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Last of a three-part series
Tuesday, November 28, 2000
By Diana Nelson Jones, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
An introduction: Appalachia, a rugged swath of America hugging the mountains from Georgia to New York, has for generations been the symbol of aching poverty in a land of wealth and opportunity.
But 35 years after President Johnson launched the War on Poverty from a simple porch in Appalachia, the region that claims part of Western Pennsylvania is climbing out of desperation.
Bordering cities of unprecedented growth and dot-com millionaires, Appalachia is finally outgrowing its image of shacks and bare feet.
On good roads, past Wal-Marts and in cozy bungalows, staff writer Diana Nelson Jones and photographer Steve Mellon visited the new Appalachia and uncovered a story of re-birth.
As Appalachia enters the 21st century, much of it wears the standard consumer look of middle America -- good roads, chain retail stores and restaurants, houses stamped with the seal of suburbia, consolidated schools.
This may be what President Lyndon Johnson meant in 1964 when he sought for Appalachia "the abundance which has been granted to the rest of the nation."
Towns once steeped in coal are now courting tourists. Asheville, N.C., is a second-home boom town. Aerospace is taking off in Huntsville, Ala. and has helped catapult north-central West Virginia to a growth rate in the late '90s exceeding the national average. Telemarketers and factories that make wood products, car parts and processed foods are among the 22 businesses recruited by eastern Kentucky.
The Appalachian Regional Commission is marketing regional crafts around the world, and a non-profit organization in Berea, Ky., has trained 115 women entrepreneurs of 51 small ventures that have grossed $4 million in annual sales.
Scores of flattened mountains created by strip mining lie above the region's hollows like elevated prairies. With mesas, cut-aways and dry arroyos, they have proved hospitable to everything from golf courses and wineries to high-tech service centers.
In the not-exactly-what-we're-looking-for-but-we'll-take-it category, three prisons are planned in eastern Kentucky -- a maximum-security federal prison and two state prisons, all within an hour and a half of each other.
Wal-Mart, which entered the region in the '80s, today provides more jobs in West Virginia than any other single employer.
Norman Clark, executive director of the McDowell County, W.Va., Redevelopment Authority, says a Wal-Mart-anchored retail complex along the new four-lane highways in his county would be a godsend. The county's population of 106,000 in 1960 has dwindled to less than 28,000, and at least a quarter of its people are unemployed.
Others fear Wal-Mart is a corporate giant that, like the coal mines, will lay off people when times turn sour and that, unlike the mines, doesn't pay very well.
"Five thousand people working at Wal-Marts in this state don't equal 400 coal jobs," says David Akers, who works in a coal-related industry in Matewan, W.Va.
Some projections give coal only 30 more years in Appalachia; the industry, on the other hand, claims 300 years of reserves. For 42,000 people between 1988 and 1998, coal jobs disappeared while production, more automated today, rose from 443 million to 455 million tons.
Reclamation, fuel prices and environmental regulations have added to the cost of extraction, says Bill Raney, head of the West Virginia Coal Operators Association. At the moment, a ton of Appalachian coal fetches $20-$25, half what it did in 1980. "If it drops below $20, they won't mine it," Raney said. "Then, how will we be making electricity? Fifty-six percent of electricity is made burning coal, 99 percent in West Virginia."
With this question unanswered, central Appalachia struggles to invest in new businesses to replace coal while coal is still providing jobs and paying taxes.
PART TWO:
When President Clinton toured the region last year, 35 years after Johnson declared war on poverty in Appalachia, he called for venture capital loans and grants of $180 million for small businesses in the region. Funding legislation is pending in the U.S. Senate.
After the floods
Three years ago, Matewan, W.Va., officially became historic. The designation produced instant flood protection for the little town and the feds released $18 million for a flood wall.
It was like a dog letting go of a sock after 50 years -- Matewan 'bout near fell down from the shock. In spite of 36 major floods since 1949, the most significant notice anyone had ever taken of the town, not counting filmmaker John Sayles, was when Baldwin-Felts detectives came in on the train to evict union-organizing miners from company houses in 1920. Ten people died in the ensuing riot.
After the '77 flood almost wiped out the whole town, it took 20 years for flood-relief money to show up.
Matewan was established in 1897 when the Norfolk & Western Railroad opened the valley to the Williamson coal fields. With a population of 600 these days, the town is looking for an opening to the future.
The new flood wall actually makes it look more isolated, but the guest book at the Matewan Development Center and Museum bears the signatures of visitors from places as far-flung as Orlando, Fla., the Netherlands and Butte, Mont.
"The person from the Netherlands is originally from here," says Joyce Dyar, the helpful manager of the center. She also is one of many caretakers of the story of the Hatfields and McCoys, Matewan's most famous families.
The story of their feud has been so comically abused by stereotype as to be unrecognizable, she says. Both families, far from being shoot-'em-up hillbillies, had status and power. "And every incident went to trial."
Former Mayor John Fullen, who helped plan the museum 12 years ago, says several companies, including Massey Coal Co., contributed $20,000 a year for three years to get it started. Then Rep. Nick Rahall II, a Democrat, went to bat for the town to get the federal government to return four acres of land inside the flood wall. Then the town had to petition the state Housing Development Fund to get back some land held by the Army Corps of Engineers.
"Once all the deeds are cleared up," Fullen says, "we can begin to do commercial development."
One day this summer, James Whitmore, an Illinois man, drove into town with his wife. Whitmore worked at a mining supply company in the area in the early 1960s and had seen Sayles' 1987 movie "Matewan."
