Harlan County Research Articles

Beyond document: essays on nonfiction film

In essays by eleven of America's foremost writers, critics, and filmmakers, Beyond Document explores the full spectrum of nonfiction film and its creative possibilities. In addition to Charles Warren's broad introductory history of the genre, the book takes a close look at ethnographic films, cinema-verite, memoir and autobiography, docudramas, essay films, and newsreels, from classics like Night and Fog and Nanook of the North to more recent important work like Film about a Woman Who. . ., Harlan County, U.S.A., Sans Soleil, and Forest of Bliss. Representations of reality are increasingly contested, in courtrooms and in Congress, as well as in art. Asking what the art of film can achieve, Helene Keyssar considers the history of nonfiction films by women; Jay Cantor discusses film investigations of the Holocaust; Patricia Hampl looks at how autobiographical films render experience into narrative; Robert Gardner questions the filmmaker'simpulse to preserve ; and poet Susan Howe explores structures of mourning in several filmmakers. All the book's essays provide deeply felt understanding of documentary film, and of how we live with, an d within, images. CONTRIBUTORS: Jay Cantor, Robert Gardener, Patricia Hampl, Maureen Howard, Susan Howe, Helene Keyssar, Phillip Lopatte, Vlada Petric, William Rothman, Charles Warren, Eliot Weinberger.

Dead work: The construction and reconstruction of the Harlan Miners Memorial

In 1986, the Harlan County Jaycees club erected a monument to honor over 1300 local coal miners who had lost their lives on the job. In 1991, the Harlan County Fiscal Court demolished the original memorial and erected a new one on the same site. The following ethnographic account, based upon nine months of participant-observation research and interviews conducted with memorial sponsors, describes the events surrounding the construction and reconstruction of this memorial. The Harlan Miners Memorial, it is argued here, provides insight into the interplay between conflict and consensus which undergirds commemoration, generally. The author concludes that neither the Durkheimian perspective, which emphasizes social consensus and the collective conscience, nor the Marxian perspective, which highlights class conflict and ideological domination, adequately addresses the complex political dynamics and repercussions of this memorial.

Two Sides to Everything: The Cultural Construction of Class Consciousness in Harlan County, Kentucky.

Two Sides to Everything: The Cultural Construction of Class Consciousness in Harlan County, Kentucky.

Two sides to everything: the cultural construction of class consciousness in Harlan County, Kentucky

Two sides to everything: the cultural construction of class consciousness in Harlan County, Kentucky

Oakley and Ida

FICTION Oakley and Ida Lou Martin I went out on the back porch and sat on the concrete step to get some air. Washing and drying supper dishes for nine people had left me hot and sweaty. After a bit, I walked around the house, stopping at the basement door to look in at the playhouse. My best friend, Loree, and I had played in here all summer, carving windows and doors in the hard clay basement walls, using scraps of cloth for curtains and old lumber to make furniture. Every bit of glass or anything else we could find we hoarded to use to make a home for our dolls. We spent every minute we could steal from chores playing here. Now that school had started there'd be hardly any time for play. I walked on across the street and called to Loree. We sat on her porch waiting for it to get dark enough to catch lightning bugs. The little lights flickering on and off in my jar grew brighter as it got darker. Suddenly, lights came on in the windows of my house across the road. I saw my father come into the living room and sit down with the newspaper. My mother moved from the bedroom to the bathroom and back as I watched. Sitting there, looking at my house, I felt like I had spun loose from my family. I was a stranger looking in. It was pitch dark by now. "I've got to go," I said, and ran across the road. I hurried to get in the house. I went into the living room and stood by my father's chair. "Where you been?" he asked. "Outside ." I knew he wouldn't stop reading to talk to me, but it felt good just to stand there beside him. After a while, he reached up and rumpled my hair. "Better get on to bed," he said. Besides my four brothers and parents, my grandpa and my aunt lived with us. It was crowded, but we made room for others, like Oakley and Lou Martin was born in Harlan County, Kentucky. She says, "I have always wanted to writefiction. My life as the daughter ofa strong unionist, wife ofa civil rights activist, and mother of three very independent children hasgiven me plenty ofgrist for the mill . . ." 45 Ida, who came around pretty often. My father said his nephew, Oakley, had never settled down. He and Ida, his wife, moved from place to place looking for work. We were always glad to see them coming. They had funny stories to tell about places they had been, and they teased and played with us. One day Oakley and Ida came up the road carrying their old suitcases —grips, grandpa called them. Oakley's had a rope tied around it to keep his clothes in because the latch was broken. They said they wanted to stay a few days and try to get some work at one of the three factories in Easton. "That's good, Oakley," my father said, slapping him on the back. "You came at a good time. They're hiring over at the mill. Come on in—you're just in time for supper." Work was just about the most important thing in my father's life. We never saw his job, never saw anyone he worked with, but his job was the biggest thing in our lives. We ate and slept by when he had to go to work. Whether he was happy or sad seemed to have something to do with his work. When I ran to meet him in the afternoon, if he walked quickly and swung his lunch bucket, I knew he'd had a good day. When he walked slow, and dragged the leg that was a little bit shorter than the other one, I knew not to run and grab the lunch bucket looking for a leftover cookie. On those days, I just walked along beside him, thinking how tired he looked. His tall body stooped a little. Every now and then he'd lift his cap off his hair to wipe off the sweat. "Nobody can...

