On this West Virginia Morning, we meet a young woman whose mother is undocumented even though she’s married to a U.S. citizen. We’ll hear from Appalachian advocates who want Congress to reverse cuts impacting flood prevention and mine restoration funds.
And a West Virginia man is now a seminarian, studying in Vatican City to become a Roman Catholic priest. He shares his thoughts on the passing of Pope Francis and his desire to minister a Mountain State parish.
West Virginia Morning is a production of West Virginia Public Broadcasting which is solely responsible for its content.
Support for our news bureaus comes from Shepherd University and Marshall University School of Journalism and Mass Communications.
West Virginia Morning is produced with help from Bill Lynch, Chris Schulz, Curtis Tate, Emily Rice, Eric Douglas, Jack Walker, Maria Young and Randy Yohe.
Eric Douglas is our news director. Teresa Wills is our host. Maria Young produced this episode.
Listen to West Virginia Morning weekdays at 7:43 a.m. on WVPB Radio or subscribe to the podcast and never miss an episode. #WVMorning
Trump’s Department of Governmental Efficiency has cut $400 million federally in funding for AmeriCorps, a volunteer workforce program. Appalachian community leaders are now speaking out.
Each year, AmeriCorps pays young workers across the country to partake in service projects — in West Virginia, ranging from community farming programs to housing support to after-school services.
In April, the Trump administration placed the vast majority of federal AmeriCorps administrators on leave, and canceled roughly $400 million in grant funding to state and national partners through the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Twenty-five states have sued the presidential administration for what they call illegal gutting of the agency.
Outreach leaders for community service groups across Appalachia gathered for a virtual forum Thursday to discuss the funding cut’s impact, and to highlight their efforts to appeal Congress for a funding restoration.
On April 28, these groups sent a letter to ranking members of the appropriations committees of the United States Senate and the United States House of Representatives.
The letter identifies particular areas where organizers say funding must be protected, namely flood resiliency, workforce development and protection, family services, energy infrastructure, coal mine safety and economic development.
“Our work is bipartisan. Every day Appalachian communities work across political differences to find common ground; rebuild our economies; update dangerous, outdated infrastructure and create a stronger foundation for the future,” the letter reads. “These investments should be protected from cuts and freezes, and the agencies implementing these programs must be properly funded and staffed.”
During the virtual forum, Dana Kuhnline, program director for ReImagine Appalachia, said the cuts hit economically disadvantaged regions like Appalachia particularly hard. Her organization focuses on areas like workforce development and clean energy.
“It’s particularly ironic and frustrating that it’s coming from a lot of folks on the federal level who would say that they’re doing it for the coal industry, when you have all these communities that are getting hit now doubly by the downturn of the coal industry and these sort of erratic and illegal funding cancellations,” Kuhnline said.
Kevin Zedack serves as government affairs specialist for Appalachian Voices, a group that focuses on things like clean energy, environmental protection and workforce development in central Appalachia.
On a broad level, Zedack said the congressional response in Appalachia to funding cuts for community service programs like AmeriCorps has been growing.
“Depending on the program, we have heard from members of Congress that there is concern about restoring some of these programs,” he said.
Zedack noted that Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., and Rep. Riley Moore, R-W.Va., havecalled for a restoration of jobs at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), which researches things like black lung disease in miners. The agency falls outside the scope of AmeriCorps, but Zedack emphasized that NIOSH provides crucial support to the region.
“There are folks who are willing to have those conversations,” Zedack said. “I think as we see the large impacts of some of these decisions more members of Congress will come forward and start advocating for those as we enter the appropriations process.”
This week on Inside Appalachia, rock climbers with disabilities have found a home in Kentucky’s Red River Gorge, which offers some pumpy crags. Climbers have also been working to make West Virginia’s New River Gorge more inclusive. And a master craftsman, who makes one of a kind whitewater paddles remembers some advice.
Rock climbers with disabilities have found a home in Kentucky’s Red River Gorge, which offers some pumpy crags.
Also, climbers have also been working to make West Virginia’s New River Gorge more inclusive.
And, a master craftsman, who makes one of a kind whitewater paddles, remembers some advice.
You’ll hear these stories and more this week, Inside Appalachia.
Wearing an orange helmet and royal blue harness, Brian Liebenow holds onto the rock above his head looking down for the best place to move his feet. The green tinted sandstone looks like dragon scales in the morning light.
