Zack Harold, Author at West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Making Faces: Behind A Face Jug’s Grin Lies A Long, Dark History

Folkways Reporter Zack Harold traced the story of Face Jugs. Examples of this type of art turn up everywhere, but some of them are connected to African Face Jugs, an art enslaved people brought with them to America.

This story originally aired in the May 21, 2023 episode of Inside Appalachia.

The tools of Ed Klimek’s trade look like something you’d find on a dentist’s tray. But that’s not what he uses them for.

“These, I can slice eyeballs in half. This one, I can put in the corner of the eye and mouth. Maybe separate the teeth a little bit,” Klimek said.

I realize that makes him sound like some kind of homespun Dr. Frankenstein or Dr. Moreau — but Klimek prefers to work in clay. For over 20 years, his Shinnston, West Virginia pottery studio has been churning out all kinds of creatures. Some look like Santa Claus, or gray man-style aliens. Klimek also has a penchant for making devils.

“Like that guy right there,” Klimek said, gesturing toward a blue jug with horns protruding from its forehead. “He’s smiling, right? But you don’t know why he’s smiling.”

These characters appear on hand-thrown ceramic jugs, about the size of your standard two gallon milk jug. Klimek makes faces on coffee mugs and cookie jars, too. And shot glasses. Though, due to their size, they only have one facial feature apiece — a nose, some lips, or a single, unblinking eye.

“You have a drink with a friend, you say, ‘Here’s lookin’ at ya,’” Klimek said.

Ed Klimek’s shot glasses often feature one facial feature apiece — like this one, with a mouth sticking out its tongue. *Credit: Zack Harold/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

Klimek’s face jugs, sold under the name Jughead Pottery, are well known in the West Virginia art scene. He’s been featured in galleries all over and was juried into the state-run Tamarack Market, where collectors snatch up his work.

But Klimek’s journey to becoming a successful full-time artist was a long one. Growing up and then as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, he tried his hands at different art forms like painting, silversmithing and woodcarving. Then came the Vietnam War, which derailed his plans for graduate school. He ended up spending eight years in the Air Force, working much of that time as an illustrator.

Once his enlistment was up, art remained a hobby as he worked a series of blue collar jobs as a carpenter, window installer, and finally as a pattern maker at a foundry in Fairmont, West Virginia. About 20 years ago, news came that the foundry was shutting down. Klimek was laid off. But instead of looking for another 9-to-5, his wife encouraged him to try the art thing full-time.

“She told me, ‘You don’t know until you try it. So go for it, dummy,’” Klimek said with a laugh. “So I did. It was a little bit of a struggle in the beginning. It takes time to get a business started.”

Ed Klimek in his basement pottery studio. *Credit: Zack Harold/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

At the time, Klimek was working with raku, a traditional Japanese style of pottery. But there wasn’t a whole lot of interest in this work. Then he saw a TV program by interior designer Lynette Jennings.

“I forget what the name of the program was, but it was about home decorating,” Klimek said. “And she had a thing on there about face jugs being very popular and collectible. It was a southern thing.”

Inspired by that program, Klimek started to make face jugs of his own. But as he’d learn, the vessels were more than just “a southern thing.” The art form has its roots in Africa, having crossed the Atlantic in the minds and hands of enslaved people.

In fact, we can pretty much trace the tradition to a single slave ship, as historian Wayne O’Bryant said.

“In 1808, you were not supposed to bring in anymore enslaved Africans from Africa,” O’Bryant said. “In 1858, 50 years later, a gentleman named Charles Lamar decided he wanted to reopen the slave trade. And he said, ‘Catch me if you can.’”

Lamar found himself a racing yacht dubbed, “The Wanderer” and set out for Africa.

“He sailed over to the Congo in West Africa in 1858, took about 400 Africans onboard, and brought them back to the U.S. The authorities did hear about it, but he outran them to the coast,” O’Bryant said.

Lamar landed on Jekyll Island, in Georgia. But even after escaping the authorities, he had a big problem. He was in possession of dozens of people who did not speak English, had never had any contact with the West. It was obvious they had been illegally trafficked. So he needed to disperse these enslaved people, fast.

A cousin took some of them up the Savannah River into South Carolina, eventually ending up in Edgefield County. Then as now, the area was known for its potteries. Many of the people Lamar smuggled ended up making ceramics. And in their off hours, they started making traditional vessels from their homeland.

“Somebody actually recorded these Africans that just landed here making these grotesque face vessels,” O’Bryant said. “Almost all of these face vessels date from after that time, after 1858.”

One prominent feature of these jugs was their stark white eyes and teeth. These were made with kaolin, a white silica clay also used to make fine china. The enslaved potters recognized it, because they had it back home in Africa, too.

“On the African continent, that is the ingredient that gives the vessel power,” O’Bryant said.

