Edwin Marshall

Edwin Marshall, Retired Heavy Equipment Operator; Beckley, West Virginia:

“I have lived here all my life. I was born here. When I growed up in Beckley, we lived down next to the coal camp in Sprag. I went to school with the kids from the coal camp. We lived outside the coal camp, but still yet it was all in the same family you might say. 

We’d go down to the company store, and the kids would come to school with scrip and their scrip was worth maybe three cents where ours was a nickel. They would switch so they could get some candy or something to drink because everybody when they went to the company store at noon always got an RC and a Moon Pie. That was the most popular thing going at that time. 

The kids, they’d come to school of morning and they’d have to crawl underneath the railroad cars down there. The girls they’d come all dressed up, but when they got to school their feet would be black. And the kid’s shoes would be black and then some of them would just come barefooted. We all was in the same boat. 

That was during the war and through the depression and we gathered silk pods. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen ‘em or not. But it’s a pod on a weed. It looks like a cucumber and it’s about that long, but the inside of it when it dries they made silk out of it. They used to make parachutes out of it. That’s one thing we did. Then, they had war bonds going on and at that time we was gathering newspapers and things like that in school for the war and defense bonds was a very popular thing. We’d come in there with maybe a nickel or a dime, and we’d just keep on bringing and donating it and they’d keep a record of it and after you’d donated so much, you got a twenty-five dollar war bond. 

My principal down there at that time in school, he’d bring a couple bushel of apples and bring them to the door and when the kids come in from dinner from playing in the yard, why he’d give everybody an apple. They was big apples. That was a fun thing. We never missed no school. Very seldom did we miss school from the time it opened in September till May. Even through the winter months, we didn’t have school buses. You walked to school. You waded the snow and everything. The only holidays you got was for Christmas and that was about a week I guess, through Christmas and New Year’s. While you was in school in the spring of the year, why they had a picnic. They took everybody up in the woods somewhere. They had a place they’d picked out where you could go play ball and things like that. That was a fun day.

The best thing I can describe as a coal camp all the houses were the same. They was all gray. The man of the family had to work in the mines. If he messed up, they put him out and put him out of the coal camp. That was a novelty or something when your dad worked in the mines there at Sprag, well then you had a house. They got paid in scrip, and their scrip was acceptable at the company store. The company store sold everything that a person at that time could want. And you paid by scrip but if you changed it to dollars the dollars was worth more than the scrip was. Scrip was a company coin that they printed their own, just like Sprag, I think it fell under New River Coal Company and it’s just like Skeleton fell under New River and Cranberry fell under New River. Most of the places around here fell under New River Coal Company. They are the ones that made the scrip. So that’s how they got paid. On Friday nights well, everybody went to Beckley. And at that time in Beckley you couldn’t elbow your way through town on Friday and Saturday night because everybody knew everybody. And when you went to town you fell into somebody that you knew and next thing you know somebody else you knew and before you know you had a crowd. At that time, there was preachers around and they would stand up on the tables there in Beckley and preach. You could always find a preacher there all the way around the courthouse. 

[When I got out of school] I joined the Navy. I was in there for three and one-half years in 1954 during Korea. I was aboard a supply ship and we left in April of 1955, I believe it was. We went to Europe, we stayed over there for six, seven months and we come back and when we went back they changed our home port from Norfolk, Virginia to Barcelona, Spain. I spent the whole time over in Europe, over in the Mediterranean. Then I returned and was discharged in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I was a boiler tender. I worked in the engine room. It was a very hot job, very hot. But it was a good job.

I come back to the mountains, come back to Beckley. I went to work for Foley Brother’s Construction Company making a dollar an hour. I was a laborer. After I done that, well then, I went to work for Petron Tosley’s, the station we built. We built all of the Sunoco stations in Beckley, and Ramey’s Amoco there on Third Avenue. When that was, I went to work for Oscar Vesillio. He was a big contractor here in Beckley. I worked for him for about six or seven years and then I left here because the work was down and I went to Maryland. 

I got married and my wife and I moved to Maryland with our little boy. We stayed up there seventeen years. I wasn’t [homesick]. I don’t think I ever got homesick unless when I was in the Navy and I was going across the ocean. It took us twenty-one days to leave Norfolk to get to Gibraltar. When you are out there on that ocean you’d wake up and feel like you was still in the same place because all you could see was water. 

I like to watch the sun come up and the sun go down. I had many, many opportunities to go into the coal mines. That was always my excuse. I like to watch the sun come up and the sun go down. I’ve worked around the mines, all the mines around here. I worked down Sprag, Tames and Infinity and for Console. I’ve worked around all the mines around where when I was working for Oscar Vesillio. It was all outside construction. We faced up for new mines. Once we got them done we moved to another one and opened it. That’s just the type of work I did.

In 1976, things got bad up in Washington. I worked up around the Capitol and the metro system up there I worked on it. I worked on 495 when they first built it and 695 around Baltimore. Things got slack up there and I just up and come down here looking for a job and I found one. 

I traveled between Beckley and Baltimore. We lived thirty miles north of Baltimore, a place called Abingdon, Maryland, between the Aberdeen Proving Ground and Edgewood Arsenal. I traveled that road for nine months, every weekend. I’d leave here in Beckley and go home to my family and leave on Sunday and drive back. Because we was trying to sell our house up there and the whole time I was looking for a place down here. I didn’t look serious because of the way the market was up there. But then when we did sell in April of 1966, well then [my wife] called me up and told me you’ve got to find a house, we have to be out of this house in three weeks. 