Photo Credit: Katie Jo Myers/Adaptive Climbers Festival, 2023
The mountains of Appalachia are home to some killer rock climbing, but they’re also accessible for some groups who’ve felt excluded in the past.
Adaptive sports reporter Emily Chen-Newton covers athletes with disabilities. She brings us this story, exploring why climbing festivals are making a home in Appalachia.
Removing Racist Language From Rock Climbing
DJ Grant climbing a route at New River Gorge.
Photo Credit: Zack Harold/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
In West Virginia, one of the most popular climbing destinations is the New River Gorge. Advanced rock climbers continue to pioneer new climbing routes there. The first people to climb these new routes are called “first ascensionists.” And they get the privilege of naming the routes. But what happens when dozens of those route names are plainly and clearly offensive?
In 2020 and 2021, Zack Harold followed the story of a climber at the New River Gorge who wanted to make the sport he loved more inclusive for his son.
Crafting A Classic Paddle
Jon Rugh with his wooden paddle at the New River near Blacksburg, VA.
Photo Credit: Clara Haizlett/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Appalachia has several huge rivers — the New River, the Youghiogheny, the Pigeon — so, it’s no surprise whitewater paddling is popular across the region, but it wasn’t all that long ago that modern paddlers first started exploring these rivers, designing their own gear and even building their own paddles. Some of those DIY paddle makers became master crafters.
Folkways Reporter Clara Haizlett followed one.
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Our theme music is by Matt Jackfert. Other music this week was provided by Sturgeon Creek, Anthony Vega, Oakfield, the Delorian, Biba Dupont, Marissa Anderson, Tyler Childers, Jerry Douglas and John Blissard.
Bill Lynch is our producer. Zander Aloi is our associate producer. Our executive producer is Eric Douglas. Kelley Libby is our editor. Our audio mixer is Patrick Stephens.
You can send us an email: InsideAppalachia@wvpublic.org.
The last few years have seen a new wave of indie rock music emerging from the Mountain South. It’s distinguished by a Southern rock sound, and lyrics drawn from observations about living in the region. We’re talking about acts like Wednesday and MJ Lenderman — and Fust, a group that’s based in Durham, North Carolina with deep Appalachian roots. Fust has a new album. It’s called “Big Ugly.” Inside Appalachia Host Mason Adams recently spoke with Fust singer and songwriter Aaron Dowdy.
The last few years have seen a new wave of indie rock music emerging from the Mountain South.
These bands are distinguished by a rich, Southern rock sound and lyrics drawn from observations about living in the region. We’re talking about acts like Wednesday and MJ Lenderman — and Fust, a group that’s based in Durham, North Carolina with deep Appalachian roots.
Inside Appalachia Host Mason Adams recently spoke with Fust singer and songwriter Aaron Dowdy.
Adams: Do you consider yourself Appalachian?
Dowdy: Absolutely. I grew up in the heart of Appalachia. I was raised in Bristol, Virginia, then I lived for a while in Asheville. So just purely based on the location and being fully surrounded by that area, I clearly consider myself to be Appalachian. But what that means is something more. I don’t know what the specific details of that is. That’s what I’ve been tracing, and my writing is less like a biographical detail and more about the entire feeling and subject of what it means to be from Appalachia.
Adams: When did you become aware of the concept of Appalachia? Was it something you grew up with, or did you kind of discover it later?
Dowdy: My dad’s family is all from West Virginia: Wyoming County, Pineville, Beckley area. We had family, though, in Union and Fayetteville. Also, Bristol is a great place to be born for music, for the history of music. Obviously, it’s the so-called “Birthplace of Country Music,” if you want to take that version of things. And Clarence Ashley‘s from there, and Tennessee Ernie Ford, and that culture is alive and well. I think my parents really loved being from that region. I mean, obviously there’s complications, but we never shied away from it. We tried to participate in as many cultural things as we could. I was brought up to know it and to love it.
Fust singer-songwriter Aaron Dowdy.
Courtesy of Fust/Charlie Boss
Adams: The press release for Big Ugly mentions your connections to the Hatfield family in West Virginia, as well as the groundbreaking Carter family, which of course exploded at the “big bang of country music” in Bristol. Was that something you were aware of, too? And can you talk a little bit about your interest in your family’s links to those famous families?
