,200 acres on the north bank of Elkhorn Creek’s south fork, from Crozer Coal Land Association.54 With this lease, the company began immediately cutting timber, opening a mine, and building a company town they called Elkhorn. Under construction before the railroad reached it, the Houston operation was the seventh mine to come into production in the Poco field, the second or third operation in McDowell County. With the death of his father, Thomas Edgar Houston moved to Elkhorn in March 1889, less than one year after the Houston Company shipped its first coal on the Norfolk and Western.55 In 1890, T. E. Houston became general manager of the Houston Coal and Coke Company and began immediately securing further leases from the Flat Top

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Coal Land Association and its successor, the Pocahontas Coal and Coke Company, for surface and mineral rights to large tracts of land and coal reserves.56 Between May 2, 1892, and July 1, 1915, taking advantage of the constrictions in the national economy and the depression of 1893, falling stock prices of the 1890s, and anticipating the potential for the economic boom of early industrial America, Colonel Houston bought a number of coal companies and acquired seven leases from the Norfolk and Western. During this period, Houston’s acquisitions and leases from the Norfolk and Western totaled 15,105.32 acres, including both surface rights and mineral rights. Houston’s leases and holdings spread across McDowell, following the Pocahontas seam: from Jacob’s Fork in the southernmost area of the county, northeast to Welch, Kimball, Keystone, Elkhorn, and points between. In addition to Houston Coal and Coke, Colonel Houston controlled five additional mining companies: Keystone Coal and Coke, Middle States Coal Company, The King Coal Company, Rock Cliff Coal and Coke, and Houston Collieries Company, all of which were located in the Elkhorn Valley.57 This is in addition to the companies in which Houston held controlling interest in the western section of McDowell, in Mingo County, West Virginia, and in Martin County, Kentucky, which were mining different coal seams. Similar to other coal operators, Houston’s leases from the railroad’s land companies required extraction of all the coal available and building and operating a fixed number of coke ovens, the product of which would be the property of the railroad to make available to the general market for the profit of the railroad. In 1896, Houston was operating 150 coke ovens with an annual production capacity of 5,500 hopper cars of coke.58 The leases also required Houston to pay a royalty on every gross ton of coal brought out of the mine. In the majority of his lease agreements, Houston paid a 10-cent royalty per gross ton; two of the leases required a 15-cent royalty. Additionally, lease agreements required a minimum annual rental to the railroad’s land company. In 1926, the Houston companies paid a total annual rental of $111,600 for all leases.59 In 1889, the Houston companies shipped 105,222 tons of coal from mines located along the Elkhorn in the Poco field. In 1909, the Houston companies shipped 1.135 million tons of coal, and in 1915, Houston shipped 1.582 million tons of coal, all of it from mines in the Elkhorn Valley. As it was with all operators in the Poco field, Houston’s leases from the railroad stipulated that his companies were legally obligated to ship all coal on Norfolk and Western trains and sell the coal through Norfolk and Western coal agents. For shipping by either sea freighter on the Atlantic or the Great Lakes, or

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barge on the Ohio River, the leases required Houston to load coal at Norfolk and Western piers in Norfolk, Virginia, or Sandusky or Portsmouth, Ohio. At each point, Houston paid the railroad surcharges and fees, selling coal at prices the railroad determined. Eventually, the operators forced the dismantling of the system of railroad coal agents, but the Norfolk and Western and its subsidiaries retained monopolistic control over nearly every other aspect of the production and marketing of Pocahontas coal. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, Houston and other operators, the Pocahontas Coal and Coke Company, and the Norfolk and Western Railway, spared no creative effort to praise the benefits of Pocahontas coal. The Pocahontas Coal Operators Association retained Phil Conley as its propagandist. Using letters, pamphlets, magazines, speeches, articles, and books, Conley pressed upon the public the benefits of Pocahontas coal. Conley constantly brought attention to the benevolence of coal companies, the progress wrought by the coal industry, and the benefits to civilization from burning the coal mined in nonunion mines in the Poco field.60 The organization’s publications make explicit the assumption that what was happening in the Poco field was part of larger, global patterns and practices, all of which were in support of white, Anglo, Christian civilization that resulted in general social and economic progress, and human uplift and betterment.61 For the Pocahontas Coal Operators Association, the Elkhorn Valley would have no other value except that which resulted from Kimball, Houston, and their colleagues’ absolute and unrelenting control over Pocahontas coal. The place was valued for its relationship to the American industrial machine, reducing its ecological and historical complexities to a production process; the Elkhorn Valley became the Pocahontas field, which might as well have been an industrial factory. These same ideas and assumptions are evident in the evolution of coal camps and company towns in McDowell County. When Isaiah Welch first explored the area, there were only a smattering of farms and homesteads along the Elkhorn.62 Speculators and promoters argued the sparse population of the place made it ideal for industrial development. After securing control of the land, the land companies and the Norfolk and Western enforced a policy of wholesale displacement of the population. By the time Houston acquired several of his leases, the land along the Elkhorn was largely uninhabited. Houston Coal and Coke, like every other company in the Poco field, began to build communities for its employees, clear-cutting the mountains and ridges of timber to build houses, processing facilities, and to provide structural support in the mines. Although coal operators and the publicist Conley described the building of the coal towns as a benevolent activity designed to meet a housing

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crisis, it was also part of the larger effort to exert final and total control over the production process. Pointing to this same policy of total control, whether incorporated or company-owned, coal operators named towns for members of the boards of directors of coal companies and the Norfolk and Western Railroad, the wives and children of coal operators, or after particular mythologized Native Americans.63 The incorporated towns of Kimball and Welch memorialized the journeys of these two through the place. Keystone acquired its name because all of the officers of the first company to lease the mining rights from the Flat Top Land Association were from Pennsylvania, the Keystone state. The company-owned and company-controlled town once named Shawnee Camp acquired the name, Eckman, for John Eckman, general manager of the Pulaski Iron Company. When Thomas Edgar Houston’s kinsman and business partner, Howard H. Houston, gained control of the Middle States Coal and Coke Company and its company town of Olmstead, he changed the town’s name to Maitland, in honor of his wife’s maiden name. George L. Carter’s Caretta was a fusion of Carter and Mayetta, named for his wife, Mayetta Carter.64 The unincorporated towns codified both the production decisions and the social conventionality of their owners. In some company towns, owners forbade the consumption of liquor and judged adultery as punishable by eviction. In many others, the owner chose the religious denomination and minister for the community church, and the clergy was on the company payroll.65 All companies enforced racial segregation in housing practices and in jobs made available to or withheld from persons of color.66 Throughout the coalfields, challenging or disregarding company decisions or the demands of management resulted in the immediate firing and evicting of employees.67 Like other operators, beyond the boundaries of their company towns, the Houston family assumed civic leadership along the Elkhorn. Thomas Edgar Houston was “one of the most highly esteemed gentlemen in his social relations . . . esteemed for both his business qualifications and his social attainments.”68 In county histories, contemporary news articles, and in obituaries, members of the Houston family receive praise for their civic work. Ostensibly beneficial to the common good, this civic work also suggests ways both subtle and overt in which civic life along the Elkhorn came to represent the shared interests of those who carried the vision of Welch and Kimball’s journeys through the Poco field. Houston, an active Republican, attended the Republican national conventions of 1904 and 1908 and served on the McDowell County Commission from 1893 through 1896. Deciding on the county’s operating budget, roads,

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and infrastructural improvements, and acting as a probate court, commissioners had many opportunities to shape life in McDowell. Houston’s sons, David and Frank, both officers in the Houston companies, were also active in the Republican Party. As his father had before him, David served on the McDowell County Commission in the middle and late 1920s. Frank Houston served on the county’s Republican Executive Committee as well as the Elkhorn District Board of Education, with several terms as president.69 Newspapers from the era extolled all three Houston men as powerful and influential in state politics. The Houston family gave their money and their name to the Houston Methodist Episcopal Church in Kimball.70 David Houston and his wife, Miriam, were active supporters of the county’s Girl Scout chapters, funding a full-time Girl Scout organizer and leader to serve throughout the county. The family donated land held by the Houston companies for use as a camp for Girl Scouts, naming it Camp Miriam Houston.71 Through the civic work of the Houstons and scores of others, a community of interest evolved in McDowell that was a direct continuation of the vision of the place that guided Welch and Kimball on their journeys, one with the Republican Party, the Pocahontas Coal Operators Association, and the control and production of Pocahontas coal. Every institution along the Elkhorn was an object and means of control: houses, churches, stores, schools, recreation centers, baseball teams, civic organizations, telephone service, water supply, electric power, and mines.72 In addition to power exerted in the company towns and in the county’s civic life, another form of control was explicitly violent and worked by means of stark terror and intimidation. In the Pocahontas coalfield, the chief enforcer of the coal company’s will was the Bluefield- and Roanoke-based Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency. The founder of the organization was Tom Felts, “the most feared and hated man in the coalfields.”73 Baldwin-Felts agents beat, killed, tortured, evicted, threatened, raped, and firebom­bed miners, their families, their children, and their homes in order to enforce the will of the operators and to ensure that no union organizing took place anywhere in the Poco field. Long years after the death of “old man Tom,” and the demise of the agency, it is difficult to appreciate the full extent of the horror and hatred with which miners in the Poco field regarded these men and Tom Felts. Even among some people who knew the Felts family in their homeplace of Galax, Virginia, there is a sense of loathing.74 Owing to the secret codes and shorthand the Baldwin-Felts Agency used in records, and that much of the company’s records were destroyed on the death of Tom Felts, it is impossible to know for sure which companies in the

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Poco field availed themselves of the services of the operatives. It is widely assumed that most companies employed and supported Baldwin-Felts agents in one capacity or another and most sheriff deputies were Baldwin-Felts agents. In October 1934, throughout McDowell County, there were 195 of these “so-called courtesy deputies, who had public authority but were paid for and controlled by coal operators.” Public funds paid for only forty-three deputies.75 These “courtesy deputies” had as their purpose to “keep order in the camps, keep labor organizers away, and to keep political control in the hands of the mine operators.”76 Even if a coal company did not directly employ a Baldwin-Felts agent, there is enough evidence to suggest that fear of the “gun thugs” was an active force in the communities of the Elkhorn and throughout the Pocahontas field. Houston, as did every other coal operator, benefited from this culture of fear and intimidation.77 Ironically, these efforts at long-term economic control were futile. Even during the boom times, the economic security of all but a few of the very largest coal companies was only marginal. Since the first coal was hauled from the first drift mouth in the Poco field, companies sought to maximize their control of global markets by increasing the volume of production and reducing the price of the product.78 As more coal mines opened and each company faced a decreased share of the market, companies increased production in order to retain a hold on profits.79 Except for minor and brief fluctuations, coal production in the Poco field steadily increased from 1886 through 1929 when production stood at 25.3 million tons. In 1929, coal production throughout West Virginia exceeded the national demand by 28.3 percent.80 With coal markets saturated with an oversupply of coal, with the breakdown of the Norfolk and Western’s system of coal agents, and in an effort to out bid competing producers, coal companies began cutting prices to entice purchasers and increase their market share. What resulted was a suicidal bidding war in which Houston and every other Poco field coal operator gave themselves over to isolating and destroying each other, not only in the Pocahontas field but throughout West Virginia. During the decade that followed the close of World War I, companies increased production while cutting prices. As national demand and prices fell, operators increased production in order to fulfill the stipulations of their leases and to put more coal on the market in order to maintain control of a shrinking profit margin, at the same time as cutting all possible production costs.81 In company towns, production costs encompassed health care, schools, churches, recreation centers, water and sewage systems, utilities, newspapers, and even food supply. Decisions regarding the costs and practices of produc-

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tion were immediately the lived experiences known in every corner of the place. In 1923, the average hourly earnings for a miner were 82 cents. By 1929, the average hourly earnings were 64.6 cents, and by 1933, the amount had fallen to 41.7 cents, a 50 percent drop in ten years, when there was work.82 Those persons living in the coal camps and those residing in the incorporated towns of the Poco field who had no control over either market or production were the ones to suffer most in these ongoing upheavals and convulsions of Pocahontas capitalism.83 Stories from throughout the Pocahontas field indicate the extent to which physical hunger stalked miners’ families during the worst of the cyclical compressions of the coal industry.84 Through the use of scrip instead of cash, by ignoring upkeep and improvements on miners’ houses, by cutting costs and reducing the quality of goods offered through the company store, by decreasing all services offered, and by increasing prices to maximize the income from auxiliary enterprises, companies further sought to increase already marginal profits and to exert control over the labor force.85 The constrictions of the coal market in the 1920s and the policies of increased production to maintain profit, and lacking the capital reserves to cushion themselves against the market’s convulsions, combined to produce the collapse of the smaller operations between 1927 and 1929. In the wake of these bankruptcies, larger companies with more extensive leases and holdings also liquidated. In this vacuum, large conglomerates and corporations began acquiring coal leases and operations at severely depressed prices, far below their original market value. Described as “captive mines,” the purpose of these newly purchased enterprises was not primarily production for the general market; rather, these companies sought to acquire for themselves a secure source of raw materials. United States Steel, Ford Motor Company, Bethlehem Steel, General Motors, Youngstown Steel, Norfolk and Western Railway, Consolidation Coal, and the Koppers Company were among those companies that largely controlled the mines in the Poco field after the economic seizures of the 1920s. In 1927, Houston remained the second or third largest coal producer in McDowell County, controlling nearly 150,000,000 tons of coal reserves and 3,000 acres of surface land; still, the company was past due in rental and royalty payments to the railroad. The February 28, 1928, minutes of the Board of Directors of the Pocahontas Coal and Coke Company, indicate that Houston owed $16,108.28 in unpaid rent and royalties for 1927.86 That same year, although Houston’s total coal production had declined by 400,000 tons from peak production during the World War I boom, and had declined about

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30,000 tons between 1926 and 1927, the total of coal tonnage shipped from Houston-controlled properties was above the 1923 tonnage. Its back to the wall, the Houston firm had little prospect of reversing the downward spiral in which it found itself. Much as Colonel Houston had gained control of several companies thirty years before, one of the oldest companies then in operation in the Poco field fell victim to the forces it had helped to produce and from which it had benefitted since the Elkhorn Valley’s first mines opened in the late 1880s. In a pattern of acquisition, consistent with the values and understandings that had prompted and guided Welch and Kimball’s journeys of more than fifty and forty years before, on December 27, 1927, the Koppers Company of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, acquired all of the Houston properties in the Elkhorn Valley of McDowell County as well as several other companies in West Virginia, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania.87 With a national reputation for innovations in the production of coke and gas, and in order to expand its capital holdings and create new markets, the Koppers Company had diversified its operations into chemical refinement, utilities, and railroads.88 With its high suitability for a range of industrial processes, Pocahontas coal was ideally matched to Koppers’s purposes. In order to expand both production and profits as cheaply as possible, freeing more capital to fund its debt and further increase its profits, Koppers moved to acquire absolute control over one of its necessary resources. In the fiscal year ending March 1, 1930, Koppers Coal Company handled primarily for its own manufacturing plants—and to a limited extent offered for sale on the general market—8,000,000 tons of Pocahontas coal.89 The most productive of all Koppers’s McDowell County holdings, as had been the case with the Houston companies, was the mine at Keystone, which the former Houston Company had acquired and operated as Keystone Coal and Coke.

Keystone In the early spring of 1873, Isaiah Welch paused to examine the outcrops of coal at a place along the Elkhorn that in fifteen years would be known as Keystone. The place where he stopped was less than one mile downstream from the convergence of the Elkhorn’s north and south forks. In this place, Welch would have seen the Elkhorn strengthened by its tributaries, flowing clear and fast, filling the woods with the sound of rushing water. Here, over the millennia, across the surface of the wide tableland, the Elkhorn had carved a narrow, deep defile, no wider than a few hundred yards.

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The coal, shale, and sandstone through which the stream had cut on either side of the plateau produced at this place in the Elkhorn three narrow bends, causing the creek nearly to turn back on itself, deepening the water and quickening its flow. At the first bend, Burke Creek, a small stream flowing from Indian Ridge, converges with the Elkhorn. Less than two-tenths of a mile downstream, a smaller creek, Clark Branch, also rising from high on Indian Ridge, joins the Elkhorn. In the area that would become Keystone, if nature had produced anything remotely worthy of classifying as bottomland, it would be on the land between where these two streams join the Elkhorn. Although when the watercourse that would become the Elkhorn had first flowed, this place had been a broad, unbroken plane, by the time of Welch’s journey Indian Ridge to the north and Shawnee Mountain to the south rose almost directly from the banks of the Elkhorn in thirty- and forty-degree angles. In today’s Keystone, where Bridge Street crosses the Elkhorn, the elevation is 1,627 feet. From this point, the summit of Indian Ridge is at an elevation of approximately 2,500 feet and that of Shawnee Mountain is 2,650 feet. When Welch first saw these nearly perpendicular slopes, unbroken stands of giant hardwoods covered them. Except when the sun is directly overhead, the ridges and spurs of the mountains deeply shade the narrow valley floor. Aside from the timber, which he had also been commissioned to measure and assess, all of this probably would have been of little note to Welch. What would have caught his eye was something else, but just as much a part of that place as the tree-covered slopes rising up from the creek. Nearing the end of his journey, from long practice, Welch would have known the telltale signs, would have known the direction in which to look, could have felt in his gut where to scrape away moss and leaf mold. At the base of Indian Ridge, above the north bank of the Elkhorn, between the two streams that flowed into it in this place, deep in the shadow of the trees, the stream had exposed an outcrop of coal, mossy and damp. It was taller than a man. With the arrival of land agents and the railroad, the high, rich coal that lay exposed above the Elkhorn became the defining reality of the place. The work of those who followed Welch and Kimball made secondary and collateral every other element of the place’s natural and built environments, enabling an assumption that human history in that place began with the discovery of the coal and the coming of the railroad. The first coal operators and builders at this place along the Elkhorn, and then Houston and his peers, separated and reduced the place’s three complex and interrelated elements to be individual parts of an economic exchange. In its building and in the culture and society

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that developed on that landscape, the town of Keystone engraved the lived realities of the American economy, carried in its bricks and mortar and in the daily comings and goings of its people. Keystone was not the product of a grand visionary plan and civic design. The construction and ordering of the town haphazardly and raggedly stamped on the landscape the values and ambitions that compelled Welch and Kimball, and after them T. E. Houston and other men of America’s industrial blossoming. Construction in the new town primarily occurred on the narrow strips of level ground on either side of Elkhorn Creek. To increase the flat ground available, engineers worked to ensure that the Elkhorn remained confined to a relatively narrow streambed, lining the bank with stone excavated from building and mining sites. The rail line and sidings and the structures associated with the mine took first priority in the competition for building space in the bottom of the channel-like valley. Situated immediately adjacent to the industrial sites, but secondary to them, were the businesses and enterprises that followed the valley’s new residents. Homes for those residents took whatever small space remained. Once flat land was no longer available, builders began to wedge homes into the rock and shale and steep sides of Shawnee Mountain and Indian Ridge. To provide the materials for all of this initial building, crews of workers felled the trees that had towered from the sides of the ridges since before the Shawnees had traveled along the Elkhorn, leaving the land bare, the rains washing the rich topsoil into the creek. Within two years of the railroad’s arrival, Keystone was a tangled knot of houses, apartments, businesses, and industries imposed on a very narrow, nearly treeless valley, strung along a muddy Elkhorn Creek. Not just in Keystone, but from the base of Flat Top Mountain to the confluence with the Tug, Elkhorn Creek had exposed the coal seam on which this frenzy focused, but the watercourse had become incidental to those whose power and resources were transforming this place. Initially, there were 150 coke ovens built along the banks of the creek at Keystone.90 When the banking fires cooled, the coke removed, and the cinders raked from the ovens, workers deposited the cinders in the creek and along its banks. Wastes from the mining operation flowed into the creek, further darkening and thickening the water that upstream had received the same types of wastes. Before the advent of indoor plumbing, homes and apartments that bordered the Elkhorn situated outhouses beside or over the creek. When a sewerage system was developed, the raw effluent flowed into Elkhorn Creek. Less than twenty years after Welch rode his horse along its banks, the Elkhorn was a black, steaming, stinking sewer, a source of typhoid, dysentery, and other illnesses.

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Because of the spatial intensity of settlement and restricted air currents due to the surrounding mountains and ridges, the air in Key­stone was perpetually dirty and gritty from the soot and smoke of coke ovens, steam locomo­tives, coal furnaces, coal-fired cooking ranges, and the exhaust from the coal tipple located almost in the center of town. Every surface, regardless of how frequently cleaned, had a coating of dark dust and soot. Years after leaving the place, people will still remark about the dirt: “I remember the filth, everything was dirty; you couldn’t keep yourself clean, it was impossible.”91 Although the valley was no longer tree-shaded, its narrowness meant that sometimes during the winter months there were less than four or five hours of direct sunlight. Adults remember times as children when it was often approaching dark as they returned from school in the afternoon.92 Adding to the feel of its deep shadows and testifying to the wealth made in the place, by the time that Koppers purchased the Houston properties, brick buildings were replacing the original frame buildings that had housed the first businesses and enterprises. Mimicking the ridges that rose above them and the narrow valley through which Welch had passed, these brick buildings crowded Main Street, giving it the appearance of a canyon cut by a river of macadam, oil, gravel, and paving bricks. In addition to the industrial filth and the urban-like shadows of the place, noise enveloped Keystone. Where Welch had ridden along a narrow path

Figure 4. A bird’s-eye view of Keystone, circa 1921. The building in the lower-left corner houses the company offices and store for Keystone Coal and Coke, then owned and operated by T. E. Houston. Williams-Apperson Collection.

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Figure 5. Main Street, Keystone, 1944. Norfolk Southern Corporation Archives.

through the woods, where the first settlers and farmers had used oxen and walked, and the native peoples had passed on foot, by the 1930s was a national thoroughfare. Every day at least ten passenger trains, six freight trains, and dozens of local shifters moved over the rail bed running beside Elkhorn Creek; three local bus lines and one national bus line also passed along U.S. Route 52, which was also Keystone’s Main Street.93 The commotion of traffic and daily commerce in the town, the incessant rattle of the coal tipple, the thunder of through trains, and the rumble of shifting empty and loaded coal cars on sidings overwhelmed and smothered the sound of the Elkhorn, replacing it with a deafening and jarring noise.94 While the Houston Company and later Koppers operated the mine at Keystone, and provided company-owned housing to employees, Keystone was an incorporated town instead of company-owned. Small groups of companybuilt houses sat beside privately owned residences.95 Company facilities and businesses operated beside independent businesses, neighborhoods that were not company-owned, and enterprises that, although dependent on coal, were independent from the company’s control. Keystone evolved as a “way station in the movements of people, goods, and information” between the Poco field and the nation as a whole, offering a range of gainful occupations in addition

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to mining.96 The town quickly became the largest, most populous place in McDowell, until Welch, the county seat, surpassed it. This independence and dynamic demographic and commercial diversity caused Keystone to evolve in the 1890s as free space in which the social conventions, dictates, and policies of coal operators did not dominate. Miners, merchants, persons of color, ethnic Europeans, and working-class whites flocked to Keystone because it was a “wide open place.”97 Outside the reach of direct coal company control, for a diversity of people, Keystone became both a place for political and social free­dom and a place to get rich. With an ascendant African American middle class, a widely circulated African American newspaper, the McDowell Times, and political office open to persons of color, the town became for many working and middle-class blacks a place of rare freedom and autonomy. The McDowell Times popularized the phrase “The Free State of McDowell” as a way of bringing attention to the freedoms African Americans enjoyed in McDowell County.98 As but one of a series of steps necessary to secure a future for the growing African American community in the Pocahontas field, the McDowell Times urged African Americans living in company housing to save their money, move to incorporated towns like Keystone, and purchase their own homes, describing Keystone as “the Mecca of the coalfields.”99 Through the McDowell county colored Republican Organization, headquartered in Keystone, African Americans wielded considerable political power on the state level, demanding and receiving from elected white officials numerous patronage jobs in return for their support at the polls. As a sizable voting block, these African American Republicans would have been critical to the election of the Houstons to the County Commission and as representatives to the National Republican Convention. In 1918, Keystone voters elected to the state legislature Harry J. Capehart, a Keystone attorney and member of the McDowell County Colored Republicans.100 Although Keystone may have been reputed to be a place of remarkable racial tolerance and generally regarded as a “black town,” Keystone’s social geography afforded little space to any person of color. By the 1910s Keystone could boast of a large African American middle class, with persons of color on city council and the police force as early as 1890, but the only places allowed for black residences and businesses was in and around Cinder Bottom and the unincorporated area of Burke Hollow or Burkesville.101 When persons of color were able to acquire ownership of private homes, the neighborhoods around those homes reflected the same kinds of conditions that prevailed in predominantly African American neighborhoods throughout the South: unpaved streets, no sidewalks, livestock in the road, no water

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or sanitation service, and devalued real estate.102 Despite the reputation for freedom from the more violent and explicit forms of white racism and the McDowell Times promotions of home ownership in Keystone, it was still a place defined largely within the conventions of race and class. Rigid racial segregation was the rule in the town’s two theaters, business establishments, professional services, public accommodations, and the geographic organization of the town’s two primary residential neighborhoods, Cinder Bottom and the Westfield Addition.103 Keystone was known and is still remembered throughout the region for the raucous crowds of just-paid miners and other men from throughout the Poco field who filled “Cinder Bottom” on Saturday nights.104 Located on the northeastern edge of town, the neighborhood derived its name from the cinders raked from the hundreds of coke ovens lining Elkhorn Creek. With the mountains rising directly above it, the Bottom was often shaded and damp. Although the cinders had built up the bottomland, increasing its original elevation above the Elkhorn, the Bottom was still susceptible to flooding when heavy rains raised the water level in the creek. In Keystone’s racial geography, this was the general neighborhood to which persons of color were relegated. In addition to its population of persons of color, “The Bottom” was famous as the center of a lucrative prostitution trade. Several dozen “houses” individually owned by African Americans and whites, men and women, each with “eight or ten girls,” did business in a one-and a-half-block area wedged between Elkhorn Creek and Shawnee Mountain. Through graft, favors, “rent,” and pay-offs, the houses were able to avoid police interference. While coal operators strictly forbade such enterprises in their camps, coal companies financially underwrote several of the houses for holding “private parties” for company managers and officials.105 Although there was general middle-class outrage over the traffic in liquor and prostitution, more appalling to the Bottom’s white detractors was the degree to which whites and African Americans mixed freely and with impunity in the houses and “joints” of the neighborhood. In a religious tract from 1912, “an anonymous Virginia lad” undertakes an exposé of Cinder Bottom and Keystone’s “tenderloin section.” Entitled Sodom and Gomorrah of Today; or, The History of Keystone, West Virginia, the moralistic diatribe’s stated purpose was to prevent “innocent young boys” from falling into the traps of Cinder Bottom and dying from the mysterious and horrific illnesses and calamities lurking there. In his “history,” the lad indicts the police department, merchants, politicians, professionals, and the Methodist church for complicity in the sins of Cinder Bottom. The lad also acknowledges that this complicity is both conscious, as in the case of the politicians and police,

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and unconscious, as in the case of the professionals and the church. The most offensive aspect of this sordid affair, according to the “lad,” is the extent to which African Americans have transgressed the dominant conventions of racial segregation.106 In June 1911, one year prior to the publication of Sodom and Gomorrah, the future Attorney General of West Virginia, Howard B. Lee, visited Keystone to see for himself the “revelation of human depravity” in Cinder Bottom. Underscoring his outrage at the moral depravity, but also pointing to the changes that had occurred in the years since Welch had journeyed along the Elkhorn and Kimball had begun to define the Poco field, Lee repeated the well-worn epithet that “the only difference between Keystone and Hell is that Keystone has a polluted stream running through it.”107 In recounting his visit in 1969, and what it suggested to him of the social relationships of Hell, Lee conveyed his youthful horror at seeing a “white man and a Negro girl” together in the same bed and in another house he had witnessed “a Negro man and a white girl in the same bed.” After touring “eight houses,” Lee evidently considered the worst aspect of Cinder Bottom to be that it was “wholly integrated—racially, socially, sexually” and that “whites and Negroes were swigging beer from the same bottle.” Leaving Keystone, he understood that the “depravity” of Cinder Bottom and having a “wideopen county” was a logical and necessary evil in order for coal companies to maintain control over the place and the thousands of people pouring into the Pocahontas coalfield.108 Following the flow of Elkhorn Creek, past Cinder Bottom, past the tipple pouring coal into waiting Norfolk and Western hopper cars, along Main Street, westward toward the towns of Kimball and Welch, developed the white residen­tial and business areas of Keystone. On the western edge of Keystone, on land belonging to the Crozer Land Company, in what Crozer advertised as the “Westfield Addition,” immigrants from Europe and a diversity of places in Appalachia and throughout the United States built their homes. The landscape of Westfield was dominated by the “white” Keystone school and the “white” Methodist church, as well as the “four square” redbrick homes, all shoehorned into the once-wooded, sloping sides of Shawnee Mountain. Terraced and stair-stepped up the side of the mountain, the brick homes higher on the mountain looked down on the roofs of those below and on the businesses of Keystone. Into the hillside, developers cut narrow roads that turned and joined each other at sharp angles on nearly perpendicular slopes. From front porches and from the side and back doors reserved for domestic servants, descending to the street below, a series of steep, concrete stairs with

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Figure 6. Westfield Addition, circa 1920, before most of the neighborhood’s homes were built. Williams-Apperson Collection.

fitted galvanized pipes for banisters joined the neighborhood to Main Street. The more ostentatious Westfield homes had leaded windows, Tiffany glass lighting fixtures, tiled and porcelain bathrooms, and polished hardwood floors and paneling. Many of the homes reflected the new American Arts and Crafts style of home design and decoration. Telephones, steam heat, electricity, and indoor plumbing were the norm for these homes. Around the houses, filling the narrow, steep yards, and overhanging the steps cut into the mountain, hydrangea, phlox, bush roses, lilac, iris, and forsythia replaced the laurel and rhododendron, the chestnut, oak, maple, and poplar that once towered there. Across Main Street, there was another row of Westfield homes. Built later than the brick houses that faced them across the street, these Westfield residences were less grand and elaborate but still provided all of the amenities of modern America: telephone, steam heat, electricity, running water. Made of timber, these Westfield homes were one- or two-story structures, universally painted white and perpetually tinged grey with coal dust. Just as with the larger, brick homes rising on the mountain above, flowers and shrubs filled the narrow, fenced yards surrounding these houses. All of the houses fronted on Main Street, which had been terraced into the side of Shawnee Mountain and, except for the westernmost house in the row, opened onto the sidewalk at the same elevation as the street. Because the mountain came so near, limiting the building space on the south bank of the Elkhorn, the

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westernmost house in the neighborhood, located on Westfield Lot 86, was below the road, its top floor connected to the sidewalk by a short, suspended walkway. Approaching Keystone from the west, from the towns of Welch and Kimball, in the direction Isaiah Welch was traveling when he came first to this place, this Westfield house is the first house in Keystone. The rear of all the houses in this lower row of Westfield were well above ground level, with stairs leading from kitchens and backdoors down to a gravel alley. Across the alley, a weedy, unkempt border snagging trash and windblown rubbish, with blue-flowered chicory, plantain, Wooly Mullein, fleabane, and ironweed, lined the south bank of the Elkhorn. Because it lay behind the houses and buildings facing Main Street and opened onto Bridge Street giving access to the mine and the businesses and stores on the north bank of the Elkhorn, this alley became one of the preferred routes of miners living in Eckman Hollow for walking to and from work. In the Westfield neighborhood, within sight of the Koppers tipple and just a few yards from the railroad, native whites lived next door to Italians, Poles, Hungarians, Lithuanians, Jews, Gentiles, Protestants, and Catholics. First impressions could lead to the assertion that here was the American melting pot, and the American Dream in all of its fullness. Yet, on closer analysis, this diversity was predicated on the fact that nearly all of the property owners in the Westfield Addition were middle-class and elite whites. Here resided the members of Keystone’s Thursday Music Club, the Women’s Club, the Rotary Club, the Masonic Lodge, and the Eastern Star. Defined as it was by its population of ascendant middle-class whites, Westfield maintained a visible and rigid social and geographic segregation both from the white working-class neighborhoods of Keystone and from the prostitutes and persons of color in Cinder Bottom. Compounding the ambiguities and contradictions of this segregation, and as evidenced by the alley that lay at the foot of Westfield, the close proximity of neighborhoods, industrial sites, and businesses meant that persons segregated from each other in Keystone’s neighborhoods were also in daily and routine contact with each other.109 This was the defining cultural and geographic tension and contradiction of Keystone and the Poco field after the journeys of Welch and Kimball. All along the Elkhorn and the other creek valleys and hollows of the Poco field, in both company towns and incorporated towns, shaping the daily lives and the larger ambitions and hopes of hundreds of thousands of persons were these same tensions, ambiguities, and contradictions. They were the products of very old ideas and practices that persons brought with them from other places when the profits Kimball had foreseen had lured them to this old valley.

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They were also the products of the industrial order imposed on this terrain in the drive to control Pocahontas coal. As a neighborhood of Keystone, in its relationships with Keystone’s other neighborhoods and defined within these contradictions, Westfield embodies this place’s history. Westfield, however, is more than a neighborhood. Owing its existence to the emergence of the Poco field as part of the American economic engine and a way of life defined in terms of industrial profit and consumer goods, Westfield is also a way of thinking and speaking with particularity about larger systems and structures of values, forces, ideas, understandings, and choices. Westfield offers opportunity to discern this larger network of assumptions and understandings in their day-to-day expression and consequence in the lives of ordinary people. As a way to think of culture, history, and the future of communities with concreteness and particularity, Westfield manifests American middle-class attitudes about place, about individuals’ relationship to place, and about what is possible, valuable, and important in a place as those ideas are seen and felt in lived experience. Westfield opens spaces to examine the difficult ambivalences of middle-class identity and the struggle for the future of a place and what it means in American culture to live and work for the future of place. Keystone’s Westfield demonstrates the same double-layering evident in the naming of the towns and institutions of Welch and Kimball and the company towns in the Poco field—a particular place on a map but also connection to larger processes and questions, larger forces and structures, other journeys of import and significance. Westfield is a way of restoring the density, complexity, and dignity of people’s individual lives, at the same time offering a means of thinking about the broader social values and relationships that helped to shape those lives and their journeys.110 As both this neighborhood wedged between Shawnee Mountain and Elkhorn Creek and this larger system of values and ideas, assumptions, understandings, and choices, Westfield contributed to my grandparents’ self-perception, helping give form and direction to how they understood themselves and their relationship to that place, and shaping their own journeys. In all of its layers and particularities, Westfield represents the objects of my grandparents’ dreams and ambitions, the things for which they most strove, at the same time it defined the limits beyond which they and many hundreds of others could not go in the Poco field.

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“On a Plane with the Best in the Country”

On the north bank of Elkhorn Creek, in a sharp bend of the stream, Isaiah Welch stopped in his journey. He found there a high bank of coal that the creek’s waters had worked against for millennia to expose. By the time Welch stood before it, the coal bank was well above water level, with Indian Ridge rising above it. It was probably lichened and mossy, damp with the early spring’s rainwater and snowmelt seeping down through the forest’s dark soil. The exposed coal was located squarely between what in a few years would become the Keystone neighborhoods of Westfield and Cinder Bottom. Nineteen years after Welch’s first journey along the Elkhorn, the Keystone mine began operations, burrowing through the face of the coal and deep into the interior of Indian Ridge, becoming one of the consistently most productive mines in the Pocahontas coalfield. In June 1911, Colonel Thomas Edgar Houston acquired the mine.1 Sixteen years later, in another series of market constrictions and liquidations of coal companies, the Koppers Company acquired all of the Houston properties. On Monday, April 2, 1928, control of the mine was to transfer from Colonel Houston and his son David F. Houston to Koppers. Since the previous December when news of Koppers’s intentions to purchase all of the Houston properties and coal leases became public knowledge, the Poco field and all the towns the length of the Elkhorn Valley had teemed with rumors of the impending deal. Speculation was rampant about a massive new coal by-

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Figure 7. C. T. Apperson’s Koppers Stores Sales Club pin. Williams-Apperson Collection.

product plant rumored for Maitland, tipple operations that were to be closed, new work crews that were to be brought into the county, where these crews were to be housed, and the new company’s employment and production plans. The Welch Daily News documented and speculated upon every rumor about the transfer: “The report of the possibility of a by-product plant at Maitland had been circulated . . . one rumor had it that whether or not such a plant would be located there, the new owner planned to spend considerable money on improvements at that site.”2 “A huge coal deal by which the Koppers interest will shortly be established in this field has added no uncertain note of optimism in the general situation.” “The store managers offer base rock information by reporting better sales, especially on Saturdays, the heavy shopping days. The Saturday night crowd last week was intermingled with many visitors from out of Welch, and this was true in other towns of the county.”3 By the end of March 1928, Koppers had shipped several railcar loads of new mining machinery to McDowell County and company officials were at every Houston site, inspecting not only mines but also tipples, company stores, company houses, and other auxiliary enterprises.4 From newspaper articles at the time, it is clear that many persons in the Poco field regarded the transition from Houston to Koppers along the Elkhorn Valley as involving more than the transfer of ownership and leaseholds and part of a larger movement of

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economic progress and further industrialization.5 In light of the gathering economic storm that was increasingly apparent in the nation’s industries and farms, to McDowell County boosters, Koppers’s desire to control a consistent supply of high-grade bituminous coal as a raw material for processing augured great things for the Poco field. Early in the morning of Monday, April 2, the day after Palm Sunday, approximately one hundred and fifty miners reported as usual to the Keystone mine. Although they reported to work at a mine the Houston family operated, by the time they left work, the Koppers Company would own and operate the mine. At approximately 10:30, as Houston’s representatives and Koppers’s supervisors worked together in the mine office, four-and-a-half miles deep within the mine at cross entry 31, the flame from a miner’s lamp ignited methane gas released from a slate fall. The resulting explosion rocked the mine and caused Indian Ridge to tremble.6 As word of the explosion spread, over six hundred people gathered at the mine entrance and waited throughout the day for word of the injured and killed. When news of the blast reached the public schools, teachers dismissed classes and the students rushed across the Elkhorn on Bridge Street to join their families and neighbors in the vigil at the mine. At midday, William Wilson, Houston’s superintendent of Keystone Coal and Coke and as of that morning a Koppers employee, “had absolutely nothing to say” to either the waiting families or to reporters. Shortly after 6:00 on the evening of April 2, rescue workers recovered the first two bodies and brought them to the mine entrance. At approximately 1:45 on the morning of April 3, the last six bodies were brought out. Eight men were dead: Joe Preston, 27; Walter Wade, 27; Archie Frazier, 34; Wayman Poole, 45; E. M. Hall, 24; F. M. Studivant, 33; J. W. Cochran, 40; and Fred Platzer, 52.7 One week later, on April 9, 1928, a coroner’s jury convened to determine the cause of the explosion. The “hearing was conducted in the company offices” at Keystone and determined that the blast was unavoidable, that all mining regulations had been followed, and that both Houston and Koppers were free from any liability.8 Even in death, however, the class divisions and racial segregation defining the distance between Westfield and Cinder Bottom held sway. In the halfdozen or so newspaper articles about this explosion and the deaths of the eight miners, there is always a clear separation between the four white miners who were killed and the four African American miners who were killed. As was customary throughout early-twentieth-century publishing in the South,

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the Welch Daily News and the Bluefield Telegraph listed the victims separately and grouped as either “colored” or “white.” Both papers always named the white miners first. When the papers named a person of color, they provided the man’s first name with his family name. Except in the case of Fred Platzer, when the papers named a white man, they used the initials of the man’s first and middle names along with the family name.9 Moreover, these reports divide the victims by class. One of the fatalities, Fred Platzer, was the “chief mine inspector for the Houston operations.” The newspaper accounts always name Platzer first in the list of fatalities. The stories provide details about his injuries, the cause of his death, the circumstances of his surviving family, and the arrangements for his funeral; for none of the other victims is as much detail offered. Yet the social separation enforced outside the mine evidently did not prevail in the victims’ deaths. In providing details of the blast and recovery of the dead, the articles state that rescuers found five of the men lying close together, implying that they shared a common cause of death.10 With the perspective of time, this convergence of explosion, death, verdict, and news articles points to the reality that while the transfer of titles from Houston to Koppers foreshadowed much change in the Poco field, there was just as much that did not change. Going to work every day, miners faced the same dangers of gas, slate, and sudden death under Koppers as they did under Houston. Koppers’s acquisition of the Houston properties and operations in 1928, while not altering the ways of power in that place, does point to the first stages of a cultural shift that was to sweep over the Poco field, eventually coming to define American culture. In this emerging culture, what its proponents described as the “New Era,” a corporation’s continual need to maximize its wealth and control demanded increasing the rate at which people purchased the company’s products and services.11 The larger the corporation, the more urgent is its need to increase the rate of purchase and consumption. Through language and images, corporate advertising divisions and professional agencies created a consciousness of need and want, always escalating the speed and urgency with which potential customers sensed their need for the company’s goods, whether they be bathtubs, radios, overcoats, automobiles, toasters, or anything else. Eventually, it was no longer sufficient or acceptable to wait until a product needed to be replaced; the whims of style and fashion as created through advertising campaigns came to set the pace for the purchase of goods. With time, these tendencies and practices evolved from being characteristic of certain corpo-

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rations and conglomerates, to being a general cultural phenomenon. Social worth and standing became the consequences of what individuals purchased and how easily persons kept pace with the rapidly changing fashion.12 These values and tendencies are also felt in places. This culture of acquisition and ownership as the measure of social worth abstracted a place from the complex and millennia-long interaction of the natural and built environments and the human history and culture that had transpired across that landscape. Rather, a place’s value, how society regarded a place, derived from what it could bring to the economic exchange. The same would be true of the people in that place. When a place and its people could provide what the American economic engine required, society honored that place and its people, deeming them worthy of attention. Additionally, fashionable places were those populated and frequented by people most able to participate in American culture through the purchase of nationally recognized brands of consumer goods. This was not new with Koppers; these attitudes and understandings had a long lineage in American culture and society, discernible in the thinking and ideas of Alexander Hamilton and his contemporaries. Koppers’s consumer culture was a continuation, following in a clear line of succession from the vision Welch and Kimball worked toward after their journeys, to that of Houston’s presence in the Elkhorn Valley. The place was no longer the arbiter and judge, the standard of what is appropriate in that place. Kimball, Houston, and others operated on the premise that rendered the place’s complexity and integrity incidental to what it could contribute to the acquisition of wealth. In the consumer culture Koppers and other corporations cultivated and put forward, these values and practices took on larger and more damaging implications, both for the place and the people who lived in that place. Two-and-a-half years following the explosion in the Keystone mine, in the September 1930 issue of the West Virginia Review, Thomas E. Lightfoot, Engineer in Charge of Accident Prevention and Compensation for the Koppers Coal Company, described the changes brought by Koppers since purchasing the Houston companies. Exemplifying the contradictions and values of Koppers’s consumer culture, Lightfoot wrote that Koppers had been “improving the living conditions” in the towns of its newly acquired operations by installing town lights, water, and sewerage services. The point for all of these improvements was that “miners working for the Koppers Coal Company may enjoy homes comparable with those living in other mining towns.”13 While living conditions were comparable or even better than those of other company towns, there were other reasons to remark about Koppers.

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Lightfoot goes on to suggest the ready availability of nationally advertised consumer goods in the Koppers Stores as the final, best standard for judging the quality of life for a Koppers employee. Life as a Koppers employee, living in a Koppers-owned town, was comparable not just to other company towns, but to any place in the country: “Koppers Stores, Inc., which operate the stores at the Koppers plants, have put their stores on a plane with the best in the country.”14 In every photograph of Koppers’s Keystone store, the venue is resplendent with fresh produce and meat, quality canned goods, fashionable clothing, household appliances and furniture, toys for children—and all of this from a company for which the sale of consumer goods was secondary to its industrial output. However, that consumer goods and access to nationally advertised brands were the standards by which to judge the quality of one’s life was not peculiar to Koppers. Other companies, active in the Poco field also engaged in this same advertising, using similar language and employing the same values.15 Long a source of national and local criticisms of the coal industry and bitterly opposed by miners, the company store and scrip payment systems were cited as evidences of coal companies’ unchecked power. As if to prove its benevolence and selflessness, Koppers consistently used a language and images of plenty and friendliness when talking about its stores. Instead of describing its facilities as company stores, with all of the implied conflict and struggle, Koppers evolved the more benign concept of the industrial store with various departments. Koppers’s concern over image, language, and marketing extended beyond its own properties and control to an industry-wide focus, building allies and alliances with other coal companies and operators of company stores. Announcing in August 1934 the September convention of The National Industrial Stores Association, the organization’s president, Paul R. Umberger, who was also vice president and general manager of Koppers Stores, Inc. underscored the importance of the convention, using Koppers’s own industrial stores as examples of new developments and trends in management and sales. Just as Keystone was not a company-owned town, this effort at constructing consumer goods as the standard for judging one’s quality of life extended beyond the relations and hierarchies of the company and into all areas of culture and society. In his editorial, Umberger implicitly lays out the political and social underpinnings of Koppers’s version of the new consumer culture and industrial stores. In Umberger’s vision, the bounty of goods available at all industrial stores provides the ground for opposition to the policies of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. “It is well to remember, fellow industrial store

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men that the eyes of the retail business world are going to be on us during this convention. We cannot let the NRA [National Recovery Administration] Committee of Three, our hosts of critical retail competitors, or the country as a whole, to continue to think of industrial stores, our Association and our annual Convention as picayune affairs.”16 Umberger’s editorial motivation remains open to conjecture. He could be writing in denial of the dire economic conditions of the time, or out of a deep hatred of the National Recovery Administration, or perhaps in response to the United Mine Workers’s increasing repudiation of the company store and “check-off” systems and the writings of “radicals” of the period.17 Regardless of these possibilities, Umberger leaves little doubt that he is also motivated by a sense that systems of company control are under scrutiny and attack and must be preserved against those who sought to limit that control. For Umberger, this is a class issue as well as an issue of corporate power. He writes, “If there has ever been a time in the history of our business when executives and managers needed inspiration and knowledge, it is certainly right now!” In articulating this camaraderie and the shape of an emerging consumer culture, Umberger enlists a New Testament parable. Not just a means of extending an invitation to his “fellow industrial store men,” Umberger’s use of scripture also represents the ways in which consumer culture annexes and sanitizes other images and ideas, including theology. “From my early scriptural training,” Umberger writes, “I recall a certain parable about a man who gave a wedding feast and had to go into the highways and byways to secure guests to attend, because his original guests began, with one accord, to make excuses. I have often wondered just what was the matter with that particular groom’s hospitality, for I simply can’t conceive of all his guests turning him down. Certainly the members of our Association won’t fail to take advantage of the opportunity before them, particularly when it will cost them very little—just the time and money necessary to get to the Pittsburgh Convention.”18 Missing from Umberger’s interpretation of the parable of the great feast are the poor, ill, dispossessed, and disenfranchised who were given places at the groom’s table when his first invited guests refused to attend. Missing also from Umberger’s vision of American and industrial-store plenty are the people of the Pocahontas coalfields who were either killed in or survived the 1928 explosion in the Keystone mine or who were economically or racially excluded from participating in a culture increasingly defined by the accumulation of nondurable goods. Given the ideology of the editorial, it is difficult to determine whether Umberger’s closing shrillness derives from fear, boosterism, or both. What is

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clear is the way in which Koppers’s industrial stores and an emerging consumer culture forcefully communicated to employees and allies alike its political, social, and cultural values. Whether it is Koppers or the National Industrial Stores Association, Umberger makes explicit that what is expected is not just participation, but “the heart and soul” loyalty of people: “It should be a pleasure as well as a duty for every industrial executive to attend the Pittsburgh Convention and put his heart and soul in the activities.” Umberger’s conclusion amounts almost to a call to arms and impassioned altar call, as he implies that every Koppers store executive and everyone associated with any “industrial store” was going to be needed for the fight ahead: “We must follow through this year. . . . Don’t let anything stop you! NISA Members and all industrial store executives of the United States: I’ll see you at Pittsburgh.”19 During the next twenty years, Koppers Stores Division’s incessant selfpromotion and its refashioning of the image and language of the company store indicate the ways in which advertising and consumer goods became the accepted standard for the social well being of people and places throughout American culture and across the globe. A number of cultural critics identify these tendencies and practices of consumer culture as characteristic of the later part of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first century. Yet the roots and emergences of this culture were many years before, in places largely forgotten or ignored. Koppers’s practice of a consumer culture in the Poco field, building as it did on existing social patterns and power relationships, demonstrates that what many have regarded as new developments are actually a continuation and expansion on the old, ongoing struggles and conflicts to control a place.20 Tal Apperson was twenty-four years old in August of 1934 when he read Umberger’s editorial and attended the Pittsburgh convention of the National Industrial Stores Association in September. Just a few years before, when he had earned his first Koppers Stores Sales Club pin and Aldah Apperson had clipped from a magazine a photograph of the new and shining Koppers building in Pittsburgh, these cultural practices and values were already in place and working to increase Koppers’s control in Keystone and the Poco field.21 For the Appersons, and for many others, this emerging culture and its values would prove to be both their life and their undoing.

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Moving to Westfield

He was sixteen years old when he stepped off the train into the steam, coal dust, smoke, and noise of Keystone, in the summer of 1926. He would have boarded the westbound Norfolk and Western passenger train in Farmville, Virginia, not far from his home in the town of Dillwyn, in Buckingham County. Once on the train, his journey would have taken him to Roanoke and then to Radford. At Radford, following the route Welch and Kimball would have taken on horses the train would have turned north along the New River and at Glen Lyn turned up the East River to Bluefield. Just a young boy, and probably not having been away from home, he could very well have spent much of the trip gazing from the train’s windows as the Virginia Piedmont changed to the mountains and he saw, perhaps for the first time, the Blue Ridge, the city of Roanoke, and the long valley of the New River. Perhaps he noticed the sudden narrowness of the New as it passed through the gap at Cloyd’s Mountain, below Belspring, with only enough room for rail bed and river. A few miles past Bluefield, the train would be plunged in darkness through the long, smoky Flat Top Tunnel. Then, dramatically, bursting, thrusting, hurtling itself into the daylight, the train entered the valley of the Elkhorn and the boy saw for the first time the place that would come to define him. The train braking against the long downhill grade followed the Elkhorn, stopping in the still-new towns along the way. As the train pulled into the Keystone station, from the passenger car’s south-facing windows, he could have looked down into Elkhorn Creek, running black with coal wastes and sewage.

