Barbara Church

Barbara Church, Entrepreneur and Artist, Eolia, Kentucky:

“I started my business about 25 years ago (Ovenfork Mercantile). Started out in this one room right here. That was all that was here and just started building on rooms. I tried to preserve the history as I built the business. I started out selling on consignment, arts and crafts, mostly things people made. I had about 30 crafters starting off. It started successful but when people sold their stuff they didn’t want to make more. If their stuff didn’t sell they didn’t want to pick it up. Then I kinda ventured off into antiques and art. About 7 years ago I started selling food, hot dogs, barbeque, snacks, homemade candy, peanut butter roll. I make six kinds of candy. It’s also a bed and breakfast. 

My business goes up and down with however the coal industry is doing. A lot of my customers are coal miners, contractors, truck drivers. Everybody around here says tourism (is the answer). But you’ve gotta do more than just hold meetings and talk about it. That always goes on. We need action not words.

Outsiders portray us as hillbillies. They portray as uneducated, living in poverty, in shacks, children running barefoot without any clothes on. We are just like anybody else. We just live here in the mountains. This is where we like to live. What’s special about this place is the culture, the people, the mountains themselves. It’s like you are traveling, just say to Lexington; when you come back this way and you see the mountains you get this good feeling.

I grew up here. I grew up at Eolia. Been here since I was 10 years old. Before that my father wondered back and forth between Kentucky and Virginia. He couldn’t decide where he wanted to live. He was killed in a logging accident when I was 10 so my mother moved us to Eolia where both sets of grandparents lived. 

It was a good place to grow up. We rode our bicycles up and down the main road. We could go visit both sets of grandparents without having to get in a car to do it. The school was just a few miles down the road. When you were growing up you didn’t really think about it but when you are grown you think about things you’d have paid more attention to like sitting on the porch of your grandparents house and them talking or playing music. You think back on it and that was a good time. 

Music is important to the culture. My father was a banjo picker. I think it is a creative outlet for a lot of people. Music just makes you happy.

I think the culture here, it’s changed but back then like in the community of Eolia, everybody knew everybody and neighbors helped each other out. You don’t even know your neighbors now. I think the values I grew up with haven’t been instilled in the younger people. 

I started doing art about 15 years ago. I just decided I wanted to paint. I had never painted before. I had these images in my head that wouldn’t go away so I went back to school to study art and just started painting. It gives my soul rest. When I finally get these images out of my head I can finally rest. 

I’ve had some sad times here. Of course it was sad when my dad passed away from the logging accident. It was time he shoulda been home but instead it was someone knocking on the door telling my mom that he wasn’t coming home. Two years after that his brother was killed in a little truck mine accident right up there at Eolia where I live. 

I lived here when the Scotia mine accidents happened. It was a very sad time. It’s like one of those incidents where you know where you were when you heard President Kennedy had been shot. Everybody around here can tell you where they were at when they heard about the Scotia explosion. First you wanted to make sure that the family that you had that were working at the mines were ok then you tried to find out who wasn’t ok. It brought about a lot of memories for me because I lost my first husband in a coal mining accident. It was the same as my dad. He hadn't been gone long then I heard a knock on the door. We lived in an apartment in downtown Harlan at that time. Our son was two weeks old. I was 17 at the time.

Four years ago I lost my son in a motorcycle wreck on top of Pine Mountain. That was kinda like losing his father again because he was the only connection I still yet had with my husband who died in the coalmines. I lost my son and my mother that same year. That was in 2011.

You just accept it and go on. 

Watching my mother has given me my strength. When dad died she was left with three children to raise on her own. She didn’t have a car, a driver’s license or nothing but she made it.”

Larry McKnight Jr.

Larry McKnight Jr. Industrial Mechanic and Artist, Clintwood, Virginia: 

“My mom’s family is originally from Mississippi and my dad’s family; my grandma grew up in Clinchco, Virginia, which isn’t to far from where I live now. My grandfather is from Barboursville, Kentucky. They both moved north to get jobs in the auto industry. When my dad got older he decided he wanted to move back down here and they had me. My grandparents moved back down too and we’ve been here ever since. 