Many Waters: Poems from West Virginia (review)

Llewellyn McKernan. Many Waters: Poemsfrom West Virginia. Mellon Poetry Press, P. O. Box 450, Lewiston, NY 14092. 1993. Even though my "to do" list includes a dozen other tasks, I have read Llewellyn McKernan's book three times. Each time it has given me new pleasure. Here is a volume that looks good to the eye, feels good to the touch, sounds good to the ear. And, as if that were not enough, it sparks the imagination and stimulates the intellect. McKernan's subjects are ordinary—deceptively so. The first section, tided for the poem which is a favorite of McKernan fans, is called "The Girl in the Black Leather Raincoat," a graveside meditation that goes far beyond the grave and far beyond meditation. Included in this section is a poem about swimming in a river and one about tree stumps, but these pieces, too, go far beyond swimming and stumps. The second section contains just one long poem, "The Fast." This tightly focused piece leads the reader through a gamut of emotions from humor to pathos, all focused on a hospital patient who refuses to eat. The third section describes the seasons and natures of 4-Pole Creek. The fourth section is titled "Neighbors" and is a delightful collection of character sketches about the subjects of the poems and about the narrator-poet. The poetry of Llewellyn McKernan is three- or four- or five-dimensional. There is surface subject, and there is the poet's insight into the subject, and there is the reader's response, and there is the enrichment of literary and historical—archetypal—allusion, and there is the religious undertone established by the epigraphs. The poems reflect a tremendous variety of human experience, all the way from the "verbless" language of the Far North to the traditionalist patriarchal culture of Latin America to the unreality and lostness of big cities like New York. It is soon obvious that these experiences are being interpreted by a West Virginian poet who has her own but wonderfully Appalachian view of the world. One of the great strengths of McKernan's poetry is its imagery and metaphor. They are mixed, both in terms of the imagery being couched in metaphor and in terms of the mixing of metaphor within a poetic phrase. The latter characteristic in the hands of a less masterly writer might be a serious problem, but McKernan handles it gracefully and effectively. In fact, the mixes are just plain wonderful. Examples abound: "the moon falls like a cancerous white cell," "I pull off my lips and give them to dirt," "my daughter slips like a vow through blue water, rides a white lion that slides through her fingers . . . her glistening body a certain cloud God spins into waking and sleeping," "the nurses' rock-a-bye shoes." Granted, once in a while the mixes don't work too well, as in "ice hugging the bank lifts anchor, splintering into panes that melt and drift downstream" or as in the somewhat troublesome 71 conjunction of apparently contradictory verbs and adjectives used to describe 4PoIe Creek. This poetry is worth reading over and over. This book is a joy. —Barbara Smith Lonesome Pine Office on Youth. Looking Back: Wise County in the Early Years. Norton, Virginia: Lonesome Pine Office on Youth, 1992. 251 pages. Hardbound: $40.00. Wise County is a place where southwestern Virginia's spacious valleys penetrate the rugged Cumberland Plateau. Most of the county drains southwestward via the Powell and Clinch rivers, but northern Wise County drains to a branch of the Russell, which flows north into the Levisa Fork of the Big Sandy. There the little town of Pound—the home town of U-2 pilot Gary Francis Powers— nestles at the foot of Pound Gap barely three miles from Jenkins, Kentucky, on the other side of Pound Gap. South a bit along the state line, Wise County's towns of Roda and Stonega lie just over a ridge from Harlan County's town of Lynch, Kentucky. Other Wise County coal towns of that border country include Big Stone Gap, Inboden (sometimes spelled Imboden), Inman, and Pardee. From those ragged hills it seems topographical light years...

