The front porch is well known across much of Appalachia as a gathering place for conversation and sharing. During the coronavirus, those front porches have become a lifeline, for some — in more ways than one.
For YES! Magazine, in partnership with 100 Days in Appalachia, reporter Alison Stine explored how the ethos of the front porch as a connection point is being used to help keep students and families fed during the COVID-19 pandemic. She spoke with West Virginia Public Broadcasting reporter Brittany Patterson. Here’s an excerpt of their conversation.
***Editor’s Note: The following has been edited for clarity and length.
Stine: I’ve lived in Appalachian Ohio for many, many years. My son was born here, and when he was a newborn, [was when] I think I first became aware of the particular spirit and ingenuity and generosity of my neighbors. Food started appearing on our porch, homemade food for myself and my son. And people would leave hand-me-downs on our porch. And so, as my son has grown older, and I’ve lived for a very long time in the town where I live, you know, we started to give back as well. And I saw that happening in the pandemic, especially now when maybe you can’t go up to somebody’s door and talk to them. People have been leaving notes on porches, or books on porches, disinfected board games, on porches, masks. And so, with YES! Magazine, we wanted to write a story about how that might be formalized. That idea leaving things for other people on the porch. Is that happening on a more formalized manner? Is that happening in larger local networks like the schools and local governments?
Patterson: One thing that this story addresses is the food insecurity that has been really brought to the forefront by this coronavirus pandemic. How is this idea of a front porch network helping get food to children and families?
Stine: What we see happening throughout the region, but I think also now nationally, is food is being delivered to school children through their bus routes. We talked about in the story that the buses aren’t sitting empty, you know, parked in the bus garages, the buses are still running and the drivers are still driving. But instead of taking kids to school and to home, they’re taking meals to children. They already had those routes established, and schools already knew who was in need. So, school buses had been delivering initially, I think they were delivering food daily, but now in many places, including places in West Virginia and Ohio, they’re delivering food bags once a week.
Patterson: They’re also delivering other things that students might need during this time. Tell us a little bit about that.
Stine: Yeah, some school districts have started delivering homework even. The idea was not that students would turn in the homework and have it be graded. But just this is a way not to fall behind, which is really important for our region, because we have some rural areas, some remote areas, not everyone has internet at home. There was one school district in Kanawha County, West Virginia, that the teachers would ride on the bus and they ran out and delivered the homework. So, the students got to see that teachers face, which was really important, just to have that sense of familiarity.
Patterson: You write in the piece that, “Appalachians are used to rising to the challenge of taking care of their own communities.” And so they were quickly able to put together these less formal means of delivering aid and helping one another. I’m wondering though, in the organizations that you spoke to, have there been challenges that have arisen since this pandemic started in trying to make sure everyone gets the help they need?
Stine: Some particular challenges in our region that other regions may not have: We do have less internet access, so people are less connected in that way. So, getting the word out, I think, is a difficulty that our region may have the other regions may not have as much to deal with that. Some volunteers in Athens, Ohio, for example, started calling people — calling senior citizens — to make sure they knew [about] places to get food. … We many also have people in our region who don’t have phones. And so volunteers in Athens, Ohio are writing letters to those people.
Patterson: In your reporting have you seen examples outside of Appalachia where organizations or communities are taking this idea of connection via the front porch or access point and using it?
Stine: Absolutely. I think that one area where we see this happening a lot is internet access. We talked about internet access and Appalachia, because we know that we don’t have it as much as other places do. But we’re certainly not the only ones. There are school buses now across the country, not just in the Appalachian region, that are being equipped with Wi-Fi. And they’re parking the school buses in places where students and families who don’t have that internet at home, they can drive up and park and use the wireless there.
Patterson: You mentioned that at least the bus drivers in Kanawha County School District are working on a volunteer basis. What did you hear from some of the bus drivers you spoke to about why they think it’s important to still go out every day even though they’re not getting paid?
Stine: Yeah, that was something that really blew me away. I didn’t realize that was happening until I talked to a bus driver. I talked to Rod Stapler, who’s driven for the district for 10 years. And he thought it was just a really important way to give back. He said that the bus drivers know the children, they know who’s in need, and they want to make sure that they’re okay. And they wanted to help those kids have some sense of normalcy and some sense of safety and security. You know, one thing that kids are used to seeing every day is the face of their bus driver. So, if they can see that once a week, even through a window that might help them as well.
A traditional gathering place where the public meets the private becomes the critical point of contact for Appalachian families.
On any day in Appalachia, you can find gifts in front of houses, left on porches for the people inside: mushrooms just foraged, cookies freshly baked. The porch is an extension of the home in Appalachia—not only a gathering spot for conversation, but a traditional sharing place. If you want to exchange tools, plants, or hand-me-downs with your neighbor: you put them on the porch. In times of struggle, porches are the vessel to deliver food: frozen meals to new parents, casseroles for grieving families.