Dowdy: Mostly this comes out of taking a greater interest in family history, as a lot of people do. At a certain point, you want to know where you come from and also you grow to love your grandparents and their experiences, and you want to know the history of that. And so, I started to sort of inquire with my grandmother about her family and where she comes from in West Virginia, and what her experiences were like. We would take trips together over the past five or ten years, where we would just kind of walk around her area and hear stories, and these connections came out, going to Matewan and seeing the courthouse steps.
She would say, it just would kind of come out in her speech, “Oh, we had family connections to the Hatfields.” And then also talking with family and talking to my dad, who’s also done similar work, asking questions about family and our connection to Maybelle Carter. It’s a kind of narrative we tell about ourselves that’s true, but it’s also just a way of feeling tied to the area and what the area’s done. And it’s legendary stuff. I mean, the Hatfields and McCoys, obviously, but also the Carters have become the stuff of legends, and there’s a long history of what the Carter family opened up and made possible for music, and the fact that I feel myself to be a part of that area and still writing music, I necessarily feel like I’m part of the lineage. Yes, I mean, I think there’s a familial tie. There definitely is, but there’s also something else — a kind of cultural tie that I feel like I’m a part of, and I’m happy to be a part of.
Adams: That feeling definitely translates to the music and the lyrics you write. How did growing up here, and all that context you talk about, how does that affect your songwriting?
Dowdy: I didn’t grow up with a community of music. It wasn’t like everybody I knew played music, or my parents don’t play music, but it was so ambiently rich that I knew music and playing music was a thing that people did. We have folk and roots festivals in that area, and we would go to them. It became clear to me at some point that music was the way that I saw the world. I didn’t intend it in any way. It wasn’t like I took lessons to try to become a great performer. I never really cared about that. It was just that at a certain point, I realized I was singing a lot, and I was tending towards instruments, and I was fixated on performers and wanting to go to shows, and I always gravitated towards being a songwriter.
That’s what I liked the most, was blending melody and instrumentations and lyrics. I think part of what makes the lyrics specifically Appalachian or specifically Southern in that way, I had lived in the South for most of my life, and then I moved to New York, and I thought that I was maybe getting away from something or needed to, just as a different experience. But almost immediately [I] felt something missing, and I was so curious, as I was missing the South, what it was that I was missing. And so, I started writing. I started the Fust project, specifically on those grounds, as somebody who had grown up in it but had moved away for a bit, to start reconnecting with the South and my region and my upbringing. So, the themes being so specifically Southern in that way, and specifically Appalachian, have to do with me trying to return to and think hard about where I’m from and what’s going on there. And yes, there are a lot of issues, but also there’s just so much feeling and so much history and so many good people. I think lyrics having an opportunity to host those contradictions, or try to describe those contradictions, is what drives the project, lyrically at least.
Fust.
Courtesy of Fust/Graham Tolbert
Adams: The lyrics on “Spangled,” the first single from the album, grab me right out the gate with the first line, “They tore down the hospital.” There have been a lot of rural hospital closures in the last decade. So right away, this hits. What inspired that line?
Dowdy: That line works on so many levels for me. I like lines that are very complicated. Rural hospital closures are a serious problem. I don’t go into the reasoning behind it in the song, whether it’s financial losses or low reimbursement rates, or whatever it may be, declining populations in rural areas. I mean, it’s just a fact. And there’s so much at play in these closures. On a personal level, the hospital I was born in was closed down in Bristol, Tennessee. That’s sort of been a figure in my thoughts since I was a kid, not being able to see the place I was born, exactly. You can kind of see the area that it was, but you can’t see the building, and you can’t visit the room. And that has been a motif that I thought about for a long time, but when I started writing this song, what I really wanted to get at was trauma in the South, or a certain kind of difficulty that maybe you end up often end up at the hospital, and the hospital becomes a point of crisis or a transition point in some person’s life. It can have a lot of meaning for somebody — that moment of being saved, or whatever you know, or coming to recognize where you are, what you need — and for that building to have been taken down. I started to imagine all the people who had that experience floating there in time. But I would also say those lyrics are really interesting.