Solomon and Sarah Saylor: The Emergence of Lay Religion in Eastern Kentucky

Solomon and Sarah Saylor: The Emergence of Lay Religion in Eastern Kentucky David Kimbrough At the onset of the nineteenth century a few families trickled into the Eastern Kentucky highlands, settling on cheap lands that other sections of the state did not provide. In 1805 Solomon1 and Sarah Saylor2 located in the present day Harlan County, in an area referred to as Forrester's Creek. The Saylors were of Scotch-Irish stock and moved onto their new land with family and friends practicing a self-sufficient, subsistence, kinship-based lifestyle. Arguing that there was no religion in Eastern Kentucky at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Harry M. Caudill claims the area was "practically without churches for fifty or seventy-five years after the first white setders. There simply were no preachers or ministers, few Bibles and litde religious knowledge."3 Bill Surface supports Caudill's position in his study, The Hollow, emphasizing that the initial people in Eastern Kentucky were suspicious of preachers and the first churches were not constructed for "eighty years" after settlement.4 Caudill's and Surface's positions are wrong. The mountaineers had religious cognizance but were restrained in worship practices because of isolation and geographic seclusion. Henry Scalf points out that Baptist churches were organized in Eastern Kentucky by Elder Daniel Williams before 1802.5 Baptist churches were established at sites like Burning Springs, located in Magoffin County, in 1814, and Mud Creek, in Floyd County, in 1825.6 David Kimbrough, an East Tennessee native, has a Ph.D. in American history from Indiana University. His dissertation, "Park Saylor and the Eastern Kentucky Snake-Handlers: A Religious History," is currently being revised for publication . 49 Methodist circuit-riding preachers were also in Eastern Kentucky. The seclusion of the Appalachian highlands made it difficult to gather crowds for religious meetings in locales such as Forrester's Creek. Strong Calvinistic convictions were evident in what religious creeds the pioneers brought with them. Solomon and Sarah Saylor were Presbyterians who believed in predestination, as did many of the initial settiers to Eastern Kentucky. Most of the pioneers who located in the vicinity of Forrester's Creek were Presbyterian because of their ScotchIrish heritage. It was the Presbyterian faith that gave the Saylors a sense of order and comfort in a sequestered world. They were haunted by death and bad times daily. Wandering Native Americans were still a menace in 1800. People froze to death, were ambushed by falling timber, mauled by farm animals, or attacked by wild animals, or they suffered from natural causes such as disease or childbirth which took lives frequentiy. If misfortune struck or Sarah's "doctorin'" skills failed it was common to attribute the calamity to "the Lord's will." When the traveling Methodist evangelists penetrated the mountains, and stopped at Forrester's Creek "to take the night" and have a meal it was the only time the Saylors heard any "real preachin'" during the first years of settlement. The Methodist itinerant usually announced the time of his next visit, "perhaps a month or six weeks later, and he was usually there just as he had promised."7 Wandering preachers in conjunction with the early camp meetings were the primary means for religious expansion in Eastern Kentucky. At the onset of the nineteenth century, the religious fervor that was being experienced in the rest of the country had penetrated the Appalachian highlands. The Great Revivals that were being conducted in the Bluegrass section of Kentucky, in places like Cane Ridge, set the pattern, or were the prototypes for smaller meetings, that were held in places like Forrester's Creek. By 1820, the Baptist, led by farmer preachers, and Methodist denominations in Kentucky had swelled to 21,000 members each, while the Presbyterians could only claim 2,700.8 The Methodists' success in Eastern Kentucky can be attributed to the achievements of the few circuit riders who entered the mountains. The Methodists were better organized than other denominations in gaining converts and rejected the formalism and traditional habits associated with the Presbyterians. It was also the Methodist position of Arminianism or Free Will that contributed to their success on the frontier.9 The early...

