Debbie Adams

“We’ve had people ask, how could you have your son arrested? We’ve been the ones to get warrants on him before, and sent him to prison. You’ll do anything you have to, to save your child’s life. I’d much rather go visit him in prison, as him be dead. People are going to judge you no matter what you do in life. It doesn’t matter.” 

Debbie Adams, Former Lab Technician, Disabled, Letcher County Farmer’s Market; Jeremiah, Kentucky: 

“I grew up on Blair Branch, right up in the holler. When my children were younger and they disagreed with what I said or whatever, they’d go ‘Oh, mom you don’t know nothin’. You was born and raised up in the head of a holler!’

Being raised in a holler and being poor, you made do with what you had. My younger sisters and me would get out and we’d hit the hills! I’m sure they’re probably laurel trees or laurel bushes, but we called them monkey trees. There was a bunch up on the hill beside where I was raised, and we would go up there and climb all over those trees and just have a good time.

We played in the creek a lot…stuff that I would not want my grandkids to do now! I remember we would go in the creek and we’d catch crawdads. I remember making little graves up and getting flowers and weeds and putting on them, and making dirt patties and stuff like that. Even after dark we were just all over those mountains playing hide and seek. [We also played] hopscotch and jump rope and stuff you don’t see kids do today. I was probably ten, twelve years old before I got my first bicycle to ride, and it wasn’t my bicycle! I was riding a brother or probably a sister’s. Now I look back, and it was a more peaceful time. 

I came from a family of fourteen. There were twelve of us that made it to adulthood. We were poor. By the time that I was old enough to realize it, my dad was not physically able to work. He was a coal miner and he worked a little bit on some Happy Pappy program. It didn’t make a lot of money for the number of children that he had. He had emphysema from smoking, and the black lung from the coal mining. Before he died, he only had a fourth of a lung that he was breathing on. He always had breathing difficulties as far back as I can remember. 

He was an old man when he married my mother. He was drafted Into WWII at thirty-seven, I remember them talking about it. I was one of the younger sets of children. I was probably twelve or thirteen when he finally got his settlement for black lung. It was only like ten or twelve thousand dollars that he got, but that was a lot of money for us back then. I remember he asked each one of us kids what we wanted. There was a little store out there in Isom called the Cow Shed. It was just a gift shop and had some clothes and stuff, but they had this big ol’ purple bear. It was purple and white, and I always loved the color purple and I remember telling him that’s what I wanted. They got it for me and that just meant so much as a child, getting that. I’ve still got that bear.

He always had health issues when I was growing up. When he was able, like on Easter Sunday, we would walk from our house at the foot of the hill and walk back on the mountain. We owned forty-two acres, hillside property most of it. We would walk up the hill and take whatever we had to eat and enjoy. That was probably one of my fondest memories of my Daddy. Kind of like a picnic. We had what we called a little pond, basically it’s a little mud hole that was on a strip job, but we’d go back there and we thought we was swimming

The older I got, the less Dad could do because he was so weak and he’d have to stop a lot and everything like that. I lost him in 1980. He was a veteran of WWII. He’d been wounded two or three different times. He got a purple heart and he got three bronze stars. He didn’t like for us to even watch war movies or anything like that. I guess it must’ve been really traumatic for him. I was very interested in the family tree and stories and I wish we’d had the technology that we have now so I could have those stories! 

I have two sisters who are alive that are younger than me. One of the sisters was a twin, and when they were born, my mother always told me that both of them were very sick and feeble. They always thought the little girl, my sister Maggie, wasn’t going make it. My mother always said that she had a high fever and they thought it burnt up her brain cells so she has a lot of problems, learning disabilities. But then, my mother told me that when the twins were a month old, she was exhausted and she took the little boy to bed with her. That morning, when she woke up he was laying on her arm, but he had passed and was cold

I’m fourth up from the bottom. We were blessed that there was twelve of us lived to be adults. As far as siblings, we didn’t lose any of them until 2009 when my oldest sister died with cancer. In August 2010, another sister died of cancer. And then my brother Den, he died in November 2013 with cancer. In my family, it’s not if you’re going to get cancer, it’s when you’re going to get cancer. To say the least, I keep my cancer policy up to date. 

