West Virginia Humanities Council Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Cemeteries Project Revives The Stories Of W.Va. Veterans

The West Virginia National Cemeteries Project pairs history graduate students from West Virginia University with high school students from Grafton High School to delve into the lives of veterans buried in the local cemeteries.

Trifold poster boards commemorating the lives of West Virginia veterans lined the entrance hall of the Taylor County Historical and Genealogical Society Monday evening.

They were part of an event celebrating the culmination of the West Virginia National Cemeteries Project’s second year.

Kyle Warmack, West Virginia Humanities Council program officer and the project’s facilitator, said the project’s goal was to foster deeper engagement with the stories and sacrifice of local veterans, but also to promote important research and writing skills.

“At the Humanities Council, I have the privilege of working with a lot of folks in academia at the college level, and when you talk to them, there can sometimes be frustration with the students that they have coming in, and the level of experience they have with research and writing,” he said.

For the cemeteries project, Warmack helped pair history graduate students from West Virginia University with high school students from Grafton High School to delve into the lives of veterans buried in the local cemeteries. Grafton was a logical place for Warmack to start the project.

“Look at Grafton and the long history that they have with the cemetery, with the Memorial Day parade they have here,” he said. “Parades are wonderful, these are wonderful displays of both community and patriotic sentiment. But when do we get a chance to tell the stories behind the veterans that we’re celebrating? There are thousands of headstones in these cemeteries.”

The Grafton National Cemetery was established in 1867 as a permanent burial site for Union soldiers who had died in hospitals and on battlefields throughout West Virginia. Two years later, the town held its first Memorial Day parade, a tradition that continues to this day. Then, in the 1960s, the West Virginia National Cemetery was established five miles away in Pruntytown as the Grafton cemetery began to fill up.

Some of the students from Grafton High School and West Virginia University that participated in the West Virginia National Cemeteries Project pose for a photograph at the Taylor County Historical and Genealogical Society Monday, April 24, 2023. *Credit: Chris Schulz/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

For high school students like Karigan Roudte, who researched the life and World War II service of twins Charles and William Lewellyn of Harrisville, the process was eye-opening.

“It’s an amazing experience. I honestly have never really thought about war as much as I have,” she said. “It’s brought so much insight to me to see how these twin brothers, they grew up together and they died together, how they intersect. It’s honestly a real changing thing, how I thought about war and life, and it’s brought such a new world and opened so many different doors to me. I think it’s a really great thing that they brought us to be able to experience.”

Becky Bartlett is a teacher and librarian at Grafton High School, and along with her colleague Richard Zukowski, she supervises the students’ research. Bartlett said the project is an engaging way for her students to learn research skills that go well beyond the computer.

“Probably one of the most important things for the kids of the 21st century to learn is that not everything is online. Since I have been the librarian, I have literally had students say to me, ‘It’s all online,’” she said. “They don’t understand, because they’ve grown up in a life that they can easily get online and search, that sometimes you have to go find a book. Sometimes you have to go to the courthouse and pull records. Sometimes you have to actually contact people to get interviews that were recorded, things like that, that aren’t online.”

Students had the opportunity to learn about major military events like the sinking of the USS Indianapolis in World War II, to the more human aspects of service, like Pauline Tetrick of Bridgeport who joined the Women’s Army Corps at the age of 36, at the end of the Korean War.

Beyond hard skills, one aspect of the project that Bartlett likes is that she can see it fostering a deeper interest in history, one that she hopes will last her students a lifetime.

“We have learned a lot just about the history of these wars that these veterans served in. I did not know the story behind the USS Indianapolis until we did this project,” she said. “There’s that rabbit hole, you learn something, and then you see the connection to it in so many places. And I think they’ll probably be learning stuff for the rest of their lives.”

One of the displays created by students presents information about veteran Bud Greathouse, who was killed in action serving on the USS Indianapolis. *Credit: Chris Schulz/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

That level of engagement is certainly evident when speaking with Emily Bublitz who is a graduate student of history at West Virginia University.