The Passing of a Bold Ruler

This delightful children's picture book is based on an incident that happened in the author's childhood in Harlan County, Kentucky. It is a heart-warming story of three generations of a caring family expressed in George Ella Lyon's magical way with words. The words of a song are woven through the text, and that song is reproduced, with the music, on the last page of the book. Milnes, Gerald. Granny Will Your Dog Bite and Other Mountain Rhymes. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990. 48 pages. Hardback in dust jacket, illustrated by Kimberly Bulcken Root. $14.95. This book and a cassette tape: $18.95. The illustrations, in the spirit of an old edition of Mother Goose, are quite appro- Ïriate for these old ditties from the Appalachians. Gerald Milnes grew up in New ersey, but in 1975, he and his young wife bought land in Braxton County, West Virginia, and began subsistence farming. Since that time Milnes has harvested a cornucopia of old tunes from area traditional musicians. Altogether, this is one of the most charming books—and cassettes—ever to illuminate regional folklore. Stuart, Jesse. Split Cherry Tree. Ashland, Kentucky: The Jesse Stuart Foundation, 1990. 58 pages. Trade paperback. $3.00. The publication of this book marks a new departure for the Jesse Stuart Foundation . It is the first time that they have published a manuscript not previously published in book form. This short story was the only one of Stuart's to be made into a movie during his lifetime. The book reproduction includes study questions for school children as well as the text of the story. The Passing of a Bold Ruler He was led to the paddock in a cold wind and looked past the slat fence through steam rising from a slurry of straw and dung, to golden rod at the edge of a field. His groom of nineteen years stood stroking the muscular neck, a hand resting on lean withers as a fatal dose of barbiturate was passed through red hair into a vein. He fell away and was framed in air by hands, stilled by death, hands that knew him as a yearling, and brushed away race drawn lather. In the stillness came a whisper and in cresendo a home stretch roar, the groom slowly began to applaud. —Ray Hackett 78 ...

Bloody Harlan: The United Mine Workers of America in Harlan County, Kentucky, 1931-1941.

Bloody Harlan: The United Mine Workers of America in Harlan County, Kentucky, 1931-1941.

Welcome to a Different World

Welcome to a Different World John B. Stephenson Two years ago Berea College sponsored a symposium on Black Appalachia. Attended by a large number of scholars, community leaders, agency staff, and businesspersons, this gathering represented a significant advance in the state of Black Appalachian studies; it was a decided step forward from the even earlier conference on Black Appalachia hosted by the University of Kentucky Appalachian Center in 1980. (It was difficult to identify the few scholars and interested persons who might be invited to the first conference, whereas many names came readily to mind the second time around, names of persons who had recently become interested in the subject or who had been toiling in relative isolation .) And now, just two years later, that task has become even easier, which in itself says something about a field of study almost unheard of a decade ago, and about which one could safely guess that no one had even thought twenty-five years ago. Why this interest in Black Appalachia? I would offer three primary reasons. First, the story of blacks in the southern mountains has been largely untold, and so here an opportunity has been grasped eagerly to bring to light a human reality important and meaningful to its participants but virtually unknown to the reading public or to the world of scholarship. Second, the telling of the story—or stories, for there are many and they are varied—has given many people of the mountains a chance to find their voices. Third, many scholars have found through the study of Appalachia that they can gain new insight into the nature of American society generally. Thus, whether one's interest is in southern history , or slavery, or black studies, or race and ethnic relations, or labor history, or folklore, or musicology, or women's studies—to name just a few—one can find new material here by looking at the world of this "minority within a minority ." There is increased interest nowadays in revealing the experience of black people living in places fike Harlan County, Kentucky , Bluefield, West Virginia, and Asheville, North Carolina. There is renewed pride expressed by the descendants or the early African Americans in the region in their stubborn courage and the will to survive. There is the excitement shown in recovering knowledge of the contributions of Appalachian blacks to music, to journalism, to education, and to the political and social life of a region and a nation. There is the surge of intellectual adrenalin in finding patterns and connections among things previously unconnected or nonexistent. And there is the pure aesthetic pleasure one takes in the writing and the reading of a poem created by one person in one small place, speaking to an understanding humanity. There is ample evidence of all these things in the collection Bill Turner has put together in this special issue of the Appalachian Heritage. The thread that runs through each of these pieces and connects them all is the question, not yet fully answered: What has the black experience been in Appalachia, and what is it now? So turn the page, and welcome to what may be, for many readers, a different world of Appalachia. 3 ...

