An Ohioan in Appalachia

The National Endowment for the Humanities sponsored this institute on Appalachian history and culture ("Regional Study and the Liberal Arts: Appalachia Up Close"). The institute ran from June 8, 2008, to July 4, 2008, with three weeks spent on the campus of Ferrum College in Franklin County, Virginia, a weekend at Breaks Interstate Park in Virginia, and a week in Caretta, West Virginia. The institute included a mix of seminars, field trips, and service learning projects. Eighteen academics, representing a wide variety of disciplines from across the country, participated in the program.

Newly retired Ferrum College English professor Peter Crow coordinated the institute. It would be hard to overstate Crow’s good sense and his uncommon insight into people and culture. He’s a man of great wisdom and humanity.

Ferrum sociology professor Susan Mead and history professor Dan Woods assisted Crow. Mead is a woman of enormous good spirit and enthusiasm. All Mead wants is to make the world a better place, and she does, one day at a time. Woods is a man of integrity and faith. He leads by good example. Under the capable leadership of Crow, Mead, and Woods, the institute was a great success.

Please forward any comments or concerns to mgormley@centralstate.edu or talkinghead2004@yahoo.com

The U.S. highway system is often touted as one of the wonders of the modern world. If so, the network of roads in Appalachia would be a close second. Highways in most parts of the United States are boring. They generally run in straight lines and when they bend, you hardly know it. In Appalachia, when roads bend, they really bend. You feel it in the gut, and over time, in the head. You always feel woozy and weak on Drammamine Drive.

Many people think of dirt roads when they think of Appalachia, but dirt roads are the exception. The roads of Appalachia are paved, not with gold, but with black asphalt.

The federal government spent more than $5 billion dollars, from the mid-60s through 1990, building 2,300 miles of highway in Appalachia. (That’s $16 billion in today’s dollars. Gold asphalt might have been less expensive.) According to the “Pittsburgh Post,” it will spend another $5 billion building the last 700 miles of the system. Highways in Appalachia are expensive. The “Post” says that it costs about $3 million to build a 1.5-mile stretch of highway in flat, western Kentucky. By comparison, a recent 1.5-mile stretch of highway in Appalachia Kentucky cost $47 million.

Taxpayers have spent enormous sums of money building good roads in Appalachia. In theory, these roads are economic drivers, attracting businesses to the region. That theory has proven accurate in some areas and less accurate in others.

The road construction was also meant to lessen the isolation of many mountain communities. They have made it easier for people to get in and out of the mountains. Yet, even with the roads, many Appalachian communities remain isolated.

(Over the past month, Appalachian scholars have repeatedly told my study group that the “isolation of Appalachia” has been exaggerated. There were always trains and roads into the mountains. Yet, I do believe these experts protest too much.)

We live in a connected age. We have cell phones, satellite TVs, home computers, beepers, pagers, and more. Regardless, geography still counts. Appalachians are isolated, to a greater extent than their countrymen, from the rest of the nation. So are Hawaiians and Alaskans. (I know. I’ve lived in both places.)

Isolation, of course, is not always a bad thing. It can produce interesting results. Just think of the Galapagos Islands or Australia. Arguably, Appalachia’s isolation is what has made Appalachian culture unique. It simply wouldn’t have developed as it did if the region hadn’t been isolated from the main currents of American life.

As Appalachia’s isolation has decreased, the frustration of its residents has risen. They watch “Desperate Housewives” with a mixture of envy and disgust. “Why doesn’t my neighborhood look like that?” they wonder. “I’m an American, too.”

The truest fact about roads is that they almost always run two ways. People can get in and people can get out. The government has spent a fortune building good roads in Appalachia. Most of the traffic on them has been outbound. Appalachians have seen how the rest of the country lives. Many of them are impatient and they’re not waiting any longer.

Useful links
Pittsburgh Post Gazette article on the history of the Appalachian Regional Commission

Columbus Dispatch article questioning ARC spending practices

The bottom fell out of the local economy in McDowell County, West Virginia, in the 1980s. For a time, every coal mine in the county shut down. (An environmentalist’s dream, but a coal miner’s nightmare.) Huge numbers of residents fled the county on the “hillbilly highway.” Those who stayed behind struggled to survive.

In the midst of this, a small group of residents came together and formed an organization called “Big Creek People in Action.” The group bought an old school in Caretta for one dollar and began providing services to the community. It raised most of its money from private foundations. No one got paid the first four years.

Since then, Big Creek has provided the community with a wide variety of programs, some of which have lasted, some of which have not, including an early childhood development program, an education and literacy program, an after school program (one of the ones that didn’t last), a young leaders program and much more.

Big Creek’s Citizenship Program is one of its flagship activities. Big Creek has transformed several classrooms in the old school into dormitories. Church and university groups come to Big Creek, usually for a week at a time, stay in the dorms and work in the community. They fix houses, paint churches, repair porch steps…you get the idea.

My group planted a garden, initiated an Internet Blog for a young leaders group, and created a new library at the Big Creek building.

All of this is good, of course, but does it really make a difference…over the log term? Well, it’s clear that Big Creek has helped an enormous number of residents over the last 18 years. Thousands of residents have been helped in tangible ways.

It’s less clear that Big Creek has had much of an impact over the long term. McDowell County is as poor as ever. Then again, would the situation be any better without Big Creek? Doubtful.

Over the last eight years, the residents of McDowell County have faced serious challenges. Since 2000, there are have been four floods — two one-hundred-year floods and one five-hundred-year flood. One of the floods inundated Big Creek’s headquarters building. “That really changed the dynamic of Big Creek People in Action and the people it serves,” co-founder Frankie Rutherford says. “For several years, the focus of Big Creek was on survival.”

