Farmer Grows Workforce Training Program In Former Coal Camp

This story was reported with support from Black By God, the West Virginian.

In the early 20th century, the coal industry was booming. Black communities in Appalachia thrived during the boom, but as coal declined, Black coal camps began to dwindle. Now, McDowell County resident Jason Tartt is reviving one of those coal camps – through workforce training and local agriculture.  

“My great-grandfather was growing vegetables all along these hillsides,” Tartt said on a recent walk around the community.

The land here was once a Black coal camp known as “Berwind,” “Hartwell” or simply “the camp.” At its peak, Berwind was a thriving, tight-knit community.

“People from all over the United States – Black people I’m talking about – came here,” Nathaniel Tartt, Jason’s father, said. “We had all Black schools. The trade schools were Black.”

The elder Tartt grew up in Berwind during the 1940s. 

“All kinds of professionals were here to run those things, and so when integration happened, a wave of unemployment swept across not only West Virginia, but this country, for Black people. And that’s when [the decline] started,” Nathaniel Tartt said.

McDowell County was once the beating heart of America’s coal industry, but in 1960, the area began to decline.

In 1950, 100,000 people called the county home. Today, fewer than 20,000 residents remain. Crushing poverty and an ongoing opioid crisis have defined the region for a generation.

Yet this land still whispers with potential, and a story of renewal is being written by Black folks whose ancestors called the Berwind coal camp home. Jason Tartt has transformed the camp into a 300-acre demonstration farm and economic development hub. 

“Our approach to economic development and, really, building out the [agriculture] sector is circulating that money within our own community, which happens to be a food desert community as well,” Tartt said. 

For years, the land around the Berwind coal camp lay fallow. Today, chickens roam freely, orchards bloom, and maple syrup flows. Tartt’s business, T&T Organics, provides a variety of fresh produce, goat meat and eggs. 

“We’ve got peaches, we’ve got pears, plums, apples, we’ve got cherry trees here. We have what we call ‘mountain-range’ poultry. The chickens are probably some of the healthiest that you’re gonna find. We do not do any artificial stuff – they’re all natural. And this is the quality that you can get here in Appalachia when you’re doing it the right way,” he said.

Tartt’s business also works together with EDGE, a nonprofit he cofounded that stands for “Economic Development Greater East.” Together, they operate a demonstration and research training environment, aptly named “Dirt.”  

“EDGE’s focus is economic development in the coal fields. You know, what are we beyond coal mining, right? And we’ve been a single-sector economy for so long, no one in the positions of leadership in the state of West Virginia took the time to figure out, what are we going to do after the coal mining industry declines?”

Fifty people have completed EDGE training sessions since 2020, and many are in the process of starting their own local agricultural businesses. 

Tartt is also working to restore some of the remaining structures from the original coal camp. 

“The church is kind of the last of what’s left here. Some of it’s falling in. We definitely want to try to restore it and at least have some memory of what once was here, because now there’s no way to tell what this was,” he said.

For some, remembering Appalachia’s Black history feels more important now than ever. 

William Turner, who holds a PhD in sociology and anthropology from Notre Dame University, was born and raised in the nearby coalfields of eastern Kentucky. He’s the author of The Harlan Renaissance: Stories of Black Life in Appalachian Coal Towns. He grew up in a community very much like the Berwind coal camp. 

“I grew up in a town where the Black community was what you might really call a genuine community – a people whose values, whose attitudes, whose traditions, whose heritage, whose little sayings and jokes, and all of that, and particularly the notion of the primacy of the family, was so important,” Turner said. “So, I grew up in what you call one of those now extinct, tight Black communities.” 

But just because something is extinct, doesn’t mean it can’t be revived. By using the land to create new opportunities for the people of McDowell County, Jason Tartt hopes to create a community more like the one his parents and grandparents remember.