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Figure 8. “The force.” Koppers Number Ten, summer 1930; left to right: unknown, unknown, Aldah Williams, Tal Apperson, Ben Davis. In his letters, Apperson often referred to the staff in each store as “the force.” Williams-Apperson Collection.

Fleeing poverty and parental abuse, Tal Apperson arrived in the Poco field in search of a future and a life like the one many others were coming to claim in Keystone’s Westfield. The day after arriving in Keystone, Apperson found a job loading coal for T. E. Houston’s Keystone Coal and Coke.1 Within weeks, he was injured when slate fell from the mine roof. No longer able to work as a coal loader, his supervisor, having grown to like the boy who had come to do a man’s work, put Apperson to delivering dynamite to the mine face at Houston’s Keystone operations. From this, he moved to a position as clerk and butcher in the Houston Company Store. His coworkers in the store came to call him “Apperson,” the name by which he was known for the rest of his life. Gregarious, generous to those whom he liked, affable to a fault, and eager to impress company officials, Apperson found his niche in the Houston Company Store.2 After the Koppers Company’s acquisition of all the Houston operations and coal leases in the Pocahontas coalfield, Koppers officials renumbered all of the former Houston stores according to the Koppers mine operations with which they were associated. The Keystone store became Koppers Store Number Ten. By the time he was nineteen, Koppers’s Stores Division had made Apperson manager of Number Ten.

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Everett C. Williams worked as the Norfolk and Western’s certified watch inspector in Keystone, with his shop in the front window of Pais and Vecellio’s Grocery store, across the rail bed and Railroad Avenue from Number Ten. In the early summer of 1930, Williams had gotten the promise of a job in Koppers Number Ten for his sixth child, a daughter, Aldah. Aldah Williams came to Key­stone after finishing a year at National Business College in Roanoke, Virginia, where she acquired the nickname, “Chick.”3 The night before she left Newbern to go to Keystone for her first day of work, Aldah told a neigh­bor that she was “going over to the coalfields, to get a job and go to dances.”4 She went to work as a bookkeeper for Apperson, whom she would later describe as “a real good looking boy, but a cut-up.” In her first years in Keystone, Aldah lived with her father in Mrs. Emma Bernard’s boarding house on Main Street and returned to Newbern for weekend visits, using the train pass the railroad provided Williams as part of his compensation.5 During this same time, sneaking away from the strict supervision of her father, Aldah and Apperson began a courtship. For three years, in their time away from work, they went to dances, parties, vaudeville shows, and picnics. His surviving letters tell of their nicknames for each other, double dates with friends, and private jokes now lost to time. With $1.50 between them, Apperson and Aldah were married on Thanksgiving Day, Novem­ber 30, 1933.6 For their honeymoon, they went to Gary, McDowell County, to watch a football game. After working the next day and Saturday, on Sunday morning December 3, Apperson, Aldah, and Everett drove to Newbern for a family gathering at the Williams homeplace. In the years ahead, Keystone and the Pocahontas coalfields with all of their conflicts and contradictions became the measure of Apperson’s and Aldah’s lives, defining and shaping their shared journey.7 The hundreds of photographs Apperson and Aldah made over the course of their eighteen or twenty years in McDowell County offer powerful witness to the interplay of place, social and cultural conflicts, and personal and collective identities, as well as the future that the two saw for them­selves and their family as they came of age in Keystone. There are photographs of the two of them sitting in front of the old Number Ten on Bridge Street and photographs of the “new” Koppers Store Number Ten, built on Keystone’s Main Street in 1935. There are photographs of their apartments and the mountains above Keystone, of Sunday School picnics and outings with friends. They took photographs of Koppers’s delivery trucks, locomotives at full steam, and freight trains loaded with coal. The albums Aldah organized offer black and white, sepia-toned glimpses of coal-blackened and smoke-smudged tipples and streets in Key­stone, War,

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Switchback, and Kimball, and along railroad tracks in unidentified coal camps. The photographs reveal a couple careful of appearances and stylish in their dress, underscoring that those who remembered him sixty years later in the Poco field still regarded Apperson as having been “a good dresser” and always looking “real sharp.”8 In nearly all of these photo­graphs, the Appersons are smil­ing, thriv­ing, energet­ic, and hopeful; their ambitions and dreams for their future were within reach. Those photographs also suggest the forms of social interaction the Appersons came to associate with a middle-class identity and future in America. While the relationships of their lives enforced many of the same social practices and values established in their childhoods, those interactions received a distinctive shape and direction in the context of Keystone’s geography and history. The Appersons saw as inseparable, almost synonymous, the practices and values of the Koppers Company, the culturally and geographically enforced customs of race and gender, the local Methodist Church, and a driving sense of future econom­ic possibil­i­ties in the communities stretching the length of the Elkhorn Valley.9 As the Appersons were coming of age, the Koppers Company in no small measure defined Keystone. Although neither of them could have articulated it

Figure 9. Aldah in front of Koppers Number Ten, about 1932–1933. Williams-Apperson Collection.

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Figure 10. Clowning around, Keystone, 1934. Williams-Apperson Collection.

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Figure 11. Keystone, 1932. Williams-Apperson Collection.

Figure 12. Newbern, August 1938. Williams-Apperson Collection.

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Figure 13. Aldah and the new car, 1935. Williams-Apperson Collection.

Figure 14. Tal Apperson, at about 16 years old, shortly after arriving in Keystone. Williams-Apperson Collection.

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Figure 15. Apperson, on Main Street, Keystone, in front of the new Koppers Store, summer of 1939, about the time he became Houston district manager of all of Koppers’s stores in the Poco field. Williams-Apperson Collection.

Figure 16. Apperson, on the steps of the old Koppers Number Ten, about 1932–1933. Williams-Apperson Collection.

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Figure 17. Meeting at Koppers headquarters, 1936; Apperson is on the far right; Mr. Staples is in the dark suit and striped tie, facing the photographer. WilliamsApperson Collection.

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precisely, the Number Ten Store and the Koppers Industrial Stores Division became their life and the means by which Aldah and Apperson understood that they could “be somebody.”10 They believed that with savvy, hard work, individual effort, and luck they would find with Koppers more economic security than they had known as children and more hope for financial suc-

Figure 18. Poco field store men, leaving for Pittsburgh; Apperson is in the back row, far right. Williams-Apperson Collection.

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Figure 19. Aldah at work, Koppers Houston District Office, May 1937. Williams-Apperson Collection.

Figure 20. Koppers’s Stores, office personnel; Aldah is seated in the front row, third from the left; J. W. Staples is in the back row, fourth from the left; June 1934. Williams-Apperson Collection.

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Moving to Westfield  /  73

cess than many others had in Depression-era America.11 Keystone’s Westfield neighborhood would be the measure of their success. The correspondence extant from their courtship and marriage reflect that Apperson and Aldah both considered being a part of the Koppers organization and assuming a life for which Westfield would represent to them and to others their success were one in the same. Internalizing the patterns and practices of the store in their own relationship, they accepted as necessary and appropriate the personal sacrifices Koppers and Westfield required. Apperson’s prompt replies to Aldah’s letters or postcards often began with a store managers’ brag: “how’s this for service?” In Apperson’s letters to Aldah, their personal rela­tion­ship takes second place to company changes and store news. They routinely cut short their vaca­tions to return to the store. Apperson traveled by train yearly to Pittsburgh for the Koppers’s Conven­tion. On other trips with “store men,” he visited other coalfields to inspect new credit systems in other companies, new lines of merchan­dise, and new store designs. Issuing scrip to Koppers employees, balancing account books, extending “emer­gency credit” to miners, often working late into the night, Apperson and Aldah became “good Koppers people.”12 The letters from Apperson to Aldah also illustrate that Koppers sought to shape and control the outlook and values of its employees. Nothing in the many references to the Koppers organization in Apperson’s letters, the other material my grandmother saved, or the oral histories of persons who knew the company suggests there was any self-determination afforded to employees or any kind of employee participation in decisions. Instead, all of the evidence points to corporate structures and practices designed to reproduce the company’s power and control, silencing any opposition. Frankly, however, many aspects of the company’s policies cohered smoothly and easily with attitudes and practices Apperson and many of his contemporaries accepted as routine and unremarkable. There are few better examples of this than the company’s policies and practices regarding persons of color.13 The Appersons assumed to be an appropriate social practice the same forms of racism Thomas E. Lightfoot demonstrates in his West Virginia Review article from the summer of 1930. Lightfoot opens with a description of a “First Aide Meet” Koppers conducted for its employees on June 28, 1930. At the meet, teams from each of the Koppers mines and plants participated in a series of competitive safety drills and first aid exercises. Photographs of the winners in three of the four contest divisions accompany Lightfoot’s description of the event: “girls, adult white and adult colored.”14 Decades

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following that competition, we are left to wonder whether these patterns of segregation persisted in the event of a real accident or mine emergency. The photograph of  “the force” at Number Ten (figure 8) suggests these same policies of racial segregation while offering consumer goods as the standard by which the quality of life is to be judged.15 Probably taken shortly after Aldah came to work at Keystone in the early summer of 1930, the photograph shows rows of canned goods, packaged light bread, different patterns of sewing cloth, and numerous household items, although the store was small and dark by later standards. Because the company held out the opportunity for its employees to have the best products generally available, all its employees were to accept that Koppers was a benevolent company and that its social practices and production decisions were just.16 From the photograph, we could assume that all of the employees at the store were white. However, historical evidence makes clear that the store generally had on its payroll persons of color whose job it was to empty the trash, sweep the floors, keep the furnace running, drive delivery trucks, and obey Apperson’s orders. In official photographs of the force at Number Ten, Koppers’s racial policies and use of consumer goods to justify production decisions rendered these employees invisible.17

Figure 21. African Americans working as pickers, Koppers Keystone tipple. Norfolk Southern Corporation Archives.

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Figure 22. Produce counter, Koppers Number Ten, Christmas 1935. Norfolk Southern Corporation.

Most, if not all, of Koppers’s white employees accepted and extended those customs of racial segregation. Family stories of Apperson’s management style and interactions with persons of color indicate that the company policies suggested through these photographs only reinforced and undergirded the racism that Apperson and others brought with them from other places. While the Appersons were gener­ally praised and are still remem­bered for “treating everyone the same” in Keystone (even risking social ridicule to help an African American estab­lish a hotel in Cinder Bottom), they lived within and saw nothing wrong with the racial limits of the white culture. These limits were regard­ed as “the way things were supposed to be” with little, if any, opportunity to reflect upon their justice or any reason to envision social connec­tions apart from those common practices.18 We must not be tempted to regard the 1930 photograph Aldah saved as an isolated representation. In other photographs of Koppers’s Number Ten, there is never a person of color pictured. While Koppers employed African Americans at the same time it constructed consumer goods as a means of defining the quality of life in the Koppers Company, the company’s control

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of all images falsely implied that blacks never touched those goods. This racial segregation in the store is indicative of the ways in which Koppers participated in the more general racialization of work and social worth already active in the Poco field. The photograph of the interior of the tipple at Keystone (figure 21) was made in 1944, and it was not an official Koppers photograph, nor was it in the material saved by my grandmother. Rather, the Norfolk and Western Railway made the photograph in preparation for a campaign advertising Pocahontas coal.19 The photograph is of African American men “picking coal” in the Koppers tipple, a job that was among the lowest paid and had even lower respect among miners. While there may have been a racial equality below ground where “you had to look out for one another,” and in working conditions where literally “everyone is black” and comes out looking the same at the end of the shift, this photograph demonstrates the extent to which Koppers accepted the white racism at work in McDowell County by segregating work groups, reserving the menial sorting of coal for African American workers.20 These images suggest that to enjoy the abundance and plenty that defined life with Koppers did not require a white person ever having to face an African American in a Koppers mine or in a Koppers store. While many of Koppers’s policies reinforced attitudes and practices already a part of Apperson’s life, the company also exerted an extraordinary force on his developing sense of himself and the world. When he was growing up in Buckingham County, Apperson’s family were Democrats, there being barely a scant Republican presence throughout most of the state, but especially in Central and Southside Virginia at the turn of the century.21 Apperson himself was ineligible to vote until he turned twenty-one years old in 1931, by which time he had been manager of Koppers Number Ten for two years. As a loyal company employee, he would have come to see Koppers’s ideas and practices as “common sense” and that those policies made good business sense.22 Like her parents and siblings, Aldah became a registered Democrat, but Apperson became a registered Republican.23 His daughter remembers that Apperson thought of John L. Lewis as “the devil incarnate,” was contemptuous of “New Dealers,” said Hoover was “blamed for a lot he couldn’t help,” and that Franklin D. Roosevelt “started us down the wrong path and ruined everything.”24 Koppers’s development and expansion of the Number Ten Store further suggests a connection between the evolving consciousness of a young man intent on his own journey to economic success and the emerging shape and direction of American consumer culture. At the same time Paul Umberger and his “fellow” store executives were reveling in American plenty and abundance

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Figure 23. Koppers Number Ten, August 1935. Williams-Apperson Collection.

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at the 1934 National Industrial Stores Convention, work was progressing on planning and building a new Keystone store. Opened in August 1935, with Apperson as manager, Koppers relocated the store to the south side of Elkhorn Creek, on Main Street, and next door to the First National Bank of Keystone. Sporting an art deco exterior and well-lighted interior, Koppers promoted the store for its abundance and variety of stock and the availability of national brands. Representing a marked departure from the store acquired from Houston, the new store was brighter, much larger, and offered a wide

Figure 24. Koppers Number Ten, grocery and men’s clothing departments, opening day, August 16, 1935. Williams-Apperson Collection.

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range of ready-to-wear clothing, cosmetics, produce, canned vegetables, fresh meats, electrical appliances, and furniture. As coal production continued to slip and unemployment and hunger continued to threaten many miners in the Poco field, for Christmas 1935, the advertising banners in the store championed consumer goods as the measure of American success: “You Are Sure To Find What You Want In Our Complete Line of Christmas Gifts”; “Give Something Electrical”; “Merry Christmas To One And All From Koppers Stores.”25 In 1939, Koppers again expanded the Keystone store with the addition of a gas station, grill, and drugstore. The Welch Daily News, always supportive of the coal industry, reported that the Koppers organization was “one of the most efficient business structures in the coalfields” and that the company “stands near the top of industrial stores nationally.” The article goes on to credit Paul Umberger for this success, saying that through Umberger’s leadership of the National Industrial Stores Association, industrial stores “were not seriously handicapped by adverse legislation during the past two [1937–1939] years.”26 The article gives considerable attention to Apperson, then manager of Number Ten, and who shortly became district manager of all of Koppers’s stores in the Pocahontas coalfield. Announcing the opening of the remodeled Keystone Store that would “be the last word in completeness and beauty of equipment and expert arrangement for the service and convenience of its patrons,” Apperson used the terminology of Koppers’s official campaign to rehabilitate the image of the company store and establish consumer goods as the final benchmark of social well being. Promising courteous service to customers, “progressive ideals,” and the “ethical business integrity of the official staff [that] have placed Koppers Stores at the top of the coal industry’s gigantic merchandise trade,” Apperson almost sounds as if Paul Umberger had written his speech. The Welch Daily News goes on: “‘The Keystone drugstore-grill-service station unit will be operated as a first class store where quality and courteous service will always be the first consideration,’ declared C. T. Apperson.”27 Owing to his effectiveness as Number Ten’s manager, as well as a brief turn as manager of the Koppers Store in Kimball, his good relationship with company officials, and his “splendid record in county civic circles,” in 1939, C. T. Apperson became Houston district manager for Koppers’s seven stores in the Pocahon­tas field. He was twenty-nine years old and had been in the Poco field for thirteen years. However, a white, middle-class future in Keystone required more than being willing members of the Koppers organization.28 Even before they lived in the Westfield neighborhood itself, the Appersons’ life involved scrupu­lous adher­ence to the strict geographic, racial, class, and

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gender orthodoxy of Keystone. Particularly for Aldah, middle-class status necessitated her constant struggle against the residue of an industrial environment in that narrow valley. Just as Pocahontas coal was industrialized McDowell’s first reality, the social consciousness that shaped Aldah’s life cannot be separated from realities imposed on the Elkhorn Valley landscape by the processes of coal production. Like most white, middle-class women in the Poco field, Aldah’s consuming job was to create a living space free from Keystone’s invasive dirt. Partially relying on household help, every day and sometimes twice each day, Aldah took up the rugs and beat them free of coal dust. Daily, she dusted the entire house and frequently washed the windows. She routinely took down the curtains, washed, ironed, starched, and rehung them. She removed the slipcovers and cleaned them several times a year. Aldah made sure that the family’s clothes never looked smudged or gray, putting the white clothes into bleach to soak every Sunday night for washday on Monday. When she hung clothes on the line, she was careful to remove them before a locomotive passed or the tipple’s coal dust had opportunity to settle.29 For Aldah, as for other white women in Keystone, the final indication of class status was having household help in the daily war with coal dust. While more wealthy families were able “to have help” every day, Aldah and other middle-class women employed domestic workers two or three days each week, usually for a morning or afternoon. All of the domestic workers employed by the Appersons were persons of color.30 While Aldah’s kin still remember the meticu­lous cleanli­ness of her home, other aspects of Aldah’s work also served as markers of middle-class status in Keystone.31 Always skilled with handwork, Aldah made the family’s Christmas cards, embroidered bed sheets and pillowcases, painted, and sketched. She gained renown in Keystone for her sewing ability, making slipcovers and curtains for herself and others. She made doll clothes and doll furnitu­re; dresses for herself and her daughter. She prided herself on her mastery of recipes her immigrant European neighbors shared with her.32 After their marriage in 1933, Aldah moved from working as a bookkeeper in the Number Ten store to become secretary for Mr. Staples, the district manager for all of Koppers’s stores in the Poco field, known officially as Koppers Houston District. Aldah quit working at the Houston District office when Apperson became district manager in 1939. During the 1940s, she became active in the Thursday Music Club, a gathering of Keystone women who shared talents and interests in music.33 Apperson was a member of the Masons, the Shriners, the Knights Templar, the Keystone Rotary Club, and the McDowell County Chamber of Commerce.34 Aldah and Apperson’s social

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activities centered in the Masonic Lodge and the local chapter of the Order of the Eastern Star as well as outings and visits with their friends or kin who lived in the area. However, beyond these activities and second only to work, the Keystone Methodist Church was the primary focus for the Appersons’ life outside their home. Tucked into the side of Shawnee Mountain, located in the middle of the Westfield neighborhood, the Keystone Methodist Church incorporated all of the limits and expectations of middle-class white culture in Keystone, at the same time it offered Aldah a sense of place, community, meaning, and continuity with her formative years in Newbern. With its membership comprised of the middle management of mine and railroad and the merchants and entrepreneurs in Keystone, the Methodist Church became one of the most important social activities for the white, Protestant, middle class in Keystone. Moreover, the Methodist Church hosted the weekly meetings of the Rotary Club, with proceeds from the meal served to the Rotarians going to support the work of the women’s missions.35 Aldah was a member of the church’s Women’s Sunday School Class and the Women’s Society of Christian Service. At her insistence, Apperson attended and joined the church, belonging to the Men’s Bible Class, enjoying it more because of his business friends who were also members of the congregation.36 Years after leaving Keystone, Aldah continued to send contributions to the church, supporting various projects and “keeping up with her friends there.”37 During the years in which Apperson worked as Houston district manager for Koppers Stores, implicit rules and assumed expectations of work, place, and church began to bring Westfield into reach for Apperson and Aldah. During those five years their only child, Alecia, was born. Those were also the years of the Second World War, when the Pocahontas coalfield witnessed an economic and population boom unlike anything since Frederick Kimball made possible the opening of the field in the 1880s. By 1944, there were nearly 100,000 people living in the county, and miners brought 25.5 million tons of Pocahontas coal from beneath the mountains of McDowell County.38 In addition to working for Koppers during the early years of the war, Apperson began to take personal advantage of the wartime prosperity.39 Between 1939 and 1944, he invested in local businesses, bought shares in the First National Bank of Keystone, purchased four coal-hauling trucks, and acquired a line of jukeboxes and pinball machines.40 In 1944, Apperson left Koppers ostensibly to pursue his own business interests as a coal hauler. At about the same time, he entered into partnership with his boyhood friend from Buckingham County, Ben Davis, opening Davis Furniture in War. With Raymond

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Goad, he opened Keystone Hardware and Furniture in Keystone. However, Apperson’s daughter remembers that there were other reasons prompting Apperson to leave Koppers.41 While Apperson was “always a salesman,” the Koppers work had become too confining for him.42 He wanted to be more in control of his own affairs and wanted a greater freedom to cash in on the money flowing through the Poco field during the closing years of the Second World War. Just beyond the shadowy edges of that memory of a man ready to make the “big strike” are the vague and nearly forgotten misgivings of a relatively young man whose life was given over to a company that he had come to suspect would not hesitate to dismiss him if expediency demanded it. Koppers broke the bargain that Apperson and Aldah believed had existed for those who would offer loyalty to the company. Immediately before leaving Koppers, he stated on several occasions that he did not approve of the company’s new policies toward its employees.43 The changes Apperson perceived taking place in the Koppers corporate structure were directly a result of the reorganization of the company to prepare for the postwar economy. Through the 1940s, Koppers’s president, Jack Tierney, planned and coordinated the integration of Koppers into “a single corporate entity” with “a single decision-making structure.” With Tierney’s death in 1944, Koppers was ready to take advantage of “the incredible postwar growth [and to] expand operations and facilities to meet the urgent needs of its customers.”44 In 1946, General Brehon Somervell, recently retired from the United States Army where he was in charge of military supply during the Second World War and had been responsible for the building of the Pentagon, became president of Koppers. Under Somervell’s direction, this ongoing process of integration and centralization continued as management restructured Koppers and all of its subsidiaries to maximize administrative control and capital expansion. In 1958, Koppers officials praised Somervell for his “warm and unvarying consideration of his associates,” and that one of his “characteristic remarks” was: “People count more than anything else.”45 From the perspective of the Appersons and the Poco field, there is another side to this story. When Apperson moved to be Koppers’s Houston district manager in 1939, he succeeded the family’s close friend, J. W. Staples. Koppers had promoted Staples to the merchandising department at the division office in Huntington, West Virginia.46 Houston and then Koppers had employed Staples since 1919 or 1920. Soon after his promotion and shortly before his retirement, Koppers Stores dismissed Staples and denied him all pension, health, and retirement benefits. In the years that followed, the Staples family “had a pretty tough

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82  /  chapter 4

time of it.”47 Her daughter remembers Aldah’s reaction to the experience: “Mr. Staples gave them the best years of his life and then they did that to him. That was the way Koppers did people.”48 Long years later, Koppers was still remembered in the Pocahontas coalfields as being “the kind of company that when you began to get up in age with them, they would let you go. They didn’t care a thing about how long you had been with them. They just let you go.”49 Fearing for his own future, Apperson was thirty-four years old when he left Koppers. With five employees and three trucks he began shipping coal to retail customers. When the Second World War ended in August 1945, with income from his coal-hauling enterprise, his business ventures, and his other investments, Apperson was riding the crest of postwar prosperity. By 1945, fifteen years after the photograph of “the force” at Number Ten, Apperson and Aldah had entered the American middle class; theirs, however, was a tenuous membership.50 Throughout their marriage, the apartments and company houses the Appersons rented were markers to them of the progress they were making in their shared journey to claiming a Westfield life. Between 1933 and 1945, they had moved more than nineteen times within McDowell County, and all but one or two of those times were within Keystone itself. “Whenever he found a better place he would come home and say we were moving the next day.”51 Yet none of these apartments and homes were located within Keystone’s Westfield, and it was only after leaving Koppers that the Appersons attained what is typically regarded as the symbol of the American middle class. On August 7, 1945, eight days before VJ Day and the end of World War II, the Appers­ons purchased their first home.52 Located on Lot 86 in Keystone’s Westfield Addition, on the opposite side of Main Street from the church and school, and less than fifty yards from Elkhorn Creek, the westernmost house in the neighborhood, the house was a duplex in which the Appersons lived on the lower floor and rented out the upper floor to supplement their income.53 The family who rented from them was that of Elio and Julia Pais and their two young sons. A first-generation Italian American, Pais was the son of two of Keystone’s wealthiest citizens, Emanuel and Elena Cattaruzza Pais. After emigrating from Italy, Emanuel Pais established the Elkhorn Grocery Company in 1919; he was one of the cofounders and later the vice president of the First National Bank of Keystone and had interests in a number of other businesses in Keystone and the Poco field. The Appersons’ house sat across the street from Elio Pais’s parents’ imposing home, located on Westfield Lot 67, with its stone terraces and steps leading directly onto Main Street.

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Not as grand or elaborate as the other Westfield homes that overlooked it from the side of Shawnee Mountain, the floor of the house on which the Appersons lived had five rooms.54 While the Pais apartment connected to the street by a short bridge from their second-story front porch, the Appersons’ front door was beneath the level of Main Street, and to reach it required descending a short flight of stairs cut into the bank. Entering the house through the front door, there was a living room on the right. Here, Aldah placed the piano. The couch and other furniture purchased either from the furniture department of Koppers Number Ten or from Davis Furniture, sported slipcovers Aldah had made to guard against settling coal dust. Her choice of styles and fabric always reflected the latest fashions she had identified in magazines and newspapers, but also pointed to her taste in flower prints and subtle, gentle colors. In this room, she entertained the Thursday Music Club, the women’s circle from the church, and other guests. Across the entranceway from the living room, there was the dining room, its walnut table and chairs used only when the Appersons had visits from friends or family.

Figure 25. Home of Emanuel and Elena Pais, Westfield Lot 67, across Main Street from the Apperson home (Welch Daily News, Twelfth Anniversary Edition, 1935). Williams-Apperson Collection.

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As it was with every house and apartment in which the Appersons lived, the center of their life was the kitchen. Situated midway down the floor’s center hall, here was where the three Appersons took most of their meals. Against one wall stood a white Hoover cabinet, also a purchase from Koppers, with its flour bin and cabinets and racks for cooking and baking supplies. Facing west toward Kimball and Welch, the kitchen window over the sink was never without curtains and a small knick-knack or two on the sill. On the Hoover cabinet, Aldah kept a small radio and as she worked and cooked, she listened to her favorite shows. Eating their noon meal together, she and Apperson listened to the midday news broadcast from Chicago. They most often listened to news broadcasters H. V. Kaltenborn and Walter Winchell. During the autumn, Aldah listened to the pennant races and the World Series; her favorite team was the Brooklyn Dodgers. She and Apperson were ardent fans of Nat King Cole, and she would often hum along with Cole’s singing as she worked.55 As she listened to the radio, she tried and perfected the recipes her neighbors and friends shared with her. Every day, Aldah cooked three hot meals for the family, and every day, Apperson came home for the noon meal. The kitchen filled with the smells and flavors that resonated with the lives and stories of Italy, Germany, Scotland, and the countries of Eastern Europe, as well as other places in Europe and America from which the people of the Poco field had come.56 In other ways, Aldah’s cooking was deeply rooted in that place. Because of the heavy concentration of Roman Catholics in the industrialized Elkhorn Valley, Koppers and every other grocer made available salt fish for Friday meals so that Catholics could observe the tradition of a meatless Friday. For the Appersons, Friday’s evening meal usually consisted of salt fish, soaked in water to remove the excess salt, and then fried. In the summer, when the garden at Newbern was bearing fruit and vegetables, Aldah’s mother often mailed green beans, picked, packed, and mailed before the sun had fully risen, arriving by train in Keystone early in the afternoon, still damp from the morning’s dew, ready to be snapped and cooked in time for a supper of beans boiled with new potatoes, tomatoes and cucumbers, and cornbread.57 Along the house’s back wall, with windows facing the alley and Elkhorn Creek below, were the two bedrooms, with the single bath between them. Resonant with the ways her mother had ordered the house in Newbern, Aldah established the bedroom she and Apperson shared as the family’s gathering place. In this back room, she situated her sewing machine and the family’s other radio, a large wooden floor model Philco. Reserving her afternoons for sewing and other handiwork, Aldah listened to soap operas and radio dramas

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as she worked on dresses for their daughter or projects for their home. After supper, the family would sit in this room, listening to the radio and reading. Time, the Saturday Evening Post, Better Homes and Gardens, Life, Look, and the Ladies Home Journal were their preferred periodicals. They read the daily Welch and Bluefield papers, and frequently Apperson bought and read a copy of the New York Times. For Aldah, the New York paper offered glimpses of the newest styles for home décor and dresses, and she often designed and sewed clothes of her own and for their daughter based on dresses she had seen in the Times.58 In a corner of this room, Aldah positioned a small desk. At this desk, bearing witness to the frugality and carefulness their Westfield journey demanded, Aldah meticulously entered into a day ledger all of her household expenses, listing items purchased and the prices paid. Suggesting a deeper consciousness of place and the natural environment that helped to constitute that place, with each daily entry she also recorded the weather conditions prevailing in Keystone on that day. Filling the house’s few bookshelves were the books Aldah obtained from her membership in the Book of the Month Club. Since the earliest years of their marriage, for a small fee, Aldah received each month a new book. Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, and dozens of other books came into the Westfield house. Each book was inscribed in Aldah’s careful, clearly legible stenographer’s script: “Aldah Apperson, Keystone, West Virginia.” Below that, she made the notation, “Book of the Month Club.” Across from the kitchen and down a short hall, on the eastern side of the house, a door opened onto a landing and stairs that descended to the alley. From these stairs, there was access to the basement garage and to the washroom where Aldah had a wringer washer and kept the laundry and cleaning supplies. In the narrow strip of ground between the stairs and the next Westfield home, was the clothesline. In addition to the family’s car, the garage was the temporary storeroom for the plunder of various deals that Apperson had made: furniture, jukeboxes, pinball machines, boxes of tools, collections of dishes and books. Around the house, in the very steep and narrow yard, hydrangea, peonies, cosmos, iris, phlox, asters, jonquils, each in its season provided decoration. At the front door, around the stone landing wedged between the foot of the stairs, the road bank, and the house, Aldah planted roses.59 Whether cut from their yard, from the weedy border along Elkhorn Creek, or from the ditch bank west of the house, Aldah usually had flowers in their home, filling a vase on the kitchen table or scenting the living room.

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Stories from their family make clear the Appersons’ pride and satisfaction in this house. With starched curtains, flowers from the yard, and floors and furniture polished free from coal dust, their home showed to themselves and to others that they had attained the American standard of success. More than class status, however, their ownership of that Westfield property also points to ways that the values and assumptions underwriting Welch’s and Kimball’s journeys, and following them the social practices of Houston and Koppers, explicitly worked to control this place, imposing on this landscape the values of an American industrial economy. While the lower row of Westfield houses may have been smaller and less elaborate, and the people who lived in them newcomers to or aspirants to Westfield membership, the Westfield assumptions, values, and practices still ruled here just as much as they did in that part of the neighborhood that rose on the mountainside above it. The property title Apperson signed on August 7, 1945, contained the following clauses and provisions:

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[1] . . . the land hereby conveyed or any building or structure thereon, shall not at any time be conveyed to or occupied by a person or persons of African descent, except that a portion thereof may be occupied by domes­tic servants of African descent, working in the house of the person or persons owning or occupying the premises . . . [2] that no building now erected on said land or which may hereafter be erected thereon, shall at any time be used for the sale therein of intoxicating liquors, for beverage purposes, either with or without license of law . . .

The deed goes on to stipulate that these conditions “run with the land” “into perpetuity” and that any viola­tion of these conditions would cause all property to revert to the Crozer Land Company, the Westfield developers.60 The code of social conduct made explicit in this deed was codependent with social customs and expectations that had determined Aldah’s work at home and her relationships to her Westfield neighbors. A Westfield membership demanded that Aldah continually guard against Cinder Bottom.61 While Apperson made loans to friends from Cinder Bottom for bail bond on Saturday nights, and sold and delivered coal to prostitution houses, respectable, middle-class, white churchwomen in Keystone, much less residents of Westfield did not venture into Cinder Bottom. Westfield’s code of conduct for women took in all of Keystone, prescribing some social relations, precluding many others, necessitating a persistent social blindness and division between persons and places that were within one-fifth of a mile of each other, and often much closer.62

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The Westfield deed demonstrates the ways in which geographic, moral, religious, and business practices combined with racism to separate the neighborhoods and people of Keystone. On one hand, Apperson increased his hold on a middle-class future by selling coal to prostitution houses where liquor was available in a neighborhood that was widely vilified for its “wide open” racial integration. On the other hand, he signed a deed that implied that while money was to be made in Cinder Bottom and the people of Westfield would benefit from the Bottom’s prosperity, Westfield would acknowledge the place and the people of Cinder Bottom only by turning a blind eye to both.63 From the deed, one could infer that in the moral landscape of Keystone it is permissible for persons of color and whites to live in close proximity, on the same land, only if the African American does not own the land and is an employee of the white property owners. Even this arrangement is acceptable only if neither of them sells the other one any liquor. The contradictions and tensions are all the more ironic, their rootedness in contradictions and tensions as old as America, when recognizing that as Aldah cooked and sewed in their Westfield home she could listen as their radio brought the singing of Nat King Cole. In 1947, she would have listened on the kitchen radio as Jackie Robinson played his first season for the Brooklyn Dodgers, integrating the national pastime. However, neither man could have owned property in the neighborhood along the banks of the Elkhorn. As with the residents of Cinder Bottom, the men who worked in Koppers’s mines and tipples, and their families that traded in scrip at Koppers’s Number Ten, were made invisible in Westfield’s geography. From her bedroom window, or sitting on the stairs that led to the alley behind the house, the Appersons’ daughter Alecia, as a young schoolgirl, would sit and watch miners walk along the Elkhorn to and from work at the Koppers mine. The whistle signaling shift changes at the mine would bring white working-class and African American miners from their homes in Eckman Hollow, west of Keystone, through Westfield two and three times a day. Alecia, sitting and watching the miners pass behind the Appersons’ home on their daily trek to work, could distinguish the men by their faces. However, on their return trip, their faces uniformly blackened and smudged, men of color and white men looked the same to the watching girl. Sometimes a few of them may have waved or called to her, but usually their conversations were among themselves, never crossing the chasm Westfield imposed.64 When set in the context of the Elkhorn Valley’s long geologic and human histories, the irony of this deed and the distances and silences it required are all the more apparent. People who had sought to control the land for less than

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88  /  chapter 4

sixty years forced the place, the history of which grew from the foundations of the earth, to conform to its role in the American industrial order. The social customs and class divisions defining Keystone were made “to run with the land,” assuring the white property owners of Keystone of the continuance of the forms and limits of social interaction to which they had grown accustomed. Equally ironic as the attempts to impose human limits on the ancient topography, Apperson’s income tax returns document the deepening contradictions of the Appersons’ Westfield lives. At the same time the Appersons, still relatively young and with seemingly many years ahead of them, had acquired the financial security and social standing for which they had worked and sacrificed, that security began to erode. During the years 1935 through 1938, the Appersons’ reported income represents a joint filing for Apperson and Aldah. The decline in reported income between 1938 and 1939 represents the time at which Apperson became Koppers’s Houston district manager in 1939 and Aldah quit working for Koppers. The dramatic increase in the income Apperson reported from 1942 to 1943 corresponds to his acquisition of coal-hauling trucks and the launching of his other business ventures, in addition to his work at Koppers. The $575.61 decline from 1943 to 1944 corresponds to the time in which Apperson left Koppers. In 1947, despite the decline from the high of 1943, Apperson’s reported income of $4,748.38 was considerably higher than the United States per capita income of $1,319 for the same year.65 The West Virginia per capita income in 1947 was $1,042. The 1948 figure represents Apperson selling all of his real property in McDowell County in the late autumn of that year, purchasing a store in Richmond, Virginia, and selling that store, all before December 31, 1948. After removing the sale of the real estate from the 1948 figure, there is a clear and persistent decline in Apperson’s income from 1945 through 1948 (see table). This decline occurred at the same time coal production peaked in 1947 and McDowell County’s population peaked in 1948, and after the Appersons moved to Westfield. However, from Apperson’s perspective, there was an even more disturbing trend here than just these declines of personal income. As he prepared his income tax returns in the years after the close of the Second World War, Apperson would also have been aware of great changes just beginning to emerge in the Poco field. As a trucker and coal retailer, Apperson was also probably aware that in the postwar economy, although it was still important, coal no longer held sway and what dominance it still had was quickly diminishing.66 Because of the interrelated dramatic increase of usage of automobiles for transportation, widespread population shifts to the suburbs, and increased

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Moving to Westfield  /  89 Table 1 Year

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1935 1936 1937 1938 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946 1947 1948

Apperson’s annual income as reported to the IRS $3,374.24 $3,608.10 $3,716.50 $3,206.54 $2,966.14 $3,553.00 $3,693.75 $4,590.00 $5,907.50 $5,331.89 $5,211.22 $4,786.65 $4,748.38 $11,093.52

foreign steel production, petroleum products such as gas and oil began to replace coal as the principle energy source for the American economy. In 1947, U.S. coal production was at a record high, over 630 million tons. That same year, McDowell miners produced 24.45 million tons of coal.67 From 1947 to 1948, there was a dramatic decrease in national coal production to 594 million tons; by 1949, national coal production had decreased to 435 million tons.68 In McDowell County, 1949 mine production fell to 16.5 million tons.69 Despite whatever initial promise of profit the coal hauling business may have held for Apperson, for the five years in which the business was in operation it was always a very marginal activity. Apperson acquired his first coal-hauling trucks in 1943. In his tax returns for that year, he reported a profit of $550.00, or about 7.5 percent of the business’ total receipts. The business’ most profitable year was 1946 when Apperson reported a net profit of $4,628.65, or 20.5 percent of the business’ total receipts. In the two years that followed, net profits consistently declined to $1,740.76 in 1947 and $1,337.61 in 1948, or 6.8 percent and 7.3 percent of total receipts, respectively. Beyond its economic aspect, the business and its marginality produced changes in the Appersons’ household. Their daughter remembers that during the time in which he operated the trucking business, Apperson did not wear his usual business suits to work but wore khaki work shirts and pants, making deliveries with his employees. He wore his suits only when going to the bank, his furniture store in War, or to Bluefield or Welch. Much to Ap-

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person’s pride and satisfaction, the business acquired a truck equipped with a mechanical conveyor loader, enabling coal to be loaded rapidly in bins and buildings without shoveling. However, it was very temperamental, perpetually broken, and the source of great frustration and considerable expense. Each evening, after their supper, Apperson and Aldah would work at the desk in their bedroom, posting the day’s receipts and expenses from the coal hauling. During this time there were days of disagreement and times of brooding silence between the two. Years later and upon reflection, Alecia recognizes that there was probably a growing uneasiness and fear on the part of her parents about what the future held for them.70 Corroborating this sense of foreboding, in all of the photographs Aldah collected from their lives in the Poco field, there are no photographs of the coal trucks Apperson owned and operated. Moreover, there are no photographs of the house at Westfield. What few photographs there are of the house are actually images of Alecia, their daughter, with the house in the background, at the edges of the image. Of their daughter, however, there are hundreds of photographs, making obvious not only their devotion to her, but also that she and her future were now their central concerns. The house becomes an

Figure 26. Westfield, 1946; note the towel that Alecia is sitting on to keep the coal dust away. Williams-Apperson Collection.

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Figure 27. Alley behind Westfield house, summer 1946; Alecia with VanStavern children and Randall Pais. Williams-Apperson Collection.

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incidental backdrop to photographs of birthdays, Easter, the first day of school, childhood friends, new dresses, and visits from family. Yet in the shadows of the photographs of this young girl, beyond the edges of the Westfield house, there is a sense that Apperson and Aldah both feared their place in Westfield was not certain, and this deepening uneasiness about themselves and their

Figure 28. Front porch, Westfield, summer 1948. Back row: Eddie VanStavern, Randy Iddings. Front row: Alecia Apperson, Joan VanStavern. Williams-Apperson Collection.

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Figure 29. Alecia Apperson, July 2, 1948, front yard, Westfield. WilliamsApperson Collection.

future in the Poco field clouded all their early enthusiasms. From the perspectives of the Poco field, the lived history of the intervening decades, set in the context of family stories, these photographs give the impression of a gathering darkness and a grinding inevitability. As a storeowner and retailer, Apperson could recognize the effects of the postwar reorganization of the American economy in a place given over solely to the production of coal. In 1939, 669 retail stores conducted business in McDowell County. In 1940, retailing was the second leading source of employment, following the mining industry, in McDowell County.71 Induced by wartime prosperity and the boom in consumer purchasing, in 1948, retail stores operating in McDowell numbered 740, with annual sales amounting to over $63 million. Ten years later, in 1958, the number of retail establishments had fallen to 580, with annual sales of slightly more than $48.5 million.72 As part of its war mobilization efforts, the federal government had assumed control of all coal-mining operations. On June 30, 1947, the government relinquished control, returning the decision-making procedures in all mines to the private operators. At the end of June 1947, as contract negotiations began

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between the industry and the union, “an emboldened union” unwilling to give up the advances gained through generations of bloody struggle faced an “embittered management” that wanted only to wrest back the control it sensed it had lost to labor during the war. The confrontation initiated a three-year battle in the coalfields.73 The UMWA demanded to keep and extend the wage and benefit gains that it had won during the coal boom of the Second World War, while the coal operators demanded a reduction in miners’ wages and benefits, and increased control over the means and conditions of production. Passed in early 1947, the federal government invoked Taft-Hartley against the UMWA twice between 1947 and 1950.74 For retailers in the Poco field, labor militancy and unrest were always associated with a loss in profits. For furniture retailers, a coal strike meant “business all but dried up and disappeared.”75 From his partnership with Ben Davis in the Davis Furniture Company, Apperson reported a profit of $3,430 in 1945. However, in 1948, after a year of strikes and work stoppages, Apperson’s reported income from the furniture store was $1,800. Apart from the income figures and Apperson’s dawning awareness of the great changes toward which they pointed, there are other realities enduring from that time in the Poco field. Stories passed down from people living through those years in the Pocahontas coalfields almost universally impart a sense of struggle, conflict, fear, and terror. For a young girl, quiet and perceptive, watching the miners pass her home every day on their way to and from work, the changes in the mood and tone of the conversations between them would have been noticeable. Arguments and debates about the advisability of a strike or the merits of a contract would have drifted up to her. When the union called a strike, men in smaller groups and contingents would go to and from the tipple to take their turn on the picket line. During a strike, Alecia’s days would hang quiet, heavy, and threatening without seeing the miners walk by the house summoned by clock and whistle. Many persons who were coming of age during that time talk of recurring nightmares and a continuing sense of foreboding and uneasiness. However, for the Appersons, the location of their home on Lot 86 intensified this geography of dread and the tensions of the Elkhorn Valley. Their front door faced across Keystone’s Main Street and looked up at the brick homes of the town’s most wealthy and powerful citizens, the Pais, Vecillio, Reed, Rogers, and McDowell families. At the house’s back stairs, opening onto the alley and looking on the Elkhorn, flowing dark and polluted with the town’s sewage, the runoff from mountain and tipple, the miners passed talking of militancy

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and strike. For those who have not lived in such disquiet, who have not known the press and pull of such daily tension, it is difficult to imagine what it must have been like. Born in 1940, Alecia Apperson’s first consciousness reflects her fear of the Second World War and the labor turmoil going on around her. “John L. Lewis was in big and there were strikes and they were awful. I used to get nightmares about Keystone and those strikes, even after we moved away from Keystone. One of the few nightmares that I can still remember having was about a strike and people being killed in front of the mines.”76 More than the shape of a young girl’s consciousness, these nightmares provide a window into Westfield’s fear of open conflict and a general drawing back from confrontation. This is Westfield’s ultimate irony, its final and most lasting exclusion. Just as life in the Westfield neighborhood prescribed a blindness to many of the realities of Keystone and Cinder Bottom, Westfield not only required but also made possible an understanding of the Poco field as free from social conflict and contradiction, abstracted from the resentment of those who for whatever reason were denied a place in the neighborhood.77 The Westfield-enforced and assumed consensus enabled one to ignore the significance of the struggles and upheavals of the 1940s in the Poco field, filling the alleys with their debates, swirling around the doorways of the houses and spilling over into them. From a Westfield neighborhood perspective, the open clashes of the 1940s were only part of a general movement of the UMWA toward autocracy and corruption. This Westfield reasoning would also suggest that were it not for the union’s militancy, the coal industry could have survived in its old forms and the economic collapse of the last years of the twentieth century would not have been visited upon the Poco field. 78 However, through a deep knowledge of the Poco field as shaped and formed within the crucible of conflicts, we are also able to understand that in the violent confrontations and upheavals of the 1940s at issue were two competing visions for society and the future. Both of these visions descended from the values and understandings Welch and Kimball carried with them on their journeys, and that Houston and Koppers enacted in the Elkhorn Valley. These visions were inextricably rooted in the history of Keystone, Cinder Bottom, Westfield, and the Poco field. The members of the UMWA knew that without the force of collective action, and without the connections of community and place, there would be only silence, suffering, and exploitation. For these people, too many miners had gasped for their last breath under tons of fallen slate, too many employees were officially invisible to the company, too many miners’ wives had sat with

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their children in the rain and cold on a dirt road while Baldwin-Felts Agents pitched their life’s possessions through the windows of a company house. Standing alone did not and could not work against such power and force. The only option that had even a remote possibility of resisting the forces arrayed against them was the strength derived by standing together for the common good. In the Pocahontas coalfields of the late 1940s, more than the long-dead T. E. Houston, more than the Koppers Coal Company, and more than any of the other managers and industrialists involved in those bitter disputes, Apperson represents the alternative vision to the UMWA’s commitment to each other and the collective standing for the other. He internalized, and in many ways proved true, the American myth that with hard work and shrewdness, and by self-help, the individual would be rewarded.79 Apperson’s life demonstrated that by adhering to the prevailing social expectations and assumptions, by being good employees for the company, the Poco field was a place where a white person with aspirations for Westfield could not only come of age, but where that person also stood to receive the best America had to offer. Apperson’s life in the Poco field also implies that for those who were willing to work and to sacrifice, willing to give their lives to the company, Westfield and its good life were within reach. Tal and Aldah Apperson’s Westfield, while offering connections and a sense of community, was a place of unrelenting individualism and social disconnection. Every man who came to the Poco field made his way on his own. Despite the social networks used and personal connections made, he was ultimately responsible to himself, and his success or failure reflected not on systems at work in that place and across the globe but on that man, isolated and alone. When he succeeded, Westfield and the trappings of an emerging consumer culture became the marks of his success. When he failed, the Poco field largely forgot him.80 Women’s lives were also defined within this individualism, bounded by the structures of class and gender that limited the social relationships available and the expectations that determined nearly every daily routine. Unless she was a widow who lived in the house after her husband’s death, or the single daughter who had inherited from her father, a single woman did not purchase property or own a home in Westfield. A woman’s place in Westfield was entirely dependent upon a male’s relationship to the production of coal and the financial resources that relationship provided to participate in the consumer culture. Although church, clubs, school, consumer goods, and public esteem became the marks of Westfield membership, it was a life rigidly structured and defined within the assumptions and silences of social distance.

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There was, however, little difference between Apperson, in his mid thirties and at his full power, and the miners who walked the picket lines in 1947 and 1948. Apperson and many of the white miners also shared similar attitudes about race and gender, seeing nothing wrong with “the ways things had always been.”81 More than these things, however, there was between Apperson and those involved in the struggle for economic justice a shared place identity. Both Apperson and his neighbors who struck the coal companies, both white and persons of color, belonged to that place, and in one way or another, their identities were inseparably interwoven with and connected to the Poco field. Moreover, both Apperson and the UMWA membership were convinced of the ability of America to ensure for them all the possibility of economic prosperity. There was the implied appropriateness and acceptance that democracy, capitalism, and consumer goods were synonymous with each other in America. In the late 1940s the United Mine Workers did not want to destroy capitalism or the American economy, but to make it more accessible, to make it more democratic, more American. Standing together, they sought to reform the coal industry so that the American promise of Westfield would be open to the miner just as it was open to Apperson. As often happens in moments of great social and cultural transformation, both Apperson and the UMWA woefully miscalculated the enormity of the processes and forces already at work along the Elkhorn and throughout the Poco field.82 Thirty-eight years old, Apperson needed a map through a place he loved, to a place he had no power to imagine, on a journey he did not fully understand. For twenty-two years, his journey had followed well the same map every man had tried to follow who came to the Poco field. Using that map, he had arrived at Westfield. Still a very young man, he stood at a juncture in the road and there was no map or model for negotiating the competing forces at work in that place.83 Apperson could conceive of no other way to live in McDowell County than the one determined by the social practices of capital and the opportunities to make the sale. The conditions of possibility did not exist for him to envision any other future in the Poco field but the one he had been pursuing since 1926. He had no idea of what another way of life might look like in that place or how to build it. In trying to fathom those years and make sense of the range of decisions that were made, his daughter understands that after what happened to his good friend, J. W. Staples, he knew the dangers of working for Koppers for many more years and realized he did not want to go back to work with the company. He also knew that the increasing displacement of the labor force in the Pocahontas field would mean fewer people with less money to spend.

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.