"The roads have changed," he said, "some of 'em. Prestonsburg and Pikeville sure have changed. So has Williamson. They're so much larger than they were when I was here. Everything's built up along the roads now. It's like everywhere else. You have McDonald's and Hardee's, whereas you used to have to eat at little country restaurants. It's all there was."
Dyar sounds hopeful when she says tourism may overtake coal as Matewan's next big industry, but others think it's unlikely to pick up coal's slack.
Matewan's development plan includes establishment of a weekly newspaper, a Coal Heritage corporation and a trail that links the sites of the area's labor history. It calls for greenways, a scholarship program, a public radio station and a folklife center that would archive, interpret and dramatize Matewan's history.
From the tavern on one end of town to the seed store on the other, downtown Matewan is 265 feet long. Its brick buildings have old-fashioned awnings, and flower beds line a raised sidewalk. Tourists, who number only in the hundreds, all eat at the Depot restaurant, which opens into the Count Your Blessings gift store.
Set inside huge rims of mountain, Matewan is pretty in the way of a small town girl who has spent a lot of time in front of the mirror anticipating a date.
One day, Robert McCoy, also a former mayor, sat in the Depot eating lunch with his niece and first cousin. When asked about Matewan's improvements, he chuckled heartily, then composed a worthy answer: "It's not much better, but it's not worse." A real McCoy, he said the Hatfield-McCoy picnic in June brought so many tourists into town, the museum made $5,000. "Otherwise, it's a few a day."
Edward Nenni, a town councilman and owner of Nenni's Department Store, says his business, family-owned since 1909, has taken its biggest hits in the past five years, the worst since '77 when the flood water rose to the ceiling.
"Our business has dropped 60-70 percent," he says. His forebears sold fine men's suits; he sells Hatfields & McCoys T-shirts. "When you go after the 'history dollar,' it kills your retail. But we'll see. Maybe it's just gonna take some more time."
A future in the past
In Hindman, Ky., home of the Gingerbread Festival and Troublesome Creek, heritage lies at the core of that town's run at economic development, too.
Based on a blueprint conceived by local residents and the consultants they hired, the state is giving Hindman $30 million for changes that one local planner, Bill Weinberg, says will make Hindman a model for other small towns that lost their way.
With a population of 900, Hindman is "a very poor municipality in a very poor county with a rich cultural heritage," says Ewell Balltrip, director of the Kentucky Appalachian Commission, the agency that has overseen the town's plan. "It has borne some tremendous influences on education in east Kentucky."
Hindman was home to one of the first settlement schools that hired young teachers from Vassar, Wellesley, Smith and Mount Holyoke colleges at the turn of he century. Today on campus, the James Still Learning Center -- named after the noted writer, who lives in the area -- is an elementary school for dyslexic children.
More recently, a consignment shop for the sale of juried crafts opened on campus. This led to craft instruction, and artist residencies in local schools.
The town plans eventually to open a branch of the Hazard Community College on site. It will team with the Kentucky School of Craft, which is being created to help build what Balltrip calls "an entrepreneurial economy."
The Hindman plan won an Environmental Design Research Association/Places magazine award for planning. The two other winners were Portland, Ore. and Berkeley, Calif.
"These communities have to prove they can do this," says Balltrip. "It is a competitive process. It's not your typical bureaucratic type of application. We ask them to tell us about their leadership and the civic profile, their culture and heritage, how they will relate that to the type of economy they want to build. And we investigate their financial capacity: Have they an occupation tax to provide public money for grant matches? And is there county collaboration?"
In its third year, the community-initiative plan is in a "test phase," says Balltrip. "The governor [Paul Patton] sees the program as the test of a theory that Appalachian development is best locally generated."
Leading the local steering committee that submitted Hindman's plan is Weinberg, a lawyer, writer and president of Clean Gas Co. He came to Hindman in the early '70s, having married Lois Combs, a local girl he met while both worked in anti-poverty programs in the '60s in his native Virginia.
Lois Weinberg started the school for dyslexic children on the settlement campus, and her husband has recently begun writing a biography of Carl Dewey Perkins, Hindman's own congressional legend and leader for education reform.
On the weekend of the annual Family Folk Festival on campus, Weinberg pointed out the sites of coming changes, walking past the strains of violins floating out open windows and storytellers on shady cabin porches.
The old Hindman High School -- which is becoming the Kentucky School of Craft -- is a huge, gorgeous stone building with a long breezeway bordered by open arches. "People are already fighting over who gets what space in it," he said.
Low bridges that lead to the campus will be lifted, because Troublesome Creek lives up to its name, and a flower shop in town has been bought to incubate craftsmen starting their own businesses to sell products worldwide.
"We're not talking corn-shuck dolls," says Balltrip. "We're talking gallery-quality, studio-grade art and craft. We're taking handmade furniture, heirloom products."
Hindman is just one model Balltrip says is a good risk. His agency has recently awarded go-aheads for grassroots redevelopment in two more communities.
Hindman's efforts will make it a benchmark for rural Appalachia within 10 years, "if it works," Weinberg says.
He has lived in the area long enough to put 10 years in perspective: "I think it'll take that long. And happen that quick."
Photos by Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette Staff Photographer 
A new city hall is part of the vision for the future in tiny Hindman in mountainous Eastern Kentucky. Design plans for the city have won national awards. (Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette) 
Fayette, Greene counties struggle economically
Across Appalachia, the poorest of America's poor struggle back
Planning for a more prosperous future