If you take the opening couplet of “They tore down the hospital out on Route 11. I’m not sure what happened. It seems like repossession.” I mean, it can be from one angle, describing this financial inequality that’s behind the closure, but then also it kind of describes the person immediately, “I’m not sure what happened.” You kind of are losing consciousness a little bit, or something sort of stepping in to get in the way. And “repossession”. You’re repossessed by an old event that happened to you, and something comes over you, and you’re repossessed by an old memory, and you lose focus. I like that play on the very personal and the historical, how they collide. And I think that opening couplet really does that.
Adams:Big Ugly is a grower. Every time I listen to it, I hear something new, and it’s still kind of revealing itself to me. But right away, my favorite song is “Mountain Language.” I love this connection between mountains and language. I spent a few years living away, and whenever I heard a mountain accent, it immediately brought me back home, and I felt like I was in community. Can you share some of what inspired this song?
Dowdy: The initial kernel for this song was actually — seems really out of field — but it’s a play by the playwright, Harold Pinter, called “Mountain Language.” And interestingly, it’s about the Kurds and the military coup of 1980 when the Kurdish language was officially prohibited in public life and private life. It’s a one-act play about the soldiers, and they’re asking questions to the prisoners, but they’re not allowed to speak in their own language, but they don’t know the language of the captors. So there’s this impasse. And it really struck me. I mean, obviously, the Syrian Civil War is a big part of my life, not exactly, but just as a global event during my lifetime. And that story always stuck with me. But then, of course, coming from Appalachia, my first thought when I think about “mountain language” is something like you’re saying, like the real character of Southern personality and regionalism and expressions.
What I wanted to write was some kind of blend of those two — this idea of a people who, when someone’s stronger than you or is more ideologically coherent or dominant, and you feel like you have to play that part. You have to speak that language. But you know you still dream in yours, in a way, that yours has gone underground, but you’ve got this language that is really true to your way of life, that maybe doesn’t get the opportunity to be worked through because you have to work these jobs, and you have to work these or deal with these kind of cultural setbacks. I wanted to write the song about country utopia, about making it up the mountain again, and being with friends and and this language, a language that is proportional to life in the South and that feels like it expresses it right, and doesn’t have to deal with the sort of ways of the world, and that kind of community that’s not inhibited, but actually it’s precisely what it needs to be. It’s Southern and it’s mountain. I like that idea of a kind of utopia that is consisting of things that people might not expect them to exist with. It’s not a technological utopia. It’s a country or mountain utopia.
In 2022, nature artist Rosalie Haizlett set out on a trip to illustrate parts of the Appalachian Mountains that often get overlooked – that is, the tiny birds, reptiles and other critters hiding beneath leaves or up in the trees. Her illustrations came together as Tiny Worlds of the Appalachian Mountains, an Artist’s journey. Bill Lynch spoke with Haizlett about the book.
In 2022, nature artist Rosalie Haizlett set out on a trip to illustrate parts of the Appalachian Mountains that often get overlooked – that is, the tiny birds, reptiles and other critters hiding beneath leaves or up in the trees.
Her illustrations came together as Tiny Worlds of the Appalachian Mountains, an Artist’s journey. It’s a new book, full of colorful images and thoughts Haizlett recorded as she spent hours exploring the mountains.
Inside Appalachia Producer Bill Lynch spoke with Haizlett about the book.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Lynch: To begin with, where did the idea of the project come from?
Haizlett: So, I have always had a special affinity for small creatures. Ever since I got my first hamster when I was eight.
I know a lot of kids go through hamster phases. I think mine was a little more intense than most kids, and that kind of spun off into a love for all rodents, and then that love for tiny creatures just kind of continued as I started to learn more about the natural world,, as I got older.
And I always wanted to be an artist, but wasn’t really sure what to focus on with my art. It wasn’t until, probably, college and my early 20s that I realized that I could pair art and nature together. I could make work that celebrates the natural world.
I started a personal project in 2017 called “Tiny Worlds West Virginia,” and that was just my goal, to get better at watercolor and also to learn a little bit about a new creature every month.
And in 2021, I got really hyped up on caffeine one day, and I took a big walk, and I was like, “What if I illustrate a whole bunch of tiny critters from the whole Appalachian mountain range?”
Before I could talk myself down from it, I called the guy that I was gonna marry in a week, and I was like, “Can we move out of our apartment and do this huge trip and document all these things?”
And he was like, “Yeah, let’s do it.”
