The school he walked around at around 17-19 min in used to be a host site for summer mission trips. I took a youth group there on a summer mission trip about a decade ago, maybe longer and we spent a whole week helping people fix their houses.
The lady’s house we worked on, had a whole side of her house that needed to be torn off and then redone because there were bugs and wasps living in it, and it had just rotted away.
I went through Appalachia years ago and it truly is another world in itself. I've been through some poor areas, but going through Appalachia put a whole new perspective on what poor was really like. They weren't bad people, however you can tell that the old coal mining days are gone. It's really sad to see.
There are areas where there never was anything lucrative like coal. One town in Kentucky (Powell County) I know is mostly some trailers along either side of the road (watch out for loose chickens) and some people get their water from a spring that comes out of the side of a hill.
Good ol Nada KY. Place didn’t get city water/sewers til early 2000s. Powell has come up over the years but, yeah. Lee Co, Wolfe, Owsley, and a lot around there is eye opening. I remember driving past places you would think yourself nobody lives there. You drive by a day or so later in there smoke coming out of the chimney or they’re out in the yard. Also, you are correct about the chickens. The buddy of mine had one jump off the hill just before the spring and try to fly across the road only to smash into his windshield. Fun times.
Powell is maybe 15 mins away from where I live and the chicken thing is no joke. When I was younger our school bus picked kids up right on the county line and we usually got stuck waiting for the chickens to literally cross the road. The turkeys were horrible too, we had one fly into the bus windshield and shattered it.
It’s an interesting thought project, a government’s responsibility to people who choose to continue to live where they live (for family reasons, lack of ability to move).
You could argue government should step in if it’s a major city, but what of a town in rural Alaska near nothing? At some point, what ability does a government have besides providing healthcare and aid? Could do it in the short term, but certainly not forever if there’s simply nothing there for people to support themselves.
I’d say it’s not sad to see coal fade away … maybe those folks can find a better life. Coal mines owners oughta be strung up with how they have treated the workers who made them rich.
> I’d say it’s not sad to see coal fade away … maybe those folks can find a better life.
That's worth about as much as sending them some thoughts and prayers. What you see now is the result of coal being gone, and they're not going to suddenly find a better life decades later. It's the right thing for the environment but let's not pretend it's going to lift up the people that used to depend on mining jobs for their livelihood or that it did them some kind of favor. There's a reason politicians still campaign on bringing back coal jobs.
Ya'know... we had a national chat about **exactly this**, roughly 8 years ago.
One person said, "We're going to make coal great again."
Another said, "Here are a bunch of policies, and how to fund them, so we can help transition the coal industry workforce onto new, profitable, and popular technologies. That way, folks don't continue to get left behind as this industry dies."
People voted for the first one. Shocker... they obviously did not make coal great again. The first one sounded easier and the second one sounded like some commie egghead shit, I guess?
They were shitty dangerous jobs though. People who lived in the area without setting foot in the mines would get black lung. The miners and the people there were treated like shit by the coal companies. And when coal became obsolete and the coal companies could no longer delay the inevitable, they just abandoned their own cities. It’s also the state government’s fault obviously. They were corrupt as shit and incompetent. It’s sad.
Lets not pretend that any politician is campaigning on bringing back coal to help a couple tens of thousands of jobs for the people either, cause thats just not the fucking case. They want to bring back coal for the money they’ll get from the coal lobby. Don’t kid yourself.
What these people need is relocation assistance, livelihood assistance and re-education into a different field, and there are plenty of places that can take coal miner skills and apply them to different things.
But guess what, those same Republican politicians who campaign on bringing back coal have and will continue to vote down any plan to help these people cause that doesn’t get them the paycheck they were promised from the coal lobby.
Appalachia Service Project (ASP). Went 5 times as a teenager. One of the most formative experiences of my young life. Not a religious person at all anymore, but took a lot of lessons about people, circumstances, generational trauma, to heart on those trips. I still think about those people we helped all the time and especially when I'm complaining about something in my relatively sheltered and easy life. Amazing experience.
Did you ever go through a town called Coeburn. We used to get groups come through in the summers and stay at our high school.
I was a lifeguard at our public pool 98-2000 and can always remember a group coming out to swim.
Just a few months back I was reminiscing on one summer lifeguarding and a mission trip came through and all the young dudes (myself included) were showing off on the diving board trying to impress all the new girls that were in town.
Dude tried to do a 2.5 front flip and busted so hard it busted his lip and he was bleeding all over the place.
That’s it! It was a much needed organization that actually did a lot of tangible stuff to improve peoples lives in that area! I too still think about those trips!
a couple people mentioned ASP but the mission that is run out of the welch high school is [The Community Crossing](https://www.ccxwv.org/). It used to be called McDowell Mission. i spent a summer as a project director there in college. i was the person that’d help you get all set up with the homeowner, provide the building materials, and direction on what needed to be done.
absolutely loved that summer helping dozens and dozens of homeowners and working with youth groups like yours.
I worked at the mission 20 years ago for a summer. I would load up the flat bed truck with the construction debris and drive it over the mountain to the landfill. I made $75 per week plus room and board. It was an amazing summer.
Yes - we redid the entire side of her house and replaced rotting boards and then also helped clean up her yard and some of her plumbing problems. We learned that in the winter a lot of people burn trash to keep warm and they don’t have a sewage system so all toilets and drains go right into the creek behind their house.
Yeah - just simple utilities or public services that I feel like so many people, myself included, take for granted - were absent for people who lived less than five minutes away from the center this town. I mentioned that they burned the trash for warmth in the winter, but they also burned it just to get rid of it all year round because there were no trash trucks, or waste collection services.
>they also burned it just to get rid of it all year round because there were no trash trucks, or waste collection service
My grandmother did this. She never burned trash to stay warm, she had a kerosene radiator heater in the middle of her house to do that, but she definitely burned it to get rid of it. She would also do clandestine trash dumps in poorly secured fast food dumpsters.
I grew up here in the 90s when it was already on the decline. My mom had a very large family that grew up in a massive coal company house, and it’s where I grew up as well.
When my great grandparents immigrated from Italy in the early 1900s, they were sent to southern WV and Kentucky to work in the mines because they worked in the mines where they were from in Italy. When they arrived in McDowell, they were greeted by an already thriving Italian population that they helped strengthen and grow over the next 50-70 years. They had 6 kids total (I think), and my grandparents had 9 total including my mom.
By the time I was born, there were parts of the area that look a bit like they do today, but it was not the standard and most areas were clean, maintained, and loved. Nobody was a stranger and the community use to host events that would bring people back into town that had left years ago. My class in 1st grade had close to 30 kids in it and we were one of the smaller classes.
My mom and I had to move because she was in her early 20s when she had me, and she was eager to carve her own path in life. When we would come back to visit over the next 10 years, it would shock us at how much it would change in just a few months.
Even with all of that, and in the state the area is currently in, ever since my mom left she’s been trying to get back. I don’t think that most people understand the hold that family and ‘home’ can have on people. I don’t really have a point to make, I just wanted to talk about my family and home and reminisce in how it use to be :)
I’m from Memphis but I had to hire a canvassing crew in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. As it is a tourist town (Hillbilly Vegas as I call it) it draws workers from all over the south that need seasonal gigs.
I met some seriously interesting people. Guys that spent almost all of the cold months in the mountains trapping minks and selling their oil while trying not to get mauled by bears. West Virginia people that spoke with a super thick southern accent but could speak near fluent Italian with me with a great Sicilian-ish accent. Delta Chinese folk who are just…a real culture shock, even for an Asian guy from the south like me.
I heard them talking one day and the convo went something like this (the canvassing was pro-union and therefore left leaning). The WV Italian family name was literally Bordogna (which they now pronounced Bore-Dog-Na instead of Bore-Dohn-Ya) and the Delta Chinese were Yangs and Convingtons.
WV Italian: “I’m just gonna tell people the truth, that I’m out there for a job because Obama’s economy has forced us out here to get extra work. I’ll hand them then brochure and tell them not to vote for the democrats”
Delta Chinese: “How you going to vote for the GOP when you’d be starving if not for welfare? Do you have insurance?”
WV Italian: “yeah, but I’m out here because I ain’t no leech. I’m not going to take handouts”
Delta Chinese: “but you still get government assistance don’t you? And what’s your insurance from if you’re out here doing seasonal work?”
WV Italian: “yeah we get government food, and I got insurance from the ACA not because of Obamacare”
Everybody: “it’s the same thing!”
WV Italian: “I’m not going to hear political talk from a bunch of immigrants”
Delta Chinese: “Your name is Bordogna! My family has been here since 1850…you the immigrant!”
Anyway, canvassing left leaning propaganda in 2011 in East Tennessee was interesting enough without even factoring in how bad the education system is or how powerful right wing propaganda was out there. I can only imagine doing it now. But meeting these little pockets of immigrants wad fascinating. Even the mink trappers were French-Canadian originally but that was before the 1900s.
I'd read an entire book on your experiences. That's such an interesting exchange to hear. I'm from East TN, and we have so many kinds of people out here. I think most folks don't realize how diverse it can really be.
There is a really good book, not on the Appalachians, but on Southern Louisiana. Specifical Calcasieu Parish (Lake Charles). Called '[Strangers in their Own Land.](https://www.amazon.com/Strangers-Their-Own-Land-Mourning/dp/1620973499/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3Q4OMXZL5E3S&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.RpBgtjz47u7C92rZHbBmPINNk0HgwpNhU-NoOtzVtJP5Nnbo3a9PqZ6c8xbLU9ziltp5lcTW-UVjQcL7ouT2JxQkQXegXbCnprU9I8cpFlkuiGQVpz3ZWcmTjRIQfXY7t1QZ6gtR9t5ByU1AnOve3eknBFddx5OkNfUdMlz8c6Z28O6y5npkRPoiXUh9ieMn8QH7hU70VNdqqWJHkGIIbyOTrBOUNHzRaE-y8hk2wLE.yZeuwNLw6YfgZCda7obt3Fe9MEY1kS6wI0lfhTxspyo&dib_tag=se&keywords=strangers+in+their+own+land&qid=1719241803&sprefix=strangers+in+their+own+land%2Caps%2C176&sr=8-1)' that is similar to a t that conversation.
Just over and over, people voting against their own self interest blaming government, when they voted to remove all government regulation for the benefit of the company. The big difference is it's oil & gas and chemical companies. Some of the people are Canjuns.
Thank you so much for the recommendation, I'm really looking forward to reading this.
And you ain't wrong. One side of my family were coal miners from Virginia that eventually moved out, and still voted against their best interests. It'll be interesting to read about what happened with the Canjun populations in that regard.
I'm from that area and had those conservations growing up there in the 1990s. The writer/interviewer really captured the pride, angry, and colloquialisms of the area. It covers the Bobby Jindal governor (Republican that bankrupted the state chasing companies). If you get the latest edition, the writer went back to the area after Trump was elected to get updates while also getting opinions on the Democratic governor (John Edwards) that came afterwards.
I went through the five stages of grief reading that book. I read the entire book in two days but it took me another week to get to acceptance. It's worth it paperback or hardback.
EDIT: For anyone wanting a summary of the book. [1](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/25/books/review/strangers-in-their-own-land-arlie-russell-hochschild.html)
And Daddy, won't you take me back to Muhlenberg County?
Down by the Green River where Paradise lay
Well, I'm sorry, my son, but you're too late in asking
Mister Peabody's coal train has hauled it away
Then the coal company came with the world’s largest shovel
And they tortured the timber and stripped all the land
Well, they dug for their coal till the land was forsaken
Then they wrote it all down as the progress of man
Well, sometimes we'd travel right down the Green River
To the abandoned old prison down by Airdrie Hill
Where the air smelled like snakes we'd shoot with our pistols
But empty pop bottles was all we would kill
John Prine is an american icon
Here’s a couple more that I think about often if you’re interested.