No one was selling face jugs at the time. They were meant for personal use in spiritual rituals.

“These practitioners can reach to the spiritual world to get information,” O’Bryant said. “And they would use these objects as a tool.”

Those Kaolin eyes and teeth were essential for those practices.

“The kaolin would be the battery in the phone. So without a battery, you still have the object but it won’t work without the battery,” O’Bryant said.

The power was largely cut off following the Civil War. Pottery is an expensive craft and after the war, many Black potters lost access to the materials they needed to make their art.

White potters, meanwhile, saw the popularity of the face jugs and appropriated the art form. They started making the vessels to sell to tourists who came to see the post-war south.

“You know, they say ‘The sincerest form of flattery is imitation,’” O’Bryant said.

But once the art form was out of Black potters’ hands, the history of face jugs as sacred objects started to be forgotten. Stories still circulate that the vessels were used to scare kids away from the beer or moonshine kept inside — even though enslaved people weren’t usually allowed to have alcohol.

The traditions were not lost completely, though. If Black potters and their face jug traditions could survive the Middle Passage and slavery, they could survive anything. Today, the tradition lives on through a new generation of potters like Jim McDowell of Weaverville, North Carolina. McDowell grew up hearing stories about face jugs.

“My granddaddy was a tombstone maker down in Spartanburg, South Carolina. And he started telling us about face jugs,” he said. “There was an ancestor in our family, and they said she made face jugs. It was family history. Oral history.”

North Carolina potter Jim McDowell is continuing the Black face jug tradition. *Courtesy*

Though he displayed artistic talent from an early age, McDowell did not take up pottery until he joined the U.S. Army and was stationed in Germany, where he started hanging out at a pottery studio in Nuremberg. He continued his study of the art form back in the states.

“I was at this university in Pennsylvania, Indiana University of Pennsylvania. There was a white guy making face jugs,” he said. “And I looked at that thing, and I said, ‘No, I think I need to make it myself.’ So I started making them, but I put Black features on them. The scarification, the big noses, exaggerated ears, and used glass for teeth or broken china plates.”

Unlike Klimek’s face jugs, with their realistic, if exaggerated-looking faces, the features of Jim McDowell’s jugs are rougher — more reminiscent of the look of the original Edgefield face jugs. He once told the Smithsonian, “My jugs are ugly, because slavery was ugly.”

“I don’t have any preconceived notions of what I’m going to make. I have an idea, like Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King or John Lewis. I think that thought is there, but when I put the nose on, I feel like I get influences from the ancestors,” McDowell said. “And I do certain things that maybe I don’t even realize. I’m versed in pottery as far as aesthetics and how to put it together. But the ideas — they don’t come from me.”

McDowell feels a particular kinship with David Drake, an enslaved Edgefield potter whose work now sells for millions of dollars and was recently featured in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

“His pots are still here because the writings reflect what he was going through,” McDowell said.

In a time where it was illegal to teach enslaved people how to read and write, Drake was making inscriptions on his pottery. And not just inscriptions, but poetry — clever, funny and heartbreaking poetry, inspired by what was happening in his life.

After Drake’s master sold his son and wife to another slave owner in Texas, he inscribed a pot with the couplet: “I wonder where is all my relations / Friendship to all and every nation.”

“He was p****d,” McDowell said.

McDowell expresses his own frustration and anger in his face jugs. Some of his recent works have been inspired by the murders of Emmit Till and George Floyd.

“I do it because if I don’t do it, I feel like this story is going to die,” McDowell said. “Somebody has to tell, even though people may not want to listen.”

“Miss Cissy” is Jim McDowell’s response to the murder of George Floyd by police. On the back, an inscription reads: “I’m coming for you son.” *Courtesy*

For someone with such a deep spiritual connection to this art, we asked McDowell how he felt about the history of white potters co-opting it.

“I’ll be honest with you, I really don’t have a problem with it,” he said.

He says he doesn’t begrudge white potters who make face jugs because everybody’s got to make a living. Plus, there are European traditions of ceramic vessels with faces on them.

But remember what Wayne O’Bryant told us? A traditional face jug without kaolin is like a phone without a charge: no power, just an object.

To McDowell, a modern face jug that isn’t shaped by the Black experience is like that. There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s fine to look at. It just doesn’t have the same power.

“They cannot put the spirits and the ideas and the thoughts that I have, because they don’t have that history. Their history is from England or Scotland or over there,” he said. “So I don’t quibble on it, because you can’t copy me.”

——

This story is part of the Inside Appalachia Folkways Reporting Project, a partnership with West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s Inside Appalachia and the Folklife Program of the West Virginia Humanities Council.

The Folkways Reporting Project is made possible in part with support from Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies to the West Virginia Public Broadcasting Foundation. Subscribe to the podcast to hear more stories of Appalachian folklife, arts and culture.