“We do a lot of the back-end research,” she said. “In the initial stages, we go in and we have this huge master list of everyone who has been buried at the National Cemetery, then we go through and research the vets to try and get one that we find that has enough materials on them to know that we can write a biography based off of them, because some people, there’s nothing. Maybe, there’s like just a draft card, but there’s nothing else.”

For Bublitz, the most rewarding aspect of the project is precisely why it was established: making a human connection to the name on the gravestone.

“The more I learn about these veterans like that, the more I care about them and their stories, and I want to do them justice,” she said. “That becomes very central to how I go about doing my work with this. I see it as giving them back their personhood, because they’re more than just veterans. That’s such a core part of who they were, but they’re also more than that. I want them to be remembered as fully fleshed out people who had families and interests and hobbies.”

The West Virginia Humanities Council hopes to expand the project to more schools in the coming years.

Preserving The Homemade Music Of West Virginia's Hollows

Old-time music is a large part of West Virginia’s heritage – it is the folk music of the state. And although it has now gained the popularity of people from all over the world, hundreds of years ago it was isolated within Appalachian communities. However, as it gains traction, some people think the uniqueness is lost.

In a special report exploring folkways traditions, as part of the Inside Appalachia Folkways Project, Caitlin Tan explores the master-apprentice relationship in the old-time music community.

Folklife Apprentice Program

In an effort to help preserve traditional Appalachian practices, the West Virginia Humanities Council started a Folklife Apprentice Program, which pairs a master of a craft with a budding artist, to help preserve traditional Appalachian practices.

“That’s part of what makes the tradition special is it’s a folk tradition” says Annie Stroud, an old-time music apprentice. “That’s what makes it work is that you share it and people are learning it and it’s part of the community.”

Annie Stroud plays fiddle with Doug Van Gundy at his house in Elkins, W.Va. She studied under him for a year, learning the music styles of Greenbrier County.

Through the folklife program, Annie studied old-time fiddling under Doug Van Gundy for all of 2018. Doug is an eighth generation West Virginian and an expert in the music. He says it is the foundation for a lot of sounds today.

“It was the homemade music. It was the local music. It was the kitchen music. And up and down the Appalachian Mountains you had people from Scotland and Germany and Northern England, places that had fiddle music traditions, that came here and that got mixed in with rhythmic traditions from West Africa with the banjo,” he says.

The Homemade Music

Annie had always wanted to learn the specific old-time music of her home, Greenbrier County. She learned to fiddle over 20 years ago, but she says learning the specific Greenbrier style is a way for her to feel more connected to her home, as she grew up on a farm in the grassy valley of Greenbrier. And it turns out, Doug is one of the few people who is an expert in the music.

Historically, within each county in West Virginia, and even sometimes each hollow, the styles of old-time changes. Doug says the music of Greenbrier County is one of the less common techniques still alive.

“The Greenbrier Valley style, the upper reaches, were relatively isolated and so I think the fiddling stayed closer to how it was when it got over here,” he said. “I think it’s a little more archaic, and yet it’s still influenced by radio and records that came through. There’s a lot of drone in it and up bow accenting.”

Doug demonstrates the Greenbrier style by fiddling a tune called ‘Jimmy Johnson.’ The chipper song is played using what Doug calls a “shuffle” and “up-bow technique.” The notes flow together seamlessly.

But when he plays the same song in Pocahontas County style there is noticeable embellishments. The notes are a bit more pronounced; one almost feels inclined to clap along.

The Greenbrier Legend

Unlike Annie, Doug did not learn how to play old time until he was an adult. After an angsty punk rock phase, Doug sought the help of Mose Coffman in the early 1990s. Mose was one of the original Greenbrier Valley old-time music legends. He had learned from players who were alive before West Virginia was even a state.

Doug Van Gundy plays his fiddle in his home in Elkins. He learned to play under one of the old-time music greats — Mose Coffman.

Mose had a distinct way of playing that sounded rough around the edges, but authentically West Virginian.

