Appalachian Studies Association Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

A Tale Of Treenware And A NASCAR Legend, Inside Appalachia

This week on Inside Appalachia, a pair of former miners found love shoveling coal and shaped a life making wooden spoons. We learn about treenware. Also, NASCAR Hall of Famer Leonard Wood shares stories, and a bit of advice. And, group bike rides are a way to socialize and get outside. But here in Appalachia, newcomers are met with steep hills.

This week, a pair of former miners found love shoveling coal and shaped a life making wooden spoons. We learn about treenware.

Also, NASCAR Hall of Famer Leonard Wood shares stories, and a bit of advice.

And, group bike rides are a way to socialize and get outside. But here in Appalachia, newcomers are met with steep hills.

In This Episode:

Two For Treenware
Hanging Out With NASCAR Legend Leonard Wood
Exploring Morgantown On The Back Of A Bicycle
Sovereignty At The Museum Of The Cherokee People

Two For Treenware

Stan and Sue Jennings turned a conversation about a passion into a business.

*Photo Credit: Zack Gray/Allegheny Treenware*

For 30 years, Sue and Stan Jennings have run Allegheny Treenware, a West Virginia company that makes wooden kitchen utensils. But they started off as a couple of coal miners. And when they weren’t underground, they talked about what else they could be doing.

Folkways Reporter Capri Cafaro visited the Jennings.

Hanging Out With NASCAR Legend Leonard Wood

Straight from the source at The Wood Brothers Racing Museum.

*Photo Credit: Mason Adams/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

Stock car racing’s roots run deep in Appalachia. Some of NASCAR’s early stars came straight from the lawless moonshine runners of the 1920s and 1930s, but NASCAR’s oldest continuous racing team had nothing to do with moonshine.

Mason Adams visited with Leonard Wood at The Wood Brothers Racing Museum in Virginia for stories and wisdom.

Exploring Morgantown On The Back Of A Bicycle

The ad-hoc Morgantown Social Rides aim to get cyclists onto the streets to explore the city in a new way.

*Photo Credit: Chris Schulz/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

With spring, lots of folks are heading out to the woods or the rivers, but one group in Morgantown, West Virginia is taking to the streets – on their bicycles.

WVPB’s Chris Schulz grabbed his helmet and tagged along to explore his city in a new way.

Sovereignty At The Museum Of The Cherokee People

BPR’s Lilly Knoepp (left) spoke with Museum of the Cherokee People Director of Education Dakota Brown and Director of Collections Evan Mathis at the Appalachian Studies Conference on Friday March 8, 2024 at Western Carolina University.

*Photo Credit: BPR*

In western North Carolina, a new exhibit called “Sovereignty” recently opened at the Museum of the Cherokee People. The exhibit focuses on the autonomy of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. Director of Education Dakota Brown is co-curator of the exhibit.

BPR Senior Regional Reporter Lilly Knoepp spoke with Brown as part of a panel at the Appalachian Studies Association conference in March and sent us an excerpt.

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Our theme music is by Matt Jackfert. Other music this week was provided by The Dirty River Boys, Charlie McCoy, John Blissard, Sierra Ferrell, and John Inghram.

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. We had help this week from folkways editors Nicole Musgrave and Mallory Noe Payne.

You can send us an email: InsideAppalachia@wvpublic.org.

You can find us on Instagram, Threads and Twitter @InAppalachia. Or here on Facebook.

Sign-up for the Inside Appalachia Newsletter!

Inside Appalachia is a production of West Virginia Public Broadcasting.

Encore: What Is Appalachia? We Asked People From Around The Region. Here’s What They Said.

Politically, Appalachia encompasses 423 counties across 13 states — and West Virginia’s the only state entirely inside the region. That leaves so much room for geographic and cultural variation, as well as many different views on what Appalachia really is. For Inside Appalachia, we turned our entire episode over to the question, “What is Appalachia?”

This week, we’re revisiting our episode “What Is Appalachia?” from December 2021.

Appalachia connects mountainous parts of the South, the Midwest, the Rust Belt and even the Northeast. The Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) defined the boundaries for Appalachia in 1965 with the creation of the Appalachian Regional Commission, a part of Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty. It was legislation that sought to expand social welfare, and some localities were eager for the money, while others resisted the designation. The boundaries and definition of Appalachia can now only be changed by an act of Congress.

Politically, Appalachia encompasses 423 counties across 13 states — and West Virginia’s the only state entirely inside the region.

That leaves so much room for geographic and cultural variation, as well as many different views on what Appalachia really is.

For Inside Appalachia, we turned our entire episode over to the question, “What is Appalachia?” With stories from Mississippi to Pittsburgh, we asked people across our region whether they consider themselves to be Appalachian.