Charleston’s Hottest Lunch Is A Spicy Eastern European Stew

General Steak and Seafood’s Yugoslavian stew has been a local favorite for 40 years.

This story originally aired in the March 19, 2023 episode of Inside Appalachia.

It’s lunchtime on the first Friday of Lent, that season when many Christians abstain from mammal meat, and it’s getting busy at General Steak and Seafood in downtown Charleston, West Virginia. Folks are stopping to buy shrimp, salmon and cod. But nothing is selling faster than the Yugoslavian stew — “Yugo stew,” if you’re a regular.

The shop started at 10 a.m. with about seven gallons on hand. There’s only a few quarts left.

“It’s very good,” longtime fan Philip Michael said. “It’s spicy. It’s got every kind of seafood, scallops and shrimp. It’s just very tasty and very filling, actually.”

The shop started getting calls as soon as it opened from regulars like Michael hoping to reserve a few containers.

“Sometimes they might be having company and want three quarts or four quarts or more,” General Steak and Seafood co-founder Robin Harmon said. “Some people buy five or six pints, take them to the office and give everybody one. It sells out every day.”

Regulars often phone ahead to reserve containers of Yugoslavian stew. *Credit: Zack Harold/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

It’s been this way for over 40 years, before this current market existed. Back then, Robin and his brother Joe owned a combined restaurant and market a few streets over, as well as a bustling catering business.

Even then, the Harmon brothers were known for having the freshest seafood in town. But they had a problem. In those days, scallops didn’t come neatly wrapped and packed on refrigerated trucks. They arrived at Yeager Airport every day in 40 pound sacks. That led to a lot of broken pieces — perfectly edible, but not pretty enough to sell to customers.

The operation was also peeling 100 pounds of shrimp each day, between all of the businesses. Some of them inevitably looked a little worse for wear.

“Then everybody wants six- and eight-ounce center-cut pieces of fish, so we have all kinds of end pieces and trimmings,” Robin said.

The brothers had all perfectly good stuff, too delicious and expensive to throw away. They just didn’t have anything to do with it. Then one day, they found the solution in a copy of the newly launched “Cook’s Illustrated” magazine. It was a recipe for Dalmatian stew from the coastal region of Croatia — then part of Yugoslavia — where a lot of the local diet comes from the ocean.

“So it was actually a catch-all stew to use a lot of local marine life,” Robin said. “I modified it for restaurant use, because I wanted everything to be bite-sized and nothing in the shell, so you didn’t have to take things out of the shell, peel shrimp, and all that kind of stuff.”

Robin made other changes, too. He added extra spices and a lot of hot sauce. Perhaps most importantly, he changed the name.

“When you spelled it out, it looked like ‘Dalmatian.’ So I didn’t want the dog thing with it,” he said.

But Dalmatian stew, by any other name, tastes just as delicious.

Though the fish is always fresh, Robin usually makes the soup base a day or two ahead. He starts by speed-chopping five onions. He throws them into a pot with warm, shimmering olive oil alongside several chopped stalks of celery and two whole heads of garlic, finely minced. Then come the spices: parsley, oregano, basil and three kinds of pepper — black, white and red.

Robin Harmon chops onions to create his Yugoslavian stew base. *Credit: Zack Harold/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

He adds chicken stock and lets the mixture bubble away, allowing the flavors to condense. After that, he adds several gigantic cans of diced tomatoes and tomato sauce, granulated garlic, sugar and three kinds of hot sauce — Tabasco, Frank’s Red Hot, and Sriracha. Sriracha was a pretty exotic ingredient back when Robin first started making this stew in the early 1980s. His shop was probably the first place in Charleston to sell it.

“We bought it out of Cleveland,” he said. “Before you could buy it at a grocery store or anything, we sold it out of Broad Street.”

The soup base is finished once the hot sauce goes in. Tomorrow morning, Robin will heat it up and add the fish. This is the only part of the recipe that changes from day to day. It depends on what comes across the shop’s cutting boards — whether that’s salmon, swordfish, mahi mahi or catfish.

“There’s always calamari and shrimp and scallops in there, too,” Robin said.

Most of the fish goes in about 10 minutes before the soup is ready to serve. It doesn’t take long to cook. The shrimp takes even less time, going in the pot for just a couple minutes.

That’s great, because by this point, people are usually lining up for their Yugo stew.

Yugo stew is so popular, General Steak and Seafood put it on a t-shirt. *Credit: Zack Harold/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

Densie Workman, a substitute teacher at a nearby elementary school, hopped over on her lunch break.

“It’s spicy and delicious, filled with seafood,” she said. “I have the recipe that was in the paper a few years ago. But I’ve never tried to make it. You can’t top this.”

Kim Brown, who entered the store just minutes after Workman, wasn’t so lucky. All the Yugo stew was gone.