My mom was a homemaker. She canned, she cooked; I always said she could take nothing and make a meal out of it. I realize now how she did that, with the canned foods and stuff she had on hand. If we had company come up she’d just go in there and cook something or other. It might be green beans and corn bread or whatever; we might not have had meat at every meal. But she would always make a meal out of whatever she had. We was raised on soup beans and taters, stuff out the garden. I have to say, I did not want to be in the garden. That was not what I wanted to do when I was younger. I wish my sister could see me now. The summer before she passed, we let her use some of our land and she raised a big garden, a huge garden. I went over and helped her because I knew she wasn’t able to do a whole lot. She goes, ‘I know you don’t like being out here.’ I said, ‘no, that’s all right, I’ll help you.’ She would be impressed with what I’m doing now. And my family would be impressed because I never pretended to be a farmer or anything like that. 

My grandmother would come in from Ohio and tell us these booger tales. You wanted to hear the booger tales, but then you were scared to death to go to sleep at night. My older brother who passed away in 2013, he was the one that begin our family reunion. We have a large family reunion the first weekend of August each year and there’s been as many as 400-500 people come. He was instrumental in organizing that, but he would share a lot of the stories of our grandparents that I never knew. 

One of my favorite stories was he said that my grandfather used to go over to Stonega, Virginia and get supplies for everybody in the holler One person in the community would go get these basics that you couldn’t ordinarily get or grow. One time, he went over there and he took the lady that he had caring for his wife. His wife was pregnant, and she must have been having a lot of health problems. So, he (my grandfather) took the lady with him that was caregiver to his wife. Well, they never came back! After the first wife died, my grandmother and my grandfather got married and they were farmers down there in North Carolina. They had one child that passed while they was down there. They came back up here and made their life here on Blair Branch. They had inherited land off his father and his great-grandfather. They said that Grandpa, after they came back up here, would do moonshine. The way they’d keep it hid is Grandpa would be on this side of the holler doing the moonshine, and my grandmother would draw attention away by burning the fields off over here on the left side. 

When I originally started school, I went to a little two-room school. I have more vivid memories of that probably than my older years! I loved the two-room school. They had a great old big partition type door that they separated the classrooms with. At Christmas, and different things everybody would be in one big classroom. They were four of us that started first grade. Two of us are friends and we get together every few, even after all these years. In that classroom you had the first grade up to the fifth grade. Then in the other classroom you had sixth, seventh and eighth. Hassie Breeding was my teacher and I know I just loved that lady to death. She was such a great storyteller. In life, when we got older, every time she would see me she would remind me I had terrible nosebleeds when I was in first grade. She would bring this bag of rags and put underneath my desk, and I learned that if my nose started bleeding to get those rags out and wipe it. 

Hassie and her and her husband, B.G. had gone to Hawaii or somewhere. She brought this little stuffed alligator and she said it was alive and that meant a lot to me because I thought that thing was alive at some point! I really enjoyed Hassie as a teacher. 

I went to Letcher High School. I enjoyed it. I didn’t try as much as I should have; I was more interested in goofing off. I was really shy. I wish I had tried harder, but I didn’t. I started working probably when I was about twelve or thirteen babysitting for a handicapped child. I enjoyed it; it’s a good memory. There was a program called the NYP, the Neighborhood Youth program. And of course we were a poor family so I was eligible to work on that program. I worked on it for years, like cleaning the school or working in the cafeteria at school. 

Of course, when the hormones kicked in there I met my soon-to-be husband. We’ve been married forty years in August. Mostly, I was focusing on that instead of my education. But then I did go back to school after I had my kids. They were probably in middle school when I went back to college and became a medical lab technician. I had two kids. I had a boy and a girl. 

I’m disabled, so I just sell for my husband at the farmers’ market. I worked for years as a medical lab technician for Mountain Comprehensive Health. 

