King Coal’s Deception

After exploring Matewan in depth, it was time to start the trip home. One great effort to improve connectivity of the southern coalfields to the rest of the state is the King Coal Highway, which is even eventually supposed to be part of I-73/74. Long story short: it appears to be little more than an ill-conceived fantasy.

We climbed out of Matewan on a ramp with a 10-percent grade that, due to the profile of the rock, was shaded at the time and would be shaded most of the time. Imagining school buses and trucks attempting to navigate this access road during the winter months was chilling. As we turned onto the main road we were greeted with a road only about five years old suffering some severe problems.

Concrete roads, when constructed correctly, should have no challenge lasting 20 years in drivable condition. Here, we could already see and feel signs of the failure of the concrete base, likely due to improper preparation of the land below the road. The odds of this being the case are compounded when it is revealed that the Mingo Central High School, the brand new consolidated high school, is having serious problems with land slipping problems. I wish I could act surprised by these circumstances, but this is largely business as usual in West Virginia. But it is disappointing that the citizens of this disadvantaged area were made some grand promises and less than five years out these promises are already clearly being broken.

Likewise, the road was never even built to interstate standards. For the most part, it is a two-lane undivided highway or a four-lane road with a grassy median. There are numerous at-grade intersections and driveways turning out onto the roadway. If this road were to be designated as an Interstate Highway, it would have to be upgraded substantially.

The singular circumstance where the new road truly is a godsend and an improvement over the prior route is over Horsepen Mountain. I once had the experience of navigating over Horsepen Mountain on U.S. Route 52 at night. It ranks highly on my list of terrifying driving experiences. I will take poor physical road condition over those geometrics any day of the week.

We traveled WV Route 44 into Logan and then WV Route 17 toward Charleston, going over Blair Mountain. The Battle of Blair Mountain was one of the largest civil uprisings in American history and it was spurred by the desire to end the exploitation of coal miners and unionize. In recent years, the state has tried valiantly to erase this historical site by turning it over for mountain top removal, yet even on a drive through you can feel that there was something very important that occurred here. Coal is finite, history is not. There are many other mountains in West Virginia, there is only on Blair Mountain.

The other notable aspect about this route is that its curves and dips were the main route between Charleston and Williamson until the mid-to-late 1970s. While Williamson may not seem like a major center to connect to today, it was much larger 40 years ago and had a much larger role in the economy of West Virginia. This illustrates how in some ways, Appalachia has only very recently connected to be able to come of age.

In Danville we picked up the thoroughly modern Corridor G, which took us all of the way to Quaker Steak. Hooray! After a hot day of caching and, in my case, getting eaten up by mosquitoes, I needed some calories. We got our fill and hit the road, well, after making one more stop. Kroger recently did a major renovation to the Ashton Place Kroger and made it even fancier. It was indeed true. There is no competition, this is the fanciest grocery store in all of West Virginia.

Matewan: Replica vs. Authenticity

Williamson is the center of commerce and medicine in the area, but Matewan is probably the center of culture, at least as of late due to the efforts of locals and historians. Matewan is perhaps best known for the massacre bearing its name, which occurred over the right to unionize the mines. Reenactments of the massacre are now actually relatively common occurrences because it is an important chapter in local as well as labor history. Furthermore, efforts have also been focused on developing the rail history in the town into something tangible as well as the development of the town as a service hub as a trailhead for the Hatfield-McCoy Trails.

Our first stop was the old Magnolia High School on the edge of town. It, like Williamson High School, was consolidated into Mingo Central, which is up isolated atop a ridge along a relatively new highway. Though Magnolia seemed much newer than Williamson High School, it seemed sort of ridiculous to close such a seemingly new school. Part of me wondered why the other schools could not be consolidated into this facility. Though, to be fair, the concrete floodwall built around the structure was a little weird—though it had some interesting friezes on it.

Then, into town we visited the Matewan depot replica. They did a masterful job with the replica, unless you knew for a fact it was a replica, you’d never guess. The materials all look to be the right age and the details are all there. Inside the depot is a small gift shop and great railroad-related exhibits. I most enjoyed the artifacts from the Norfolk and Western, but there were some impressive old prints and dioramas as well. I frequently imagine that if I were alive 100 years ago in a coal town like Matewan, because I’m a woman, perhaps working in the station is one of the few jobs (besides nurse or teacher) they might’ve let me have.

Outside the replica depot is an old caboose. Cabooses tend to attract geocaches and this one was no different, but the gentleman working inside the replica depot saw us poking around the caboose and offered to show us the inside of it. We figured it had to have been one of the last cabooses in use because it seemed to have some more modern touches, though we were surprised by the lack of privacy offered by the toilet.

As we concluded the tour of the caboose, we could hear the whistle of a train. The three of us started across the parking lot to get a good view and to see if we could get just the slightest feeling of how it must’ve felt, again, a century or so ago.

Chris waving at the freight train rolling through Matewan

Mysteries of Williamson

Deep into the coalfields, we first head for South Williamson, where a strip of run-down retail and fast-food joints on par with any aging suburb await. The Wendy’s is usually a solid choice and, given how busy it was, we clearly weren’t the only ones who felt that way.

