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Fall Volunteers Get to Know West Virginia Coal Country
by Megan Moran
Volunteers
in West Virginia
Caty Carpenter*
Bryson Bettini
Joseph Deng
Cece Mangena
Kayla McCurry
Megan Moran
Holly Schaeffer
Lindsey Ward
*group leader
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The only grocery store in town
Marsha Timpson
Big Creek People in Action Community Center
Holly, Lindsey, Cece, Kayla, Megan & Caty on the mountain
Heaps of Coal
View from the mountain
Kayla, Caty & Joseph on the porch
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Caretta, West Virginia is a small mountain town filled with trailers and small houses set closely together along the edges of narrow mountain roads. Scattered heaps of coal are surrounded by looming industrial machinery. This is King Coal country.
Along Main Street, you pass one small grocery store about the size of a Quick-E-Mart, a Bluegrass Hall, a used car lot with about eight cars and a small pizza place.
Our Mars Hill College volunteer group had come here over Fall Break on a service mission to rip out a dilapidated porch and begin building a new one.
The town at first struck me as a fairly uninteresting place, but I soon became intrigued and walked away from it with a new perspective as well as a new-found respect.
This was my first service trip with the Bonner and Grayson Scholars, and I had no idea of what to expect.
Our group was welcomed by Marsha Timpson of Big Creek People in Action, a locally-run organization of people working to improve living conditions in their area of southern West Virginia. Recently they have been concentrating on improving economic development and education in their community.
Timpson showed us to our home for the next three days, an old renovated school house built in 1924 that shut down in the mid 1980s after many of the mines in the area had closed and the population sharply decreased. The building was vandalized and burned numerous times throughout the years. Local residents who eventually organized and became Big Creek People in Action bought the building from the local Board of Education for one dollar.
"King Coal controlled and took care of everything. Then, when big coal companies moved out, we were left with no infrastructure," explained Timpson.
Local residents began holding meetings in their homes. Once the meetings began outgrowing the home spaces, the group moved forward and purchased the school that is now the center of Big Creek people in action.
Timpson, daughter of a coal miner, was born in this area. She left for many years and now has returned as a single mother, intent on helping the community where she grew up. She is a busy woman. Through Big Creek People in Action, she works with numerous programs that are trying to tackle the problems this community faces.
McDowell County, where Caretta is located, is the seventh poorest county in America. According to the latest U.S. Census data, about one third of the residents live in poverty. Just half of the adults are high school graduates. One third of the population has left the county since 1990.
Programs operated through Big Creek People in Action include the Strong Families program, which offers literacy skills and tutoring, and the Citizenship Center, which encourages young people to graduate from high school, attend college, and become leaders in their community. Big Creek also helps people connect with other federal and private programs, such as the Community Work Experience Program (CWEP), a federal welfare-to-work program; and Just Connections, which attempts to connect people in Appalachian communities with Appalachian colleges.
Timpson is involved in all of these efforts and is also the president of the board of directors for her county's Parks and Recreation Department.
She fell into this lifestyle after her marriage ended and she moved back to West Virginia. Compared to the rest of her family, she was the only one with some "gypsy blood" in her. She is currently living in her forty-second home. She was offered a job at AmeriCorps as a reading coach and then became a VISTA worker, given the role of coordinating and organizing reading programs and fundraising for Big Creek People in Action.
She is currently a learning coordinator for BCPA and is also an adult coach for the Kellogg Leadership for Community Change, which aims to build leadership skills with youth and adults in the community. BCPA was recently awarded a grant from Kellogg to work on education and economic development.
The affiliation between Mars Hill College and Big Creek People in Action came from Just Connections and a five year memorandum of agreement that says BCPA will provide service opportunities and cultural immersion for the scholars. One of the first projects as an organization was a daycare center that five hundred residents said in a public survey was needed most.
Big Creek was the first to establish such a program, but now that population numbers have dropped, the program was reluctantly shut down since it was draining from other "more needed" programs, such as education and economic development, according to Timpson.
Economically, coal has kept Caretta's head above water for years, since there are few other jobs. "Coal Keeps WV going," said one bumper sticker. However, environmentally, coal has had a negative impact. According to Timpson, the pollutants have affected her family. "A few years back, my daughter Kathy had a health problem arise. When I took her to the doctor, and he realized we were drinking our local water, he strongly advised against it. He said, "Don't let her drink that water," so we started getting our water elsewhere, and her problem went away and has never been an issue since."
Coal and its processing by-products contaminate everything from the soil to the air. The town has a record of high cancer rates, poor drinking water and air pollution. Also poor nutrition and lack of healthcare are complicating factors. The one store in town had limited food choices, and trying to shop healthy for my meals was a challenge. Also Timpson mentions that there are not any local dentists or doctors nearby.
"People just don't have the access to the basic services that they need," she says.
Another environmental issue is clear-cutting by the timber industry. The mass removal of timber from the mountains has caused great erosion. This erosion, combined with coal-caused pollutants, has created many areas with toxic runoff.
In 2001 and 2002, devastating floods, amplified by erosion, tore houses from their foundations and left thousands homeless.
Socially, the area is fighting a policy that is consolidating schools in the county. This is a big issue that has many complicating factors. Two socially different schools are being consolidated. Big Creek High School serves a largely blue collar, working class population, while Iaeger High School in the nearby town of Iaeger serves a largely white collar population. Timpson says there are tensions involving class and race.
According to Timpson, the coal industry attracted many types of people to Caretta in the past, including immigrants and African Americans.
"Coal bonded the people here because it is such a dangerous job that requires the trust of your fellow worker," said Timpson. "As my Daddy said, 'when we were all down there together…everyone walks out black.' It just wasn't an issue here."
Another problem that will result from school consolidation is that fringe communities on the outskirts of the county will have a two-and-a- half hour drive to attend this new school, but they could cross the state line and attend another school fifteen minutes away. This will take money that is usually put into West Virginia's school system and move it out of state. Another concern is that elementary school kids would have to ride along with high school students, getting dropped off at their school while the high school students continue on their long bus ride. Some buses would be making up to ten railroad crossings each day.
Many problems affect this area, and as our service trip continued, our original project became less important, and my interest grew more for the big picture of Caretta.
I had been unaware of many of these issues, which is surprising considering the close proximity and similar natural environment to our area. I realized my biggest service to these kind people was not a one-time service project, but a sense of awareness of what our neighbors are struggling with in our own region.
Click for photo gallery by Megan Moran
Reader Comment:
Cassie Robinson Coordinator, Ramsey Center, 12/4/2006, 5:12 p.m.
Megan, Thank you for your great article! I am so pleased to see students interested in life in Appalachia! You mentioned the environmental problems relating to timber extraction, but did you learn anything about Mountain Top Removal (an ecologically devastating form of coal mining) while you were there? 101,755 tons of coal were mined through mountain top removal in McDowell County, West Virginia in 2003. [Statistic is from WV Coal Facts 1971-2003 and West Virginia Bureau of Employment Programs, 2003.] I would encourage you to explore more of what is going on in greater West Virginia, especially relating to MTR. A great place to start is the website: http://www.ilovemountains.org/. If you are interested in learning more about MTR, there is a video you can watch in the Ramsey Center for Regional Studies, in Renfro Library.
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