I’ve lived here all my life. I have been all over the place, as far west as Phoenix, Arizona, as far north as Maine and as far south as the Keys. So I’ve been around a place or two. I worked in Florida for a while, worked in Baltimore for a little. I worked as a boilermaker then, worked on trash burning power plants. I’m a mechanic… an industrial mechanic is what they would call it.

I used to tell people when I did travel work that working and traveling, that’s what I did. When I came back home it was like being on a vacation. And that’s how life is here. It is as hard as you want it to be. I feel that if you have a decent amount of drive and aptitude to do things you can do anything here in these mountains regardless of the economy. There are ways to make a living. It’s all about living within your means by doing that. You can’t expect to have a champagne lifestyle on a beer budget.

The original MacGyver probably learned from one of these old boys back in one of these mountains. Book sense will only get you so far. I think common sense will get you a lot farther. Because of the adversity we have in this area you have to learn to do a lot of different things. You have to be a jack-of-all-trades. Lets say you do one thing on your job all day, once that job is gone what are you gonna do? I wake up every morning and try to learn something new. That way I know I’ll always have something I can make a living at. 

I have noticed in this area that there are a lot of people who aren’t afraid to do things themselves. I was taught at a young age, in our family, we did everything; carpentry work, electric work, mechanical, farming. It didn’t matter what it was someone close to me already knew how to do it so I had really good teachers growing up. There is one thing my dad wouldn’t touch much,. That would be masonry. We usually outsourced masonry. There is a reason. That stuff has to be spot on. There is no room for error with masonry. 
Being raised in these here mountains and having parents that support me; that always did what they wanted to do, growing up in that lifestyle, my mind is the only thing that can keep me from doing the things that I want to do. 

Where we live we are blessed. If you have a talent and you can hone that skill there is somebody that will buy your work. You just have to do it. You just have to stick to it. If you put love and care into it someone will see that love and care and have a connection to it. 

(Appalachians are) probably the most honest and humble people you will ever meet. They are not afraid to work, they are not afraid to help their fellow man. I do worry sometimes though that we are being to get a little separated. There’s not as much community as there once was. Here, in Whitesburg, (Kentucky) I do see a growth in community. I see a big change. There seems to be a lot of people actually touching one another in ways of making art or business. It’s not about money. It’s about people being happy. 

We are a minority. We are not a mainstream people. The media doesn’t know us. The media has a tendency to betray us, as backwards which is not the case. Just because we get from point A to Point B differently than someone else does, doesn’t make us wrong. It just means we like to look at things differently. I think the perception, the reason the perception is the way that it is, is because we don’t have a good voice from here telling people how we really are. Ignorance causes the most hate and I think they (the media) are ignorant of who we are, what we are; the differences we have and the similarities that we have. We are all the same at the core but we are all raised a little different. There is nature and there is nurture. Our people grew up hard from the day they were born here. You have to actually work hard if you want something. 

(Regarding coal) I don’t necessarily like how a lot of coal is being taken from our land but I do like toilet paper and electricity. It real hard to talk people out of using their air conditioners when it’s 90 degrees outside. What needs to happen is, they actually need to realize that there is other ways to get things and there are ways that people in the area can benefit from it as well. Take natural gas for example. Our natural gas is piped hundreds of miles away from here. Why not make an infrastructure here based on natural gas right where it comes from. Make it easier on the people that live here first. And then help everybody else. Charity begins at home. 

We need to quit worrying about the dollar; it’s just a piece of paper. Worry more about the people. “

Plez Dean

Plez Dean, Age 9; Harlan, Kentucky:

“I’m short. I was born short. I play video games and ride my bike. I like jumping on my trampoline. I like living in the mountains but sometimes the radio gets static-ee when you drive through them. 

I want to be a person that makes video games (when I grow up).

I haven’t had any sad times (in my life) yet. Had some hard times though… can’t remember them.