Memories Draw Generations Back to Lynch

Memories Draw Generations Back to Lynch Andy Mead Biscuit Jackson stopped a car on narrow Mountain Street to talk to the people inside, and soon half a dozen more were lined up behind it. No one honked to hurry the conversation. On Memorial Day weekend in Lynch, visiting with old friends always has the right of way. The former coal camp, tucked into a Black Mountain hollow on the north end of Harlan County, is bulging this weekend with hundreds of black coal miners' sons and daughters who left to seek a better life elsewhere. Biscuit is in from California, where he is Sgt. William Jackson of the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department. "These are my people, my roots," he said. "I come back and walk up and down these streets, and I'm home." Joyce Hall Petteway came back from Waterbury, Connecticut, where she is a securities trader. "This is just a different atmosphere from city life," she said. "You can hear birds singing here. I like to just sit on the porch and listen to water running down the mountain." Clara Hayes is from Detroit. She's a retired teacher who works in a juvenile home. She moved away more than thirty years ago, but Lynch keeps calling her back. "I was born here," she said. "My dad is buried here. We had to leave when the head of the family died, but I was baptized in that church on the corner there." Hayes and her sister, Ardella Jackson, have been back every Memorial Day for twenty-six years. "We don't even know what Detroit looks like on Memorial Day," she said. Probably less crowded than Lynch, Mrs. Hayes. Cars hugging street curbs in Lynch this weekend have license plates from Michigan, Indiana, New York, Virginia , Connecticut, North Carolina, Alabama , New Jersey, Florida, Ohio, Maryland , Massachusetts, Illinois, Tennessee, and Texas. The 1990 census found 1,166 souls living in Lynch, but on Saturday night more than twice that number crowded in and around the former Lynch Colored School for a dance sponsored by the Eastern Kentucky Social Club. On Sunday morning, 350 people packed the Mount Sinai Baptist Church. The Rev. W. B. Rutland said Sunday service usually draws 110 to 120 people. Today, many will drive to Monte Vista Cemetery—it's a few miles away, on the far side of a cemetery where white people are buried, to place flowers on relatives' graves. Three generations of the Baskin family were there Saturday, digging up! old pots of plastic flowers and putting new ones in. "All the people you see up here are coal miners and their wives," said Sylvester Baskin, the grandfather. "This one here was a classmate of mine. That was my neighbor; that one was my father-in-law. Sam Houston over there was a motorman . I'd say two-thirds of them, I knew them." Lynch is a tight little town of homes that once were owned by the coal company . The town was born in 1917, when the United States Steel Corporation decided to build a town to house people who would dig coal for its steel mills. Terraces for houses and roads were 20 blasted out of the mountain above Looney Creek. An army of men was brought in to build homes, boarding houses, bathhouses, churches, a machine shop, a company store, and what was then the world's largest tipple. The place was named after Thomas Lynch, the first president of United States Coal and Coke, a U.S. Steel subsidiary. The company brought in white coal miners from Pennsylvania and elsewhere. From Alabama, Virginia, and other southern states, it brought in thousands of blacks, many of them sharecroppers. U. S. Steel later sold the town to another company, which in the early 1960s sold the houses to the people who lived in them. Lynch always stood apart because it was one of only a handful of places in Eastern Kentucky where blacks live. Now, says city council member Bennie Massey, about 80 percent of the population is black. Like many other towns in Eastern Kentucky , Lynch is shrinking as mining jobs dwindle. Up the mountain from the last...