I’d been watching a house that had been on a market, so I went up and checked with them and I gave them a five hundred deposit on it. I bought the house sight unseen for my wife and them. We loaded up and moved down here, they’d never seen the house. That morning when we settled up at the Beckley Federal Bank in Beckley, I took them over to the house and they went through the house and they liked it. It wouldn’t have done them any good not to like it. 

My daughter and my son, the two oldest ones said, ‘Dad, where’s the dishwasher at?’ I said, We’ve got a GE.’ And she said, ‘Where’s it at, I don’t see it?’ I says, ‘You and Eddie, Ginger is a G and Eddie is an E, and that’s my GE.’ So they frowned on that, but we got through that situation for a while. 

My wife, she done ceramics and she wanted a dishwasher so she challenged me. She says, ‘I’ve got my money, where’s yours?’ So I had to come up with some money too, to help buy the dishwasher. We accomplished that little task and we got the dishwasher, and everybody was happy.

I used to go fishing all the time and that was my favorite thing, but my wife, she’s got arthritis real bad in her ankles. She don’t have no ankle bone, she has to wear a brace on her ankle all the time so that pretty much takes up all my time. I have to put her brace on her every day and help her with that. We went to the University of West Virginia and they told us there wasn’t nothing they could do for her, they can’t replace ankle bones. So that’s just something we live with.

(What makes this place special?) You know that’s a good question about living here. Either you’re up or down. It’s just something that grows on ya. If you live here, when you go out in Virginia out toward Maryland and places like that, it’s all flatland. All you can see on both sides of the road is trees and everything. But here, you can crawl up on the mountains and you can see for miles. It’s just something about the people. Everybody around here is just mountain people. That’s the only way I know to describe it. 

(Why are mountain people special?) Their personality, well they are good people. They’re all friendly, they’ll talk but you don’t interfere with their business. I found that out many moons ago, you speak to people, but you don’t go nosing around about their business. You just leave that part alone. You just talk about things in general. 

Just like back in the days when they moonshined. If you come upon someone’s still, well you talked to ‘em and they figured you out and you just went on and you just kept your mouth shut. Just like the three monkeys, hear no evil, see no evil and speak no evil. 

I do consider myself a hillbilly because I have lived here, except for the time in Maryland, for seventy-eight years. I was born in the house [where] my mother, she dropped me. This will be a funny thing, but she went to the bathroom and her water broke and that’s where she dropped me, right there in the john. All my sisters at that time was older, they told mother when they found out I was a boy, to flush me. They said, ‘flush him, we don’t want him.’ And I was a thorn in their side ever since. 

I can remember things here in Beckley back when they had that polio, that they didn’t allow children in town. My mother got sick or I believe it was my Dad got sick and they needed some medicine for him and her brother was a pharmacist up in the front of the courthouse in Beckley. He had the medicine and nobody could go after it except me. I went up the back way; you didn’t walk up the street, you had to go through people’s back yards and through the bushes and stay hid. 

I met my Uncle Lacy up there on Hieber Street up there beside the bank. He gave me the medicine and he said, ‘you run on home.’ I took the medicine on home to them. 

I knew people that had polio, and it was a terrible thing. Through time you forget about those things. There was another time it was bad, it was just like they had an epidemic of ringworms back in the forties and they wouldn’t let the kids in the theaters then. Because they’d lay their head on the back of the seats and then you’d go in and lay your head on the back of the seat and the next thing you knew you had ringworm and you’d lost all your hair. 

You know, I’ve had a happy life all of my life. I have been in the valleys and I’ve been in the mountains. I guess the worst times I’ve had was my parents died. Both my parents were killed in car wrecks at different times. My dad he got killed in a car wreck in 1966 on Thursday before Father’s Day. My mother was in a car wreck in 1979 on Thursday before Father’s Day. They both was buried on Father’s Day. It was a peculiar thing. That was the two biggest tragedies”.

Carol Judy

Carol Judy, Community Land Trust Founder, Environmental Activist; Clear Fork Valley, Tennessee, Campbell & Claiborne Counties:

“Clear Fork Valley encompasses two states and four counties; Campbell and Claiborne in Tennessee, and Bell and Whitley in Kentucky. The first ten years of my life, I lived in Florida, the next eight more or less, I lived in Plains, Georgia, moved back to Florida, married a boy from the hills, and came home to Tennessee. 

We managed to make it about seven and a half years living in and out of the mountains, and I just decided I didn’t know how to make the relationship work, so I walked the path of divorce. [I] had my two kids, moved back to the mountains per se, until my children wanted to come back home, and get to know their daddy. My daughter was twelve, thirteen at the time, and my son was younger, and I was ready to come back home myself, because the mountains called. 

One of my granddaddies was from the Big Sandy up in Appalachia. I would imagine, if I looked hard enough, I could discover varied kinds of traditional roots here. On my paternal grandfather’s side, the family name was Brown, the other name was Rose. You can find your roots, if you need to.