My dad works in the coalmines and my mom, she’s a head start teacher. 

Coal mining, it's really hard in this place called the temple, in the coalmines. My dad works in the temple. He gets really, really dirty with all that dirt on him. He looks like dirt, dirt everywhere. He does paperwork, mines some coal out and some other things. He is loading the train, getting pipes unclogged. 

I did once want to work in the coalmines, but once I saw my dad was getting really, really dirty I didn’t anymore.

I saw people get hurt in the coalmines. My dad, his back, it broke. He was laid off, to where you don’t go to work. I think you still get paid but I ain’t sure. My dad has friends in the coal mines.

I can’t tell which are the peace ones and the Hillbilly ones. I’m getting hippies and hillbillies confused. The hillbillies are the poor ones.

I’m not a hillbilly. It means you are poor and stuff. I ain’t. It’s hard to tell a hillbilly. They may have nice clothes but that doesn’t mean they have money. That’s what I think. 

It was a pleasure you meet you. You need to grip whenever you shake a hand. It makes you confident.”

Valerie Ison Horn

Valerie Ison Horn, Retired as a Teacher and Counselor, now Works with Grow Appalachia and Community Farm Alliance (A Voice For Farmers) and the Appal-TREE Project...Appalachians Together Restoring the Eating Environment); Little Dry Fork, Kentucky:

“I work with local foods and food nutrition, but I also look at it as community building, helping neighbors, buying food from neighbors, sharing seeds with neighbors, the better our community grows. 

I was born up on Cowan. Was born in 1965, about the time the war on poverty began. I went away to school and that’s the only time I’ve been away from these mountains. 

Right now, my son-in-law works for a strip mining company and drives about an hour and a half to work and an hour and a half from work for ten hour shifts, six days a week. They have a daily, three-hour window to be a family. Although he makes good money so my daughter can stay home and take care of their child, it is my dream that someday they can live off the family land making a living growing fruits and vegetables. 

A lot of things have changed over the years. Our grandparents grew gardens, as did most who lived here then. My grandmother raised a big garden; she had nine children and lost her husband in a mining accident when my mom was three years old. The children never questioned working in the garden. It wasn’t a big scale agriculture garden. They had nine hoes; a few reap hooks, no tractor, and no tiller. It wasn’t easy, but they did it every day. If you were too young or, like my mom who was sick with polio, your job was to bring the others lunch. Everybody had a job. 

One of my favorite stories is about my Aunt Mary Lou. She worked on the mountain near Scuttle Hole Gap near Little Shepard Trail hoeing corn for ten cents a day. She was never rich, just a steady worker all her life. She took care of herself and helped others. She worked for Harry Caudill’s sister-in-law for many years. (Harry Caudill was an accomplished Appalachian author writing, among other things, ‘Night Comes To The Cumberland’s’). Harry’s sister-in-law left her some money when she passed away. Aunt Mary Lou took that money and bought a new cook stove, along with the land on Scuttle Hole Gap she hoed as a little girl. That’s a full circle of life.

Somehow, we lost that ability to garden here in the mountains. Things became more convenient, they became habits. We didn’t consider that processed food might not be as good for us, that it might have the health implications that we know it does now. We just got comfortable with those choices. I’m sure if my grandmother had had the opportunity to order pizza and feed all the children, she would have. Those choices just weren’t available then. 

We have to reeducate folks. It is an opportunity that has to be learned. It’s hard to get back to. What I like about Grow Appalachia is that we are trying to reconnect those folks with the skills, provide opportunities and reduce barriers so folks can learn, experiment and find out if gardening is for them. Grow Appalachia has about 60 family gardeners, 20 market gardeners and 10 community gardens. 

We are planning a Grow Appalachia camp for children in July. It will be our first year doing this, small scale. Another program we work with is ‘Mountain Garden Initiative’ who works in the schools in the area to get school gardens growing. We have been successful with that. We also help folks who want to sell eggs, getting licenses etc. to sell eggs to restaurants and other retail outlets.”