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Eighteen years after the photograph was made in Number Ten, and three years after they had moved to Westfield, on the last Saturday in November 1948, Apperson, Aldah, and their eight-year-old daughter crated and sent ahead of them all of their belongings. After lunch with Elio and Julia Pais, with Aldah and Julia crying, they said their goodbyes to their neighbors, and pulled away from Westfield and Keystone for the last time. Driving eastward on Main Street, cars would have been parked all along the way, the sidewalks of Keystone and Northfork crowded with people doing their first shopping of the Christmas season. The Koppers storefront, and the windows of the other stores would have been decked in tinsel and lights, tempting shoppers with the best things, the most fashionable things America had to offer them that season. My mother remembers that as he drove their car around the curve on the long Elkhorn grade outside of Northfork, Apperson began to cry. It was the first time she or my grandmother had ever seen him cry. He did not look back and he did not pull the car to the side of the road. He said only one thing: “The coalfields have been good to me, but I can’t make it here anymore.” They first went to Richmond, Virginia, where he owned and operated a variety store in the newly developed subdivision of Bon Haven. Miserable with their living arrangements in one among hundreds of rental duplexes in a subdivision built in response to the postwar housing crisis, unhappy with the restrictions the variety store imposed on his time and freedom, and dissatisfied with the schooling Alecia was receiving, Apperson sold the store immediately after Christmas of that same year. Before the New Year, they moved to Newbern and lived with Aldah’s parents, in the old homeplace. Alecia started school in January 1949 at the three-room Newbern School, the same school her mother had attended and her great-grandfather had helped build. Before the end of 1949, the family built and moved into a new home, located next door to Aldah’s parents. On Friday morning, July 4, 1952, at the age of forty-two, Apperson died of a massive heart attack.84 When Apperson’s family and friends speak of those four years after Keystone, they briefly mention his illness, but they linger over his depression and loneliness that derived from his dislocation and loss of identity in a new place: “He was never the same after he left over there, you could tell it.”85 My grandmother, over the decades of trying to make sense of what had happened, and, later, in talking about Apperson’s death with their grandchildren, would describe it by saying simply, almost poetically, “He died of a heart attack, but what killed him was a broken heart.”

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He Saw It Coming

Apperson traveled south and east by train from Cleveland, to Columbus, through Chillicothe down the Scioto River Valley, to the Ohio at Portsmouth, the same route the Shawnee had followed on their way to the hunting grounds in the river valleys of the Clinch, Holston, and New. At Portsmouth, he changed trains to one of the Norfolk and Western Railway’s elite passenger trains, “The Powhatan Arrow,” “The Pocahontas,” or “The Cavalier.” His route followed the Ohio River upstream and then down through the West Virginia coalfields Isaiah Welch and Frederick Kimball had envisioned on their journeys. Alone and perhaps preoccupied with larger questions and struggles, the passing views of city and river and countryside were probably of little interest to him, but his interest would have increased as the train stopped in Welch. Situated at the foot of courthouse hill, on the north bank of the Tug, the Norfolk and Western station sat in a curve of the track, in the middle of town. As the porters and conductors assisted passengers on and off the train, he would have had opportunity and cause enough to lean forward and look from the train’s window. He could have seen businesses of men he knew as lodge brothers and friends; on the ridges that rose on both sides of the narrow valley there were the homes of people he had known since he first came to the Poco field twenty-six years before. As the train pulled from the Welch station, heading east, more than any of the countryside or cityscapes through which he had passed that day, the landscape—the places that now slid by the train’s window—would have been

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Figure 30. Lodge cards, furniture market pass, 1952. Williams-Apperson Collection.

the focus of his mind and eye. The train would not have gathered much speed along the curves and bends of the route as it followed the Elkhorn upstream. The density of building and industrial operations immediately adjacent to the tracks would have further slowed the train, giving him ample opportunity to look at the places and the communities in which he had come to manhood. At Kimball, he would have seen the Koppers District Office where he and Aldah had worked, and where he had become district manager of all the company’s stores in the Poco field. Farther on, he would have looked down on the Koppers store on Kimball’s Main Street, the store that for a short time he had managed. As the train rattled from one company town to the next, sidling beside coal tipples and gondolas, he would have noticed mines that were idle, perhaps seeing a sign or two that announced “no work today.” He was astute enough to notice all along the way that there were fewer people along the streets and one or two businesses with which he was familiar would be shuttered and closed. As the passenger train slowed to pass through the rail yard in the stretch of bottomland at Eckman, he would have noticed there were fewer coal gondolas loaded and waiting for assembling into trains going either east or west. As the train made its way up Elkhorn Creek from Eckman to Keystone, his interest would probably have peaked. From the window, he could have

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seen the back of their former home in the Westfield neighborhood, the back stairs descending to the cinder alley. With his head arched back to take in the mountainside, he could have seen the homes across Main Street belonging to the Pais, Vecillio, Reed, and McDowell families, the Methodist Church and the school nested among them; Shawnee Mountain new green in the May sun and tinted gray with dust from the tipple. As the train slowed to accommodate the switches and grade crossing at Bridge Street, he would have seen the back door of the First National Bank of Keystone and the loading dock at the Koppers Store Number Ten. At the base of Indian Ridge, the Keystone tipple would be working, but far fewer coal cars would have been waiting for loading beneath the clanging shoots and sorting bins. He could have smiled to himself or shaken his head at the changes, as the train passed Cinder Bottom, never again to be the “wide-open place” it had been when he first saw it as a sixteen-year-old. When the train crossed over where Burke Creek joined the Elkhorn and passed into Dead Man’s Cut, he would have been able to see the company house to which he and Aldah moved following the birth of their daughter in July 1940. Through Northfork, built where the Elkhorn Valley was broader and more open, then to Powhatan, Upland, Elkhorn, and up to Switchback, every place would have had some association, some memory of a boy coming of age in this place in which he believed he could claim the American Dream. Laid against those memories, at every bend in the rail bed’s tracing of the Elkhorn he saw Westfield and every other neighborhood and community diminished and trouble increasingly evident along the streets of the Poco field. Apperson had long known that trouble was rising, but from his train window he could have seen that it was intensifying, making its values felt and known in every corner of the place. Like a rising flood, it was lapping at the doorsteps and around the porches of his old Westfield. Just past Maybeury at the crest of its ascent up the Elkhorn, at the head of Barlow Hollow, the heaving engine and burgundy-painted passenger cars would leave the valley and roar into the darkness and murk of Flat Top Tunnel, the now-black windows giving back a reflection of himself. Or, perhaps, he chose not to look at all, chose not to watch the Poco field slip by the train’s window, preoccupied instead with his own thoughts, doubts, and struggles. Searching desperately for some understanding of the increasing pain and tightness in his chest and not finding a doctor who could diagnose or treat his worsening condition, Apperson traveled to the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio in search of help from the renowned team of specialists there. He left Newbern sometime around the thirteenth or fourteenth of May 1952, arriving at the

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clinic without an appointment. He stayed several days in the Hotel Bolton Square, a short distance away. He saw two doctors on Friday afternoon, May 16, and wrote Aldah late in the afternoon of Saturday, May 17, telling her of the examination and the skill of the doctors he had seen. “I’ve seen two doctors so far and one of them told me that I’d been having trouble with the tightness in my chest—he didn’t ask me.” He appreciated the clinic’s businesslike order, “I’m certainly sold on the way they go about examining one. This is a large place and the most efficient organization I ever saw.” After comments about the cool weather and perhaps “going to see a show” later that evening, he returned to telling of his impressions of the clinic. “See people here from all over the world for examination at the Clinic and treatment at the hospital. (They have a big hospital.)”1 After another examination on Monday, the doctors told Apperson that the tightness in his chest was due to rapidly deteriorating angina and that he only had three to six months to live. There was nothing they or anyone could do for him. Either that afternoon or early the next morning, he began his journey back to Newbern. As he sat in his hotel room, as he listened to the doctors tell him that he would soon die, as he traveled home through the Poco field, as on the morning he died, in Apperson’s wallet were his current insurance cards, lodge membership cards, and his entrance passes to the furniture markets at Hickory and Lenoir, North Carolina (figure 30). All of the insurance cards were for policies issued through agents and offices in McDowell County. The Masonic, Royal Arch, and Knights Templar cards were for lodge memberships in communities along the Elkhorn: Welch, Keystone, and Northfork. The furniture market passes indicated that his place of business was Davis Furniture Store in War, West Virginia. Pressed in the wallet he carried, and now faded with time, these cards point to the ways that Westfield as a structure of beliefs, choices, assumptions, silences, and practices had come to define his life, necessitating leaving the Poco field. More than half a century later, those cards also bear witness to the enduring power of place and place identity to shape one’s life and selfunderstanding. Together, the cards make clear the debilitating contradictions in which he found himself, suggesting an intense internal struggle between his love for the towns and neighborhoods along the Elkhorn and the actions and decisions Westfield, as a structure of values and assumptions, had dictated. If he could have better accepted the Westfield values of placelessness, mobility, and adaptability, if he had cared less for and loved less the Poco field and the Elkhorn Valley, after four years absence from the place he would have made

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other contacts and other connections in the places Westfield was coming to value more. From any perspective, the future that would unfold in McDowell over the next half-century and more, the first stages of which Apperson would have seen from the train’s window, would be a crucible of convulsive, destructive, relentless loss and decline of what once had been the Poco field. Apperson could not have foreseen what would happen in all of its enormity. He probably could not have articulated Westfield as a way of self-understanding, except that success required certain things. Yet he was astute enough to know that there was increasingly less space for him to envision, claim, and maintain his family’s hold on any future in Keystone’s Westfield neighborhood. When talking of that time and those choices, his family and those who knew him would say, “He saw it coming.”

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A Rising Flood In 1948, McDowell County’s population was 100,000 persons. McDowell was one of the wealthiest counties in West Virginia, and aptly described as “the billion-dollar coal field.” There were 19,054 McDowell countians working daily in the mines.2 By 1960, the county’s population had declined 25 percent to 75,000 and chronic poverty had become so widespread that in the West Virginia presidential primary, John F. Kennedy used McDowell County to point to the failures of his opponent’s ideas, positioning himself as the candidate for social change. In every decade since 1948, the population of McDowell has declined by at least 25 percent, and by the second decade of the twenty-first century, McDowell’s population was less than 22,000 persons. At the century’s turn, half of the children in McDowell County lived in poverty, and it was the sixth poorest county in the United States.3 By the first decade of the twenty-first century, neighborhoods and entire communities that Apperson would have known in 1948 and would have seen from the train on his last journey up the Elkhorn in May 1952 had ceased to exist. Where once there were rows of houses and storefronts, there are now stretches of flat ground beside the roadway, with poplar saplings, scrub pine, and broom sedge covering the scattered and broken pieces of sidewalk. Vines of Virginia Creeper, honeysuckle, and kudzu slowly overtake and obliterate the coal tipples that remain. In Apperson’s Keystone, few businesses are in operation, and many of the homes of Westfield stand vacant. The remaining Westfield homes that were in the row with the Appersons’ home, show the mark of the high waters of the Elkhorn in flood.

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Forty years after the Appersons left the Poco field, most of the major coal companies that had operated leaseholds had closed their operations and divested themselves of most of their capital investments in McDowell. When they left, these companies ceased operation of all auxiliary enterprises undertaken in connection with the mining of coal. Almost overnight, some communities were without water treatment plants for drinking water or wastewater facilities.4 However, McDowell’s issues and troubles were not limited to water quality or the collapse of the county’s single industry. The troubles and issues that have beset this place in the years since 1948 grow from practices and institutions that enact Westfield’s values and assumptions of placelessness, individualism, and the acquisition of consumer goods as the final indicators of success. Ironically, one of the Westfield institutions in which Apperson had placed considerable trust and that was for him one of the primary markers of his Poco field ascendancy, was also a principal agent in these calamities.

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“Time Tried and Panic Tested” Riding the crest of the Second World War coal boom, and building on his close friendship with directors and officers of the bank, Apperson began to purchase stock in the First National Bank of Keystone in 1946 and 1947.5 Founded in 1904, the bank prospered in the heyday of the billion-dollar coalfield and was a central concern for many of the members of Keystone’s Westfield neighborhood. The Keystone Bank was the oldest continuing bank in McDowell County, and was one of only two of the county’s fourteen banks to survive the Depression of the 1930s. The bank had seen the rise and fall of the Houstons and their contemporaries, the shift to the corporate structure and values of Koppers and other companies, and then the transformation of the Poco field in the years after 1948. The First National Bank of Keystone had weathered all of this to become a stable, local bank with moderate wealth. Inscribed over the bank’s door was its motto, “Time Tried and Panic Tested.” In 1977, Apperson’s old friend, Jack Christie, retired as president of the First National Bank of Keystone and the bank’s directors named J. Knox McConnell as president.6 A native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with a reputation for a miserly lifestyle and close friendships with Republican politicos, McConnell brought in two coworkers to help him manage the bank, Billie Cherry and Terry Lee (Fisher) Church.7 At one time, Cherry and J. Knox McConnell had been lovers, and they remained close companions for the rest of McConnell’s life. From the outset, McConnell and Cherry maintained a policy of hiring only women to work in the bank and its branches. Although several officers

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and directors were men, the majority of bank personnel were women, acquiring the nickname “Knox’s Foxes.” The bank’s employees were a source of some pride for Cherry, “[At the bank], [w]e’ve enjoyed a good reputation as far as customer service. . . . That was always a compliment for me because people say . . . your girls are always pleasant and always help.” McConnell vowed that any bank employee who worked hard could become a millionaire. McConnell and Cherry convinced the Board of Directors to change the corporate structure of the bank so that employees had opportunity to become part owners of the bank, with stock constituting part of their compensation packages. Stock options also served as the pension plan for employees.8 The events of the next twenty-three years were eerily prescient of the global financial panic and collapse of 2008, and had equally catastrophic results for Keystone and the other towns along the Elkhorn. Taking advantage of banking deregulation and the ability of the Internet to recruit business from far beyond the Elkhorn Valley, McConnell, Cherry, and Church engineered a twenty-year period of stunning growth in the bank’s holdings and in its overall worth. As a strategy to increase its assets, the First National Bank began to offer a range of new products funded through a number of financing and borrowing strategies. The Keystone bank began to offer home equity loans to high-risk borrowers, loans that were often a second loan or mortgage for the borrower and which paid higher interest rates to the lender. After banking deregulation in the early 1990s, First National Bank began buying the same risky, second mortgage–type loans from other banks and lending companies. These loans were then bundled and resold to other financial institutions as an investment, the argument being that the number of loans in each bundle that were successfully paid would outweigh whatever loss the investor incurred from the loans that defaulted. The Keystone Bank retained an interest in these bought, bundled, and resold loans, so that a portion of the income from the successful loans would accrue to First National Bank, recorded as income on the bank’s books. As events in 2008 would prove, if too many loans default, if the bank overvalues the loans, or if the residual interest the bank expects to earn is overvalued, the assets a bank claims on its books and expects to collect are false. Under McConnell, Church, and Cherry, the bank purchased and processed so many loans that it stood to reap considerable rewards from the process, as did other, much larger national banking institutions. In order to finance the purchasing of increasing numbers of loans, First National Bank began to borrow significant amounts of money from other banks as well as offer high interest rates to attract large deposits that would then finance further purchases and bundling of loans. By 1999, First National

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was offering interest rates as high as 5.4 percent on two-year certificates of deposits, which was as much as two percentage points above the national market.9 Attracted to the unusually high rate of return the bank was offering on deposits, and with the advent of Web-based advertising and banking, customers from across the country flocked to the bank. Demonstrating the Westfield values of a global and placeless market, many depositors had never set foot in McDowell County or West Virginia, and with Internet banking, never would. In 1977, when McConnell became president, the bank had $17 million in assets. Between 1992 and 1997, the value of deposits at the bank increased by $600 million. During the same time, the reported worth of the bank’s assets (loans to be repaid to the bank) had increased to $740 million. As financial magazines reported that the Keystone bank was the most profitable community bank in the United States, people from across the country began to acquire bank stock. On June 30, 1999, First National reported its assets as $1.1 billion and deposits totaling $880.9 million. Given the bank’s corporate structure of employee ownership and pensions invested in bank stock, this also meant that the women employees of First National Bank stood to benefit greatly. By 1999, the average salary at First National Bank of Keystone was $63,678. At the same time in Keystone, 46.3 percent of the population lived below the poverty line; the median income for females was $18,750 and the per capita income for Keystone was $7,033.10 Eventually, the Keystone bank became Keystone’s largest employer. In 1999, there were one hundred employees at the bank and its branches in Bradshaw and Gary. The bank also became Keystone’s largest corporate taxpayer. West Virginia state law requires businesses operating in a locality to pay a business-and-occupation tax (B&O tax) directly to the municipality; First National was responsible for over 80 percent of the revenue generated from this tax in Keystone as well as the two other McDowell localities in which it held branches. There were also political aspects to this rapidly increasing wealth. McConnell and Cherry hosted state and national politicians in Keystone, ingratiated themselves with the powerful, and hosted lavish weekends and overnight stays at such resorts as the Greenbrier. Cherry would boast in 1994, “Knox knows the governor and the governor invites us to different functions. We know [Senator Robert] Byrd . . . you can see [Senator] Jay Rockefeller. I have given a party down here for Rockefeller.”11 In many of the same ways as Senator Rockefeller’s forebears, Cherry’s and Church’s relationships to the communities and people of the Elkhorn

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Valley were actually processes of acquisition and conspicuous benevolence. Church acquired large tracts of land atop Indian Ridge, building an extensive compound for her family. Townspeople often saw Church coming in and out of Keystone on one of her “more than forty motorcycles or riding in one of several dozen cars.”12 Church and Cherry oversaw the tearing down of old buildings dating from the first decades of the twentieth century and replaced them with new business ventures. On Keystone’s Main Street, Church owned a gas station that sat on the site of the former Koppers Store Service Station. Across the street, she owned the Keystone Hardware Store, which had evolved through a series of owners from a joint venture in which Apperson had principal interest. Church relocated the business to the same building in which Koppers Number Ten had operated. Cherry purchased the block of buildings on Keystone’s Main Street in which Apperson’s Keystone Hardware was originally located in the late 1940s, remodeling the second floor of the entire block into an extensive walk-up apartment that became her primary residence in Keystone. At the street level, part of the building was devoted to the documents processing and storage company that she operated. The rest of the building was chock-full of furniture purchased from the estates of residents of the Elkhorn Valley who had died or those who were moving away. Tiffany fixtures, antique furniture, leaded glass, and ornate woodwork were purchased from the more elaborate Westfield homes and removed to be stored for future use or used immediately in one of Church’s or Cherry’s current homes.13 In Kimball, Cherry purchased the Tudor-style mansion that David and Miriam Houston built in the 1920s. Resonating with the consciousness of the Houstons and their contemporaries that went into the naming of company towns, Cherry purchased the Empire Coal and Coke Company’s former clubhouse and boarding house for single miners in Eckman, remodeled it into a fourteen-room bed and breakfast, and named it the Cherry-Key Inn (Cherry—Keystone).14 When Keystone voters elected Billie Cherry as the town’s mayor in 1994, there developed a dependent relationship between bank and town. Money generated from the taxes First National paid and Cherry’s other, seemingly bottomless, financial resources, made possible the purchase of land for future development, after-school tutoring and mentoring programs for youth, adult education and GED programs, additional members of the police department, water treatment projects, community meals and picnics, garbage pickup, beautification efforts, and dozens of other initiatives. Cherry, especially, became Keystone and McDowell’s greatest booster and citizens routinely referred to her as Keystone’s “fairy godmother,” or a “breath of fresh air.”15

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In the early spring of 1994, as she sat in her office bundling recently acquired mortgages, at the height of the Keystone bank’s power, Cherry spoke of her work as mayor, the benefits First National Bank of Keystone brought to the community, and her regard for that place. Cherry’s story suggested a vibrant continuity with the same Westfield values and relationships that Houston and Koppers exemplified. She pointed to the many things that the town was able to afford, as proof that it was a good place to live. Echoing the same consciousness that the Norfolk and Western Railroad directors must have had some one hundred years before, Cherry proudly stated that she could acquire so much more property in McDowell because no one else was smart enough to want it.16 In Cherry’s story, boosterism, civic work, her personal influence, and an unquestioning acceptance of the Westfield patterns of power and relationships are nearly synonymous.17 To prove the beneficence of her work in Keystone, to underscore both her no-nonsense approach to the world and that all persons in town stood to gain from her acquisitions, Cherry described an event that happened as she began work to remodel the block of Main Street buildings that would become her primary residence. “A young black fellow ran down the street, and I grabbed him by the arm and I said, ‘Do you have a job?’ He said, ‘No ma’am.’ I said, ‘Well, you do now.’” In relating a conversation about a person dismissed from the bank that she had with a young woman of color, Cherry described how the young woman had said to her, “Miss Cherry, I have to go with my people.” Cherry replied, “You’re your people. If you were in trouble, who would you call?” According to Cherry’s account, the young woman responded with, “I’d have to call you, Miss Cherry.” To which Cherry responded by saying, “That’s right, and then I have people that I can call.”18 While Cherry’s story makes clear the convergence of race, class, and gender in the Westfield patterns she enacted in her acquisitions and in her work at the bank, it also demonstrates that Cherry’s civic work and interest in the place extended the Westfield values and practices at the same time making clear her own Westfield alignments. Cherry described an event she hosted for first through sixth-graders: “[On the ground floor of the building that I own on Main Street], we had the boys and girls come from the tutoring school. We had the boys [sit] down and they looked at the menu and the little girls took their orders and waited on them and made change. They were tickled over that. It was funny how they reacted. We’d tell [the girls] that you had to be pleasant no matter what the customer said. We . . . played house with them but it was cute. I had two old cash registers—they got to put their play money in there and make change.”19

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Cherry’s generosity as Keystone’s “fairy godmother” was not without the quick and sharp judgment and the exercise of Westfield power and control. In the same way that Houston and Koppers and others ran the former company towns, if persons challenged Cherry’s authority as mayor or benefactor they were judged ungrateful; if persons refused to take advantage of the opportunities that Cherry’s largess provided, they were judged lazy and unwilling to better themselves. There developed among many in Keystone, Northfork, and Kimball an attitude of emotional dependency and unquestioning acceptance, acknowledging that without Cherry and the Keystone Bank, nothing good would be happening. Those persons with doubts about Cherry or the gifts she showered upon Keystone were afraid to voice those doubts.20 Cherry wrapped herself in a mantle of selfless civic virtue. Sounding very much like a missionary to the mountains and the people there, Cherry understood herself as a role model of the appropriate Westfield values for young people and for the whole community. “I think what we need down here most of all are role models; I’d like to think of myself as one. We need people who do not cheat people. We need people who do not steal from other people.”21 Cherry’s identity with that place and her understanding of the values that were necessary to serve that place had little to do with its long and complex history but were related more to the wealth that she saw to be made there. For Cherry, there was pride, certainly, perhaps even a love for that place, but the real alignments, the real connections, were to a way of life defined by power, prosperity, economic success, and the acquisition of consumer goods and real estate. With the perspective of time and later events, Cherry’s place identity, her vision, and her actions run counter to those that Apperson held in his life. However, Cherry expressed a progression and development of the same Westfield identity and membership for which Apperson was striving. Throughout McConnell’s time at the bank and afterward, many of the members of the bank’s board of directors were Apperson’s former Westfield neighbors and friends and the children and grandchildren of these same Westfield associates.22 These directors elected McConnell as president; they endorsed the policies McConnell, Cherry, and Church implemented, and they benefited greatly from those policies. The values and alignments that motivated the directors’ support were consistent with what Westfield suggested about America and were held in common with Houston, Koppers, and many others. All of them could have and would have joined in Cherry’s assessment: “I think our bank has been good for the area . . . our bank has grown. [We] do give good banking services. I think we do have a good reputation as far

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as a bank is concerned. It has been good for us in West Virginia. Knox and I both have said how nice West Virginia has been for us.”23 In 1994, few suspected that the foundation of all Cherry’s civic investment, the source of this wealth and this power was a complex web of graft, fraud, and embezzlement. In the early 1980s, the bank became an agent for laundering illegal bingo proceeds from a massive fraud and racketeering operation in Piedmont, Alabama. Cherry’s Elkhorn Valley Development Corporation became one of the means of laundering this money. When some staff members at Elkhorn Valley Development Corporation became suspicious of the amount of money that was moving through the nonprofit’s accounts and then voiced their suspicions, Cherry fired them all, accusing them of grand larceny.24 Cherry and Church followed a practice McConnell instituted, recording as assets the mortgages and loans they had sold, pocketing the money. Through “due diligence fees” for providing “services,” the three siphoned millions of dollars from the bank’s accounts.25 Money that people had invested and deposited in the First National Bank, proceeds from loan payments, and residual income from bundled loans underwrote the lavish lifestyles, real estate, and consumer goods that Church and Cherry flaunted. When their cash holdings became conspicuous enough to be dangerous, possibly drawing public attention to the illegalities, Cherry and Church donated large sums of cash to nonprofits, community development organizations, civic clubs, and charity initiatives. The gifts were always under the guise of Cherry’s and Church’s civic mindedness and received great publicity. When J. Knox McConnell died in October 1997, he left an estate worth more than $19 million, $10.4 million of which was in First National Bank of Keystone stock. McConnell bequeathed the majority of the stock to Hargrave Military Academy, which he attended as a young boy, and to Waynesburg College, from which he graduated.26 The amount of stock bequeathed to each institution would have made it possible for both Hargrave and Waynesburg to name a director to the board and exert considerable control in the affairs of the bank. Fearful that when McConnell’s stock went to an outsider and they lost control of the bank their fraud in the mortgage program and the bank’s insolvency would become apparent, before McConnell’s funeral Church and Cherry forged documents giving them control of McConnell’s Keystone Bank stock. In addition to the stock, in the days immediately following McConnell’s death and with the help of other bank employees, by forging Cherry’s name on numerous bank accounts Church and Cherry also stole millions of dollars in cash from his estate.27

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Upon McConnell’s death, the directors named Cherry president of the bank and chair of the board. At the time, it seemed of little importance to the directors that Cherry did not have any college training in banking, and before joining McConnell in a Micronesia bank in 1975, had no banking experience at all. When they came to Keystone, Church had never worked in a bank and Cherry had only two years of experience in a bank, and that was outside the United States. By 1999, Church was executive vice president of the bank and president of the Keystone Mortgage Company. Michael Graham, the executive vice president of the mortgage company, whom Church and Cherry had hired some years before, was a trained accountant but the State of West Virginia had revoked his CPA license before he had come to work at Keystone.28 Under pressure from bank examiners and regulators because of poor management practices, Cherry stepped down as president of Keystone National Bank in 1998, but the members of the board of directors continued to elect her as chair of the board. In the same pattern of control and intimidation that contemporaries of Houston and Koppers employed, Church, Graham, and Cherry pressed the bank’s employees into the fraud and embezzlement scheme under threat of firing. With the salaries and benefits each employee received, the threats and intimidation were real: where in McDowell were these women to find a job as good as the ones at the Keystone bank? On Tuesday, August 31, 1999, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and Federal Bank Examiners, after years of suspicion and investigation, met with the Board of Directors of the First National Bank of Keystone to report that $515 million the bank listed on its books as assets were missing, sold sometime before. The discovery of this discrepancy instantly rendered the bank insolvent.29 The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency closed the First National Bank of Keystone. In the days immediately prior to the bank examiners completing their work, as rumors of the bank’s insolvency spread, depositors had rushed to the bank to withdraw their money, only to have bank personnel say that the bank was safe and that there was no need to panic. At the same time, several bank employees secretly began to sell their own bank stock and to withdraw large amounts of cash in anticipation of the closure.30 Depositors not so fortunate to have inside information and connections lost all money that exceeded the FDIC insurance limit of $100,000 per depositor. Because many depositors had IRA accounts and other forms of larger savings accounts, hoping to take advantage of Keystone’s high interest rates, the losses were particularly shocking. There were 25,434 accounts on deposit

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on the morning of September 1, 1999, with a total value of $928 million. Of these deposits, 85.5 percent exceeded the FDIC insurance limits, totaling $793 million in uninsured and lost deposits.31 Apart from the lost deposits, immediately upon closure, First National Bank stock was worthless and with it the pensions and investment strategies of hundreds of people.32 Life savings, retirement accounts, certificates of deposit, and other forms of savings evaporated. Prior to the financial crisis of 2008–2009, it was one of the largest and costliest bank failures in the history of the FDIC, costing the agency’s insurance fund over $664 million.33 For a number of years, First National had functioned as almost the sole anchor and magnet for what little business remained in Keystone. After the bank’s closure, all the Keystone businesses owned in large measure by Church, Cherry, and the bank, closed. The tax source supporting Keystone’s municipal work disappeared overnight. The town of Keystone lost over $465,000 in its budget, forcing the immediate dismissal of six of its fifteen employees and the eventual layoff of others. McDowell County lost over $200,000 from its annual operating budget.34 Federal prosecutors charged Church, Cherry, and Graham with fraud, embezzlement, mail fraud, conspiracy, income tax evasion, money laundering, insider trading, and obstruction of bank examiners. In her trial for her role in the loan-bundling scheme, Church admitted that in the loan purchasing and bundling operation, the Keystone Bank “never earned a dime” and that all the money went to Church, Cherry, McConnell, and Graham.35 In her courtroom defense against charges that in the hours and days following McConnell’s death she stole from his estate, Cherry claimed that she did not realize the money was not hers to begin with. At her sentencing hearing, Cherry claimed that the persons who testified against her had lied under oath, striking deals with prosecutors to save themselves from prison. She also vehemently argued that the bank had been sound, but that bank officers had needed just a little more time to make a few corrections.36 Several other bank employees, all women, who helped build the case against Church, Cherry, and Graham, received lesser sentences for their involvement in the various frauds and embezzlements. Terry Church received sentences totaling nearly thirty years. In an agreement with federal prosecutors, at her last trial Church pleaded guilty in order to stop further prosecution. By the time of her last trial and sentencing, she was forty-nine years old. A federal judge sentenced Michael Graham to serve nine years for his involvement. Billie Cherry resigned as mayor of Keystone in June 2001, and a jury convicted her of embezzlement, money laundering, mail fraud, and

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fraud in October of that same year. She was eligible for sentences totaling three hundred and fifty years. On March 28, 2002, a federal judge sentenced Cherry to serve sixteen years and five months; she was seventy-seven years old. She reported to federal prison on April 29, 2002. Billie Cherry died in prison of a massive cerebral hemorrhage on December 29, 2006.37 One of the markers of Apperson’s Westfield membership closed its doors forever.

“Cinder Bottom Is Washed Away” muddy water Well, it was on a Sunday mornin’ on the eighth day of July In the year of two thousand and one, Way down in McDowell County in the West Virginia hills Our lives would change before the day was done. The rain was steady fallin’ through the early mornin’ dawn And we wondered if it was ever gonna end. The lightenin’ flashed around us and the thunder shook the ground And I could hear the devil laughin’ in the wind. Well, the rain kept on a fallin’ and the creeks began to rise With a mighty force that we had never seen. From Keystone down to Landgraff and from Kimball down to Welch Muddy water washed away our hopes and dreams.

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Muddy water can you hear me can’t you see what you have done Can’t you see you are not welcome here today. We worked hard all our lifetime for what little bit we had Just to have you come and take it all away; Muddy water came and washed it all away. Some people blamed the coal mines and the timber industry And they called it the hundred year flood. We said it wouldn’t happen for another hundred years As we shoveled up the garbage and the mud. But less than ten months later on the 2nd day of May The thunder clapped and the rain began to fall, And we ate the words that we had spoken way back in July. Muddy water you made liars of us all. We worked so hard to put back what you took away before, Just to have you come and take it all again. Ten thousand people cried. Seven people died, And I could hear the devil laughin’ in the wind.

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Muddy water can you hear me can’t you see what you have done Can’t you see you are not welcome here today. We worked hard all our lifetime for what little bit we had Just to have you come and take it all away; Muddy water came and washed it all away. —Alan “Cathead” Johnston, 2002

In the years after Apperson made his last journey through the Poco field, much changed in McDowell County. However, there was little change in the ownership patterns in which Norfolk–Southern Railway through its wholly owned subsidiary, Pocahontas Land Corporation, and two or three other companies held “some 80 percent” of the surface and mineral rights in the county.38 After the almost total collapse of coal mining in the 1980s—although the larger companies such as Houston, Koppers, United States Steel, and Olga were no longer mining coal—smaller companies operated both strip mines and some deep mines. By the late twentieth century, there was a resurgence of mining, the national demand for coal was increasing, and surface mine operations were employing mountaintop removal techniques to get at the coal seams. This method removes hundreds of thousands of cubic yards and millions of cubic tons of overburden and dumps them to the side of the mountain in order to gain access to the coal. “Overburden” is a euphemism for the trees, undergrowth, topsoil, clay, stone, bedrock, springs, creeks, and wildlife that interfere with the removal of the coal. Put more bluntly: overburden is everything that lies between the coal and the sky. The devastation is not just at the top of the mountain, but it extends to the valleys and hollows that the watercourses carved as they flowed across the tableland. The millions of cubic tons of trees, topsoil, rocks, clay, and shale pushed into in the narrow valleys block streambeds, destroy watersheds, bury homes, and render private property useless and uninhabitable. Destroyed are the humus and root systems that once held and filtered water, preventing runoffs and washouts, and which kept the mountainsides in place. The environmental destruction and degradation during the early industrialization of the Poco field was massive. However, in ways unimaginable under the old practices of deep mining, the twin processes of clear-cutting large stands of timber on the mountains and mountaintop removal have forever altered and scarred the Elkhorn Valley’s, and central Appalachia’s, once stunningly beautiful natural environment. In the Elkhorn Creek watershed, atop Indian Ridge and Shawnee Mountain, little remained to absorb the rains.

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During May and June 2001, a series of heavy rains had resulted in some flooding throughout West Virginia, which the prevailing timbering and mining practices exacerbated. On the morning of Sunday, July 8, 2001, a series of storms gathered along an advancing weather front to the north and west of McDowell County. Toward midmorning, across Indian Ridge, on the border of McDowell and Wyoming counties, just to the north of Keystone, the front stalled and the storms began “to pile atop each other,” taking on a life and intensity of their own. As people sat in church, or made their way through a leisurely Sunday morning, the black sky rolled and roared; the rains raged and roiled. At points along upper Elkhorn Creek, gauges measured eleven inches of rain before washing away.39 Witnesses along the Elkhorn who saw what happened next have described the water as nothing like anything seen before. Instead of rising from streambeds, the floodwaters descended from the sides of the mountains. “It looked as if gods at the top of the mountains turned on fire hoses and left them on too long.”40 Water, logs, mud, and rocks roared from mountainsides. This mass of water and debris combined with the storm water already collecting and flowing in the valleys and with the density of the built environment in the Elkhorn Valley to produce catastrophic results. Because the ground was already saturated and Elkhorn Creek was already flowing full, there was nowhere for the waters to go. As the gathering flood roared downstream from Maybeury to Superior, to Elkhorn, to Northfork, to Keystone, to Kimball, and on to Welch, other torrents surged from the sides of mountains magnifying and intensifying the flood, causing landslides that buried roads, vehicles, and homes. One resident of Cinder Bottom, when describing what he saw as the water rose said, “When I saw that water, it was like the end of time coming.”41 In Kimball, a bend in Elkhorn Creek caused the debris to lodge and wedge, forming a dam, multiplying and extending the damage and suffering. The flood destroyed the Kimball business district, pouring through the building that had housed the Koppers store. On the outskirts of Kimball, at the foot of Indian Ridge, the former Houston and Koppers buildings at the head of Carswell Hollow were torn from their century-old foundations and washed away, taking dozens of houses with them. In Eckman, floodwaters washed over the bottomland, covering the rail yard. The Elkhorn “entered the bottom two floors” of Billie Cherry’s CherryKey Inn, destroying everything and weakening the structure. Cherry, having resigned as mayor of Keystone less than two months prior to the flood, was awaiting trial. “We had things going so well . . . we’d cleaned up the town,” she said the day after the flood. When asked what she would do with the inn,

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Cherry replied, “Rebuild? No. Why? Sell it? No. Who around here would buy it?”42 In Landgraff, the collapse of the coal economy and the ensuing struggles for survival had reduced the population to fifteen families. On the afternoon of July 8, nine of those families lost their homes and the other six families had sustained major damage to their homes. Along the Elkhorn, the flood damaged or destroyed over four hundred homes, and throughout McDowell six hundred and sixty-two families were homeless.43 In the 1970s, using federal antipoverty housing funds, Cinder Bottom became the site for a low-income housing facility known as Tri-City Housing Development, replacing buildings that had at one time housed brothels, speakeasies, and juke joints. Because of its location at the lowest point in the Keystone area, the housing development and surrounding neighborhood took the brunt of the July flood. On the afternoon of July 8, water crashed through the cinderblock foundations of the Tri-City Housing Development. As the waters ravaged Cinder Bottom, “one hundred people lined U.S. Route 52.” The water rising in their homes, homeless, and with no place to go, they stood just yards from where during the 1920s through the 1940s, Thomas Whittico had published his daily newspaper for African Americans, the McDowell Times, calling persons of color from across America to purchase homes in Keystone, “the Mecca of the coal fields.” When the waters receded, all of Tri-City Housing’s residents, forty-three families, were homeless.44 At Westfield’s Lot 86, the Appersons’ former home still stood, but the Elkhorn lapped and pushed against the walls, flowing into the first two floors. Floodwaters from the Elkhorn destroyed outright several of the houses neighboring the Appersons’ former home or weakened them to the point they were uninhabitable. By the end of the day, much of Maitland, Superior, Kimball, Bottom Creek, Vivian, Landgraff, Keystone, Northfork—the landscape that Apperson had known best and saw for the last time on his train trip through the Poco field in May 1952—had been washed away. In the aftermath of the flood, residents of the towns through which the Elkhorn flowed were very clear and deliberate in citing the primary source for the destruction: the mining and timbering practices that were destroying the place’s natural environment. Residents formed the Indian Ridge Watershed Association to identify the contributing factors for the flood and to work for measures that would prevent it from happening again. West Virginia Governor Bob Wise formed several groups to investigate the flooding, affix responsibility, and propose solutions. The investigation revealed that federal policy required that every strip mine permit be accompanied by an implemented

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plan to mitigate flood runoff from mine sites; however, state personnel had ignored the regulations, not enforcing them until April 2002. The investigative committee also revealed that by early 2001, loggers had applied for permits to harvest the timber from 6.5 percent of McDowell County’s entire land area. Governor Wise’s committee was to make its report in December 2001. The work of the committee was handicapped when legislators and personnel from policy agencies repeatedly refused to attend committee hearings. Because of the difficulty it encountered from regulators and legislators, and because of the enormity of the issues, the committee asked for a delay. The Governor rescheduled the report for July 2002.45 On Thursday afternoon, May 2, 2002, two weeks shy of the fiftieth anniversary of Apperson’s 1952 last journey through the Poco field, after a week of crystalline blue skies and balmy spring weather in the greening mountains, with the last of the dogwood and redbud blossoms fading away, heavy rains erupted over McDowell County. All over McDowell County water again burst and tore from mountainsides, logs came as rockets, rockslides and mudslides obliterated everything in their paths. Unlike the floods of the previous July when damage was relatively localized along the Elkhorn, this time all of McDowell suffered; it was the county’s second hundred-year flood in ten months. Because the flooding occurred at the end of a school day, creeks turned to torrents stranded children on school buses. As the water rushed from the sides of mountains, heaving logs, rocks, and mud before it, it washed out bridges and roads and destroyed communication lines, leaving families separated from each other and unable to communicate. Fifteen feet of water stood in the streets and buildings of downtown Welch. A majority of schools in McDowell received some damage; the school at Panther was destroyed. In Caretta, Bradshaw, Bartley, Coalwood, and War, homes came to rest atop each other. Throughout the county, 2,045 homes were damaged, with 197 destroyed; 85 percent of all homes in McDowell either sustained damage or were destroyed. Seven people died.46 In the weeks and months that followed this more destructive flood, the citizens of McDowell reeled. Yet the nation’s attention focused instead on the terrorist attacks of September 2001, the expanding War on Terror, and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.47 In the aftermath of each of these floods, little attention was paid to the people of McDowell, outside the immediate region. No neighborhood, no community was exempt from the suffering these floods wrought. While all the neighborhoods and communities in the Poco field suffered, perhaps none more deeply and enduringly as Keystone’s Cinder

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Bottom. Between the destruction of July 2001, the flood of May 2002, and the collapse of the local economy after the failure of First National Bank of Keystone, “the hurt was compounded” for the people of Cinder Bottom.48 To understand the lived experience and implications of the flooding it is necessary to hear the voices of those whom Westfield would have disallowed and excluded. Before July 2001, Marcus Wilkes, a resident of Keystone and at the time an agent with the West Virginia University Extension Service, had been coordinating community efforts to build a park adjacent to the Tri-City Housing Development for the young people and families residing there and in the surrounding neighborhood. With the shrinking of community services following the bank closure of 1999, the building of the park was one positive step. A community effort, the park involved the work of parents, grandparents, youth, children, and others from within the community. Almost complete on the morning of July 8, the flood obliterated the park and any vestiges of it. According to Wilkes, the flood and subsequent dislocation of families and neighbors combined to limit or to destroy “the motivation to do good work.” In the flood’s wake, the federal government elected not to rebuild the Tri-City Housing Development and there were increasing numbers of people who were talking of leaving, despite their deep roots, and despite having weathered all of the changes in the previous decades. Yet many of these people lacked the resources to leave and most of them were just “waiting for the next shoe to fall.”49 Darryl Cannady’s grandfather had been an employee of Koppers Stores, but because of his race, he never appears in a photograph of store personnel. Cannady’s parents left Keystone in their early youth, seeking something better. A native of Brooklyn, New York, during his childhood Cannady returned to Keystone for visits with family. When his grandmother became ill, Cannady left a job as a credit manager in New York to help her in her illness, intending to stay only three months. The three months became a permanent residency as he found work as a tutoring and clerical volunteer and then as a paid staff member with the Elkhorn Development organization. Cannady was one of the staff members Billie Cherry fired when the staff became suspicious about the amount of money deposited in the Elkhorn Development accounts. Following this, Cannady became the executive director of the Southern West Virginia AIDS Alliance. An HIV/AIDS educator and activist, Cannady works in Bluefield, but resides in Keystone. On the morning of July 8, 2001, he watched as the rising waters inundated Cinder Bottom. For Cannady, “Keystone flooded because of the mining system. It wasn’t nature that did this.” Cannady and others were clear that the floods were the

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logical outcome of willful decisions. They were equally clear that the people of Keystone and Cinder Bottom had between them the tools, vision, and skills to pull together and to rebuild, if allowed to do so. However, the federal policies enacted after the flood, by persons not of that place, were destructive to the connections that in large measure defined that place, empowering its people beyond bank scandals and rising floodwaters.50 In talking about the flood and its aftermath, Cannady spoke of the efforts of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to designate a new flood plane, reducing potential insurance liability by relocating residents out of the way of the highest water, but not addressing the reasons and malfeasances behind the flooding. Because of the Keystone topography and the extent to which mining leases and ownership of the higher ridges excluded the possibility of moving up the ridges, a new flood plane designation would make it impossible to rebuild Cinder Bottom. Cannady understood that “FEMA is tearing down Keystone and Cinder Bottom and trying to get rid of the people.” Both Cannady and Wilkes voiced the question, “Where are the people going to go?” Both men understood the federally enforced leaving, the removal of a whole community with its connections and networks of support, was more damaging than the flood. While in the hours, days, and weeks immediately after the floodwaters receded, the people of Cinder Bottom came together and began the long work of reknitting their lives, the removal would destroy what people have between them. For Cannady, the policy of redrawing the flood plane without questioning the reasons for the flood, and the removal of residents without regard to the social connections of the place, were not so much a race-based decision as a reflection of the class bias of policy and policy agencies against places like Keystone or McDowell County.

“Someday things might be really good for us here in McDowell, like it is in other places.” For over a century, following the advent of industrialization of McDowell, coal operators and coal companies constituted a community of shared interests, holding absolute sway over nearly every aspect of public life. This community of interest saw little reason for accountability to citizens for the upkeep or strengthening of the civic infrastructure or concern with acknowledging the gifts and abilities citizens can bring to public life apart from their economic role in the production of coal.51 Although in the policies and practices that led to the flooding in 2001 and 2002, and in the Keystone bank scandal, there

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is abundant evidence that these ideas and assumptions continued after the heyday of the Poco field, one of the more crippling and long-term legacies of this Westfield power is in the troubled public schools of McDowell. In the early years of the twentieth century, the public schools of McDowell County were the exclusive purview of the coal companies that controlled the towns in which the individual schools were located. In incorporated towns such as Keystone, coal operators still dominated the local school district, exerting a defining, controlling, force on education.52 After the county began operating the schools and other Westfield elite succeeded the coal operators in leadership positions across the Poco field, assuming control of the county school system, the Appersons and many others regarded the public schools of McDowell as strong and effective. Many persons of color also agree that although McDowell’s schools were among the last in the state to abolish the practice of racial segregation, the education they received in the segregated McDowell schools was critically formative, setting them on the path to Westfield membership. In their praise of the McDowell County schools, these persons of color point to teachers and the empowerment they received in school. Students of color and whites both comment that they graduated with a feeling that they had the tools to accomplish much.53 Despite its acknowledged strengths, there was within the school system an unquestioned assumption of the appropriateness of Westfield practices, perspectives, and values. However, for most people not accepted in Westfield, education, while important, was secondary to the assurance of steady work in the mines. Prior to legislation prohibiting child labor, families decided when it was best for boys to leave school to join fathers, grandfathers, uncles, brothers, and cousins in the mines. Following the passage of fair labor standards in the 1930s, boys were restricted from working in the mines until they turned sixteen. Regardless of laws and common practices, there were always jobs in the mines waiting for boys and there were not always incentives among families or in coal companies to encourage males to finish high school. These attitudes and customs persisted throughout the constrictions of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. With the collapse of the coal-based economy in the 1980s, the majority of citizens were unequipped for anything but the coal industry. In 2001, the principal of the Welch Middle School asserted, “Fifty to sixty years ago, we put all our eggs in one basket and that was coal. Now students who graduate can’t find jobs.”54 Not just males found themselves as victims of a faltering public school system. Because the industrial sector was so completely the domain of males, and because there was usually a steady supply of jobs for males, females became

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secondary in the education process. Just as many males were encouraged to quit school and go to work in the mines, females were encouraged to quit school to get married and start families.55 As the economy collapsed, McDowell County’s rate of teen pregnancy skyrocketed, demonstrating that teen pregnancy is a symptom of hopelessness and frustration, a grasping after selfvalidation unavailable in other ways. By the end of the 1980s, McDowell had the highest teen pregnancy rate in West Virginia, and West Virginia had the highest rate in the country. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, 75 percent of all McDowell students qualified for free or reduce-priced lunch.56 In these realities, the historic gap and widening chasm between Westfield insiders and those unable to gain Westfield’s validation became disturbingly apparent in the school system. Citizens came to understand teachers and school administrators, many of whom had clear alignments with Westfield and the community of interests handed down from the coal operators, as enforcers of Westfield’s limits and communicators of Westfield values. Through bitter experience, parents outside of Westfield saw teachers and administrators as adversaries working against their children.57 As McDowell’s economy continued to slip, the schools offered few alternatives or opportunities and less hope to persons already trapped in a downward spiral. While there were certainly differences from family to family, and among individuals in any family, and despite a deep commitment to the local schools in each community, from the perspective of those parents outside of Westfield, the schools became a means of ensuring their children’s failures. From Monday through Friday, the week of October 22–26, 2001, a team of reviewers from the West Virginia Office of Education Performance Audit visited every school in McDowell County, attended a number of classes, and undertook an extensive curricular, infrastructure, and administrative assessment of the county’s public schools. The purpose of the review was part of the state-mandated accreditation process for the school system. What these auditors documented is unrivaled in its scope. They made two hundred and sixty citations of noncompliance with state policies and standards—more than had been made for any other school district since the state began auditing public schools in 1998.58 By any measure, the public schools of McDowell were in a rapidly deepening crisis and all were its victims, but especially those excluded from Westfield. In all three of the county’s high schools, students scored far below the state average on the ACT tests, and numerous students were discouraged from taking the tests because teachers, administrators, and counselors judged them ineligible for college. Students at Big Creek High School scored lower on the ACT than the students at any other school in

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the state.59 At Panther, Bradshaw, Anawalt, and Welch elementary schools, at Sandy River Middle and Mountain View High schools, students did not meet the state’s minimum standards on Stanford-9 tests or other instruments used to determine accreditation for the schools. In several of the schools, the number of students unable to meet the minimum expectations were dramatically increasing. Auditors documented that many classes were without textbooks or the texts were substandard and out of date. Most schools had few, if any, computers, and computer labs remained locked during the instructional day. In some cases, there were computers in the school, but students did not have access to them. In several high schools, there were no laboratory components to traditional lab science courses, and often the schools did not offer a lab science. In several schools, there was not a library. In other schools, the library remained locked, denying access to all students. Few of the school libraries had books that were contemporary or in good repair and many books were mildewed and unusable.60 When teachers were absent, often there were no substitutes to oversee instruction. On the day auditors visited Mount View High School, approximately one hundred and fifty students remained unsupervised throughout the day. At the time of the October audit, students in Grades 7 and 8 at Bartley Elementary had not had a teacher since school started. When bus drivers were absent, there were no substitutes to drive the bus routes. Students who would normally ride the bus were left at home, often for days at a time. However, the school administrators did not count these students as absent, because to do so would threaten the state-mandated attendance percentages for the school.61 Auditors found that there were teachers in the majority of schools who were not licensed for their teaching assignments. Several teachers had no teacher training. At Bradshaw Elementary, the school counselor had worked for seven months without licensure, because the individual did not meet the minimum college grade-point average required for certification. At both Fall River Elementary and Sandy River Middle schools, an active teacher did not have a college degree. Few teachers completed lesson plans, and rarer still did principals review and provide comments on submitted lesson plans. Supervisory staff seldom completed or filed annual evaluations for administrative or instructional personnel. On the day of the performance review, Sandy River Middle School did not have a principal. When auditors inquired about who had administrative responsibility in the school, the acting assistant principal repeatedly responded, “I’m not responsible . . .” When auditors asked who was responsible, the response was, “I don’t know, but I’m glad it is not me.”