Now, because of COVID-19, those practices are becoming more important than ever. It’s not homemade food appearing on neighbor’s porches so much as home-sewn masks, or bags of groceries at the homes of senior citizens. And while school buses are no longer shuttling children to and from schools in the region, the buses are certainly not parked and empty.
More than half of all children in Appalachian Ohio receive free or reduced-price lunch, as reported by the Ohio PTA in 2013. At some elementary schools, the participation rate is almost 75%. In many cases, food distributed to Appalachian children at school feeds a family; thanks to programs such as Blessings in a Backpack, some children go home for the weekends with backpacks of shelf-stable food like canned tuna and peanut butter, designed to help out the whole household.
Credit Brian Ferguson / 100 Days in Appalachia
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100 Days in Appalachia
School buses line up at a loading dock in Charleston, West Virginia, on a Monday morning. The buses will be loaded with food boxes that will be delivered to Kanawha County students.
How are those children—and their families—getting food during the pandemic? Throughout the region, it’s from their school bus drivers.
School bus routes were already established, and the drivers known to families, so it was a natural step that a familiar person could deliver meals to children. In the Appalachian county of Athens, Ohio, in an email to parents, the school asked families to call if they needed food, and meals would be provided by bus drivers, whether or not children had previously been enrolled in free lunch programs.
In West Virginia’s Kanawha County, school bus drivers are leaving meals on porches. Every Monday, drivers drop off enough breakfasts and lunches to last a week. If children are sheltering at places other than at home during the pandemic, families have been asked to call the bus terminal, because the school district tries to reach as many people as possible.
By the first week of April, Kanawha County Schools was providing more than 12,500 meals, with food “delivered to every bus stop along our normal routes,” said district communications director Briana Warner. “Our school bus drivers have stepped up and are our heroes.”
One of those heroes is Rod Stapler, who has driven for the school district for 10 years. “The way we figure it,” Stapler said, “if we go through the end of April, we’ll deliver almost a million meals.”
Importantly, like Athens, Ohio, the Kanawha County School District is not discriminating: Families that say they have a need are having their needs met. “We know based on our data that the vast majority of our students need meals during this time,” Warner said.
And to see the familiar face of their school bus driver, “helps the kids,” according to Stapler. That normalcy “keeps them kind of going,” he said.
Because of their contracts, bus drivers in the county are not required to drive during the pandemic, but they are making the extra deliveries to help the community.
“Mostly all the drivers now that are working are voluntary,” Stapler said. “We can stay home and get paid by our contract, but [we] want to come out and deliver food.”
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100 Days in Appalachia
A Kanawha County school bus driver loads his bus with food boxes that he will deliver in Charleston, West Virginia.
Some bus drivers even delivered coursework in Kanawha County, packets of assignments alongside meals. As Stapler described it, “teachers ran out on some of the routes and delivered their homework [to students]”—providing another familiar, reassuring face in a time of upheaval. This work was not graded or collected, but was designed to help prevent children from falling behind, Stapler said.
That’s a necessity for many Appalachian children without home internet access. Because much learning across the U.S. has shifted online, schools have had to acknowledge that a number of their students still do not have reliable home internet service, particularly in more remote areas.
In Athens, Ohio, parents can pick up loaner technology, such as mobile hot spots and laptops, from the schools in special giveaway days. In Greenville, South Carolina, the school offers free Wi-Fi access with children’s meal pickup.
To address the inequity of households without consistent internet, some school districts in South Carolina equipped school buses with Wi-Fi and parked them in neighborhoods and rural areas. Parents drive children close to the buses to access the wireless, or children ride up on their bikes. In Cincinnati, school buses that functioned previously as bookmobiles, stocked with library sources, are being retrofitted with internet to serve as mobile hubs.
More and more districts outside of the Appalachian region are beginning to offer Wi-Fi in a bus, with school districts in such states as California, Florida, and Colorado enacting the idea.
Lack of internet services is also a perennial obstacle to the delivery of aid and communicating with people in remote areas, such as parts of Appalachia. To inform residents where or how to receive help, Athens volunteers are calling senior citizens, or if people don’t have telephone service, writing letters to them.
Geographically isolated and historically neglected by the rest of the nation, Appalachians are used to rising to the challenge of taking care of their own communities. And when schools closed because of the pandemic and senior citizens became trapped in their houses, these areas were able to mobilize quickly and tap into existing aid networks.
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Sharon Uppercue, from Martinsburg, West Virginia, routinely visits her parents, Charles and Waunita Hatmakers, with her daughter, Kaylee Uppercue, to deliver supplies and distantly sit on the porch to talk. Charles Hatmaker, a former coal miner, struggles with asthma, COPD and black lung, leaving him and his wife to rely on friends and family for supplies.
