Forty years on, some places still recovering from War on Poverty

By Allen G. Breed

The Associated Press
(Top) Pedestrians and cars fill McDowell Street in downtown Welch, W.Va., in this file photo taken in 1970s. Welch is the county seat of McDowell county. (Bottom) A few people walk down McDowell Street in Welch on Tuesday, April 27, 2004. Since the coal boom ended, McDowell county has struggled with poverty and high rates of unemployment.

ECKMAN, W.Va. — Staring blankly from behind a curtain of bangs, Amanda Mullins has an outlook that’s as black as the coal heaped in the railroad gondolas rumbling down the tracks behind her.
Childhood dreams of becoming a pediatrician died with the birth of a son and an education cut short after the 10th grade. At 18, unwed and on welfare, Mullins has set her sights on earning her high school equivalency diploma so she and her baby can follow that coal out of McDowell County.
‘‘He’s just going to follow right in my footsteps if he stays here,’’ Mullins says over the squeal of the passing train. ‘‘Ain’t no future here ’cause ain’t no jobs here.’’
Forty years after President Lyndon B. Johnson declared ‘‘War on Poverty,’’ McDowell County seems more like an orphan — some would say victim — of that struggle.
Whether measured in miles of road paved or high school diplomas earned, there is no question that Appalachia has come a long way since it was famously called ‘‘The Other America.’’
The regional poverty rate has been slashed from 31 percent in 1960 to 13.6 percent in 2000, just over a point higher than the national average. And the percentage of adults in the region with a high school education or better has increased by more than 70 percent.
Nearly 2,300 miles of roads through Appalachia have been completed at a cost of $6.2 billion, and federal grants have given more than 800,000 families access to clean water and sanitation facilities.
But while many parts of this 13-state region that stretches from New York to Mississippi have reached parity with the nation as a whole, rural central Appalachia remains very much a region apart.
In its most remote, rugged stretches, the poverty rate remains about double the nation’s. Per capita and family income in these areas are only about two-thirds of the U.S. average.
As metropolitan areas spread
to include much of official Appalachia, and resources are directed at regional growth centers, the areas of entrenched poverty face an ‘‘outlook that is still fairly grim,’’ says Ohio University sociologist Ann Tickamyer.
‘‘I think what we’ll see in the near future is more of the same — sort of nibbling away at the edges,’’ says Tickamyer, co-author of a soon-to-be-released study of the region’s depressed areas. ‘‘And the persistence of severe poverty, the most severe poverty, in the most remote areas.’’
McDowell County is one such area.
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From the time in the 1880s when prospectors spotted that first 12-foot seam of coal glistening like black gold from one of the region’s innumerable, V-shaped valleys, McDowell County’s fate was sealed, its fortunes seemingly tied to the boom and bust cycles of the mining industry.
At one time, the county’s population swelled to more than 100,000, a fifth of those employed digging the coal that forged the steel and generated the electricity that propelled the United States to economic dominance. Last year, more than 4 million tons of coal rolled out of this southernmost West Virginia county, but it took barely 700 people to produce it.
Of the county’s remaining 26,000 residents, 37.7 percent live in poverty, the median household income is less than $17,000, and more than 80 percent of the students in every McDowell school qualify for free or reduced-price lunches.
It ranks last in West Virginia in economic sustainability and general health; first for its rate of diabetes, low birth weights, births to unwed mothers, suicide, homicide and sudden infant death. The life expectancy of 64.5 years for men is about 13 years less than the national average.
Some say the statistics arise from, and feed into, a generational cycle of apathy and hopelessness.
During coal’s heyday, the mining companies supplied most people’s needs, from jobs to housing to sewage to medical care. With the War on Poverty, the government replaced that ‘‘coal-camp mentality’’ with another kind of dependency, says Jo-Claire Datson, a program director with the Council of the Southern Mountains and president of the county’s rural health advisory board.
‘‘You’re dealing with a population in which those who were raised with work ethics and who really want to work have left, for the most part,’’ says Datson, who left an analyst position with Dun & Bradstreet seven years ago to give back to her native community. Those remaining here, she says, may not be against working, ‘‘but they don’t know how.’’
Four decades after the nation’s first food stamps were issued at a little grocery store in the county seat of Welch, McDowell suffers from what one local relief worker calls a ‘‘poverty of imagination ... a poverty of role models.’’
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Outside the old train depot that serves as city hall for the town of War, a sign declares ‘‘Children are our Future.’’ But the stately cut-stone and ornate brick buildings that dot the streets of War and other former coal boomtowns stand as derelict, haunting reminders of a once-prosperous past.