“Darn it. I knew I was probably too late,” she said.

It seems like everyone in town has a hankering for this dish — everyone, except for one person.

“My brother still eats it. The other people who work here still eat it. But they don’t make it every day like I do,” Robin said. “It’s the first thing I do every day when I get here, put it on the stove. I haven’t eaten it in years.”

Well, that’s just more for the rest of us.

——

Celebrating W.Va.’s Rail History On A One-87th Scale

Sometime in the 1970s, a group of model railroad enthusiasts in Charleston, West Virginia started getting together at the local Presbyterian Church to talk trains. As the club grew they found a bigger space where they could set up little dioramas for their engines and cars to traverse.

This story originally aired in the Feb. 17, 2023 episode of Inside Appalachia.

Sometime in the 1970s, a group of model railroad enthusiasts in Charleston, West Virginia started getting together at the local Presbyterian Church to talk trains. As the club grew, they found a bigger space where they could set up little dioramas for their engines and cars to traverse.

Then, in 1998, the Kanawha Valley Railroad Association got a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. The county commission gave them some money to build a brick-and-mortar clubhouse. Members decided to use the new space to build one big, permanent model train layout.

So, like the steel driving men who once tamed the West Virginia mountainsides, they set to work. They built huge tables where they laid track and wired it up to electricity. They crafted rock outcroppings from stacks of ceiling tiles that they roughed up with wire brushes — though sometimes they’d just find a nice looking rock outside and add it to the layout. They built houses and businesses and barns, coal tipples and a replica of the Hawk’s Nest Dam. They made thousands of trees from white poly fiber stuffing that they dipped in watered-down school glue and rolled around in ground-up green foam.

The Kanawha Valley Railroad Association built huge tables where they laid track and wired it up to electricity. *Credit: Zack Harold/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

Completing the layout took thousands of hours over about five years. But in the end, the club filled in the space, wall-to-wall, with the communities of Charleston, Elkview and Thurmond all at one-87ths scale.

And you can see it — just stop by the Kanawha Valley Railroad Association’s headquarters in Charleston’s Coonskin Park, any Sunday from 1 to 4 p.m. Admission is free, though donations are appreciated.

“It’s not only for us to enjoy but it’s for the community to enjoy,” member Anthony Parrish said. “Not everybody can have one of these in their basement.”

Club members have created a little game for visitors to help them fully experience the layout in all its detailed complexity.

“We have a ‘see if you can find it’ sheet that we give our visitors,” said Parrish, who helped build the layout. “There’s one scene here where there’s an old moonshine still located in the forest, in an area you wouldn’t think to look for a moonshine still. There’s rock climbers and stuff [and] a barber shop.”

Look really closely, and you start to notice something besides those Easter eggs. Is that a ‘57 Chevy crossing the Southside Bridge in Charleston? There’s the Kanawha County Courthouse on the boulevard — but where are the high rise office buildings or Haddad Riverfront Park?

This model doesn’t only capture the landscape of southern West Virginia. It captures a moment in time: a single sunny summer afternoon in the late 1950s or early 1960s. The club’s old-timers did the majority of the work on the model, and this was a way of remembering and reliving a bit of their youth.

Club members have created a little game for visitors to help them fully experience the layout in all its detailed complexity. *Credit: Zack Harold/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

But that doesn’t mean the club is stuck in the past. As you stand there, marveling at the West Virginia of yesteryear — along comes a Northfolk Southern diesel locomotive, just like the ones you might see chugging down the tracks today. It belongs to Austin West. At 15, he’s one of the group’s youngest members.

“The engines I have are ones that’s actually been in my backyard that I’ve seen,” West said. “I was like ‘I want to have that.’ And now I can.”

West doesn’t have a layout at home, so the model at the clubhouse gives him somewhere to run his trains. The club also has train cars and digital controllers that members can borrow, greatly reducing the barrier of entry for what can be a pretty expensive hobby.

But that’s not the only benefit newcomers like West get from their membership dues. He’s learned a lot from the more experienced members. Once you really get into it, it’s not enough to collect locomotives and railcars — you’ve got to modify them.

“The cars are mostly dirty and patched. And the front engine is supposed to look like it caught on fire, like the real thing,” West said.

While West prefers modern trains, his buddy Joesph Watson is focused on the Norfolk and Western railroad — trains that disappeared 20 years before he was born. He has diesel and steam locomotives from the N&W line, which he’s weathered with paint and special chalks using techniques he’s learned from other members.

“It’s all about making it look real,” Watson said. “Everybody here does it different. Get those different opinions and add it into what you do, and it makes your own style on how you model.”

It has enabled Watson to recreate something he never saw in real life. He’s 20 and the N&W went away in 1982, when it merged with Southern Railways to become Northfolk Southern.