David Keller is development coordinator for the Southeast Ohio Foodbank & Regional Kitchen, which works with local, state, and federal organizations to serve more than 22,000 households in 10 Appalachian counties. But that was before the novel coronavirus outbreak. Comprising low-wage earners and many workers in the service industry, “the population we served wasn’t necessarily in the best situation before [the pandemic],” Keller said.
Mirroring the rest of the country as economic devastation spread, Appalachian food pantries began to see new people “coming into the emergency food network that may have never really considered that option before,” Keller said. “All they know is their family’s hungry and they’re out of work.”
Combined with burgeoning need, the more than 70 food pantries that Southeast Ohio Foodbank assists have had to deal with tightening restrictions and safety concerns, as information about how the virus spreads has changed quickly. “We have had to overhaul basically every part of our program, from what our process is when we come into work each day to how we organize and distribute food,” Keller said.
Changes include taking the temperatures of people working at pantries, distributing masks, and quickly shifting to no-contact food delivery. A food bank worker puts the box into the trunk of a client’s car, or simply leaves it outside to be collected.
This goes against traditional, pre-pandemic recommendations from the USDA about choice and food distribution at pantries. (Ideally, families know best what they need, and should be empowered to choose it themselves.)
The Athens City School District Food Pantry, which serves not only southeastern Ohio schoolchildren and their families, but all of Athens County, has moved to contactless food delivery, passing out pre-packed bags of food in drive-through distributions.
Anna Joyce Williams knows hunger doesn’t stop, even when the routine of daily life does. As student body vice president at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, she developed a food pantry with 12 community partners in the state to serve students and the greater community. “In Appalachia, and Marshall University especially, we are fortunate to see a lot of students come to college [despite coming] from adverse situations,” Williams said. “However, a lot of hardships can follow them during this transition, finances being the largest.”
Like most universities in the nation, Marshall University announced a shift to remote learning before the end of spring break. “During breaks, we [always] see a lot more traffic through our pantry as our food services on campus become more limited,” Williams said. “This time, though, we had a big increase in visitors and needs. I think the pandemic created a lot of fear for people. … The shelves nearly cleared out.”
Less formal means of delivering aid in Appalachia and other rural communities have existed for generations, through neighbors helping neighbors. In a small town, it is easy to know who is in need. What is less easy is asking for help—and reaching out and offering the same, something that some people may not have known to do before the pandemic.
“It’s really our hope that once we weather this, there will be systemic changes in support for hunger relief throughout this country,” Keller of the Southeast Ohio Food Bank said, “because a lot of people are being brought face-to-face with issues that, fortunately, they’ve never had to deal with [before].”
Appalachia knows need, and knows that in times of increased struggle, need increases for all. While much of the country might fall back at this time, Appalachia has stepped up in ways both official and grassroots. “Pandemic or not,” Keller said, “we still have a job to do.”
Bus driver Stapler echoed this statement. “You know the drivers could stay home, but they want to come out, make sure the kids are taken care of,” he said. “Mostly drivers in [the] county always felt that way. We want to look after the kids.”
This article was produced in partnership with YES! Media, 100 Days in Appalachia and West Virginia Public Broadcasting, with support from the One Foundation.
Big Sandy hides on a big hill. If you’re not looking for the federal prison, you’ll miss it easily. At first, all that can be seen above the soaring Kentucky cliffs, jagged granite dotted with green scruff, are lights. They look like the lights for a high school football field, or maybe a mall. Then the guard towers loom into view. You can’t see the razor wire from the road.
Construction on U.S. Penitentiary Big Sandy finished in 2002, one of three federal prisons built in eastern Kentucky since 1992. Plans for another federal prison, in rural Letcher County, Kentucky, appear to have fallen through; in June, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons withdrew its plans for Letcher after an outcry from the community—and a federal lawsuit expressing concern both over the environmental issues of building the prison on a former coal mine site, and the fact that the public had not been able to weigh in.
In the scramble to “save” Appalachia as the coal industry collapsed, prisons—many housing incarcerated individuals transferred from distant states—have been presented as an antidote to the joblessness and poverty plaguing parts of the region, especially the more isolated rural areas. Prisons are big projects with hefty price tags, and they bring pledges of “jobs, jobs, jobs.” But more often, prisons do not deliver promised local employment, at least not initially, and carry with them a host of other issues.
Inez, Kentucky, the town nearest Big Sandy, has a population of less than 900. Multiple storefronts on East Main Street are empty, one with large pane windows covered in flaking white paint. There’s a hardware store, a rural health clinic. The pawn shop at the edge of town has a row of ATVs parked out front, near a stack of tires and a few old wagon wheels. A sign says “We Buy Gold.” It’s unclear how many locals work at the prison. Despite Big Sandy’s promise of local jobs, the largest industry employing people in Inez is still oil and gas extraction, and less than a third of the town’s total population is employed anyplace at all.
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The Inez Pawn Shop in Martin County, Ky.