Not far down the road, in a hollow overlooking a gently gurgling creek, Ralph Hagerman is a living monument to coal’s place as both blessing and bane.
Hagerman left school in the eighth grade to work in the mines. At 16, he was ‘‘shooting from the solid’’ — packing a drilled hole with dynamite and blasting the coal from the seam.
Eventually, Hagerman signed up with the United Mine Workers union. He rose to roof bolter, earning $14 an hour driving steel rods to secure mine ceilings. Once he had to be dug out of a roof fall; another time, a bucking auger hit him in the head, giving him what locals jokingly call a ‘‘coal miner’s tattoo.’’
By 1986, after 14 years in union mines, Hagerman was used up. Years of breathing coal dust had fouled his lungs, though the government said he didn’t qualify for black lung benefits. Years of crouching in dank coal seams had ruined his back, but the UMW said he didn’t work long enough to earn a pension.
Hagerman’s only income is his $1,149 a month disability check. He has a medical card, but his wife, Kelly, has no health insurance.
‘‘I suppose there’s levels of poor,’’ the 47-year-old woman says as she drags on a discount cigarette. ‘‘We’re better off than some and worse than others.’’
Swinging on the porch of the couple’s corrugated tin-sided singlewide, the 50-year-old Hagerman thinks things would improve if only the mines would expand again. But, he adds, ‘‘I don’t ever expect it to come back like it was.’’
‘‘I don’t want you telling people we need another handout,’’ his wife interjects. ‘‘We need a hand up.’’
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Like the splashes of redbud and dogwood that signal the annual rebirth of these mine-scarred hills, there are faint signs of progress in McDowell County.
On a recent sunny day, downtown Welch was alive with the sounds of saws and drills. When the three-screen cinema is completed, it will be the first time in a decade that residents can watch a current-release film without having to drive an hour or more.
Work is under way on a state-funded, medium-security correctional facility, and a former strip mine is in the running for a new federal prison. There is talk of a coal-fired power plant in the county, and officials are working to identify 200 miles of all-terrain vehicle, motorcycle and horse paths to link up with the popular Hatfield-McCoy Trail system.
And, in early May, officials broke ground on another leg of the four-lane ‘‘King Coal Highway’’ that will run through the heart of McDowell County.
But in this forbidding terrain that blocks out cellular phone signals and makes each mile of highway cost $16 million, the road remains a distant promise that Geneva Goodson can’t wait to be fulfilled.
Goodson grew up on welfare and quit school in the 11th grade to have a child. She was determined her daughter wouldn’t end up the same way.
But her husband, Dennis, lost his carpentry job a year ago and hasn’t been able to find steady work. The family went on food stamps to make ends meet.
Now, at 28, her plan is to get her high school equivalency, enroll in a two-year secretarial course at a nearby college and get out of McDowell County.
‘‘I never wanted to leave McDowell, but it’s coming to a point we’ve got to do something,’’ she says. ‘‘We’ve got kids we’ve got to look forward to. ... We’ve got to raise them right ... even if it’s away from here.’’
Talk like that infuriates community advocate Datson.
‘‘I get so damn mad at these people who are constantly negative,’’ she says, her voice rising. ‘‘No, it’s not going to be fixed overnight. But I’m sorry, as long as there are still people here, there’s still hope.’’
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It’s revival time on Big Jenny Creek, and a couple dozen hungry souls have turned out at the Pentecostal Full Gospel Church of God this Wednesday evening to hear Brother Woody Wyatt preach about the path to a better life.
‘‘Christ is the one, amen, that brings the jobs back. ... We need to look to God, amen,’’ he preaches. ‘‘We ain’t got no money. Don’t have any jobs. ... But spiritually, we’re rich. We’re rich.’’
Swaying beside one of the pews, eyes closed and hand stretched heavenward, Roxie Hurt is a true believer.
She and her husband, Rex, raise their three children — ages 5, 6, and 7 — on the $724 a month he brings home from his job as a coal company security guard. The children have Medicaid cards, but Hurt hasn’t seen a doctor in years.
‘‘It’s been a lot of times that I didn’t have things that I needed,’’ she says. ‘‘And I would just start praying, and God would send me people who gave me money when my kids needed diapers — people who helped me.’’
Looking back on her childhood, the 27-year-old woman didn’t think she was poor. She remembers times when the lights and water would be shut off, but her mother would make an adventure out of going to the spring to collect water.
‘‘We never had much money,’’ she says, ‘‘but we had a lot of love.’’
Even today, Hurt doesn’t consider herself poor.
Parked outside the church is her maroon Chevy. She’s put 226,926 miles on it running errands for people she considers worse off than herself.
‘‘The Lord has provided for me so much,’’ she says, a beatific smile creasing her rosy cheeks, ‘‘I feel like He’s my job.’’