“It makes you look back on, how would these be back in the day?” he said. “What would it be like to stand on the side of a railroad in the 1930s and see these coming down the tracks?”

And there are his trains, clacking right past Austin’s modern Northfolk Southern locomotives, in this snapshot of midcentury West Virginia. The past and present of American rail transit, alive on a small scale.

Completing the layout took thousands of hours over about five years. But in the end, the club filled in the space, wall-to-wall, with the communities of Charleston, Elkview and Thurmond all at one-87ths scale. *Credit: Zack Harold/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

The future, though, is less certain.

Yeager International Airport sits just up the hill from Charleston’s Coonskin Park. And a proposed multi-million dollar expansion of the runway there would require a whole section of park to be filled in with dirt — right where the clubhouse sits.

The building isn’t doomed just yet. The Federal Aviation Administration is still studying the project. But the train club has already started looking for new potential locations.

Member Mike Reynolds said any move will mean the end of their gigantic model of southern West Virginia rail lines.

“This was built to be permanent, so it would be really hard to break it up,” Reynolds said. “And whatever we take will be partially destroyed in the process and have to be redone. But we don’t know where we’re going to, so we don’t know how much room we’ll have. If any.”

It’s a little ironic. The very mode of transportation that supplanted trains as Americans’ go-to mode of cross-country travel now threatens to take away a place where that history is celebrated.

But while club members are concerned about the future of their building and layout, no one seems too worried about the future of the club. New train fanatics are being born every day.

“I’ve got a grandson that’s 3 years old. And from the day he had any idea what was going on, he has wanted to fool with trains,” Reynolds said. “It’s almost like a fox knows how to hunt. They already know what trains are all about.”

“I think it’s magic,” he said. “I do. I think it’s magic.”

The Kanawha Valley Railroad Association will also host its 17th annual Model Train and Craft Show at the Charleston Coliseum and Convention Center on March 11 and 12. You can find more about it on their Facebook page.

——

Toy Story Gets A Much Anticipated Sequel

With new owners, the Mountain Craft Shop Co. will bring traditional folk toys to a new generation of kids.

This story originally aired in the Dec. 23, 2022 episode of Inside Appalachia.

Steve Conlon knew everything about the traditional Appalachian folk toys he and his wife Ellie manufactured at the Mountain Craft Shop Co. in Proctor, West Virginia.

He knew the history, the principle of physics that made them work, and the right technique to make that ball on a string float up into the air and come down perfectly inside the wooden cup.

There was one thing Steve didn’t know, though. He didn’t know who would make these traditional toys once he and his wife were gone.

“How will it play out? We don’t know yet,” he said in a 2019 interview with Inside Appalachia. “The reality of the situation is we are manufacturing in America. Look around you. There’s a lot of competition.”

A year after that interview, Ellie died of lung cancer. A year after her death, Steve died from leukemia. That left the business in the hands of their son Terra.

Zack Harold

West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Steve and Ellie Conlon purchased the Mountain Craft Shop Co. in 2002 from its founder Dick Schnake.

“Terra — it’s Latin for ‘earth,’” he said. “I was an earth child, born on the living room floor.”

Terra lives in San Francisco now, where he’s a computer programmer. He tried to run the business from afar since his parents’ passing but it hasn’t really worked. The company lost money last year. So he decided to try and sell — but that didn’t work out either. At least, not the way Terra wanted.

“I had buyers that were interested in the businesses in Pennsylvania or New York. And ideally I wanted to keep it in the location,” he said.

Mountain Craft Shop Co. is so tied to Wetzel County — so tied to West Virginia — that even the wood used to make the toys comes from local trees that Terra’s dad would cut, mill and dry himself.

One day, while Terra was back in the Mountain State trying to wrap up his parents’ affairs, Fred Goddard stopped by. Goddard is a minister who lives just a few miles up the road.

“I saw some things for sale and I thought, ‘That would be handy on the farm,’” he said. “So I pulled in and [Terra] began to talk about the toy store and I began to share my memories with him.”

It turns out Goddard’s relationship with these toys goes back even farther than Terra’s — and even farther than Terra’s parents. Steve and Ellie Conlon were not the Mountain Craft Shop Co.’s original owners. They bought it in 2002 from its founder, Dick Schnake. He started the company in the mid-1960s. He was a mechanical engineer by trade but didn’t manufacture the toys himself. Schnake handled research and development and farmed out manufacturing to a staff of artisans.

But Schnake displayed his toys in a little showroom near his home, where shoppers could take them for a test drive. Goddard’s mother used to take him to that toy store when he was a little boy.

“Dick would stand and talk for hours,” Goddard said. “He would explain how the toys were made. He wanted us to see every toy in the store, not just what we were interested in. He wanted to show us everything.”

Zack Harold

West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Traditional wooden folk toys manufactured at the Mountain Craft Shop Co. in Proctor, West Virginia. The toys can be found at craft fairs and gift shops all over Appalachia.