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Additionally, numerous financial irregularities and lax oversight of financial transactions were evident at every school.62 School facilities were nearly all in a state of advanced decay. Auditors listed numerous unsafe and outright dangerous conditions in every school. At Gary Elementary, Fire Marshal citations, some over fifteen years old, were unaddressed, and there was no ventilation system for the building. At Iaeger High School, one unaddressed Fire Marshal citation was twenty-two years old. At Bartley Elementary, the third floor of the building was unusable because the roof was collapsing and county personnel had condemned the area. In nearly every school, there were exposed electrical boxes, electric breaker boxes located in classrooms, and ungrounded outlets adjacent to sinks and drinking fountains. School janitorial staffs left garbage piled in corners of classrooms, in hallways, and in cafeterias. Unsanitary conditions prevailed in many school kitchens. Auditors found bathrooms that were actually smoking areas, or where plumbing did not work, or that remained locked during the day. Many water fountains did not function at all. Searing in its implications, the published report unequivocally stated that in all but two of McDowell’s eighteen schools, “the environment of this school was deplorable, filthy, unsafe, and disgusting for children.”63 Perhaps the most disquieting aspect of all this was the attitude of teachers and administrators toward students. There was a pervasive mind-set evidenced among school personnel that equated poverty with stupidity, laziness, and a lack of willingness to try or to succeed. The report went into extensive detail describing teachers’ use of outmoded methods of instruction and failure to empower students even to try to succeed. In numerous instances, instruction consisted of distributing worksheets that the teacher never collected, graded, or reviewed. No multicultural educational curriculum existed. For most students, there was no music, art, or theater instruction. Auditors photographed teachers and students smoking together in school hallways. The audit identified persistent discriminatory practices and policies against female students and students with disabilities.64 Not surprisingly, none of the schools in the county demonstrated processes or strategies for parent or community involvement in the schools. Functioning local oversight committees and parent-teacher organizations were virtually nonexistent. Nowhere was this more evident than in Big Creek High School, located in War. From May to October 2001, immediately prior to the audit of the entire McDowell County school system, Big Creek People in Action undertook a listening project. Researchers conducted interviews with individuals and with

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families. Published on October 18, 2001, the report conveyed citizens’ appraisals of the county school system in general, and specifically the schools in the Big Creek District. In the report, one parent suggests that the county’s public education system was “not accountable for the kids getting an education.” Parents and students alike described the atmosphere at Big Creek High as being “like a prison,” that persons “felt unsafe,” and the school was “dark and depressing.” Implied in their criticism of Big Creek High School was the understanding that a family’s economic status and their political standing—their relationship to Westfield—determined how school administrators related to them and the quality of education students received. Nearly every parent participating in the listening project reported that they had no voice in the decision-making process in the school and education system, and that administrators “assumed parents are not smart enough” to make meaningful contributions.65 Students stated clearly that discriminatory practices against females prevailed in sports and in classrooms. Most students reported that they did not feel empowered to work hard, excel in their studies, and to continue in a lifetime of learning. Students universally reported that the education system discouraged them from wanting to learn. Big Creek did not offer courses that were necessary for entrance into most colleges or offered them from remote locations through closed-circuit television, precluding any possibility of interaction between instructor and student. What encouragement and help students did receive came from family and from outside the schools. In discussing Big Creek High School, parents were clear that part of the issue was the lack of imagination or creative leadership at the school. The school’s lack of positive leadership had resulted in a decaying school building that many parents and teachers described as unsafe and depressing. This lack of leadership, naturally, resulted in a deepening sense of powerlessness and hopelessness among students at Big Creek. Several parents and students reported, “The principal encouraged kids to quit school.”66 On Monday, April 29, 2002, six months following the state’s performance audit and the completion of the Big Creek Listening Project, three days before floodwaters again swept over the county, McDowell County Schools suspended Hobert F. Muncy, the principal of Big Creek High School, under allegations of sexual misconduct with students.67 In November 2003, Muncy was convicted on ninety-six counts of having sex with young boys, ages twelve to seventeen. Hobert Muncy died in prison on Wednesday, December 3, 2003.68 An automatic, even natural response to this deepening crisis would be to identify the funding disparity between suburban and rural schools and to lay blame for the lack of educational funding allocated to McDowell, call-

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ing for more federal and state investment. While there certainly needs to be an examination of funding disparities because rarely do the public schools have all the financial resources they need, there are other more long-term, more troubling reasons for the collapse outlined in the state’s performance audit and the evaluations from citizens. The reality is that there was no lack of investment of state and federal monies in the county’s school system. In the first years of the twenty-first century, McDowell County invested $8,461 per student, “vastly above” the West Virginia average of $7,300. The amount McDowell budgeted per student was the second highest in the state of West Virginia. With a county school budget of about $44 million, 18 percent came from county taxes, 64 percent came from state taxes, and another 18 percent came from federal funds.69 By the 1980s, the public school system replaced the coal industry as the county’s largest employer. Instead of a school system focused on equipping all students with the skills and knowledge necessary to respond to the shifting economy, instead of financial resources deployed to gain the most benefit from tax dollars, financial resources and political power underwrote sinecures, corruption, and malfeasance. In the twenty-five years between 1975 and 2000, McDowell County lost 7,933 students, 64 percent of its student population. By the fall of 2001, the total enrollment in the McDowell County schools was 4,616 students. While school board members and administrators cited the difficulty in hiring teachers and that “maintenance . . . staffs [have been] cut to the bare bones,” state auditors concluded that based on the number of students enrolled there were twenty-six more professional educators and thirty more service personnel than the number allowed for in the state formula used to determine staffing levels.70 Although the county’s pupil-teacher ratio was an enviable thirteen to one, the ratio resulted from inflated figures and the hiring of unlicensed and unqualified teachers. Despite the level of funding for the schools, in 2001, school expenditures exceeded revenues by $1.6 million.71 All of which begs the question, where did the money go and for what purpose? Teaching and administrative positions had become a means of rewarding people for political loyalty and support, and providing family members with secure, well-paying jobs. Throughout the county, parents and students faulted the public schools for the degree to which they had become a patronage system. The values and assumptions implied in this system shaped life in the classroom, defining the boundaries, marking the membership of Westfield: “big scholarships go to the students with well known [or] influential parents.” Parents called for the school system “to treat kids equally so there [were] no differences” between the education afforded most students and that afforded

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“upper-class” students. Many experienced the schools as “not welcoming and you are made to feel like dummies because you don’t have power behind you.” One parent stated, “I would not go to the school with a problem without a lawyer with me.”72 In the same way that the crippling dysfunction that plagued the schools cannot be attributed to the lack of funding, it also cannot be ascribed to a rapid turnover of administrative personnel. In 2001, the McDowell County Public School Superintendent, Kenneth Roberts, had been at his post for fourteen years, and other administrators also had plenty of time to identify and address the worsening debacle. Moreover, there had been public outcry over the deteriorating schools for a number of years. For the 1998–1999 school year, McDowell ranked last among West Virginia counties in scores on the state’s measure of performance, the Stanford Achievement Test. This was the third year in a row that McDowell ranked at the bottom of the state. As the 1999 school year ended, a group of citizens that had been working to raise education issues across McDowell published the findings of a survey to which almost four hundred people had responded, representing each of McDowell County’s school districts. “Concerned Citizens for Better Education” asked parents about the quality of education their children received, the curriculum, the engagement of teachers, the responsiveness of school administrators, and their overall impressions of the public schools in McDowell. Respondents overwhelmingly condemned the condition of the schools, the lack of support for teachers and classroom teaching, and the unresponsiveness of school administrators to parents’ concerns, questions, and suggestions. Parents also were very clear that the salaries for the system’s top administrators were “out of line with the quality of education our children are receiving.”73 There were forces of greed and dishonesty, however, from outside McDowell that also took advantage of the public’s trust. The flood of July 8, 2001, severely damaged a number of schools in McDowell. Immediately following the flood, Governor Bob Wise made repair of the damaged schools and having them ready for students in August a top priority for his administration. In order to accelerate the process of repairing the damage, Wise ordered a suspension of the state’s rules that require a competitive and public bidding process for all contracts. This directive proved to be a “license to steal.”74 With the rules suspended, a conspiracy evolved that included the State Assistant Superintendent of Education, his friend from college, at least one county school superintendent, and several other local officials and lowerlevel state management personnel. The conspirators fixed contracts, made

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kickbacks, bribed, and extorted the McDowell and Wyoming school systems. Together, these men ordered the rapid and unregulated purchase of hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of furniture, equipment, and fixtures. One of the contractors in the conspiracy directed an employee to falsify an invoice for $68,000 for school furniture the students of McDowell never saw. In several schools, officials paid to replace furniture and equipment that floodwaters never touched. In almost every instance, exorbitant prices were charged, paid, and never questioned.75 In August 2001, before McDowell County received delivery of any replacement school furniture, the State Assistant Superintendent ordered the McDowell County School Board to authorize and the County School Superintendent to hand deliver to his coconspirator a county check for $350,000. In all, the conspiracy cost McDowell County over $770,000.76 All this happened at the same time that McDowell’s schools were already in a downward spiral of titanic proportions and tragic implications. The State of West Virginia published the full report of the McDowell County Education Performance Audit on November 7, 2001. That same day, the school superintendent, Kenneth Roberts, announced his immediate retirement and in an emergency meeting, the county board of education requested the state take control of the school system. On Thursday, November 8, 2001, the West Virginia Department of Education assumed control of the McDowell County Public Schools, removing the elected board of education. The West Virginia State Board of Education appointed Dr. Mark Manchin to serve for five years as the superintendent of McDowell County Public Schools. The people who suffered most in this history since 1948 were not the people who had made decisions about the corporate structure of coal mining, they were not coconspirators in bank fraud, they were not acquainted with the powerful, they were never asked about the environmental practices and relaxed regulatory oversight of coal mining in the early twenty-first century. These people never served on a school board nor did they have a voice in determining the conditions of the schools their children attended. These people had no control over media corporations and outlets that opted not to bring careful and ongoing attention and coverage to a place’s struggles. The economic, cultural, and environmental floods that swept over them were and are the expressions of a way of life that had at one time valued and privileged those same places. While it is not the case with everyone, many of those who have remained in McDowell and witnessed firsthand these floods, many of those who daily work and stand against those floods, claim McDowell

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County as central to their political commitments, their citizenship, and their personal identities. As it was for Apperson, for these people, the communities along the Elkhorn Valley and more generally all over McDowell County—Keystone, Caretta, War, Coalwood, Kimball, Welch—have become not just a place of residency, but a defining element in their lives and commitments. Yet unlike Apperson, their place has become the foundation upon which they make a critique of the range of floods and calamities that have beset them, and the ground out of which they envision and enact a new world beyond the Westfield values and practices. Place has become for them a dynamic, creative practice that “works at the roots of the mind,” creating another perspective to see and understand the world, new ways of relationships, new understandings, and other social possibilities. Because of Westfield and its choices and values the new ways of understanding and relationship would have been impossible for Apperson as he made his journey through the Poco field.77

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chapter 6

Through the Deep Waters

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Christmas 1953 Shortly before Christmas 1953, in the Life Saving Crew Hall in Dublin, Virginia, Aldah Apperson, a widow for a little more than seventeen months, handed Fred Hale, chief of the newly formed Pulaski County Life Saving Crew, a check representing the money she helped raise to support a volunteer ambulance service for the area. She and others had raised the money going door to door in Newbern. Although the raising of the money was a project of the Newbern Community Improvement Club, for Aldah there was a more personal reason for her involvement in the effort. The morning that Apperson suffered his fatal heart attack, no ambulance was available and Aldah called Stevens Funeral Home whose hearse doubled as an ambulance. In the months after Apperson’s death, Aldah joined with her fellow Community Club members in asking neighbors for donations to support the formation of Pulaski County’s first life-saving crew.1 While she was helping to raise this money, in the weeks and months since July 4, 1952, Aldah had journeyed through deep waters and crossed a river of woe.2 Forever wrapped in questions and uncertainty, for reasons known only to him and now lost, C. T. Apperson Jr. died intestate. According to the Code of Virginia in effect in July 1952, that her husband died without a will denied Aldah clear title to his estate or a right to the unqualified guardianship of their daughter. Although property deeds to their home in Newbern and to the businesses in which he was a partner listed both Apperson and Aldah, the

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Figure 31. Aldah Apperson and Fred Hale, chief of the Pulaski County Life Saving Crew, Christmas 1953. Williams-Apperson Collection.

code required most of Apperson’s property to be sold and two-thirds of his estate deposited in a court-administered account, to be applied to expenses for his daughter until she reached the age of twenty-one. To qualify as the guardian of their daughter, the Commonwealth of Virginia required Aldah to be bonded. The state also required that the person signing Aldah’s bond be a resident of Virginia and have a net worth of at least twice that of Apperson’s estate, in the event that Aldah absconded.3 The letters, notes, documents, receipts, bank drafts, and personal remembrances from the time following Apperson’s death suggest Aldah and Alecia’s heartache, compounded hundreds of times over by Virginia’s inheritance and survivorship laws. At the same time she was struggling to find a way through an entangled legal morass, Aldah had a twelve-year-old daughter to rear and her own grief with which to deal. The small town of Newbern and the Dublin Methodist Church were central to her long healing process and the life she eventually built. As with her efforts to raise funds for the life-saving crew, much of Aldah’s involvement in church and community grew from her own work experiences, her commitments to her family, the circumstances of Apperson’s death, her

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daily struggles with grief, and her often-stated opinion that “we ought to do something about that.” Established in April 1952, the Newbern Community Improvement Club was for the rest of her life an organization to which she gave unstinting support, offering her a way to serve her place. The formation in the early 1950s of community improvement clubs across the state of Virginia was the result of efforts by the Virginia Cooperative Extension Service. While the development of community improvement clubs resulted in a number of significant achievements in rural localities throughout the state, the program’s dependence on a Westfield model of competition between clubs proved a fatal flaw. Annually, judges evaluated each club individually, based on the work it had accomplished in the year and its documentation of that work in a club scrapbook. Clubs with the highest scores were recognized and given various types of awards. In some instances, chambers of commerce cosponsored the contests and awards. All of this resulted in fierce competition between communities that were sometimes immediately adjacent to each other. Disputes and squabbles about the quality of scrapbooks and decisions of judges sometimes drove neighbors apart.4 What could have been an opportunity for rural communities to learn to work cooperatively, discerning ways in which rural places might have begun creatively and collaboratively addressing the changes that were already diminishing those places became instead a process of competition resulting in divisions and lost opportunities. Having acknowledged this, however, no one can deny that many of the community improvement clubs built a remarkable record, particularly the Newbern Community Improvement Club. Because she could not find a doctor on the morning of Apperson’s death, Aldah mobilized herself and other club members to recruit a doctor for Newbern. As chair of the committee to secure the physician, she wrote letters of inquiry to medical schools throughout the eastern United States and was instrumental in bringing a doctor to Newbern. With her significant skills and talents in baking and cooking, she helped raise money to have a waterline and streetlights installed throughout the town.5 When the county built a new public school in Newbern, she joined with other club members to petition the school board to sell the old building to the community club. After the community club secured title to the structure, she helped renovate the former school building, where she had attended, into a community center. The center served as “Newbern’s Town Hall” and was always a source of pride for her.6 For more than thirty years, she was the person in Newbern to whom people would come to get a key and reserve the building if they wanted to use “the center.”

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The Methodist Church in Dublin, some two miles from their home in Newbern, which the family had joined after moving from Keystone and Richmond in 1948, also became an essential focus for her life. Aldah served on committees, worked with children, undertook special projects, coordinated fundraisers, and was an active member of women’s circles. With her daughter, she started the church’s first children’s choir. At a time when many women could not drive, she often functioned as a chauffeur, bringing other women to and from church events. She gathered and brought flowers for classrooms and for worship services; she sewed curtains for church rooms and made sure they were always clean and ironed. She tithed and gave other financial gifts without measure. Despite some early hesitancy, when the Dublin Methodist Church, traditionally a white congregation, and the Mount Pleasant Methodist Church, traditionally an African American congregation, merged in 1970, Aldah embraced the change forming fast friendships with persons Keystone’s Westfield would have disallowed. Building on her work as a bookkeeper in the Poco field, Aldah eventually served as treasurer in all of the organizations in which she participated: community club, the church, and women’s circles at the church. For Aldah, the office of treasurer was a great honor, demonstrating the trust that people came to have in her abilities and her character. The keeping of detailed records of expenditures and assets, making routine reports to the membership, and confidentiality and discretion in which she kept each organization’s books were for her a sacred trust and part of the way she served that place. As Alecia grew and entered high school, Aldah was an active and avid supporter of everything in which Alecia participated. When Alecia became a majorette in the Dublin High School marching band, Aldah attended ball games, parades, and other events where the band was performing. She opened their home to Alecia’s classmates and friends, making it a place where they all felt welcome and accepted. In a number of instances, Aldah helped these young people through difficult times they were having with their own families and in their own lives. In choices she made in her journey, in her service, in her citizenship, and in the stories she told, Aldah made clear that she understood that place, Newbern, as a vibrant, dynamic reality formed from the foundations of the earth, its history and life intricately tied to its natural environment. Continuing the practice begun in the first months of her marriage, Aldah recorded her daily household expenses in a ledger, and along with each day’s expenses, she set down the details of the day’s weather in Newbern. She gave daily attention

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to the long, high ridge atop of which Newbern sat, the valley falling away to either side of town and the mountains rising in the distance. The stone outcroppings in her backyard, the bits and flecks of stones that came with every shovel when planting flowers or working the garden, the hard limestone water that was the town’s supply pumped from a well at the ridge’s highest point were all sources for comments and lessons to her grandchildren.7 The town’s built environment was also central to her consciousness. The home she and Apperson built in 1949 was on the former site of Newbern’s African American Methodist Church, across the road from the former site of the white congregation of the Methodist Church, adjacent to the house where she had grown up, which was once the town’s school—all of this was known and lived and told, passed to her grandchildren. A car ride or walk down Newbern’s single street, the route of the Great Road, always included references not only to the present occupants of houses but also to those who had once lived there, or to the structure’s former uses. She spoke often of the flagstone walkway that once bordered the Great Road, from the former site of the Methodist Church down through town, pointing out to her grandchildren and visitors the few vestiges of that limestone pathway. Although Newbern had suffered mightily in a fire that destroyed many of the old businesses of the town in 1924, she could trace for her listeners where those old buildings had been, seeing them in the air, her stories reverberating her young-girl terror the December night “Newbern nearly burned to the ground.”8 Entwined with Newbern’s long natural history and the place’s built environment, what most drew her were the stories of her family and the people they had known and the history they had experienced in this place.9 Following their mother’s death in September 1965, Aldah and her sister Emma renovated the family’s homeplace, and in August 1966 Aldah moved from the house she and Apperson built in 1949 to live next door in the Williams’s homeplace, assuming her mother’s role of keeping and sharing traditions and stories. Looking from the back windows of her home, she could point toward Godby’s Cliffs and the New River, just out of sight, across the pastures to the south and east, telling her grandchildren stories of their family’s roots in that place. Aldah’s stories of the place included Newbern’s importance to those who had journeyed the Great Road and how that journeyed road had helped to shape her family’s life there. Cooking became for Aldah an act of memory, not just of Newbern, but interwoven with that place, other places, and other stories. This was a memory carried and shared in stories, tastes, smells, and even techniques, all of it bearing witness to her own journey and those of many others. Standing in

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her kitchen, working at sink or stove or floured board, nearly every recipe or dish prompted a comment, remark, or story. When her Newbern kitchen filled with the smells and flavors of food from Italy, Germany, Scotland, the countries of Eastern Europe, and other places in Europe and America from which the people of the Poco field had come, laden in those smells and tastes were stories of their immigrant neighbors and all that she had learned as a young woman in the Elkhorn Valley.10 On slips of paper and index cards bearing her favorite recipes, stained with butter and grease and batter, she often wrote that it was a recipe that had come from West Virginia or from Keystone. Particular recipes would remind her of Apperson, bringing forth other stories.11 In other cooking, Aldah built on lessons learned from her mother and grandmother, they, in turn, having learned to cook from their mothers and grandmothers over open hearths, in times of scarcity and want.12 Over time, Aldah’s cooking smelled and tasted and felt of all these influences, becoming for her an act of living memory, joining skills, lessons, tastes, and stories gathered from many people, places, and circumstances. Her cooking also provided her with a sense of connection, to people, to the place, and to its future; it became for her a testimony of her commitment and dedication.13 Yet all of this, these three elements of place recounted in stories and impromptu lessons, offered in the car or at the kitchen sink, was a seamless fabric, woven together unconsciously—a living, thriving continuity, charting and shaping her journey.

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good va. cooks Jerrie Atkins article Oct.3, “Virginia delicacies only for natives,” upset a lot of good cooks in Southwest Virginia. (And we really have quite a few.) I have not had the privilege of traveling much in the Northern states, but as far north as I have been the food is very good. I am sure all the good cooks in Virginia appreciate the marvelous cheeses made in the North. I would never be so critical of the food there. I have been making baking powder and soda biscuits since I could reach the cabinet to roll them out, and I am 70 years young and still making them. Sometimes I make as many as 175 to 200 for ham biscuits. I live in the old town of Newbern, which was recently declared a historical landmark both state and national. We in this small town have done what improvements have been made by having public suppers with this terrible Virginia food. Come visit us sometime. ALDAH W. APPERSON Newbern Letter to the Editor, Roanoke Times & World News, October 1979. Aldah

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and others throughout Southwest Virginia were incensed at an article that had made disparaging remarks about traditional Virginia cooking.

As Aldah’s life in Newbern provided her with a sense of continuity in the face of so many discontinuities, Newbern also became the lens through which she witnessed a rapidly changing world in which Westfield’s relentless and rapid movement toward new consumer trends and fashions devalues and deserts places. In the middle 1960s, the building of Interstate 81 as part of the national interstate highway system leveled the hills and meadows where the family’s milk cow had grazed and where as children Aldah and her friends had picnicked. By the late 1980s, the night sky, once dark except for the moon and stars at which Aldah loved to gaze, was bright with the lights of gas stations and fast-food restaurants. Where the fence rows around her homeplace used to grow wild asparagus and black raspberries, catching the wheat chaff and corn fodder of the neighboring farm, they came to be littered with hamburger wrappings and plastic cups. In the midst of these changes, Aldah held to that place and as her grandchildren and great grandchildren came to the old Williams and Farmer homeplace, they came to know it as their homeplace, too, shaping their own journeys. The people of her daughter’s and grandchildren’s generations would increasingly have a consciousness of Aldah as a free spirit, creative and hopeful, gathering flowers by the side of the road, laughing and cooking, unconcerned with what others may have thought of her, welcoming of all, never meeting a stranger, introducing herself to everyone as “Granny.” While she eagerly talked to anyone of West Virginia and the towns and neighborhoods of the Elkhorn Valley, her identity moved beyond that by which her neighbors would have known her in Keystone’s Westfield in the 1940s, although it had its glimmers and hints there. In many ways, she also moved beyond many of the silences and practices endemic to Westfield as a system of values and beliefs. What is inseparable in people’s minds now is an image of the person Aldah became in her journey, her love for her family and the community of Newbern, and her commitment to the church. Although she still felt the loss of the old connections and life of the Poco field, and still felt keenly the death of her husband, the bonds of family, the place of Newbern, and her service to community and church were of a piece for her. Together, each were part of the life she built, opening possibilities of healing, a passage through the deep waters of her grief and loss, expressed in her expanding empathy for others and service to the place. For Aldah, Newbern was an ark of memory, history, grief, family, and hope, and it was more than that, too.14 Newbern

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and the Methodist Church became an active, creative, and defining force in Aldah’s life, offering her opportunities to move beyond the walls and limits that define Westfield as a system of practices and assumptions to recreate and redefine her life and her connections to others.15 Given his own commitments and perspectives, it is doubtful Apperson could have accepted an understanding of place as a creative, transformative force. Yet, after leaving the towns and neighborhoods of the Elkhorn Valley and after the death of her husband, Aldah’s choices and struggles, and the hope she built after 1952, point to a life passage informed and enriched by place as a creative practice and dynamic social force. In the years after 1948 and 1952, her journey traces these tensions, mapping a way beyond the boundaries of both her old Westfield neighborhood and Westfield as a structure of values and assumptions. When understood in the context of that place and time, the photographs and remembrances from Aldah’s life point to the power of place to help heal and build a life, to open new understandings and possibilities, and to make available a future that would have been unimaginable in Westfield and in the larger values and structures the neighborhood represents. Understanding Aldah’s life from the perspective of her service to Newbern as the convergence of natural and built environments and stories of human community, points to the ways place as creative practice makes possible ideas and relationships and the opening of a consciousness beyond the Westfield way of life. Her daily choices and habits, the mundane work of serving in community organizations and supporting community benefits, the baking of pound cakes and cream pies for neighbors and fundraising projects, the keeping of financial records, all suggest a practical consciousness that some might dismiss as not political or too traditional. Others might want to diminish the significance of Aldah’s journey, saying it is only the result of changing times and part of the natural and healthy recovery from deep grief. Aldah herself probably would not have attached any special meaning or interpretation to these things, except that they were just what one did, part of “making do.” Some of her kin, however, would say of Aldah and Newbern in those years after 1952, “this little place saved her life.”16 Demonstrating the importance of the choices Aldah made and the creative practice of place for her, members of her own family, members of Apperson’s family, and close friends from her days in the Poco field did not or could not embrace the same processes or changes. Aldah “stood out,” she was different from many, precisely because of her journey through deep waters and the choices she made for herself and for that place. To argue that the changes Aldah embraced and the change in

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consciousness that were so clear in her life were not of her choosing but the result of living in different times disregards this woman’s apparently successful effort to move beyond inherited and long-accepted ways of understanding the world. These accepted understandings were the bedrock of Westfield and at one time Aldah had accepted them as appropriate to “becoming somebody” and “making something of yourself.” Aldah’s initial involvement in civic work in Newbern in the first months after Apperson’s death may have given her something to do in the face of overwhelming grief, offering her opportunity to think of other things. However, this naturally led to other relationships and opportunities for her to confront the Westfield habits that were a part of the “fiber of [her] self” and were to be “struggled against in the hard, practical substance” of ordinary relationships.17 The work of building and serving that place and the opportunities for relationships with persons Westfield values and structures would subordinate, exile, and exclude were part of a process that resulted in the formation for her of new ways of thinking and being. In other ways, Aldah’s life always represented an unquestioned acceptance of Westfield’s beliefs. She rarely accepted any leadership role for herself except as treasurer or in the kitchen, she never spoke in public, she had an abiding and enduring distaste for conflict, she rarely critically questioned many assumptions or dominant ideas, and she was always deferential to persons she judged to be good businessmen. For anyone, as it was for Aldah, the creative practice of place is never easy, always uneven, usually unacknowledged, and daily fraught with fear, difficulties, and obstacles. There are no litmus tests. However, being in a place, understanding it, and serving a place as a multitiered reality, enable a consciousness that is also traceable and discernible in other places, in other lives, other journeys, always marked with individual inflections, perspectives, difficulties, limits, failures, possibilities, and potentials.

Christmas, 1988 Forty years and one month after C. T. and Aldah Apperson and their eightyear-old daughter left the Poco field, Christmas morning in 1988 dawned crisp and bright. In southern McDowell County, in the town of Caretta, with only a slight breeze and clearing skies, the morning mists rising from Harmon and Fork branches, Straight and Barrenshe creeks, seemed to hang suspended in the bare limbs of the trees. Christmas lights blinked across front porches, and plastic Santas and nativity scenes filled the front yards along Route 16 where

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it begins its ascent across the mountain to Six and Coalwood and beyond to where the Elkhorn joins the Tug. The four decades before that Christmas morning had been ones of unrelenting struggle and loss for the people of McDowell and Caretta. By 1988, McDowell County was in economic freefall, its people facing an economic catastrophe unlike anything yet seen. On the threshold of the last year of the decade, most of the large coal-mining operations across McDowell had ceased all production and pulled out of the county. In 1986, Olga Coal Company, which had been operating the Caretta mine, closed operations; for two years, there had been a steady exodus of people away from Caretta. No one could know anything about McDowell or Caretta or any of the other communities in Apperson’s Poco field and ignore or deny the reality that those decisions in which the majority of people in McDowell had no voice and the circumstances over which they had no control were fast reducing the people of this place to a “leaving people.”18 In the wake of this collapse, everyone in Caretta faced difficult choices and losses, but not just about whether to leave or to stay. If a family decided to try to stay, the hard realities of the economic collapse would define every contour of life and every moment of every day. Among the first to feel and absorb into their lives the costs of these new contours were the children of Caretta. In response to the declining student population, in 1987, little more than a year following the closing of the mine, the McDowell County Board of Education closed the Caretta Elementary School, busing the children several miles to War Elementary. With the failure of the coal industry, many of the county’s citizens who remained and were able to find work did so in jobs outside McDowell. This necessitated that they devote themselves to time-consuming travel over longneglected roads. Moreover, in most instances these new jobs paid much less than the jobs formerly available. For those from Caretta, in the Big Creek District, in the southernmost portion of the county, this could mean more than an hour’s drive, one-way, every day, to a minimum-wage job that offered no benefits. Because there was no day care facility anywhere in the county, for those parents who were fortunate enough to have jobs either in McDowell or at a distance away requiring long commutes, a fragile, uneven network of neighbors and kin sufficed to provide care for the children while parents were at work. For people in Caretta and the other towns of the Big Creek District, the geographic distance from Welch, the county seat, compounded their fear,

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frustration, and sense of helplessness in the face of the cataclysm that produced unemployment rates as much as 90 percent in some McDowell places. Living in one of McDowell County’s more remote areas, most citizens of Caretta understood that decisions about their lives emanated from “across the mountain” or farther away, and they had no voice in those decisions. The decisions of that time and Westfield’s inability or unwillingness to address the daily crises of the people reinforced the understanding among the people of Caretta that they faced a government and an economy that at every level entirely aligned politically, economically, and geographically against them. From Westfield’s perspective, the local government carried little responsibility or ability for addressing the burgeoning crises facing the people of McDowell and especially for those who resided at a distance from the neighborhoods of the Westfield elite. In the Poco field, such responsibility had never been that of the citizens and certainly never involved a democratic process.19 As the general condition of the public schools would suggest some fifteen years later, for the Westfield leadership, the providing of public services such as clean drinking water, day care facilities, and support networks for those caught in the economic collapse were not public obligations; rather, these and a host of other things were the responsibilities of the coal companies. Now, however, the coal companies either were gone or had so dramatically restructured themselves as to have divested themselves from any accountability to or responsibility for the community. With every passing day and every new crisis, in a place that large coal-mining corporations had badly used and then nearly completely abandoned, the irony of this attitude became increasingly apparent and was not lost on the people of Caretta. At the end of 1988 in McDowell, 85 percent of all wastewater and sewage was straight-piped into streams. Only one McDowell County town, Gary, had an operational sewage treatment facility, and it worked only sporadically. Welch was the largest town in the United States that did not have a wastewater treatment facility, dumping its wastes directly into the Tug Folk. When the Olga Coal Company ceased operations, it no longer accepted responsibility for operating the water and waste treatment facilities it had maintained in Caretta and Coalwood. By December 1988, the Olga Coal Company was bankrupt and the company with which it had contracted to operate the water system for Coalwood and Caretta was in receivership, leaving Caretta and Coalwood much like every other community in McDowell.20 On Christmas morning, reunited for the holidays, many families had returned for short visits with kin and former neighbors. It was a day to gather and to try to hold at bay, at least for a short while, the trouble that seemed

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to loom at every turn for every family. Early that morning, as the sun inched along Caretta’s Number Five Hollow, families rose from the night’s sleep, preparing for the day, wanting to wash the sleep from their eyes, to brush their teeth, to make a pot of coffee, to start cooking Christmas breakfast, to put water on to boil potatoes or beans for the family’s Christmas dinner. They little suspected that when they turned on their water spigots their world would change. Instead of clean, usable water, the system delivered a disgusting brew of mine sludge, human and animal feces, and wastes of every kind. Anger, frustration, and confusion grew, and telephones began to ring all over Caretta as neighbors called neighbors. Because there was no public agency responsible for maintaining safe drinking water, there was nowhere for the people of Caretta to turn. In much the same way Aldah was motivated “to do something” about the lack of an ambulance service or community physician or water and streetlights in Newbern, the situation with which they were confronted on Christmas morning not only enraged a group of women in Caretta, but also convinced them they had “to do something.”21 In the weeks and months to follow, these women organized their neighbors to protest the decisions and inactions that had brought Caretta to this crisis, compelling them to work for a resolution. Their motivation was their shared community in Caretta, what they held in common in that place, and their shared dream for something better for themselves and their families. The water crisis, but also their years of struggles and loss, forced them to break free of the inherited idea that Westfield was responsible for addressing McDowell’s problems. They knew that if ever again there was to be clean water in Caretta and if their community survived, the work would depend most on the people who loved that place.22 No one was coming to save them. In the years that followed, various attempts at repairing the old water system succeeded for short intervals, but because of the system’s age and the coal company’s neglect of maintenance over the years, those attempts were ultimately fruitless. Through lawsuits against the bankrupt coal company, court-issued injunctions against the county, lobbying the McDowell County Commission, leveraging state officials, organizing their neighbors, and holding community gatherings, the people of Caretta began to exert pressure against the county’s Westfield leadership to address the water crisis. Throughout those struggles, in the middle of Caretta, at the crossroads of the place, the old three-story, pale-yellow brick school, gray from decades of accumulated coal dust, remained as an ark of memory. In the fading light of summer evenings, sitting on the tracks of the abandoned siding in Num-

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ber Five Hollow, mothers gathered as their children played among the old cinders and rail bed ballast, in the shadows of the old school. They spoke of their frustrations and weariness from having to carry water daily to use in their homes. They shared news and opinions about the seemingly endless struggle to have McDowell County provide water services to the people of Caretta, learning who among Westfield’s elite could be trusted and who could not. When the news and gossip were exhausted and the stories of frustrations recounted enough, they told and retold stories of the school and the times of their growing up together. The school had come to embody and symbolize for these women and their neighbors all that was happening to their place—young people leaving, the place’s vitality and life under assault. In their conversations, the people of Caretta came to understand that by sharing that place, they also shared, held in common, needs and issues that were pressing on that place and its people: poverty, unemployment, teen pregnancy, drug abuse, hopelessness and disaffection among the youth; lack of child care, health care, recreational, and educational opportunities; and the need for adult literacy programs.23 From those relationships, those stories, and those shared experiences in that place, the idea began to grow for the people to reclaim the school building, that the school could become a common ground, a gathering place for the people of Caretta against the deep waters rising on every side. As they worked and strategized to provide the community with clean water, the people of Caretta petitioned the Board of Education to sell them the building. Instead of selling it, the board gave the community its old school.24 Before they could accept ownership of the building, the petitioners were required to have an incorporated entity to take title to the property, in trust for the people of Caretta. Big Creek People in Action incorporated on December 11, 1990. A few weeks later, in the early days of 1991, the people of Caretta took possession of the abandoned school building. After closing in 1987, the structure had become a favorite target for vandals. By early 1991, the former school was more than sixty years old; the building’s age, combined with the vandalism, had resulted in near hopeless decay. There were holes burned in the gym floor, the bathrooms did not work, the furnace was missing necessary parts, and few windows remained intact. The county school system had used the vacant building as a storage facility and dumping site for unwanted equipment and furniture. When they reentered their school, the people of Caretta found some rooms impenetrable with castoff and worthless furniture and goods piled from floor to ceiling. While their lawyers were arguing for clean water as a basic right and a public responsibility, the people of Caretta reclaimed the old school, scraping paint,

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repairing bathrooms, patching plaster, and dreaming boldly for their place. Working nights and weekends, volunteers made do with donated materials; utilized money raised from within the community; leveraged money from outside of McDowell to refurbish the building. From the day they accepted ownership of the badly crippled structure, the people of Big Creek People in Action were clear that they wanted the building to serve as a common ground, and that the people of that place would establish its mission and its use. After long work to identify the community’s needs and determine their neighbor’s wishes for the space, Big Creek People in Action announced in January 1993 that it would establish a day care center on the ground floor of the former school, serving primarily the children of low-income families. Designed for children ages six weeks to six years, the center would have capacity for thirty-two to thirty-four children, twenty-two of whom were to be from low and moderate-income families. By this time, the people of Caretta had renamed their former school the Caretta Community Center. Almost five years after the Christmas morning in which the people of that place first began to claim their voice, on Wednesday, June 23, 1993, the McDowell County Board of Commissioners announced a $3.36 million project to bring clean drinking water to Caretta and Coalwood. It would be the first public service water system in McDowell County. On Monday, July 12, 1993, as work was beginning on the project that would bring a permanent source of clean water to Caretta, Big Creek People in Action, on the ground floor of the Caretta Community Center, opened the first day care center in the county’s history.25 Passing through these deep waters, Big Creek People in Action came to define its relationship to the place. As with Aldah, the journey of this organization’s relationship to its place traces the contours of both the Westfield neighborhood’s boundaries and Westfield as the values and beliefs structuring a way of life. Signaling a dramatic shift from the relatively short-term and single-focused Westfield vision of Colonel Houston or Koppers, Big Creek People in Action’s vision is to “foster a community in which people learn, work, play, and grow together and prepare themselves for success in the twenty-first century.” The organization’s vision for McDowell is one of “empowered, self-sufficient people living in communities that are economically vibrant, democratic, and socially just.”26 While Houston and Koppers may have publicly touted a similar vision for McDowell’s future, the power of the Westfield values to define the limits of social interaction and citizenship prohibited even the remotest possibility of anyone realizing these ideals. Big Creek People in Action is a coalition of women, men, youth, persons of color,

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college-educated, people of poverty, natives of McDowell County, and those from outside the county: a coalition that neither the Westfield neighborhood nor the Westfield culture could envision or condone. The defining, creative force for this organization has been the people’s love for and connection to Caretta, the other side of the mountain from Westfield. From its beginning in the water crisis and efforts to reclaim their former school building, in its work and advocacy for the place, Big Creek People in Action sets itself apart from and against the traditional ways of Westfield’s power. The organization approaches issues in a way that Westfield would have found impolite, unnecessary, and unacceptable. Big Creek People in Action is willing to be engaged in intense public conflicts and is insistent in its demand for all the citizens of the place to be part of the decision-making processes that Westfield would have reserved for its chosen elites and leaders. Before the West Virginia Board of Education assumed control of the county school system, Big Creek People in Action was routinely present at public hearings and meetings of the county school board, challenging board decisions, citing contradictions in policy, duplicity of board members, and malfeasance of system administrators. Increasingly, the county board of education and county commission looked on the organization with derision, denigrating its efforts, ignoring its representatives in public meetings, even avoiding meetings they expected representatives of Big Creek People in Action to attend.27 After the state assumed control of the county’s public schools, Big Creek People in Action continued to hold accountable the new school administrators. When the state-appointed school superintendent moved to consolidate the Big Creek and Iaeger high schools, arguing that a larger school would be more effective and efficient, Big Creek People in Action organized and led the opposition to closing local schools. Building on their research and the work of similar places facing similar struggles, contending that the presence of the local high school was essential to maintaining the community’s coherence, and that children of poverty had stronger opportunities for success in smaller schools, Big Creek People in Action members adamantly and ardently argued against the proposal. Big Creek People in Action and its affiliated citizens brought suit against the county school system to prevent the closure of Big Creek High School, eventually taking the case to the West Virginia Supreme Court. The basis for the case resonated with the decades-long struggle against the power of Westfield to determine and direct the lives of all the people of the place. The community’s case rested on the argument that the state had no right to make the decision about the local school and that the people on “this side of the mountain” whose children attended the school were the rightful persons

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to make the decision. So intense was the debate, and so effective were Big Creek People in Action’s organizing efforts and research, that the state’s school administrators were forced to stop the consolidation process until gathering further citizen input. Big Creek People in Action then launched and hosted a series of community forums and workshops in which school administrators, citizens, parents, high school students, and outside consultants worked to find a common ground between the competing visions. Throughout the process, in the press and in meetings with state officials, Westfield characterized the lawsuit and the community’s organizing efforts as shortsighted, self-centered, and obstructionist. While it was eventually determined that both Iaeger and Big Creek high schools would close and a new high school formed, a new middle school was identified for the former site of the Big Creek High School football field and conversations were ongoing to develop the former Big Creek High School as a community learning center. Without Big Creek People in Action’s involvement and its insistence of some consideration of the longterm future for the place (Westfield described it as ignorant interference and “meddling”), the possibility of such a conversation would have been unlikely or even impossible.28 In addition to its willingness to be deeply involved in conflicts, Big Creek People in Action’s programmatic concerns have run the gamut of issues and troubles facing a community deeply shaped in the control that coal companies exerted for so long in that place. Decades after the coal collapse of the 1980s, 37 percent of persons in McDowell have difficulty reading above a fourth-grade level, the highest percentage of any county in West Virginia.29 Big Creek’s Young Leaders Action Council targets high school–aged persons and enlists them in personal development opportunities, democratic leadership training, tutoring, life skills workshops, college visits, and college-prep workshops.30 Beyond the borders of Westfield, no family or individual is completely free of or safe from these rising troubles, but the burden falls heaviest on children. By 2005, based on a series of indexes measuring children’s health and well being, West Virginia ranked forty-seventh out of the fifty states and McDowell ranked last among the state’s counties.31 Through its Strong Families Program, Big Creek People in Action works to improve adult and family literacy and is involved in housing rehabilitation and addressing issues of hunger, particularly focusing its efforts on the well being of children. Because the last thing that T. E. Houston, his contemporaries, and his successors wanted or needed was citizen input, and political and civic leadership was limited to those with Westfield credentials, the citizens of McDowell had few opportunities to learn or practice democratic civic skills; for many persons denied a Westfield

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membership, the United Mine Workers of America was their only opportunity for civic leadership during the heyday of the billion-dollar coalfield. Big Creek People in Action develops people’s long-neglected citizenship skills through its Citizenship Center by supporting “collective action by young people, adults, and allies inside and outside the area to reduce the effects of poverty and build sustainable communities in McDowell.”32 In the years since the mid-1980s, the people of McDowell have supported and initiated a number of efforts similar to Big Creek People in Action, some of them short-term, some more enduring, some more effective than others. A very short list of these initiatives would include Council of the Southern Mountains, Tug River Community Health Clinic, McDowell County Action Network (McCAN), Elkhorn Valley Youth Development Center, Team Effort Against Ruining Southern West Virginia (TEARS/WV) and Stop Abusive Family Environments (SAFE).33 All of these efforts bear witness to the many “snares and pitfalls” that block success, and undermine and threaten the organization.34 Among many of these organizations and their staffs, there is a growing and sharpening critique of American society because of its abandonment of McDowell and the majority of its people. Interwoven with this critique is an abiding commitment to do something to build a stronger McDowell. As it is for Big Creek People in Action, in the mission and work of many of these organizations, place is a creative, defining force, fostering connections between people, and defying Westfield’s practices and boundaries. Because of their refusal to believe that place and its people are commodities to be bought and sold, or to be abandoned in the rush for the newest trend in consumer goods, these organizations represent a marked departure from Billie Cherry’s Westfield vision in which place is a thing to be bought in an individualized quest for maximum acquisition. As the interaction of the natural and built environments with human culture and history, defined in the crucible of human struggle and conflict, place acquires in the work of these organizations, and in these individuals, a political force, creating possibilities, informing dissent, offering a standard by which to critique and evaluate policy and leadership. As persons who either for a short time or for their life’s work have claimed McDowell and have worked for a future for the place beyond Westfield’s limits, Jeff Allen and Franki Rutherford understand the complex nature of place and its creative potential to inform and shape alignments and commitments. Not a native of McDowell County, Jeff Allen became the pastor of the Keystone United Methodist Church in 1987, the same church in which Apperson, Aldah, and their daughter had been active members forty years before. The church sits in the middle of the Westfield neighborhood, just a few dozen

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yards east of what in the 1940s was the Keystone public school for whites. From the front porch of the parsonage in which he lived, Jeff Allen could look from the northern slope of Shawnee Mountain, across Keystone’s Main Street to the Appersons’ Westfield house, to Elkhorn Creek, flowing westward toward its confluence with the Tug, and to the railroad and Indian Ridge on the opposite bank. For Allen, Keystone’s first reality was its natural environment. Allen spoke of the narrowness of the Elkhorn Valley in the area of Keystone, the ways that the town is built into the ridges surrounding it, Elkhorn Creek running dark and polluted through the middle of town. Allen understood the natural environment as part of this place’s interior, spiritual landscape, shaping the view of the world from Keystone and his own struggles, his own journey of self-understanding. Resonating with the words of the Old Testament prophet Amos, the water springing from cut banks and mountainsides and flowing down to join the Elkhorn, became for Allen metaphors for rivers of justice washing clean the place’s long struggles and deep grief.35 Franki Rutherford was one of the founding members of Big Creek People in Action, served on its board for seventeen years, and was executive director for eight years. Descended from McDowell’s first settlers, she lived away from McDowell as a young adult, returning home in the early 1970s. Rutherford’s understanding of the place arises from a profound respect for the mountains: their beauty, and their endurance, as well as the coal lying beneath them. Moreover, she understands her own life as well as the life of the community as interwoven with the natural environment: “I was born in these mountains and I have chosen to live my life in these mountains and it has been a good life. It has not been without struggle but it has been an incredible process. I want to die here and I want to be buried here and replenish these mountains so that I continue forever.”36 For both Allen and Rutherford, the century-long, draconian efforts to control and exploit the place’s geologic wealth deeply shape the built environment and the human history across that geography. This history results in what Allen has described as a “landscape of grief” in which the place and its people are hourly confronted with the foreclosures of futures and opportunities. For Allen, this also meant that while the geography and geology might be defining realities for that place, it was a place forever shaped in enduring conflicts and struggles, lived out along the social divisions that Westfield had dictated to “run with the land.” The pervasiveness of this social and cultural conflict shaped Allen’s first consciousness of the place. Before coming to Keystone, he dreamed of the church and its stained glass windows, “with people coming up through the

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mines and crashing through the windows.” In the same recurring dream, people with guns chased him, but he escaped to safety at the top of the ridge. Allen recounts that when he arrived in Keystone, the windows of the church were as he dreamed them, as were the steps of his house. Then, tinged with the irony of understatement, Allen says, “and there was a struggle.”37 In Franki Rutherford’s stories of her family and her work for the place, there is little room for understatement. She cannot tell her family’s stories in McDowell without also telling the story of violence, control, and corruption, dating back to the taking of the land in the 1880s, through the violence enforced by Baldwin-Felts agents, to the more contemporary struggles for clean water for Caretta and the debate and court cases concerning the school system. For Rutherford, struggle and conflict are integral to the McDowell landscape; nearly every geographic feature, bend in the road, and place name can evoke some memory or the personal scars of a history of standing against Westfield’s efforts at control of the Poco field’s wealth. Rutherford’s grandfather, Jim Harmon, was a union organizer before 1933, often hiding in the woods to protect himself and his young family from Baldwin-Felts agents. Baldwin-Felts agents accosted one of Harmon’s sons, Woodrow, beating him. Woodrow Harmon died of complications from his wounds two weeks later. Rutherford remembers that during the labor struggles of the 1950s, when she was a child, her father was a trusted member of the “UMWA brotherhood,” union officials frequently called him, and he made many trips to United Mine Workers of America headquarters in Washington, D.C. Following years of work and struggle for the place she loved, standing against Westfield’s power, she could assert, “It is an all-out war for this place.”38 Rutherford’s and Allen’s creative practices of place involved struggles to open new possibilities and new understandings of the future in McDowell County. For Allen, the principal organizer behind TEARS/WV, this work took on an environmental component to prohibit dumping of out-of-state garbage in abandoned mine sites in the county. Allen’s was also a church struggle, because he worked to bring African American youth into the formerly all-white Keystone church. His motivation in this work was to connect the former Westfield church, now struggling and dying, in substantive ways to the surrounding community. This was a work of theological, cultural, and political transformation, moving an institution from the confinements imposed from Westfield values and structures to be an active force on behalf of and with those Westfield had excluded. For Rutherford, the work is as broad as Big Creek People in Action’s vision but finds its fullest expression in her advocacy for public education, youth, and children. Allen and Rutherford acknowledge

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that the issues they have faced are larger than a county power structure, but they take on national and global systems that in vision and values manifest Apperson’s Westfield but also have a harder, more bitter, and unrelenting edge. These systemic questions and issues find their expression in ways in which wealth is defined and managed, patterns of property ownership, and in the ways that control continues to be exerted through grants and funding sources. As philanthropic foundations sought the best management practices for endowments, taking advantage of the stock market boom of the 1990s and at the same time seeking relatively safe long-term investments, transportation and energy companies offered a viable and sound investment choice. Consequently, by the turn of the twenty-first century, foundations and churches that were helping to fund nonprofits such as Big Creek People in Action were doing so with profits accrued from investments in the companies that controlled the land and resources in McDowell and which had benefited from and contributed to the economic collapse of the 1980s. Many of the persons volunteering to serve for a short time in McDowell to help with housing rehabilitation projects or with flood cleanup hold pension and mutual funds with investments in Norfolk-Southern and other corporations that benefit directly from the property ownership and tax structures that have long prevailed in McDowell. The result is that Big Creek People in Action and other nonprofits apply for and use profits from systems that helped create the conditions that the organization is working to address. These organizations depend on college and university student volunteers, church groups, and individuals just as tied to this system, who often come not so much focused on social change, but for a poverty-immersion experience justified by acts of charity. Foundations, appropriately enough, institute programmatic and funding guidelines to which grant recipients must adhere; in most cases these guidelines will represent the interests and values of foundation staff and boards of directors, who themselves are heavily involved in the same patterns of investments and property ownership. With the stock market panic and collapse of 2008–2009 and the ongoing economic upheavals, philanthropic foundations curtailed grant-making activity to accommodate the loss of income from endowments, and those endowments remained invested in dependable stocks and securities of energy and transportation and the pillars of consumer culture. In McDowell, the pattern of land ownership remained unchanged. This intricate web of money, power, charity, and service entrenches Westfield more completely and pervasively than it ever was in Apperson’s time, leaving no room outside its boundaries for anyone or any organization to claim complete objectivity, innocence, or freedom from influence. This same web

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of power and influence often stands in the way of, limits, and destroys the creative practice of place. Even in the tightening and confusing bind in which the place and its people seem caught with fewer and fewer options, there are those who can suggest the continuing relevancy and importance of a creative practice of place. Allen and Rutherford are among them. Another is Marsha Timpson. As it was for Aldah, for Timpson, the defining, creative practice of place has a personal element in addition to its social and political aspects, calling us in the deep waters of our lives to a new life of healing and hope.