A 1996 map that shows the southern part of Appalachia, as defined by John Alexander Williams.

Mississippi

Bob Owens is a watermelon farmer outside New Houlka, in the northeastern part of Mississippi. Owens said he was aware that Mississippi is part of Appalachia, but that no one in the state would consider themselves Appalachian. “I consider myself the worst redneck you’ve ever seen,” Owens said. “I live in the area of the Appalachian mountain range — not part of it, but close to it. So I guess you call me a redneck Appalachian.” This is the general consensus among the people in Mississippi who Inside Appalachia spoke to.

Geographically, the foothills of the Appalachian mountain range are located in northern Mississippi. The state’s tallest point is Woodall Mountain, 806 feet in elevation. For reference, the highest point in North Carolina, Mount Mitchell, is more than 6,600 feet in elevation, eight times higher than Woodall Mountain.

Co-host Caitlin Tan spoke with Texas State University history professor Justin Randolph, who wrote an essay for “Southern Cultures” called “The Making of Appalachian Mississippi.” Randolph argues in his essay that Mississippi became part of Appalachia for political and racial reasons, as well as economic advantages the designation brought to the 24 counties in Mississippi that were included in the ARC’s boundaries.

Shenandoah Valley

In the 1960s, while some localities were clamoring to get into Appalachia, on the eastern edge of the region, some lawmakers fought to keep their counties outside the boundaries, including politicians in Roanoke, Virginia and the Shenandoah Valley.

Appalachian Studies associate professor Emily Satterwhite said explaining to her students why some counties in Virginia are included in Appalachia, but others aren’t, is confusing. “The students in front of me are wondering why they’re not included,” White said.

Pittsburgh

Appalachia’s largest city is Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. When we asked people from that city to tell us if they consider it a part of Appalachia, about half said no. “I definitely do not feel that I am Appalachian culturally,” said Mark Jovanovich, who grew up just outside Pittsburgh’s city limits in the Woodland Hills area. “Personally, I would consider the city of Pittsburgh is sort of like a mini New York City. I guess we’d probably be lumped in as like a Rust Belt city, which makes enough sense, but definitely not Appalachian culturally.”

Writer Brian O’Neill disagrees. He wrote a book called The Paris of Appalachia: Pittsburgh in the Twenty-First Century. “My original title for the book was, ‘I love Pittsburgh like a brother and my brother drives me nuts.’”

An editor advised him to change the title of his book to a phrase that he said is sometimes used to refer to Pittsburgh derisively. “I couldn’t figure out why that should be a putdown, because Paris is nice. And Appalachia is a beautiful part of the world. And if we were called the Paris of the Rockies, we wouldn’t run from that. So why would we run from this? Why don’t we embrace it? So that became the title of my book.”

He said that geographically, Pittsburgh is clearly in the Appalachian Mountains. “I mean, this is one mountain range that stretches from Georgia to Maine. And the idea that it belongs only to the southern part of the mountain range defies logic to me,” O’Neill said.

What Do You Think?

How about you? Do you call yourself an Appalachian? Why or why not? Send an email to InsideAppalachia@wvpublic.org.

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Our theme music is by Matt Jackfert. Other music this week was provided by John Wyatt, John R Miller, Alan Cathead Johnston, and Dinosaur Burps. Roxy Todd originally produced this episode. Bill Lynch is our current producer. Our executive producer is Eric Douglas. Zander Aloi is our associate producer. Kelley Libby is our editor. Our audio mixer is Patrick Stephens.

You can find us on Instagram, Threads and Twitter @InAppalachia. Or here on Facebook.

Sign-up for the Inside Appalachia Newsletter!

Inside Appalachia is a production of West Virginia Public Broadcasting.

Affrilachian Poet to Appalachia: Give Voice to the Silenced, Make the Invisible Visible

The 39th Annual Appalachian Studies Association Conference was held March 17-20 at Shepherd University. More than 800 people attended the four-day event, which explored the culture and the future of Appalachia. Conference-goers spoke about many topics, including diversity and social justice throughout Appalachia.

One main focus of the conference this year was about confronting Appalachian stereotypes that portray all people from our region as white, rural hillfolk. Responding to these stereotypes led one African American poet, Frank X Walker, to coin the phrase Affrilachian a few years ago. Walker was the keynote speaker at this year’s ASA conference.

For years, the ASA conference has focused on environmental issues, relating them to cultural, literary and historical writing and scholarly studies about Appalachia. Dealing with Appalachian stereotypes is nothing new — and neither is trying to diversify the canon of Appalachian writers and thinkers.

"My first year at the Kentucky Book Festival, a man said, I've been looking at a map all day, and I can't find Affrilachia nowhere."