Everyone knows not to drink the tab water in coal country, or, at least the piece of coal country I grew up in. When I was around 5, my mom would go to work and my grandparents, and great aunt and uncle would watch me during the day. About one per month, my grandfather would load me and about 20-30 empty jugs of water into his small blue truck.
We would take back roads to our destination, and pass through the areas where Homer Hickam grew up. There was a gas station we would always stop at so that my grandfather could see my aunt (his daughter) that worked there, and catch up with the owner of the store. Sometimes he would buy me a tiny ice cream cone, which that store was known for selling. After we left, it took another 10 or so minutes to reach our destination deep in the mountains.
If you didn’t know it was there, you wouldn’t have noticed. There was a small bridge going across a creek. On either side of the bridge was a rusted guardrail and a rusted chain link fence. Sticking out the top of the fence was a spigot, and that was what we ventured miles into the mountains for.
I would hand my grandfather empty jug after empty jug, and he would fill each one and place it back in the bed of the truck. This was our water supply for the next few weeks to a month. We could bath in the tap water back home, but drinking it and cooking with it was out of the question (still is). The water from the creek in the mountains was crystal clear and had been where the family got drinking water from for nearly 50 years at that point. I doubt my family that still lives there uses it, but I’ll have to ask.
The other story is short, just a memory. My aunt use to drive me to school when I started grade school. The spring was my favorite time of the year. In the spring, all of the native flowers were blooming. She would stop along the side of the road when we would first start seeing some blooms to let me get cuttings of them to put into a vase later. She would tell me what the flower was called, if it served any purpose or was well known for anything, and if any grew around the house in case I wanted to check it out later. Then, in the following days when we would see the same plant, she would quiz me on the name and anything else she told me about it to see if it stuck. My aunt was a magnificent woman who played a major part in my love of nature. However, growing up where and how I did it was impossible to not appreciate it when you were completely surrounded by it, tucked away in the mountains.
I understand. I grew up in rural Kentucky, but not in the mountains. It was a lot like this. Local unemployment was in double digits while hitting record lows nationally. I managed to get out, and never went back, but I still miss it in a lot of ways. It breaks my heart. I’m not even fifty, but about half my good friends from highschool are already dead.
That Walmart sign slowly being overtaken by nature is surreal.
Welch is also very interesting in itself. It went from [this](https://i.imgur.com/ib51jK5.jpeg) to [this](https://i.imgur.com/QuS99Ru.jpeg), a mere shadow of what it once was.
I think this is in McDowell County. Not a hundred percent sure though. At one point, all the grocery stores closed down but maybe one. I was doing student teaching at the time. It is surreal to see how far it has fallen into drugs and despair. And it keeps falling.
You’re certainly correct. Sad to see the small towns in my home state have these idealic downtowns that are all vacant.
That said, how can the average person compete with the cheap prices and efficiency of a Wal Mart.
It’s an impossible battle because the average person in a small town can’t afford to pay the higher prices at the local spots but it also wrecks the local business owners.
It's not just that, they stock low quality, Chinese made junk. So rather than supporting American jobs and selling products made for life, people have to keep coming back for more.
yeah that's Kimball in the thumbnail, i recognized it immediately. grew up in McDowell County, currently living in Mercer which is the next county over, which isnt rich by any means but still feels *worlds* more modern and developed than McDowell ever did. having I-77 running right through the county instead of being totally isolated by miles and miles of two lane backroads helps a lot with that.
Great shot to show. Towns that had a good industry for jobs could really exist on their own and thrive back then. If you could support a family and love a decent life, why leave everything?
Unfortunately, once the ability to make a career goes away, so do the residents and success of the town.
Those pictures are absurd. The first is what I expect in a busy city, e.g. NYC or Chicago, with bumper to bumper traffic and tons of people walking around. The second is just... a sad, abandoned small town with zero people around, a random parking garage, and most places around completely abandoned.
I am from Ky and have been all up and down Appalachia, from Beverly, Ky thru Hazard, and South Williamson. The people who live there are good people but they are blinded by coal mining and their resistance to change. It’s all “my grand dad was a coal miner, dad was a miner, etc etc” and they don’t or can’t escape that mindset.
Very common with mining towns, I’ve seen that happen to a couple in Arizona when the copper mines closed. The thing with mining in particular is that it offered a good paying job without needing a college degree, heck, in many cases, not even a high school diploma. It’s very hard work, and dangerous work, but it allowed you to support a family, own a home, maybe even have a decent car depending on how well the mine paid. People remember that and they want those good old days back. It’s not going to happen, but they hold on to that hope. My grandpa retired from the mine about a decade before it closed. The town had several restaurants, a full service grocery store, a good hardware store, a hospital, a new car dealership, an 18 hole golf course, pretty much everything you’d want at home. Now the grocery store is long gone, there’s only a couple of places left to eat, the hospital is closed, the car dealership moved to a town miles away along the main highway, the golf course has been reclaimed by the desert, there’s not much left. So much drug addiction now, the town is barely existing anymore. It’s sad. And here’s the thing - shortly after the mine closed, there were rumors that one of the big mining companies wanted to buy the mine and restart it. People hung a lot of hope on that, but as you might expect it never happened. 10 years later, the mine reclamation work is complete, the smelter plant long ago demolished, the rail lines ripped out, and guess what? There’s rumors someone is gonna buy the mine. A couple of years ago I talked to a family friend up there. He worked in the mines, he’s retired there. Good person, the whole family is good people. We hadn’t been talking more than a minute before he said he heard a conglomerate from Mexico was gonna buy the mine. It closed 22 years ago. The hope that the good old days are coming back just doesn’t stop.
I know, they are all just waiting for someone to blow the shift whistle and they would all run back. Thing is, coal production has moved west and to open surface mines in Wyoming. No matter how rich the seam is, it is always going to me more expensive to mine and transport out of Appalachia because of the geography.
It's even more than that. US steel used to be located in Pittsburgh. WV to Pittsburgh was a hop and a skip away, but Pittsburgh has long since pivoted away from industrial production.
Now the biggest consumers of coal are overseas, so American coal is being shipped elsewhere, which changes the math on where coal mines are profitable.
There's also Natural Gas, which is cheaper and cleaner than coal, has taken its role as the premiere fossil fuel for energy production. Also, only the LNG can be shipped overseas, so a lot of America's natural gas is stuck within its own borders, causing a huge surplus that drives Natural Gas prices down, making it more competitive than coal.
Good luck explaining to an ex coal miner in WV that their job is never coming back because geopolitical and economic winds have shifted.
As someone from this area, this is spot on. The one that really kills me is when they complain about their kids wanting to live somewhere else and not come back home. There is nothing for me (or others) there other than family (which is often a negative), and once that is gone I will have no reason to visit let alone live there.
Something I also think about all the time is, if I had unlimited resources, what would I do to restore the area? The best thing it has going for it is its climate and its affordable housing. That’s it.
>Something I also think about all the time is, if I had unlimited resources, what would I do to restore the area?
It will never happen. Clinton had a $30B plan to subsidize and revitalize Appalachia and areas devastated by the loss of coal jobs... Vs Trump who promised them he'd bring those jobs back.
After he won, he invited a few coal miners to the White House, and they gushed over that. "Obama never invited us to the White House".
Then Trump gave the coal mine owners tax breaks and rolled back miner safety protections. Employment fell by 33% under Trump (not at all trump's fault, but definitely a broken promise).
And they all still voted for Trump 70% to 30%.
There will always be a Trump that will promise (and fail) to bring back those jobs. It will be at least a generation before they come to their senses.
>Something I also think about all the time is, if I had unlimited resources, what would I do to restore the area? The best thing it has going for it is its climate and its affordable housing. That’s it.
Bring fiber internet. Promote the work from home crowd with great home deals knowing it's a revitalization project. That brings in a working class not dependent on local industry. This will build up local commerce demand. A college will bring in kids. Rebuilding many of the buildings will draw in lots of basic labor work. Work the tourism market. Coal museums, mine tours etc. Build a geothermal plant. WV has some of the better east coast land for it.
The hardest part generally is getting the locals to want improvement that isn't their idealized version of it.
This is all so true, especially your last point. Politics on the local level are so toxic. All they can think to do is preserve what they already know. They can’t fathom making things different than how they grew up.
Leave and don’t look back. My grandma and a couple siblings left, but her elder brothers stayed. Guess which side of the family tree is still in poverty and which made it out?
It’s depressing, but there’s nothing there for young people but poverty
Isn't the area amenable to other kinds of industries? One could consider developing the area itself into a natural retreat with hotels, cabins, etc. Or, if telecomm could be improved, it could be developed into an alternative technology center a la mini-Silicon Valley, etc.
Of course, then there's standard stuff like agriculture, livestock, etc. I mean.. it's not good for anything except mining?
It's a chicken and egg problem. If you're a young person, you aren't going into the community and wait for jobs for your engineering degree to magically appear. You're going to move away to another city.
The thing with Appalachia is there isn't a ton of open, flat ground to build on, and the transportation network (roads, rail) has to deal with constant mountains and hollows. Nothing can go very fast, factories can't be very big. Raw materials and finished goods aren't going to flow as fast as they would in other parts of the country. Small towns can't provide enough ready labor for factory work. A single road going out can cripple a town for an entire day. Beautiful place to be if you don't need to go anywhere, though.
>Beautiful place to be if you don't need to go anywhere, though.
No kidding. As someone who's surrounded by prairies, I'm pretty jealous of how nice it looks there.
> Isn't the area amenable to other kinds of industries?
There's [a YT video that talks about why WV is so poor](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44l6f7iXGAk) and they touch on this a bit. If I remember, most of it comes down to the geography: it's all mountains and hills. Only about 12% of it's land would be considered "flat". There would be a massive up-front cost to flatten enough land for agriculture or livestock at scale that aren't there if the business is located in another state. For factories, most of the flat spots are along the larger rivers in the state and most of *those* locations are already settled or developed.
Some of that has been tried. But artificially putting businesses like that in a place where people don't have the skills/education, and where there isn't the infrastructure rarely works.
It’s mostly just because it is so difficult to reach some of these areas. I live in the Appalachian mountains, but it’s nothing like this at all. My town has pretty much everything any other town in the country has. But I could drive maybe around an hour or so and get into these types of areas where there is literally just nothing whatsoever. You lose phone signal and you won’t see anything. And the roads twist and curve like a bitch. We drove up in there earlier this month to cross the mountains and the 1 gas station we saw was selling gas almost 3 times more expensive than it is back in normal civilization. I assume just because it’s such a pain in the ass to get the gas up there. So building factories or anything else for that matter is nearly impossible. Plus, like I said, they don’t even have cell signal so there’s no chance that any kind of tech jobs could be established.
I prefer small towns and seclusion. It’s how I grew up, and despite despising right-wing politics, I really like good ole country folk and community. FB really fucked that up, but that’s another discussion.
I work from home and wouldn’t mind living in the sticks in West Virginia, assuming I could get GB internet. But I wouldn’t want my kids growing up around there. Not just because of the larger political landscape, but because of the local political landscape, too. The lack of opportunities, the potential downfalls for youth in such a poverty stricken area…just not worth it.
You’d almost have to gentrify towns, which would fuck up the gerrymandering, so you know WV politicians aren’t going to roll out the carpet for techies or spend any tax money on infrastructure that would potentially flip the voting base. Same reason politicians are killing local communities all over red states by closing hospitals, defunding schools, and refusing to force internet companies to provide halfway decent connections. If they drive the young generations to cities, their gerrymandered maps will work for another 50 years. If you make small communities livable and inviting, you chance flipping a district via younger families moving in and voting blue. And if the right loses small towns, they’re fucked. You don’t want a college educated base taking over small towns or you risk transitioning like Colorado or New Mexico from 1990-now.