(What makes this place special?) Freedom. Fulfillment. Connections. (Sighs) Interesting things. Knowledge. Good people. An ecosystem that lets me learn with it, and the potential for helping others to discover better balance. There’s a lot of healing that has to be done, and you heal best if you’re able to look at what’s going on.

Oh, I’m a Jane of all trades, and a master of none of ‘em. (Laughs) I have twenty-five years in the food service; waitressing, hosting, bartending, doing that kind of people work. I dig roots, and used to sell roots, until I got to recognizing that the injustices far outweighed the money I was gaining, so I took it a different track. I drew Welfare, and taught myself that’s not a handout, a gift. Everybody needs to feel like they have earned that money, so I worked within my community helping to create a community land trust, establishing some educational systems [and] generally wreaking havoc in some people’s lives, to tell you the truth. 

It’s a community land trust, and one of the first that was formed in our country. Every state has different laws about land trusts, and community land trusts, in particular. This one is designed along, like the Jewish masad, so the land is owned communally. Individual developments on the land, like your house and all, belong to the individual and you have a lifetime lease on your homestead acre. 

We bought every acre of land we’ve ever acquired. The first seventeen was a gift from a failed not-for-profit. That was someone in the community who thought establishing a Danish folk school was a fine idea. It is, and was a fine idea, but it needed more support than the community could give it. 

Probably close to five hundred [live there] by now. It’s an interesting mix. The land trust was conceived to enable people to build a home their way. Having acquired the land previously in my community of place, there had been forty-some odd acres of land acquired by another group of citizens. They did the very traditional one of laying out lots, and selling the lot, and let people build the houses, and they kept the house and land ownership directly tied. 

With [our] land trust, one of the reasons we did it was because in cash poor communities, when push comes to shove, you sell whatever you’ve got to make sure some kind of critical need is met, albeit, healthcare, death in the family, what have you. The land trust was a way of collectively owning it, and maintaining it together. I guess the scariest thing about it, if people really stop and think about it, is it takes land off the public market. So, is my community land trust a form of public trust?

I lived on it, worked on it, worked for it, but I don’t live on the land trust at this time. I have a history of being a founder, and I still consider it part of my life. The goals of the land trust are to be able to let people be engaged in living a rural culture type of life. Housing is such a critical necessity that we get slam bagged by the more immediate need, and lose sight of that longer-term goal. 

I did a lot, built houses very innovatively with programs, tried to bring in the typical mortgage financing to meet the state mandate. We don’t even meet the critical needs. We’ve built to these standards, and now we don’t even have the kind of income that would let people have the mortgage financing required. 

What I’ve learned from [this is] I’m a place based educator. We got so caught up in the housing we step back from how to sustain our housing longer term. Knowing that we were managing and making do, and taking advantage of programs to secure some good, solid foundational kind of housing and different ways of training [but] programs lack enough manpower to keep that multi-facet development scheme going. 

I continue to focus on young people, and the woods, and started helping create the Clear Fork Community Institute [CCI}, which is a separate 501c3, but owns a ninety-nine year lease on land from the land trust. How sweet is that?

CCI [is about] lifting the live/learn lessons of our community up and out, and try to make ‘em visible so that we can better define where we want our community to go.

There’s what some people would call some subsistence farming. People do raise beef, and go to take some produce or some livestock to market up in Corbin. There’s a butcher that lives up the valley, he’ll butcher what you raise and package it for you. Gardens are kind of there, hayfields. We can sustain ourselves in some levels, but I guess the biggest thing we contribute to a larger marketplace is we’re the cash poor folks that have an economy built around our poverty from our perception. 

It’s a food stamps, Welfare, crippling economy, because it lets you kind of sustain or meet some basics, but not even really that, so you are always trying…so your energy’s burnt up trying to manage, and maintain, and scrap, and make do. 

For rural people, if you stop and think about it, we’ve never had all our income in one way. People defined it as farming and it sounds like one income, but farming is multi layers of incomes. And quality of life has to be addressed as part of it, so how farming has been presented and people’s experience of it, is sometimes not defined by personal knowledge.

Carol Judy’s answer [to the regional economy]; is people struggle to have hope, but they haven’t given up. We know that we don’t have any problems that are any worse than anybody else, so commonality of our issues can lead us to work together toward better solutions. Being able to anticipate things, being able to name things, should help make that happen. 

No rural community should have a single source of income industry, no monoculture. Urban areas sort of need monocultures, or microcosms of monocultures, of types. People have a strong faith, so they figure God is on their side. And who’s to say? 

I figure myself, personally, that about a hundred years ago, these mountains looked around and said, ‘Oops, you know these humans keep on this path, they might not be around to tickle our ribs, and scratch our bellies, and wade in our waters,’ And they said, ‘Well, we might want to give ‘em a chance.’ So they sent people forth from different kinds of living arenas having been impacted from a top down kind of economy, and said, ‘Well, you know, let’s send ‘em out, because as the earth, we know that the solution lies in the coming together of those who are resolving it.’ 

Education for me is an arena that lets me help cross-connect classes and cultures, and let ‘em put some sweat equity into each other so that the investment in each other is carried forth throughout their lifetime. We all need air and water, and these mountains, according to the World Health Organization statistics, produce eighty percent of the world’s living, tasteful, drinkable waters. In the United States, that translates into an ecosystem service, which I’m not real happy with, but I can live with it. But, I also know that they produce a hundred percent of it for me, ‘cause I live in these mountains, as do many others. 