The Coalfields have been a source of regional turmoil forever. Recently, it has been this resurgence in nostalgia over coal mining jobs versus the fact the land just doesn’t have much more to give and increasingly tough environmental regulations and, yes, competition. But this is land that has seen bloodshed over all sorts of things, most notably the right to organize labor at the Hatfield and McCoy Feud (which is now a tourism thing).

At any rate, it is an interesting place culturally because it has always been a region of misfits, and there is a lot of literature about that and there is a lot of music about the more fit members of this society leaving for more industrial jobs in the big, urban centers of the north from the 1930s through the 1970s (Dwight Yoakam’s Readin’, Rightin’, Route 23 comes to my mind first). I like reading about it, I recently finished reading Kathleen Stewart’s A Space on the Side of the Road, which covers her experience with the dialects a few counties over in area like Odd, Rhodell, and Winding Gulf (it’s jargon-heavy, but gives a very good sense of how it is truly an “other” America).

After lunch, we turned back around and found ourselves in the middle of a street festival closing off all the streets in downtown Williamson. Everyone was out, and we skirted around the periphery toward the old high school because wanted to check the Hatfield-McCoy House, a bed and breakfast run by a fellow geocacher to serve the newly developing tourism trade in Mingo County. But once we stopped, there were so many things to stop and look at.

The first thing that caught our eye was the old high school. With a dwindling population, many of the county school districts in West Virginia have taken to consolidating their schools, Mingo is no exception. So while the old Williamson High School, which closed in June 2011, was surrounded by a high density of homes (something we would call excellent planning and walkability), the new consolidated high school is the only thing out on a deserted ridge on a brand new highway that’s already beginning to fail… but I’ll get to that later. In the place of the old high school is a Christian academy. Though despite being closed for three years, we found artifacts from and evidence of the building’s prior life visible from the perimeter of the school yard.

The front entrance of Williamson High School, closed June 2011

From here, we also spotted a pair of grand, but abandoned, old buildings overlooking the town from atop a hill. We took some guesses as to what they were. Hotel? Boarding house? School (because the high school in front of us probably wasn’t the original Williamson High School!)? Hospital? After driving around and noticing the hospital nearby, we kind of figured hospital and nursing school, and were able to confirm this suspicion after locating the application for admitting the Williamson Historical District to the National Register of Historic Places and finding older photographs of these buildings in a slightly better condition. The disappointing news is that at the time of application, numerous dwellings were already abandoned and it is clear that the down is emptying out.

The yellowish building on the left is the former nursing school/nurse's home the the building on the right is the former hospital and, until very recently, was a professional building with physician's offices in it

It is clear that Williamson and South Williamson are the major service hubs for the region, given the presence of major chain retail and restaurants, in addition to a community hospital (with a helipad area in the parking lot!), but the empire is crumbling. Buildings large and small, historic and recent are being left fallow for nature to reclaim and there is nothing to intervene. Williamson may never complete evaporate like some of the smaller communities in regions like the New River Gorge, but may find that it is shrinking.

We carried on toward Matewan, seeking geocaching in the mosquito-heavy, seemingly tropical hot weather. En route we discovered remnants of old curves that the DOT straightened out, cemeteries so old they lacked real roads to get up to the burial plots (even though they had some recent burials!), and even a pair of railroad tunnels.

Dingess Tunnel

The other major motivator for our trip to the Coalfields was visiting the Dingess Tunnel. Originally built as a railroad tunnel in 1892 it was part of Norfolk and Western’s main line along Twelvepole Creek until an easier route was constructed along the Big Sandy River (easier grades) and a train crash occurred inside the tunnel in 1905 that left three people dead. Since 1914 it has been part of the road network down there and, from my own experience now, driving through it is quite the experience!

Because the tunnel was originally built to accommodate a single track of rail, the tunnel is only wide enough to accommodate traffic traveling in one direction at a time. It is customary for those in the tunnel to have their lights on so that someone who may wish to enter from the opposite direction knows to wait until that vehicle exits the tunnel. This is important because the Dingess Tunnel is not lit. Small efforts have been made to ensure there is drainage, on one side of the roadway there is a small ditch that is able to move the water that works its way through into the tunnel.

The tunnel feels very small and cramped, so even in a regular car the sounds can seem loud and overwhelming, coupled with the strong scent of diesel exhaust (there’s no ventilation in the tunnel)—it is not difficult to imagine you’re on a loud, stinky train of the past going through what was as wild as anything going on over on the western frontier. After clearing the tunnel, back out into the silence of the remote Logan County countryside, Chris said, “I can almost hear a train horn.” You really, really could.

One of the portals for the Dingess Tunnel, you can also tell it's election season

A brief search on the internet will turn up countless stories of how haunted the tunnel is and how strange and backward the region is, but it is a worthwhile experience and West Virginians are typically the nicest people you’ll ever meet.

Due to the dramatically different needs and dimensions, I don’t know of many other rail tunnels repurposed into road tunnels (though there is another from this Norfolk and Western line in Logan County, but it is much shorter and much less storied). If anyone knows of any others, please share!