Goddard doesn’t only have memories — he still has some of the toys his mother purchased from Schnake.

“I have a rubber band gun. And that one, of course, tended to get me in some trouble around the house,” he said.

As Goddard walked around the Conlons’ shop, Terra floated an idea.

“All of a sudden he said ‘I could sell you this business.’ And I’m thinking ‘No, I could never own this,’” Goddard said. “And he made an offer and I realized, I can’t pass this up.”

The timing was almost too perfect. Goddard lost his wife of 33 years to COVID-19 last December. Since then, he found love again with a widow who lost her husband to COVID-19. They’re engaged now and Goddard’s fiancé, as fate should have it, is an amateur woodworker.

Goddard plans to keep any current employees who want to stay. He also plans to recruit some additional elves to help build toys. The company won’t be able to stay in its current facility but Goddard plans to find a storefront where he can display the toys just like Dick Schnake once did.

Terra says it’s what his parents would’ve wanted.

Zack Harold

West Virginia Public Broadcasting

These marble runs are among the many traditional folk toys manufactured by the Mountain Craft Shop Co. They are sold with marbles manufactured by Marble King in nearby Paden City.

“I’m super pumped that not only is it someone in West Virginia, but it’s someone in Wetzel County,” he said. “My mom spent so much time, so much effort, developing the ‘West Virginia grown’ and Mountain State marketing. I like that.”

Fred’s just happy he’ll be able to give kids the same kinds of toys — and the same kinds of memories — he has.

“This area, this state, this country, this world, needs this store,” he said.

——

New Book Explores History Of West Virginia Hot Dogs

“Making Our Future” by former West Virginia state folklorist Emily Hilliard dives deep into the niches of Mountain State culture, from songs of the labor movement to the history of hot dogs. The book was released on Nov. 22, 2022.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Harold: There’s so much that we could cover. I would like to talk about something that’s near and dear to my heart — your chapter on hot dogs. Can you tell me about how the craze began?

Hilliard: It’s linked to industry and immigration, popularization of mass culture, urbanization and European migration. There were a lot of instances where Greek and maybe Italian immigrants were setting up hot dog stands in West Virginia. And mostly, that was in major urban centers in industrial areas. I think that’s why we see the hot dog really being popular in West Virginia in the southern coalfields, the northern coalfields and then industrial cities like the Ohio river towns of Huntington and Parkersburg. Hot dogs really seemed to boom in the 1910s and 1920s in West Virginia.

Harold: I love the line in the book from a Fairmont newspaper that calls Charleston “one of the greatest places on earth for hot dog eaters.”

Hilliard: That was amazing to find. I found several articles about hot dogs in Charleston. I found that there were at least four hot dog stands in Charleston in the early 1920s. Three of four of them were owned by Greek immigrants. And there was this amazing stat in one of the articles. It said 22,000 dogs a day are sold out of those four hot dog stands at one point. That is about one for every two residents in Charleston at the time.

Harold: I have this highlighted in my copy. “If all the hot dogs consumed in a year in Charleston were strung together, the string could extend to Huntington and back and still have enough left to run down to St. Albans on one side of the road and back on the other.”

Hilliard: And then I think it goes on to say, “Or it could go all the way to Morgantown.”

Harold: To return to your point: I found it interesting that it was so tied to industry. Because it’s cheap. It’s portable. This is the perfect thing for people who are doing shift work.

Hilliard: I talked to the descendants of A.J. Valos, who was a Greek immigrant born in 1894. He had actually worked as an indentured servant in the hot dog industry in New York and then moved to Parkersburg and opened the Broadway Sandwich Shop, which is still open. He opened that in 1939. And his relatives were saying they thought much of the success of his shop was because it was right across the street from the Mountain State Steel Foundry. And it was also close to a high school. So they got students from the school coming for a snack or for a meal. And then there were some other companies right nearby, so factory workers would grab hot dog before and after shifts.

Harold: Let’s talk about the hot dog stand war of 1922 in Fairmont.

The book was published Nov. 22, 2022 by University of North Carolina Press.

Hilliard: This was also something I found through looking through historic newspapers. There was this flurry of activity in the Fairmont papers in 1922. City officials were upset with the clientele that these hot dog stands in Fairmont were attracting. Most of that seems like racist and classist resentment of the Greek and Italian immigrants who were running these hot dog stands and wagons, and also the clientele of high school students and workers. They equate them with dive bars and beer joints and attest that they are unsavory, and tried to shut down some of these joints.

Then there’s the counter response of someone writing in and saying “maybe the city officials could worry about more important things than just shutting down hot dog stands.” Then there’s another newsstand owner who writes in and he is incensed that people had been thinking his new stand was a hot dog stand. He writes into the paper to assert that is simply not true. “I don’t want to be affiliated with that kind of base business.”