Cities turn taps on, and make use of a resource that our mountains create, and there’s a total disconnect from that knowledge.

If you look hard enough, you’ll find an essence of Appalachia culture in any resilient community. Ours is probably unique in the fact that people think that we have been isolated from the world. I believe it is the opposite, that the world has been isolated from us. 

We certainly understand the impacts of culture ‘cause we have all the same stuff, exposure to it, that everybody else does. But who has exposure to us? Appalachian culture, for me, is based in feeling, being able to connect generationally to the land around you; to know that those of your bloodline are buried in them hills and have become part of the earth again. Even if it’s not your bloodline, it’s your human kinship. 

To feel that connected and to see, to understand how to respect the earth in its capacities, is something we need. We used to know much better than we know today. The out-migration dropped my community of place from thirty thousand to three in about twelve to fifteen years. That’s a great loss. That’s a super great loss. They come home on weekends, but they no longer have the capacity to live there. 

We stereotype lots of things, and sometimes it’s in satire. It’s a way of communicating and getting some emotions caught up in something. I have to watch it myself, because I know where I live and all these young folks that come in. Higher education was always a problem to me because it was educating you so you had to leave. The assumption was you had to go, and education was a way. 

What about using education to help let you stay? I think that stereotypes are a tool that sometimes is implemented, and that the ripples of those implementations, we’re still feeling ‘em. They don’t quit. The ability to understand, to challenge your own stereotypes, should begin to give you a good bullsh*t indicator for others. 

I consider myself a mountain woman. We live along the ridges and in the hollers. I’m sitting here talking to you, but I bet you a nickel, if you had time, you could find thousands of us. You just got to have time to get in the hollers, or find some who are venturing out. 

I like to go in the woods and dig roots. I like to learn. The young people I’ve met over the past ten years, working with Mountain Justice people, young people who helped amplify our voice, got the attention of a society. They had to take it serious. It was their sons and daughters, and grandkids, who were saying, ‘Look, you know there’s a problem here. Sor-rrrry, we gotta do something.’ Their young people saying it is different than the children of the ridges and hollers, it seems, and there again, some of that is because of stereotyping. 

It’s also part of the colonialism of thinking that because people have some paper education, they know better. But paper education has to be tempered with hands-on knowledge. The hands-on knowledge of understanding what it was you were reading about [and] the ability to have a connection to it. Having spent time with it, having done something with it, looked at it, and explored it from fourteen different aspects.

I keep battling for trainings and mechanisms that get our kids into each other communities so they have reasons to care for each other, and find hope.

Anything that continues to interrupt these mountains’ abilities to be healthy heart and lungs, creators of water, and producers of air, and cleaning, and contributing that to all populations, not just people [is devastating]. 

I see that we’re going to need some plague controls, vectors, understanding of what it means to take care of people who are so addicted they cannot function without some kind of support structure. Are we going to let ours starve? It’s not our nature. How do we implement community gardens, because I think working with the earth helps heal. [We need to help] ourselves become food sufficient and be very conscious of understanding how this kind of work improves long-term air and water quality. 

The woods has three layers, and the woods around me are mountain forest woods. A tree with a thirty-inch diameter is probably going to cycle a thousand gallons of water a day through its system. That’s a lot of water. It pulls that water up through the soil, filtering that water, and removing things from the soil at the same time. But, that tree pulls eighty percent of its mass from the air. Now that’s magic. (You can hear the smile in her voice.) 

That tree’s leaves is reaching in that sky, and pulling some elements out of that sky that are too small for us to perceive, and turning it into itself. Trees are a way of the mountain forest being like a cold-blooded creature. It can control its own body temperature with trees. You cut the trees, your body temperature is going to rise, your water’s gonna go sink, way, way down deep, and you’re gonna lose that exchange of things. When you got the trees, you also got a mid-story, an under-story, and the fourth floor. 

My familiarity with the forest floor is that it’s a skin layer on the body of the mountain and the bones are the rocks and stuff, and the flesh, just like all the dirt, and the things of that nature. I don’t really have good words for it, but it cohabits with itself. The seasons and the cycles are part of it, so the timeline, timespan, and attention of a mountain is different than a human being’s. 

That’s why they could send people forth, and have a little patience. A hundred years ain’t much to ‘em, but it’s a lot to us. If the earth has got enough sense to send people forth to come back with multi kinds of knowledge to be part of the solution of beginning the regenerative healing that’s needed, then who am I to question that? 

The role I play is finding folks who seem to have an interest or knowledge [and] are willing to do something. Sometimes they succeed, and sometimes they don’t, but people don’t seem to give up too much. We’re part of them [the mountains] and they like us. Whatever creation stories you believe in, people have always been part of the story, but not all of the story.”

Trecia Short

Trecia Short, Full-Time Grandma; Daniels, West Virginia:

“My childhood was not a bad childhood. It had a lot of good stuff, but it was not easy. My childhood was spent with my siblings. There were nine of us all together; I had three sisters and five brothers. I was the older sibling, so I learned real fast how to take care of my younger siblings. It helped us become a lot closer 

My dad, he managed Beckley Garbage Disposal that’s in our local town here until he was injured. He was 32, and he was hurt seriously and then he was disabled. 

