Alert (09/10/2026): Our Parkersburg TV transmitter is undergoing maintenance for a few days and will not be operational. We apologize for any inconvenience.
All our programming is available via our TV livestreams on our website and WVPB Passport. Thank you for your patience!
This week, in author Willie Carver, Jr.’s new book, he reconsiders a negative childhood experience with a neighborhood girl who might have just been looking for a friend. Also, a southwestern Virginia community rang the alarm after more and more of its children were diagnosed with cancer. A local journalist is trying to unravel the cause. And, the city of Asheville has a new crusading reporter. He’s a puppet.
Home » WVPB Podcasts » What the History of Salt, Slaves and the Mine Wars Teaches Us About Change in Appalachia
Published
What the History of Salt, Slaves and the Mine Wars Teaches Us About Change in Appalachia
Listen
Share this Article
This year marks the 60th anniversary of the publication of a series of novels called The Beulah Quintet. The novels are by the late Mary Lee Settle, a writer who set out to capture moments in West Virginia history when a revolutionary change was at stake. Today’s economic uncertainty here in Appalachia has many people wondering whether we are also living in the midst of a transition.
Producer Catherine Moore was inspired to capture all this in an hour-long radio documentary called Cedar Grove, featured in this week’s episode of Inside Appalachia. “There’s just kind of a feeling in the air, right now, in central Appalachia, that we have reached a moment, or a crossroads, where we’re gonna have to choose a path for our future. So yeah when I discovered that aspect of Mary Lee Settle’s work it really resonated with me, as we face the projected long-term decline of coal.
“So that was a big inspiration for me to make this documentary. I wanted to explore that idea of what these times are like, and I do think that if we’re going to survive here we’re gonna have to look for new ways of being,” Moore said.
Moore said, “[Mary Lee Settle] set each of her books in her Beulah Quintet in what she called “pitch points” or “seed points”, which she thought of as moments right on the edge of a deep and profound societal change. She wanted to see the kinds of choices people were making and how those choices were impacting the future.”
Credit Roger May
/
Shirley Stennett and Patty Thurmon are sisters who own and operate The Haven, a rest home, in the Cedar Grove mansion, which was the Tompkins ancestral home.
Credit Roger May
/
Add WVPB as a preferred source on Google to see more from our team
On this West Virginia Week, the state signs a memorandum of understanding about nuclear energy, the Public Service Commission disputes need for a transmission line, and 9/11 is remembered.
This week, in author Willie Carver, Jr.’s new book, he reconsiders a negative childhood experience with a neighborhood girl who might have just been looking for a friend. Also, a southwestern Virginia community rang the alarm after more and more of its children were diagnosed with cancer. A local journalist is trying to unravel the cause. And, the city of Asheville has a new crusading reporter. He’s a puppet.
Lydia Hamessley is a professor of music at Hamilton College in New York and the author of "Unlikely Angel, The Songs of Dolly Parton." She spent nearly a decade researching Dolly's music catalog. Inside Appalachia Associate Producer Abby Neff talked with Hamessley.
Dolly meant a lot to educator, author and poet Willie Edward Taylor Carver, Jr. from east Kentucky. Inside Appalachia Producer Bill Lynch spoke with Carver about the loss of Dolly Parton.