Lynch: Tell me about your husband. This is a pretty big leap to do something like this. So, tell me about him.
Haizlett: He is a water engineer and he works remotely. It worked out that he was able to keep working while we were on the road. We ended up going on this trip. It was six months in total: a continuous road trip that started in Alabama, which is the southernmost part of the Appalachians. Then, we ended in Newfoundland, which is the northernmost part in North America.
The Appalachian mountains extend into Scotland.
Pretty much every day, I would go out and look for interesting, small critters, plants, fungi, slime molds –all sorts of stuff. I would document my observations with words and sketches and take pictures. And then I’d come back to wherever we were staying, and I would illustrate what I saw using watercolor.
Lynch: The trip itself, the places you went, how did you choose them?
Haizlett: So we wanted to take advantage of discounted rates at different rentals.
A lot of them, you have to stay in a place for two weeks or longer.
We had, like, six main base camps all scattered throughout the mountains. We kind of just looked at a map of the Appalachian Mountains, found these locations that were close to public lands – so, a national park or something nearby state parks.
Lynch: Words and pictures, which was harder to get down?
Haizlett: Words! I’ve never really thought of myself as a writer. I’ve been a journaler my whole life, like I kept very regular journals from the time I was like five to 18. Every day is documented.
So, I always liked to record what I saw, but I never really tried to write essays or poems or, like, polished writing.
It was always just very casual. So, I kind of leaned into that for this book, because I was really “psyching” myself out about the writing.
I originally wanted it to be all illustrations and just the tiniest descriptions of what I saw. Then, as I was working on it, I realized that it was becoming disjointed, and I needed to tell the story more through words, so that people could understand what was happening.
They weren’t there on these long hikes. I’d be by myself so much time in my own head. So, I would just jot down what I was thinking or what I was seeing in my phone, in the Notes app.
Basically, I wrote the whole book while I was walking or sitting on a log. Because sometimes I’d be tripping over stuff. So, I’d stop. I’d sit on a log and I’d write out an observation or the beginning of an essay. Then, I’d edit it later.
That actually works really well for this book because I want it to feel like you’re walking alongside me through the mountains.
Lynch: There’s definitely a feeling of being in your thoughts. There’s a lot of introspection. You talk, you kind of gloss over portions of your childhood, even how you got there, which made me interested in your childhood. You were homeschooled?
Haizlett: Yeah, I was homeschooled till I was about 12. I’m one of seven kids. So, I had kind of a weird childhood, lived on a farm and was in a family band.
I talk about a lot of these things in the book, and it was a very beautiful childhood, but a little weird.
Lynch: The family band tell me just a hair about that.
Haizlett: So, I have… let me see… I don’t even know how many older siblings I have… I have three older siblings….lost count… three older siblings. And so by the time I came along, there was already a family band established. They all played instruments, and so it was just kind of a thing that when you’re born into my family, you are part of the band.
And we were not a big deal, but we did travel around quite a bit to state fairs, festivals, churches, family reunions. We’d all be standing up there with our old-timey instruments. It was very much like Americana music, so a lot of John Prine and the Carter family.
Yeah, we played, played lots of tunes together.
My dad wrote a lot of the songs too. It was a good time.
It lasted until I was about 14. I write about that in the book that I was kind of the demise of the family band, because I went to school and my peers found out about the band, and they did not think it was cool.
So, I ruined it. I broke up the band.
Lynch: Well, this project, what was your favorite part about it?
Haizlett: Oh, well, there’s so many things.
One of the things that felt really special was just getting to dive deep into a project for a couple of years. So, the trip took six months. Planning the trip, getting some grants to help pay for the trip and finding a publisher took a full year before we even left.
Coming back afterward, I spent a year finishing all the paintings from those reference materials. I was able just to kind of lose myself in the project, to lose myself in the places.
Even after we got home, I had spent so much time in each place, and was so present in each place, that I was able to access those memories in a way that I hadn’t been able to before.
So, I’d be working on the section about Quebec, I would see my husband at lunch, and he would ask me what I’ve been up to. And I’d be like, “Oh, I’m just in the woods of Quebec right now.”
Like, mentally I was there because I had so much time in each place, and that was really a treat.
Lynch: Do you have a favorite critter?
Haizlett: Oh, there’s so many good critters. I’ll tell you about two.