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Troy Wiley, 39, of Martin County, Ky., works at the Inez Pawn Shop. Wiley lost half of a foot in a sawmill accident, and has been working at the pawn shop owned by Joe Evans for three years.
Kentucky has 12 state prisons, plus five federal prisons. The Virginia state prison in Big Stone Gap is just across the state line. In March 2019, the number of people under the jurisdiction of the Kentucky Department of Corrections reached more than 24,000, though there were not enough beds for all of them.
Kentucky has the ninth-highest incarceration rate in the nation, so much so that Kentucky radio station WMMT began producing a radio show, “Calls from Home,” in the early 2000s. The program reaches into seven prisons, broadcasting messages from inmates’ families. WMMT is housed within Appalshop, Kentucky’s media, education, and arts center within Letcher County.
A prison is not like a factory. Its massive size doesn’t automatically mean jobs, especially not for a local workforce without the specialized training needed to be a corrections officer, or CO—and especially not in a federal prison, which has additional qualifications. Work as a federal corrections officer requires a college degree, or three years of work experience.
“Fifteen years in, you might be able to have more local folks because the people they start out with would have been trained up, [but] it’s not immediate work; it’s never been,” says Ada Smith of Appalshop and the Letcher Governance Project, a group that opposed the prison in Letcher County. People with military experience may have a greater chance of prison employment, says Smith, whose cousin works as a CO. When hiring for federal prison COs, the federal government looks for military experience, and as Smith says, “there’s a higher percentage of rural military people than anywhere else.”
The U.S. Penitentiary, Big Sandy, in Martin County, Ky., houses inmates from around the country. The prison population comprises mostly people of color, while most corrections officers tend to be white.
Appalachian prisons have overwhelmingly been built in remote places, a fact that family members of incarcerated individuals lament in Up The Ridge, Appalshop’s 2006 documentary about the prison industry, which focuses on the then-new Wallens Ridge State Prison in Big Stone Gap, Virginia. Lisa Richardson, traveling to Virginia from Connecticut to see an incarcerated loved one, asked, “Why would you build a prison so far up here and so secluded?”
Federal prisons house inmates from all over the country—often, inmates are transferred without warning—requiring family to make these costly and difficult journeys to visit their loved ones, if they can visit at all.
Some local government officials in McCreary County, Kentucky, tried to pitch the federal prison there as a generator of additional tourism dollars from families visiting incarcerated loved ones. The thought was that families would stay at hotels, eat in restaurants and take part in local recreational activities, including waterskiing. Smith characterized the pitch from officials, who suggested that traveling to the region for visitation as “going to feel like a vacation!” That did not happen, and the prison tourism dollars never came at the scale officials had hoped.
Near the Virginia state line, churches and other volunteer groups run ride-share programs where families are picked up, driven all night, fed breakfast, and taken to prisons for visitation. Families spend the night locally, but usually at inexpensive motels, where they receive a discount.
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Downtown Inez, Kentucky, the county seat of Martin County. The Big Sandy federal penitentiary opened outside town in 2002, but the area remains economically depressed.
Even without many local jobs or tourism dollars, prisons can potentially contribute to a rural community in the form of infrastructure. Large prisons need a lot of water. They need roads and sewage systems. These structures aren’t always in place in rural, remote Appalachia. Kentucky, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania are among the states with the largest number of households without indoor plumbing, according to the Appalachian Regional Commission.
Yet a water crisis has persisted in Martin County, home of Big Sandy, for decades. In 2000, the collapse of a sediment pond, meant to hold the waste from a now-closed coal extractor company, turned several rivers black. The waste, which contained arsenic, lead, and mercury, among other toxins, poisoned the county water supply.
That was almost 20 years ago, and Martin County residents still struggle to obtain clean, safe water. Pipes don’t work. They don’t have pressure; the water that eventually drips out of them is sometimes neon blue and smells of diesel. Water bills have skyrocketed, and the Martin County Water District in 2018 conducted shut-offs to conserve water, with some residents reporting their water was cut off for days.
In Letcher County, lack of basic infrastructure could have stopped the prison project before it began. Then the federal Abandoned Mine Lands Pilot Grants program pledged $4.5 million for the building of a sewage plant near the rural site, and to install the needed 9.5 miles of water lines. These basic public works projects were imperative for a prison, but they were also sorely needed by the community at large. The prison project promised water and sewer service to 100 nearby households. The future of those services is uncertain now.
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A replica of the Statue of Liberty stands along the Warfield Walking Trail, in Martin County, Ky. The traditional symbol of welcome is on the edge of the town of Inez, an economically depressed community that is home to a federal prison.
On the small main street in Inez, Big Sandy feels distant, a phantom over the shoulder of the town, miles and a mountain away. But prisons cast a long shadow over the communities in which they rest.
The Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield, Ohio, my hometown a few hours north of Kentucky, was closed in 1990 as a result of a lawsuit over inhumane conditions and overcrowding. It was quickly replaced by a different, mixed-security state prison for men. But the Reformatory stayed standing. It was used for music videos and movies, including The Shawshank Redemption.
It’s strange to grow up in a small, rural town where one of the major industries, after the Westinghouse and General Motors factories closed, is prison tourism. One tourism website titled their review of the Reformatory “Locked Up & Lovin’ It!” Buying a ticket and wandering inside, people gawk and take pictures, laughing. Someone spray-painted “HELL” in the administration area. Paint flakes from the walls. The cell blocks are six tiers high, narrow as kennels and covered in rust. Solitary confinement looks scarier than any fiction that might have been filmed there: near-complete darkness in the damp, low-ceilinged belly of the basement.
In Up the Ridge, an unnamed young White man hoping to land a job as a CO acknowledges the racism of the area, but says he’s “colorblind.” He says he understands “racism probably would come up, but that’s something that hopefully they would train you for.”
Prison employees receive training on diversity in some states, such as California, but the impact of these trainings is difficult to determine.
“I do not know anyone who dreams of being a prison guard,” Smith told The Appeal, an online newsletter focused on criminal justice. It’s difficult work with a culture of closed ranks, similar to the military, and there’s a high turnover rate among COs. There’s even a term coined for the specific job stress and lack of support that guards can experience: “corrections fatigue.”
As with any job, COs can bring the stress and anxiety of work home. But the stress of being a prison guard includes dealing with physical violence and emotional distress, along with the low-level anxiety of being constantly alert to potential danger. Hypervigilance can lead to post-traumatic stress disorder, a condition for which 34% of corrections officers fit the criteria, at rate even higher than that of military veterans.
The connection between police officers and domestic violence is widely known, but prison guards have been less studied, which a 2012 paper in the Journal of Family Violence theorizes may be because COs do less visible work than public police officers. The work and stress of prison guards is hidden away in restricted buildings, behind barbed-wire fences, and away in the hills. Still, the data revealed that 33% of more than 700 respondents were aware of unreported domestic violence perpetrated by COs.
In Up the Ridge, activist Sister Beth Davies described officers she had met in prison “day after day, becoming more violent and more racist, the hate—and so the domestic violence rate has gone up. The divorce rate. The drug and alcohol problems. It compounded so many of the social issues here.”
In 2019, two inmates at Big Sandy were convicted of assaulting another inmate with a weapon. Two other inmates pleaded guilty the month before for attempted murder of another incarcerated person. A prison staff member was burned with scalding water thrown by an inmate. In 2009, a prisoner at Big Sandy attacked a fellow inmate with a homemade ice pick before strangling him to death.
That leads to a high rate of burnout and turn-over even after a short period of employment. “People start working at prisons and don’t try to do it at year two,” Appalshop’s Smith says. “Then it’s just like …I can’t do this.’ … It is a very intense job, and all the things that come with being in that kind of environment for eight to 12 hours.”
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The Martin County Youth Soccer Complex in Inez, Ky.
Sometimes in Appalachia—including Appalachian Ohio, where I have lived for much of my adult life—there is a sense that this is all we are good for, and this is our lot in life. That sense can lead to the belief that we are destined to suck it up and do the difficult, unwanted work—work that changes people. It’s the inevitability of what Smith calls “shit jobs,” referring to “this masculinity idea that, ‘Yes, we’re trash, and yet we’re the ones willing to do it—we’re the hard workers.’”
She likens this legacy to coal jobs. “I have supplied the [country with] energy and now I’m proud that now I’m the one making sure these dangerous people are off the streets … ,” she says of the mindset of some COs and others working within the prison system in Appalachia. “[We have] these labor-intensive, physically exerting, basically dangerous jobs that most people won’t work in, or the people that do work them, it’s mostly immigrant labor. What has been said over and over again [is] White men won’t take these jobs anymore. But here they will.”
“When you’re hungry, honey, you’ll take a job,” said Chuck Miller of the Big Stone Gap Housing Authority in Up the Ridge.
The Appalachian willingness to work could translate to a host of other jobs, such as manufacturing in the factories currently sitting empty, or in health care, for which the region has a dire need. Joe DePriest, president of the Letcher County Chamber of Commerce, the county where he was born, says there is a Keebler factory, call centers, and mattress factories that are still open in Letcher County, home of the stalled prison project.
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United Baptist Church of Old Zion Association in Big Elk, Martin County, Ky. The stairs lead to the creek, where members gather for baptisms when water levels are higher.
In September, Letcher County received a $3.5 million grant to build a sports resort, including a competitive shooting range. The county is also being considered for an airport project, which DePriest thinks would help with the accessibility of the area for potential developers: “If they say they’ll build you an airport, you should take it, you know?” Hemp and CBD oil extraction continue to flourish, sometimes on farms on reclaimed mine land.