[As kids] We got up in the morning and we were told to go outside and play and come back at dark. And we did! We had a garden and we worked the garden. We raised chickens, pigs, carried coal in for the coal stove, cut wood in the summer so we’d have it in the winter. 

We raised chickens to eat and I didn’t normally have to do the duty of choppin’ their head off with a hatchet, but I had to stand there and hold the head while my brother did, and then the chicken would just start flopping everywhere. As a little kid, you see that and it’s very traumatic! Seeing this chicken flopping around and you’re thinking it should be dead but it’s not. 

We had guineas, they were really mean. The guineas would just chase us up and down the hill. We went the other way when they came. We lived on top of a hill in a holler, and the nearest house was quite a ways away. I never ate any guineas, but we got their eggs. We used the chickens for the eggs, I always got the eggs every day. 

[We also raised] hogs, every year, probably two or three to butcher. My dad would butcher them right there on our table and cut it up and put it in the freezer. 

We did not [have a smoke house]. The majority of it [meat] we froze. My dad can can and cook, so he did all the cooking at our house, and taught me and my younger sister all the techniques for cooking, canning and everything. He still cans. Any vegetable, any kind of meat, he would can it. Because who know how long it could last?

For the most part, even though we had hard times, we had fun. We played non-stop outside. We had oak trees in our backyard, so we would gather acorns and you ain’t felt nothing ‘til you’ve been whipped upside the head with an acorn or a cat tail. We would collect those and have huge fights until one of us got hurt and we had to go home. 

I was the mama, so we played school and I always had to be the teacher ‘cause I was the oldest one. We did whatever we wanted. We played. We would go up in the woods [and] we would carry buckets of water, if say the creek was running dry, from our spring to the woods where we were at and make mud slides going down with the grape vines that would hang down. And we would just mud slide. In the summer we could do it all day long, but we couldn’t come back dirty—we had to go and rinse off before we could come back in.

My grandfathers died really early on both sides, and my grandmother passed away about 17 years ago. I didn’t get to spend much time with them ‘cause I was young when my granddaddy died so they didn’t really have much to do with us. My granddaddy was holding me on his lap and said, ‘I don’t feel too good,’ went and laid down and didn’t get back up again. He had a heart attack and died. He was young. 

High school for me was okay; it wasn’t bad, it wasn’t good. Most of the people that went to our high school lived the same way we did, so it wasn’t anything bad. I married the first guy I met and took off and got out! 

He [was in the] military. I never thought I’d leave my little town in West Virginia. All [through] growing up, I thought I’d be right here in this little town and I had no perspective for the world. All I knew was my little world. But when I got married, I had this whole new world open up to me; different places, different things. 

We went to sign up to the military in a car that had no heat, in about 24 inches of snow. It was our way out. It was the only way out for us. We didn’t have family that was going to put us through school, and we didn’t even have a concept of going to school. It wasn’t pushed to us. 

I’ve been to Germany, I’ve been to the Netherlands, I’ve been to France, I’ve been to Mexico… you name it, we got to go. And my children have a perspective of the world. My girls have been to Greece, to London. Things I’ve never dreamed of doing, they’ve gotten to do. That is attributed to my husband.

We’ve lived all over. We lived in Georgia in two different places. We lived in Texas, two different places. My husband was NATO, special troops battalion, so we travelled a lot more than the average military family. He was stationed in the Netherlands, was stationed in Germany and we travelled a lot. 

He was communications, so he had a Top Secret SCI clearance… I don’t really know what all he did! He did something! He worked in a bunker under the ground and helped with their signal switches and stuff like that.

I took care of two kids [while he was away]! I worked between 10 and 3 at a glass shop so I could be home in the evenings [after] my kids were in school. And when he was gone, I took care of my kids. Basically for the past, I’d say, since 9/11, I was a single mom. He deployed so many times that my older daughter and him, I have a daughter that’s 27, her and her dad are extremely close. But the little daughter and him are not, because she was a little, tiny girl when he left. When he came back, she was grown up; she was 16, now she’s 18. They’re just not as close. That was really, really hard, but he’s working on that now.

He was an outstanding soldier—he really was. He went into the service, and he excelled at it. I couldn’t be any more proud of him. He has two Bonze Stars; he’s highly decorated in our area. There’s a memorial in Mabscott, right outside of Beckley, with his name on it for the future. He’s retired [from the military], but he’s working. 

[On advice for other military wives] Stick it out. It’s worth it. It’s easy to walk away. If marriage was easy, everybody would do it. But boy, if you do stick it out… I’ve been married for almost 26 years… it’s worth it. I wouldn’t trade my husband off for anybody. Even with [us] having issues that the war brought on for our family and some of the hardships that we’ve had, it was well worth it. 

This [area has] most beautiful and best people that there is. They all feel a kinship. My husband and I went to a place called Idar-Oberstein, overseas in Germany, it’s on the border of Germany and France. We’re at a little festival, they have little festivals all the time over there, and we’re sitting there, happen to start talking to somebody and meet someone from West Virginia. It’s a kindred spirit that all West Virginia people have. You just feel related even if you’re not related. You feel ‘you know how I live, you know how it was, you know what the mountains look like’. 