In Alabama, one of the very first things that we saw was a green anole lizard.
They’re sort of like chameleons. They change color based on their temperature and mood.
So, I saw this little, brown lizard on the trail, and it was holding very still. So I was very pleased, because small critters, often, because they don’t have a lot of defense mechanisms, they’re very speedy.
So, that’s a constant challenge with this book, because I only wanted to include things that I actually saw and got my own pictures of. So, even though Hellbender salamanders are so iconic for this area, I didn’t see one on the trip. I couldn’t include it.
I was watching this little lizard. It was holding still. I was very happy. And then it dove under a leaf and ate a beetle.
It stayed under there for a long time. So, I got curious. I lifted up the leaf and it had turned bright green, and I was shook because I did not know that they changed colors.
I just thought I was looking at this brown lizard, and then all of a sudden it’s this beautiful, lime green.
That was a really cool surprise and a lesson that just watching a critter for a long time will lead to interesting observations.
The second one I want to talk about is actually an eastern screech owl that I saw after we returned from the trip.
After six months on the road, we came back to the farm that I grew up on and we lived there for a while. My goal was just to see this place that I knew so intimately with fresh eyes after the trip.
I wondered after so many months of slow hiking and paying attention, “what will I see that I might have missed before?”
One of the coolest things that I saw right around the farm was an eastern screech owl who lived in a hollow in a tree. I just stumbled upon this owl one day. I don’t even know how I saw it was so camouflaged, but I was just looking around and saw two eyes staring back at me from this hole.
That owl stayed there all winter long, and that’s something that they often do to kind of stake their claim for nesting in the spring.
That owl kind of became my muse when I got home, because it was really easy, after seeing all this cool stuff on this long trip, to think like, oh, what else is there to see in my home? Like, I know everything. It’s less exciting. But then thinking about my owl being there and how hidden it was, and how I wouldn’t have found it unless I’d been looking closely, made me think “Oh, there’s probably so much more here that is yet to be discovered.”
And that’s been a really nice takeaway. It’s not always about going elsewhere to find that inspiration. You can find it in your own backyard.
Lynch: The book is Tiny Worlds of the Appalachian Mountains: an Artist journey by Rosalie Hazlett. Rosalie, thank you very much.
Haizlett: Thank you so much for having me.
Author Rosalie Haizlett’s book Tiny Worlds shares her fascination with little critters.
Appalshop, an Appalachian arts and media hub based in Kentucky, faced archival damage during a devastating flooding incident in 2022. Now, the organization says restoration efforts have brought much of the archive back to life.
For Appalshop, a regional media and arts hub, the floods brought severe damage to its film and audio archive, which documents decades of Appalachian culture and folk life.
This month, another bout of severe flooding killed at least 23 people in Kentucky and three in West Virginia. Reporter Jack Walker spoke to Roger May, Appalshop’s director of artistic programs, about the recovery process thus far, plus the future of archival work as environmental disasters become a seemingly ever-present concern.
Listen to an extended version of this conversation below:
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Walker: Can you tell us about what kind of archives Appalshop posts and its ties to Appalachia as a region and the regional heritage here?
May: Our archive is, we believe, the largest repository of Appalachian ephemera in the country and quite possibly the world. That includes film. That includes video, photo negatives, audio recordings and other types of ephemera. A lot of that material was damaged in the flood of July 2022, when the flood waters off of the North Fork of the Kentucky River reached about six-and-a-half feet in height inside our vault in the archive at our Whitesburg building.
It was a huge blow to not just our archive, but to the region and to the folks that know what’s in that archive and the richness that’s contained therein. But we’ve been able to get that material out to the respective subject matter experts in those fields. And we’ve been really pleasantly surprised with the results that we’ve seen from the cleaned and digitized material that we’re getting back.
Walker: I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that, this February, both Kentucky and West Virginia have been affected by flooding, which has been fatal in certain communities. Given that we’re talking about flooding today and how it’s impacted your work, could you speak to what the situation is like over in Eastern Kentucky?
May: In 2022, it was deemed the 1,000-year flood. One that no one could recall seeing [another flood] as bad as it was. It was just devastating. Now, in February of 2025, we find ourselves in the midst of another 1,000-year flood in fewer than 1,000 days. So it seems like the frequency of these kinds of floods are increasing, and the impact of these floods are just horrific every time they may happen.