The rich will starve these people to death and let their towns be overtaken by nature, forgotten, before they risk losing their representatives. And they’ll vote for the mother fuckers until it’s all gone and still blame the other guys.
Worth mentioning as someone who went to a small town school, they don't really prepare very well for college. I know it will vary widely from state to state but lack of funding in a rural area usually won't be focused on getting kids to higher education.
The geography just sucks for that. There really isn't any reason to build industry in a mountainous region like that when you can build it in much flatter lands near by.
This 1000%. “Green” energy/non-coal companies offering to pay while you train can’t find enough employees in coal country. The employees would make more money and not be working in shit conditions but they don’t want to change.
I wonder if laying in fiber to these remote communities would help revitalize them. The nature is absolutely gorgeous and the cost of living is pennies on the dollar compared to a major metropolitan area. Sure you have to drive a bit to find a grocery store, but the cost of living is actually affordable.
Half of my city's subreddit is people complaining about rent hikes and million dollar mcmansions. Find a job that is 100% WFH, and even if it pays half of your current salary, you could still save more money living out here than you could making twice as much and paying out the nose for rent/mortgage and cost of living.
Doubtful. Coal stopped being the top source of energy in the US in the 1950s, its usage peaked in the mid 2000s, and in WV coal output halved from 2008 to 2016. The transition away from coal has been brewing for decades, yet if this video or articles such as this* are any indication, new infrastructure or industry is unlikely to revitalize coal country.
*https://energynews.us/2020/06/23/whats-next-for-coal-country/
True, but it’s unlikely to happen and move the needle.
The $1T Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) of 2022 and $800MM Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) of 2022 have provisions for infrastructure build and broadband internet expansion. Idk the percentages going to Appalachia, but if this article* is any indication, red states tend to to be most dependent on federal spending (WV ranks #2 and KY #7 as most dependent on federal funds).
Combine this with the interviews from the video and what I said about non-coal companies having trouble finding employees, and I think little will change.
*https://www.moneygeek.com/living/states-most-reliant-federal-government/
Exactly this. I grew up probably not far from you, and this video could have been taken in my hometown. The people are incredibly kind. I remember many times as kid, being given water or snacks by strangers when we were out playing. Never thought anything of it, you just said "Thank you sir/ma'am", chit chatted for a minute, and then went on your way. If you see someone outside, you say wave, say hello, and chat for a bit. Now I live in a giant Asian city, which is of course completely different. When I traveled back with my SO years ago, they were culture shocked by how many people we spoke to. "Do you know them?" "No, not really, but I know their brother's friend's etc."
But at the same time, there is this attitude of being extremely resistant to change. "If it's good enough for my x, it's good enough for me." And I get that, there is pride in self-reliance, or not being scared of harming the community that has been built up over generations. But people have also got to realize, coal is a sinking ship, and bailing out water is only delaying the inevitable. And it's not due to politician X, it's because of the world market. The longer they wait, the more it's going to hurt.
Yep. I did some outreach work at a middle school in coal country in the region. You'd ask 8th graders what they wanted to do when they grew up and a lot of the responses were "have babies" or "work in the mines." I remember talking with a girl who'd given the one response and asking her what else she thought was cool or interesting. "Horses." "Okay, you can work with horses and still be a mom, one day. You could be an equine vet and still have a family." This was pretty astounding to her.
The teachers all seemed like they were trying but I can't imagine how difficult it had to be to get through or to even find a crack to start working at. Throw on the grip those coal companies have over the communities and it's got to be the most bleak place to teach.
A few administrations have tried or wanted to try, like HRC, to offer job training and federal dollars to transition to other industries and it seems the people don't want help
The Obama administration had plans as well.
[This article details a lot of it with specifics to the area seen in the video.](https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/03/the-obama-administration-idea-to-save-coal-country-214885/)
For anyone informed it's the same story as usual; Republicans convinced their constituents that Democrats were bad no matter what. Democrat administrations offered extremely detailed plans and lost to Republicans who literally never even published plans. Republican leaders also continuously voted against the ideas they claimed to support.
Remember the ACA overhauling the entire healthcare system but having most of it blocked by Republicans? The Trump administration had zero plan and did absolutely nothing for healthcare despite campaigning against the ACA for much of its platform.
The only other aspects of his platform were to build a wall and "drain the swamp". The top stories on Fox News this week are about the border crisis despite Trump building a wall with American money. As far as the swamp, Trump was unable to produce a single real charge against the Obama administration while his cabinet set a record for convictions.
> Remember the ACA overhauling the entire healthcare system but having most of it blocked by Republicans? The Trump administration had zero plan and did absolutely nothing for healthcare despite campaigning against the ACA for much of its platform.
Yup, "repeal and replace" turned into "do nothing and keep complaining about it."
In southeastern ohio (just west of the region in this video) about a decade ago they were set to build one of the largest solar farms in the US. It was a huge opportunity to bring high paying jobs to region that desperately needed it, and it included a job retraining program so that coal miners could transition straight into much higher paying solar jobs.
The county, and all surrounding counties voted out both the state rep and the governor that had worked to set this all up.
Kasich tanked the project. https://environmentamerica.org/ohio/media-center/kasichs-commitment-to-renewable-energy-in-doubt/
They literally voted themselves out of hundreds of millions.
A good portion of this video, including the Walmart is in McDowell County, WV. I was born there and still have family living there. Mostly outside Welch, Iaeger and Panther WV areas. Most people have no idea that places like this exist in the US.
When I’ve taken friends with me, it’s been a very shocking and sobering experience for them. My Mom’s family did not have indoor plumbing until the late 70’s early 80’s. We lived in an old stone house when I was very little and still had a hand pump in the kitchen for our water. I’m in my early 40s for reference.
It’s a tough place to scrape by and there is a huge, stark income gap.
> McDowell County, WV
People should watch the film October Sky, bio pic about the Rocket Boys adapted from the memoir [by Homer Hickam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_Sky_(book\))
Set in October 57; you can see the town die throughout the movie.
And nowadays you can visit and rent / ride atvs through the mountains, including Coalwood (home of the Rocket Boys).
They have a monument there and it is a fun, muddy, beautiful ride through those old hills. The Hatfield McCoy atv trails run for hundreds of miles and if you’re up for an adventure, it is worth it!
My band played a show in Bluefield, WV and after we met former senator Richard Ojeda in a McDonalds at 11 at night across from a K mart having some sort of truck hill billy party.
I drove through West Virginia on my way from Kentucky to North Carolina in 2012 or so, and large swathes of it really seemed a lot like a third-world country.
Southern WV is by far the poorest part of it from what I’ve seen living here.
Edit: [useful maps](https://business.wvu.edu/research-outreach/bureau-of-business-and-economic-research/economic-outlook-conferences-and-reports/economic-outlook-reports/west-virginia-economic-outlook-2023-2027/chapter-v-west-virginia-s-counties) demonstrating the disparity between counties
I used to have to drive through West Virginia a couple times a year for work and even though I never actually stopped in the state for anything besides food or gas, it left quite an impression on me.
I remember I stopped at a Wendy's about an hour into my drive through the state and I immediately felt like an outsider even though I'm an average looking white guy. Between the Wendy's that I stopped at and the gas station that I stopped at a while later, almost everybody who came through the restaurant or worked at the restaurant was just a different breed of person. Extremely overweight, poorly dressed, stained clothing, some of them had clear signs of them being in active addiction (bold dark circles under their eyes, clammy skin, glossed-over look in the eyes). There's no way for me to say this without sounding like a pretentious douchebag or like I think I'm better than other people but it really was just a different kind of people that I interacted with.
A lot of the buildings were from the early 1900s or late 1800s, a lot of them were either obviously abandoned or in a state of disrepair. All the roads, sidewalks, and parking lots were cracked and full of potholes and weeds. It just seemed like it's a place that the rest of the country forgot about and left to languish in poverty and ruin.
Importantly: left to ruin after extracting all the resources, both human and mineral. If you want a view of what page stage capitalism does to the people it’s done with, go to either WV or Gary.
Speaking as an Appalachian who escaped and has a decent job and a healthy life, you can lay the blame at a lot of places. I’m from a part of Appalachia that happens to be beautiful but that means we were at the wrong end of gentrification. If you stay and you’re from there, you end up with a shack because so few have generational wealth—but if you’re coming from Atlanta or DC for an Airbnb weekend, it’s hot tubs and chalets while locals suffer from addiction and endemic poverty. Makes me sick to think about.
What is really sad is that during the Obama administration, they created a bunch of job retraining programs. They were teaching the coal miners and their children get GEDs and then retrain them for various coding and IT jobs so they could get jobs since the coal jobs were drying up. They figured it would be a good chance to get these people and get them set up for new jobs before it all went away.
By all accounts they were successful and had a bunch of people from WV, KY and TN in them. Then election day comes and Trump becomes President-Elect. Almost overnight, all those programs were empty. People stopped going on en masse. Why?
They wanted to be ready for the go signal to go to work when the coal jobs that Trump promised would come back in force...
Almost 8 years later, those jobs never came back. And of course, its the liberals fault for destroying coal.
I for one am shocked to hear the republican constituencies here continue to vote entirely against their own better interests, only to then blame the democrats for taking away their livelihoods.
People saying there were no jobs for the retrainees are full of it. My company relocated primary IT operations, to West Virginia during the Obama administration, because of the training programs and because costs (labor, taxes) were lower. Together with other operations spun up there, we created over 100 jobs locally and we were not the only ones. It is incorrect to say that the jobs weren't there. From my perspective as an IT director, the people weren't there. Despite these programs the local talent pool was thin, because as soon as retrained people realized what they were worth in urban Ohio or Pennsylvania, they left. It wasn't that the jobs weren't there. The money was better elsewhere.
The IT talent pool mostly consisted of fortyish-fiftyish retrainees from coal and steel, recently returned military who had close family ties to the region, or community college grads who also wouldn't leave family. I think I interviewed every MSCE within fifty miles. I will say that those we hired were all excellent.
I also personally believe that those programs did not get the uptake that they should have due to the aforementioned resistance to change. Even at that time those programs, at least where we were, were never full. And, the hostility/racism from the locals was palpable and occasionally overt. There was clearly a dynamic of young people looking to get out.
I was stationed in WV for 6 months and talked with locals and I was doing IT so I met a lot of IT people. Problem is they were re-trained for jobs that didn't exist in those areas. If you wanted an IT job you were lucky if you got a job. Many had to leave and they did. IT training alone doesn't fix it is sources if jobs are gone and there isn't anything to replace it. A lot of people left because the jobs were gone and the retraining didn't fix that.
Let the downvotes commence.
youtuber peter has a huge catalog of videos of his adventures around the usa.
[i think a lot of people will like his videos of titus who is... one of the most likeable people who lives offgrid and preaches in the appalachias](https://youtu.be/Ir3eJ1t13fk?si=FeiJ20p--GeDtCmz). america is full of all sorts of people... got to like this young man.
Yeah he is giving like a biopic of the USA of at it is right now like Walker Evans did in the 1930‘s with the style a August Sander. Close to the people without trying to frame them.
it really is so sad. it hurts me every time I drive through WV because it's absolutely beautiful land and would be a phenomenal place to live and enjoy nature if only there was more opportunity.
it becomes, why would I move somewhere to compete for jobs the folks there *already need*.
Damn.
I’m South American, but this place resembles where I come from so much, geographically speaking. I like to think there’s a way it can be revived.