So Doug visited Mose weekly in a nursing home for the last year of Moses’ life. At the start of his apprenticeship Doug says he just watched Mose play.

“So he played for about three hours and he kept trying to hand me the fiddle, “Now you play me something.” And I said, “I can’t play. I can’t play anything.” But he would play for me,” Doug says, “and by the end of that he had figured out a tune that I really liked that he thought was simple enough for me to start on and he said, ‘Ok. I want you to come back and play this for me. Come back next week.’”

Mose passed away in 1994, but 26 years later, Annie can have that connection to some of the original old-time musicians through Doug. And Annie says, that is what makes the music so special.

“There are these direct lines of connection of like, stories and nuances, and the way people play it and each time it gets passed down it changes a little bit,” she says. “And that’s part of the tradition, which is really exciting.”

Keeping The Tradition Going

Through the apprentice program, Doug and Annie met up to practice several times a month.

They spent a lot of time listening to Doug’s old recordings of Mose. One of their favorite songs they practiced over the year is called ‘Turkey Creek.’ It is a song Mose wrote.

“It’s named after a little creek in Greenbrier County, and this is a tune that I don’t know that anybody else really played. If people play this out in the world, it probably came from Mose Coffman. Or us,’ Doug says with a chuckle.

Annie Stroud and Doug Van Gundy warm up their instruments while the WVPB video crew sets up.

Annie says in the past year since her apprenticeship, she has shared a lot of what she learned. She even taught a beginner fiddle class at Augusta Heritage Center this past fall.

The 2020 WV Humanities Council Folklife Apprentice Program will begin this March — pairing together another round of novice and professional artists in the state.

This story is part of the Inside Appalachia Folkways Reporting Project. Subscribe to the podcast to hear more stories of Appalachian folklife, arts, and culture.

Weirton’s Serbian Heritage Is A Chicken Blast

Every summer Wednesday since 1969, members of the Serbian Eastern Orthodox Church Men’s Club have gathered at the Serbian Picnic Grounds along King’s Creek outside of Weirton, West Virginia. In a long, cement block building, they mill about in the dawn light, eating donuts, drinking coffee, and reading the morning paper. They’re here for a weekly fundraiser they call a “Chicken Blast,” for which they roast 300-400 chickens and sell them to the Weirton community.

“Guys get down here usually around 5:30 in the morning, and they start the process of what we have to do—cleaning the poles up, getting the chickens out, and more or less getting preparations to start the day. I start the fire,” said John Kosanovich, a Men’s Club member.

Kosanovich is nonchalant about the process, but it’s a lot of work. Each member knows their role, and they work together like a well-oiled machine, tending the fires, adding salt and pepper to the chickens, tying 25 to a pole, rotating the poles so each is evenly roasted, checking the chickens for doneness, and then wrapping them in tinfoil to stay hot for customers. When the afternoon rolls around, they take breaks to eat or have a beer from the on-site bar.

The roasting operation is impressive. Four open-air hearths hold three to four poles stacked on top of one another, with about 25 chickens each. A geared machine rotates each pole over the wood fire, burning at about 800 degrees. The chickens on top drip fat on the chickens below, naturally basting them. Other than that, the recipe is deceptively simple.

“They taste terrific!” said Chicken Blast volunteer Jon Greiner. “I think some people say it’s the best chickens that they’ve ever had. A lot of people think there’s a secret recipe—there’s no secret to it at all. It’s just salt and pepper and we make sure they’re cooked.”

A Community of Steel Workers

This complex spit design, an industrial brick oven, and walk-in coolers were built just for this purpose by members of the Men’s Club, who worked at Weirton Steel. They used the specialized skills they developed at work as pipefitters, bricklayers, and machinists to help design and build these hearths.

Their ancestors settled in the Upper Ohio Valley at the turn of the 20th century, establishing the church and picnic grounds.