There have been a number of deaths in Eastern Kentucky and southern West Virginia. And it’s just, it’s hard. We’re often labeled as resilient people, and there’s a point at which resilience is not a choice. It’s something you have to do. But it’s also tiring to have to be resilient all the time.
Walker: You mentioned that a lot of these materials were damaged during the 2022 flooding incident. What did the restoration process actually like? You said you found experts who were able to restore certain materials. Can you walk us through what it takes to restore archives?
May: Well, from from a lay perspective — again, I’m not an archivist or a restoration expert — but from my 30,000-foot understanding of it, as soon as those materials are exposed to water or humidity or mud or any of the elements that came through during the flood, they can begin to break down. So the first thing is to suspend that growth of mold and so forth. And you do that by getting it into a freezer or colder storage. So that’s step one.
Then the experts in the field have developed methodologies to carefully clean and restore those items. Then they have a digitization process that they go through. And once that’s completed, they send those films and audio recordings and footage and so forth back to us on hard drives. So that’s a little bit of what that process looks like.
Walker: Now that we’ve seen the impact that flooding can have on archival materials like this, are you taking any steps to prepare for incidents like that in the future?
May: One of the things that we had to do in 2022 was look for another space. We simply just couldn’t be in the building we were in in Whitesburg anymore. So we relocated to a temporary office space in Jenkins, which is about 15 miles away from Whitesburg, still in Letcher County. We’ve moved our materials over there. Also, our archive standard practices geographical separation. So we have multiple copies of hard drives backed up in geographically different locations. So, if something catastrophic like a flood were to happen again, we would have multiple copies of those materials at different locations.
Runoff flooded portions of U.S. Route 119 in Kanawha County, W.Va. earlier this month, causing traffic delays.
Photo Credit: Eric Douglas/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Walker: I’m a little biased because I’m coming from a West Virginia perspective here. But maybe for our West Virginia listeners, are there any things that have stood out from the West Virginia materials you’ve collected?
May: Yeah, one that really stands out to me. Again, I’m biased too, because I was born in Pike County, Kentucky, and raised in Mingo County, West Virginia. So I usually joke and say I get to claim dual citizenship.
But as a West Virginian and as somebody from Chattaroy in Mingo County, Nimrod Workman, the regionally well-known activist and singer and performer is from Chattaroy. We have June Appal Recordings, our record label; the very first imprint on our record label is an album by Nimrod Workman and his daughter. There’s an Appalshop film about Nimrod Workman called “To Fit My Own Category.” Again, as a West Virginian and somebody from Mingo County, I’m really proud that those items are in our archive at Appalshop.
Walker: I was curious, then: Do you think archival work like this that focuses on the entire region of Appalachia plays a role in uniting communities here, and making them feel like they are part of a shared history?
May: I think it’s really important for people to be able to see themselves in the archive — that they see themselves represented and reflected back to themselves in our archive. That’s one of the amazing things about the archive at Appalshop. It counters the stereotype of Appalachia just being white and rural. We’ve got a really broad collection of materials, from Cherokee speakers to African American folks. As an archive, we want to continue to build on that and continue to show the diversity in Appalachia.
Walker: A word you used earlier in the conversation that I think really highlights what we’ve spoken about so far is ephemera. So, materials that aren’t necessarily long lasting. I’m curious, when you face an incident like this that really highlights how ephemeral, for lack of a better word, some of these archival materials that relate to Appalachian heritage really are, how does that change your motivation to protect these pieces of cultural heritage? Does it add a sense of urgency to the work that you’re already doing?
May: I think it does. In this time, everything feels urgent. I think it’s important that we remind ourselves of why we’re here in the first place. That is to help other people tell their stories and to center those stories in a landscape where their their voices and their stories are often not centered and not heard, and to celebrate the beauty in that, and to lift that up and to preserve it so that future generations can also see and learn the beauty and the value of it. Whether it’s a flood or another natural disaster, it’s important to preserve these materials.
To learn more about Appalshop, its archive and its arts programming in Appalachia, visit the organization’s website.
This story was distributed by the Appalachia + Mid-South Newsroom, a collaboration between West Virginia Public Broadcasting, WPLN and WUOT in Tennessee, LPM, WEKU, WKMS and WKYU in Kentucky and NPR.