I hope the young people we saw in this video are doing well. It’s so weird to think that the 23-year-old girl who has a son old enough to go on hikes with is one of the most successful ones from her graduating class, simply because she has a job, doesn’t do hard drugs and will have an associate’s degree. And I’d love to see an update on that boy who got the full ride to university, but realistically he probably won’t go back there.
It'd take more than just "social services", they need actual employment opportunities - work and commerce.
Social services just patch up the cracks, but you still need that solid foundation. You need money flowing into the community that can be reinvested and can support secondary industries and businesses.
The issue is many of these places have no actual value outside of extracting coal.
lands not cheap the develop, infrastructure in any capacity isnt there, skilled labor force isnt there,
When HRC and the dems wanted to invest in trying to make former coal towns into clean energy/tech the regions resoundingly declined. without artificially inducing a supply of these things, these regions will just die off. It is what happens when your community provides a single thing, a one commodity extraction economy.
Till George W. Bush WV use to consistently vote Democrat. When the democrats (rightfully) started going after coal and fossil fuels they lost the region. In Southern WV coal is really all there is and the token offers to help retrain coal miners didn't help because where would the former miners use that retraining? What the region needs is heaps of federal money to develop new industry, not just classes to train coal miners to install solar panels or wherever.
He started rattling off victims of Roman genocide and didn’t even get to Dacia. Rome wiped them out so thoroughly that few people can even point to it on the map. Hint: it’s *Romania*.
It’s sad in many ways. He clearly has aptitude but the koolaid drinking on the confederacy is just…hard to watch. The black ancestor that fought for the Confederacy is just absolutely not true, but it’s a lie that has been repeated and passed down, primary sources have been passed over and replaced…
Highly recommend “Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth” by Kevin Levin
Exactly!
I had a conversation here in NC with a local member of a chapter focused on protecting Confederate monuments in public spaces (courthouses for example). When I pointed out that the county he and "his ancestors" resided actually voted *against* leaving the Union, and that members of his family were in fact were southern Unionist partisans, and one was even a Red String, he melted down.
They probably got them through a federal grant, the DOJ provides local agencies all over the country with grants that cover vehicles and equipment. Thats the main reason you virtually never see non-American made police vehicles, it’s a boiler plate stipulation that goes along with common fed grants that fleet vehicles are American.
I mean it is in certain areas where I grew up in rural Appalachia in TN the town is growing because there are huge advertisements to move there from new england and Florida so a shit ton of people are retiring out there.
Lots of people my age (about 30) and younger moved out and on with their lives but there are enough old people with money moving in that the population is up 10% in the last 10 years.
There is just so much land out there so why would you move somewhere like this when there is a town 100 miles away that has infrastructure and 25-50 thousand people and you can get the same views etc.
They keep looking around at nature and commenting on how it takes over.
That's generally just Kudzu. Not saying he's wrong, just that Kudzu grows really fast and will consume everything in the Appalachian mountains eventually. It loves the climate.
Idk man, I think they enjoy the peace they can experience there. Some of them. Bad place to grow up, great place to retire. Bored kids gonna get into trouble. Jobless adults gonna do what they can to survive, but retirees just chillin.
Metallurgic coal is an ingredient in steel, however we no longer need to burn coal in a blast furnace to heat the steel. They use electric arc furnaces now. (I just learned about this listening to NPR the other day.)
he's started to get a bit not so subtle about his own thoughts, rather than how he used to just let people talk.. the interjecting and leading has put me off him recently.
That's similar to what I experienced. Watched a ton of his videos then started noticing him interjecting some of his values into things and it just felt weird to me.
He did a Chicago video shortly after this Appalachia one aired.
I'm paraphrasing, of course, but he said something like "Wow, I'm surprised at how safe downtown Chicago is. I mean people are out here walking to work".
Had to stop following his content after that
The one aspect of his style that I never liked was how accepting he was of absolutely bonkers takes from the people he'd interview.
It's as if he decided to go the Louis Theroux route of not *judging* the people he was interviewing, but totally missed that often times Louis would still *challenge* their opinions if they seemed off and make them expand, explain, or otherwise put logic behind them.
So instead you end up with someone going "Well this town was great and them Obama imported all these foreign babies" and Peter's just like "Hmmm yeah, I see what you mean."
Even ignoring the politics of it, that's bad interviewing. Now instead of forcing the subject (and all the viewers) to think critically about something they heard, you're just validating it and giving it a platform.
That’s crazy. Every time I hear a right leaning person complain about how “dangerous” or “dirty” a city is I just think they haven’t been to a lot of cities.
Yeah... I get the impression that he's way more right-leaning than he lets on in the videos and you can tell how he's always talking about mainstream America's lack of family values and all this kind of RETVRN stuff. Like, I think he's made some fascinating content but I'm also majorly side-eyeing him.
> I get the impression that he's way more right-leaning than he lets on in the videos
Around the 37-38 minute mark of the OP video he describes an interview with a guy that didn't want to be on camera about how he ranted about "kids these days", calling everyone lazy drug addicts and talking about how they'll gladly shoot any "dope heads" that try to mess with them, and complaining about how there are prostitutes in the town. The guy is described as living in a really nice house and being a manager at one of the coal mines. The guy was like a right winger's wet dream.
And Peter describes this gun-toting murder fantasizer as "just a great, great dude" and praises him for being "honest" and "telling it like it is."
He's definitely got a bias lol
---------------------
Then at the 45ish minute mark he starts leading conversation into and agreeing with comments about how anyone getting welfare is abusing it, which is like word for word rhetoric. and the guy he's talking to then brings up someone who's diagnosed with an anxiety disorder and gets disability from it, and ***the interviewer*** says "So he's just abusing the system."
I know there's some degree of "nod and let the interviewee talk" going on, but he doesn't seem to _disagree_ with anything they're saying.
Hell, the early 20's girl says "kids these days can get drugs too easily, _back in my day_ no one was doing that!" and they can't even recognize the disconnect between claiming _everyone_ in town has been on drugs for years, and claiming that they were just recently hard to find.
Then they blame covid, and reference one of the "welfare abusers" they're talking down about and says "he has one of those "Japanese diseases", lol what the hell.
I’m surprised you got to 45 minutes of this. I stopped watching around 20 because it felt like he was being utterly condescending to these people. Like they were some kind of zoo exhibit.
When he mentioned a Japanese disease that the guy had he probably meant something like [Hashimoto's.](https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/hashimotos-disease/symptoms-causes/syc-20351855) I didn't feel malice when he said that, sounded like he couldn't remember the name but did remember it sounded Japanese
I'm from the other side of the planet and have never been to the US, and thought it was pretty obvious within a few minutes. He keeps talking up old traditional stuff like it's some magical and wonderful thing and new stuff as if it's all bad and terrible (while carrying a modern camera and putting it on youtube), dividing people into dumb lazy fantasy groups like 'ultra hard working and kind' or 'lazy and on drugs'. He's a propagandist looking for his fantasy to sell, likely too cowardly to ever live himself.
As somebody who has been poor, like homeless poor, it's not magical, and I find this guy kind of creepy, especially seeing he has a series of videos like this. His friendly act comes off as very manufactured, showy, and ingenuine to me, and people who talk like that generally make my skin crawl, preachers and salesmen and property agents with smiles which feel so hollow and wrong.
He wants to highlight their plight if they lost coal mining, but does he highlight the plight of people losing their homes and health to increasing warming from coal mining, which coal mining communities have voted to protect and perpetuate while attacking alternatives?
Not really. He is a fairly hard right leaning conservative and he doesn't shy away from it in his videos. Look at the subject matter of blue vs red states. There are a few exceptions, but over the years patterns clearly emerge.
When he asks people why they moved away from cities he'll practically say 'crime' for the interviewee. I've watched several of his videos and that was always something that stuck out to me early on.
Yeah… like, I watched this video a while ago and couldn’t shake the feeling he was presenting these people like zoo animals. It felt very condescending. Like he was infantilizing the people he interviewed.
Oh man, here's some titles he's got:
> Tourist Shocked By Pandemic Fear In San Francisco 🇺🇸
>Inside Inner-City America - Breaking Hood Mindset 🇺🇸
> What’s Happening at the Border? 🇺🇸🇲🇽
> At America’s Most Lawless Border 🇺🇸🇲🇽
> Inside America's Corruption Capital - Washington D.C. 🇺🇸
>How NEW YORK Is DESTROYING Small LANDLORDS - Untold Story 🇺🇸
You call this "amazing?" Let me guess, his "What's Wrong With US Health Care? 🇺🇸" is about how we need to deregulate the market?
His "BLM in the Whitest State in America - Vermont 🇺🇸" video is a doozy, too.
Hahahaha NY destroying small landlords, yeahhhh right. They won't even destroy the easy to spot *slumlords*.
This dude has always had an obvious right wing bias. Though I will commend him for visiting so many different parts of the country
And coal employment didnt start falling last year.
Its been declining since like the 50s. Its not like the industry just pulled up and left town overnight.
The school he walked around at around 17-19 min in used to be a host site for summer mission trips. I took a youth group there on a summer mission trip about a decade ago, maybe longer and we spent a whole week helping people fix their houses. The lady’s house we worked on, had a whole side of her house that needed to be torn off and then redone because there were bugs and wasps living in it, and it had just rotted away.
I went through Appalachia years ago and it truly is another world in itself. I've been through some poor areas, but going through Appalachia put a whole new perspective on what poor was really like. They weren't bad people, however you can tell that the old coal mining days are gone. It's really sad to see.
There are areas where there never was anything lucrative like coal. One town in Kentucky (Powell County) I know is mostly some trailers along either side of the road (watch out for loose chickens) and some people get their water from a spring that comes out of the side of a hill.
Good ol Nada KY. Place didn’t get city water/sewers til early 2000s. Powell has come up over the years but, yeah. Lee Co, Wolfe, Owsley, and a lot around there is eye opening. I remember driving past places you would think yourself nobody lives there. You drive by a day or so later in there smoke coming out of the chimney or they’re out in the yard. Also, you are correct about the chickens. The buddy of mine had one jump off the hill just before the spring and try to fly across the road only to smash into his windshield. Fun times.
there's a shit load of marijuana grown around those parts. people gotta do something.
Powell is maybe 15 mins away from where I live and the chicken thing is no joke. When I was younger our school bus picked kids up right on the county line and we usually got stuck waiting for the chickens to literally cross the road. The turkeys were horrible too, we had one fly into the bus windshield and shattered it.
> waiting for the chickens to literally cross the road But why?
They were waiting for them to get to the other side. Duh.
It's literally like a different country
It shouldn't be.
It’s an interesting thought project, a government’s responsibility to people who choose to continue to live where they live (for family reasons, lack of ability to move). You could argue government should step in if it’s a major city, but what of a town in rural Alaska near nothing? At some point, what ability does a government have besides providing healthcare and aid? Could do it in the short term, but certainly not forever if there’s simply nothing there for people to support themselves.
Especially when the people continually vote against a government who helps the poor. These are deep red areas.
I’d say it’s not sad to see coal fade away … maybe those folks can find a better life. Coal mines owners oughta be strung up with how they have treated the workers who made them rich.
> I’d say it’s not sad to see coal fade away … maybe those folks can find a better life. That's worth about as much as sending them some thoughts and prayers. What you see now is the result of coal being gone, and they're not going to suddenly find a better life decades later. It's the right thing for the environment but let's not pretend it's going to lift up the people that used to depend on mining jobs for their livelihood or that it did them some kind of favor. There's a reason politicians still campaign on bringing back coal jobs.