While the Serbian population has shrunk in recent years with the decline of coal and steel jobs, the community remains an important presence in the Weirton and Steubenville, Ohio communities. In the early days, the customer base was largely steel mill workers and their families.

“Most guys that worked in the mill, they were looking for lunches after work or took a chicken to work for their lunch. And the more the word spread around in the mill about this being available, more people took the opportunity to make themselves available for it,” Kosanovich said.

They chose their roasting day to coincide with the mill workers’ Wednesday payday.

As steel jobs declined in Weirton, the number of chickens the Club sells per week has declined with it. In the early ‘80s, the Club could sell 600-700 chickens a week. Now they average about 350.

“I started in the mill in 1966. And we had 14,000 workers in there. And when I retired in 2003, we had a little over 2,000. So we had a big drop-off,” Kosanovich said.

Still, the men cook about 5,000 chickens over the course of the summer, usually selling out each week in a matter of two and a half hours. Some regular customers have standing weekly orders and come down to the picnic grounds early to stake out their favorite picnic table for their evening chicken dinner.

A Taste of Serbia

The survival of the tradition can be attributed not only to how the weekly Blast fostered community among steel workers but also connects families to their Serbian heritage. Many of the men remember roasting meat in their backyards with their families growing up.

“I lived next to my grandmother and grandfather, and they used to do pigs for Christmas. And we didn’t have electric spits, we had by hand. We were kids. We’d go up there and turn the spit. It would take hours, but we didn’t care. It was cold in January, but we were by that warm fire. You just knew you were helping for the day, and it was a lot of fun,” Kosanovich remembered.

It’s that connection that keeps him coming down at dawn, to stand over a hot fire, every week in the heat of summer.

“Why do I do it?” he asked. “My basic word is tradition. You know, it’s something that you see it done every day, every week, you want to get involved with it.”

The money raised from the Chicken Blasts help the Men’s Club maintain the Picnic Grounds, which are used for graduations, weddings, and other church celebrations, like the Annual Serbian Picnic. The Picnic is like a larger version of the Chicken Blast and serves as a homecoming for those who have moved away from the Weirton area. As usual, the Men’s Club roast hundreds of chickens and a few lambs. The church sells other Serbian fare such as pogacha (a type of Serbian bread), haluski or cabbage and noodles, cevaps (a pork, lamb, and beef sausage), strudel, and nut rolls. Attendees eat, drink beer and Slivovitz, dance to traditional Serbian music, and catch up with family and old friends.

The Chicken Blasts run from the last weekend in May to the last weekend in August at the Serbian Picnic Grounds in Weirton, WV. To order a chicken, call 1-304-748-9866 the Wednesday morning of the Blast. Make sure to start calling at 6:00am the morning of the blast; they’re usually sold out by 8:30am. For more information, visit Serbian Picnic Grounds on Facebook.

Emily Hilliard is the West Virginia State Folklorist with the West Virginia Humanities Council. Learn more about the West Virginia Folklife Program, a project of the West Virginia Humanities Council, at wvfolklife.org.

‘We’re Going To Do It No Matter What’: Appalachian Queer Film Festival Is Back, With Plans To Stay

When civil rights attorney-turned-filmmaker Jon Matthews agreed to start a film festival with his friend Tim Ward, Matthews said the title alone was the selling point.

“He’s like, ‘It’s Appalachian Queer Film Festival,’” Matthews said. “I’m, like, ‘Done. You’ve got me. Sold.’ … I never heard anything like those two words in the same sentence before, ‘Appalachian and queer.’”

He recalled the festival’s origin story from the Floralee Hark Cohen Theater, an intimate room underneath the Taylor Books coffee shop in downtown Charleston, where the 2019 Appalachian Queer Film Festival (AQFF) took place last weekend.

Matthews and Ward, who live in Los Angeles and New York respectively, are both West Virginia natives. Several of the films they chose to show this year involved directors from and stories set in Appalachia, or rural America.

“We want to bring good film here, but we also like to bring people from out of state here to show them like, ‘Hey, we don’t meet all the stereotypes that you might have in your head,’” Matthews said. “We’re much more open minded … And we love good cinema.”