But this year, the inclusion of many diverse voices throughout Appalachia was the main focus of the ASA conference, which was named “Diversity and Unity, a New Appalachia.”

“This year’s conference theme acknowledges that it is time to write our whole history and to right our wrongs,” said Walker, who is a Kentucky native. He coined the term “Affrilachian,” which refers to African Americans who are from Appalachia.

“My first year at the Kentucky Book Festival, a man said, ‘I’ve been looking at a map all day, and I can’t find Affrilachia nowhere.’”

Walker said that man was serious, so he decided to play a little joke on him.

“I smiled, considering my many optional responses and asked him if he’d been using a black and white map or a four colored map. When he responded with ‘Black and White’ I reckon’, I said, ‘well that’s the problem…. you need a colored map to see Affrilachia.’”

Walker said that man walked away, scratching his head, still not sure how to find Affrilachia.

"To us it was about making the invisible visible, or giving voice to a previously muted or silenced voice."

And finding Affrilachia – or rather, reclaiming Affrilachia – is what Walker spoke about to a packed auditorium.

He said that though Affrilachia has been a word in the Oxford Dictionary since 2011, some still don’t accept it.

“My critics have pledged allegiance to a study that said Appalachia is more striking in its homogeneity than its diversity and that rural Appalachia lags behind rural American, urban Appalachia lags behind urban America, and that metropolitan Appalachia lags behind metropolitan America to perhaps plant the idea that Appalachia was not really America.”

Walker went on name many African American social activists and intellectual thinkers who are from Appalachia – but who often are not identified as Appalachians.

“When people talk about the father of Black History week, Carter G. Woodson, who was born in New Canton, Virginia, a former share cropper and miner who attended Berea College before going on to become the second African American to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard, neither he, nor perhaps an even more famous American, Virginia’s ex slave Booker T. Washington, are ever recognized as sons of Appalachia.”

Walker called for fellow Appalachians to reclaim African American cultural gems who were from the Appalachian south but are often excluded from studies about the region as a whole.

“When people talk about the woman known as the mother of the blues, Rome, Georgia’s Bessie Smith, Black Mountain, North Carolina’s Grammy Award Winning Roberta Flack (who wrote “Killing Me Softly”).

Walker said that even though the Oxford American Dictionary defines an Affrilachian as an African American living in Appalachia, when he and his colleagues began using the word years ago, it included people who are from many different races – and places – including Hispanic Appalachians, and even Asian Appalachians.

“To us it was about making the invisible visible, or giving voice to a previously muted or silenced voice,” he said.

And giving voice to minority groups in Appalachia – that’s the challenge that Walker said will determine the future of the region.

Appalachian Studies Association Holds 37th Annual Conference

Nearly 800 people were on Marshall’s campus this weekend for the Appalachian Studies Conference.

The three-day conference marked the 37^th time the organization has got together to discuss the ins and outs of what makes Appalachia, Appalachia. Tyler Hughes made the trip from East Tennessee State University to attend.

“Even though every community has its own issues and each community is diverse, we’re still part of a larger system,” Hughes said. “I think it’s important for us to stay connected that way we can learn from each other in similar instances, we can learn from each other’s mistakes and from each other’s successes.”

Linda Spatig is a Professor in the College of Education at Marshall and the organizer of the conference.

“It brings together people who are academics doing scientific research on all kinds of aspects of the region all together with artists and writers and people who do that kind of work that are interested in the region and also there is a big strand of work in activism in the organization and blends all three of those components in a real unusual way,” Spatig said.

Sessions ranged from pop culture, to the psychology of the region, to musical performances and sessions on the food that is native to Appalachia, a region that stretches from New York to Alabama and Mississippi. Chris Green is a professor at Berea College in Kentucky and the outgoing President of the association. He said it’s a conference that touches on subjects as wide in scope as any conference out there.

“That means we’re people with a commonality of care about a wide place and I say a wide place because this is includes everywhere from Knoxville, Tennessee to Hinton, West Virginia, it includes the Cranberry Glades and it includes Huntington and it includes all the people therein, this includes immigrant doctors, it includes people who have been in this region because their granddads came in from Alabama to work on the railroads and work in McDowell County,” Green said.

Marcus Fioravante is a Marshall student from Charleston. He said it was important to him to be able to attend the event because he believes understanding about the area in which the university is located is important.

“I think it’s immensely important to remind people where you’re at, you’re not just here at Marshall University and that’s displaced from everything, so it’s great when it can bring opportunities that aren’t just reminders that this is a college, but this is an Appalachian college,” Fioravante said.

The keynote address was provided by Kentucky Writer Silas House.