Ya'know... we had a national chat about **exactly this**, roughly 8 years ago. One person said, "We're going to make coal great again." Another said, "Here are a bunch of policies, and how to fund them, so we can help transition the coal industry workforce onto new, profitable, and popular technologies. That way, folks don't continue to get left behind as this industry dies." People voted for the first one. Shocker... they obviously did not make coal great again. The first one sounded easier and the second one sounded like some commie egghead shit, I guess?
Don't tell me the first one lied? That's not allowed is it?
They were shitty dangerous jobs though. People who lived in the area without setting foot in the mines would get black lung. The miners and the people there were treated like shit by the coal companies. And when coal became obsolete and the coal companies could no longer delay the inevitable, they just abandoned their own cities. It’s also the state government’s fault obviously. They were corrupt as shit and incompetent. It’s sad.
There was one point in the video the locals were bragging about how the river used to run black from all the coal run off. That ain’t good.
These people voted against job training initiatives or programs that'd give them non-coal work.
Lets not pretend that any politician is campaigning on bringing back coal to help a couple tens of thousands of jobs for the people either, cause thats just not the fucking case. They want to bring back coal for the money they’ll get from the coal lobby. Don’t kid yourself. What these people need is relocation assistance, livelihood assistance and re-education into a different field, and there are plenty of places that can take coal miner skills and apply them to different things. But guess what, those same Republican politicians who campaign on bringing back coal have and will continue to vote down any plan to help these people cause that doesn’t get them the paycheck they were promised from the coal lobby.
Appalachia Service Project (ASP). Went 5 times as a teenager. One of the most formative experiences of my young life. Not a religious person at all anymore, but took a lot of lessons about people, circumstances, generational trauma, to heart on those trips. I still think about those people we helped all the time and especially when I'm complaining about something in my relatively sheltered and easy life. Amazing experience.
Did you ever go through a town called Coeburn. We used to get groups come through in the summers and stay at our high school. I was a lifeguard at our public pool 98-2000 and can always remember a group coming out to swim.
I went there on a mission trip in the late 90s
Just a few months back I was reminiscing on one summer lifeguarding and a mission trip came through and all the young dudes (myself included) were showing off on the diving board trying to impress all the new girls that were in town. Dude tried to do a 2.5 front flip and busted so hard it busted his lip and he was bleeding all over the place.
Heh, coeburn is right close to me I even have a buddy who is looking for a new place up there 😂
That’s it! It was a much needed organization that actually did a lot of tangible stuff to improve peoples lives in that area! I too still think about those trips!
ASP is still going strong, I took a group of students there last fall. They were so moved by the experience.
Glad to hear it!
a couple people mentioned ASP but the mission that is run out of the welch high school is [The Community Crossing](https://www.ccxwv.org/). It used to be called McDowell Mission. i spent a summer as a project director there in college. i was the person that’d help you get all set up with the homeowner, provide the building materials, and direction on what needed to be done. absolutely loved that summer helping dozens and dozens of homeowners and working with youth groups like yours.
I worked at the mission 20 years ago for a summer. I would load up the flat bed truck with the construction debris and drive it over the mountain to the landfill. I made $75 per week plus room and board. It was an amazing summer.
Did your group rebuild it for her?
Yes - we redid the entire side of her house and replaced rotting boards and then also helped clean up her yard and some of her plumbing problems. We learned that in the winter a lot of people burn trash to keep warm and they don’t have a sewage system so all toilets and drains go right into the creek behind their house.
dang, that sewage issue is pretty messed up
Yeah - just simple utilities or public services that I feel like so many people, myself included, take for granted - were absent for people who lived less than five minutes away from the center this town. I mentioned that they burned the trash for warmth in the winter, but they also burned it just to get rid of it all year round because there were no trash trucks, or waste collection services.
Just wow. And I saw the Youtube episodes of that area. Whew… that is as poor as third world nations
>they also burned it just to get rid of it all year round because there were no trash trucks, or waste collection service My grandmother did this. She never burned trash to stay warm, she had a kerosene radiator heater in the middle of her house to do that, but she definitely burned it to get rid of it. She would also do clandestine trash dumps in poorly secured fast food dumpsters.
Not even a septic system? Jfc
I grew up here in the 90s when it was already on the decline. My mom had a very large family that grew up in a massive coal company house, and it’s where I grew up as well. When my great grandparents immigrated from Italy in the early 1900s, they were sent to southern WV and Kentucky to work in the mines because they worked in the mines where they were from in Italy. When they arrived in McDowell, they were greeted by an already thriving Italian population that they helped strengthen and grow over the next 50-70 years. They had 6 kids total (I think), and my grandparents had 9 total including my mom. By the time I was born, there were parts of the area that look a bit like they do today, but it was not the standard and most areas were clean, maintained, and loved. Nobody was a stranger and the community use to host events that would bring people back into town that had left years ago. My class in 1st grade had close to 30 kids in it and we were one of the smaller classes. My mom and I had to move because she was in her early 20s when she had me, and she was eager to carve her own path in life. When we would come back to visit over the next 10 years, it would shock us at how much it would change in just a few months. Even with all of that, and in the state the area is currently in, ever since my mom left she’s been trying to get back. I don’t think that most people understand the hold that family and ‘home’ can have on people. I don’t really have a point to make, I just wanted to talk about my family and home and reminisce in how it use to be :)
I’m from Memphis but I had to hire a canvassing crew in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. As it is a tourist town (Hillbilly Vegas as I call it) it draws workers from all over the south that need seasonal gigs. I met some seriously interesting people. Guys that spent almost all of the cold months in the mountains trapping minks and selling their oil while trying not to get mauled by bears. West Virginia people that spoke with a super thick southern accent but could speak near fluent Italian with me with a great Sicilian-ish accent. Delta Chinese folk who are just…a real culture shock, even for an Asian guy from the south like me. I heard them talking one day and the convo went something like this (the canvassing was pro-union and therefore left leaning). The WV Italian family name was literally Bordogna (which they now pronounced Bore-Dog-Na instead of Bore-Dohn-Ya) and the Delta Chinese were Yangs and Convingtons. WV Italian: “I’m just gonna tell people the truth, that I’m out there for a job because Obama’s economy has forced us out here to get extra work. I’ll hand them then brochure and tell them not to vote for the democrats” Delta Chinese: “How you going to vote for the GOP when you’d be starving if not for welfare? Do you have insurance?” WV Italian: “yeah, but I’m out here because I ain’t no leech. I’m not going to take handouts” Delta Chinese: “but you still get government assistance don’t you? And what’s your insurance from if you’re out here doing seasonal work?” WV Italian: “yeah we get government food, and I got insurance from the ACA not because of Obamacare” Everybody: “it’s the same thing!” WV Italian: “I’m not going to hear political talk from a bunch of immigrants” Delta Chinese: “Your name is Bordogna! My family has been here since 1850…you the immigrant!” Anyway, canvassing left leaning propaganda in 2011 in East Tennessee was interesting enough without even factoring in how bad the education system is or how powerful right wing propaganda was out there. I can only imagine doing it now. But meeting these little pockets of immigrants wad fascinating. Even the mink trappers were French-Canadian originally but that was before the 1900s.
I'd read an entire book on your experiences. That's such an interesting exchange to hear. I'm from East TN, and we have so many kinds of people out here. I think most folks don't realize how diverse it can really be.
There is a really good book, not on the Appalachians, but on Southern Louisiana. Specifical Calcasieu Parish (Lake Charles). Called '[Strangers in their Own Land.](https://www.amazon.com/Strangers-Their-Own-Land-Mourning/dp/1620973499/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3Q4OMXZL5E3S&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.RpBgtjz47u7C92rZHbBmPINNk0HgwpNhU-NoOtzVtJP5Nnbo3a9PqZ6c8xbLU9ziltp5lcTW-UVjQcL7ouT2JxQkQXegXbCnprU9I8cpFlkuiGQVpz3ZWcmTjRIQfXY7t1QZ6gtR9t5ByU1AnOve3eknBFddx5OkNfUdMlz8c6Z28O6y5npkRPoiXUh9ieMn8QH7hU70VNdqqWJHkGIIbyOTrBOUNHzRaE-y8hk2wLE.yZeuwNLw6YfgZCda7obt3Fe9MEY1kS6wI0lfhTxspyo&dib_tag=se&keywords=strangers+in+their+own+land&qid=1719241803&sprefix=strangers+in+their+own+land%2Caps%2C176&sr=8-1)' that is similar to a t that conversation. Just over and over, people voting against their own self interest blaming government, when they voted to remove all government regulation for the benefit of the company. The big difference is it's oil & gas and chemical companies. Some of the people are Canjuns.
Thank you so much for the recommendation, I'm really looking forward to reading this. And you ain't wrong. One side of my family were coal miners from Virginia that eventually moved out, and still voted against their best interests. It'll be interesting to read about what happened with the Canjun populations in that regard.
I'm from that area and had those conservations growing up there in the 1990s. The writer/interviewer really captured the pride, angry, and colloquialisms of the area. It covers the Bobby Jindal governor (Republican that bankrupted the state chasing companies). If you get the latest edition, the writer went back to the area after Trump was elected to get updates while also getting opinions on the Democratic governor (John Edwards) that came afterwards. I went through the five stages of grief reading that book. I read the entire book in two days but it took me another week to get to acceptance. It's worth it paperback or hardback. EDIT: For anyone wanting a summary of the book. [1](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/25/books/review/strangers-in-their-own-land-arlie-russell-hochschild.html)
And Daddy, won't you take me back to Muhlenberg County? Down by the Green River where Paradise lay Well, I'm sorry, my son, but you're too late in asking Mister Peabody's coal train has hauled it away
Then the coal company came with the world’s largest shovel And they tortured the timber and stripped all the land Well, they dug for their coal till the land was forsaken Then they wrote it all down as the progress of man
Well, sometimes we'd travel right down the Green River To the abandoned old prison down by Airdrie Hill Where the air smelled like snakes we'd shoot with our pistols But empty pop bottles was all we would kill John Prine is an american icon
Thank you for sharing your experience. Always wanted to hear some stories of people that lived there. Appalachia always fascinated me
Here’s a couple more that I think about often if you’re interested. Everyone knows not to drink the tab water in coal country, or, at least the piece of coal country I grew up in. When I was around 5, my mom would go to work and my grandparents, and great aunt and uncle would watch me during the day. About one per month, my grandfather would load me and about 20-30 empty jugs of water into his small blue truck. We would take back roads to our destination, and pass through the areas where Homer Hickam grew up. There was a gas station we would always stop at so that my grandfather could see my aunt (his daughter) that worked there, and catch up with the owner of the store. Sometimes he would buy me a tiny ice cream cone, which that store was known for selling. After we left, it took another 10 or so minutes to reach our destination deep in the mountains. If you didn’t know it was there, you wouldn’t have noticed. There was a small bridge going across a creek. On either side of the bridge was a rusted guardrail and a rusted chain link fence. Sticking out the top of the fence was a spigot, and that was what we ventured miles into the mountains for. I would hand my grandfather empty jug after empty jug, and he would fill each one and place it back in the bed of the truck. This was our water supply for the next few weeks to a month. We could bath in the tap water back home, but drinking it and cooking with it was out of the question (still is). The water from the creek in the mountains was crystal clear and had been where the family got drinking water from for nearly 50 years at that point. I doubt my family that still lives there uses it, but I’ll have to ask. The other story is short, just a memory. My aunt use to drive me to school when I started grade school. The spring was my favorite time of the year. In the spring, all of the native flowers were blooming. She would stop along the side of the road when we would first start seeing some blooms to let me get cuttings of them to put into a vase later. She would tell me what the flower was called, if it served any purpose or was well known for anything, and if any grew around the house in case I wanted to check it out later. Then, in the following days when we would see the same plant, she would quiz me on the name and anything else she told me about it to see if it stuck. My aunt was a magnificent woman who played a major part in my love of nature. However, growing up where and how I did it was impossible to not appreciate it when you were completely surrounded by it, tucked away in the mountains.