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Hope and Place in the Deep Waters The daughter and granddaughter of miners, Marsha Timpson grew up in Warriormine, outside of War. In many ways, Timpson has lived out and embodied in her life and choices the story of the Poco field in the years since Apperson left. One of six children, Timpson remembers family conversations about which of the children would go to college. With two brothers who would have work in the mines, in essence the question was who of the four girls would go to college. As her family debated the decision, her father would turn to her and say, “Marsha, you try to get married as soon as you can.”39 Timpson married her first husband when she was seventeen years old and the couple moved immediately to South Carolina to find work. Soon after their wedding, her husband began to be physically and verbally abusive to her. After a short time in South Carolina in which their daughter was born, they returned to McDowell, living in Cucumber, just south of War. By the time their daughter was seven, Marsha’s husband’s outbursts were more frequent and increasingly severe. She fled the marriage, taking her daughter with her, fearing for their lives. Depending on family and friends for a place to stay, with the McDowell economy ever-worsening and hundreds of people leaving every week, Timpson and a family of close friends decided to flee the mountains, moving to South Carolina where they were certain they could find work. With no prospects for work, they arrived on the coast south of Myrtle Beach. The six of them slept in their truck. Eventually a local property owner allowed them to stay rent-free in a structure that had two bedrooms and a kitchen but no running water, no electricity, and no furniture. Cooking outside, bathing under a water spigot in the woods behind the house, sleeping on the floor with three young children, fighting bugs and rats, eating as they could, Marsha looked for work. She eventually found a job waiting tables, bringing her daughter to work with her, letting her sleep under the front counter and then

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catch the school bus in front of the diner. Securing two more jobs, and now working at three, she often took additional work cleaning houses in resort communities surrounding Myrtle Beach.40 During this time, Marsha married an itinerant construction worker. As the family moved from one place to another, this man became as abusive and dangerous as her first husband. Two more children were born and her husband’s abuse increased. Through the help of a domestic violence shelter, battling shame and fear, Marsha asked her family to come get her. Her sisters met Marsha and the children in the parking lot of a McDonald’s, and they all returned to McDowell seeking the safety and shelter of home and the mountains.41 With the McDowell economy now completely collapsed, finding work was nearly impossible, but she was able to secure a few positions cleaning homes for those who could afford to have someone help with housework. Given the number of people looking for any work, the pay was despairingly low. With three children to feed and rent to pay, Marsha barely had enough to keep her family alive. When she got a job cleaning the public library at War, Marsha began to read books to children, drawn to them because of their curiosity and wanting to help them, taking time away from her regular duties of sweeping the floors and cleaning the bathrooms. Her reading gained in popularity, and the library staff soon asked her to undertake a weekly reading session with young children, which came to the attention of a regional staff member for an AmeriCorps literacy program. The offer of a $650 monthly living stipend as an AmeriCorps member was more money than she could make cleaning houses and offices. Soon enough, Timpson had made a name for herself empowering and helping young people to learn to read and to gain confidence in their own abilities. When her AmeriCorps service was complete, Big Creek People in Action offered Marsha Timpson a staff position.42 As a Big Creek People in Action staff member, Timpson is daily among “her neighbors” helping to feed hungry families, tutoring people to read, leading visiting college students in service and reflection opportunities, encouraging the place’s young people to think beyond the limits imposed from a school system in crisis. As she speaks of her work, Marsha is often selfdeprecating—mentioning her lack of education and her years of silence, years when she felt obligated to allow persons with Westfield credentials to speak and to decide. The deep waters of her life have taught her that justice and place are not mere abstractions for those struggling on the brink of obliteration, without the resources of home and kin. Rather, justice means food and shelter, effective education, access to economic opportunities, the space to

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dream and plan for a future in a place, the opportunity for safe and meaningful relationships undiminished by the vise grip of poverty. As it was the day her family came to get her, place means safety and security, an enfolding reality offering relationships and opportunities for change and growth. Despite the deep waters through which she has passed, her place in “my mountains” and its creative practices have helped transform her from a victim of abuse and a daughter of fear, to a person with voice and power. “I have come a long way . . . what I have to say may not be as well put together, but I know how the issues affect me and what I can do to help. I know my community. Everybody has importance and value. I see that.”43 Marsha Timpson daily decides to stay in Warriormine and Caretta and to serve the people of that place. On the afternoon of May 2, 2002, floodwaters inundated the ground floor of the Caretta Community Center, destroying furniture and fixtures in the child care center. That evening in the gathering dusk, as the rain abated to a drizzle and floodwaters receded, there were few places left in McDowell County from which to stage relief efforts. In the early spring darkness, with roads blocked with trees and mud slides, with bridges washed away, with communications systems in disarray, it was unclear how widespread the damage had been or what would be needed in the flood’s wake. Before the long night was spent, emergency workers designated the Caretta Center as a disaster relief center and Big Creek People in Action staff members were its principal coordinators. Over the next six weeks, Franki Rutherford, Marsha Timpson, Dyanne Spriggs, Kem Short, and other staff members at Big Creek People in Action, prepared and distributed 17,397 meals, delivering many to families stranded in damaged homes. They unloaded relief supplies from eighteen-wheel trucks at all hours of the day and night, dispensing cleaning supplies, clothes, and medical goods to persons throughout the day. With the help of hundreds of volunteers, Big Creek People in Action distributed to people who came to the Center and by trucks to outlying neighborhoods supplies of water and food, disinfecting materials, and mattresses, supplying 3,424 individuals and 984 families. The organization also offered temporary shelter, victim counseling, transportation, and direction for further help.44 In the days immediately following the flood, the sun transformed into dust the mud and sludge the flood had left behind. The area around the Caretta Community Center came to resemble a battlefield with National Guard Humvees, tractor-trailer trucks, and the daily lines of flood victims standing and driving through the clouds of dust. Noise, dirt, glaring sun, muddied Styrofoam cups and plates, weeds and trash wedged in chain-link fencing, and piled garbage and debris—all underscored and compounded the

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sheer human misery. In the bedlam and sorrow of the flood’s wake, Big Creek People in Action bore witness to its commitment to that place and its people against all that stood against it. In the crush of work and exhaustion of those long days, no one had time for reflection or drawing lessons from the individual disasters that abounded at every turn. The nation refused to notice what was happening in McDowell County, preferring instead to focus all attention on ever-shrill calls for a war on terrorism and the neutralization of Iraq. For Timpson, the daily demands, the service she offered, the listening to the stories of families that had lost everything confirmed her already firm impression that “America would rather not have to deal with us.”45 To remain in a place, to be engaged in its creative force, to choose to serve in that place is to understand that place in all of its complexity and to come to see its troubles as connected to and symptomatic of larger, global trends and systems that are in one way or another active in every place.46 To make the choice to stay and to serve means valuing human relationships, the connections of neighbors, family, and friends more than Westfield’s priorities. In this, the choice to stay and to serve is a definitive creative and political act, a creative journey of place, lived out in daily interactions and in ordinary ways. It is the daily struggle and work for honest engagement with and honest responses to complex and unanswerable questions. Aldah, Big Creek People in Action, Jeff Allen, Franki Rutherford, Marsha Timpson, and all those who have worked beside them demonstrate that some of the journeys defining a place are journeys through deep and troubled waters; they are journeys of hard work and struggle, conflicts, doubts, and contradictions and ambiguities. They can be journeys of grief and healing. They are also journeys of hope. Shaping and charting these defining journeys are the natural and built environments of the place joined with the human culture and history that has moved across that topography, told and passed along in stories and memory. The journeys these people have made suggest that this complexity is the source of a place’s creative practice, both for healing and for defining and designing hope’s work. The creative practice of place is work of many kinds with many expressions, many journeys; yet Aldah Apperson’s, Marsha Timpson’s, Jeff Allen’s, and Franki Rutherford’s journeys and the work of Big Creek People in Action make clear that in the creative practice of place choices to remain in a place also entail choices to serve both the place and its people. Place as a creative practice involves abiding—resting easy and living with—the ambivalence of choosing to remain in and serve a place although Westfield may regard such

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choices as irrelevant or pointless. Persons take up these creative practices and journeys of place in the real tension between contending values, ideas, choices, and visions. Often in this creative tension, there are stories of truth and journeys completed but only partially discerned and understood.

Newbern As dementia began to gain a foothold in her life, one of Aldah’s last community projects involved an effort to make Newbern’s presence known to the thousands of Interstate 81 travelers who bypassed the place. The members of the Newbern Community Improvement Club determined to install on the backyard fence of one of Aldah’s neighbors, overlooking the interstate, large letters spelling out “Newbern.” For several summer evenings, Aldah worked with her neighbors to hang and paint the letters, enjoying the company and conversation, taking great pride in the project. When it was completed, she said, “People won’t be able to miss Newbern now.”

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Caretta, May 2002 Just back from delivering the noon meal to persons whose homes were damaged as the floods swept around and through them, having traveled over washed out and debris-choked roads, they sat with disposable Styrofoam boxes on their laps, eating a dinner of once-warm ham, corn, and peaches. Marsha Timpson offered second helpings on food, along with plenty of encouragement and support. Shoveling the food in their mouths, they talked above the roar of National Guard bulldozers and dump trucks forming hills of rubble just outside the Caretta Community Center, their words sometimes lost in the noise. The conversation between college-student volunteers, National Guardsmen, citizens of Caretta, and members of Big Creek People in Action’s board of directors and staff members soon turned from talking about the enormity of the destruction to questions of families in Caretta, Coalwood, and Bartley and how they had fared and who was yet to be accounted for. Marsha was the fount of information, sharing news and insights about families’ conditions, making sure that volunteers did not overlook anyone or forget any family. As talk ebbed, the staff prioritized the afternoon’s work and who would direct what crew of volunteers. With hurting backs and sore feet, eyes smarting from the dust, the group fell silent, gathering their strength. Weary from working since before dawn, some dozed with their heads thrown back; others,

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their empty plates still in their laps, fell asleep with their chins resting on their chests. The roar of grinding gears jolted them as the eighteen-wheeler, coming down the long grade from Welch and Coalwood, made the sharp and difficult turn into the parking lot. Sidling between Humvees and dump trucks, it backed to the side door: another load of castoffs and surplus from America’s abundance, sent to help. At the first sound of the truck’s gears and airbrakes, as it shuddered and groaned over the broken macadam, the people sitting in that kitchen well knew that the day’s priorities were lost. Everyone would be needed for the hours of work to unload the truck, moving slowly through the cargo, sorting the goods into accessible stacks and piles. Clearing away their meal boxes, the same sort of containers delivered to families all morning, they piled them in the black, plastic trash can that sat in the middle of the room. From between and atop the plastic water bottles and pop cans, the paper towels and disposable spoons and forks accumulating amid the scraps and bits of uneaten food in the plastic garbage bag, the meal boxes were like neon, announcing in red, white, and blue, frenzied stars and streamers, with words emblazoned so that no one could miss them: “American Pride.” Running their hands through their dust-and-sweat–stiffened hair, they groaned, rose, and stretched; they rubbed their backs and their shoulders, yawning. Settling their caps on their heads, they followed Marsha as she led them down the community center’s crowded, chaotic, mud-stained hall to the waiting truck, and they went back to work.

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chapter 7

“He Always Wanted a Cadillac”

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“Research as to motor car preference indicates that some twenty million motorists would like to own a Cadillac, if they felt it within their economic means.” “[A Cadillac] identifies its owner as a man of accomplishment and distinction.” “The roster of Cadillac owners comprises a virtual listing of the best known and most respected names of our day . . . men and women of recognized achievement and accomplishment . . . leaders in virtually every phase of business, industry and of the professions. . . . If you hope, sometime, to find in your motor car what these many distinguished motorists have found—go visit your Cadillac dealer.” —Cadillac advertisements, spring and summer, 1952

“He liked cars and always wanted a Cadillac.”1 It would have been for him the marker and the sign that his journey had brought him to his long-planned destination. As he set out that morning in the early summer of 1952 to purchase what would be his last automobile, Apperson was prepared to own finally what to his mind was, and what American consumer culture regarded as, the best car money could buy. He was also prepared to pay cash for it, having enough money to purchase outright the luxury car. Leaving their home in Newbern, he was wearing work clothes: khakis, a cotton shirt, brogans, and an old brown fedora. As he stood in the showroom of the Cadillac dealership in Pulaski, none of the sales staff knew Apperson and they ignored him, not suspecting that a man dressed as he was could afford a Cadillac. He waited, nervously jiggling the small change in his pocket. No one approached him offering to help. Indignant with the careless inattention paid him, with the money still in his wallet, he stormed from the showroom. Driving another twenty miles to Wytheville, he purchased a 1952 Chrysler New Yorker.

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Figure 32. Cadillac advertisement, Time, May 12, 1952.

Apperson then returned to Newbern where he changed clothes to his best, most expensive, most finely tailored suit, and his newest shoes and hat. Driving back to Pulaski, he stopped at the drugstore, buying the most expensive cigar available. In his new car, dressed in his finest clothes, smoking an expensive cigar, Apperson pulled into the Cadillac dealership. Once in the showroom, he ordered and then paid a sales representative to have the dealership’s garage employees immediately wash his new, spotless Chrysler. As they worked, Apperson watched, smoking his cigar. As children, we heard that story told and retold, for its humor, for what it said about our grandfather. Thinking about it now, more than a half-century

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after the events of that morning, from the perspective of his journey and the Poco field, there is something else. The frustration he must have felt. Very possibly, he could have felt himself a stranger or trespasser in the Cadillac showroom, the sales representatives not acknowledging that he belonged there. If he were still living in the Poco field in the communities along the Elkhorn, he would have gone to a dealership in Bluefield, Keystone, Northfork, or Welch and the sales staff would surely have recognized him and he could have made the purchase. In addition to the cash, in his wallet were all of the credentials of his Westfield membership. Having worked, sacrificed, saved, plotted, and planned since he was sixteen years old to claim membership in Keystone’s Westfield neighborhood, he left the Poco field so that he might better retain membership in a Westfield larger than any one neighborhood, but a way of life with incumbent values, associations, and privileges. On the morning he tried to purchase “the automobile that identifies its owner as a man of accomplishment and distinction,” he knew that he was dying.2 Throughout his journey, the apartments and houses, the automobiles, and the other goods their resources enabled them to accumulate marked Apperson and Aldah’s progress toward Westfield. With the purchase of the Cadillac, Apperson would have understood that he had arrived at the destination toward which he was journeying when he boarded the train in Farmville, Virginia, in the early summer of 1926 and headed for the Poco field. Now, because he was not dressed appropriately and because in this new place no one knew him, Westfield values denied him the final marker of its membership. In Apperson’s experience in the Cadillac showroom there is enacted the contours and shapes of a larger system of values, as he faced head on Westfield’s most damning reality and its essential irony. In the stories of other people, there are traces of these same contours and ironies as Westfield neighborhoods, along with their accumulation of consumer goods, offer themselves as the object and destination of the American middle class, the destination of the journey to claim the American Dream. In the Poco field, in the Appalachian region, and across American culture, Westfield as a system of values and a structure of beliefs that are enforced and carried out in myriad ways, daily sets in the way of those journeys obstacles, walls, chasms, snares that constitute the foreclosure of the journey, its bitter unfulfillment, its hopeless dead end. For some, just as there were inviolate borders between Westfield and Cinder Bottom, Westfield as a structure of values precludes the taking up of the journey in the first place, relegating some persons to the shadowy,

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silent borders, denying every hope of entrance or acceptance. Sometimes, for those who make the long journey, accepting its incumbent sacrifices, Westfield grants its validation, bestowing membership. At other times, from other persons making that same journey and choosing the same sacrifices and choices, Westfield withholds its privileges and markers. Even those whose Westfield journey seems to end well can never assume the permanency of their social position or that their journey is complete; Westfield can always withdraw its acceptance. Moreover, as a system of values and assumptions moving through American society and culture, Westfield demands that in order to gain and to maintain social validation from the consumer culture, in order to have a higher-paying job, live in a more fashionable place, acquire a more prestigious or marketable education, persons must always be willing to uproot themselves, to deny their places, to take up again and again their dividing journeys, leaving behind places, relationships, and connections. As with Apperson, when people are willing to make these choices, sacrifices, and divisions, Westfield can still withhold the final credentials of membership. Even with the fading of memories and the humor with which the story was always told, Apperson’s utter and desperate caughtness and the sheer unfairness of how it must have seemed to him, burns through. As Westfield exerted its divisive, fragmenting force in McDowell and in his life, Apperson did not have another map to follow, lacked the opportunities to see another way; he could not chart any other journey but the one that had brought him to that showroom. Despite all his efforts to follow the Westfield journey, to fulfill the Westfield expectations of mobility and placelessness, and all the ways he had “become somebody,” that whole way of life still denied him, turning him away. Part of the larger work of my own journey of discernment and inquiry has been to identify ways that Westfield formed the journeys of Apperson and Aldah, and continues to characterize the journeys of so many others. More than indictment and censure, however, the work I have claimed for myself along this journey has also been to make meaningful and substantive contributions, suggesting alternative journeys and creative ways of relationship with and for our places. This creative, place-based work involves listening to the stories that people offer up from their lives; discerning what shapes and influences the stories people tell and how these friends speak of their places. If the story of Apperson in the Cadillac dealership is not to be yet another vignette of frustration and fragmentation on the portals of the American middle class, we must use Apperson’s story, and the stories of others, to provide a new map, gathering the resources for a new journey.

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158  /  chapter 7

Stories along the Divide

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Stories always start this way . . . set within a strange world. Patience is required, to let the stories unroll. This is how people explain their lives. —Peter Behrens

For a number of years, I have asked persons to tell me their stories of place, learning from them that these stories are how people explain their lives.3 I have asked them what they consider their place to be and to describe their place. I have asked them what their hopes and dreams are for their place. I have also asked them how they think of Appalachia, and what this relatively new regional identification means to them. On back porches snapping beans, on front porches watching a July rain, leaning on the counter in old stores, in kitchens, standing over ironing boards, in long midnight conversations, listening beside hospital beds, talking in the gathering twilight on the sidewalks in front of funeral homes, and visiting in community centers over potluck meals, people have shared with me moving stories and profound insights. They have told me of their dearest dreams, of the searing crucibles and deep waters through which they and their people have passed, and of their most enduring hopes. Through these stories, these people have explained their lives, making sense of their journeys. In these conversations, there is a clear and discernible division, laid down along Westfield’s boundaries, tracing a deep connection between one’s relationship to Westfield and one’s stories of place. For those persons who would have found easy acceptance in the Cadillac showroom, the stories describe place as secondary to the demands, expectations, and values of Westfield. For those who would be unacknowledged or unwelcome in the Cadillac showroom, their stories are of place as held to, a creative practice, a defining force bringing people together, offering not only a critique of Westfield, but holding out a different way to be in the world, a different journey. In ways as varied as the people who have welcomed me and shared their lives, these stories tell of Westfield’s devaluation of places and people outside the economic mainstream, and the creative, hopeful possibilities to which these same places and people bear brave witness. No categorization, however, is entirely consistent or accurate in every instance. There is, of course, a long human history of forced migration just to survive. For many emigrants, leaving behind a place is not so much a choice for Westfield, but a decision to seek a marginally better life for their children: enough food to eat, enough clothes to wear, and strong schools to attend. Throughout American history, the places to which emigrants have journeyed

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and the work they have taken up were often outside Westfield. While these emigrants may have had little hope or even desire for admittance to a Westfield neighborhood, Westfield values imposed, dictated, and necessitated those hard, hard decisions. Through its individualism, its use of consumer goods as a measure of well being, and its definition of personal success, Westfield informs economic structures and public policies, removing the possibility of people remaining in the place and among the people who shape them. In the words of Franki Rutherford, this same force reduced the people of Caretta in the 1980s to “a leaving people.”4 The removal of possibilities to choose a place is a divisive act, not only isolating persons from central relationships but forcing a consciousness of the place as involving only the present time—place as expendable and irrelevant. If the present time in a place is economically marginal, if it lacks the glitz and glimmer of fashion, no one should want to stay in that place. Because place is both expendable and irrelevant, Westfield refuses to recognize or accept the emigrants’ difficulty in adapting to or accepting a new place, believing that such difficulty is the mark of a deficiency in the people and the places from which they come. If Westfield deems the people not to have what it takes to succeed in a place, they are often convinced to take up their journey again to find a better place. Often, for those persons forced to emigrate, to relocate, to uproot themselves and their families, the original place identity, like a mooring rope, exerts a strong bond and connection. As it was in Apperson’s driving to McDowell from Newbern for day trips to visit cronies and friends, emigrants give expression to these connections as they travel back home for weekends and holidays. Only with the passage of generations and the fading of memory do the place connections abate. The second and third generations of these families who have been a part of these migrations are sometimes able to claim a Westfield membership, but these sons and daughters also speak of the lingering costs exacted from their families because of the uprooting. Honesty also requires acknowledging that people make choices every day to relocate, to find a place more suitable to them, to look for work that allows more opportunities for growth, to see other parts of the world, to secure for themselves a greater freedom of expression, to escape a painful past or troubling memory. When Aldah and Apperson came as young people to the Poco field, it was partly for such reasons that they left their home places. This freedom to move from one place in search of a new place, the freedom to explore a new frontier is part of the very essence of America, written into our founding documents, prompting the journeys of many of those who passed

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along the Great Road in Newbern’s earliest days. However, the substance of the stories I have heard on this journey is not about the decisions to emigrate for survival or the decision to explore a new frontier. Rather, these have been stories that suggest place as a contested and conflicted reality, pointing to the Westfield divisions at work across American culture. When taken together, the stories shared with me suggest that on both sides of Westfield’s boundaries the first and essential place identity is to a particular landscape, to particular connections of people, to the stories of a particular place. When asked where their place is, people will invariably identify the local landscape and people and then secondarily speak of America or any regional connection. Westfield exerts itself first against this particularity. As it did for Apperson, as evidenced in Koppers’s store designs and in its displays of abundance of food and goods, a culture of accumulation and acquisition devalues and tries to hide the losses and sacrifices felt in daily relationships and within specific places, across known and familiar terrains. As it devalues the importance of a lived and known place and the memories and stories associated with it, Westfield binds persons to the idea that they are a part of something larger, more important, and more beneficial to them as individuals than the attachments to one place. To move ahead and have individual worth, one must acquire not so much placelessness, but a sense of “any place” as long as it has the requisite amenities, abundances, and opportunities. For those who take up the Westfield journey, the vibrant, living, interrelated complexity of place is sacrificed and the place abandoned if Westfield demands. In stories robust with Westfield values and devaluations, people will refer to economic development, the lack of jobs, the promise of jobs from a new industrial park, the need for a better road or a better airport, and the quest for all manner of outside investments in the place. There is also the assumption that postsecondary education means moving away, going some other place to do better. These conversations usually carry the implied appropriateness and expectation of friends’ and children’s mobility and pulling up stakes to move to the next job, of always deciding on a job based on the salaries offered. Decisions to remain in a place, to accept a lower-paying job in order to stay, while praised for their virtue, run counter to common sense, dismissed as unrealistic once one has heavier responsibilities and obligations. The insistence on individual mobility and maintaining the boundaries of class and race instill a palpable distance between a person, a place, and the people of a place. In this Westfield vision of place, “the notion of being close to people

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back [home] is no more possible . . . than it would be . . . to be close to space aliens. . . . It’s not a possible thing . . . [and nothing] . . . [for which to] aspire.”5 Once we become aware of the Westfield assumptions about place, we can trace their influence throughout American culture and society. Among academicians and other professionals in higher education, these values find expression in the implicit belief that the quality of students is often a function of Westfield membership, the vitality and legitimacy of institutions results from their Westfield status. Local or regional colleges or universities are less prestigious for study or for employment than those that have reputations for preparing and educating persons for placeless mobility in a global economy. Upward professional mobility for the professoriate and administrators differs little from the Appersons’ first trust in Koppers. For the writer or filmmaker who produces from within a Westfield consciousness, a place’s integrity, its natural environment and long human history, is secondary to the demands of the story or film. The natural environment of one place, with all of its specificities, intricacies, and interdependences can easily describe another place, if it helps the story or film. Place names, with all of their implied and explicit human history, are used because of their novelty. The social struggles and conflicts across a particular geography are transplanted to describe another place, any place, if the storyline demands it.6 For economic planners working within unquestioned assumptions and consensuses, the effort to attract industrial investment or nationally known retail merchants subsumes the coherency and integrity of a place. Architects, designers, engineers, investors, and developers often impose on one place plans and ideas that produce sameness from place to place, neglecting the nature, character, and native purposefulness that have evolved on a particular landscape. Architects and developers often either reject and obliterate the vernacular architecture or use it merely as adornment to enhance commercial appeal. Designers will use old photographs and artifacts to give the impression of permanence and rootedness to businesses that have little connection to any place except as a relatively temporary economic exchange. The Westfield neighborhood is called by different names—Hunter’s Crossing, Cambridge Green, Fox Ridge, Steeple Chase, Braeland Meadows, Willow Springs—but it is still the same movement. Sometimes, they are gated communities, their boundaries enforced with keys and passes; sometimes, they are not. These developments dot the landscape by the hundreds of thousands, hardly countenancing that such places as Newbern, the Poco field, the Elkhorn Valley, or McDowell County even exist, much less are part of the same country. However, along with their collaterally built strip malls, fashionable boutiques,

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and chain stores, the values implied in these developments resonate and give expression to the same expectations and assumptions as Keystone’s Westfield. So dominant and prevailing is the Westfield perspective in America, that most persons and communities accept these tendencies and beliefs as normative and as common sense, not noticing these things as patterns and practices of cultural and economic power. Westfield’s approach to place has been a contouring force in American culture since the earliest European settlement, going right to the heart of the global economy in which all of us now participate. Yet many of the stories I have received also point to another way of relating to place. There are those persons, who by their work and life, by their choices and struggles, point to ways of being in a place that are more creative. These friends tell us that we cannot change who we are, that our lives will always carry the stories of the events and places through which we have passed; from our experiences, we bring with us the substances of our identities. Having a Westfield legacy and inheritance does not necessarily mean that we are bound to Westfield’s divisions and placelessness. These people teach us that we can make the value choices and civic commitments to use who we have become and who we are becoming, as well as the skills, access, and privileges that accrue, for the good of our places and the building of a better future for all people in our places. Westfield does not need to be our essential force; a new, alternative journey is open to us. For those who by choice or by accident do not or cannot claim a Westfield membership, or who seek relationships and expressions beyond that membership, place can become a fundamental resource suggesting political alignments and a range of social values and practices. These stories fairly shimmer with individuals’ fierce love and pride of place, telling of its importance to their identity, their understandings of themselves and the world, their moral, civic, and political commitments. For those who find little of value and less acceptance in the Cadillac showrooms, place offers a common ground, bringing people together whom Westfield could not have allowed, to undertake work and service that Westfield cannot admit as necessary or even envision except as charity extended to those outside its boundaries. Pointing the way of this new journey are people like Franki Rutherford and Marsha Timpson and the other women and men of Big Creek People in Action who have never assumed a Westfield membership. Also demonstrating what an alternative journey might be are people such as Aldah Apperson and Jeff Allen, who may have clear title to a Westfield inheritance but have chosen or been forced to choose another way of being in a place. These people speak of their places as a source of pride, but also more than just a matter of pride. Their

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stories suggest that claiming a place is a means of living out values, choices, and a particular vision of citizenship. While economic development and opportunity are always concerns, these stories of place suggest a greater awareness of issues beyond these concerns, taking in the whole reality of a place—environments, history, culture, and society. In their stories, these people give voice to the ways the broad reality of a place can shape and inform politics, thinking, and relationships. Often, these friends envision a future that does not always involve extractive industry or a service-based economy. Commitment to their places and to the relationships of those places motivate years of work for health care reform, for redress of injustice, for recording a place’s history from a perspective broader and more inclusive than that of Westfield. This same commitment also leads to decisions to stay in a claimed place when the commonsense decision would be to relocate to a more economically vibrant locality. In telling their stories, these people speak from relationships that cross the old Westfield boundaries, suggesting that the increasingly difficult work to claim and maintain a place beyond the standards of accumulated consumer goods and economic control involves a range of friendships, alliances, and strategies. These are the people who seek in a variety of ways to practice a model of collective leadership, not because it is the latest corporate fashion or a tenant of “servant leadership,” but because they see it as the only way to build a democratic future in any place. Place forms the initial common ground in all these alliances, bringing people together. From these place-focused and place-based alliances and relationships, citizens often undertake a critique of policies and programs, advocating for social and cultural changes Westfield would see as unnecessary or inappropriate because the Westfield allegiance is to something larger and more important than any particular place.7 From these stories, many of them bristlingly alive with the particularities and possibilities, the images and metaphors of place, we learn that for those who perceive their place as a three-part interaction of natural and built environments and human history, this vision and commitment are more than a narrow localism. These stories suggest the possibility of understanding that any particular place, whether in the Elkhorn Valley or in the valley of the New River, whether Keystone or Newbern, or some place on the other side of the planet, is a social process, constituted from the same complexity as any other place. When appreciated as social realities of interwoven complexity, all places face similar possibilities, questions, issues, and problems that are best examined and addressed together.8 The world and its people, however, do not easily divide into facile categories and easy niches. Along the way of this journey, I have also heard stories

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from those who could have stood with Apperson in that Cadillac showroom and who would have received the attention and the recognition denied to him. These are stories from people who have Westfield’s validations and are considered its members, people who live not only within this structure of beliefs and values but also are residents of particular Westfield neighborhoods. Theirs are stories of the daily encounter and wrestling with Westfield’s implications. In these stories of grappling in the long night watches with questions that defy any easy or rote answers, these people question the contradictions of American culture. Whether received by accident of birth or by dint of hard work, what does it mean to accept as appropriate Westfield’s credentials, manners, and privileges, at the same time as working to establish roots in a place, to honor and to contribute toward a place’s connections? What is the base character of mainstream American culture? Is the American Dream in essence defined in the values of consumerism or is it something else—something more creative, more hopeful, more sustaining? Although there is membership in the American nation, there is also a recurring debate, often only partially articulated, about what that American membership entails in a place and what it means to be a member of a particular place. While there might be the tendency to dismiss such questions and struggles, to regard these people and their lives with self-righteous ridicule and condemnation is both sanctimonious and wrong, participating in and extending Westfield’s divisions and devaluations. Nor does rejecting these people, their questions, and their stories take into account the ways that Westfield values and structures have been integrated throughout American culture and society so that it is nearly impossible to find a place to stand that in some way is not within the reach of Westfield and its power. Some people join this struggle within Westfield through their faith and religious practice. Others respond through their political work. Many persons use service to the place and its people, supporting a variety of voluntary associations, as a means of joining this struggle. Still others are involved through their financial philanthropy. Nearly all of the stories from the people who daily confront these questions suggest that they find expression for their values in their service, in their work in the places of their lives. This service can and often will slowly change them, bringing them to other values and other understandings about the place and its people, their neighbors divided from them along Westfield’s boundaries. These, too, are creative journeys, felt and known in the deep fibers of the self, to discern and claim and live out other values within Westfield, in all of its iterations. Part of this creativity is born of the struggle to negotiate the territory between the right answers Westfield

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may expect and demand and the honesty a place in all of its dynamic and interconnected complexity teaches. They are journeys to affirm the values of connection, in a world predisposed against connections. These stories also suggest that for most people, as it surely would have been for either Apperson or Aldah, and as with the perception of membership in the American nation, the first and strongest place identity is to a particular place and not to Appalachia. The stories shared with me suggest that Appalachian regional identity is secondary to one’s connection to a particular place and even subsequent to a sense of national membership. Discussion about Appalachia or a person’s sense of belonging to Appalachia generally results from prompting and direct questions about how one thinks of the region. A possible exception to this tendency would be those persons, academics usually, who have spent a great deal of time and energy studying and discussing Appalachia. Once prompted, however, the Westfield division again asserts itself in how people, regardless of their familiarity with the concept of Appalachia, describe their understanding of the region and its importance to them. In stories told from within Westfield or from those who have not taken up the struggle with Westfield’s values, Appalachian regional identity is limited to pride in a cultural heritage or a personal historical interest. Many people will say, “I am proud of Appalachia, but it has gotten a bad name . . . and there is a bad connotation about the region, but there is so much good in this part of the country; heritage and history. When most people hear [Appalachia], [they] think about poor destitute people who live in log cabins.”9 Often, in defending the region, it is in terms of eligibility for Westfield membership, “[being called Appalachian] has a connotation of being hillbillyish. The [media] made like we had two heads and we weren’t capable of bettering ourselves.” 10 In much the same way that the photograph of Mary Williams, lantern in hand (Figure 1) at the front door of her home represented the “old style of lighting,” ignoring the light bulb hanging behind her, Westfield’s Appalachia is an ornament, ultimately inconsequential in a culture that uses geographic mobility and consumer goods as the final measures of success. In Westfield, like place itself, Appalachia has little bearing on life choices. For those from outside of Westfield, or for those who struggle with the implications of Westfield’s demands, claiming an Appalachian identity or membership takes on a political edge and is nearly always focused on the interweaving of lives: “being Appalachian . . . means being connected with people.” 11 For many persons, the critical importance of an Appalachian identity is one of individual worth and collective solidarity, rooted in the deep interrelationships of the natural environment, the built environment, and the

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long history of human interaction in a place. “I’m special in a very positive way . . . I am a direct result of the Appalachian Mountains [and] I have an individual future as well as a collective future.”12 Although these connections make possible the observation that “America does not know what to do with us,” there is not the idea that Appalachia is somehow apart from or separate from America.13 The connections to which these stories point are from within American culture and identity and speak to its contradictions and tensions. Appalachia becomes in these stories not an ornament or an object of Westfield curiosity, but a place of connections from within and standing in opposition to the conflicts and contradictions of American culture. Within these defining connections, Appalachia, like the Appersons’ Poco field, becomes part of an American story of place. In these stories of Appalachian connection, there is also a spirituality of place, an abiding consciousness of the world’s pain, and an effort to join the place and the struggles of one’s life in creative ways. As Newbern was for Aldah, Appalachia becomes a way to give meaning and context to the deep waters of heartache and doubt. “When the people you live with are suffering, if there is anything to you, you suffer, too.”14 As Jeff Allen said, in looking on the trouble through which he had passed in Keystone, “Being Appalachian means in a sense having to confront the realities of pain and suffering in the world and of grief. Part of being an Appalachian is also that after the sorrow and after the grief, you wake up in the morning . . . with the sun hitting the other side of the hill and light . . . gradually coming down like a curtain on a new day and just the hills and the trees and being connected with nature. [A]ll the seasons of one’s life with the good and the bad are somehow found in Appalachia. [In a] world where things are becoming disconnected . . . Appalachia has a lot to offer people . . . I think we model what connection is all about.”15

To Run with the Land: The Making of a New Map The story of Apperson in the Cadillac showroom is a story of place. Like many other stories of place, it is also a story of the search for validation, for connection, and for the credentials of membership from a system of values and assumptions experienced throughout American culture. Apperson’s story is also about the denial of those credentials and connections and that membership and place. Like many stories of place, Apperson’s story of the Cadillac showroom is also rich with insights and metaphors. In this story, remembered from toward the end of Apperson’s journey, there is the implied metaphor of a map. In the years following World War II, when purchasing an automobile,

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the dealership would often provide the new owner with maps, encouraging buyers to drive their cars, to travel and explore from place to place across the American expanse in celebration of mobility and the American way of life. Although the Cadillac dealer did not give Apperson a map, there are other maps nested within this story of place. On the morning in 1926 he stepped from the train, Apperson received Westfield’s map of the Poco field, and following that map he arrived twentysix years later at this logical destination, away from the place he loved. This would have been a map that had on it geographic features, watercourses, and coal deposits, but it would also have conveyed values, attitudes, assumptions, and practices necessary for a Westfield journey. For Apperson and for many hundreds of others in the Poco field, Westfield “ran with the land”; it was both the journey and the destination; it pointed the way, set the journey’s limits, and defined its objectives and end point.16 When he stood in that showroom waiting to be noticed, he was at the place his Poco field predecessors and cronies and American culture had all made clear to him was the point toward which he should travel. Yet he stood there, a man alone, isolated, and without a map to find another way. That early morning, standing among the best cars money could buy, the Westfield map had done for him the same work it had long exacted from the Poco field and across America. The first, fundamental work of the Westfield map is to sunder the innate connections and interrelatedness of place, reducing it from a complexly formed reality to its individual component parts, all of which are expendable. Disjoined and unconnected, the place’s natural environment, its built environment, and its long human history can all be offered individually into the market, available to the highest bidder. The Westfield map separates and denies the defining connections and pays no heed to the vibrancies and delicate life balances of a place, rendering the place an object of utility and acquisition, a means to wealth. This was the work Isaiah Welch accomplished in the maps he drew and in his descriptive notes of the coal outcroppings and the stands of timber along the Elkhorn, to determine and “report on the timber, surface, and mineral value of the area.”17 This same map with its attendant values charted both Koppers’s control and Apperson’s ambitions in that received place, extending, enforcing, and legitimizing those disconnections. For all of Apperson’s love for Keystone and the Poco field, and for all of its importance to him, the map he received suggested to him that the place was secondary to what American culture represented as the standards by which to measure one’s success and for what the place could offer to the American economic engine. The enormous

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social and environmental costs of industrialization in the Poco field were unquestioned and assumed appropriate. In their own time with their own inflections and agendas, Billie Cherry, Terry Church, and the directors of the First National Bank of Keystone enacted these same maps, reducing the place to its individual, fragmented, expendable parts, its importance and value determined by the market. For others, to free a nation from dependence on foreign petroleum, the Westfield maps and their values argue the necessity of leveling mountains to expose seams of coal. As was so clear in Billie Cherry’s story and that of the public schools, regardless of public rhetoric and appearances, within Westfield’s maps the defining realities of a place are the processes of division, acquisition, and control. To divide the three fundamental elements of place one from the other, to reduce a place to the value it can demand on the market, also entails a particular relationship with history and with memory. A Westfield map is one of short memory, sacrificing a place’s stories and its history to what it sees as the place’s relationship to the global, American marketplace. This map of short memory removes from a place its people, enacting the same values evident in the Koppers’s photographs of the Number Ten Store, showing only the whites who worked for the company and enforced in the rigid boundaries between the neighborhoods of Cinder Bottom and Westfield. This short memory underwrote Paul Umberger’s use of the parable of the great feast, denying place and presence to the poor and dispossessed, both of the parable and of the communities along the Elkhorn. In Westfield’s short memory, the questions to consider are those of the present and only peripherally and incidentally those of the past and the future. The people who matter are those now in the place; the ones privileged are those who gain the most from and bring the most to the economic exchange. Westfield denies to a place the possibility and the validity of its history, denies the relevancy of individual or collective memories, reducing them to the shortest, least populated form possible. Just as Westfield’s map reduces history to a relatively brief span, peopled with only those credentialed for membership, these same practices myopically focus a place’s future on the short-term and immediate uses of a place. Westfield denies place as a measure or standard for considering what the future could be, substituting for it the standard of short-term economic gain.18 With competing visions and claims, the future at any time in any place is often a contested territory. However, Westfield’s assumptions of consensus and its disallowance of social conflict refuse persons the tools or insights to negotiate any future other than the one deemed worthwhile in the Westfield-enforced consensus. The life map the Poco field offered Apperson when he stepped from the train

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in 1926 removed from the place both its responsibility and its potential to be a standard by which to evaluate the conflicts and decisions roiling across it or to question the future. That Elkhorn Creek became a polluted stream and remains so still is of little matter compared to the immediate and relatively short-term wealth the coal seams provided Kimball, Houston, and Koppers, their allies, and their successors. The Olga Coal Company did not evaluate or question its lack of investment in wastewater facilities and water treatment processes against the long-term interests of the Caretta community or its citizens. For decades, the members of the McDowell County Board of Education did not think of the place’s future when they accepted and acquiesced in acts of wrongdoing. The map Apperson was given to follow helped to make these ideas and actions possible in part by building on a sense of the history of the place as relatively short, its trajectory the result of a consensus shared among those whom Westfield validated. That same unquestioned and unchallenged consensus sees the place in service to a future dramatically limited to economic profit and control, with a membership equally narrowed and limited. As it was with the deed to the Appersons’ Westfield home in August 1945, all of these values and practices “run with the land,” understood to be the appropriate, normal standard for relating to a place, both now and for all generations to come. Any journey that uses these Westfield maps will by definition have as its destination a place consistent with the Cadillac showroom in which Apperson found himself in the early summer of 1952; unknown is whether that destination will be one of validating membership or credentials withheld. Apperson’s story makes clear that the values of the American Westfield did not prepare him and cannot prepare us for a journey the destination of which is not the Cadillac showroom with its simmering potential for anger and frustration. However, as Aldah Apperson, Jeff Allen, Marsha Timpson, and others demonstrate, place’s creative practice does offer a different map. In their choices for lives in and of a place, these people are our teachers and our cartographers in an educational process that can provide the map and the “resources for a journey of hope.”19 This education crosses the traditional boundaries between classroom and world, allowing everyday life experiences and the stories of a place to be part of the teaching process, refusing confinement in traditional structures of school, college, and university.20 Instead, education that works toward connections of people and places, crossing the Westfield boundaries, can and does transpire in civic clubs, small groups, community centers, youth associations, religious organizations, and academic settings.21 This boundary-crossing education draws these resources for a journey of hope from the place, allowing the place to speak in the rich diversity of dialects and perspectives of all its voices.

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These resources for a journey of hope counteract and refute Westfield’s divisive, destructive work, and as with the springs and streams that flow to the Elkhorn, they are interrelated and interdependent, providing depth, context, and vitality to each other when they converge. A place rejoined to and with all of its components fosters and encourages an active and engaged appreciation of the full expanse and complexity of a place’s natural environment: rainfall, aridity, the water table, the animals and birds, the humus and the forest canopy, the open fields, as well as what the place can contribute to industrial and economic activity. These realities become a place’s defining treasure, not to be squandered or prodigally used. From this deep knowledge, the history of human habitation and culture becomes not so much a story of conquest, but of dependency at times recognized and honored and at other times, more often, completely ignored and disavowed. In a place rejoined, the people of that place come to understand human life as completely dependent on the natural environment of the place. This educational process brings to our consciousness the complexities of the interactive and interrelatedness of the natural and built environments, the human culture and history that have transpired across that landscape, and then roots that complexity in the foundations of the earth. In her attention to Newbern’s rocks and limestone water, to the changing colors of the mountains and the winds rippling the hayfields, to the constellations of the night skies, despite the chronological distance from its earlier geological stages, Aldah as teacher communicated that the present place is deeply and intricately the story of every phase of this long, long time. In the tours she gave of the house that was her family’s homeplace, tours which always ended in the old cellar with its rough limestone walls, her hands on the logs that had been cut from virgin timber, Aldah taught her visitors that Newbern’s original built environment was vitally linked with its natural environment.22 Restoring these connections, this education for a map makes possible reconsideration and reordering of the values and assumptions that Westfield imposed across the landscape. In a place rejoined, the land itself and the people who inhabit it become the evolving and continually new realities providing additional resources for journeys of hope. Another resource for the journey of hope is the long memory of a place.23 An education that has as one of its purposes restoring the connections of a place must create opportunities for people to claim, perhaps for the first time, not just their own stories and experiences in a place, but those of others, relating those stories to their own lives and to the place’s fullness. To return to a place its memory is to restore to a place its membership

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“He Always Wanted a Cadillac”  /  171

and the echoes and resonances of all its stories, if not known in their detailed particularity, then acknowledged and honored for their shadows, whispers and traces, and the ways they are etched into the contours of the place. To hear inscribed and see silently carried in the place those stories, to see that history that runs with the land as a part of the fiber and sinews and life of a place is to see and know a place as Aldah understood Newbern, as an ark of memory.24 To regard one’s place as an ark, a treasury, of memory means to take responsibility for that memory, to be a steward of that history. In this long memory we understand that our time in a place is but the briefest passage, and we are heirs and successors of all those who have journeyed through this place. In McDowell County, this would include the native peoples who traveled along the Elkhorn, but also those aboriginal nomadic hunters who first wandered out of Siberia and down through North America. This long memory would also include the speculators and empire builders of the Gilded Age and their corporate successors whose greed and corruption forever mangled and damaged the place. Peopling that long memory would be the families who watched as company guards pitched their few possessions through the doors and windows of a company house, the family evicted for back rent or supporting a union. A long, deeply peopled memory would also include those mine guards and their stories. As with the Appersons, Marcus Wilkes, Darryl Cannady, and Marsha Timpson, of central importance in this history are the struggles and triumphs, the losses and hopes of people on both sides of the Westfield division, stories and lived experiences often judged to be outside the purview of traditional scholarship and history. This work of peopling the long memory is the task of historians and teachers, but it is also the responsibility of people like Aldah, who clip and save and squirrel away the riches of documents and letters and remembrances. This is the work of recipes passed from neighbor to friend, from parent to child, spattered with grease and batter. This is the work of preachers and storytellers, of fiction writers, poets, and dramatists. This is the work of the one who finds a small box crafted of walnut and long forgotten in an attic, seeing in the bits and torn pieces of notes and a journal the fragments of stories and the shadows of lives never to be fully known, but still a part of the memory and membership of the place.25 Parents and grandparents, children and grandchildren bear responsibility for this good work. Joining these teachers and cartographers are songwriters and filmmakers, the members of historical societies and those who would never receive invitations for such a membership. As it was for Aldah, this long memory is the daily work of kitchen and household, it is also the daily routine of workplace and factory floor. This teaching, this

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new cartography, transpires wherever and whenever recipes and food or daily chores and jobs requiring physical strength, practical knowledge, and skill are laced and spiced with stories and remembrances of other persons’ lives, their skills and strengths, the deep waters of their heartaches and failures, their hopes and dreams. All the people of a place are called to be its rememberers, for the history of a place, its long memory stretching from its foundations, is never complete, never fully peopled, never fully known and told. Restoring to the people of a place its long, full memory also challenges Westfield’s avoidance and denial of conflict and confrontation. Resonating with Franki Rutherford’s sharply vivid association of nearly every feature of the McDowell landscape with some story of opposition and contest, the long memory will necessarily bring with it the understanding that the place, as we know it, is the product of challenge and dissent. If social conflict is endemic and natural, it is not to be feared or regarded as aberrant. This educational journey helps provide persons with the tools necessary to confront, to understand, and to find new ways of addressing and resolving competing visions, claims, and interests, for the health and future of the place. By first acknowledging the presence and indeed the naturalness of conflict in any place, we begin to acquire for ourselves the skills and resources to bring from social conflict creative, hopeful possibilities for our places. From a deep knowledge of the place rejoined, with its long, peopled memory restored to it, comes the resource of the place as the standard, the measure, by which to evaluate and appraise possible futures on that landscape. “Re-membered” to its interrelated vitality, a place equips people to gauge and determine what will be best in the place, weighing alternatives on a basis other than that which the market demands.26 As a standard or measure, rather than a prescriptive formula, the place gives rise to a range of difficult questions. In McDowell County more than a half-century after Apperson left there, and in the wake of bank failures and catastrophic floods, are Westfield’s individualism and consumer values still appropriate when critiqued from the perspective of the place’s complex and continuing history and the social conflicts that constitute it? If so, why? If not, why not? What other values might be more appropriate to this place? Given the nation’s need for a steady supply of domestic fuel and to respond to the desperate need for jobs in McDowell, is mountaintop removal a viable path to energy independence and local economic growth? If so, why? If not, why not? Is an appropriate education policy in this place the consolidation of smaller, struggling high schools with high percentages of students in poverty? If so, why? If not, why not? These and others like them are questions for which there are no right

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answers, only honest responses echoing the honesty of the place rejoined to its native integrity and long memory. Moreover, these are questions not just for those who carry in their wallets the credentials of a Westfield membership. They are questions for all the people of a place, and they are questions that will help shape the future in that place, requiring from all the creativity and carefulness, stewardship and honesty that works at the roots of the mind, making possible the resources of new ideas and new approaches. Grounded in a place rejoined to its essential wholeness and strength, traveling from these and similar questions, this education brings us to such a living, vital intimacy with the place that we are able to envision and begin to build new futures in that place, claiming a common ground in a place where Westfield would disallow such a thing, working to salve and heal the damages handed to us by those who have badly used the place. Drawing on the examples of Aldah and her work in the community club and the Methodist church, the women who established Big Creek People in Action, and Marcus Wilkes’s work to build a small park in Cinder Bottom, this education equips persons for the long, hard journey of effective citizenship and service in a place. Interwoven and connected to the place, endeavoring to reflect and represent the broadness of the place’s environmental and human history, this educational process is fundamentally a democratic process. Equally concerned with the processes of education as with its results, shaping this education is the insistence that the people of the place are coeducators and co-learners together and that the importance of everyone’s contributions to the educational process are independent of their position in the economic system and the values attached to them in the market. As people explain their lives through their stories of place, they bring each other into a deeper knowledge of the place, creating the possibilities that the place can come to be a common ground between them. In the forums Big Creek People in Action conducted over school consolidation, a victim both of the McDowell floods and the long history of administrative neglect in the school system, Marsha Timpson and the state-appointed chair of the county board of education had opportunity to learn and to teach together.27 As a democratic process, this education for a place honors the stories and life experiences persons will bring, believing that stories have the power to teach and to foster new awareness, and that all of us have something to bring to the work of building a new future in our places. Apperson and Aldah’s stories suggest that we do not need to look very far in our own lives and families to discern Westfield’s values of placelessness and mobility. Together, my grandparents’ stories and those of the women and men of Big Creek

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People in Action suggest that all persons’ stories can point to Westfield’s contradictions and also to ways beyond those contradictions. Because of the importance this education gives to the lived experiences and stories that people will bring, it holds open the possibility, indeed the certainty, of contradictions, inconsistencies, and conflicts, bringing to these realities the critical skills of a range of people, with perspectives as broad as the place itself. Acknowledging and claiming these contradictions and ambivalences within our own lives and relationships, this education holds open the possibility of making and sustaining the defining connections of a place. This education is finally an education about values and service. Within this education is the awareness that regardless of a person’s age or relationship to Westfield, civic responsibility is a matter of vocation and calling, and there is a close and necessary relationship between one’s citizenship and one’s service to a place and its people. Within every place, there are those, like Marsha Timpson and Aldah Apperson, who can teach us and chart for us the daily customs and choices by which place can become a creative practice, exerting a creative force, allowing us to envision new ways and new journeys of citizenship and service, to tell new stories of the place. For Aldah, the weekly baking of cream pies to pay for streetlights and water service for Newbern and the friendships she forged were a seamless fabric with her stories of Newbern’s past and her hopes for its future, challenging and altering how Westfield might have expected her to order her life after the loss of her husband. At Big Creek People in Action, Marsha Timpson mentors young people who often have the stated ambition to leave McDowell and never look back. She asks them to examine what it might mean to gain an excellent education and use it in service to persons from their school or their neighborhood. For Jeff Allen, this education meant helping young teens to produce their own video shows, talking of their dreams and realizing that “everyone has dreams.”28 In other places, in a program for a civic organization, members might be encouraged to explore the values that brought them to a community and prompted them to join the organization, and how those values could be communicated to young people who feel locked out and cut off from a future in that place. This work is a matter of seeing and accepting places as worthy, of electing to live by values and honoring connections, respecting the long processes out of which all places grow. It is a refusal to accept Westfield’s standards for judging the quality of life in a place, replacing those values with values of an expansive and embracing interrelatedness.