My husband worked in the mines 37½ years before he got laid off. From the time he was eighteen, he had worked in the mines up to June the 9th of 2013. ‘Course he got six months unemployment and that was over with. He’s only 58 year old right now so he’s too young to retire. He wasn’t in union mines or anything like that. Only thing he’s got to look forward to is getting social security, but we’re just spending the kids inheritance. (Laughs) That’s what you do when you don’t have anything else. He bought a tractor in January, so people hire him to bush hog their ground and he got the loader part on his so he can move dirt and different things like that. 

We had the land [and] his family had always raised vegetables and things. We just decided in the beginning just to raise enough to supplement us, to help our income out. We enjoyed it and were really amazed. I just posted some pictures on Facebook, next thing I know people wanted to buy the beans and the corn and everything I had! So I became a part of Grow Appalachia this spring and oh God, this is such a wonderful community. I feel like they’re family. They are wonderful people. It’s just been a blessing. I’m so grateful to be part of it. 

I don’t see coal coming back at all. I really don’t. That’s the reason I try to encourage younger people to start farming. I feel like the future of Letcher County lays in tourism or agriculture. There’s hope that we’re going to get a commercial kitchen up here in Letcher County. It would be a blessing. We’re hoping to do a commercial kitchen where you can come up here and can your vegetables. Of course, there’d be demonstration kitchens for 4-H or different clubs that want to come up and can. 

I’ve had my micro-processing class and I’m hoping to get my recipes submitted to the state pretty soon for some of the things I can so I can sell it. The things I’m going to submit right now are a spaghetti sauce and a chow-chow and pickled beets. I’m working on getting me a good canned vegetable soup. I’ve canned some this summer and I like it! Hopefully I can get them all submitted and get them on the market pretty soon. I’m a decent cook, I don’t say I’m really a good cook. I can cook though! Do I look like I’m going to starve, honey? 

One of the hardest things I’ve ever had to go through is my son’s addiction. My son is a drug addict. It was traumatizing for me at first. By the time he was eighteen years old he was a barber, living in Lexington making $750 a week. The next thing you know, he was a drug addict, living back here in Letcher County and can’t find a job for nothing. It was traumatizing. That’s been a struggle for the last ten or twelve years. To be honest, I don’t know how I was able to work while I was going through the rough part of it. But I had great co-workers and understanding friends. Yeah, I would say that’s been the hardest thing I’ve had to deal with in life, other than losing your parents and your siblings. You just have to pray about things and go on a lot. 

I’ll be honest; I’ve dealt with depression. When I first started dealing with it I was in shock because nobody in my family had ever been an alcoholic or a drug addict or anything like that. One of the ladies he worked with as a barber in Lexington had messed her back up and gone to the doctor. They gave her oxycodone and apparently she must not have needed it that much because she was telling these other two guys how great it made her feel. To me, it wouldn’t have made you feel that great if you really needed it, it might have comforted you. Next thing you know, they were using it too. 

We just deal with it one day at a time. He’s been in and out of prison; he’s been in and out of rehab. All because of drugs. He had so much potential. That’s going to be something we deal with for the rest of our lives. We’re just grateful for every day he’s alive. 

We’ve had people ask, how could you have your son arrested? We’ve been the ones to get warrants on him before, and sent him to prison. You’ll do anything you have to, to save your child’s life. I’d much rather go visit him in prison, as him be dead. People are going to judge you no matter what you do in life. It doesn’t matter. 

[Happiest times] I don’t know why you have to have kids to have grand kids! I love my kids dearly and I’d give my life for either one of them, but them grandkids, there’s just something about them! My grandchildren are so precious. I got two granddaughters that are eleven years old; they were born two months apart. And then I’ve got a little five year old granddaughter. My daughter has two children and my son has one. All girls! They have just stolen our hearts. They’re a blessing. They sure are. 