Another much-needed industry in the region with the potential to bring jobs to Appalachia is substance abuse rehabilitation—the anti-prison, if you will. With the possible exception of rehab facilities, none of these industries have the big, sweeping allure of a federal prison. But when statistics show that prisons do little to ease the poverty of a rural county, a prison seems more metaphor than strategy, the great ghost of a promise.
“They were putting an enormous amount of hope in that federal prison project,” DePriest says. “And nobody, even the smallest guy on the street, or the biggest guy there is, nobody presented the federal prison as a cure-all for Letcher County. Nobody looked at it that way, but everybody looked at it as a shot in the arm, or something that could help … But it shocked me how much [the prospect of the prison project] affected people’s thinking and logic and the hope. It really did, and right now it still does. It’s still right there.”
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Abandoned horses graze empty fields at the Eastern Kentucky Business Park in Martin County, Kentucky, less than a mile from the federal prison. Prisons are often promoted as engines of job creation for rural communities, but the jobs often aren’t filled by locals.
Up on the hill past the turnoff for Big Sandy prison is an office park. It winds through wild, grassy acres beside the prison. Most of the buildings sit empty, abandoned or never filled, weeds pushing through the parking lots. The prison didn’t really bring tenants to the park, just as it didn’t bring family tourists to the town.
Letcher County has an industrial park too, but because it was populated with companies primarily related to the oil and gas industry, most of those jobs were lost in the economic downturn 10 years ago. DePriest says a neighboring office park has remained full of tenants, but he doesn’t know why or how to replicate its success. “Those are the same kind of people 30 miles down the road as here,” he says. “They have the same kind of benefits, and the same kind of problems and attributes as here. And if they can generate 20 companies … 30 miles north of here, we can do the same.”
It is no coincidence that Appalachia is considered a prime place for prisons, as it was for coal, fracking, and other industries that often exploit both land and people—it’s not simply a question of the terrain, but of industries no one else wants. Smith says that local officials have told her as much about the undesirability of the region, and how it is still passed over for more positive development: “If we could have got a pie factory, then we would have!” she recalls a member of the local planning commission saying. DePriest agrees that the abundance of extractive, exploitative industries in the region is no accident. “I think the thing with the whole general area—we’re talking about Letcher County, but really the whole area in general—is a loss of hope,” he says. “People need something to cling to, something to look forward to tomorrow.”
A Dollar General store in Warfield, Martin County, Ky. The area’s economy suffers from the collapse of the coal industry, and the arrival of a federal prison hasn’t significantly changed that.
Perhaps for outlooks to change in Appalachia, the larger country’s opinion of the region needs to change, too—to view the region not only as a place to build an industry, but as a place to build a life. Smith says that highlights the importance of scaling back projects in the region to address the fundamentals. Clean water and repaired roads might not be as exciting as a prison, but the need for these services is dire and still unmet in some rural places. “If we could just get basic infrastructure for people that would be great,” Smith says.
DePriest says, “I think what we need to do, the leaders of the community, however we can, whatever needs to be done, is re-encourage people. To get their hope back.”
Otherwise, the promise of prisons may be like the promise of mines: largely empty, largely unjust.
This story was reported with support from the Marguerite Casey Foundation, which supports and amplifies stories of low-income families and the actions that make change possible. Additional support for YES! Magazine’s Appalachia coverage comes from the One Foundation.
Alison Stine wrote this article for YES! Magazine. She is a writer and editor who lives in southeastern Ohio. She is a contributing editor for the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, the author of several books, including her debut novel The Grower, to be published by Mira (HarperCollins) in September 2020.
When a group of Kentucky miners decided to block a coal-laden train from leaving a bankrupt mine in July, they weren’t just laying claim to missing paychecks.
The miners in Harlan County won attention across the United States for their willingness to put their bodies on the line for their beliefs. In doing so, they’re invoking the long-entrenched spirit of civil disobedience and direct action in the Appalachian Mountains. The mine wars of the early 20th century led to the rise of American unions in the 1930s and 1940s, but it’s not just coal miners who have laid claim to a history of activism.
The first day of the Harlan County train blockade, July 29, 2019, also marked the 89th day of a 24/7 protest in Kingsport, Tennessee, over a monopolistic health care provider’s move to downgrade a hospital’s emergency services and close its neonatal intensive care unit, where sick newborns are treated.
And July 29 was the 328th day of the Yellow Finch Lane tree-sits in Montgomery County, Virginia, where two anonymous tree-sitters and a small support camp block construction of a 303-mile, 42-inch wide pipeline being built to move natural gas from the fracking fields of the Marcellus and Utica shale formations in northern West Virginia to a terminal just north of Danville in southern Virginia. From there, the gas would be sent on to the East Coast, and perhaps overseas.