Big Creek and the community both survived but neither prospered. The group is in serious financial trouble, is struggling to fill several staff positions, and is without an executive director. Marsha Timpson, Learning Coordinator of the Citizenship Program, has stepped into the breach and provided energetic leadership to the group. Timpson says the county will never return to its glory days, but “it can be better, and we want to help make it better.”

As a reporter, I learned to be cynical about self –help groups that talk big but accomplish very little. But I’ve been very impressed with the people at Big Creek. They are battling powerful forces — globalization, a variety of social ills, the mechanization of jobs— with no guarantee or likelihood of success. Let’s hope they keep up the good fight.

Useful links:
Big Creek People In Action

Here are a few that deserve to be seen.

I went to War this week and survived to tell the tale. Some of the things I saw —abandoned buildings, vacant storefronts — I fully expected. But some of what I saw surprised me.

The streets of War bustled. The people seemed busy and happy —more so than the people of Welch who I hand encountered the day before.

Why did the people of War seem so much happier? “It’s the first of the month,” a colleague told me. Ah, that explained it. The checks had begun to arrive.

It’s safe to say that most of the people in McDowell County, West Virginia, rely on the government in some way. They either work for the government (or an agency funded by the government) or receive some other kind of government check. The federal government mails out a lot of checks each month, including welfare, unemployment, disability, and social security checks. It provides rental assistance, food stamps, school lunches, head start programs, and more. So people are pretty happy at the start of the month. That’s when everyone’s Uncle Sam steps up to the plate. The problem is the rest of the month. Despite all the government help, people here are very poor.

A social service agency described the county in a grant proposal that I obtained. Here is what the proposal said:

Our residents face many challenges. The county is the 8th poorest in America, with a median family income that is less than half the national one, and an unemployment rate that persistently doubles the state rate and more than triples the national rate. We have the 5th highest child poverty rate in American, with 100 percent of our children living in high poverty neighborhoods; 82 percent of our students are eligible for free or reduced lunch. Education has not enabled residents to reach their full potential, as 37 percent are illiterate (the highest rate in West Virginia); 48 percent of the population lacks a high school education; 22 percent of teens are high school dropouts, 29 percent of youth between 16 and 19 are not in school and are not working; and only 5.6 percent of the work force are college graduates. We have the 6th worst health status in America. Absentee landowners own 85 percent of the land and natural resources.

A hospital administrator told a colleague that 70 percent of the women who give birth at her hospital test positive for drugs. More than two-thirds of the homes in McDowell County discharge sewage directly into local streams. I saw a nice home on the market for $30,000 and the owner told me that she hopes to get $20-25,000. A social worker told me that a coal company tested 163 job applicants for drugs. Five applicants passed. A WalMart opened three months late because it had trouble finding drug-free applicants. And so on.

Poverty today, of course, is different from poverty forty years ago. And poverty in Appalachia is different from poverty in the developing world. Few people go hungry in Appalachia. (Indeed, there is an epidemic of obesity here.) Residents may not live in big houses, but the houses have electricity and running water. Just about everyone has cable or satellite TV, a cell phone, a working car, and possibly a home computer. I drove my car down a poor hollow outside Welch, West Virginia, and was able to detect a wireless airport with my computer. That’s American poverty.

It’s hard to know why this poverty exists, much less what can be done about it. Part of the problem, I suppose, is that Appalachia is isolated. In a world of highways, concrete and digital, Appalachia remains a place apart. The mountain geography does not invite industry.

The culture here is also somewhat insular. It is friendly but not necessarily inviting. Immigrants — who tend to be very entrepreneurial — tend to go elsewhere. They go where they feel welcome and where they find economic opportunity. By going, they create even more economic opportunity.

Many Appalachians have left the region for greener pastures. Some coal mining counties have lost 75 percent of their peak population. Economic progress is almost impossible in such a situation.

Appalachian culture, which is romanticized from the inside and belittled from the outside, is problematic in other ways. Substance abuse is common here. Educational achievement is weak. Dependence on the government has become a way of life.

The economy in Appalachia has long relied on extractive industries — timber, coal, and gas — that no longer produce enough jobs or wealth. Residents of the region must find new ways to make money. They must reinvent this place.

I wish that I could blame the government for the poverty in Appalachia. I think the government has hurt the region by failing to protect manufacturers from unfair trade. Certainly, the textile industry has been hurt by our trade policies. But the coal industry has not. The coal industry is booming. It’s just not employing many people. That happened because of technological change — mechanization — and there’s not much the government can do about that.

The federal government has spent enormous sums of money trying to lift Appalachians out of poverty. It has built highways and dams. It has funded a social safety net and an alphabet soup of welfare programs. And people are still poor.

To be fair, the poverty rate has been cut in half over the last half century. Some parts of Appalachia are making real progress, though there is still severe poverty in other parts, such as the coal mining region. Unfortunately, much of the region’s progress rests on a thin reed of government spending. If government spending drops significantly, many local economies will collapse, if they haven’t already.

After seeing first hand, the level of poverty in southern West Virginia, I am at a loss over what can be done to solve the problem.

It’s almost as bad as Youngstown.

Editorial Note: I am usually pretty aggressive taking pictures of people. People pictures are better than building pictures. When traveling through the developing world, poor people are often quite happy — even thrilled — to have their pictures taken. The camera is such a novelty to them and with digital cameras, you can show them the results immediately. In Appalachia, people react differently to cameras. They know what cameras are and they know why you want to take their pictures — to illustrate a point. So I’ve reigned in my aggressive instincts with this blog.
Useful links
McDowell County, WV (official site)
McDowell County, WV (Wikipedia)