[Saddest time was] The day my brother died. He was 42. It was the hardest day of our lives, but it really brought the rest of us a lot closer together. It was so unexpected, he was young, and you think your siblings will go on and always be there for you. And when you realize you have a limit to your life, you want to make it important and make the people that you love better. And so we try to spend as much time together as we can, and we do. That was definitely the hardest day of my life. 

To me, no matter where I went, this was always my home. Always. And it always will be. My husband and I were like, ‘if I can get a good job we’re going back home.’ We were fortunate enough for him to get a good job and be able to come back home. 

[Describing Appalachians] Hard working. People think they’re dumb, but they’re not. Their vocabulary may be limited, but not because of knowledge. It’s just because of the culture and how to get it out. West Virginia people are hard working, intelligent, family oriented people and the rest of the world doesn’t know that. They don’t think that. But we really are. And West Virginia has one of the largest populations of military servicemen. 

I came back [home] every year—that’s where we spent [our] vacation. Last year was the first vacation we really took. We went to Disney for a week with family, because every other time we wanted to come home for our vacation. It was great, because when we come on vacation, we could do all the fun stuff, [like go] boating, cause there’s so many rivers there, Stephen’s Lake is here, Flat Top is here. People don’t realize how much stuff there really is to do. 

(On seeing the mountains after being away) The way I would come home up 77, there are two tunnels. The first tunnel you’re still in Virginia. But that second tunnel, every time we come through that tunnel we would start beeping and hollering, ‘West Virginia! West Virginia!’ As soon as you get on the other side, you’re in West Virginia and you know it. There’s a big sign. It used to say ‘Wild Wonderful West Virginia,’ then they changed it to something else… ‘West Virginia’s open for business.’ Everyone hated that slogan, so now it’s back to ‘Wild Wonderful West Virginia’.

I am a hillbilly. Hillbillies and rednecks are the exact same thing, just one wears shoes and one don’t. Rednecks wear shoes because they’re down south where more snakes are! 

I’m a grandma! I have an older daughter that has some issues. She tried for six years to have my grandson and it took a lot out of her. She’s got a huge cyst—it’s touching about four organs. So anytime she needs me, zoom. I go to Georgia. She’s had like five surgeries, so I just go down there and help her. My job is to be a grandma and a mom. 

They [media] think West Virginia, and they think [we’re] hill people, we’re dumb, they’re uneducated, they think they’re druggies… and yes, to an extent they are that, but there’s that in every single state in the United States. 

I’ve been all around [and] there’s that, but for the most part, West Virginians are hard working, honest, family oriented people. And I know that, ‘cause I live that. 

The happiest time in my life? Hasn’t happened yet… it’s coming. I’m not a very sad person, but it’s coming.”

Megan Epperson

Megan Epperson, AmeriCorps Vista Program Employee, Pine Mountain Settlement School; Big Laurel, Kentucky:

“I live over in Big Laurel, which is on the north side of Pine Mountain in Harlan County. I have [lived there] twenty-seven years. It’s very rural; there’s no restaurants, there’s a post office and a convenience store and then, homes. 

For groceries and stuff like that, you have to travel thirty minutes to either go to Harlan or Cumberland, or forty-five minutes to Whitesburg. Pretty much anything that you need you have to drive to, but I love it. I chose to remain there instead of moving to Harlan or something like that. I love the quiet; I love the closeness of our community, everyone knows everybody, everyone supports everybody. It’s a wonderful, wonderful place to live. 

[As kids] we spent a lot of time in the mountains, my sister and I did. We hiked, we just explored our area, we spent a lot of time at Pine Mountain Settlement School, which is just about five miles from where we live. We’d go to day camp there and go hiking and learn about naturalist qualities. 

Staying close to home, we didn’t really travel. Of course, we do vacations and stuff like that, [but] really we just kept ourselves occupied being out in the forest, and taking advantage of where we lived. 

My father worked on a strip job, he drove a loader, and then my mom owns a convenience store and she ran that for many years while also doing retraining for coal miners. Now, she’s a nurse and now my dad is retired. 

High school was fun; growing up across Pine Mountain, we had a grade school over there, Green Hills Elementary. I went to school with pretty much the same group of kids from kindergarten to eighth grade. So, going to high school over here in Harlan, because there was no high school over there, we had to come over here to James A. Caywood High School, which is actually no longer a high school. We kind of went all together. We were a Green Hills Elementary group. 

When we came over, it was a long bus ride. Any sort of inclement weather could be a little stressful ‘cause we cross Pine Mountain. If anyone’s experienced any mountain top living, you know that it can be raining and sunny down in the valley, but up on the mountain, it can be a whole other story. All my friends from Harlan would message me or call me and say, ‘Is it snowin’ over there? Do you think we’re going to have school? Is it snowin’ on Pine Mountain?’ 

The bus ride took almost an hour, just depending on how many stops. I was definitely very happy when my sister got her driver's license so I could ride with her to school and then when I got my driver’s license. That was a long ride to get know and talk to people that I’d really grown up with, so it really wasn’t that bad. 

It was a big chunk of your day, I mean we had to wake up so much earlier than everybody else who might have had about a fifteen or twenty minute commute. Then, of course, we got home a lot later than everybody else, so by the time you got home you were exhausted from the ride over. Then, of course, you had to do your chores at home and your homework and all of that stuff. It definitely was exhausting. 