Harold: First comes the hot dog and then comes the West Virginia hot dog. You get into the history a little bit, which seems a little murky. When did we start putting slaw on dogs?

Hilliard: The first mention of slaw that I could find was from a 1949 paper in Raleigh County, and it was about the jail. Incarcerated people in the jail liked slaw on their dogs because they could smuggle in a razor blade.

That was another instance where it’s like, is this a joke column? I think there was a little bit of humor to it. But it is kind of funny to think that is why people started putting slaw on hot dogs.

Stanton from the West Virginia Hot Dog Blog credits a Stopette advertisement in the paper from 1922 that says something like, “Everyone’s talking about the Stop-Ette’s new dog with slaw.” So it may have been popular in the state before that. We just don’t know. There were traditions of coleslaw and cabbage with German immigrants and Eastern European immigrants who were living in West Virginia at the time.

Harold: I don’t think I’ll ever look at a hot dog the same way again.

Hilliard: Well, hopefully that doesn’t mean that you won’t still enjoy it.

Harold: I love them even more. You’ve published a book and authors have to do a certain amount of self promotion — telling people about the book, letting them know they can pre-order it. You ran into a little bit of controversy on social media over hot dogs. Can you tell me what happened?

Hilliard: I posted a map that my friend Dan Davis from Kin Ship Goods made for the book. It’s of the hot dog joints that are included in the book — most of them, but not all of them. I think maybe people just didn’t read that’s what it was for. I wouldn’t say it wasn’t quite viral, but it had hundreds of retweets and responses. People were just so mad that their favorite hot dog joint was not on this map. And I ended up issuing the disclaimer and saying, “This is not a value statement of the best hot dog joints. It’s simply the hot dog joints, some of them, that are listed in the book. And it’s not exhaustive by any means, and neither is the book. But I would love to see your hot dog map.” Which I’m serious about. I would love to see a collection of people’s favorite hot dog joints in West Virginia, or the ones where they have memories. I think Dan is making some merch for it, which might inspire more controversy. But hopefully not.

Harold: Or hopefully so — because like you said, if we generate enough controversy, this will lead to the creation of rival hot dog maps and then we just have a whole other chapter in your next book.

Hilliard: Yeah, that would be fun.

Harold: I feel like the state of West Virginia owes you a profound debt of gratitude for the work and love that you’ve put into this book, whether we’re talking about your chapter on hot dogs or your chapter on the author Breece D’J Pancake, or the chapter on the teacher strike or the one on independent pro wrestling. What we’ve ended up with is a book that you could put in somebody’s hands and say, “This is why West Virginia is special. This is what makes us who we are.” And I’m just so glad that you’ve given that to us.

Hilliard: I really appreciate that. In a way, it’s a love letter back to the state in all its complexity.

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The Folkways Reporting Project is made possible in part with support from Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies to the WestVirginia Public Broadcasting Foundation. Subscribe to the podcast to hear more stories of Appalachian folklife, arts, and culture.

New Podcast Takes Up Snake Handling Churches — But Leaves Behind The Stereotypes

Folkways reporter Zack Harold interviews musician, songwriter, painter and former preacher Abe Partridge about his podcast “Alabama Astronaut,” which chronicles the world of Appalachian snake handling churches and the unique genre of music found within their walls.

This story originally aired in the Nov. 4, 2022 episode of Inside Appalachia.

Folkways reporter Zack Harold interviews musician, songwriter, painter and former preacher Abe Partridge about his podcast Alabama Astronaut, which chronicles the world of Appalachian snake handling churches and the unique genre of music found within their walls.

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Harold: Can you give us a brief introduction on how you became familiar with the world of snake handling churches?

Partridge: I guess it depends on how far we want to go back, but I pastored in Middlesboro, Kentucky when I was in my mid 20s. I went through a crisis of faith, I guess you could say, and I was in the process of leaving the church.

During that time, I met a guy by the name of Jamie Coots, who was pretty well known in the serpent handling faith. We probably had a 30 or 45 minute conversation, but in that 30 or 45 minutes, it was a real striking conversation that I never forgot. He gave me his phone number — I think he knew that I was struggling.

Well, I started playing songs and painting and stuff like that. I was touring on the West Coast with artists by the name of Jerry Joseph and this other Alabamian from Birmingham named Will Stewart. He had a song that he wrote called “Brush Arbor.” It had a line in it that mentioned “copperheads and the Holy Ghost.” And I thought that was odd. I asked Will what it was about and he’s like, “It’s about a book I read called ‘Salvation on Sand Mountain.’” I read it at the beginning of the pandemic. And guess who’s in it? Jamie Coots.

So I said, “I’m going to go find this serpent handling church and I’m going to go.” Well, I found a few. And at every one that I went to, I had heard songs that I never knew — that I’d never heard before. And I had spent a large portion of my life in church.