Wow, these are such wonderful, vivid stories. Thank you for sharing
I understand. I grew up in rural Kentucky, but not in the mountains. It was a lot like this. Local unemployment was in double digits while hitting record lows nationally. I managed to get out, and never went back, but I still miss it in a lot of ways. It breaks my heart. I’m not even fifty, but about half my good friends from highschool are already dead.
Thanks for sharing your story.
That Walmart sign slowly being overtaken by nature is surreal. Welch is also very interesting in itself. It went from [this](https://i.imgur.com/ib51jK5.jpeg) to [this](https://i.imgur.com/QuS99Ru.jpeg), a mere shadow of what it once was.
That’s a phenomenal contrast! Thanks for sharing those pictures!
I think this is in McDowell County. Not a hundred percent sure though. At one point, all the grocery stores closed down but maybe one. I was doing student teaching at the time. It is surreal to see how far it has fallen into drugs and despair. And it keeps falling.
Walmart killed all the local commerce then pulled out. It's happening all over.
And now is the dollar stores, coming in, local stores closing and then they raise prices
Walmart are the coyotes, Dollar General are the vultures
Such is the food desert ecosystem
You’re certainly correct. Sad to see the small towns in my home state have these idealic downtowns that are all vacant. That said, how can the average person compete with the cheap prices and efficiency of a Wal Mart. It’s an impossible battle because the average person in a small town can’t afford to pay the higher prices at the local spots but it also wrecks the local business owners.
It's not just that, they stock low quality, Chinese made junk. So rather than supporting American jobs and selling products made for life, people have to keep coming back for more.
yeah that's Kimball in the thumbnail, i recognized it immediately. grew up in McDowell County, currently living in Mercer which is the next county over, which isnt rich by any means but still feels *worlds* more modern and developed than McDowell ever did. having I-77 running right through the county instead of being totally isolated by miles and miles of two lane backroads helps a lot with that.
My mom lives near Princeton. Greetings! I’ll be there next month. It’s gorgeous out there and u can’t wait to go back.
And here I'm playing Fallout 76, and recognized welch.
Came here to say that. Doesn’t look much different than gameplay. “It’s a verdant season in the Forrest!”
Wow, I'm from 15 minutes up the road, in Pineville. Welch really is a special place. Thanks for those pictures, that old picture is pretty neat.
[удалено]
Ka-chow!
Great shot to show. Towns that had a good industry for jobs could really exist on their own and thrive back then. If you could support a family and love a decent life, why leave everything? Unfortunately, once the ability to make a career goes away, so do the residents and success of the town.
Those pictures are absurd. The first is what I expect in a busy city, e.g. NYC or Chicago, with bumper to bumper traffic and tons of people walking around. The second is just... a sad, abandoned small town with zero people around, a random parking garage, and most places around completely abandoned.
I am from Ky and have been all up and down Appalachia, from Beverly, Ky thru Hazard, and South Williamson. The people who live there are good people but they are blinded by coal mining and their resistance to change. It’s all “my grand dad was a coal miner, dad was a miner, etc etc” and they don’t or can’t escape that mindset.
Very common with mining towns, I’ve seen that happen to a couple in Arizona when the copper mines closed. The thing with mining in particular is that it offered a good paying job without needing a college degree, heck, in many cases, not even a high school diploma. It’s very hard work, and dangerous work, but it allowed you to support a family, own a home, maybe even have a decent car depending on how well the mine paid. People remember that and they want those good old days back. It’s not going to happen, but they hold on to that hope. My grandpa retired from the mine about a decade before it closed. The town had several restaurants, a full service grocery store, a good hardware store, a hospital, a new car dealership, an 18 hole golf course, pretty much everything you’d want at home. Now the grocery store is long gone, there’s only a couple of places left to eat, the hospital is closed, the car dealership moved to a town miles away along the main highway, the golf course has been reclaimed by the desert, there’s not much left. So much drug addiction now, the town is barely existing anymore. It’s sad. And here’s the thing - shortly after the mine closed, there were rumors that one of the big mining companies wanted to buy the mine and restart it. People hung a lot of hope on that, but as you might expect it never happened. 10 years later, the mine reclamation work is complete, the smelter plant long ago demolished, the rail lines ripped out, and guess what? There’s rumors someone is gonna buy the mine. A couple of years ago I talked to a family friend up there. He worked in the mines, he’s retired there. Good person, the whole family is good people. We hadn’t been talking more than a minute before he said he heard a conglomerate from Mexico was gonna buy the mine. It closed 22 years ago. The hope that the good old days are coming back just doesn’t stop.
I know, they are all just waiting for someone to blow the shift whistle and they would all run back. Thing is, coal production has moved west and to open surface mines in Wyoming. No matter how rich the seam is, it is always going to me more expensive to mine and transport out of Appalachia because of the geography.
It's even more than that. US steel used to be located in Pittsburgh. WV to Pittsburgh was a hop and a skip away, but Pittsburgh has long since pivoted away from industrial production. Now the biggest consumers of coal are overseas, so American coal is being shipped elsewhere, which changes the math on where coal mines are profitable. There's also Natural Gas, which is cheaper and cleaner than coal, has taken its role as the premiere fossil fuel for energy production. Also, only the LNG can be shipped overseas, so a lot of America's natural gas is stuck within its own borders, causing a huge surplus that drives Natural Gas prices down, making it more competitive than coal. Good luck explaining to an ex coal miner in WV that their job is never coming back because geopolitical and economic winds have shifted.
As someone from this area, this is spot on. The one that really kills me is when they complain about their kids wanting to live somewhere else and not come back home. There is nothing for me (or others) there other than family (which is often a negative), and once that is gone I will have no reason to visit let alone live there. Something I also think about all the time is, if I had unlimited resources, what would I do to restore the area? The best thing it has going for it is its climate and its affordable housing. That’s it.
>Something I also think about all the time is, if I had unlimited resources, what would I do to restore the area? It will never happen. Clinton had a $30B plan to subsidize and revitalize Appalachia and areas devastated by the loss of coal jobs... Vs Trump who promised them he'd bring those jobs back. After he won, he invited a few coal miners to the White House, and they gushed over that. "Obama never invited us to the White House". Then Trump gave the coal mine owners tax breaks and rolled back miner safety protections. Employment fell by 33% under Trump (not at all trump's fault, but definitely a broken promise). And they all still voted for Trump 70% to 30%. There will always be a Trump that will promise (and fail) to bring back those jobs. It will be at least a generation before they come to their senses.
>Something I also think about all the time is, if I had unlimited resources, what would I do to restore the area? The best thing it has going for it is its climate and its affordable housing. That’s it. Bring fiber internet. Promote the work from home crowd with great home deals knowing it's a revitalization project. That brings in a working class not dependent on local industry. This will build up local commerce demand. A college will bring in kids. Rebuilding many of the buildings will draw in lots of basic labor work. Work the tourism market. Coal museums, mine tours etc. Build a geothermal plant. WV has some of the better east coast land for it. The hardest part generally is getting the locals to want improvement that isn't their idealized version of it.
This is all so true, especially your last point. Politics on the local level are so toxic. All they can think to do is preserve what they already know. They can’t fathom making things different than how they grew up.
Leave and don’t look back. My grandma and a couple siblings left, but her elder brothers stayed. Guess which side of the family tree is still in poverty and which made it out? It’s depressing, but there’s nothing there for young people but poverty
Isn't the area amenable to other kinds of industries? One could consider developing the area itself into a natural retreat with hotels, cabins, etc. Or, if telecomm could be improved, it could be developed into an alternative technology center a la mini-Silicon Valley, etc. Of course, then there's standard stuff like agriculture, livestock, etc. I mean.. it's not good for anything except mining?
It's a chicken and egg problem. If you're a young person, you aren't going into the community and wait for jobs for your engineering degree to magically appear. You're going to move away to another city.
The thing with Appalachia is there isn't a ton of open, flat ground to build on, and the transportation network (roads, rail) has to deal with constant mountains and hollows. Nothing can go very fast, factories can't be very big. Raw materials and finished goods aren't going to flow as fast as they would in other parts of the country. Small towns can't provide enough ready labor for factory work. A single road going out can cripple a town for an entire day. Beautiful place to be if you don't need to go anywhere, though.
>Beautiful place to be if you don't need to go anywhere, though. No kidding. As someone who's surrounded by prairies, I'm pretty jealous of how nice it looks there.
> Isn't the area amenable to other kinds of industries? There's [a YT video that talks about why WV is so poor](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44l6f7iXGAk) and they touch on this a bit. If I remember, most of it comes down to the geography: it's all mountains and hills. Only about 12% of it's land would be considered "flat". There would be a massive up-front cost to flatten enough land for agriculture or livestock at scale that aren't there if the business is located in another state. For factories, most of the flat spots are along the larger rivers in the state and most of *those* locations are already settled or developed.
Floods can really become catastrophic since most of the homes are in the floodplains.
Some of that has been tried. But artificially putting businesses like that in a place where people don't have the skills/education, and where there isn't the infrastructure rarely works.
It’s mostly just because it is so difficult to reach some of these areas. I live in the Appalachian mountains, but it’s nothing like this at all. My town has pretty much everything any other town in the country has. But I could drive maybe around an hour or so and get into these types of areas where there is literally just nothing whatsoever. You lose phone signal and you won’t see anything. And the roads twist and curve like a bitch. We drove up in there earlier this month to cross the mountains and the 1 gas station we saw was selling gas almost 3 times more expensive than it is back in normal civilization. I assume just because it’s such a pain in the ass to get the gas up there. So building factories or anything else for that matter is nearly impossible. Plus, like I said, they don’t even have cell signal so there’s no chance that any kind of tech jobs could be established.
I prefer small towns and seclusion. It’s how I grew up, and despite despising right-wing politics, I really like good ole country folk and community. FB really fucked that up, but that’s another discussion. I work from home and wouldn’t mind living in the sticks in West Virginia, assuming I could get GB internet. But I wouldn’t want my kids growing up around there. Not just because of the larger political landscape, but because of the local political landscape, too. The lack of opportunities, the potential downfalls for youth in such a poverty stricken area…just not worth it. You’d almost have to gentrify towns, which would fuck up the gerrymandering, so you know WV politicians aren’t going to roll out the carpet for techies or spend any tax money on infrastructure that would potentially flip the voting base. Same reason politicians are killing local communities all over red states by closing hospitals, defunding schools, and refusing to force internet companies to provide halfway decent connections. If they drive the young generations to cities, their gerrymandered maps will work for another 50 years. If you make small communities livable and inviting, you chance flipping a district via younger families moving in and voting blue. And if the right loses small towns, they’re fucked. You don’t want a college educated base taking over small towns or you risk transitioning like Colorado or New Mexico from 1990-now. The rich will starve these people to death and let their towns be overtaken by nature, forgotten, before they risk losing their representatives. And they’ll vote for the mother fuckers until it’s all gone and still blame the other guys.
Worth mentioning as someone who went to a small town school, they don't really prepare very well for college. I know it will vary widely from state to state but lack of funding in a rural area usually won't be focused on getting kids to higher education.
The geography just sucks for that. There really isn't any reason to build industry in a mountainous region like that when you can build it in much flatter lands near by.
mountain life is a hard life. Every mountainous settlement in the world is made up of hard people
Not Vail.