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Taken together, this educational process and the journey of hope for which it provides resources are models for what may be described as place-based work. As I have seen it used in organizations such as Big Creek People in Action, and have used it in this book, as I have seen it practiced by the people who are my teachers, place-based work takes the perspective of the whole way of life of the place in which it is initiated. However, it is well to note that too many people living lives of substance and integrity are involved in this work for it to become the hottest trend in academic, intellectual, and public policy circles. We cannot employ a place-based approach to the questions and issues of our time and continue to assume the appropriateness of a culture that values mobility over relationships and a global economic structure over the interconnected particularity of a place. Place-based work allows and encourages the people of a place to propose alternative value choices and suggest different ways of being and relationship. From this can grow the work of social change, addressing long-felt and long-endured divisions and damages. Place-based scholarship and education are means of using the stories and life experiences of persons outside of Westfield’s boundaries to confront those attitudes, practices, and patterns. For those whose Westfield journeys have ended well, this place-based work introduces a living tension that is “struggled with in the fibers of the self,” a tension that rebalances individuals and families when difficult personal and professional decisions are at hand.29 If this map produces new and difficult tensions and struggles, it also equips people to encounter creatively and honestly Westfield’s ambiguities and ambivalences. Regardless of the place from which we undertake this work, if we take seriously the whole reality of that place, it will demonstrate the inconsistencies and failures of the Westfield vision but also teach us how to recognize, honor, and forge the connections of place, to follow the map for a new journey of hope. Whether undertaken along the Elkhorn or elsewhere, this new journey of hope echoes the Kenyan proverb that reminds us to care for the earth not because our parents have given it to us, but because our children have loaned it to us. The aim of this journey, the aim of this careful, thorough attention to place, its people, and its stories is to return to our children better places, a better world, ripe with possibilities for connection and hope. Those who call upon a new map, who travel this way, will together build and arrive at places and communities in which neither we nor our children will need stand in the Cadillac showrooms of the world at the end of our journeys, isolated, caught, and angered, hungering for acceptance and validation that never comes.

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chapter 8

The Poco Field Elegy and Ferocious Hope

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Newbern, Va August 21, 1940 Dear Apperson, Received your letter today and was real glad to hear from you. Guess you had a large time at the convention. It has been so cold and rain that we had a fire for the babies. Mary came back with Emma and has been here all week. Alecia has been fine. She just smiles and talks a lot now. She weighed 11 lbs and 1 oz yesterday. Mary took Rebecca to see the Dr. tonight and he told her she wasn’t giving her enough to eat. She weighs 15 lbs. Father had a spell with his heart tonight. He is sleeping now and is better. We had to rock Alecia to sleep tonight. She hasn’t slept much today. But she hasn’t been bad. Be good and come over Sunday if you can or Wed. afternoon either. Love from us both, Aldah and Alecia

America was coming out of the Depression. Europe had been at war for almost a year, and the signs were increasingly apparent that the United States would become involved. Coal production was increasing and American industry was beginning to expand. From Sunday through Wednesday, August 18–21, 1940, Apperson had been in a Koppers meeting in Cleveland, Ohio. While he was away, Aldah and their daughter, Alecia, little more than a month old, were

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Figure 33. Aldah to Apperson, August 21, 1940. Williams-Apperson Collection.

staying in Newbern with Aldah’s family. His letters are rife with references to company gossip, to staff changes, and to what he is doing at “the convention.”1 Apperson’s letter of Sunday night, August 18, suggests the contradictions and tensions that were coming to define his life. After having arrived in Cleveland “about 6 p.m.,” Apperson writes of that familiar and loved place with its implied promises for American success, “Have seen quite a number

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178  /  chapter 8

of people I know but not many from the Poco field.” Then, giving a nod to the human casualties of company policy and politics and what happened to their good friend, and parenthetically prefiguring other heartaches to come, Apperson confides, “Seems unusual to be at another convention without Mr. Staples to room with. (I’m alone.)” Unconsciously recording the changes in consumption patterns, technology, and the places Westfield valued that were taking shape in America and that would bring upheavals and loss to the Poco field, Apperson tells Aldah that he hopes to see the airport the next day. The letters they exchanged these several days are unique in that of all the letters Aldah and Apperson wrote to each other over the course of their life together, only one of her letters to him is extant, that which she wrote to him on Wednesday, August 21.2 She begins, “Dear Apperson” and according to the letter, it was a day of cold rain in Newbern, requiring a fire. Running through each of their letters that August, more than family happenings in Newbern, more than company news, the reality that deeply binds them to each other is their love for their daughter. The convention is of secondary importance to the repeated references to their six-week-old daughter: “Kiss Alecia for me,” “Love to you both,” “How’s Alecia doing? I certainly do miss you both.” In her letter to him, in the chilly rain of Wednesday, Aldah concludes with this assurance, “Love from us both, Aldah and Alecia.” Early in the afternoon on Tuesday, August 20, Apperson writes that he has “been tied up all day. Had a company meeting today & have been pretty busy.” Hinting at what a day-long business meeting must have entailed in the humid heat of late August, as well as an awareness that comes in a world without forced-air cooling, Apperson reports “Has been hot here but the lake breeze is nice in the evening.” He closes with the assurance that he would write that night. At 4:30 that same afternoon, as the lake breezes began to lift and stir, Apperson writes that he “has had enough of the noise” and that he is coming home. He reports that he will leave Cleveland the next day to travel to Huntington with Mr. Catlett, Mr. Deardorff, and Mr. McMillan. From Huntington, he and Mr. Catlett will “come by train . . . if we don’t see anyone going closer.” I started this journey hoping to arrive at the same place Apperson had in his mind as he wrote to Aldah on that sweltering, late summer afternoon in Cleveland. I hoped also that when I arrived at that place, I would meet him, find him there waiting for me. Only once have I traveled to McDowell County from the north, from Huntington. Rather, many of my trips to McDowell have been through Bluefield over Flat Top Mountain and into the county, descending the Elkhorn Valley, following the creek and U.S. Route 52. Most

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often, I travel into McDowell from the south, from my home in Meadowview in Washington County, Virginia, through Tazewell and then over Stony Ridge, roughly following the Dry Fork and Jacob’s Fork watershed. Regardless of the route, despite a few straightening projects and in several places the moving of the road farther up a ridge to avoid the tight squeeze between houses, creeks, and railroad bed, the routes into and through McDowell are little changed from what they were during Apperson’s time. The creeks, ridges, and bottomland engrave the ancient history of delta, forest, swamp, and inland sea that once were this place. The paved roads of today pass along the same routes the Shawnees and their predecessors established through this woodland and the confusing maze of mountains, ridges, and hollows. Along those same routes are the contradictions and questions that have prevailed in this place since the late nineteenth century. At every turn of the road, there is the overwhelming evidence of Westfield’s failures to make good on its promises. Names of places bear witness to the unbounded optimism and to the powerful titans of American industrialization in the Gilded Age. By the roadside there are the abandoned coal tipples and storage bins around which now grow the saplings of poplar and pine. Above the road, high on the ridges, sometimes glimpsed only when crossing the highest elevations or cresting a mountain before swinging into the descent, are the deep and ugly scars of strip mines: clear-cutting, mountains shorn of millions of tons of earth and stone, and the coal slurry dumps and impoundments behind the earthen dams. However, the boom-and-bust cycles that have always been the defining reality and the bane of any coalfield, in the early years of the twenty-first century once again blessed the Poco field. Just as it must have seemed to Apperson as he returned home from Cleveland in August 1940, everywhere there are reminders of the coal reserves still lying below the surface as Pocahontas coal again attracts attention for its potential contribution to American success. Coming into McDowell from the south, the road in Bishop is lined with former company houses and the long-abandoned company store. From Squire to Newhall, the Norfolk–Southern Railroad’s coal gondolas line the spurs and sidings, skirting the road following Jacob’s Fork across land once held by T. E. Houston. Before reaching Cucumber, in a flat and straight stretch where cars can gather speed, the road lies beneath the royal blue coverings of new conveyor belts taking coal across the road to the rail loading station, the coal brought from a new mine and waiting in piles seventy and eighty feet high. The traveler can glimpse the lines of loaded railcars that wait shifting to the assembly yards in Williamson, Iaeger, Eckman, and Bluefield.

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Following the Jacob’s Fork, Dry Fork, and Big Creek watersheds north, the road twists along the crevices and ridge sides; when the trees are leafless, the traveler looking up and across can see rocks like palisades and watchtowers at the ridge crests. Their regular sedimentary layers serrated and jagged with billions of years of erosion as the creeks and streams cut across the plateau, exposing the coal beds hundreds of feet below. In War, Apperson’s road follows Main Street, empty storefronts staring blankly onto the street. The building in which Apperson and Ben Davis operated a furniture store is dark. Through the former coal camps of Yukon and Excelsior, where Baldwin-Felts agents beat Franki Rutherford’s uncle and left him for dead, there are the houses built with timber taken from the sides of the mountains rising above them. As they were when Apperson last drove through this place, the houses are so close to the road that persons sitting on the porches of a summer morning can speak to the driver without raising their voices. Approaching Caretta, in the narrow piece of flat ground wedged between the creek and ridge, the scrub growth has not yet covered the sidewalk that once ran the length of town. Just south of the Olga Coal Company’s now abandoned, rusting, and collapsing tipple, a new mining operation piles tons of coal for trucks to transfer to a rail facility. Where the road turns toward Coalwood and Welch, there is the Caretta Community Center, with Big Creek People in Action’s sign hanging in front, announcing twenty years of work and service. Crossing into Welch, Apperson’s Poco road enters the Elkhorn Valley and turns east through Welch’s “Little New York”; its once-red brick is gray, streaked, and mud-washed. With thought and imagination, the Westfield hopes of Italians, Poles, Lithuanians, Hungarians, Yugoslavians, persons of color, Jews and Gentiles, native whites, and the hundreds of other nationalities and ethnicities still faintly echo. Following Elkhorn Creek upstream through Colonel Houston’s Maitland to Kimball, the traveler sees David Houston’s mansion on a bluff above the road. Below the mansion, the Houston Company headquarters faces Elkhorn Creek and the highway. Acquired by Koppers in 1928, both Apperson and Aldah worked in this building, and as district manager for the Koppers stores in the Poco field, Apperson would return to his office here after his trip to Cleveland in August 1940. In Landgraff, floods have scoured clean the land and it has begun its long journey back to woodland. At Eckman, much as it might have seemed in Apperson’s time, the rail yard is thick and black with loaded coal gondolas waiting for assembling in miles-long trains for transport to Norfolk on the Atlantic to the east or to Portsmouth on the Ohio River or Cleveland on Lake Eerie to the west. Topping the short hill into Keystone, the road descends first into the

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Westfield Addition with its foursquare brick homes, some with windows broken or boarded over, others with laundry hanging from front porches, rising up Shawnee Mountain. Opposite the houses that surround the Methodist Church and the former school, between the road and Elkhorn Creek, there is a single row of homes. The upper floor level with the road and its first floor hidden beneath the level of the road bank, the Appersons’ Westfield house is the first in the row, the Elkhorn’s high-water marks from May 2002 still visible on its sides. A few hundred yards farther, the Keystone National Bank building stands shut, ply board nailed over its windows. On the side of the building that faces the former site of Koppers Store Number Ten, the closed bank’s motto remains affixed, gathering bird droppings and coal dust: “Time Tried and Panic Tested.” Across the street, Billie Cherry’s block of buildings, where once Apperson operated a hardware store, stands vacant; the sign for Keystone Documents Storage hangs askew, rusting, and broken. In Cinder Bottom, the few houses that remain standing have flood-swept mud crusted under their eaves, and across their doors FEMA’s red paint announces the buildings are uninhabitable. Turning left between the bank and the old Koppers store, Bridge Street crosses Elkhorn Creek and climbs to the rail crossing. Where once the Houston Company had its store, the first store in which Apperson and Aldah worked, along with the Pais and Vecillio Grocery Store where Everett Williams had his watch repair shop, the railroad has removed all the buildings. Rail sidings and gravel access roads now cover the area. Just a few hundred yards upstream to the east, looming over all this in Keystone with its dark dust, billowing steam, and all-consuming roar, Second Sterling Corporation, descended from Keystone Coal and Coke, Houston, Koppers, and Eastern Gas and Fuel, continues to bring thousands of tons of coal from beneath Indian Ridge.3 On Indian Ridge, five hundred and sixteen feet above town, but overlooking Main Street from the north, Second Sterling maintains a coal waste impoundment. Held back by a dam sixty-three feet high and capable of holding over a billion gallons of coal slurry, the thick, shining, black water and tarry sludge extend into the dips and hollows of Indian Ridge, with dead trees sticking up through the muck.4 Further along Indian Ridge, beyond the impoundment, Bluestone Coal Corporation runs a mountaintop removal operation. Tracing the Elkhorn upstream, leaving Keystone on U.S. Route 52, past Second Sterling’s coal preparation plant, through Cinder Bottom and then through the burned-out and vacant storefronts of Northfork, the road begins a long, slow climb through Kyle, Powhatan, Upland, Elkhorn, and Switchback before cresting Flat Top Mountain and descending into Bluefield. Somewhere

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just past Northfork, perhaps where he needed to shift the car’s gears downward for the climb, as they left the Poco field that November Saturday in 1948, Apperson had begun to cry. For a long time, I traveled this route trying to see what my grandparents and others saw when they first came to the Pocahontas coalfield. I struggled to get the feel of that time and place, to see Westfield’s promises tangible. I wanted to witness his eagerness and enthusiasm, to feel his hope, as he traveled home from Cleveland in August 1940 to be with his family. I tried to imagine what his car must have felt like; the way the fabric on the seats must have scratched and crackled on a summer afternoon; the way the smoke from his Chesterfields and Lucky Strikes must have drifted across the dashboard with the breeze from the open window. I tried to think how it sounded as he listened to the car radio, enjoying the singing of Nat King Cole, the reception intermittent and static-laced depending on the terrain, shifting down the gears for the winding ascents between War and Welch or for the uphill grade from Northfork. I wanted to sit in that car with him as he drove from War’s Main Street back to Keystone’s Westfield, in 1948, as he made his decision to leave the Poco field. Everywhere along Apperson’s journey through McDowell, the landscape carries timbres of both the hopes realized and the dreams dashed of the hundreds of thousands of persons who came to this place seeking to claim all that America promised. In its place names, in the bends of the road, in red brick buildings, in front steps built into hillsides, this landscape carries the memories and stories of individuals and families who found here Westfield’s promises fulfilled. The lines of coal cars on nearly every siding from one end of McDowell County to another suggest the staggering wealth of a few against equally staggering poverty, bearing witness to the contradictions of great abundance and pitiless, relentless suffering. There are along this road, the scars of unmitigated greed, of killing floods, and of blind corruption. When I began to travel Apperson’s road through the Poco field, I sought to make more than a record of that which is past and lost and more than a conventional account of economic collapse in an Appalachian place told from within the pitying and condescending comfort of a Westfield life. I was convinced that the Poco field had something important to teach us about America and about this part of America, Appalachia. For a time, as I continued my work, returning to the Poco field time and again, I drove over Apperson’s routes arrogantly confident that I was articulating truths from this place that could change the world. Then in September of 1999, the Keystone bank failed, taking so much with it and exposing my naive assumptions and unquestioning

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acceptances. The flood of July 8, 2001, and ten months later the flood of May 2, 2002, together dealt their staggering blows to the place and the people. The public schools were exposed for their systematic oppression and the myriad ways they had long foreclosed futures and opportunities, becoming the enemy of young people’s hope. Still, the coal piles high as rumbling, roaring trains bear away thousands of tons of it every day. People I know, whose work and service I respect, felt like giving up, awash in desperation and fear. Despite its work to address the Westfield legacies and the increasingly complex web of power and control, despite its many successes, despite its enduring vision for the future of McDowell, the same issues and troubles that plague the life and vitality of most nonprofit organizations in every place threaten Big Creek People in Action. As the floodwaters of 2002 receded, an exhausted and dispirited staff and a financially bankrupt organization surveyed what remained. Differences of vision, misgivings and doubts, staff burnout and turnover, questions of power and authority, persistent lack of funds, low pay for staff, few opportunities for training and development, mistakes and oversights mark its arduous journey. When coupled with the swelling tide of natural and economic disasters, Westfield’s widening web of influence, and a growing awareness that much of the money available to support nonprofit community development organizations is derived from companies that benefit from the conditions that have caused the floods, even Big Creek People in Action’s commitment wavers.5 In the wake of floods and the tide of globalization that sweeps over and around many places once valued for their industrial wealth, a commitment to stay in McDowell, to work for social change has become for some almost untenable. Poverty and daily struggles to keep open the doors of an agency committed to social change, the nagging feeling that no one beyond the county’s borders really knows of or cares about your work, the toll of working beyond the limits of emotional and physical exhaustion—these things do not ennoble or enrich; they destroy, regardless of how deeply or devotedly one is committed to a place. Worn down from eight years of unrelenting struggle, burned out from running an organization on an ever-shrinking and inadequate budget, and mourning the death of her husband, Franki Rutherford resigned as executive director of Big Creek People in Action in July 2007. Rutherford moved to a place where she could resume her college education, which she had laid aside more than thirty years before.6 Six years before the Keystone Bank collapsed, long before the floods of 2001 and 2002, the daily work of serving a place and working for institutional

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change in Keystone had taken its toll on Jeff Allen. Without a support network, with little time or space for reflection or rest, with tensions and pressures mounting, and with little institutional commitment, Allen was no longer able to sustain his work. Allen left Keystone in 1993. Today, most of the flood wreckage has been cleared away, and there is certainly a national thirst for the coal that is still brought from beneath the ridges and the destroyed mountaintops. Regardless of the new coal boom and the proliferation of “Friends of Coal” yard signs, none but a few benefit from the new demands for the Poco field’s geologic wealth.7 Moreover, the land ownership patterns remain in place that produced the calamities through which McDowell has passed and is now passing. Driving Apperson’s road through the Poco field, there were no more easy answers or facile hope; whatever easy truths I once thought I had discerned were gone. There were no right answers and I realized that any honest response in this grief and heartache would ask much of me. Traveling this journey, having gotten to Apperson’s place, I felt my work had left me with only elegy. In Memoir from Antproof Case, Mark Helprin writes, “The object of elegy is not to revive or review the past . . . not to heal the [one] who travels through memory . . . The object is not remedial, but only a song to the truth. I have recounted [this] for the reason that a singer sings a song or a story teller tells a story: once you have got to a place . . . something . . . makes you look out and back, . . . makes you marvel at the strength of the smallest accidents to forge a life of sweetness, ferocity, and surprise.”8 I journeyed to this place, to his place, to her place, and what is it that I see from here? If the power of the story is in its truth, what then are the truths of this place and the lives of these people? What is the power of this journey and of this story I have told?

Abiding Some I know. From the bend of a back, the angle of a cane, a certain stoop, a long-remembered profile, the wearing of a scarf, some of them are familiar now more than fifty years after the photographs. Along with the comfortable familiarity also comes remembrance of times when they were frustrated with each other and had for too long borne in silence another’s flaws, the lifelong squabbles and muttering acceptances of all manner of personal eccentricities and poorly conceived ideas and prejudices. There were grudges and grief, hasty judgments, and ill-considered words. Commitments sometimes flagged, disappointments and hurts sometimes drove people apart; abilities and talents were sometimes uneven. None of them was perfect. As there always are in

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every relationship, accommodations were required. Even then, even within these realities, conflicts, and choices, other choices and other values echo and speak of the connections they made, how they interwove their lives in the shared work to recruit a physician and to renovate a building for the new doctor’s office. Documented in the Newbern Community Improvement Club’s 1954 scrapbook, there are dozens of other improvement projects that speak of ferocities and surprises that caused Westfield to marvel that the people of a place such as Newbern could accomplish so much. Five years after the floods of May 2, 2002, in the early summer of 2007, I again traveled Apperson’s Poco road and came to sit at a table on the ground floor of the Caretta Community Center, talking with some of the staff members of Big Creek People in Action. In words that Aldah and her neighbors would have found familiar, Franki Rutherford, Marsha Timpson, Dyanne Spriggs, and Kem Short told stories of ferocities and surprises. Kem Short offered a story from her husband’s family, who had been in the place for generations before the coming of the coal companies. Short’s father-in-law had told of riding one night behind his father on the back of a mule. As they made their journey home on Atwell Mountain, rain threatened, heralded with rolling thunder and flashes of lightning. When it began to rain, the boy’s father dismounted the mule and retrieved his rain cloak from a saddlebag. Remounting the mule, he wore the cloak and draped it over the boy, keeping them both dry as they rode through the night. In the dark and under the cloak, the boy could not see anything, but had his arms around his father, feeling beneath him the movement of the mule as it strained to climb and then braced to descend across the ridges. Short then said that whenever her father-in-law told that story, he always said that was the safest he ever felt in his life, under the cloak, behind his father on the back of the family’s old mule, journeying through the mountain. His was a safety born from the relationship that bound together people and place. Hearing this story of a young man’s journey of safety, the women said almost in a single voice “in these mountains we feel someone is going to protect us.” An extended and deeply rooted network of family, neighbors, and distant kin, will “cover us and keep us safe.” That morning, with floods and hard-fought struggles over the schools still sharp in their memories, these four women returned often to the refrain of the interweaving of lives and place as their defining reality.9 Having escaped violence and fear and finding in the mountains a safe refuge, Marsha Timpson spoke of the “magic of the mountains,” the beauty of the ridges heavy with dewy green, and waking every morning to see the sun on

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the opposite ridge. This magic became for the women, nodding in agreement with Timpson, both this place’s beauty and the relationships of neighbors and kin. The necessity of caring for aging or ill family brought some of them back to McDowell, the connection of kin and neighbors convinced them to stay when Westfield gave every reason to abandon the place, the safety of family offered a way through peril and fear. Much as it was for Apperson and Aldah in their letters of August 1940, and in Aldah’s work after 1952, family—their commitments to parents, grandparents, siblings, and children—as well as the larger network of neighbors and friends is a defining, guiding, creative force in these women’s journeys.10 The photographs, remembrances, and civic legacies of Newbern’s work, and the values and vision these women of Big Creek People in Action articulated in their stories, bear witness in bone and blood, in citizenship and service to what Paul Theobald describes as “intradependence,” or “liv[ing] by virtue of the necessary relations within a place.” Theobald’s intradependence echoes the same vision and values to which Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow gives voice when he says, “Sometimes, when the heart is generous, it realizes that for better or worse our lives are woven together here with one another and with the place and with all the living things.” Herb Reid and Betsy Taylor have described these same commitments and this same work as “world” and its “dynamic mesh of relationships” between people and their place.11 As it did for Aldah and as it has for the women of BCPIA, these “necessary relations within a place,” this “dynamic mesh of relationships,” this weaving together of people, place, and all the living things becomes the ground for a citizenship of place that moves beyond the Westfield limits and understandings. However, if these relationships woven together are the ground from which it grows, a citizenship of place also makes those same relationships possible, contributes to them, works to sustain them. Because it both expresses and participates in a place’s creative practice, placed citizenship moves us into a new consciousness, a new understanding, creating a new common ground, expanding the conditions of possibility required to think imaginatively for and about our places and our shared lives. Thirty years old and district manager for all of the Koppers’s stores in the Pocahontas coalfield for less than a year, the American Westfield was opening its doors to Apperson. He knew and gave the right answers that Houston, Koppers, and Westfield and all of their attendant institutions expected and demanded; he understood and accepted Westfield’s categories and assumptions. His life was increasingly woven together in loving and good ways with that of his family. Yet, on August 18, 1940, in a parenthetical statement about

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not having a roommate, Apperson writes, “I’m alone.” From the perspective of another century, Apperson’s being alone was more than being without a roommate. Despite his gregariousness and affability, despite his lodge memberships, and a host of friends and associates, despite his extraordinary business acumen, despite building a life responsive to Westfield’s bargain and his acceptance of the risks of that bargain, Westfield’s map could not and would not open for him the possibility to learn the arts and skills of a journey of intradependence, could not and would not allow Apperson to practice a citizenship of place. A citizenship of place represents a deepening and broadening attentiveness to the fundamental components of any place. In this citizenship, the natural environment from the foundations of the earth, the built environment with its elegancies and functionalities and its mistakes, misdeeds, and misuses of the earth, and the long human culture and history riddled through with graces and conflicts are all bound together, from the past long before any recorded history, in the present, and into the future. Placed citizenship refuses and rejects Westfield’s separation of a place into its individual parts with each judged for the value the market attaches to it. In her abiding love for the particularities of the landscape surrounding Newbern, in her deep knowledge of the place and its people, Aldah spoke of this attentiveness. In talking about the magic of the mountains, the healing and safety she found there, Marsha Timpson spoke of this same care. This attentiveness enabled Jeff Allen to talk of the Elkhorn Valley and McDowell as “a landscape of grief.” A citizenship of place that moves against and across the old Westfield boundaries understands place as a dynamic, ongoing social reality expressed in all aspects of daily life. This citizenship knows that we need each other on a deep and significant level; that we come to know the world and ourselves through the interwoven relationships with the place and all the living things, and from that interweaving, we can grapple with the most difficult and intractable questions of our time to envision and build a new future. As with all human relationships, there are issues and questions for which there are no right answers, requiring instead a courageous and unflinching honesty. Because of its insistence on a false consensus and general acceptance of the appropriateness of its boundaries and silences, Westfield cannot allow this honesty, requiring instead, as Apperson knew, the right answer. Persons take up a placed citizenship on this difficult and ambiguous terrain, discerning the differences between the right answer and the honest response. In this citizenship, our places become the opportunity and the reason not just to work and struggle, but also to explore and try new ideas and to dwell in possibilities of honesty and courage, of ferocity and surprise, that Westfield cannot allow.

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A citizenship of place understands that any place has embedded in it, as part of its fiber, conflicts; in fact, a place is the product of all manner of conflicts. Placed citizenship acknowledges and accepts human frailties. Sometimes, people lie. Sometimes, we hurt each other. Sometimes, we fail ourselves and each other, and our shared purposes. To this reality, however, a citizenship that works from and moves toward intradependence brings to these conflicts and shortcomings values and practices of honesty, the civic skills of listening and negotiation. With an intradependence that owns and endures social conflict and carries with it the skills required to render conflict creative and productive, a citizenship of place confronts Westfield’s old boundaries and distances. That newfound and not-yet-fully found, the hard-won and still-to-be won place, its interwoven relationships, its future, and the children who will come after us in that place, become the new common ground, the map, and the standard for a new journey. Within the practice of a place citizenship, intradependence becomes the measure of justice. Those ideas and actions, habits and assumptions, policies, practices, and politics that together or individually expand, enrich, and enliven the necessary relationships within a place are just. Those things that discourage, harm, foreshorten, or diminish the relationships necessary within a place are not just. In the full context of a place complexly formed, justice is more than a question of legality. Justice that uses as its measure the relationships of a place would ask of the policies that govern the practice of mountaintop removal and clear-cutting of timber, while they may be legal, are they just? For McDowell County school officials and Keystone National Bank directors, contributors to all manner of troubles, while their actions and decisions may not have been illegal, were they just? Do their actions and decisions make stronger the necessary relations within this place? In addition to Aldah’s legacy of work in Newbern and the work of Big Creek People in Action, this concept of a placed citizenship that grows out of and contributes toward a vital interweaving of necessary relationships, defines the work of many persons and organizations. Crossing the Westfield boundaries that often render colleges and universities insular and isolated, Just Connections is an organization bringing together professional academics and persons from outside the academy, working not only to build partnerships between colleges and places in Appalachia but to train and equip persons to more effectively research, study, and discern equitable, just, and honest responses to pressing issues and questions. This work becomes a means of exploring what it means to be a citizen of a place, understanding that a placed citizenship is applicable in all places.

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Similarly, Emory & Henry College has come to be involved in meaningful and substantive ways in an equitable partnership with the neighboring town of Meadowview. From this engagement, college students, faculty, and staff worked shoulder to shoulder with a diversity of people with deep roots in Meadowview to envision and build a sliding-scale medical clinic to address the health care crisis in that place. Serving more than seven hundred persons each month, the Meadowview Health Clinic and Community Center also offers adult and family literacy programs, tutoring for the Graduate Equivalency Diploma, and counseling—all of which is one more step toward building a new future for the generations to come in that place. Andrea Bowman, at the time an Emory & Henry College student, along with Philip deFelice, then a student from the University of Richmond, worked with members of the staff of Big Creek People in Action to conduct the McDowell County Education Listening Project as part of the shared effort between Big Creek People in Action and participating colleges and universities to leverage resources for the people of McDowell. Released just days prior to the state review of the county schools, the report gave personal voice to the catastrophe documented in the audit. In Wytheville, Virginia, the social service organization Helping Overcome Poverty’s Existence (HOPE) practices a citizenship of place in its housing programs. HOPE has been involved in providing for financial counseling and mortgage assistance for families facing financial crises, and the development of affordable housing for low and moderate-income families. Suggesting the interweaving of lives and place, in its housing development just outside of Wytheville, HOPE named two of the streets for persons who by their work and generosity had served the place and its people; another of the streets was named for the rich and productive soil types found in that place: Frederick. Built as a cotton mill town on the New River in Grayson County, Virginia, not far from Newbern, Fries, like Keystone and many other places, grapples daily with rebuilding and reinventing itself after its single industry and principal employer abandoned it. Here, citizens are envisioning their future from a deep knowledge of the cultural and historical legacy of the place, its unique built environment, and the rare beauty of the New River. On a landscape and in circumstances deeply akin to those of the Poco field, students, faculty, and staff of Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College in Harlan County, Kentucky, collaborated with many other persons to study and learn the reasons behind the crisis in prescription drug abuse in that place. Drawing on oral histories collected in the study, a coalition of local citizens, students, faculty, and writers produced the script for Higher

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Ground.12 Students, faculty, and citizens from throughout Harlan were the actors in the drama. Offering no answers to very difficult questions but stories of honesty and truth, Higher Ground not only documented the issue but also became a common ground “to talk about the tough issues, the hard things,” and to think in new and creative ways, in honest ways, about their place.13 Justice in the Coalfields is a film directed by Anne Lewis and produced by Appalshop, an arts and education center in Whitesburg, Kentucky.14 The film documents how a strong place identity and a deep network of relationships mobilized thousands of people in support of a miners’ strike against the Pittston Coal Company in 1989 and 1990, when the company withdrew from a health and retirement plan for its retirees and their families. The film interweaves the beauty of the natural environment with images of the built environment of the coalfields of Russell and Dickenson counties in Virginia and the long history of social conflict in those places. In conversation with those from within Westfield and those to whom Westfield closes its doors, Justice in the Coalfields lays out issues and questions for which there are not right or easy answers, but struggles to voice honest responses to those questions. The film offers a clear vision of what it means to be a citizen of a place, juxtaposing Westfield values against those values explicit in living by virtue of the necessary relations within that place, leaving viewers to question the difference between law and justice. Equally forceful is Spike Lee’s documentary of the flooding of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, When the Levees Broke.15 The film builds from and repeatedly returns to a deep attentiveness to New Orleans as the result of the interplay of the three components of place. Moving across the Westfield boundaries that divide New Orleans and exploring the breadth and depth of place identity among those whom Westfield would exclude, When the Levees Broke demonstrates the power of place to inform and initiate a ringing critique of the ways that Westfield shaped and worsened the disaster. More than a record, When the Levees Broke is a work of intradependence, extending this work to include other places, just as the persons displaced and relocated after the flood were scattered throughout the country. For those who see the film from the perspective of the Poco field, the connections between New Orleans, the power of the oil and coal industries, and the industrial history of the mountains, is stunning. The stories of people who may never have been to the mountains suggest that places as different as the Elkhorn Valley and the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans are formed in similar processes, troubled with similar issues, but they are often unaware of the ways in which their lives, histories, and struggles are joined.

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Laying the foundation of this same bridging work between places and practitioners of placed citizenship is the aim of a number of scholars such as Steve Fisher in Fighting Back in Appalachia, Herb Reid and Betsy Taylor in their recent book, Recovering the Commons: Democracy, Place, and Global Justice, and Douglas Reichert Powell in his Critical Regionalism: Connecting Politics and Culture in the American Landscape. These teachers and writers make clear that the ideas that particular places are disparate and disconnected, and the divisions between them unbridgeable, are basic to Westfield’s power in this new century. Their work reminds us that a citizenship of place, a citizenship growing from and working toward the “dynamic mesh of relationships” is by no means narrow and isolated. Instead, they help us to see the creative potential and possibilities for a joining of places to address the issues and structures that threaten them. These friends and this work point the way of a placed citizenship; however, there is something else, more elusive and intangible perhaps, that is also a part of a citizenship of place and living by virtue of the necessary relations within a place. Aldah’s work in Newbern, beyond the old Westfield boundaries, and the stories, lives, and work of the women of Big Creek People in Action speak of what it means to abide, to rest easy, to endure, to continue, to persevere in and with a place. To abide involves embracing the complexities, contradictions, and questions of the place. Abiding means choosing and enduring the place’s tattered and roughened realities, which Westfield argues against and suggests the successful leave behind, despite its fundamental and unacknowledged responsibility for them. To abide is to allow a place’s whole life to enrich and enliven relationships, prompting persons to work with neighbors with whom there is little common ground to find ways beyond the harshest words and deepest hurts. To abide means to claim and to be claimed by a place and the persons there in the face of Westfield’s reasons not to do so. Abiding implies a long sojourn and indwelling—a journey defined in understanding. Instead of the Westfield journey over or across or through a place, abiding is a long and patient journey into greater understanding and deeper consciousness of place. Apperson’s journey through the Poco field was one Westfield both charted and shortened; because his was a Westfield journey, it was a journey of knowledge, but it lacked understanding. Along Apperson’s Poco road, I have come to see in new and defining ways the differences between knowing and understanding. Deep knowledge is important, central to any work we do in a place. However, more than the deep knowledge, our places require of us understanding. To know a place is one thing; to under-

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stand it is quite another. From deep knowledge comes understanding, and from understanding moves the journey of abiding and intradependence. From insight and understanding of what makes us who we are and the importance of place to that process, from insight and understanding of all that constitutes our places, we come to the civic work of weaving together the lives of people to forge new ways in a place. Surely, part of the truth of Apperson’s road, his journey through the Poco field, is the story of heartache and loss, of the landscape of grief. However, the song of truth is about much more than that. Apperson’s road, its choices and its truths, is also a road connecting other places and other times, offering choices that Apperson was not able to make. Decades after Apperson last traveled through the Poco field, Franki Rutherford, Linda Underwood, and their neighbors called a corporation to accountability, opened a community center, and started a day care facility. When floods ravaged the place, Big Creek People in Action dispensed meals and supplies, welcomed strangers, and offered a glimmer of hope. Big Creek People in Action challenged the board of education, fought to save the local high school, and took their case to the West Virginia Supreme Court. Marsha Timpson and Dyanne Spriggs daily come to work at the Caretta Community Center, opening the doors to youth and children, daily making the decision to stay and to serve. Marcus Wilkes continues to teach, instruct, and lead. Darryl Cannady gives himself to good work for the outcast and forgotten, all while abiding in Cinder Bottom. Jeff Allen and his neighbors stood against the forces that would have used McDowell for the nation’s landfill. Along the sidewalks of Westfield, Allen welcomed children of color into a church that would never have accepted them when Apperson knew that church. Farther on, across the mountain, away from the coal tipple’s rattle and dust, in an old place little noticed, Aldah served as a treasurer, wrote letters, attended committee meetings, baked pies and helped with dinners to raise money for water and lights, worked to bring a doctor, and reared their daughter. Although I began my journey knowing, I now understand that we must honor and accept as a gift the stories of a place. I have received the rare and sacred gifts of my grandparents’ stories and the stories of the women of Big Creek People in Action. Jeff Allen, Marcus Wilkes, and Darryl Cannady and so many hundreds of others have honored me with their stories. I have also come to understand as part of this place the Westfield stories of Houston, Koppers, and Billie Cherry. I have heard the stories of the days when the mud, trees, debris, and floods poured from the mountainsides. I have heard the stories of the youth who hunger to leave, but who feel trapped without the skills to make a living anywhere. I have heard the stories of young people

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who want nothing more than to be a part of a world not defined so much by loss and struggle. There are also the stories of so many hundreds of others little known and never noticed. Fragile, uneven, inconsistent, as they may be, we must allow those honest stories to teach us and to inform who we are, to foster an understanding from which we can abide in a place, interwoven with all of its life and history, working to secure for that place a new future. From these stories, I have come to understand that giving ourselves to the possibilities, ferocities, and surprises of place, is not a matter of affectations and pretense, or a denial of who we are. We can neither change nor deny the accidents of birth or the ways that Westfield has bestowed or withheld its validations and privileges; to do so is pointless and dishonest. Rather, those of us who have inherited or been granted or earned a Westfield membership have a moral obligation to use the resources and privileges afforded us to address the issues of our places, to become full citizens of our place, moving across the boundaries and limits Westfield would impose. Aldah did not need to write the medical schools on the East Coast looking for a doctor to come to Newbern. She did not need to collect nickels and dimes to support the founding of a lifesaving crew. She did not need to bake pies to help support the Newbern Community Club or the Dublin Methodist Church. She used what she had and who she was, and she used the accidents of her life to help, to build, to change the place for those who would come after her. She abided. Just as she ended her letter to Apperson of August 21, 1940, with an invitation for him to come over to Newbern, and just as she closed her letter of October 1979 to the editor of the Roanoke Times with an invitation “to come see us,” from Aldah’s abiding grew an invitation, open and welcoming to all, to join her in that place. There are the Aldah Appersons and the Marsha Timpsons, the Franki Rutherfords and Marcus Wilkeses, the Jeff Allens, and the Darryl Cannadys in every place, engaged in a creative, surprising, hopeful, abiding citizenship of place, inviting all of us into the work of weaving together our lives with our places. Weaving together our lives and places is often difficult, requiring of us choices that are unconventional, the implications of which are profound, extending into and influencing the lives of many others. People engaged in this lifework often grapple with values and choices that may run counter to those honored in Westfield. A citizenship of place is exacting, requiring thought and honesty and at times all of the emotional, spiritual, and relational resources we can muster. Abiding in a place can put us in difficult positions, forcing us to confront the contradictions and inconsistencies of our lives and professed values as well as those of others. The abiding citizenship of place to which

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these friends bear witness is taken up and practiced from within a connection of persons, as part of an extended network, a great cloud of witnesses. From their photographs and letters, from their service, from their stories and the examples of their lives, these people help us to understand that the history of one place is deeply tied and forever joined with the history of all places. Any place is much older and more complex than we realize, and the ways in which we experience Westfield’s values and limits are but a brief moment in a long, long history. To practice a citizenship of place, to abide, to journey and be woven together is not so much a way out of the difficulties and problems of our time but a way through those questions and issues, and a continuation of the long history known in that place. To be a citizen of a place means to honor that long history and to give ourselves to seeing that those who have loaned us our place and will come after us in our place will receive back from us a place of surprising possibilities and ferocious hope.

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Notes

The oral histories from my grandmother’s surviving sibling and in-laws and the members of the subsequent generation of this family were all critical to The Poco Field. Naturally, there was often considerable overlap between those histories. In citing them in the notes, I have elected not to mention each one individually. Rather, in instances where I draw on the collective memories and stories conveyed through those histories I reference them as Stories of Place: A Family Oral History Collection. Included in that collection would be the following interviews: Emma Williams, interviewed June 7, 1994, in Newbern, Virginia; Daisy Nelson Williams, interviewed June 7, 1994, in Newbern, Virginia; Betty Patteson Jackson, interviewed June 6, 1994, in Cedar Bluff, Virginia; Harold Patteson, interviewed May 19, 1994, in Ridgeway, South Carolina; Ruth Evelyn Williams Hardy and Nancy Williams Akers, interviewed March 24, 1995, in Newbern, Virginia. All interviews were conducted by Tal Stanley with tapes and transcripts held by the author. Also included in Stories of Place is Harry (Pat) Patteson, interviewed August 20, 1988, by Stuart McGehee, in Jewel Ridge, Virginia, tape held by the Eastern Regional Coal Archives, Craft Memorial Library, Bluefield, West Virginia, with a tape also held by the author. In material drawn from a particular interview or several interviews, I cite the interview. For the material gathered from the oral histories of other persons, I cite those interviews individually as well. I have conducted a number of interviews with Alecia Apperson Stanley, only child of C. T. and Aldah Apperson. Because of their central importance to this narrative, I cite those conversations separately; tapes, transcripts, and notes are also in the WilliamsApperson Collection. During the course of this work, it has been a frequent subject of conversation and as with any family, often questions were asked or information offered in casual conversation. Although every effort has been made to keep an accurate record of all those conversations, at points the results of this running conversation about the Poco field have found their way into this book, but tracing the exact when and where of their paths is impossible. Additionally, there are some things here so deeply a part of my consciousness that I cannot trace where or how I first heard them. The Williams-Apperson Collection is a remarkable family and place history. The bulk of this collection is organized and catalogued. Some parts of it, recipes for instance, with their notes of origin, are not stored in the collection itself, but are in daily use in ordinary lives in many places.

acknowledgments 1. Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture (New York: Viking, 2008), 219.

Prologue: Coal Dust under My Feet 1. Patrick B. Mullen, Listening to Old Voices: Folklore, Life Stories, and the Elderly (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992) 2, 19.

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196  /  notes to introduction

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Introduction: The Places toward Which I Seem to Bend 1. Stephen L. Fisher, ed. Fighting Back in Appalachia: Traditions of Resistance and Change (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 327, 329–330. 2. Ibid., 333, n.23. 3. Raymond Williams, Politics and Letters: Interviews with the New Left Review (London: Verso, 1979), 118–119. 4. R. J. Johnston, A Question of Place: The Practice of Human Geography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 97; David Harvey, Justice, Nature, & the Geography of Difference (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 316–324. 5. Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community: Eight Essays (New York: Pantheon, 1993); Williams, Politics and Letters, 116–120; Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 113, 226–229; Herb Reid and Betsy Taylor, Recovering the Commons: Democracy, Place, and Global Justice (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010) 4,8,15; Stephen William Fisher, “Politics, Expressive Form, and Historical Knowledge in a Blue Ridge Resistance Movement,” in Fighting Back in Appalachia, Stephen L. Fisher, ed., 303–304. 6. William H. Whyte Jr., The Organization Man (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956), 3–5; C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes, Fiftieth Anniversary Ed. (2002; New York: Oxford University Press, 1951), 161, 244. Citations refer to the 2002 edition. 7. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 106; Raymond Williams, Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism, ed. Robin Gable (New York: Verso, 1989), 242. 8. C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 3–22. 9. Fisher, “Politics, Expressive Form, and Historical Knowledge,” in Fisher, Fighting Back, 307–313. 10. Mills, Sociological Imagination, 3–22. 11. Deborah R. Weiner, Coalfield Jews: An Appalachian History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 23–24, 84–86; Mary Beth Pudup, “Town and Country in the Transformation of Appalachian Kentucky,” in Appalachia in the Making: The Mountain South in the Nineteenth Century, Mary Beth Pudup, Dwight Billings, and Altina Waller, ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 270–296. 12. Stories of Place: A Family Oral History Collection, Williams-Apperson Collection; C. T. Apperson to Aldah Williams, September 9, 1933, Williams-Apperson Collection. 13. Thomas E. Lightfoot, “The Koppers Coal Company,” in the West Virginia Review (September 1930): 450–451. 14. David Horowitz, ed., American Social Classes in the 1950’s: Selections from Vance Packard’s The Status Seekers (New York: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 65–66. Vance Packard, The Status Seekers: An Exploration of Class Behavior in America and the Hidden Barriers That Affect You, Your Community, and Your Future (New York: David McKay, 1959), 78–92. In addition to Packard, these studies include William H. Whyte’s The Organization Man, C. Wright Mills, White Collar, David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character, and the earlier studies by

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notes to introduction and chapter 1  /  197 Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown: A Study in Contemporary American Culture (1929) and Middletown in Transition: A Study in Cultural Conflicts (1937). 15. Packard, Status Seekers, 78, 311; Whyte, Organization Man, 3, 129. 16. My association with Big Creek People in Action began in 1994 when I first began this project. Over the years, my work as a writer and teacher has brought me to Big Creek People in Action time and again. Since 2003, I have served on its board of directors. 17. Richard Couto, with Catherine S. Guthrie, Making Democracy Work Better: Mediating Structures, Social Capital, and the Democratic Prospect (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 37–69. Couto uses the terms social capital and mediating structures. 18. Paul Theobald, Teaching the Commons: Place, Pride, and the Renewal of Community (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1997), 7–31. 19. Reid and Taylor, Recovering the Commons, 6, 8, 10–11, 15; Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow: The Life Story of Jayber Crow, Barber, of the Port William Membership, as Written by Himself: A Novel (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 2000), 210. 20. Janet Theophano, Eat My Words: Reading Women’s Lives through the Cookbooks They Wrote (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 1, 3, 7, 12, 26, 41, 48; Jane Ziegelman, 97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement (New York: Harper Collins, 2010), xii. 21. Frank Delaney, Ireland (New York: Harper Collins, 2005), 389.

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Chapter 1. To Hold Hands with My Kin 1. Although there are no exact statistics, over one million people, counting only whites and free blacks, left Virginia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. From 1830 to 1840, over 375,000 left Virginia; these figures do not include those who emigrated through Virginia from other states, traveling the roads west. David Hackett Fischer and James C. Kelly, Bound Away: Virginia and the Westward Movement (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000), 137–145; Conway Smith, The Land That Is Pulaski County (Pulaski, Va.: Pulaski County Library Board, 1980), 39, 180–183, 456–458,486–487; Robert L. Kincaid, The Wilderness Road, 5th ed. (Kingsport, Tenn.: Arcata Graphics, 1992), 64; Mary B. Kegley and F. B. Kegley, Early Adventures on the Western Waters, Vol. 1, The New River of Virginia in Pioneer Days; 1745–1800 (Orange, Va.: Green, 1980), 289–293; Property Deed dated, August 21, 1920, Deed Book 43, page 73, Pulaski County Courthouse, Pulaski, Va., copy in the Williams-Apperson Collection. 2. Annals of Southwest Virginia, n.d., sometime between 1840 and 1850, in WilliamsApperson Collection. 3. Ibid. 4. Fischer and Kelly, Bound Away, 230–238. 5. Newbern Charter and By-Laws, Williams-Apperson Collection, copy of the original held by the author. The family had maintained the last surviving original printing of the charter and by-laws, and donated it to the Wilderness Road Regional Museum, Newbern, Va.

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198  /  notes to chapter 1 6. Records of the Newbern Community Improvement Club, Newbern, Va. 7. Janet Zandy, ed. and “Introduction,” Liberating Memory: Our Work and Our Working Class Consciousness (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995), epigraph, 1–15. 8. Stories of Place, Williams-Apperson Collection. 9. Mary Williams to Mr. and Mrs. Miller, January 18, 1897; Betsy Jordan Cox to Emma Williams, October 16, 1965; Deed Book 57, page 43, Pulaski County Court­ house, Pulaski, Va.; Receipt from Albert W. Farmer to Mary F. Williams dated March 1936, signed by Albert W. Farmer, all materials in Williams-Apperson Collection. After the death of her father, Francis Marion (Frank) Farmer, in 1919 and her stepmother, Victoria Woolwine Farmer in 1926, Mary bought the house from her brother for $166.66. It took Mary six years to pay the debt. The greater part of the money came from the insurance settle­ment that fol­lowed the death of Mary’s seventh child, Francis Wilbur Williams, from spinal meningitis in January 1936. 10. Stanley, 1994 interview. 11. Ibid. 12. Mills, Sociological Imagination, 3–6. 13. Philip Woolwine owned Matilda and her daughters Oraegan (born October 7, 1853) and Aradilla (born December 3, 1860); Robert Woolwine owned Laticia and her daughter, Laura (born February 1859). R. N. Price, Holston Methodism: From Its Origins to the Present Time, Vol. 5 (Nashville: The Methodist Episcopal Church South, Publishing House, 1913), 354–356; County Birth Registry, Pulaski County Courthouse, Pulaski, Virginia; United States Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Vital Statistics for Counties and Minor Civil Divisions, 1840, 1850, 1860, 1870, 1880, 1890, 1900, 1910. 14. Stanley, 1994 interview. 15. On county maps, in county histories, on road signs, in historical documents there is no consistency in the spelling of “Burke.” Some sources spell it as “Burke,” others as “Burk.” 16. This final phrase derives from an exchange with an elderly man in Jewell Ridge, Virginia. In 1916, the man came into the coal camp and for the first time saw ice cream. He asked what was in the ice cream churn, which he called a “truck.” The person churning the ice cream offered a sample and after tasting it, the man said, “That’s laripin’ good truck.” The saying describes any especially good food. “Laripin” implies licking as one would ice cream. 17. E. C. Williams to Mary Williams, 1921; E. C. Williams to Wilbur Williams, 1921; C. T. Apperson to Aldah Wil­liams Apperson, Collected Letters, Williams-Apperson Collection; Stanley, 1994 interview; Stories of Place; Blanche Roope, interviewed by the author, Newbern, Va., July 9, 1994, all in Williams-Apperson Collection. 18. David Harvey, “From Space to Place and Back Again: Reflections on The Conditions of Postmodernity,” in Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change, Jon Bird, ed. (London: Routledge, 1993), 3, 5, 7; Stanley Aronowitz, The Politics of Identity: Class, Culture, Social Movements (London: Routledge, 1992), 51–52. 19. Stories of Place. 20. In her will, Mary Williams referred to the dwelling as “the home”; she wrote her

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notes to chapters 1 and 2  /  199 will in her own hand. Mary Farmer Williams, will dated January 15, 1958, notarized September 22, 1959, Williams-Apperson Collection. 21. Jerry Bruce Thomas, An Appalachian New Deal: West Virginia in the Great Depression (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1998), 117, 119–120; U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Historical Atlas of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, Part 1, Labor Force and Its Components, Table D 1–10 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1975), 126. 22. Minutes of the Pulaski County Board of Supervisors, Thursday, March 8, 1933, Minute Book, 1933, Pulaski County Courthouse, Pulaski, Va. 23. Meredith Sue Willis, “Barbara Kingsolver, Moving On,” Appalachian Journal 22 (Fall 1994): 78–86; Harry (Pat) Patteson, interview. 24. Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown: A Study in Contemporary American Culture (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1929), 127–129. In their study of the same period, the Lynds note the increasing trend toward women entering the workforce. In this photograph, five of the seven women worked outside their homes. 25. Harold Patteson, interview; Jackson, interview; Stanley, 1994 interview. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid. 28. Stanley, 1994 interview. 29. Stanley, 1994 interview; Jackson, interview; Harold Patteson, interview; Lynd and Lynd, Middletown, 478–479. 30. The date for Thanksgiving changed from the last Thursday of November to the fourth Thursday during the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt. 31. Offering tours of an old home or barn are a means of storytelling and providing continuity with the past, connection to the future. Mullen, Listening to Old Voices, 3, 21. 32. Denise Giardina, The Unquiet Earth (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1992), 110–111.