New Appalachian Books

New Appalachian Books by George Brosi* Cockrell, Amanda. The Moonshine Blade. New York: Bantam Books, 1988. 263 pages. Mass market paperback. $3.95. The heroine of this action/romance is a professor at a small college in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The author holds a graduate degree from Hollins College and lives in nearby Roanoke, Virginia. Dickinson, Jack L. Jenkins of Greenbottom: A Civil War Sage. Charleston, West Virginia: Pictorial Histories Publishing Company, 1988. 100 pages, illustrated with a bibliography and index. Oversized trade paperback. $7.95. This- attractively presented book tells the story of a plantation owner in the Huntington, West Virginia, area who became a Confederate officer. Douglas, John. Shawnee Alley Fire. New York: St. Martin's Press, first paperback reprint, 1988. 215 pages. Mass-market paperback. $3.50. A "thoroughly seductive mystery debut . . . quietly enthralling and memorably evocative, the most auspicious or the many recent mystery debuts." -Publisher's Weekly. I enjoyed it, and felt that the author, a native of Cumberland, Maryland, now living in West Virginia, did a great job evoking his native ground. Dunn, Durwood. Cades Cove: The Life and Death of a Southern Appalachian Community: 1818-1937. Knoxville, Tennessee: The University of Tennessee Press, 1988. 319 pages. Trade paperback, illustrated, index and bibliography. $12.95. *George Brosi owns and operates the Appalachian Bookstore in Berea and publishes the bimonthly Appalachian Mountain Books. He also sells books through mail orders to clients in all parts of the country. If readers need more information about any of the above listings, write him at 123 Walnut Street, Berea, Kentucky 40403. 71 This is an important contribution to regional scholarship and popular understanding of our region-since it focuses upon one of the communities which is most dearly loved by tourists. It has both the strengths and weaknesses which come from being written by a scholar who has personal roots in the community he is studying. Cades Cove is located in Blount County, Tennessee, and Dunn is a professor at Tennessee Wesleyan. Frazier, Tom. "You Can Go Home Again" and Other Mountain Moments. Williamsburg , Kentucky: Mountain Moments Productions, 1988. 56 pages. Staplebound paperback. $3.50. The author grew up in a Harlan County coal-camp and is presently an English professor at Cumberland College in Williamsburg, Kentucky. This book is a compilation of his syndicated column carried by rural newspapers across America . Topics include: "Four Rooms and a Path, Screen Doors," and "Rasslin'." Garza, Amy. Retter. Nashville, Tennessee: Winston-Derek Publishers, 1988. 226 pages. Trade paperback, illustrated. $12.95. This first novel is fictional biography of the author's grandmother. It has an appealing, down-to-earth charm, and it portrays mountain people as neither saintly nor especially sinful. Those who read widely will have to get used to a writing style which some may consider idiosyncratic and others, amateurish. It is set in the high mountains of Jackson County, North Carolina. Giardina, Denise. Storming Heaven. New York: Ballantine Books, the first paperback reprint, 1988. 293 pages. Mass-market paperback. $3.95. "Brilliant, diamond-hard fiction, heartwrenching, tough and tender." -Los Angeles Times. This novel, based on the struggle to unionize the coal mines of southern West Virginia, is written by a gifted young author who grew up in a West Virginia coal camp. It was a co-winner of the Weatherford Award as the outstanding Appalachian book for 1987, and selected as the book of the year by the Appalachian Writers Association. Glen, John M. Highlander: No Ordinary School: 1932-1962. Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 1988. 309 pages, illustrated with a bibliographical essay and index. Hardback in dust jacket. $30.00. Highlander was founded in Grundy County, Tennessee, in 1932. Shut down by the state of Tennessee in 1961 and moved to Knoxville, it has been operating in Jefferson County, Tennessee, since 1972. This scholarly study of Highlander illuminates not just local history, but also the field of adult education and the social movements Highlander has been involved in-from Civil Rights to CIO to the Appalachian Land Ownership Study. Hagan, Chet. Redemption. New York: Richardson and Steirman, 1988. 263 pages. 72 Hardback in dust jacket. $16.95. "Redemption takes place, like James Dickey...

Summer Squash

the hero in a novel by John Fox Jr.; he could have been The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come. For her part, Addie had many of the qualities that made Harriette Arnow's character Gertie Nev- éis so appealing in The Dollmaker, and that Wilma Dykeman gave to Lydia McQueen in The Tall Woman. It is a tribute both to the novelists and to the Ledfords that the art of the former imitates the lives of the latter. When she died quietly in her sleep on December 12, 1987, Addie Ledford was six weeks short of her 103rd birthday and six days shy of the 84th anniversary of her marriage to Burnam. She was ready, finally, to go and join him, as he had asked her to do nearly five years earlier. And with her passing, a remarkable story spanning two full centuries of continuous history and remembrance came to an end. Beginning with the birth of their great-grandparents in the late 18th century, Burnam and Addie chronicled the lives of seven generations of forebears and descendants. They were the balance point of that saga, the essential voices uniting past and present and future. After them, there is no one who remembers the 19th century, and no one who has actively worked to keep the oral history skein unbroken. Some of the story is recorded.* Addie remembered that the last time I saw her. She had been telling me about her father, logging on the mountainsides above Clover Fork in Harlan County in the late 1800s with the help of a few strong men and eight yoke of oxen. She was lost in thought for a minute, and then she said: "So you've got it all written down somewhere , have you?" "Yes," I replied, "just like you and Burnam told it to me." "Well, I told you the truth. Everything I told you is the honest truth, and that's a fact/' She was at peace that day, alwaysserene and content, just the way I remembered her being the first time I ever saw her. She knew her truth, and it had set her free. *In 1983 the University Press of Kentucky published Generations, an award winning book about the Burnam family. Summer Squash rise in the middle almost three feet tall with leaves eight inches across that canopy the tiny, white gold gourds, slowly pan old Helios' ore and siphon into them the sun to help them swell to fruit. Some, in only the first stage of miracle, are large, slightly fringed ochre stars, petal precursors of squash. The green mosaic dome keeps itself. Jimson weed, morning glory and lamb's-quarters find little purchase here. Grass blades stand short for lack of light; a few pale green stems stretch toward the roof. This July morning bumble bees tryst with the golden blooms. -Harry Brown 65 ...