Following the Hatfield and McCoy Feud

I have never understood the fascination with the Hatfield and McCoy feud. The entire situation seemed fueled by members of two groups consistently trying to prove their worth but who were really on more of a race to the bottom, not unlike the violence and irrational behavior between rival gangs of now. I will even be the first to confess, I never saw the Hatfield and McCoy miniseries on the History Channel because I am that disinterested and, truthfully, I just can’t stand Kevin Costner (fun fact: both Kevin Costner and I briefly attended, but did not graduate, from Villa Park High School in Villa Park, California).

Nonetheless, when the Hatfield and McCoy Geo Trail was published we eagerly accepted the challenge to be among the first 400 to complete the Geo Trail and receive a geocoin to commemorate the accomplishment. I can’t remember what time we left Morgantown to set out for the coalfields of West Virginia and Kentucky, but when we arrived at our first stop, parked behind a church bus from Mississippi, the rain was pouring and I was a little concerned about how successful we would be.

Our initiation to the geotrail involved a steep trudge up the muddy and rocky driveway to the old cemetery where Hatfield patriarch, “Devil” Anse Hatfield, was buried. Despite the perception of seclusion in the narrow holler a group of about 20 were looking on the grave monument while a local historian described Devil Anse. The rain seemed only appropriate because this man seemed miserable.

Into Matewan we stopped at a historical marker that described the feud. Across the river from Matewan was a site far more dismal. Three of the McCoy boys had been returned alive as promised, but because Ellison Hatfield had succumbed to wounds inflicted by a McCoy, the boys were tied to a tree and fifty shots later none had a hope of survival. It was easy to imagine such horrific events on such a dismal day.

Despite the hot feud, romance between Johnse Hatfield and Roseanna McCoy somehow bloomed. The two ran off, with Roseanne even living under Devil Anse’s roof for a time. But Johnse wasn’t going to settle down and left his fling pregnant and unable to return home. Roseanna found quarters with her aunt. On the other hand, the baby survived less than a year and is buried in the cemetery across the road and up the hill from her aunt’s home. The real kicker in this is that Johnse eventually married Roseanna’s 15-year-old  cousin. The historical marker at the foot of the stairs to the historic cemetery reads like the summary of a daytime talkshow.

The skies began to clear as we approached the home site of Randall McCoy. The only evidence of the home that was there is the hand-dug well, which is maintained by the current owner of the property. The current property owner has generously decided that the site belongs to everyone and welcomes guests to park in his driveway and walk over to the well and imagine the area in the years just after the Civil War. Knowing the story well, the property owner added dimension by informing us the McCoy boys who had been murdered were buried on the hillside across the holler so that Mrs. McCoy could see her sons each day. It was such a bucolic place.

Perplexing for me is the feud began over a pig. Times were hard then, but I still can’t imagine a pig instigating a blood feud. But a pig showed up on Hatfield property so they claimed ownership. So did the McCoys. A jury of six Hatfields and six McCoys decided that the pig belonged to the Hatfields. Selkirk McCoy sided with the Hatfields. The case was decided by “Preacher Anse” Hatfield. Preacher Anse’s cabin has been restored and rests below the Hatfield Family Cemetery. In this cemetery is a washstand used by the Hatfields. Feud history aside, it is an interesting relic of Appalachian life at that time.

We continued on the trail toward Pikeville, Kentucky. With six geocaches (of 15) remaining, we sought the grave of “Bad” Frank Philips. His grave is deep in a holler and involved gravel roads narrowly hemmed in between trailers and a creek. Upon arrival it is clear this cemetery has only recently seen efforts of maintenance and improvement. Some of the steps to the burial sites are uneven and loose. Frank’s wife, Nancy McCoy (her first husband, as indicated above, was Johnse Hatfield), is buried here, but so are a few others. Particularly startling was a primitive grave stone from 1992. It appeared to be made of a small square of cement with the last name and year of death written in it by hand with a stick. Times were hard for the Hatfield and McCoys, and the times continue to be very hard in eastern Kentucky.

The last five sites toured us around Pikeville, Kentucky. Numerous times we caught ourselves saying how nice the city looked and how it exceeded our expectations. The university and medical school look to be modern, quality institutions and many of the neighborhoods are populated with beautiful homes.

We finished the trail at the Dils Cemetery. Here many of the McCoy family members are buried, including patriarch Randolph McCoy. It seemed appropriate because we began with the burial place of Devil Anse. The feud was officially ended in 1891. The silence was evident in each of the cemeteries we visited. While many of the descendants of the Hatfields and McCoys moved on, some remain in the area and add dimension to the tale.

As we finished up at the cemetery one of the two people who took the effort to place the caches came up the hill. Our timing was perfect. Before we left Pikeville we were able to obtain our geocoins, evidence we completed this historical challenge!

I still don’t really understand the allure of the feud. It seems like a relic from a certain era of American history, but it’s a story that could be told just as easily today. In fact, I think it’s a story you can see on daytime TV. The differences between the Hatfields and the McCoys still separate us today and the results of brutality toward one another are no less damaging than they were then.

We returned to Morgantown after 2:00am. Exhausted, but thrilled.