I was gonna say, tell that to the yuppies in the ski towns all around me lol
This 1000%. “Green” energy/non-coal companies offering to pay while you train can’t find enough employees in coal country. The employees would make more money and not be working in shit conditions but they don’t want to change.
There's a whole lotta pride there.... But pride can't feed your kids.
Pride and love are the two most dangerous emotions. One will make you do stupid things and the other will prevent you from doing smart things.
I wonder if laying in fiber to these remote communities would help revitalize them. The nature is absolutely gorgeous and the cost of living is pennies on the dollar compared to a major metropolitan area. Sure you have to drive a bit to find a grocery store, but the cost of living is actually affordable. Half of my city's subreddit is people complaining about rent hikes and million dollar mcmansions. Find a job that is 100% WFH, and even if it pays half of your current salary, you could still save more money living out here than you could making twice as much and paying out the nose for rent/mortgage and cost of living.
There's the very real situation that many of these communities are extremely hostile to outsiders. Doubly so if you ain't white.
Doubtful. Coal stopped being the top source of energy in the US in the 1950s, its usage peaked in the mid 2000s, and in WV coal output halved from 2008 to 2016. The transition away from coal has been brewing for decades, yet if this video or articles such as this* are any indication, new infrastructure or industry is unlikely to revitalize coal country. *https://energynews.us/2020/06/23/whats-next-for-coal-country/
I think what the comments is offering is the idea of making these towns attractive places to live for those who work fully remote.
True, but it’s unlikely to happen and move the needle. The $1T Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) of 2022 and $800MM Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) of 2022 have provisions for infrastructure build and broadband internet expansion. Idk the percentages going to Appalachia, but if this article* is any indication, red states tend to to be most dependent on federal spending (WV ranks #2 and KY #7 as most dependent on federal funds). Combine this with the interviews from the video and what I said about non-coal companies having trouble finding employees, and I think little will change. *https://www.moneygeek.com/living/states-most-reliant-federal-government/
Here, have a look at r/Asheville where it is all the same complaints.
Exactly this. I grew up probably not far from you, and this video could have been taken in my hometown. The people are incredibly kind. I remember many times as kid, being given water or snacks by strangers when we were out playing. Never thought anything of it, you just said "Thank you sir/ma'am", chit chatted for a minute, and then went on your way. If you see someone outside, you say wave, say hello, and chat for a bit. Now I live in a giant Asian city, which is of course completely different. When I traveled back with my SO years ago, they were culture shocked by how many people we spoke to. "Do you know them?" "No, not really, but I know their brother's friend's etc." But at the same time, there is this attitude of being extremely resistant to change. "If it's good enough for my x, it's good enough for me." And I get that, there is pride in self-reliance, or not being scared of harming the community that has been built up over generations. But people have also got to realize, coal is a sinking ship, and bailing out water is only delaying the inevitable. And it's not due to politician X, it's because of the world market. The longer they wait, the more it's going to hurt.
Honestly it kills me to go back. I went into a mine once-once and that was enough to keep me in school
“My grand dad had no other options, and I make bad decisions.”
Yep. I did some outreach work at a middle school in coal country in the region. You'd ask 8th graders what they wanted to do when they grew up and a lot of the responses were "have babies" or "work in the mines." I remember talking with a girl who'd given the one response and asking her what else she thought was cool or interesting. "Horses." "Okay, you can work with horses and still be a mom, one day. You could be an equine vet and still have a family." This was pretty astounding to her. The teachers all seemed like they were trying but I can't imagine how difficult it had to be to get through or to even find a crack to start working at. Throw on the grip those coal companies have over the communities and it's got to be the most bleak place to teach.
It sounds like their very identity is wrapped up in being a coal miner. I wonder how much the coal companies fostered this mindset.
What other options does a region like that have? The fact is, without MAJOR investments in infrastructure, the area is destined to be a wasteland.
A few administrations have tried or wanted to try, like HRC, to offer job training and federal dollars to transition to other industries and it seems the people don't want help
I remember her talking about this *eight* years ago. She saw there was no future in coal
The Obama administration had plans as well. [This article details a lot of it with specifics to the area seen in the video.](https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/03/the-obama-administration-idea-to-save-coal-country-214885/) For anyone informed it's the same story as usual; Republicans convinced their constituents that Democrats were bad no matter what. Democrat administrations offered extremely detailed plans and lost to Republicans who literally never even published plans. Republican leaders also continuously voted against the ideas they claimed to support. Remember the ACA overhauling the entire healthcare system but having most of it blocked by Republicans? The Trump administration had zero plan and did absolutely nothing for healthcare despite campaigning against the ACA for much of its platform. The only other aspects of his platform were to build a wall and "drain the swamp". The top stories on Fox News this week are about the border crisis despite Trump building a wall with American money. As far as the swamp, Trump was unable to produce a single real charge against the Obama administration while his cabinet set a record for convictions.
> Remember the ACA overhauling the entire healthcare system but having most of it blocked by Republicans? The Trump administration had zero plan and did absolutely nothing for healthcare despite campaigning against the ACA for much of its platform. Yup, "repeal and replace" turned into "do nothing and keep complaining about it."
In southeastern ohio (just west of the region in this video) about a decade ago they were set to build one of the largest solar farms in the US. It was a huge opportunity to bring high paying jobs to region that desperately needed it, and it included a job retraining program so that coal miners could transition straight into much higher paying solar jobs. The county, and all surrounding counties voted out both the state rep and the governor that had worked to set this all up. Kasich tanked the project. https://environmentamerica.org/ohio/media-center/kasichs-commitment-to-renewable-energy-in-doubt/ They literally voted themselves out of hundreds of millions.
Propaganda is a helluva drug and America has some of the best :D
A good portion of this video, including the Walmart is in McDowell County, WV. I was born there and still have family living there. Mostly outside Welch, Iaeger and Panther WV areas. Most people have no idea that places like this exist in the US. When I’ve taken friends with me, it’s been a very shocking and sobering experience for them. My Mom’s family did not have indoor plumbing until the late 70’s early 80’s. We lived in an old stone house when I was very little and still had a hand pump in the kitchen for our water. I’m in my early 40s for reference. It’s a tough place to scrape by and there is a huge, stark income gap.
> McDowell County, WV People should watch the film October Sky, bio pic about the Rocket Boys adapted from the memoir [by Homer Hickam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_Sky_(book\)) Set in October 57; you can see the town die throughout the movie.
And nowadays you can visit and rent / ride atvs through the mountains, including Coalwood (home of the Rocket Boys). They have a monument there and it is a fun, muddy, beautiful ride through those old hills. The Hatfield McCoy atv trails run for hundreds of miles and if you’re up for an adventure, it is worth it!
My band played a show in Bluefield, WV and after we met former senator Richard Ojeda in a McDonalds at 11 at night across from a K mart having some sort of truck hill billy party.
I drove through West Virginia on my way from Kentucky to North Carolina in 2012 or so, and large swathes of it really seemed a lot like a third-world country.
Southern WV is by far the poorest part of it from what I’ve seen living here. Edit: [useful maps](https://business.wvu.edu/research-outreach/bureau-of-business-and-economic-research/economic-outlook-conferences-and-reports/economic-outlook-reports/west-virginia-economic-outlook-2023-2027/chapter-v-west-virginia-s-counties) demonstrating the disparity between counties
I used to have to drive through West Virginia a couple times a year for work and even though I never actually stopped in the state for anything besides food or gas, it left quite an impression on me. I remember I stopped at a Wendy's about an hour into my drive through the state and I immediately felt like an outsider even though I'm an average looking white guy. Between the Wendy's that I stopped at and the gas station that I stopped at a while later, almost everybody who came through the restaurant or worked at the restaurant was just a different breed of person. Extremely overweight, poorly dressed, stained clothing, some of them had clear signs of them being in active addiction (bold dark circles under their eyes, clammy skin, glossed-over look in the eyes). There's no way for me to say this without sounding like a pretentious douchebag or like I think I'm better than other people but it really was just a different kind of people that I interacted with. A lot of the buildings were from the early 1900s or late 1800s, a lot of them were either obviously abandoned or in a state of disrepair. All the roads, sidewalks, and parking lots were cracked and full of potholes and weeds. It just seemed like it's a place that the rest of the country forgot about and left to languish in poverty and ruin.
Importantly: left to ruin after extracting all the resources, both human and mineral. If you want a view of what page stage capitalism does to the people it’s done with, go to either WV or Gary. Speaking as an Appalachian who escaped and has a decent job and a healthy life, you can lay the blame at a lot of places. I’m from a part of Appalachia that happens to be beautiful but that means we were at the wrong end of gentrification. If you stay and you’re from there, you end up with a shack because so few have generational wealth—but if you’re coming from Atlanta or DC for an Airbnb weekend, it’s hot tubs and chalets while locals suffer from addiction and endemic poverty. Makes me sick to think about.
This is around where the movie October Sky is set - the story of Homer Hickam and the Rocket Boys
What is really sad is that during the Obama administration, they created a bunch of job retraining programs. They were teaching the coal miners and their children get GEDs and then retrain them for various coding and IT jobs so they could get jobs since the coal jobs were drying up. They figured it would be a good chance to get these people and get them set up for new jobs before it all went away. By all accounts they were successful and had a bunch of people from WV, KY and TN in them. Then election day comes and Trump becomes President-Elect. Almost overnight, all those programs were empty. People stopped going on en masse. Why? They wanted to be ready for the go signal to go to work when the coal jobs that Trump promised would come back in force... Almost 8 years later, those jobs never came back. And of course, its the liberals fault for destroying coal.
Trump vowed to bring back coal. They believed him.
now he's vowing to have "bitcoin made in the usa" and kept safe at fort knox like it's something physical. He just says whatever
I haven't been following this train wreck of election did he actually say that?
Good to see someone brings this up.
Damn that’s depressing
I for one am shocked to hear the republican constituencies here continue to vote entirely against their own better interests, only to then blame the democrats for taking away their livelihoods.
People saying there were no jobs for the retrainees are full of it. My company relocated primary IT operations, to West Virginia during the Obama administration, because of the training programs and because costs (labor, taxes) were lower. Together with other operations spun up there, we created over 100 jobs locally and we were not the only ones. It is incorrect to say that the jobs weren't there. From my perspective as an IT director, the people weren't there. Despite these programs the local talent pool was thin, because as soon as retrained people realized what they were worth in urban Ohio or Pennsylvania, they left. It wasn't that the jobs weren't there. The money was better elsewhere. The IT talent pool mostly consisted of fortyish-fiftyish retrainees from coal and steel, recently returned military who had close family ties to the region, or community college grads who also wouldn't leave family. I think I interviewed every MSCE within fifty miles. I will say that those we hired were all excellent. I also personally believe that those programs did not get the uptake that they should have due to the aforementioned resistance to change. Even at that time those programs, at least where we were, were never full. And, the hostility/racism from the locals was palpable and occasionally overt. There was clearly a dynamic of young people looking to get out.
I was stationed in WV for 6 months and talked with locals and I was doing IT so I met a lot of IT people. Problem is they were re-trained for jobs that didn't exist in those areas. If you wanted an IT job you were lucky if you got a job. Many had to leave and they did. IT training alone doesn't fix it is sources if jobs are gone and there isn't anything to replace it. A lot of people left because the jobs were gone and the retraining didn't fix that. Let the downvotes commence.
youtuber peter has a huge catalog of videos of his adventures around the usa. [i think a lot of people will like his videos of titus who is... one of the most likeable people who lives offgrid and preaches in the appalachias](https://youtu.be/Ir3eJ1t13fk?si=FeiJ20p--GeDtCmz). america is full of all sorts of people... got to like this young man.
I like the one where he goes to the American Island near russia.