Geology and Stratigraphy of Devonian and Lower Mississippian Sediments of Roaring Fork-Looney Creek Field, Wise County, Virginia, and Harlan County, Kentucky: ABSTRACT

The Roaring Fork-Looney Creek field produces from the Devonian shale and the Berea, Sunbury, Injun or Weir, and Greenbrier (Big Lime) formations. The Devonian shale production is from the Cumberland Plateau fault block and the Pine Mountain (Cumberland) overthrust fault block. The Pine Mountain thrust fault courses through the lower members of the Devonian shale. Isopachs of the shales total thickness are useful for determining the volume of reservoir rock in an area but not for depositional interpretation. Gas production from beneath the Pine Mountain thrust fault is an extension of the shale-gas production in the Big Sandy gas field of Kentucky. Although the shale has relatively low initial flow rates, its relatively long production life provides the largest gas reserves. The Berea Formation is shale in the field area and, like the overlying Sunbury Shale, thins from east to west. The normal completion practice for these formations is to perforate the upper part of the Devonian, Berea, and Sunbury shales at the same time, as one overall shale interval. The Injun or Weir is a sandstone-shale sequence that thins from west to east, and its sandstone members become siltstones and shale in the same direction. This sequence has providedmore » the best high-sustained flow rates in the field. The Greenbrier has sporadic porosity development, which typically develops in the lower half of the formation. This limestone thickens to the east. Although the Greenbrier has high initial production rates after treatment, the rate of decline is relatively steep.« less

Women's Participation in the Brookside Coal Strike: Militance, Class, and Gender in Appalachia

The decade spanning the late 1960's through the late 1970's was a period of broad-based and militant social protest in the Appalachian South. In West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, southwestern Virginia, Georgia, and North Carolina thousands of people mobilized both in rural communities and in the urban centers of the region. -There were violent labor disputes in coal mines, textile mills, hospitals, public schools, discount retail stores, nuclear plants, and in the city services sector. -Safety and health issues were fought over in these and many other work places. -Environmental protection and public health issues were debated in local county court houses, state legislatures, and the U.S. Congress while people tried to get some control over serious threats ranging from strip mining to drinking water. -Lack of equity in access to simple community services was protested by welfare rights groups and various coalitions of community-based social justice groups. -Ownership and control of regional resources was challenged by a wide range of local and regional groups, as was the use and misuse of state and federal funds targeted to address the region's persistent poverty. It was a decade when the nation heard many voices from Appalachia-voices that challenged traditional stereotypes and spotlighted an area of the country where articulate and angry people were organizing for basic social and economic change. During this period I was working for a regional newsmagazine based in the central Appalachian coalfields. Because of my work, I was able to meet and get to know many of the people who were leaders in these local and regional movements. In every instance, I found that women were key figures in the protests. They were leaders in the political movements surrounding black lung, brown lung, welfare rights, unionization and union democracy, environmental protection, the provision of community services, use of regional resources, and work place safety and health. Frankly, I was surprised to find this high level of political activity among working-class women in that part of the country. My current research is on two labor disputes in eastern Kentucky that took place in the early 1970's in which large numbers of women were mobilized and in which women played key roles that shaped the nature and outcome of events. This paper focuses on the 1973-74 strike in Harlan County, Kentucky-a strike by coal miners over union representation. That strike resulted in the formation of the now-famous Brookside Women's Club, which is featured in the film Harlan County, U.S.A. The other strike was in Pike County, Kentucky, where over 200 nonprofessional employees of a hospital-most of whom were womenmaintained a twenty-four-hour picket line for over two years in an unsuccessful effort to win union representation. The question of such a high degree of involvement by women in these strikes underlies my research. What was it that got these women mobilized, kept them active, and led them to do things they had not only never done before but also had never dreamed of doing? The strikes were violent; they lasted a long time; they challenged entrenched and powerful elites that controlled both counties where the conflicts occurred. Still, women were at the forefront

