Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, May 16, 1994 TAG: 9405160057
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO NOTE: BELOW
SOURCE: JEFFREY FLEISHMAN KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
DATELINE: APPALACHIA, VA. LENGTH: Long
He's got a vision for this valley and its rickety little coal camp everyone calls Derby. A smile creeps across his face. The only sound is the ticking from the engine of his Chrysler that's cooling in the breeze.
"Yes, it'll work," he says. "The tourists will come."
He coughs - lungs full of coal dust, a face as seamed as a fisherman's net - and bends into his car.
"We've got to start selling this region," he says. "If we don't, we'll lose a whole culture."
He drives off through coal country, once a busy land where hundreds of thousands of miners produced the energy that made industrial America grow. But today, hundreds of little coal camps in Virginia, West Virginia and Kentucky hollows are dying as automation and competitive markets have left miners without work.
Coal was such a pervasive force in their lives that many don't believe anything else can pull the region from despair. But others, such as Henegar - a miner for 37 years - say it's time to quit moaning about coal and to sew together some kind of economy to keep towns from vanishing.
The task is not easy. The region is isolated by mountains. Some of the valleys are so narrow a paper airplane could glide from one mountainside to another. A poor system of sewers and highways, and the lack of big tracts of real estate, keep industry away.
Such things don't bother Henegar. The solution, he says, is to sell the region: its culture, people, crafts, music, mountains and its history in coal from the days of the pickax to machines. He and others along the Appalachian Mountain chain believe deteriorating coal camps can be renovated and turned into places where tourists will want to spend a few nights while learning about a way of life most of America never knew.
Coal camps as tourist meccas?
"There are some who think that tourism is a cure-all," said Rene Campbell, director of the Appalachian Tourism Research and Development Center in Concord, W.Va. "But I think they'll discover it's not. You can't survive on one economy. Look what happened after coal. . . . And a lot of these communities don't even have the money to invest in tourism."
Some communities recently started marketing their history. A coal museum has opened in Benham, Ky.; the National Park Service is planning to restore an old coal camp for tourists in West Virginia. That state is also working on developing a Coal Heritage Trail that would lead visitors through four coal counties.
The town of Appalachia, which has a population of 1,995, has a long way to go. It's in a county of 40,000 with a poverty rate of 22 percent, nearly double the national average. More than 75 percent of the town's residents are on fixed incomes. Poverty and the leaving of residents may force its school system to merge with a neighboring town's. And its working-age population, used to high wages paid by coal companies, may not rush to the comparatively meager salaries offered by tourism.
Hop in, says Henegar.
He feels like driving. Away from the town, on whose rim towers the Westmoreland Coal Co. - railroad cars bunched by a tipple and six slate-colored silos, each able to hold 14,000 tons of coal.
He heads along Callahan Creek, past Andover, the railroad camp built to serve the coal mines in the early 1900s. These hollows are slim as the folds in a tight accordion. "Yup," he said, "it's creek, track and mountain."
Henegar calls himself an optimist, but he's a little riled today. A recent $42,000 feasibility study commissioned by the town said the prospects of turning a coal camp into a tourist attraction were not good - unless the town spent $8 million and did some more studies.
"I'll tell you," Henegar said. "I hate that word `study.' When they say `study,' boy, watch out."
Henegar said the heck with the feasibility study. He's got his own plans to bring tourists into creaky Derby, one of seven coal camps that ring the town of Appalachia - places that once held 5,000 miners but today have fewer than 900.
He turns onto the thread of road that winds through the center of Derby. On each side are two-story homes made from red tile and built in 1924. Some homes' windows are broken and laced with vines; others are sturdy and clean.
Henegar drives a bumpy dirt road past the crumbled miners' bathhouse, the mine portal where 17 miners were killed in an explosion in 1934. His plan is to fix up the houses, open an exhibition mine, stock the streams, carve out horseback-riding trails and have retired miners tell stories to the tourists. Maybe ones about "Walking Susie," the ghost that stalked some of the coal camps.
"It's got a lot of potential," he said. "People could come here, stay in the houses a few days, live like the miners did. I'd like people to see who we are and what we are."
Henegar, who started in the mines hand-loading coal for 72 cents a ton in 1948, stares at the snakelike way the homes meander through the wooded valley 60 miles from the nearest interstate.
"It could work, couldn't it?"
It's pretty much always still on Main Street, where eight vacant storefronts sit musty and grimy. In 10 years, the town of Appalachia has lost 25 percent of its business tax base. That didn't deter Gail Luntsford from opening Mamaw's House, an antiques-and-crafts shop that sells pairs of Apple Butter raggedy dolls for $43.75.
"I remember when I opened," she said. "People came in and said, `I give you three months. Why you trying? It won't work.' But look, a year later and I'm still here."
Luntsford believes reviving Main Street will help Appalachia flourish again. She proudly opens her registry and shows off names from Alabama, California, Florida and even a couple from Oklahoma. "They sent a Christmas card last year," she said.
"People are curious about this region," she said. "And they will come." Some come looking for the Jed Clampett hillbilly.
"I'm thinking of hiring two guys to lie out in front of the store with a moonshine jug and a still," Luntsford said, laughing. "I don't mind playing the Daisy Mae part, but I don't like it when they think we're ignorant. One guy from Florida wanted to take advantage of the `stupid' people here by trying to buy handmade quilts for $20 and then sell them himself for $500."
Luntsford said most people are wise enough to stay away from slick outsiders, but many cling to the dream of coal. "With that tipple sitting right out there," she said, "they'll keep on believing coal will come back. This town is dying, and they're hanging onto nothing."
"We've gone down about as far as we can," Henegar said. "But I'm an optimist."
He offers a parable: Some men give a boy a shovel and lock him in a room full of manure. When they return, the boy is shoveling furiously.
"They ask him why, and the boy said, `Well, if there's this much horse----, there's got to be a pony somewhere.' That boy's kinda like me."
by CNB