These ongoing actions aren’t recent aberrations. In 2018, more than 20,000 teachers in all of West Virginia’s 55 counties went on strike for two weeks to secure better pay and benefits—and in the end were successful. That action inspired similar teacher strikes in Kentucky, Oklahoma, and elsewhere.
In the mid-’00s, activists trying to stop mountaintop removal coal mining—a form of surface mining that uses explosives to blow off ridge tops to expose underground coal seams—regularly took part in direct actions, chaining themselves to equipment, disrupting stockholder meetings, and blocking access to mine sites and facilities.
These activists run the gamut in terms of age, class, race, ethnicity and hometowns. Women tend to be more prevalent in these actions than men, but everyone shares the frustration of fighting against a system that feels rigged, where other options are blocked, and the only thing left to do is to fight using one’s body.
New Generations Join The Fight For Their Rights
The depth of Appalachia’s activist tradition can be seen in Becky Crabtree of Lindside, West Virginia. Crabtree grew up near Bluefield and went to work as a teacher in McDowell County in 1975. The year she started, local teachers, including her mother, went on strike for better pay, but Crabtree was afraid of losing her new job.
“When I didn’t sign to go out on strike, teachers I loved and respected circled my car and asked why I wasn’t going to go out on strike,” Crabtree said. “It was my first grown-up job, and I told them I had agreed to work. They explained to me I had to go out on strike, and I understood. We stood together and had to go out on strike.”
The teachers struck again in 1986, and Crabtree, now with 11 years of experience, became much more involved. By 2018, she was a substitute teacher, and she didn’t go to Charleston to rally with thousands of others at the State Capitol, but she watched the children of those who did. She also took to the streets with signs of support for the striking teachers, standing with her mother and her daughters—three generations of West Virginia teachers—encouraging car drivers to honk their support.
Credit Mason Adams
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Rachel Campbell, left, and Davin Miller, elementary school teachers in Charleston, were among the thousands who demonstrated for better pay and benefits at the West Virginia State Capitol in 2018.
That summer, Crabtree also protested construction of the Mountain Valley Pipeline across her Monroe County sheep farm by chaining herself to her 1971 Ford Pinto—the same car the other teachers surrounded in 1975—which was placed on concrete blocks straddling the pipeline trench.
“I had done all the things I knew to work the system,” Crabtree said. “I had been to town meetings. I had spoken at pipeline-sponsored gatherings. I spoke about it on TV. We collected petitions. We had a case lined up to go to the U.S. Supreme Court about eminent domain, but they chose not to hear it this year. We had done everything we knew to do. It was all I could do, was to put my body across the pipeline.”
Ultimately, Crabtree said she disrupted about a half-day’s worth of work by pipeline crews before she was arrested and removed from the Pinto. She was charged with obstruction, but the charge was eventually dismissed.
Taking A Stand — Or A Sit — Against Fossil Fuels
Crabtree’s action marked just one episode in a substantial campaign against the Mountain Valley Pipeline. Tree-sitters placed their bodies in the way of pipeline construction in Monroe County, West Virginia, and Franklin, Giles, Montgomery and Roanoke counties in Virginia. The longest-running tree-sit is near the town of Elliston on Yellow Finch Lane, where, as of September 2019, tree-sitters and a support camp have been in place for more than a year.
On the day the Harlan County miners began their train blockade, the Yellow Finch tree-sit was preparing for the possible arrival of federal marshals, because the pipeline company had asked a judge to remove them. That morning, a bulldozer roared on the opposite slope of the narrow hollow as protesters made breakfast and talked about what might happen later. The judge ultimately declined to remove the protesters, who remain in the trees to buy time while other activists pursued legal and regulatory avenues to halt construction.
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Miners and their families play cornhole while blocking railroad tracks to prevent train loaded with coal from departing a mine near Cumberland, Kentucky, until they receive pay for their work from their employer, Blackjewel, which abruptly filed for bankruptcy in July.
The anti-pipeline movement grew largely from organizing efforts that were developed more than a decade ago to fight mountaintop removal in central Appalachia. Erin McKelvy, who works with the group Appalachians Against Pipelines, grew up outside Blacksburg, Virginia, and took part in Take Back the Night rallies with her mother, a professor at Virginia Tech.
McKelvy found another mentor in Sue Daniels, a local mountaintop removal activist who took her along on a 2004 trip to Inman, Virginia, where a 3-year-old boy had been killed in his sleep by a flying boulder blasted from a nearby surface mine. The two joined with others to plan what became known as 2005’s Mountain Justice Summer and the beginning of a protracted campaign against coal companies.
The training sponsored by Mountain Justice taught McKelvy about direct action, preparing for legal fallout, speaking to media, and the importance of centering local leaders and voices.
Direct action, McKelvy said, “is a necessary tool in the toolbox. When regulatory agencies say yes to things that are in clear violation of the charters they have to protect air, water, and the environment, and when there’s so much momentum behind the sort of toxic death culture status quo, sometimes it takes physically getting in the way of those things that are destructive and dangerous to actually get anywhere.”