*Musician, singer-songwriter, painter, podcaster and former preacher Abe Partridge*

Harold: For people that haven’t heard the podcast — what makes it special, compared to church music they might be familiar with?

Patridge: It differs, number one, in the lyrical content. These people happen to believe a certain passage of scripture that’s found in the book of Mark, chapter 16, verses 18 and 19. It draws from Jesus’ last words to his disciples before he ascended into heaven. And the last things that he told his disciples was there were five signs that were going to follow them that believe. Very quickly, the five are: cast out devils, laying hands on the sick and they shall recover, speaking in tongues, “they shall take up serpents,” and then “if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them.”

Now there are hundreds of millions of Pentecostals that exist on planet Earth. And nearly all of those Pentecostals will do three of those signs — speaking in tongues, they profess to cast out devils and they profess to lay hands on the sick and then they recover. But outside of these few believers, I’m not aware of any other ones in the world where they literally take up serpents and literally, if they consume a poison that it does not hurt them.

So whenever you hear a song that references those, you know that it had to originate within this sect of believers — because there is literally no other sect of believers on planet Earth that falls under the realm of Christianity that believe these things.

Harold: The musical style is also unique. How would you describe that?

Partridge: Dennis Covington wrote the book “Salvation on Sand Mountain.” He described it as a mixture of Salvation Army and acid rock. And then other people have called it rockabilly, rock and roll, rock and roll sacred music. I call it serpent handling gospel music. They just call it music.

Harold: So how is this tradition being passed down?

Partridge: The same way that music was passed down for all the centuries before man had access to means of recording. Person to person, church to church. I have yet to meet a serpent handling musician that had any type of formal training in music. They pass down both the songs and the style of their playing, I guess you would say, orally.

Harold: But you’ve got churches all the way from Alabama up into West Virginia. It’s a pretty big swath of territory. Are they visiting one another and passing along songs? How does that cultural exchange happen?

Partridge: The serpent handlers know each other. They sometimes have special meetings they call them “homecomings.” Sometimes they have meetings called “revivals.” And people will travel from the other churches to attend. I’ve actually been in services before where, if you listen to the audio, you would assume there was only one guitar player. But in actuality, there were multiple guitar players. They pass the guitar along as each one feels led. But they play the same style, because it all derives from their sacred music.

Harold: Has there been a change over the years in the kind of music that the snake handling churches are playing? Or has it maintained some kind of consistency?

Partridge: I wouldn’t call them “changes,” I would call them “tweaks” with the introduction of electric instruments, probably in the ‘60s. But before that even, they were playing acoustic instruments, and they were playing the same type of songs they’re playing now.

It’s still actively, right now in 2022, being passed down. And I’ve got hundreds of hours of recordings that show this kind of music being played back into the ‘50s.

Harold: It seems the depth you’ve gone into all this — is it all just about the music? Or is there something else behind it too?

Partridge: So it’s always been music first. That was my goal. But I will tell you this, if it was just about the music, I wouldn’t still be going. I’ve already got hundreds of hours of recordings. I could put a record out but two weeks ago, I was still there.

It’s actually helped rekindle my own faith. I wouldn’t necessarily like to line out what that looks like. And, you know, I’m not going to start picking up snakes. But I have witnessed things in the moment that felt absolutely supernatural.

Harold: So you’ve got the recordings. What’s the plan to present those to the public?

Partridge: We have released the Coots Duo album, which is an album that we recorded inside of the Full Gospel Tabernacle in Jesus’ Name in Middlesboro, Kentucky — which is Jamie Coots’ old church — with his son Cody, and his wife, Cassie.

Cody happens to be a fourth generation serpent handler, serpent handling preacher and songwriter. So we’ve recorded music with them. And we’ve already put that out on our website. It’s already available for download.

The Coots Duo album, produced by Partridge, features snake handling preacher Cody Coots and his wife Cassie.

The goal is to create a documentary record that is captured within the church. But now I need to find the most powerful moments and get these things mixed and mastered — which I do not personally have the skills to do. So that’s where we’re at right now.

And let me tell you when it gets done, it is going to blow your mind. Because it’s so good.

Harold: This is one of the most compelling podcasts I’ve heard in a long time. It gives a peek into a side of American culture that I don’t think a whole lot of people have thought about. A lot of people don’t even know exists. And it handles it with such respect and an apparent love of the subject matter.

Partridge: It’s not hard to treat them with respect. It’s not hard, but it never gets done. I think the overall theme is, there’s a lot of people in this world. And like Dr. Hood said in the podcast, if we’re going to have diversity in this country then it requires a respect.

You can find more information about the Alabama Astronaut podcast, the Coots Duo album and Partridge’s other projects at AlabamaAstronaut.com.

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