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Chapter 2. The Poco Field 1. “Welch Natural Name for City in Honor of Founder,” Welch Daily News, June 3, 1958, McDowell County Centennial Edition, copy in Williams-Apperson Collection; Ronald D. Eller, Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers: Industrialization of the Appalachian South, 1880–1930 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982), 48–52. 2. Isaiah A. Welch, “The Pocahontas Flat Top Coal Field: A History of Its Location and Development,” Bluefield Daily Telegraph, Industrial Edition, November 1, 1896. 3. Ibid. 4. Joseph T. Lambie, From Mine to Market: The History of Coal Transportation on the Norfolk and Western Railway (New York: New York University Press, 1954), 123. Where navigable streams were available to take out the logs, timber companies were already cutting the forests. On the upper reaches of the Tug and along the Elkhorn, where there was not the possibility of removing the timber by boat or floating downstream and there was yet no railroad, the forests stood. 5. Chris Bolgiano, ed., Mighty Giants: An American Chestnut Anthology (Bennington, Vt.: Images from the Past, 2007), 4–65; Susan Frienkel, American Chestnut: The Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Perfect Tree (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 9–27.

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200  /  notes to chapter 2 6. Donald Davis, Where There Are Mountains: An Environmental History of the Southern Appalachians (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000), 16, 31, 112, 113–114, 121, 164; Ronald L. Lewis, Transforming the Appalachian Countryside: Railroads, Deforestation, and Social Change in West Virginia, 1880–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 15–44. 7. Davis, Where There Are Mountains, 12. 8. Welch, “The Pocahontas Flat Top Coal Field.” 9. Lambie, Mine to Market, 29. 10. Ibid., 26–30. 11. Lambie, Mine to Market, 29; Eller, Miners, Millhands, 50–51. Lambie says that after stopping in the place that would become Pocahontas, Kimball and Steel then followed the Bluestone to the East River and down to the New River, but not crossing Flat Top Mountain into the Elkhorn Valley. Other histories suggest that he traveled through the Elkhorn area before construction had begun on the railroad into Pocahontas coalfield. 12. Lambie, Mine to Market, 30. 13. Dwight B. Billings, Mary Beth Pudup, Altina Waller, “Taking Exception with Exceptionalism: The Emergence and Transformation of Historical Studies of Appalachia,” in Appalachia in the Making: The Mountain South in the Nineteenth Century, Dwight B. Billings, Mary Beth Pudup, Altina Waller, ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 12–14; Altina Waller, Feud: Hatfields, McCoys, and Social Change in Appalachia, 1860–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 12, 17–76, 235–249. 14. Steven M. Stanley, Earth and Life through Time (New York: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1989), 165–198, 368. Keith Frye, Roadside Geology of Virginia (Missoula: Montana Press Publishing Company, 1986), 167–171. Geologists describe this period as the Paleozoic Era. 15. Stanley, Earth and Life, 201–205, 214–227. 16. Stanley, Earth and Life, 215–220, 370–377, 596–598, 634–644; Frye, Roadside Geology, 160–177, 246–247. 17. Stanley, Earth and Life, 385–417, 614–633; Frye, Roadside Geology, 241–252. 18. Frye, Roadside Geology, 3–13. 19. Technically, the description of this process is the formation of anticlines and synclines. 20. Lambie, Mine to Market, 40; Waller, Feud, 19–21. 21. Stanley, Frontispiece, 227, 516–517, 596–598; Frye, 244–245. 22. C. R. Boyd, Resources of Southwest Virginia, Showing the Mineral Deposits of Iron, Coal, Zinc, Copper, and Lead (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1881), 178–180. The coal formation shares its name with Pocahontas, Va., the town built at the place in Abb’s Valley, Tazewell County, where engineers opened the first full-scale mining operation in 1882. 23. Welch, “The Pocahontas Flat Top Coal Field.” 24. Lambie, Mine to Market, 41–46. 25. Boyd, Resources of Southwest Virginia, 180. 26. Lambie, Mine to Market, 41–46.

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notes to chapter 2  /  201 27. Welch, “The Pocahontas Flat Top Coal Field”; W. E. E. Koepler, “The Pocahontas Coal Field,” in Fiftieth Anniversary Celebration of Pocahontas Coal (Bluefield: Pocahontas Operators Association, 1933), 1–2, Williams-Apperson Collection; Welch Daily News, Twelfth Anniversary Edition, 1935, Williams-Apperson Collection; “Pocahontas Coal Gravure Section,” Bluefield Daily Telegraph, March 22, 1936, Williams-Apperson Collection. 28. Lambie, Mine to Market, Plate X., 227; Map of Coal Deposits held by Pocahontas Land Company, Folder F-4, Norfolk and Western Collection, Norfolk Southern Corporation Archives, Norfolk, Va. 29. Dean R. Snow, “The First Americans and the Differentiations of Hunter-Gatherer Cultures,” in The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, Volume 1, Part 1, North America, Bruce G. Trigger and Wilcomb E. Washburn, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 130, 133, 138. 30. William Frederick Neal, “The Indians of Tazewell County,” in George W. L. Bickley, History of the Settlement and Indian Wars of Tazewell County, Virginia, 1852, with added materials compiled by J. Allen Neal (Parsons, W.Va.: McClain, 1974), 51–72; William Frederick Neal, “The Indians of Tazewell County,” in Louise Lesley, Tazewell County (Radford, Va.: Commonwealth Press, 1982), 364–402; Joseph L. Benthall, Daughtery’s Cave: A Stratified Site in Russell County, Virginia (Archeological Society of Virginia, Special Publication Number 18, 1990), 1–2; Howard A. MacCord Sr., William T. Buchanan Jr., The Crab Orchard Site, Tazewell County, Virginia (Archeological Society of Virginia, Special Publication Number 8, 1980), iii, 1–4, 148–149, 150–152. 31. Bruce D. Smith, “Agricultural Chiefdoms of the Eastern Woodlands,” in Trigger and Washburn, Cambridge History of the Native Peoples, 274–281; Edward V. McMichael, Introduction to West Virginia Archeology, 2nd Edition Revised (West Virginia Geological and Economic Survey, 1968), 3–8, 37–45, 47–49, 51–56; Neal, “Indians of Tazewell County,” in Bickley, 57–69; Neal, “Indians of Tazewell County,” in Lesley, 387–393. MacCord and Buchanan, Crab Orchard Site, 78–107, 108–112, 150–152. 32. Centennial History of McDowell County (Fort Worth: University Supply and Equipment, 1959), 33, 39–43. 33. John Sugden, Tecumseh: A Life (New York: Henry Holt, 1997), 21–22. Resonating with the subsistence patterns of the Native peoples of an earlier time, during times of peace, with the end of the growing season, Shawnee family groups and smaller bands often traveled together into the McDowell area to hunt, returning to the Ohio villages for the growing season. 34. McMicheal, Introduction to West Virginia Archaeology, 36–39; MacCord and Buchanan, Crab Orchard Site, 1, 151; Neal, “Indians of Tazewell County,” in Bickley 55, 56–57, 68–71; Neal, “Indians of Tazewell County,”in Lesley, 394, 398–399. James H. Howard, Shawnee! The Ceremonialism of a Native Indian Tribe and Its Cultural Background (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1981), 1, 6, 7–13; Neal Salisbury, “Native People and European Settlers in Eastern North America, 1600–1783,” in Trigger and Washburn, Cambridge History of the Native Peoples, 399–460. 35. The Shawnees were a loose alliance between five divisions. By the time of the first contact with Europeans, each of the five divisions lived independently of the other, in autonomous villages spread between the northern Ohio Valley, Pennsylvania,

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202  /  notes to chapter 2 Kentucky, Illinois, and farther to the interior South. The Shawnees had always been a largely nomadic people, often moving because of tribal conflicts or alliances, or for trading opportunities with native people, or later with Europeans. With a reputation for political independence and fierceness in combat, Europeans and Native peoples alike regarded the Shawnees as being very sophisticated in the arts of both warfare and diplomacy. Helen Hornbeck Tanner, “The Land and Water Communication Systems of the Southeastern Indians,” in Powhatan’s Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast, Peter H. Wood, Gregory A. Waselkov, M. Thomas Hatley, ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 6–11, 16–17; Sugden, Tecumseh, 13–15; James Moore Brown, The Captives of Abb’s Valley: A Legend of Frontier Life, Robert Bell Woodworth, ed. (1854; new edition, Staunton, Va.: McClure, 1942), v–x; McMichael, Introduction to West Virginia Archaeology, 34–46. 36. There are numerous accounts of whites and other Indians taken captive by the Shawnees who chose adoption into a Shawnee life instead of escape or enforced release back to their former communities. White children and women, particularly, found life among the Shawnees preferable to their former lives in frontier American culture. There are instances in which treaties with either British or American officials required the Shawnees to turn over whites living among them and the “captive” whites stridently and violently resisted the enforced transfer. In some cases, the whites devised ways to avoid the transfer. Sugden, Tecumseh, 4–5, 19–20, 34–35, 69–70, 84–85. 37. Lewis Preston Summers, History of Southwest Virginia, 1746–1786, Washington County, 1777–1870 (1903; repr., Baltimore: Regional Publishing, 1966), 32–33, 34–54, 55–107. 38. Centennial History of McDowell County, 10; “McDowell County Has Fitting Name; for VA 25th Governor,” Welch Daily News, Centennial Edition, June 3, 1958. 39. Centennial History of McDowell County, 10–12. 40. “Virginia County Vote on the Secession Ordinance, May 23, 1861,” New River Notes, accessed July 22, 2009, http://www.newrivernotes.com/. 41. Waller, Feud, 17–33. 42. Joe William Trotter Jr. “Memphis Tennessee Garrison and West Virginia’s African American Experience, Historical Afterword,” in Memphis Tennessee Garrison: The Remarkable Story of a Black Appalachian Woman, Ancella R. Bickley and Lynda Ann Ewen, ed. (Athens: University of Ohio Press, 2001), 215–219; Ronald L. Lewis, Black Coal Miners in America: Race, Class, and Community Conflict, 1780–1980 (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1987), 152–153. 43. Lambie, Mine to Market, 40; Eller, Miners, Millhands, 69–75; Rutherford, interview. 44. The Flat-Top Coal Land Association owned 65,000 acres along the Elkhorn, as well as 10,000 acres in Tazewell County, Va., 50,000 acres in Mercer County, W.Va. (along the Bluestone River), and over 100,000 acres in four other W.Va. counties: Wyoming, Logan, Raleigh, and Boone. Samuel A. Crozer owned the Crozer Company. Crozer, a Pennsylvania industrialist and investor, purchased his lands (12,000 acres) directly from Jed Hotchkiss, who had acquired holdings along the lower reaches of the Elkhorn in anticipation of the railroad’s interest. Lambie, Mine to Market, 37–40; Eller, Miners, Millhands, 72.

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notes to chapter 2  /  203 45. In June 1901, a syndicate controlled by United States Steel, which formed from the merger of several smaller steel companies in April 1901, purchased the Flat Top Coal Land Association’s entire land holdings of 238,624 acres for $10,000,000. The new company became the Pocahontas Coal and Coke Company. Kimball saw this as a hostile development threatening the railway’s monopolistic control over the Pocahontas field, and on December 31, 1901, the Norfolk and Western agreed to pay $20,000,000 for all coal lands held by the Pocahontas Coal and Coke Company in the Pocahontas coalfield. Lambie, Mine to Market, 237–263. 46. Rutherford, interview. 47. Lambie, Mine to Market, 30–34; John W. Bond, “Pocahontas Mine No. 1,” National Historic Landmark Nomination (United States Dept. of Interior, National Park Service, 1993), 14. The Norfolk and Western was not the first railroad company to seek access to the coal beds that many believed underlay McDowell. Another group of Philadelphia capitalists had been at work since the late 1870s to establish a link to the region. While no tracks were yet in place, the company had acquired rights of way, and grading was underway for a narrow gauge railroad from eastern Pulaski County, Va., following the New River to the East and Bluestone rivers. Under Kimball’s direction, the Norfolk and Western purchased this enterprise, converting the construction to standard gauge. 48. Lambie, Mine to Market, 122; Eller, Miners, Millhands, 73. 49. Lambie, Mine to Market, 129–130. 50. Quoted in Lambie, Mine to Market, 126. 51. Lambie, Mine to Market, 137. 52. Ibid., 128. 53. Cincinnati: The Queen City, Newspaper Reference Book (Cincinnati: Cuvier Press Club, 1914), 169; “Commercial Club of Cincinnati Memorials,” n.d., copies made available by Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County, Cincinnati, Ohio; “T. E. Houston, Coal Pioneer Is Dead at 73,” Welch Daily News, March 27, 1929. 54. “Houston Coal and Coke Company,” Bluefield Daily Telegraph, Industrial Edition, November 1, 1896. 55. Bickley and Ewen, Memphis Tennessee Garrison, 46, 77; Centennial History of McDowell County, 18; Rose Marino, Welch and Its People (Marcelino, Mo.: Walsworth, 1985), “David F. Houston.” Leading industrialists in the early days of the McDowell County coal boom received the appellation “Colonel.” Newspaper articles and the recollections of people of the time routinely refer to T. E. Houston as Colonel Houston. 56. Houston acquired the companies and their leases contemporaneously with the Norfolk and Western securing control of the Flat Top Land Association and Pocahontas Coal and Coke. Lambie, Mine to Market, 237–263. 57. Although there may have been five Houston-controlled companies in the Elkhorn Valley, each company operated several mines. Alex P. Schust, Billion Dollar Coalfield: West Virginia’s McDowell County and the Industrialization of America (Harwood, Md.: Two Mule Publishing, 2010), 19, 44, 96–100, 167, 171, 213–217, 227–229, 577. 58. “Houston Coal and Coke Company,” Bluefield Daily Telegraph, Industrial Edition, November 1, 1896.

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204  /  notes to chapter 2 59. Minutes of the Pocahontas Coal and Coke Company, Board of Directors, December 29, 1927, Norfolk and Western Collection, Norfolk Southern Corporation Archives, Norfolk, Va. 60. David Allen Corbin, Life, Work, and Rebellion in the Coalfields: The Southern West Virginia Miners, 1880–1922 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981), 133–134, 144 n110. Conley edited and published the West Virginia Review between 1923 and 1947, from which a number of articles appear in the Williams-Apperson Collection. 61. F. R. Wadleigh, “Pocahontas Coal: A Rhapsody,” in Fiftieth Anniversary Celebration of Pocahontas Coal (Bluefield: Pocahontas Operators Association, 1933), WilliamsApperson Collection. 62. Welch, “The Pocahontas Flat Top Coal Field.” 63. W. P. Tams, The Smokeless Coalfields of West Virginia, A Brief History (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 1963), 74–106. 64. Schust, Billion Dollar Coalfield, 227; Tams, Smokeless Coalfields, 100–106. 65. Harry (Pat) Patteson, interview. 66. Weiner, Coalfield Jews, 125; Lewis, Black Coal Miners, 143, 146, 148–150. 67. Harold Patteson, interview; Harry (Pat) Patteson, interview; Rutherford, interview. 68. “Houston Coal and Coke Company,” Bluefield Daily Telegraph, Industrial Edition, November 1, 1896. 69. Marino, Welch and Its People, “David F. Houston”: Joseph Friedl Sr., A History of Education in McDowell County West Virginia, 1858–1976 (Parsons, W.Va.: McClain, 1975), 75; Corbin, Life, Work, 71. Prior to 1932, there was not a countywide school board in McDowell; instead, there were local school districts, controlled largely by the coal company officials in each district. 70. This naming created a double layering of messages of power. The Methodist Church was named for the coal operator and his family who operated the mines in the area, and the town was named for Frederick Kimball who was largely responsible for the industrialization of the place. The Houston mines around Kimball all operated on leases from the Norfolk and Western. 71. Centennial History of McDowell County, 85; Bickley and Ewen, Memphis Tennessee Garrison, 193. 72. Rutherford, interview; Weiner, Coalfield Jews, 89, 125; Lewis, Black Coal Miners, xii, 143–150. 73. Howard B. Lee, Bloodletting in Appalachia: The Story of West Virginia’s Four Major Mine Wars and Other Thrilling Incidents of Its Coalfields (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 1969); Carter Goodrich, The Miner’s Freedom (New York: Arno, 1977); Richard D. Lunt, Law and Order vs. The Miners: West Virginia 1907–1933 (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1979); Corbin, Life, Work, 26, 50–52, 187–188; Joe William Trotter Jr. Coal, Class, and Color: Blacks in Southern West Virginia, 1915–1932 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 21, 80, 110–114; Rutherford, interview. 74. Tams, Smokeless Coalfields, 60–61. Emma Williams, interview; Rufus L. Gardner, The Courthouse Tragedy, Hillsville, Virginia (Mt. Airy, N.C.: Reliable, 1962); J. Sidna Allen, A True Narrative of What Really Happened at Hillsville, Virginia (Leaksville, N.C.: privately printed, 1956); newspaper clippings and other material in the Williams-

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notes to chapter 2  /  205 Apperson Collection. A native of Galax, Va., Felts employed former law enforcement officers, felons, members of the organized mob, and others from throughout the United States and Europe to work for his secretive agency. 75. Jerry Bruce Thomas, An Appalachian New Deal: West Virginia in the Great Depression (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1998), 101. 76. Ibid., 101. 77. Trotter, Coal, Class, 21, 80, 112; Rutherford, interview; Corbin, Life, Work, 26, 50–54, 87–88, 95, 114–115, 120, 135, 167, 187–188, 196, 201–215. 78. Lambie, Mine to Market, 56, 60, 67, 68, 69, 107. 79. West Virginia led the nation for the first time in the production of coal in 1927; beginning in 1905 in the tonnage of coal mined, McDowell County had led all other counties in the state. Annual coal tonnage in McDowell County nearly always accounted for approximately 18–20 percent of the total state production. During the Depression years of 1929 to 1940, the year of lowest production was 1932, when 13.2 million tons were mined. The last year coal production had been that low was 1909, when production was registered at 10.5 million tons. West Virginia Bureau of Mines, Annual Report (Charleston, West Virginia, 1942), 142. 80. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Coal Heritage Study (Philadelphia: Mid-Atlantic Regional Office National Park Service, 1993), 11–13. 81. In 1920, the price per ton was $3.75 on average for lump coal. By 1929, the average had fallen to $1.78 per ton, but production from 1920 to 1929 had risen by 7.6 million tons. Harry Patteson recalled in 1988 that at the Jewell Ridge Coal Company “during the Depression,” run-of-mine coal was selling for 26 cents per ton. When figuring in the freight rates, storage fees, and other costs of production, coal companies generally had a profit margin of two or three cents per ton. Harry (Pat) Patteson, interview; Morton S. Baratz, Union and Coal Industry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955), 100. 82. Before unionization, coal miners’ wages were not determined on the hour, but on the amount of coal loaded and moved from the mine to the tipple. These figures represent wages earned divided by the hours it took the miner to load the coal. Not until 1944 were the wages in the bituminous coal industry equal to the national averages of wages in either the manufacturing sector or the iron and steel industry. Baratz, Union and Coal Industry, 92; Keith Dix, What’s a Miner to Do? The Mechanization of Coal Mining (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988), Table C, 93, 219. 83. Nearhood, interview; Nuckols, interview; Harry (Pat) Patteson, interview; Harold L. McGlothlin, interviewed by Stuart McGehee, Jewell Ridge, Va., August 20, 1988, tape held by Eastern Regional Coal Archives, copy of tape held by the author; Mack Smith, interviewed by Stuart McGehee, Jewell Ridge, Va., August 20, 1988, tape held by Eastern Regional Coal Archives, copy of tape held by the author; Harold Patteson, interview; Jackson, interview. 84. Jackson, interview; Nearhood, interview; McGlothlin, interview. 85. Weiner, Coalfield Jews, 89. 86. Minutes of the Pocahontas Coal and Coke Company, Board of Directors, Report of the President, A. C. Needles, February 28, 1928. Norfolk and Western Collection, Norfolk Southern Corporation Archives, Norfolk, Va. Pocahontas Coal and Coke was

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206  /  notes to chapter 2 a wholly owned subsidiary of the Norfolk and Western Railway, controlling the titles to coal lands and managing the many leases. 87. Moody’s Manual of Investments, American and Foreign, Industrial Securities (New York: Moody’s Investor Services, 1925, 1926, 1928, 1929); National Park Service, National Register of Historic Places Registration Form, Houston Coal Company Store, February 10, 1992; Helen Payne Dawson, interviewed by Tal Stanley, Kimball, W.Va., August 2, 1994, tape held by the author. Dawson, who knew the Houston family, suggests that immediately prior to its collapse, a family crisis beset the Houston companies dividing the management of the company and the community. When Miriam Houston, the wife of the company’s president, discovered her husband in the couple’s bed with the leader of the local Girl Scout troop, the resulting public scandal forced the Houston family away from McDowell County. The ensuing divorce settlement, the constrictions of the coal market in the 1920s, and the disarray in which the company’s management found itself, forced the Houston companies to liquidate assets and sell off its Pocahontas properties. 88. H. Reid, The Virginian Railway (Milwaukee: Kalmbach, 1961), 77–80, 90–91; Fred C. Foy, Ovens, Chemicals, and Men! Koppers Company, Inc. (New York: The Newcomen Society in North America, 1958), 16; Shirley Stewart Burns, Bringing Down the Mountains (Morgantown: University of West Virginia Press, 2008), 23–25. The railroad in question is the Virginian, which linked Deepwater, W.Va. on the New River, with the shipping docks at Sewall’s Point at Hampton Roads, Va. Drawing on the assistance of gravity to pull loaded coal to the coast, between Mullins, W.Va. and Roanoke, Va., the line operated on electricity, daily consuming 275 tons of Pocahontas coal. In 1929, Koppers’s mines provided so much coal that reserves exceeded the demand from the company’s coking and chemical operations and Koppers began to provide large quantities of this surplus coal for the industrial market. While the Norfolk and Western was the only carrier for coal mined in the Poco field, the Koppers coal mined in other fields and not shipped over the Norfolk and Western shipped by way of the Virginian. By 1937, fully one-third of all coal shipped from the Virginian’s facilities at Hampton Roads belonged to Koppers and 45 percent of the railroad’s revenues came from shipping Koppers’s coal. In 1937, in order to control its own shipping costs and monopolize its markets by dictating freight rates to its competitors, Koppers acquired controlling interest in the Virginian. 89. Thomas E. Lightfoot, “The Koppers Coal Company,” in the West Virginia Review (September 1930): 450–451. 90. “Keystone Coal and Coke,” Bluefield Daily Telegraph Industrial Edition, November 1, 1896. 91. Stanley, 1994 interview. 92. Ibid. 93. McDowell County, West Virginia: the Nation’s Coal Bin, The Elkhorn Valley Grocery Company and the McDowell County Chamber of Commerce, circa 1936, WilliamsApperson Collection. By 1912, 69,562 persons detrained at the Norfolk and Western passenger station in Keystone. James Morton Callahan, Semi-Centennial History of West Virginia (Semi-Centennial Commission of West Virginia, 1913), 220, accessed August 3, 2009, http://books.google.com/.

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notes to chapter 2  /  207 94. Stanley, 1994 interview. 95. Stanley, 2009 interview. 96. Pudup, “Town and Country,” 286–293; Weiner, Coalfield Jews, 23–24. 97. Garret Matthews, “Ashes, Memories Have Settled on Keystone’s Cinder Bottom,” in Bluefield Daily Telegraph, May 26, 1975. Jean Battlo, “Cinder Bottom: A Coalfields Red-Light District,” Goldenseal (Summer 1994): 60–64; Michael Kline, “‘Wide Open’: Nat Reese Remembers Cinder Bottom,” Goldenseal (Winter 1987); Stories of Place, Williams-Apperson Collection; Stanley, 1994 interview; Blanche Roope, interviewed by Tal Stanley, Newbern, Va., July 9, 1994, tape held by the author; C. T. Apperson to Aldah Williams, September 3, 1938; Reginald Millner, “Conversations with the ‘Ole Man’: The Life and Times of a Black Appalachian Coal Miner,” in William H. Turner and Edward J. Cabbel, eds. Blacks in Appalachia (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1985), 213–221; Trotter, Coal, Class, Tables 3.2–3.4, 66–74. 98. Bickley and Ewen, Memphis Tennessee Garrison, 221. 99. Trotter, Coal, Class, 131–132. 100. Bickley and Ewen, Memphis Tennessee Garrison, 221–222; Weiner, Coalfield Jews, 122–125. 101. Stanley, 1994 interview; Matthew S. Sarel, “A Brief History of Keystone, West Virginia,” (working paper, Public History Program, West Virginia University, Morgantown, 1988). 102. Trotter, Coal, Class, 130–133; William Archer, “The Whittico Legacy of Keystone,” Observer (Charleston, W.Va.), February 7, 1990; Sarel, “A Brief History,” 14–16; Stanley, 1994 interview. Burke is distinct from Burke Hollow or Burkesville. Burke itself was a series of duplexes owned by the Houston Collieries Company and then by the Koppers Company for management officials; Burke Hollow was farther back from the Burke residences, which were reserved for whites. 103. Weiner, Coalfield Jews, 125. 104. An Anonymous Virginia Lad, Sodom and Gomorrah of Today; or the History of Keystone, West Virginia (no publication information provided, 1912), Eastern Regional Coal Archives, Craft Memorial Library, Bluefield, W.Va.; Battlo, “Cinder Bottom,” 60–64; William T. Blakely, “Tales of the Sons of Pocahontas,” Bluefield Daily Telegraph, April 13, 1983. Denise Giardina, “Another Idea of Cinder Bottom: ‘Sure We Got Problems,’” Goldenseal (Summer 1994): 65; Matthews, “Ashes”; Sarel, “A Brief History”; Stanley, 1994 interview; Stories of Place, Williams-Apperson Collection; Denise Giardina, interviewed by Tal Stanley, Charleston, W.Va., August 3, 1994, tape and transcripts held by the author; Billie Jean Cherry, interviewed by Tal Stanley, Keystone, W.Va., March 21, 1994, tape and transcripts held by the author; Allen, interview; Rutherford, interview. 105. When Robert and Helen Lynd revisited Middletown in their ongoing study of the American middle class, they noted that the town “was the prostitution center of the eastern part of the state.” Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown in Transition: A Study in Cultural Conflicts (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1937), 163. 106. Lad, Sodom and Gomorrah of Today, 1912. 107. Lee, Bloodletting, 203. 108. Lee, Bloodletting, 203–208; Weiner, Coalfield Jews, 102–103.

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208  /  notes to chapters 2 and 3 109. Weiner, Coalfield Jews, 104. 110. This is what C. Wright Mills means by a sociological imagination that connects individual biography with larger historical patterns and issues. Mills, Sociological Imagination, 6.

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Chapter 3. “On a Plane with the Best in the Country” 1. Schust, Billion Dollar Coalfield, 167. 2. “Representatives of Koppers Company Say Houston Mines Were Bought for Production, No By-Product Plant Is Planned Here,” Welch Daily News, December 13, 1927. Koppers and Houston finalized the purchase in December 1927, but the transfer of properties and operations was not complete until April 1928. 3. “Business Outlook Growing Better in McDowell Field,” Welch Daily News, March 30, 1928. 4. “Koppers Officials Here on Inspection,” Welch Daily News, March 30, 1928. 5. “Business Outlook Growing Better.” 6. “More than 200 Escape; 53 Men Not Accounted For at 1 O’Clock, But Most May Have Escaped by Pinnacle,” Welch Daily News, April 2, 1928; “Inquiry over Death of Eight Miners Brought Out that Gas from Slate Fall Caused Blast,” Welch Daily News, April 10, 1928; “Inquest Is Being Conducted Today into Mine Blast,” Welch Daily News, April 9, 1928. 7. Charles H. Hardison, “Mine Explosion Takes Toll of Eight,” Welch Daily News, April 3, 1928. 8. “Inquiry over Death of Eight Miners”; “More than 200 Escape.” 9. For a discussion of the separation of races in the newspaper, see Lynd and Lynd, Middletown, 479, n.1. “Eight Killed in Mine Blast near Keystone,” Bluefield Daily Telegraph, April 3, 1928; Hardison, “Mine Explosion”; “Platzer Services Friday Afternoon at Coal Creek, Va.,” Welch Daily News, April 5, 1928. 10. “Inquiry Over Death”; Hardison, “Mine Explosion.” 11. In the “New Era,” there was a cultural shift from production to distribution; what you owned determined your place in the class structure, not what you built or produced. H. W. Brands, Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Legacy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (New York: Doubleday, 2008), 219–221; Mills, White Collar, 164; Lynd and Lynd, Middletown, 497. 12. Brands, Traitor, 220. 13. Thomas E. Lightfoot, “The Koppers Coal Company,” in the West Virginia Review (September 1930): 451; Ralph M. Hower, History of Macy’s of New York, 1858–1919: Chapters in the Evolution of the Department Store (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1943), 279, 283, 287, 333, 337–338. 14. Lightfoot “The Koppers Coal Company,” 451. 15. Deborah Weiner makes clear that while the company store became a venue to acquire nationally advertized consumer goods, it “reinforced workers’ subordination to their employers. Consumption patterns were in fact an expression of their powerlessness” before the company. Weiner, Coalfield Jews, 89. 16. Paul R. Umberger, “I’ll See You in Pittsburgh!” Industrial Retail Stores, August 1934, 7, Williams-Apperson Collection. The National Recovery Administration (NRA) was one of the central agencies of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.

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notes to chapters 3 and 4  /  209 17. The “check-off system” was the practice by which companies automatically deducted from a miner’s weekly scrip payment for expenses at the company store, medical services, mining supplies, housing costs, and other fees. In many places, these accumulated fees amounted to more than the miner’s weekly pay and a debt began to accrue. This accumulating debt then became another item added to the “check off.” When a miner’s “check off” was more than his pay, it was said that he got “a snake,” a long line drawn through his ledger sheet for that week. John L. Lewis, The Miners’ Fight for American Standards (Indianapolis: Bell, 1925), 40–52, 85–106, 138–189; Harlan Miners Speak: Report on the Terrorism in the Kentucky Coalfields, prepared by Members of the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1932). 18. Umberger, “I’ll See You in Pittsburgh!” 7. 19. Ibid. 20. “In the new society, selling is a pervasive activity . . . the market now reaches into every institution and every relationship.” Mills, White Collar, 161–164. For discussion and analysis of the deep roots of American consumer culture and the ways in which consumer goods become standards of social well being, refer to: Warren I. Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon, 1984); Barbara Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class (New York: Harper Collins, 1989); David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989). 21. “The prestige of a company’s name or location conferred prestige on those working there.” Mills, White Collar, 161–162, 170, 244.

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Chapter 4. Moving to Westfield 1. Pocahontas Coal and Coke, Minutes of the Board of Directors, November 22, 1927; December 29, 1927; March 26, 1929. Norfolk and Western Collection, Norfolk Southern Corporation Archives, Norfolk, Va. When Apperson arrived in Keystone, he did not own a pair of shoes appropriate for work in the mine. In the boarding house in which he was lodging at the time, was Charles Roope, a Newbern neighbor and boyhood friend of Aldah Williams, who was also working at Keystone Coal and Coke. Roope loaned Apperson a pair of work shoes until Apperson could receive his first pay and purchase his own. Roope, interview. 2. Stanley, 1994 interview. 3. Indicative of the ways in which gender and work help to shape a sense of propriety, while some people did call her “Chick” in her later years, it was not something by which she took much pleasure. However, she referred to her husband as “Apperson,” far more frequently than any other name. 4. Stella Anderson, interviewed by Tal Stanley, Newbern, Va., July 9, 1994, tape held by the author. 5. Stanley, 1994 interview. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8. Helen Payne Dawson, interview; Maxine P. Walker (Crumpler, W.Va.), telephone conversation with Tal Stanley, February 1996, notes held by the author.

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210  /  notes to chapter 4 9. Apperson became what William Whyte describes as “the organization man,” not only working for the organization (Koppers), but belonging to it as well, understanding that “loyalty to the company” will result in “the company being loyal to you.” William H. Whyte Jr., The Organization Man, 3, 129. C. T. Apperson to Aldah Williams/ Apperson, various letters in the Williams-Apperson Collection; Koppergram: Official Publication of Koppers Stores, Inc., Huntington, W.Va., July 19, 1940, Williams-Apperson Collection. 10. Harold Patteson, interview; C. T. Apperson to Aldah Williams/Apperson, letters in the Williams-Apperson Collection; Koppergram: Official Publication of Koppers Stores, Inc., Huntington, W.Va., July 19, 1940, Williams-Apperson Collection. 11. Stanley, 1994 interview; Stories of Place, Williams-Apperson Collection. 12. Koppergram: Official Publication of Koppers Stores, Inc., Huntington, W.Va., December 14, 1933, Williams-Apperson Collection; Whyte, Organization Man, 3–7. 13. Apperson and many of his contemporaries in the Poco field demonstrate that there was a deep coherence between the “inner direction” they had received from birth through culture and society, and the “other direction” of the company, as they became the “middle class Americans of today.” David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950), v, vii. For the organization man, “social ethics rationalizes the organization’s demands for fealty and gives those who offer it wholeheartedly a sense of dedication in doing so.” Whyte, Organization Man, 7. “Most operators followed the customary social norms by segregating the racial and ethnic elements of the mining population.” Lewis, Black Coal Miners, 146. 14. Lightfoot, “The Koppers Coal Company,”449–451. 15. In letters to Aldah, Apperson routinely referred to the staffs at each of the Koppers Stores as “the force.” 16. Weiner, Coalfield Jews, 89. 17. Darryl Cannady, interviewed by Tal Stanley, Bluefield, Va., October 16, 2001, tape held by the author; Stanley, 1994 interview; Jackson, interview. 18. Stanley, 1994 interview. 19. The name of the ad campaign for which this photograph was taken was, “Pocahontas Coal: Fuel Satisfaction.” Norfolk and Western Collection, Norfolk Southern Corporation Archives, Norfolk, Va. 20. In describing policies and decisions of coal companies throughout southern West Virginia, Ronald Lewis has demonstrated that “blacks were isolated in lower pay and lower status categories,” and “social life was segregated by custom and management by design.” Lewis, Black Coal Miners, xii, 152; Trotter Coal, Class, 25–27, 103–108, 114–115; Rutherford, interview; Stanley, 1994 interview. 21. Lucy Apperson Hanes, William Overton “Doty” Apperson, conversation with Tal Stanley, Dublin, Va., January 15, 1998. 22. Gramscian theories of hegemony and ideology suggest a strong and formative connection. Antonio Gramsci, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. and trans. by Quintin Hoare and Geoffre Newell Smith (London: Lawrence and Wishant, 1971); Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 108–141. For the “other-directed” persons that Riesman identified as the members the emerg-

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notes to chapter 4  /  211 ing middle class in America, the organizations that offer them validation also shaped and gave them their politics and allegiances. Riesman, Lonely Crowd, 19. 23. “Middletown is a Republican stronghold. The business leaders and business class tend to be solidly Republican.” Lynd and Lynd, Middletown in Transition, 87. “Democratic rule gave way to a new generation of business-oriented Republicans at the end of the century.” John Alexander Williams, “Class, Section, and Culture,” in Pudup, Billings, and Waller, Appalachia in the Making, 229. It bears remembering that for both Apperson’s and Aldah’s parents, the Democratic Party was the party of liberty and tradition, holding absolute power in Virginia, while the Republican Party was the party of industry, tariffs, reconstruction, occupation, and persons of color. 24. Stanley, 1994 interview. 25. The interior and style of the new Koppers store is part of the continued development of the idea of the industrial store, following the example of independent retailers. Deborah Weiner suggests that independent retailers in the southern West Virginia coalfields developed the “New Way” of displaying goods and waiting on customers, setting them apart from the company stores of the region. “Goods were displayed in dust-free glass cases and wardrobes, and customers could look about and pick and choose.” Weiner, Coalfield Jews, 85. Wording of advertising banners taken from photographs in Williams-Apperson Collection. For a discussion of the ways the “Big Bazaar” came to define American culture and society, refer to Mills, White Collar, 166–172. 26. “Drugstore—Grill—Service Station Opens Tomorrow,” “Koppers Stores Promotions Made,” “J. E. Herndon New Manager of Keystone Store,” Welch Daily News, October 13,1939. The articles could well have been written by a Koppers employee and published by the Welch Daily News. 27. Ibid. 28. Mills, White Collar, 172. 29. Stanley, 1994 interview. 30. Ibid. 31. Stanley, 1994 interview; Stories of Place, Williams-Apperson Collection. 32. Stanley, 1994 interview; Mrs. C. W. Cooke, “Mrs. C. T. Apperson’s Talents Produce Attractive Handiwork,” Southwest Times, Sunday, December 6, 1953. 33. In her book, Authorized to Heal: Gender, Class, and the Transformation of Medicine in Appalachia, 1880–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), Sandra Barney documents the reform work of an array of women’s clubs on behalf of better health care in the mountains. Barney’s account makes clear that most of this work had dissipated by the early 1930s, ten years before Aldah’s involvement in these organizations. 34. For members of the business class in Middletown, lodges and civic clubs were a source of power and influence, and as early as the 1920s they were beginning to replace religious observance in social importance. Lynd and Lynd, Middletown, 408–409. 35. Stanley, 2007 interview; Allen, interview. 36. Vance Packard observed that career achievement hinged on several important factors for those seeking status in middle-class America: not being a Roman Catholic, being Anglo-Saxon and protestant, being a member of the lodge, and being a Repub-

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212  /  notes to chapter 4 lican. Clearly, based on these factors, Apperson was poised for ascendency in the Poco field. Horowitz, ed., American Social Classes in the 1950s: Selections from Vance Packard’s “The Status Seekers” (New York: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 84. 37. Stanley, 1994 interview; material in the Williams-Apperson Collection; Lynd and Lynd, Middletown, 359–360, 407, 408–409. 38. U.S. Department of Interior, Minerals Yearbook, 1945 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1947), 903, Table 41. 39. Although eligible for military service and the family prepared for his service in the military, Apperson was never called up. In later years, Aldah offered that the reason Apperson was not drafted was that he was classified as 4-F. 40. “Banking is one of the primary means by which the business class exerts its power . . . the power of the elites is largely banking power . . . the other way of power is retail.” Lynd and Lynd, Middletown in Transition, 78–81. C. T. Apperson, Federal Income Tax Returns, Williams-Apperson Collec­tion. 41. Stanley, 1994 interview. 42. Ibid. 43. Whyte, Organization Man, 129; Stanley, 1994 interview. 44. Foy, Ovens, 29–31. 45. Foy, Ovens, 31. 46. Staples was from Lynchburg, Va., near Apperson’s boyhood homeplace of Dillwyn, and he was probably the person most responsible for Apperson’s first job in the Houston Company Store. Aldah worked for Staples when he moved to the Houston District office. Apperson and Aldah’s wedding ceremony took place in the living room of the Staple’s home. 47. Stanley, 1996 interview. 48. Ibid. 49. Maxine P. Walker, telephone interview, 1996. 50. C. T. Apperson, Federal Income Tax Returns, 1935–1952, Williams-Apperson Collection. 51. Stanley, 1994 interview. 52. Deed of August 7, 1945, Deed Book 164, page 344, McDowell County Courthouse, Welch, W.Va.; copy in Williams-Apperson Collection. 53. Deed of August 7, 1945; Stanley, 1994 interview. 54. The interior of the Appersons’ Westfield home modeled what the Lynds identified as a transition home, from less well-to-do to a decidedly middle-class home. Lynd and Lynd, Middletown, 99–102. 55. Stanley, 2001, 2007, 2009 interviews. 56. Ziegelman, 97 Orchard, xii; Theophano, Eat My Words, 4, 41. 57. Stanley, 1994, 2002, 2009 interviews; Theophano, Eat My Words, 49; Mullen, Listening to Old Voices, 27. 58. Stanley, 2009 interview. 59. Stanley, 2002 interview. 60. Deed dated August 7, 1945. Arguably, the deed’s stipulations could have been in response to the charges of persons such as “The Anonymous Virginia Lad” who understood Keystone’s elite as supportive of the Cinder Bottom human trafficking,

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notes to chapter 4  /  213 racial mixing, and sales of liquor. However, the deed is also entirely consistent with and representative of prevailing social patterns. “In Keystone, as throughout the coalfields, social life remained largely segregated.” Weiner, Coalfield Jews, 125. 61. Stanley, 1994 interview. 62. Ibid. 63. “Despite Cinder Bottom’s isolation, Keystone’s respectable and less-respectable sides existed in a symbiosis that made it hard to differentiate the two.” Weiner, Coalfield Jews, 104. 64. Stanley, 1994 interview. 65. Beginning in the 1940s and accelerating in intensity after the end of the war, those in the middle class who lacked a college education faced the probability of downward mobility of both status and income. Packard, Status Seekers, 37–38. “Education has replaced property as the insurance of social position.” Mills, White Collar, 245. 66. In his Federal Income Tax Returns for 1944, 1945, 1946, 1947, and 1948, Apperson lists his occupation as “General Business,” “Trucker,” and “Trucking Operator.” 67. U.S. Department of the Interior, Minerals Yearbook, 1948 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1950), 271, 340, Table 39. 68. Mineral Yearbook, 1948, 271; U.S. Department of the Interior, Minerals Yearbook, 1949 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1951), 261. 69. U.S. Department of the Interior, Minerals Yearbook, 1950 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1953), 320, Table 34. Part of the reason for the decline in production was the ongoing work stoppages and strikes. 70. Stanley, 1994 interview. 71. Weiner, Coalfield Jews, 90. 72. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, City and County Data Book 1956: A Statistical Abstract Supplement (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1957), 325, Table 2; Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, City and County Data Book 1962: A Statistical Abstract Supplement (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1962), 418, Table 2; Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Historical Atlas of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, Part 1 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1975), 216, Table D 1–10. 73. Charles R. Perry, Collective Bargaining and the Decline of the Untied Mine Workers, No. 60 of Major Industrial Research Unit Series (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984), 181–186. Those conflicts were also known throughout American culture during those years. Nationally, labor militancy rose in response to business and industrial leaders’ efforts to reassert control over the workplace in the wake of the federal government’s relinquishment of its war-mobilization control of industry and in reaction to the social programs of the New Deal. George Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 120–134, 158. 74. Perry, Collective Bargaining, 181–186. 75. Stanley, 1994 interview. 76. Ibid. 77. “They trust the ultimate harmony they see between themselves and the organization.” Whyte, Organization Man, 4. 78. I do not mean to imply here an uncritical reading of the history of the United

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214  /  notes to chapters 4 and 5 Mine Workers of America. There is abundant historical evidence pointing to corruption and antidemocratic practices. However, there is also abundant evidence that the UMWA membership was willing to undertake the responsibility of reforming the Union. 79. Whyte, Organization Man, 4–5. 80. The pursuit of individual salvation through hard work, thrift, and competitive struggle is the heart of American achievement. Whyte, Organization Man, 4. 81. Stanley, 1994 interview. 82. Mills, Sociological Imagination, 3. 83. Stanley, 1994 interview. I am indebted to a number of conversations over several years for this insight as to the necessity of models and maps before we can begin to think in new ways about our places and futures. In a roundtable discussion of It Comes from the People, Maxine Waller expressed her frustration with her earliest organizing and leadership in Ivanhoe by saying that she had “no models” of what would work and what would not. It Comes from the People (roundtable discussion, Appalachian Studies Association, Unicoi, Georgia, March 30, 1996). 84. Very early in the morning of July 4, he awoke feeling ill. Having suffered several heart attacks in the preceding months, Apperson knew what was happening and what it meant. Leaving their daughter with family, Aldah and her sister Ruth, accompanied Apperson to the hospital. He died as they crossed the New River into Radford. 85. Stanley, 1994 interview; Stories of Place, Williams-Apperson Collection.

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Chapter 5. He Saw It Coming 1. C. T. Apperson to Aldah Apperson, May 17, 1952. 2. U.S. Department of the Interior, Minerals Yearbook, 1949 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1951), 329, Table 40. 3. Franki Rutherford, Big Creek People in Action, Citizenship Center, Service Learning and Its Sustainability at BCPIA (Caretta, W.Va.: Big Creek People in Action, 2004), 1; Franki Rutherford, Helen Lewis, comps., McDowell County Citizens Learning Team, McDowell County Enterprise Community Report (Welch, W.Va.: McDowell County Action Network, 1997), 1–2. 4. Rutherford and Lewis, “Enterprise Community Report,” 1. 5. Lynd and Lynd, Middletown, 78–81. 6. Also on the board of directors were Apperson’s close friends Elio Pais, his brother Louis Pais, and Julian Budnick. The Pais brothers’ father, Emanuel Pais, had been a major stockholder in the bank. First National Bank of Keystone, W.Va., 1977 Annual Report. 7. On coming to McDowell County, McConnell often boasted of his close friendship with George H. W. Bush and “he wrote letters to George Bush on an almost daily basis.” Lawrence Messina, “Keystone Chief’s Image Changes,” Charleston Gazette, October 14, 2001. 8. Cherry, interview. 9. “FDIC Official Says High Interest Rates Were a Danger Sign,” Associated Press Newswires, September 8, 1999, Dow Jones Interactive Publications Library, accessed September 29, 1999, http://nrstg2s.djnr.com/.

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notes to chapter 5  /  215 10. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Profile of General Demographic Characteristics: 2000, Keystone City, W.Va., Washington, D.C.: 2001, accessed October 8, 2010, http://censtats .census.gov/. 11. Cherry, interview. 12. “Bank Failure Latest Blow to a Poverty-Racked County,” American Banker, September 17, 1999, 4; Lawrence Messina, “In Keystone, Trying Times Return,” Charleston Sunday-Gazette Mail, April 2, 2000; Terence O’Hara, “Big Bank Scandal Unearthed in Tiny W.Va. Town,” Washington Post, October 19, 1999, all articles accessed July 14, 2006, http://find.galegroup.com/. 13. Cherry also purchased all of the lighting fixtures, wood moldings, and hardware from the Pais home in Westfield. Cherry, interview. 14. Messina, “In Keystone”; O’Hara, “Big Bank Scandal.” 15. Messina, “In Keystone.” 16. Cherry, interview. 17. The Lynds understood this “civic loyalty” and boosterism as one of the defining characteristics of Middletown’s business class. Lynd and Lynd, Middletown, 407. 18. Cherry, interview. 19. Ibid. 20. Cherry, interview; Messina, “In Keystone”; Lawrence Messina, “The Harder They Fall: Once One of the Nation’s Most Profitable Banks, Keystone Is Emerging as One of Its Costliest Failures,” Charleston Sunday Gazette-Mail, September 26, 1999; O’Hara, “Big Bank.” 21. Cherry, interview. 22. Shortly after his promotion to chair of the board and president, McConnell invoked a clause in the bank’s bylaws that gave him responsibility for director nominations. He reduced the fourteen-member board to six members, and added Church and Cherry to the board, giving the inside directors significantly more control. John R. Engen, “The Collapse of Keystone,” Bank Director, April 1, 2001, accessed July 27, 2006, http://www.bankdirector.com/issues/. 23. Cherry, interview. 24. Darryl Cannady, one of the staff members of the Elkhorn Valley Development Corporation, described the organization as “run by the Bank of Keystone.” Darryl Cannady, interview. 25. Rob Jameson, “First National Bank of Keystone,” ERisk, June 2002, accessed July 27, 2006, http://www.erisk.com/; “Former Keystone Bank VP Testifies in Civil Case,” Associated Press Newswire, December 4, 2004, accessed July 27, 2006, http://global.factiva .com/. 26. Messina, “Harder They Fall.” 27. Martha Bryson Hodel, “Another Keystone Officer Admits Looting Bank: Testifies Against Former Colleagues,” Associated Press Newswires, October 3, 2001, accessed July 27, 2006, http://global.factiva.com/; Debra Gariety et al., v. Nancy Vorono, Vida Hedrick, Evelyn Herron, Jeanie Wimmer, et al., No. 06–2248, U.S. Court of Appeals, 4th Circuit, unpublished. 28. O’Hara, “Big Bank”; George Hohmann, “Man Lacked License: Bank Accountant Lost His License after Guilty Plea,” Charleston Daily Mail, September 17, 1999.