Making Business Work For Communities
Numerous Yellow Finch tree-sitters cited the Dakota Access Pipeline protests of 2016 and 2017 at Standing Rock Indian Reservation as a galvanizing moment for them. That event also has inspired other actions, including a round-the-clock protest at a hospital in Kingsport, Tennessee, that as of September 2019 stretched beyond 140 days.
Dani Cook grew up in Bristol, which straddles the Tennessee-Virginia line, but was living in Charlotte, North Carolina, when she traveled to Standing Rock and spent five days with a group of military veterans supporting the protest. The experience left a lasting impression, so when Cook learned that the neonatal intensive care unit at Holston Valley Medical Center was scheduled to close as part of the hospital being downgraded as a trauma center, she took to the street.
“When I came out here, I was by myself,” Cook said. “I had no clue if anyone would come with me. All I knew is that what’s happening here is so wrong, we just have to do something. At first I thought that was emails and phone calls. I thought it was 450 people showing up at the [public] hearing. I thought, surely when the state hears from nurses and doctors and the community, it will do something. When that didn’t work, all I knew to do was to make it physical.”
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Dani Cook of Kingsport, Tennessee, protests the closure of a neonatal intensive care unit at her local hospital by Ballad Health, a regional nonprofit hospital company.
Cook stationed herself on the sidewalk in front of the hospital and started talking about the plan set in motion by the hospital’s owner, Ballad Health. Before long, she was joined by other people, and since then they’ve been a constant presence on the road in front of Holston Valley, waving signs, asking motorists to sign petitions and waving to honking cars.
“Our protest is 90 percent women,” Cook said. “We have probably eight or so men who are here. Right now, it’s four of us women and one man out here. That’s pretty much the norm.”
Women Take The Lead Throughout History
That dynamic—of women taking leadership roles and driving direct action—appears throughout Appalachia, both geographically and throughout history.
“Women putting their bodies on the line—because that is really what they’re doing— has been a historical pattern,” said Jessie Wilkerson, a professor at the University of Mississippi and author of To Live Here, You Have to Fight: How Women Led Appalachian Movements for Social Justice. “They always center what I and other scholars call ‘caring labor.’ They’re really emphasizing the labor that it takes to sustain life, to take care of other people, to take care of children, to take care of the environment, to take care of their communities.”
Wilkerson’s book was inspired by the Brookside Women’s Club of Harlan County, Kentucky, which played a pivotal role in the ’70s strike whose memory has been stoked by the train blockade. That’s just one example of women taking the lead in direct action.
Ollie “Widow” Combs, for example, placed her body before a bulldozer at a strip mine above her Kentucky home in 1965, leading to her arrest and inspiring future movements such as Mountain Justice, 40 years later.
Kentucky residents also picketed over potential hospital closures in Hazard, Harlan, Middlesboro, and Whitesburg in the early ’60s. Those protests eventually resulted in the establishment of numerous community-based clinics as part of Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty” programs.
“Often the story is told as the federal government swoops in and is telling people what to do, but in fact, this came from protests around Washington, D.C., and in the region because of the hospital closures,” Wilkerson said.
That action has echoes today in the Holston Valley protests.
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Colorful signs adorn two tree-sits on property near Elliston, Virginia, where protesters have blocked construction of the Mountain Valley Pipeline for more than a year.
Wilma Lee Steele, a resident of Matewan and a board member for the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum, fought coal and gas companies as a landowner whose property was dramatically affected by both. She said that today’s activists increasingly connect their fights with the labor actions found throughout Appalachia’s history, such as the West Virginia mine wars, an escalating series of labor showdowns that culminated in a 1921 declaration of martial law when thousands of miners faced off against law enforcement and private detectives on Blair Mountain. That vibrant connection between the past and present, Steele said, is a good thing.
“There’s things happening in West Virginia,” Steele said. “You see communities doing something. It can be hard to see, but underneath is a wave.”
Crabtree, the teacher whose car was surrounded by striking teachers in 1975, remembered what she felt as she sat chained to that same car 43 years later, waiting in the early morning mists for pipeline crews to arrive.
“There’s nobody in sight,” she said. “Just the shadows of the trees. It’s not quite daylight but it’s not dark. It was one of the most peaceful moments of my life. That’s real important to me. There was absolutely no fear. I knew logically that no jury in Monroe County would convict me of a crime for sitting on my own land, and I was doing the right thing. It’s a wonderful feeling, of doing the right thing.”
This article was funded in part by a grant from the One Foundation.
Mason Adams wrote this article for YES! Magazine. Mason has covered Blue Ridge and Appalachian communities since 2001. He is also one of WVPB’s Folkways Corps members. He lives in Floyd County, Virginia, with his family, goats, chickens, dogs, and cats. Follow him on Twitter @MasonAtoms.