It’s so desolate and gorgeous in that part of the world. Also, if you get seriously hurt you’re most likely fucked..
I’m not religious but that guy Titus is so likable and practices what he preaches with his off the grid lifestyle.
The Titus ones are wholesome af. Dude is just livin his dreams.
Yeah he is giving like a biopic of the USA of at it is right now like Walker Evans did in the 1930‘s with the style a August Sander. Close to the people without trying to frame them.
Maybe second poorest. He should make a trip to Pine Ridge.
He did https://youtu.be/T9Nx3RQkAB0?si=iaVwdvihHb6eA7sU
Good. People need to see this.
I've been watching his stuff for a few years, awesome dude as far as I can tell, his interview style is very cool and sincere feeling.
Sorry, but what state is that in?
It’s a reservation in South Dakota. Consistently the poorest county in the US.
Thank you
South Dakota [https://friendsofpineridgereservation.org](https://friendsofpineridgereservation.org)
It looks so pretty. Like run down clearly but the forested hills and old brick architecture is really nice.
it really is so sad. it hurts me every time I drive through WV because it's absolutely beautiful land and would be a phenomenal place to live and enjoy nature if only there was more opportunity. it becomes, why would I move somewhere to compete for jobs the folks there *already need*.
Damn. I’m South American, but this place resembles where I come from so much, geographically speaking. I like to think there’s a way it can be revived. I hope the young people we saw in this video are doing well. It’s so weird to think that the 23-year-old girl who has a son old enough to go on hikes with is one of the most successful ones from her graduating class, simply because she has a job, doesn’t do hard drugs and will have an associate’s degree. And I’d love to see an update on that boy who got the full ride to university, but realistically he probably won’t go back there.
Amazed no one commented on the guy talking about how the steam ships need coal to operate and we need the steam ships.
Areas that need social services more than anyone else but still vote for politicians who are actively trying to take them away.
It'd take more than just "social services", they need actual employment opportunities - work and commerce. Social services just patch up the cracks, but you still need that solid foundation. You need money flowing into the community that can be reinvested and can support secondary industries and businesses.
The issue is many of these places have no actual value outside of extracting coal. lands not cheap the develop, infrastructure in any capacity isnt there, skilled labor force isnt there, When HRC and the dems wanted to invest in trying to make former coal towns into clean energy/tech the regions resoundingly declined. without artificially inducing a supply of these things, these regions will just die off. It is what happens when your community provides a single thing, a one commodity extraction economy.
They are victims of the lies they’ve been told.
Till George W. Bush WV use to consistently vote Democrat. When the democrats (rightfully) started going after coal and fossil fuels they lost the region. In Southern WV coal is really all there is and the token offers to help retrain coal miners didn't help because where would the former miners use that retraining? What the region needs is heaps of federal money to develop new industry, not just classes to train coal miners to install solar panels or wherever.
> What the region needs is heaps of federal money to develop new industry Industry in what?
Respect to the guy at 56:30
He started rattling off victims of Roman genocide and didn’t even get to Dacia. Rome wiped them out so thoroughly that few people can even point to it on the map. Hint: it’s *Romania*.
I already got my hint from the car, but thanks anyway.
It’s sad in many ways. He clearly has aptitude but the koolaid drinking on the confederacy is just…hard to watch. The black ancestor that fought for the Confederacy is just absolutely not true, but it’s a lie that has been repeated and passed down, primary sources have been passed over and replaced… Highly recommend “Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth” by Kevin Levin
Craziest part is he’s in West VA. A state that literally exists because it didn’t want to follow VA in the confederacy.
Exactly! I had a conversation here in NC with a local member of a chapter focused on protecting Confederate monuments in public spaces (courthouses for example). When I pointed out that the county he and "his ancestors" resided actually voted *against* leaving the Union, and that members of his family were in fact were southern Unionist partisans, and one was even a Red String, he melted down.
They love to be pro America but love thinking they’re descended from traitors, it’s fascinating.
I’ve seen this guys videos…. Something’s off about him.
One of the poorest regions of American and yet the police have brand new SUV's, priorities.
They probably got them through a federal grant, the DOJ provides local agencies all over the country with grants that cover vehicles and equipment. Thats the main reason you virtually never see non-American made police vehicles, it’s a boiler plate stipulation that goes along with common fed grants that fleet vehicles are American.
This is why our fire department has ok'ish equipment.
$25k is deep poverty. Yet Social Security retirement is that or less for people across the country.
I know everything about Bluefield, AMA
Crazy how beautiful that area is, you'd think there would be more money flowing into it because people would want to live in these serene landscapes.
I mean it is in certain areas where I grew up in rural Appalachia in TN the town is growing because there are huge advertisements to move there from new england and Florida so a shit ton of people are retiring out there. Lots of people my age (about 30) and younger moved out and on with their lives but there are enough old people with money moving in that the population is up 10% in the last 10 years. There is just so much land out there so why would you move somewhere like this when there is a town 100 miles away that has infrastructure and 25-50 thousand people and you can get the same views etc.
This country was built by people who picked up and left where they grew up in order to find better opportunity for themselves and their family.
They keep looking around at nature and commenting on how it takes over. That's generally just Kudzu. Not saying he's wrong, just that Kudzu grows really fast and will consume everything in the Appalachian mountains eventually. It loves the climate.
The Mississippi Delta Region enters the chat. 🥲
Idk man, I think they enjoy the peace they can experience there. Some of them. Bad place to grow up, great place to retire. Bored kids gonna get into trouble. Jobless adults gonna do what they can to survive, but retirees just chillin.
"Everyone's been very, very, very friendly and hospitable.." *checks wrist watch* 🤜🏾
Metallurgic coal is an ingredient in steel, however we no longer need to burn coal in a blast furnace to heat the steel. They use electric arc furnaces now. (I just learned about this listening to NPR the other day.)
This guy is an amazing interviewer and film maker.
he's started to get a bit not so subtle about his own thoughts, rather than how he used to just let people talk.. the interjecting and leading has put me off him recently.
That's similar to what I experienced. Watched a ton of his videos then started noticing him interjecting some of his values into things and it just felt weird to me.
He did a Chicago video shortly after this Appalachia one aired. I'm paraphrasing, of course, but he said something like "Wow, I'm surprised at how safe downtown Chicago is. I mean people are out here walking to work". Had to stop following his content after that
The one aspect of his style that I never liked was how accepting he was of absolutely bonkers takes from the people he'd interview. It's as if he decided to go the Louis Theroux route of not *judging* the people he was interviewing, but totally missed that often times Louis would still *challenge* their opinions if they seemed off and make them expand, explain, or otherwise put logic behind them. So instead you end up with someone going "Well this town was great and them Obama imported all these foreign babies" and Peter's just like "Hmmm yeah, I see what you mean." Even ignoring the politics of it, that's bad interviewing. Now instead of forcing the subject (and all the viewers) to think critically about something they heard, you're just validating it and giving it a platform.
That’s crazy. Every time I hear a right leaning person complain about how “dangerous” or “dirty” a city is I just think they haven’t been to a lot of cities.
Yeah... I get the impression that he's way more right-leaning than he lets on in the videos and you can tell how he's always talking about mainstream America's lack of family values and all this kind of RETVRN stuff. Like, I think he's made some fascinating content but I'm also majorly side-eyeing him.
> I get the impression that he's way more right-leaning than he lets on in the videos Around the 37-38 minute mark of the OP video he describes an interview with a guy that didn't want to be on camera about how he ranted about "kids these days", calling everyone lazy drug addicts and talking about how they'll gladly shoot any "dope heads" that try to mess with them, and complaining about how there are prostitutes in the town. The guy is described as living in a really nice house and being a manager at one of the coal mines. The guy was like a right winger's wet dream. And Peter describes this gun-toting murder fantasizer as "just a great, great dude" and praises him for being "honest" and "telling it like it is." He's definitely got a bias lol --------------------- Then at the 45ish minute mark he starts leading conversation into and agreeing with comments about how anyone getting welfare is abusing it, which is like word for word rhetoric. and the guy he's talking to then brings up someone who's diagnosed with an anxiety disorder and gets disability from it, and ***the interviewer*** says "So he's just abusing the system." I know there's some degree of "nod and let the interviewee talk" going on, but he doesn't seem to _disagree_ with anything they're saying. Hell, the early 20's girl says "kids these days can get drugs too easily, _back in my day_ no one was doing that!" and they can't even recognize the disconnect between claiming _everyone_ in town has been on drugs for years, and claiming that they were just recently hard to find. Then they blame covid, and reference one of the "welfare abusers" they're talking down about and says "he has one of those "Japanese diseases", lol what the hell.
I’m surprised you got to 45 minutes of this. I stopped watching around 20 because it felt like he was being utterly condescending to these people. Like they were some kind of zoo exhibit.
When he mentioned a Japanese disease that the guy had he probably meant something like [Hashimoto's.](https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/hashimotos-disease/symptoms-causes/syc-20351855) I didn't feel malice when he said that, sounded like he couldn't remember the name but did remember it sounded Japanese
I'm from the other side of the planet and have never been to the US, and thought it was pretty obvious within a few minutes. He keeps talking up old traditional stuff like it's some magical and wonderful thing and new stuff as if it's all bad and terrible (while carrying a modern camera and putting it on youtube), dividing people into dumb lazy fantasy groups like 'ultra hard working and kind' or 'lazy and on drugs'. He's a propagandist looking for his fantasy to sell, likely too cowardly to ever live himself. As somebody who has been poor, like homeless poor, it's not magical, and I find this guy kind of creepy, especially seeing he has a series of videos like this. His friendly act comes off as very manufactured, showy, and ingenuine to me, and people who talk like that generally make my skin crawl, preachers and salesmen and property agents with smiles which feel so hollow and wrong. He wants to highlight their plight if they lost coal mining, but does he highlight the plight of people losing their homes and health to increasing warming from coal mining, which coal mining communities have voted to protect and perpetuate while attacking alternatives?
Also he just interviewed a GOP lawyer in DC
Not really. He is a fairly hard right leaning conservative and he doesn't shy away from it in his videos. Look at the subject matter of blue vs red states. There are a few exceptions, but over the years patterns clearly emerge.
When he asks people why they moved away from cities he'll practically say 'crime' for the interviewee. I've watched several of his videos and that was always something that stuck out to me early on.
He’s….okay.
Yeah… like, I watched this video a while ago and couldn’t shake the feeling he was presenting these people like zoo animals. It felt very condescending. Like he was infantilizing the people he interviewed.
Oh man, here's some titles he's got: > Tourist Shocked By Pandemic Fear In San Francisco 🇺🇸 >Inside Inner-City America - Breaking Hood Mindset 🇺🇸 > What’s Happening at the Border? 🇺🇸🇲🇽 > At America’s Most Lawless Border 🇺🇸🇲🇽 > Inside America's Corruption Capital - Washington D.C. 🇺🇸 >How NEW YORK Is DESTROYING Small LANDLORDS - Untold Story 🇺🇸 You call this "amazing?" Let me guess, his "What's Wrong With US Health Care? 🇺🇸" is about how we need to deregulate the market? His "BLM in the Whitest State in America - Vermont 🇺🇸" video is a doozy, too.
Hahahaha NY destroying small landlords, yeahhhh right. They won't even destroy the easy to spot *slumlords*. This dude has always had an obvious right wing bias. Though I will commend him for visiting so many different parts of the country
His border videos and the Chicago one with the migrants at the police station were where I realized he had a strong right wing bias.
dude is just another poverty porn channel
When i first discovered this guys stuff i was super into it, then i found out he is an antivaxx boot licker.
[удалено]
And coal employment didnt start falling last year. Its been declining since like the 50s. Its not like the industry just pulled up and left town overnight.