Books About Appalachia

Books About Appalachia A truly great book is something as wildly natural and primitive, mysterious & marvelous, ambrosial & fertile, as a fungus or a lichen. — Thoreau C^ The university presses within the Appalachian region provide a valuable service by printing worthwhile books often unappealing to the money-minded larger national publishers. They also issue publications not strictly within the confines of conventional scholarly works once more or less associated with the university presses. Some have re-issued needed but out-ofprint books, both fiction, non-fiction, and studies of various aspects of the region. The University Press of Kentucky at Lexington and The University of Tennessee Press at Knoxville have been especially active in issuing numerous region-related books. Below are brief reviews of some books issued by these presses. They will be glad to send brochures of their publications for the asking. THREE FROM THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KENTUCKY WELCOME THE TRAVELER HOME Jim Garland's Story o/ the Kentucky Mountains Edited by Julia S. Ardery, Foreword by Thomas hl. Bethell 256 pages $23.00 GENERATIONS An American Family by John Egerton 272 pages PASTTITANROCK Journeys into an Appalachian Valley by Ellesa Clay High 192 pages $19.50 $16.00 These three books have a good deal in common: they are social histories covering, for the most part, similar periods in time (roughly pioneer days to the present), they deal with the people of the mountains of eastern Kentucky and make use of the techniques of oral history. Beyond that there considerable differences and individuality. Jim Garland was born at Fourmile in southeastern Kentucky in 1905. It was then, as Thomas N. Bethell states in his Foreword, "a quiet place in a quiet time poised on the edge of permanent disruption. Great changes were beginning to sweep across the mountains." At the age of thirteen, rather than preparing for college as he had hoped, Jim Garland was forced to go to work in the mines. For fourteen years he experienced the hardships, disasters, and dangers of mining and attempts at unionization that is now a part of the record of the 1920s and early 1930s. He was an active worker for the communist-backed NMU, and he wrote and sang protest songs. Forced to leave the mountains in the 30s, he went to New York and had his own radio show of mountain music and protest songs. He recorded for the National Archives but never returned to the mountains except for brief visits to record folk material for the Archives and Folkways Records, and later to conduct interviews to update the material of his book, much of which he had set down during the winter of 1967. During World War II he moved with his family to Washington state to work in the shipyards. Afterward he established his own broom and mop factory, employing the blind and handicapped. After twenty-one years he sold out and "joined the retired." It was there on Washington 's Pacific Coast that he began to set down his story "before nature stopped me from remembering." 73 Editor Julia S. Ardery explains Garland's major intention in Welcome The Traveler Home as "to chart the waves of social upheaval across two hundred years in the mountains (white men's settlements, the building of an agrarian society, the subsequent concentration of land holdings, the influx of small-scale industrialists, the mountain's usurpation by outside, money-minded technocracy) and to narrate a coeval family history, his own, showing how mountain people met these changes." This is his story, the story of a generous working man who wanted to change things, to make the world better. Jim Garland did not live to complete his story, but here it is ably edited by Julia S. Ardery with a very perceptive Foreword by Thomas N. Bethell. Generations traces the family line ofone family from an emigrant from northern England born in 1724 through sojourns in Virginia, North Carolina, and Harlan County , Kentucky, to the present members of that family now living in Garrard County, Kentucky. For his projected history, John Egerton sought a "representative" middle class family—one that could stand "as a metaphor for America." He found that...

Book Review: Labor Organizations: Which Side are You On? The Harlan County Coal Miners, 1931–39

Book Review: Labor Organizations: Which Side are You On? The Harlan County Coal Miners, 1931–39

Which Side Are You On? The Harlan County Coal Miners, 1931-39.

Which Side Are You On? The Harlan County Coal Miners, 1931-39.

Which Side Are You On? The Harlan County Coal Miners, 1931-39

Journal Article Which Side Are You On? The Harlan County Coal Miners, 1931–39. By John W. Hevener. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978. xiv + 216 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $10.95.) Get access Gary M. Fink Gary M. Fink Georgia State University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 66, Issue 3, December 1979, Pages 700–701, https://doi.org/10.2307/1890384 Published: 01 December 1979

Which Side Are You On? The Harlan County Miners, 1931-39.

Which Side Are You On? The Harlan County Miners, 1931-39.