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216  /  notes to chapter 5 29. In the days leading up to the FDIC closure, Church and Graham systematically worked to destroy truckloads of bank records, seeking to cover the fraud. These documents, 370 boxes of them, were buried in a trench outside Church’s mountaintop home. The trench measured 10 feet deep, 100 feet long, and 20 to 30 feet wide. After filling the trench with documents, it was covered and the disturbed earth reseeded. In instructing the bank employees to pitch the boxes of documents from the thirdstory window of the storage building into the bed of Church’s dump truck, Graham told them that the boxes contained records from a doctor’s office. The day before the examiner’s meeting with the board of directors, employees witnessed Church carrying several boxes from her office. Authorities later found and seized these boxes when they searched the Church’s home. O’Hara, “Big Bank Scandal.” 30. Securities and Exchange Commission v. Lorene Ellen Turpin and Lora K. Mc­ Kinney, U.S. District Court, Southern District of West Virginia, n.d., accessed June 24, 2010, http://www.sec.gov/. 31. Jameson, “First National Bank.” 32. The stock Apperson purchased in the late 1940s multiplied as the board periodically divided stocks. Aldah and Alecia sold portions of it to finance major expenses. Yet, Aldah held to the majority of it, depending on the yearly dividend checks. Alecia and Aldah sold all of Apperson’s stock in the late 1980s and early 1990s to finance Aldah’s long-term care as her Alzheimer’s disease progressed. 33. “High Interest Rates a Danger Sign”; “Southern West Virginia Struggling with Fallout of Keystone Closure,” State Journal, October 4, 1999, accessed July 27, 2006, http://global.factiva.com/. 34. Stephen Singer, “Millions Vanish from West Virginia Bank.” Associated Press Online, October 26, 1999, accessed July 27, 2006, http://global.factiva.com/; Bill Archer, “Keystone Mayor Faces Traumatic Town Situation,” Bluefield Daily Telegraph, September 10, 1999. 35. “Former Keystone Bank VP Testifies in Civil Case.” 36. Lawrence Messina, “Former Bank Official Testifies She Just Followed Orders,” Charleston Gazette, October 11, 2001; Martha Bryson Hodel, “Two Former Bank Execs Found Guilty of Embezzling, Looting Mentor’s Estate in West Virginia,” State Journal, October 12, 2001, accessed July 27, 2006, http://global.factiva.com/; Martha Bryson Hodel, “Judge Sentences Keystone Executives, Orders $12 Million in Restitution,” State Journal, March 28,2002, accessed July 27, 2006, http://global.factiva.com/. 37. Bill Archer, telephone conversation with Tal Stanley, July 25, 2010; Bill Archer, “Keystone Bank Officials Found Guilty on All Counts,” State Journal, October 22, 2001, accessed July 27, 2006, http://global.factiva.com/ha; Hodel, “Two Former Bank Execs Found Guilty”; Holden, “Judge Sentences.” 38. Rutherford and Lewis, “Enterprise Community Report.” Norfolk-Southern is the corporate successor to the Norfolk and Western Railway, the result of the merger between the Norfolk and Western and the Southern railways. Norfolk and Western purchased the Pocahontas Coal and Coke Company in 1901. Pocahontas Coal and Coke was the corporate successor of the Flat Top Land Association and the land companies it had acquired. With the 1901 purchase the Norfolk and Western (now the Norfolk-Southern) became the largest landowner in McDowell County, and remains

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notes to chapter 5  /  217 so. Pocahontas Coal and Coke became the Pocahontas Land Corporation in August 1939. Schust, Billion Dollar Coalfield, 24–30, 43–46. 39. Bob Schwarz, “July Rains Set Record in Mountain State,” Charleston Gazette, August 3, 2001, accessed July 28, 2006, http://infoweb.newsbank.com/. 40. Randy Coleman, “If these floods had come at night, we would be digging bodies out of these waters and not furniture,” Charleston Gazette, August 5, 2001, accessed July 28, 2006, http://infoweb.newsbank.com; Bill Archer, “High Water!” Bluefield Daily Telegraph, July 9, 2001. 41. Coleman, “If these floods had come at night”; Archer, “High Water!” 42. Coleman, “If these floods”; Randy Coleman, “Flooding Just One More Hit for Keystone,” Charleston Daily Mail, July 11, 2001, accessed July 28, 2006, http://infoweb. newsbank.com. 43. Rick Steelhammer, “Flood Relief Special Legislative Session Not Needed Yet, Wise Says,” Charleston Gazette, July 10, 2001, accessed July 28, 2006, http://infoweb .newsbank.com; Charles Owens, “Wise: ‘We Will Rebuild Flood-Torn Areas,’” Bluefield Daily Telegraph, July 14, 2001; Bill Archer, “McDowell Residents Struggle to Rebuild,” Bluefield Daily Telegraph, July 10, 2001. 44. Archer, “High Water!” 45. Tara Tuckwiller, “What’s behind the Floods?” Charletson Gazette, May 12, 2002; “Get Serious with Studies of Floods’ Causes,” editorial, Charleston Gazette, May 8, 2002, accessed July 28, 2006, http://infoweb.newsbank.com. 46. Mary Massingale, “Relocation Slow for Flood Victims,” Charleston Gazette, May 10, 2002, accessed July 28, 2006, http://infoweb.newsbank.com. 47. Ibid. 48. Marcus Wilkes, interviewed by Tal Stanley, Welch, W.Va., October 10, 2001, tape held by the author; Cannady, interview. During the 1950s and 1960s, Elizabeth Drury, a resident of Northfork, a woman of color, and a member of the West Virginia House of Delegates, led an effort to rehabilitate the image of the once notorious neighborhood. These efforts led to renaming Cinder Bottom to Middletown, but even residents of the neighborhood continue to use the former name. One of the more interesting ironies of Westfield writ large across the McDowell landscape is that of renaming Cinder Bottom as Middletown, resonant with the Lynds’ study of middle-class white America, Middletown. 49. Wilkes, interview. 50. Cannady, interview. 51. Rutherford, interview; Allen, interview; Couto, Making Democracy, xiv, 37. 52. Frank Houston, son of T. E. Houston, served on the Elkhorn District School Board from 1922–1926, part of which time he was president of the board. The Houstons were not the only coal operators to assume leadership roles in the public schools. Joseph Friedle, A History of Education in McDowell County West Virginia, 1856–1976 (Parsons, W.Va.: MacClain, 1975), 75, 141–142. 53. Corbin, Life, Work, and Rebellion, 71; Bob Schwarz, “You Could See She Would Be the One: Judger Irene Berger Punctual, Prepared, and Above All, Fair,” Charleston Gazette, February 9, 2000, accessed September 7, 2007, http://infoweb.newsbank.com. 54. Allison Barker, “School Officials Want Students to Rise Above ‘Deplorable’

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218  /  notes to chapter 5 Conditions,” Charleston Daily Mail, November 12, 2001, accessed October 2, 2007, http://infoweb.newsbank.com. 55. Franki Rutherford, telephone conversation with Tal Stanley, July 7, 2010. 56. Eric Eyre, “McDowell Residents Fight to Save High Schools,” Charleston Gazette, March 28, 2003, accessed September 8, 2007, http://infoweb.newsbank.com. 57. “McDowell County Education Survey Results,” Welch Daily News, n.d., clipping from Big Creek People in Action, Caretta, W.Va.; Andrea Bowman and Philip deFelice, McDowell County Education Listening Project, Community-Based Research Report, Big Creek People in Action, Caretta, W.Va., October 18, 2001. 58. Eric Eyre, “State Takes Over McDowell School System: Mark Manchin Selected to Fix ‘Deplorable, Filthy, Unsafe and Disgusting’ Conditions,” Charleston Gazette, November 8, 2001, accessed September 7, 2007, http://infoweb.newsbank.com. 59. Bowman and deFelice, Listening Project. 60. Board of Education, Education Performance Audit, November 2001. 61. Ibid., 11,104, 108. 62. Ibid., 27, 73, 76, 77. 63. Ibid., 10–12, 31–32, 65, 96–97. 64. Ibid., 19, 24, 47–50, 62–63, 75, 102, 109, 114, 131–139. 65. Bowman and deFelice, Listening Project. 66. Ibid. 67. Eric Eyre, “McDowell Principal Suspended: Allegations Termed ‘Very Serious,’” Charleston Gazette, May 9, 2002, accessed September 7, 2007, http://infoweb.newsbank .com. 68. “Former Principal’s Trial Resumes,” Charleston Gazette, November 6, 2003; “Ex-Principal Convicted in Assaults on Boys Dies,” Charleston Gazette, December 4, 2003, accessed September 29, 2007, http://infoweb.newsbank.com. 69. Editorial, Charleston Daily Mail, January 23, 2004, accessed September 29, 2007, http://infoweb.newsbank.com. 70. Barker, “School Officials”; Board of Education, Education Performance Audit, 140–144. 71. Board of Education, Education Performance Audit, 140–144. 72. Bowman and deFelice, Listening Project. 73. “McDowell County Education Survey Results,” Welch Daily News, n.d., clipping from Big Creek People in Action, Caretta, W.Va. 74. Eric Eyre and Scott Finn, “‘A License to Steal?’ After Floods, Lax Oversight Leads to Questionable Spending,” Charleston Gazette, November 3, 2002, accessed October 5, 2007, http://infoweb.newsbank.com. 75. Ibid. 76. Eyre and Finn, “‘A License to Steal?’; Eric Eyre and Scott Finn, “Businessman Pleads Guilty to Kickbacks for Contracts,” Charleston Gazette, March 1, 2005, accessed October 5, 2007, http://infoweb.newsbank.com. 77. Williams, Marxism and Literature (1977; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 206–212. For Raymond Williams, creative practice is rooted in social and historical processes, such as place. Because place is a dynamic social, environmental, cultural, historical process, it is appropriate to think of place as a creative practice that

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notes to chapters 5 and 6  /  219 can result in the development of a new ways of understanding and ordering Westfield’s relations, the telling of ignored and nearly lost stories, the imagination of new ways of being and acting in a place, unbound by Westfield.

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Chapter 6. Through the Deep Waters 1. Newbern Community Improvement Club, records, scrapbooks, and minutes, held at the community center, Newbern, Va. 2. “How Firm a Foundation,” The United Methodist Hymnal (Nashville: The United Methodist Publishing House, 1989), 529. This hymn was among Aldah’s favorites. 3. The man who signed Aldah’s bond was Lacy Trinkle, of Dublin, Va. Trinkle was coowner of Trinkle and Dobyns Construction Company, and a member of the Dublin Methodist Church. In cases in which a wife died and the husband was the survivor, no such laws were in place. 4. Stanley, 1994 interview. 5. When the community club appointed the committee to oversee the installation of the waterline, the club named Apperson as its chair. He died before the committee had its first meeting. 6. Daisy N. Williams, description of community work, n.d., Williams-Apperson Collection. 7. Mullen, Listening to Old Voices, 270–271. 8. Storytelling connects the present moment, past experience, and the future. Mullen, Listening to Old Voices, 19, 269. 9. “The preservation or construction of a sense of place [through storytelling] . . . is an active moment in the passage from memory to hope, from past to future . . . the reconstruction of places can reveal hidden memories that hold out the prospects for different futures.” David Harvey, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 306. 10. Arguably, for both Aldah’s immigrant neighbors in the Poco field and for Aldah, “food was a form of emotional ballast for the uprooted.” Ziegelman, 97 Orchard, xii. 11. More than the social and cultural world inhabited, more than bearing witness to her efforts “to make beauty and meaning in the everyday world, recipe cards and cookbooks are one of the means by which [Aldah] wrote of her life.” Theophano, Eat My Words, 2–6, 117–154. 12. Stanley, 1994, 2002, 2009 interviews. 13. For Aldah, these recipes, the cookbooks she kept, and the notes she made were all ways of “writing the place into being.” Through her cooking, she came “to defy, delimit, manipulate, and infiltrate the social, cultural, and geographic boundaries” of Westfield. Theophano, Eat My Words, 268. 14. Harvey, Justice, Nature, 304–306. 15. Ibid., 306. 16. Ruth Evelyn Williams Hardy and Nancy Williams Akers, 1995 interview. 17. Williams, Marxism and Literature, 212. 18. Rutherford, interview. 19. Rutherford, interview; Allen, interview. 20. Rutherford, interview.

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220  /  notes to chapter 6 21. Much as with the women and organizations discussed in Virginia Seitz’s Women, Development, and Communities, while Westfield “marginalized” these women, they organized in response to the structures that threatened the security of their families and communities. Virginia Seitz, Women, Development, and Communities for Empowerment in Appalachia (Albany: University of New York Press, 1995), 3, 6, 37. 22. Seitz, Women, Development, and Communities, 34, 37; Mary Ann Hinsdale, Helen M. Lewis, S. Maxine Waller, It Comes from the People: Community Development and Local Theology (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995), 336. Studies of similar movements and efforts point to the ways women understand themselves as inseparable from the place and the community and their understanding that they act not only for the present but for future generations. 23. Organizing to meet new challenges requires an inclusive common ground; place understood as a complexly formed, ongoing dynamic, social reality serves this function. Eve S. Weinbaum, To Move a Mountain: Fighting the Global Economy in Appalachia (New York: New Press, 2004), 263. Women’s decisions to enter into struggles for profound change are grounded in intense concern for the well being of their family; the language of family and kinship shapes the struggles and the debates. Seitz, Women, Development, and Communities, 33–34. 24. This was the first time the McDowell County Board of Education ceded a former school building to a community, and it became a model for similar property transfers throughout McDowell. Rutherford, 2010 telephone conversation. 25. Charles Owens, “Caretta Center Refurbished,” Bluefield Daily Telegraph, January 21, 1993; “McDowell Day Care Opening,” Bluefield Daily Telegraph, July 2, 1993; “Center Opens in Caretta,” Bluefield Daily Telegraph, July 13, 1993; all copies on file at Big Creek People in Action, Caretta, W.Va. Rutherford, 1994. 26. Big Creek People in Action, Mission Statement and Vision Statement. 27. Like the work of the Ivanhoe Civic League of Ivanhoe, in Wythe County, Va., the women of BCPIA understood that before educational opportunities would be available to prepare those from outside Westfield to be autonomous, productive, and active citizens, the educational system would need radical change. Seitz, Women, Development, and Communities, 117–119; Ivanhoe Civic League, interviewed by Tal Stanley, Ivanhoe, Va., March 21, 1995, tape held by the author. 28. Rutherford, 2010 conversation; Big Creek People in Action staff, Franki Rutherford, Dyanne Spriggs, Marsha Timpson, Kem Short, interviewed by Tal Stanley, Caretta, W.Va., June 29, 2007, tape held by the author. 29. West Virginia Library Commission, “Literacy Levels in West Virginia Counties,” in “The State of Literacy in America,” The National Institute for Literacy, comp., 1998, copy supplied by Big Creek People in Action. 30. Marsha Timpson, Take Me Home Country Roads, unpublished paper, n.d., held by the author. 31. West Virginia Kids Count Fund, West Virginia Kids Count Data Book, 2007, 24–25. The indexes used to determine rankings were percent of low birth-weight babies; infant mortality rate; child birth rate; percent of teens who are high school dropouts; percent of teens not attending school and not working; percent of children living in families where no parent has full-time, year-round employment; percent of children in poverty; and percent of families with children headed by a single parent.

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notes to chapter 6  /  221 32. Big Creek People in Action, The Citizenship Center: Service Learning and Its Sustainability at BCPIA, Caretta, W.Va., November 2004, 2. Resonating with Richard Couto’s use of social capital and mediating structures, the work of organizations such as BCPIA is to build a consciousness among people, formerly excluded by Westfield habits and structures, that they have the potential and the abilities to make substantive civic contributions and they can be effective citizens. Couto, Making Democracy, 199–203; Seitz, Women, Development, and Communities, 97. “[The coal company] provided a leader for the Boy Scout troop and a recreation director and when the company left, there [w]as nothing. . . . We had to develop voluntary organizations for the community where people could practice democracy. With the coal companies, there was never any chance for that.” Allen, interview. 33. Council of the Southern Mountains is an anti-poverty social service agency responsible for a range of government programs in McDowell, with roots in the War on Poverty and the social activism of the 1960s. Tug River Community Health Clinic is a community health clinic with branches in several towns in McDowell, and has been in operation since the 1970s. McDowell County Action Network (McCAN) was a countywide initiative given impetus under the United States Department of Agriculture’s Empowerment Zone project in the late 1980s. Elkhorn Valley Youth Development Center was located in Keystone and was active in the late 1980s through the mid-1990s. Team Effort Against Ruining Southern West Virginia (TEARS/WV) was a grassroots effort to stop the dumping of out-of-state garbage in abandoned mine shafts in McDowell. Stop Abusive Family Environments (SAFE) is a shelter for women and children who are victims of abuse as well as a number of other initiatives designed to address the economic and social needs of women in the McDowell area. 34. Hinsdale, Lewis, Waller, It Comes from the People, 333. 35. Allen, interview. 36. Rutherford, interview. 37. Allen, interview. 38. Rutherford, 2010 telephone conversation; BCPIA staff, interview. 39. Marsha Timpson has shared with me her story in parts and pieces over many years, recounting it to me in detail on two occasions. Her story also appeared in a five-part series in the Huffington Post. David Mixner and James McGreevey, “The Amazing Marsha Timpson,” Parts 1 and 2, Huffington Post, January 11, 2006, January 14, 2006, accessed June 13, 2006, www.huffingtonpost.com. 40. BCPIA staff, interview; Mixner and McGreevey, “Amazing Marsha Timpson.” 41. BCPIA staff, interview. 42. BCPIA staff, interview; Mixner and McGreevey, “Amazing Marsha Timpson.” 43. BCPIA staff, interview; Couto, Making Democracy, 175, 236–237; Seitz, Women, Development, and Communities, 97. 44. Big Creek People in Action, Caretta, W.Va., Annual Report, 2002, 14. 45. BCPIA staff, interview. 46. Mills, Sociological Imagination, 3–13; Reid and Taylor, Recovering the Commons, 4, 8; Douglas Reichert Powell, Critical Regionalism: Connecting Politics and Culture in the American Landscape (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2007), 18.

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222  /  notes to chapter 7

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Chapter 7. “He Always Wanted a Cadillac” 1. Stanley, 1994 interview. 2. Cadillac advertisements, U.S. News and World Report, April 4, 1952; Time Magazine, May 12, 1952. 3. Peter Behrens, The Law of Dreams (Hanover, N.H.: Steerforth Press, 2006), 289. 4. Rutherford, interview. 5. David Huddle, interviewed by Tal Stanley, Burlington, Vt., September 19, 1994; tape and transcript held by the author. 6. David Huddle, interview; Lee Smith, interviewed by Tal Stanley, Hindman, Ky., August 1, 1994; tape and transcript held by the author. 7. Weinbaum, To Move a Mountain, 263, 265. 8. Harvey, Justice, Nature, 96–113, 316, 320; Reid and Taylor, Recovering the Commons, 4; Powell, Critical Regionalism, 18–23. 9. Jackson, interview. 10. Cherry, interview. 11. Allen, interview; Fisher, interview; Rutherford, interview; BCPIA staff, interview. 12. Ibid. 13. BCPIA staff, interview. 14. Federal Judge Glen Williams, Big Stone Gap, Va., in Anne Lewis, Justice in the Coalfields (Whitesburg, Ky.: Appalshop, 1995), 57 min. 15. Allen, interview. 16. Apperson property deed, August 7, 1945. 17. Welch, “The Pocahontas Flat Top Coal Field.” 18. “An historic disregard toward planning in the coal communities has fostered a lack of commitment to addressing the problem. . . .” (quoting Franki Rutherford). John Gaventa, Lashelle Norris, Janice Morrissey, Highlander Research and Education Center Staff, Dismantling the Barriers: Rural Communities, Public Participation, and the Solid Waste Policy Dilemma (New Market, Tenn.: Highlander Research and Education Center, 1993), part 3, p. 13. 19. Raymond Williams, Toward 2000 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1983), 249–250; Raymond Williams, Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism (London: Verso, 1989), 242. 20. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Berman Ramos (New York: Herder and Herder, 1970), 57, 66–74. 21. A model of this educational practice is available in the work of the Ivanhoe Civic League. Hinsdale, Lewis, and Waller, It Comes from the People, 329. 22. Mullen, Listening to Old Voices, 269, 270–271. 23. Wendell Berry, What Are People For? (Berkley: North Point Press, 1990), 48–92. 24. Harvey, Justice, Nature, 304–306. 25. I am indebted here to Andy Kegley of Wythe County, Virginia, for a continuous twenty-five-year conversation about place, memory, and change. He found an old box, long in his family, with the fragments of the life and memory of William Kegley, who died as a Confederate prisoner of war in a federal prison in Brooklyn, New York, written on scraps of faded paper, somehow making their way back to his widow. 26. Wendell Berry, Remembering (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1988).

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notes to chapters 7 and 8  /  223 27. BCPIA staff, interview. 28. Allen, interview. 29. Williams, Marxism and Literature, 208–212.

Chapter 8. The Poco Field: Elegy and Ferocious Hope

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1. C. T. Apperson to Aldah W. Apperson, August 18, 1940; August 20, 1940A; August 20, 1940B. 2. Aldah W. Apperson to C. T. Apperson, August 21, 1940. 3. http://www.nscorp.com, accessed October 23, 2010. 4. Burns, Bringing Down the Mountains, 205. 5. Timpson, interview. 6. Rutherford, 2007 interview. 7. Burns, Bringing Down the Mountains, 33, 58–59. 8. Mark Helprin, Memoir from Antproof Case (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1995; Harper Collins Perennial, 2002), 513–514. 9. BCPIA staff, interview. 10. Ibid. 11. Theobald, Teaching the Commons, 7–31, emphasis original. Berry, Jayber Crow, 210. Herb Reid and Betsy Taylor, Recovering the Commons: Democracy, Place, and Global Justice (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 8. Between these three there is a consistency of meanings, though terms may differ. 12. Jo Carson and a community coalition, Higher Ground, directed by Gerard Stropnicky, 2005. 13. Connie Owens, community coordinator for Higher Ground, quoted in Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College, Appalachian Center website, accessed September 12, 2010 http://southeast.kctcs.edu/. 14. Lewis, Justice in the Coalfields. 15. Spike Lee, When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (Brooklyn, NY: 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks, 2006), 4 hrs.

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Index

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Note: page numbers in italics represent illustrations abiding, 184–85, 191–94. See also citizenship of place; home African Americans, 50–51, 58, 73–76, 79, 86–92. See also Cinder Bottom; racial segregation and discrimination air pollution, 47 Allen, Jeff, 144–48, 166, 169, 174, 184, 193 “American Dream”: ambiguity, 7, 60; “becoming somebody,” 136, 137; consumerism basis, 156–57, 174–75; cultural forces, 3–4; freedom, 158–60; “making something of yourself,” 135–36; Poco Field, 23–24; salvation by individual achievement, 214n80. See also consumer culture; individualism; middle-class values and status American way of life, 1, 2, 3–4, 55, 95–96, 167–69, 173–74. See also Westfield as symbol Americorps literacy program, 148 Appalachian regional identity, 1–2, 158–59, 165–66 Apperson, Aldah Williams (grandmother): abiding, 193; on Apperson’s death, 97; cooking and food, 130, 219nn10–11, 219n13; “at home,” 1933, 18; as keeper and server of place, 128–36, 152, 169, 188; in Keystone, West Virginia, 68, 69; the Koppers Company identity and values, 66–67, 71, 73–79; at Koppers Store Number Ten, 65, 67; Koppers Store Number Ten bookkeeper, 66; marriage, 66; middle class status, 79–88; in Newbern, Virginia, 68; Newbern Community Improvement Club, 188; Newbern community participation and service, 128–36; nickname, 209n2; place and service as journey of hope, 151, 152; political affiliation, 76; Pulaski County, Virginia Life Saving Crew, 127–28, 129; recipes, 79, 84, 132–34, 219n10; social and organizational

middle class activities, 79–80; struggles upon return to Virginia, 128–29, 219n3; uncertainty and foreboding of Westfield years, 90–94; Westfield home ownership, 82–87; widowhood, 127–28 Apperson, Alecia (mother), 79, 90–94, 90, 91, 92 Apperson, Calvin Talmage Jr. (C. T.). See Apperson, Tal (grandfather) Apperson, Tal (grandfather): aloneness of later years, 186–87; Cadillac dealership anecdote, 154–56, 155; coal hauling business, 80–82, 88–90; death, 214n84; departure from Keystone, 96–97; district manager, 70, 71, 79; draft status, 212n39; early Keystone days, 209n1; as embodiment of American middle-class dream, 23–24, 95, 209n10, 210–11n22; financial contradictions of Westfield years, 88–90; journey to Keystone, 64–65; in Keystone, West Virginia, 68–70; the Koppers Company identity and values, 66–67, 71, 71, 73–79, 210n9; Koppers Keystone Store Company, 62; marriage to Aldah Williams, 66; misunderstanding of social and cultural reality, 95–96; Newbern, Virginia, 68; Newbern, Virginia final years, 97; Newbern Community Improvement Club, 130; nickname, 209n2; 1937 letters home to Aldah, 20, 21, 24, 80–82, 186–87, 209n2; placelessness, 127; political affiliation, 76, 210–11nn22–23; postwar retail businesses, 80–81, 213n66; Richmond, Virginia efforts, 96; store manager, 63, 65, 77–78; tensions, contradictions, and tragedy, 101–2, 176–78; uncertainty and foreboding of Westfield years, 90–94; Westfield home ownership, 82–87; young man with a future, 64–65, 69 Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency, 42–43 Bartley, West Virginia, 116, 152–53 Behrens, Peter, 158 Berry, Wendell, 186

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Big Creek District. See McDowell County; specific towns of McDowell County Big Creek High School, 120, 122, 142–43 Big Creek Listening Project, 118–26, 122, 123, 189 Big Creek People in Action: author association, 197n16; Caretta Community Center, 180, 220n24; challenges and struggles, 183–84; citizenship of place, 188; early definition of people’s relationship to place, 141; fighting for government accountability to people of the place, 142–43; formation and incorporation, 140; founders, 173; funding and support, 146–47; leaders and exemplars, 144–53; legal battles, 142–43; member composition and common ground unity, 141–42; political and civic leadership, 143–44; property ownership v. place-based ethic, 147–48; stories of place, 185–87; Strong Families Program, 143–44; victories against education system bureaucrats, 142–43; vision, 141, 146–47; women, 137–38, 220nn21–24; Young Leader’s Action Council, 143–44. See also Big Creek Listening Project; Citizenship Center: Service Learning and Its Sustainability at BCPIA, The Bluefield Telegraph, 59 Bluestone Coal Corporation, 181 Bluestone River, 25 “Bottom, The,” 50–52 Bottom Creek, West Virginia, 115 Bowman, Andrea, 188–91 Bradshaw, West Virginia, 116 Brown’s Creek, 25 built environment, 2, 144 Cadillac dealership anecdote, 154–56, 155 Cannady, Darryl, 117–18, 193, 215n24 Capehart, Harry J., 50 capitalism, 44, 96. See also coal mining company operating methods; consumer culture; First National Bank of Keystone Caretta, West Virginia: as company town, 41; contemporary description reflecting history, 180; economic failures and losses, 136–38; floods of 21st century, 116, 150–53; government public service and education failures, 137, 138–40; postflood adoption of place-based values and practices, 127. See also Big Creek People in Action Caretta Community Center, 140–41, 150,

180, 185, 220n24. See also Big Creek People in Action Carter, George L., 41 Cherokees, 32–33 Cherry, Billie, 103, 104, 106–12, 117, 168, 181 Christie, Jack, 103 Church, Terry Lee (Fisher), 103, 104, 110–12, 168 Cinder Bottom: contemporary description, 181; Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), 118; floods of 21st century, 112–13, 115, 116–17; moral hypocrisy of company management, 51; racial and class segregation evidence, 50–52, 86–88; rehabilitation efforts of 1950s and 1960s, 217n48; valuation, 168. See also Keystone, West Virginia Citizenship Center: Service Learning and Its Sustainability at BCPIA, The, 144, 221n32 citizenship of place, 34, 112, 187–91. See also place-based approaches and practices classifications of environment, 2 class segregation, 58, 79 clear-cutting timber, 38, 40, 113, 179, 188, 199n4 coal mining company operating methods: anti-union organization methods, 41–43; career achievement requirements, 211–12n36; coal miners’ wages pre-unionization, 205n82; coal price statistics, 205m81; company towns, 39–44, 204nn69–70; floods of 21st century relationship, 118; irresponsibility and immorality, 43–44; monopolization of authority, 39–44; natural environment scarring, 113; overproduction, 43–44; political control, 41–42; profit margins, 39; public relations and advertising, 40; racial segregation and discrimination, 58, 73–76, 209n20; short-term thinking and planning, 43–44; transport systems and profits, 39–40; ultimate sale to out-ofstate corporations, 43–44; valuation of place, 40–41 Coalwood, West Virginia, 116, 127, 140, 152–53 community v. place, 2 company operating methods. See coal mining company operating methods company towns, 39–43. See also Cinder Bottom; coal mining company operating methods; specific towns of McDowell County

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“Concerned Citizens for Better Education,” 125 Conley, Phil, 40, 204n60 connections of place, 162–66, 186–87. See also home; place-based approaches and practices consumer culture: as American, 3, 6–7, 60– 63, 175; as “American Dream,” 156–57; anecdote epitomizing, 154–56; corporate motivations, 59–63; as failed map for journey of life, 156–57; individualism connection, 95, 144, 172; “making do” v., 19, 135–46; placelessness relationship, 159; place v., 163; Westfield as manifestation, 55, 60–63, 175. See also “American Dream”; middle-class values and status; Westfield home ownership contemporary efforts for place, 184–85. See also Big Creek People in Action content overview, 4–5 corporate operations. See coal mining company operating methods corporate profit statistics, 39–40 Council of the Southern Mountains, 144, 221n33 Critical Regionalism: Connecting Politics and Culture in the American Landscape (Powell), 191 Crozer, Samuel A., 202n44 Crozer Land Company, 36, 52, 202n44 Cucumber, West Virginia, 179 Davis, Ben, 80–81, 93 Davis Furniture, 80–81, 93 Delaney, Frank, 4 Delawares, 32–33 democracy, 96. See also “American Dream”; American way of life; individualism Depression, 19 Dickenson County, Virginia, 190 Dublin Methodist Church, 129, 131, 173, 193 Eastern Gas and Fuel, 181 Eckman, John, 41 Eckman, West Virginia, 41, 114, 180 economic valuation, 45–47. See also coal mining company operating methods educational system: Big Creek People in Action, 220n7, 220n31; corruption and patronage, 123, 125–26; faculty standards and performance, 121–22; failure to educate for life outside coal mining, 119–20;

funding statistics, 123; legacy of mining industry power and middle class values, 118–19; racial and sexual discrimination, 125–26; school conditions and limitations, 121–22; student test scores, 120–21, 125; West Virginia Office of Education Performance Audit, 120–27 elegy, 184 Elkhorn, West Virginia, 38 Elkhorn Creek, 25, 30, 33, 36–38 Elkhorn Valley: association with Poco Field and “American Dream,” 23–24; floods of 21st century, 114–16; incorporated towns, 41; post-flood adoption of place-based values and practices, 127; scarred natural environment, 113; transformation during Gilded Age, 40. See also coal mining company operating methods; Elkhorn Creek; specific towns of McDowell County Elkhorn Valley Development Corporation, 108, 215n24 Elkhorn Valley Youth Development Center, 144, 221n33 Emory & Henry College, 189 Empowerment Zone project (Department of Agriculture), 221n33 Farmer, Francis Marion (great-great-grandfather), 12–13 Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), 118 Felts, Tom, 42–43 Fighting Back in Appalachia (Fisher), 191 financial crisis. See First National Bank of Keystone First National Bank of Keystone: Apperson stock, 216n32; banking deregulation and unprecedented growth, 103–4; bank-town mutually dependent interconnections, 106–10; betrayal of place, 168; board of directors, 106–8, 214n4, 215n22; civic loyalty and boosterism, 215n17; contemporary description, 181; early history, 103; failure and closure, 110–12, 182–83, 216n29; financial importance to Keystone and McDowell County, 104–6, 107; moral and social values of Keystone, 110–12; political aspects and affiliation, 105–10, 214n7; as reflection of global consumer culture, 104–6; restructuring, 103–4 Fisher, Steve, 191 Flat Top Coal Land Association, 36, 38–39, 202n44, 203n45

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228  /  index Flat Top Mountain, 25, 30, 36–38. See also coal mining company operating methods floods of 21st century, 114–16, 150–51, 183 forest destruction, 38, 40, 113, 179, 188, 199n4 freedom, 158–60. See also individualism; placelessness Fries, Virginia, 189

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Giardina, Denise, 22 Gilded Age, 42–43, 44 Goad, Raymond, 80–81 Graham, Michael, 110–12 “Granny’s House,” 12, 18, 13–22. See also home Great Depression, 19 Great Road, the, 11–12, 197n1 Guyandotte River, 25 Hale, Fred, 129 Harlan County, Kentucky, 189–90 Harmon, Jim, 146 Helping Overcome Poverty’s Existence (HOPE), 189 Helprin, Mark, 184 Higher Ground (community drama production), 189–90 home, 13–22, 18, 126, 149–50. See also citizenship of place; place-based approaches and practices HOPE (Helping Overcome Poverty’s Existence), 189 Hotchkiss, Jedidiah, 24–25, 27–28, 35 Houston, David F., 42, 56, 180 Houston, Frank, 42 Houston, Howard H., 41 Houston, Miriam, 42 Houston, Thomas Edgar: background, 38; coal company ownership outside McDowell County, 39; Keystone mine acquisition, 56; land leasing and acquisition, 38–39, 203nn55–56, 204n70; vestiges, 178, 179, 180 Houston Collieries Company, 39, 206n87, 208n2 Indian Creek, 25 Indian Ridge Watershed Association, 115 indigenous peoples, 32–34, 201n33, 201–2nn35–36 individualism: “becoming somebody,” 136, 137; consumer culture connection, 144,

195; limitations, 159; “making something of yourself,” 135–36; mobility, 17, 59, 157, 160–61, 167, 191; Westfield connection, 95–96, 159, 172. See also “American Dream”; consumer culture; individualism of place; middle-class values and status individualism of place. See place-based approaches and practices industrial age values, 45–47. See capitalism; middle-class values and status intradependence, 9, 186, 187, 188, 190, 192. See also citizenship of place; place-based approaches and practices Ireland (Delaney), 9 Iroquois, 32–33 Jayber Crow, 186 Johnston, Alan “Cathead,” 112–13 Just Connections, 188 Justice in the Coalfields (film: Appalshop), 190 Keystone, West Virginia, 48, 49, 53; African American population, 50–51, 58, 73–76, 79, 86–92; air pollution, 47; Apperson family photos, 65, 67, 68–70; association with Poco Field and “American Dream,” 23–24; class segregation, 58, 79; construction and layout, 47; contemporary description, 180–81; creek, 47; current routes to and through, 179–82; as defined by the Koppers Company, 67, 73–79; economic valuation as guiding principle, 45–47; Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), 118; First National Bank of Keystone, 103–12; floods of 21st century, 114, 115, 116–17; industrial values reflection, 45–47; landscape, 47; light, 46; Main Street (U.S. Route 52), 47, 49; middle class, 78; middle-class consumer values, 95–96; middle-class status organizations, 211n33; naming and incorporation, 41; “New Era” of social and cultural values, 59–63; 19th century valuation, 45–47; noise level, 48; original environment and natural history, 45–47; political ironies, 50; post-flood adoption of place-based values and practices, 127; postwar struggles of mining industry and unions, 90–93; racial and class segregation, 50–51, 58; setting, 45–47; social and cultural realities, 93–94; soot and dark dust coating, 47; tension and contradic-

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index  /  229 tion defining, 54; as “wide open place,” 49–52, 207n105; World War II years, 80–81. See also Cinder Bottom; Westfield Addition, the; Westfield as symbol Keystone Coal and Coke, 39, 45, 48, 181 Keystone Hardware and Furniture, 80–81 Keystone mine, 45, 56, 56–57, 74 Keystone mine explosion, 58–59 Keystone Mortgage Company, 110 Keystone National Bank. See First National Bank of Keystone Keystone United Methodist Church, 144–45 Kimball, Frederick: coal mining potential exploration route, 200n11; as Gilded Age exemplar, 38, 40, 42; land acquisition, 27– 28, 35; land exploitation for coal revenue purposes, 37–38; Norfolk and Western Railway, 203n46; revenue visions, 31 Kimball, West Virginia, 114, 115, 127, 180 King Coal Company, The, 39 Koppers Company, the, 71, 72, 74; acquisition of Houston properties in Elkhorn Valley, 45; employee identity and middleclass values source, 57, 66–67, 73–79; as gateway into “American Dream,” 23–24, 64–65; Houston District, 78; racial segregation, 73–76; railroad purchase, 206n88 Koppers’s Keystone Store, 61. See also Koppers Store Number Ten Koppers Store Number Ten, 65, 67, 70, 75, 77; “check off system,” 209n17; consumer culture birth and growth reflection, 211n25; contemporary description, 181; expansions, 76–79; produce counter, 74; workers’ subordination in consumption, 208n15 Koppers Stores, Inc., 61–63. See also coal mining company operating methods; Koppers Company, the Koppers Stores Sales Club pin, 57 Landgraff, West Virginia, 114, 180 “landscape of grief,” 145 “laripin,” 16, 198n16 Laurel Creek, 25 “leaving people, a,” 159 Lee, Howard B., 52 Lewis, Anne, 190 Lewis, John L., 94 lifestyle. See American way of life; Westfield as symbol Lightfoot, Thomas E., 60–61, 73–74

Main Street (U.S. Route 52), 49 Maitland, West Virginia, 41, 115, 180 Manchin, Mark, 126 Masonic Lodge, 54 McConnell, J. Knox, 103, 104, 105, 109, 214n7 McDowell, James, 34–35 McDowell County: Apperson’s last journey, 98–102; banking and real estate disaster, 103–12; coal-mining industry failure and population decline, 136–38; coal production statistics including Great Depression, 205n79; conflict and alienation in settlement and history, 34–35; contemporary description reflecting history, 178–84; contemporary people-supported projects, leaders and efforts, 143–53; as creator of a “leaving people,” 159; current routes to and through, 179–82; description and identification by Welch, 24–26; economic failures and losses, 136–38; educational system, 118–26; as elegy, 184; failures of Westfield and middle-class consumerism, 136–40, 178–84; floods of 21st century, 114–16, 150–51; forest destruction, 38, 49, 113, 178, 179, 188; geologic history, 200n14, 200n19; Gilded Age, 40, 178; as home, 149–50; illiteracy statistics, 122; incorporated towns, 41; late decades of 20th century, 136–38; 1950s hard times, 98–100; ownership patterns between 19th and 20th centuries, 113; political and social conflicts, 34–36; post-flood adoption of place-based values and practices, 126; scarred natural environment, 113; song about destruction, 112–13; strip mining, 178; as travel route juncture, 33; unemployment rates of late 20th century, 137–38; watersheds, 180 McDowell County Action Network (McCan), 144, 221n33 McDowell County Education Listening Project, 122, 123, 189 McDowell County Republican Organization, 50–51 McDowell County Schools, 118–26 McDowell Times, 50–51 Meadowview Health Clinic and Community Center, 189 Memoir from Antproof Case (Helprin), 184 memories, 169–73, 185 Mercer County, 25

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middle-class values and status: Apperson’s Westfield identities, 57, 99, 101; conflicts and insecurities, 7, 87–97; corporate identity, 71, 73, 210n9; destruction of community sense, 95–96; hope for, 66–67; as identity provider, 55; as insured by education rather than property, 213n65; “making do” v., 19, 135; mobility, 17, 101, 160–61, 173, 175; rules and trappings, 68, 69, 78–79, 99; segregation and divisions, 73–76, 156–57; striving toward, 66–67; Westfield as symbol, 7. See also American way of life; consumer culture; individualism; Westfield as symbol Middle States Coal Company, 39 mining company operating methods. See coal mining company operating methods mobility, 17, 59, 157, 160–61, 167. See also American way of life; placelessness monopolies, 39–40 Mount Pleasant Methodist Church, 131 Muddy Water (Johnston), 112–13 Muncy, Herbert F., 123 narrative, 169–73, 185, 219n9 National Industrial Stores Association, 61–63 National Industrial Stores Convention, 76–77 National Recovery Association (NRA), 62, 208n16 native peoples, 32–34, 201n33, 201–2nn35– 36 natural environment, 2 Newbern, Virginia, 11–12, 18, 128–36, 198–99n20 Newbern Charter and by-laws, 197n1 Newbern Community Improvement Club, 127, 152, 173, 184–85, 188, 193 Newbern house, 17–18, 18 New Deal, 61–62 “New Era” of social and cultural values, 59–63, 208n11 1950s hard times, 101–2 Norfolk and Western Railway, 27–28, 36–37 Norfolk-Southern, 113, 147, 179, 203n45, 203n47, 216–17n38 Northfork, West Virginia, 115, 181, 182 NRA (National Recovery Association), 62, 208n16 Olga Coal Company, 137, 138

Olmstead, West Virginia, 41 “ordinary” people’s representations and records, 15–17. See also citizenship of place; place-based approaches and practices “overburden,” 113 overviews, 5–10 Pais, Elio and Julia, 82 Pais, Emmanuel and Elena, 82 Pais residence in Westfield addition, 83 Panther, West Virginia, 116 Pittston Coal Company strike, 190 place-based approaches and practices: abiding, 184–85, 191–94; connection, 162–66, 169–70; contemporary efforts, 184–85; creativity, 218–19n77; custom and choice alternatives, 174; education broadening, 169–70, 175; explained, 2–5, 9–10; freedom and ambition reinterpretation, 166–68; historic roots, 171; home, 16, 17–18, 20–22, 20, 126, 149–50; hope restoration, 169–70; McDowell County after the flood, 126–27; memory and story rediscovery and revaluation, 169, 170–73; need for models and maps to develop, 214n83; “ordinary” people’s representations and records, 15–17; place elements reunited, 168–69; place v. community, 2; realities creating, 2–3; re-making American individualism and consumer culture, 166–75; “re-membering,” 171–72; shortterm consumption and place reexamination, 168–69; stories of place, 169–73, 185, 219n9; as unifying people, 156–57; v. economic valuation as controlling philosophy, 40–41; v. valuation of placed based on profit, 40–41; work reimagined, 174–75. See also Big Creek People in Action; home place defined, 2 placelessness: as American, 158–61; consumerism relationship, 3, 55, 60–63, 157, 163; contemporary description, 3–4; spirituality of place v., 166; varying causes, 3. See also “American Dream”; middle-class values and status place v. community, 2 Pocahontas Coal and Coke Company (PCC), 38–39, 203n45 Pocahontas Coal Operators Association, 40, 42–43. See also coal mining company operating methods

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Pocahontas Formation, 30, 200n22 Pocahontas Land Corporation, 113, 216–17n38 Poco Field, the: archaeological sites, 32–33; coal production increase statistics before 1929, 42–43; coal quality, 30–31; early descriptions, 24–25; early political and social conflicts, 34–36; Elkhorn Creek, 30, 33, 36–38; first maps, 24–25; as gateway into the “American Dream,” 23–24; geologic history, 23–24, 28–30; human history before mining, 32–35; land acquisition, 27–28; natural ecological diversity and beauty, 25–28; overproduction and price cutting, 30–42; prevalence of natural water, 27; watersheds, 31; Welch exploration, 27–28 pollution, 47. See also coal mining company operating methods Powell, Douglas Reichert, 191 pride of place, 162–63. See also citizenship of place Pulaski County, Virginia, 10, 19, 27, 128, 129 Pulaski County, Virginia Life Saving Crew, 128–30, 129 racial segregation and discrimination, 58, 73–76, 86–92, 125–26. See also Cinder Bottom; Westfield Addition, the Recovering the Commons: Democracy, Place, and Global Justice (Reid and Taylor), 191 Reid, Herb, 186, 191 “re-membering,” 171–72 Roberts, Kenneth, 126 Rock Cliff Coal and Coke, 39 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 61–62 Rotary Club, 54 Russell County, Virginia, 190 Rutherford, Franki, 145–48, 150–51, 170–71, 183, 185, 193 Second Sterling Corporation, 181 Shawnees, 32–34, 201n33, 201–2nn35–36 Short, Kem, 150, 185 Sodom and Gomorrah of Today; or, The History of Keystone, West Virginia, 51–52. See also Cinder Bottom Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College, 189–90 Southern West Virginia HIV/AIDS Alliance, 117

spirituality of place, 164–66. See also home; place-based approaches and practices Spriggs, Dyanne, 150, 185 Staples, J. W., 71, 72, 79, 81–82, 96, 212n46 Steel, Edward T., 27–28 Stop Abusive Family Environments (SAFE), 144, 221n33 stories of place, 169–73, 185 Strong Families Program, 143–44 Superior, West Virginia, 115 Taft-Hartley Act invocations of late 1940s, 90–93, 213n73 Taylor, Betsy, 186, 191 Tazewell County, Virginia, 19, 25, 29, 33, 34, 36 Team Effort against Ruining Southern West Virginia (TEARS/WV), 144, 146–47, 221n33 text content overviews, 5–10 Theobald, Paul, 9, 186 Timpson, Marsha, 148–51, 169, 173, 174, 185–86, 193 Tri-City Housing Development, 115 Tug Fork River, 25, 30 Tug River Community Health Clinic, 144, 221n33 Umberger, Paul R., 61–63, 76–77, 168 United Mine Workers’ Association, 62, 90–93, 94–96, 213n73, 213–14n78 United States Steel, 203n45 Unquiet Earth, The (Giardina), 22 Virginia Cooperative Extension Service, 129 Vivian, West Virginia, 115 Walker, Thomas, 24 War, West Virginia, 116, 127, 148, 149, 182 Warriormine, West Virginia, 148, 149 Welch, Isaiah, 25–28, 35, 37–38, 56 Welch, West Virginia, 116, 127, 153, 180, 182 Welch Daily News, 56, 59, 78 Westfield Addition, the: as advertised, 52; Apperson home, 82–86, 90, 92, 212n54; contemporary description, 180–81; de facto blindness to social and cultural realities, 93–94; description in advertising, 52; as embodiment of American middle class dream, 52–55, 212n54; location, 52–53; lower row, 53–54; ownership

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232  /  index When the Levees Broke (film: Spike Lee), 190 Wilderness Road, 11–12, 197n1 Wilkes, Marcus, 116–17, 173, 217n48 Williams, Aldah. See Apperson, Aldah Williams (grandmother) Williams, Everett Cox (great-grandfather), 14, 15, 16, 67 Williams, Mary Farmer (great-grandmother), 12, 14–16, 17 Williams/Apperson/Patteson Family photo, 18 Wilson, William, 58 Wise, Bob, 115, 125 Women’s Club, 54 World War II years, 80–81 Wyoming County, 25 Wytheville, Virginia, 189 Young Leader’s Action Council, 143–44

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terms, 86–92, 212–13n60; Pais home, 83; photographs, 52, 83, 90, 91, 92; population demographics, 54–55; residences, 53; social and geographic middle-class segregation, 54–55; valuation, 168 Westfield as symbol: American way of life, 12, 55, 167–69, 173–74; Cadillac dealership anecdote relationship, 15, 156–57; consumer culture, 7, 55, 60–63, 175; core values, 101–2, 103, 157–60; divisions, 156–57; explanation, 52; failure, 126–27; financial crisis, 108; individualism connection, 95–96, 144, 159; middle-class values and status, 6–7; rules for, 78–79 West Virginia 19th Century History, 34–35 West Virginia Office of Education Performance Audit, 120–27 West Virginia Review, 60–61, 73–74, 204n60 westward emigration, 11–12, 197n1

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talmage a. stanley is the director of Appalachian Center

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for Community Service and an associate professor and chair of the Department of Public Policy and Community Service at Emory & Henry College in Southwest Virginia.

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The University of Illinois Press is a founding member of the Association of American University Presses.

Composed in 10/13.5 Janson Text LT Std with Electra LT Std display by Barbara Evans at the University of Illinois Press Manufactured by Thomson-Shore, Inc. University of Illinois Press 1325 South Oak Street Champaign, IL 61820-6903 www.press.uillinois.edu

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appalachian studies / american studies

“This genre-blending work combines biography, family and social history, ethnography, political economy, and personal observation to provide a penetrating examination of the implications of place-based practice on local and global citizenship. The work is promising for use in Appalachian and American studies, community sociology, environmental studies, activism, and sustainable development.”—Dwight B. Billings, coauthor of The Road to Poverty: The Making of Wealth and Hardship in Appalachia “ A terrific contribution to an understudied topic in Appalachian studies: middle-class culture, society, and politics. Talmage A. Stanley’s elaboration of the West Virginia coalfield experience as an archetypal form particular to the industrial capitalist social vision is brilliantly illuminated by fragments of his family archive.”—Mary Hufford, editor of Conserving Culture: A New Discourse on Heritage

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T

his beautifully written meditation on identity and place addresses a long-standing gap in Appalachian and American studies, illustrating the lives and choices of the middle class in the mid-twentieth century and delving into questions of place-based identity. Exploring the natural and built environments of the towns of Keystone, West Virginia, and Newbern, Virginia, Talmage A. Stanley delineates the history of conflict and control of local industry and development. Through his grandparents’ struggle for upward mobility into the middle class, Stanley narrates a history that counters ideas of Appalachia as an exception to American culture and history, presenting instead an image of the region as an emblem of America at large. Stanley examines broad structures of values and practices as they reflect and relate to place, showing how events such as the development of extensive mineworks, the ghettoization of the area’s black residents, the catastrophic flooding of the Elkhorn Creek, and the fraud-induced failure of Keystone National Bank signal values that erode a place both literally and figuratively. Giving voice to activists now working to break down boundaries and assumptions that long have defined and restricted the middle class in the global economy, The Poco Field also champions the creative potential of place for reinvigorating democratic society for the twenty-first century. Talmage A. Stanley is the director of the Appalachian Center for Community Service and an associate professor and chair of the Department of Public Policy and Community Service at Emory & Henry College in southwest Virginia. cover images: Top: Westfield Addition, circa 1920 Bottom: December 3, 1933, “At Home” cover design: Erin Kirk New

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U N I V ERSITY OF ILLI NOIS PRESS Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield www.press.uillinois.edu

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