My sister and I always tried talking my mom into getting a dishwasher, but she said she had two perfectly good dishwashers right there. Keeping the house clean and picking up yard work, we’ve always raised a garden my whole life so we’d help with that. And I didn’t get paid for chores. I hear about kids these days who get paid for chores, but that was your cost of living there in my house. Just helping out our parents the best way we can. They worked hard to keep us fed and clothed and a good life, so that was our repay to them. 

Ever since I was small, I remember going in the garden and picking beans, picking corn, canning tomatoes, just everything. Still to this day, my family raises a garden. My sister and I raise a garden together. My grandma, who is eighty-one, raises a full garden. We have all the good things you could want; beans and tomatoes and corn and squash and cabbage and lettuce. It becomes a family affair, we all help each other can and pick. We just do it all together. I love it. 

[Appalachian food] Lord, I could go on about that for forever. My mom likes to tell about when my sister first started school. She came home [from school] and she’d always be super hungry, as soon as she got home she’d want something to eat. As the weeks progressed, she come home and she’d just be really upset. 

Finally, my mom was like, ‘What’s wrong Sara?’ [Sara] said, ‘They’re feeding us fake food!’ It was because we had always been raised on garden food, we didn’t eat out of cans. My mom didn’t buy can corn or canned beans or carrots. It was all stuff from our garden, and then we preserved it. So she referred to [the school food] as fake food. 

I feel sorry for people who have never ate things that are fresh. They really have no idea the real taste of things. It tastes so much better when you’ve grown it yourself and put your hard work and sweat into it. 

I fortunately come from a long line of wonderful country cooks. We can really put down a supper, like I mean we’re talking chicken and dumplins’ and shuck beans and cream corn and cornbread. We can really put down food. 

My friends, when we would spend the night with each other, they could not wait to come to my house because at my house we had full meals. Steak, green beans, corn, cornbread. Full meals everyday. We didn't have heat up hot pockets or pizzas or anything like that. I had never ate anything microwavable until I was in high school. So, they loved coming to my house ‘cause my momma would feed them good. 

When we woke up in the morning, we’d have biscuits and gravy and sausage and everything. When I would go to their house, we were having canned ravioli and stuff like that, so they loved coming to my house ‘cause they really got to eat good.

I’ve worked for the United States Postal Service for eight years and I’m about to be employed at Pine Mountain Settlement School. I’m going to be employed under the AmeriCorps Vista Program, and I’m so excited about that. I’ll be helping with the community, and helping an organization in a place that I have loved and grown up my whole life. 

[Pine Mountain Settlement School] is really a hidden gem. There’s so much history there; it started as a boarding school in 1913. It was a dream of a local man named William Creech, who wanted children of the community and of the area to have just as much opportunity and education and academia as elsewhere in the state. 

He donated land, and enlisted a woman named Ethel deLong [Zande] and Katherine Pettit and they came down and kind of ran the show. There was Mary Rockwell Hook, she came and designed all the buildings [and] all the stone. The timber all came from Pine Mountain. There’s so much history there and we still full-fledgedly run education, except we focus on environmental education. We offer programs for children, and we offer plenty of programs for adults, as well. 

If you [don’t] have time for programs or anything, just come and look at all of the historical buildings that are over one hundred years old. The architecture is beautiful; it’s definitely something to come check out and look at. The chapel, first and foremost, is all in hand cut stone and, what’s really amazing to me, is the entire chapel and every stone that is in the building was all taken from one large boulder that was found on Pine Mountain. It’s built in the shape of a cross, and it features an organ there that was carried over Pine Mountain when it was still just a dirt trail; piece by piece on horseback. 

It’s a pipe organ and it creates wonderful sound. You can hear it played if you come to the Nativity Play in December, which is a play [about] the Nativity [and] the birth of Christ. 

We have the library that’s still fully stocked with amazing, old wonderful historical books about the area. We have the Draper Building, where we have a lot of our classes. It houses a lot of looms and, of course, our animal rooms. There’s really so much stuff to look at. In the library upstairs, we have a lot of Indian artifacts; arrowheads, spearheads and a lot of history on the Native Americans that dwelled in that area in the past. 

As a Vista employee, we’re going to be focusing on doing community outreach; keeping that relationship with the community strong. Seeing what Pine Mountain can do to help others. Also, we’re going to be working on just getting the word out there about the Settlement School, because there’s so many people that I know that are just from Harlan that have never been there before. It’s just because they don’t know things they can do there or they don’t know if they can just drive over and visit. 

[Appalachian culture] There’s no doubt about it, it is special and it is different. My family and I like to travel a lot. My sister, mom and I love to go on road trips together. We stick to places like the South, because there’s no place like Appalachia. 

You have this mentality and this common courtesy; you have manners and you have respect and not to mention Appalachian people are so resilient. They come from a long line of people who have worked hard for anything and everything that they have. A lot of them can be set in their ways, and that can be a good thing and that can be a bad thing. 

Really, there’s just this sense of community. Take this conference here today (It’s Good To Be Young In The Mountains). We have people from seven, eight, maybe more states, but we’ve all come together for one common good. That’s the wonderful thing about Appalachia is there’s undying support in any endeavor. 