The first AQFF took place in 2015, at the Lewis Theater in Lewisburg, Greenbrier County. The two curators had secured a grant from the Greenbrier County Community Foundation, which had received $6,700 to help with the festival, from the West Virginia Humanities Council.

The AQFF received honorable mentions from national news outlets, including Vice and the Huffington Post.

“To The Stars,” directed by Ashland, Kentucky, native Martha Stephens, was the first film of the 2019 Appalachian Queer Film Festival at the Floralee Hark Cohen Theater in Charleston.

In 2016, Matthews and Ward’s work was acknowledged by a different type of publication — a study on wasteful spending in West Virginia by the Cardinal Institute, a conservative lobbying group funded by the Koch Brothers.

The report, “Wild and Wasteful West Virginia,” said the festival was using state dollars to show films that “many taxpayers would find objectionable.”

Among its list of wasteful spending in festivals, the study also called attention to grants supporting the West Virginia Strawberry Festival, the State Fair of West Virginia and the Mountain State Forest Festival.

The West Virginia Humanities Council decided against rewarding the AQFF a second grant in 2016. According to Erin Riebe, grants administrator for the West Virginia Humanities Council, the decision had nothing to do with the study.

Rather, Riebe said, the AQFF’s second application didn’t meet the council’s requirements for humanities content.

“A small festival like that, you know, it kind of really hurts,” Matthews said. “So, we took a hiatus because of that grant being taken away, and really regrouped after that. We’ve taken this time to kind of find our legs again.”

After viewing “To The Stars” during the first night of the 2019 Appalachian Queer Film Festival in Charleston, viewers got to ask Director Martha Stephens, an Ashland, Kentucky, native about the movie.

Today, the AQFF receives support from local nonprofits, businesses and the West Virginia International Film Festival. Regardless of this year’s turnout and cost, Matthews said he’s looking forward to having an Appalachian Queer Film Festival next year, and for years to come.

“We’re going to do it no matter what,” Matthews said. “Even if just two people show up, we’re still going to do it, because we feel like this is important. So many people come up to us, and say the fact that this thing exists is important to them. They’re like, ‘I had trouble even saying who I was, and now there’s a film festival that represents that, and it kind of carries that banner for me.’”

Emily Allen is a Report for America corps member.

West Virginia Humanities Council Leader Announces Retirement

The executive director of the West Virginia Humanities Council has announced his retirement.

Ken Sullivan has led the council since 1997. His retirement takes effect Oct. 12.

The council says it has hired Eric Waggoner of West Virginia Wesleyan College as the new executive director.

The council is a nonprofit organization serving West Virginia through grants and direct programs in the humanities. Its board of director includes 24 people. The council is the state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

During Sullivan’s tenure, the council bought and restored historic property and published the West Virginia Encyclopedia in both print and online versions. The council bought the 1836 MacFarland-Hubbard House in Charleston two years after Sullivan became executive director and dedicated the property as its headquarters on West Virginia Day in 2000.

W.Va. Awarded Funds to Promote Arts & Culture

West Virginia’s arts and culture just got a boost through a federal grant.

The National Endowment for the Arts, or NEA, awarded West Virginia nearly $800,000 this week to support programs that aim to preserve the state’s cultural history and promote arts education.

According to a release from the NEA, the funds are meant to help provide access to the arts for people across the country and support programs that provide jobs to artists, administrators, and other creative workers.

The majority of West Virginia’s award will be given to the West Virginia Division of Culture and History – through a grant of more than $650,000. The Heritage Farm Foundation, which works to preserve and develop Old Central City in Huntington, will see $75,000 of the grant.

Other groups that will see some of the funds, include the West Virginia Humanities Council ($34,000), the West Virginia Symphony Orchestra ($15,000), and Allegheny Echoes ($10,000) – an organization based out of Marlinton that helps support summer workshops that focus on Appalachian arts and music.