There’s no other culture I could imagine that I would want to be a part of more. [I expect to live here the rest of my life] I’ve never been the type that’s, ‘I can’t wait to get out of here’. I like visiting cities, and I like visiting different places, but I want so much for this area and how can I really support that if I don’t live here?

My family went on a vacation to the beach in July; we went to Topsail Island, North Carolina. It’s beautiful, and we stayed seven days and when we hit middle North Carolina and we first seen those sights and mountains, literally you get a relief, weight is lifted off. 

I remember making a status on Facebook, ‘I see mountains’. It’s so comforting. You know, a lot of people feel like mountains that surround you is a trap, but to me it’s like a protective net. It’s comfort. I have comfort seeing the hills surrounding me. I don’t feel like it's a cage, I feel the opposite, I feel comfort in that. There’s no better feeling than seeing those mountains after you’ve been gone from them for a while. 

[Outsiders] It’s very frustrating to read articles from maybe, New York Times or see things on TV and shows that or movies that are representing people from this area. It’s frustrating ‘cause mainly it’s inaccurate. To me, it’s almost like they don’t know any better; it’s ignorance. 

They’re just going with the stereotype that has been perceived for hundreds of years, and they themselves have not put in the effort of going and finding things out for themselves. Or if they have made a trip into Appalachia, it seems like they always tend to go to places that might not be favorable because, yes, just like here in Appalachia, or just even in a large city, there’s places in large cities the sides of town you don’t go to. 

Every place has areas that are unfavorable, unpleasant, have history that you might want to sweep under the rug. For some reason it just seems like that is the things that are focused on in terms of people from this area, or places of this area. It’s very frustrating when you know that is completely inaccurate and you just have to be kind of smart with how you handle it. 

You want to represent our area in the best way possible, so you need to react to it in the best way even though it’s easy to get angry and upset. All I can say is before you speak out about this area, or if you have questions about this area, just come and visit for yourself. I promise you’ll leave here and you’ll have a completely different opinion if you’ve started with a negative one. 

It seems like we have always been the accepted butt of all jokes. It’s so frustrating because we have so many wonderful qualities; we have so much to be prideful about, and be thankful for. Look at where we are at right now. There’s so much to be proud of. It’s still okay to laugh about us, or poke fun about us and to be mean and negative about us; we’re the accepted joke I guess you could say. It’s not fair, and I feel like now is the time to change that and it doesn't mean that we need to find someone new to pick on or to kick on or anything like that. You should just have support and acceptance of everybody. There’s positive and negative everywhere, why does it have to be us?

[Economy] It’s been very disheartening to see loved ones, friends and things, suffer with maybe not being able to make their next car payment or maybe not able to take their kids on vacation because they don’t have the money. It’s very unfortunate, but I do think that there are solutions. 

I feel like coal has been our staple and has been our reliance and it was fine while it lasted because you use what you have, you use what resources you have. But now, since that’s not ideal and that’s not logical, it’s on to the next thing. 

We are a resilient person [and] our ancestors made do with what they had and succeeded in the best way possible. Why can’t we take that mentality and bring jobs in? Why do we need to leave this area and go to a city in order to get a networking or a computer job? Why can’t we have that here? We can! 

If we want to stay here, it’s our responsibility to go out seek those opportunities. If the jobs and opportunities are here, people will stay here, but if they don’t have nothing to go to, they’re not going to stay here. We have to go out and get it ourselves, because we can’t rely on anyone else to do it for us; and why should we when we are just as capable of doing it ourselves? 

Go out, get opportunities and bring them to us. I feel like we have full potential of doing that. Of course, technology is more insane than ever. There are so many that things you can do, everything is being computerized and technical. Anything having to do with technology and computers in this area would be a huge benefit. I can name a lot of friends who have degrees in electronics and technology, but they had to go out of state or out of region to get education in that. Maybe if we offered some more of those classes at our community college, or if we brought in some sort of networking place. If we could think of what we need we could bring it in here. 

[Difficult times] I’ve actually been very fortunate in having a very good life. I have the most amazing family that I could ever ask for, incredible support system. I guess the thing that has been a little painful on the heart is just seeing friends and family members who have given up on this place. Have to leave here and missing out on this area and losing friendships and losing relationships based on them leaving this area. That’s been difficult. 

[Triumphs] I’m twenty-seven years old and I was late in going to college; I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I graduated in May with an Associates Degree. I finally found a career that I enjoy, which is working at the Settlement School, and now I’m part of the Vista Program and that’s going to help me go back to college and get my Bachelor’s Degree. 

My life is finally going toward where it’s supposed to be. I worked multiple jobs for many years just because I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. I just kept myself busy and just paid bills, but I felt like I was treading water and not really moving toward anything. Now I feel like I finally have my destination in sight and I’m moving toward it. I’m very relieved to feel like I’m finally getting toward where I’m supposed to be and going toward an opportunity that I know I can make a difference. I’m going to get [my degree] in environmental education, because that’s what I interned at the Settlement School for three semesters teaching environmental education to inner city kids that came to the Settlement School. 

I want to be known as someone who was supportive and enthusiastic in everything that I did, and was willing to help and assist in making a difference in this region, in my community and made a positive influence on people that I was around.”