I’m very proud to say I’m a hillbilly. I think everybody around here really cares about each other and I know if I needed help with something, somebody would be there for me. I’m not sure you got that in these larger cities and towns. There’s a closeness in the mountains, and I’m glad to say I’m part of it. We’re a proud people. I know we get insulted a lot, and I don’t care if it’s in Letcher county or if it’s California, you’re going to have people that don’t want to work or don’t want a better quality of life. But I don’t think most people are looking for a hand-out, maybe a hand up. 

I hope people realize that I will help a person if they need help. I try not to bother nobody, don’t want nobody bothering me. I try to live a private life. I love to be social and everything like that. I feel like I’ve got a lot of friends and family and I hope they remember me as a nice person.”

Bonita Skaggs Parsons

“Mamaw also taught me that you could take nothing, and make something out of it. The quilts she made were beautiful, and they were made out of scraps of nothing, old clothes. I’ve heard her sit and tell, ‘well this was the dress that Hazel had when she was fourteen,’ and she would name off every person that was in that quilt. Well, by giving you that quilt, she was giving you those people to carry on through life with.” 

Bonita Skaggs Parsons, Artist; Morehead, Kentucky: 

“I have named myself a self-proclaimed ‘buckabilly,’ because I am the daughter of parents that crossed the river to find work. I was born in Mansfield, Ohio, then we moved down here. Then we went to Michigan. Then we moved back to Mansfield. Then we moved back to Kentucky when I was eleven. 

A buckabilly child [has] this place in the very essence of themselves because they’ve been here most of their life, back and forth. I’m the tailgate kid. I saw license plates going this way, and I saw license plates going that way, and I ended up this way. But that’s what a buckabilly is. It’s something everybody asked me. They said, ‘Well your accent don’t sound like you come from around here.’ I lived both places, so it was different. Maybe I don’t have the thick accent, but boy it comes out sometimes.

When Daddy asked Mommy to get married, she was sixteen and he was nineteen. She told him, ‘you don’t have a job. We’re not getting married.’ Him and his brother went up to Mansfield, Ohio to look for work, because there were no jobs in the area unless you were a logger, or a farmer, or something like that. You really couldn’t make a good living that way. You survived. And so they crossed over the river the day they got married, and Daddy went to work in a lumber mill. He worked up there, and then we came home every weekend or every other weekend. I thought Kentucky was home, and I thought Mamaw’s was a vacation, because that’s all I knew. (Laughs) Vacation was Mamaw’s house. Every one of us children was born in Ohio, but we’ve all grown up in Kentucky. 

Dad and Mom were trying to buy the farm that my grandparents owned, and the only thing I remember is, sometimes I’d hear, ‘You can’t have this at the store, because we’ve got to pay on the home place.’ So to me, I was always Appalachian. I was raised a buckeye, because of where I lived at the time, but home was here, and I knew it was going to end up being home. As soon as we could pay for the farm, it was going to be home. We ended up coming back here when I was eleven. We did our house from the ground up. We dozed it. We dug the basement. We laid the block. We put up the walls, and we made our home. We were traveling back and forth to Ohio still while we were building our home. We pulled an old trailer from Mansfield, like a ‘50s model trailer, and we would live in it on the weekend, and work on our house. As soon as we got the roof on, we’d sleep on the sheetrock in the house, and that’s where we stayed. 

[As kids] we did a little bit of everything. We learned to shoot guns, of course, which was normal. But ours was with a BB gun, because Mom and Dad didn’t give us real guns. But if you could shoot a BB gun, you could shoot a rifle, so you were fine. We spent a lot of time with family. We worked at my Mamaw’s. We did everything from slaughtering hogs, to making soap out in the yard, to learning how to quilt…Oh, Lord, just so much. 

When we moved back here it was flooding, and it had flooded the school out. We didn’t know, and we went out to the road. We lived on a gravel road that was two tracks of mud, and Daddy had to bring us out on the tractor. We got out there and the bus hadn’t run, and we found out school was cancelled. Well, it was a mile and a half back to the house, so we had to walk in. I fell down in my brand new school clothes, and I hated it. I thought, ‘How in the world are we going to live, when we can’t even get to a school bus without a tractor, and then we get the tractor stuck?’ I don’t even think much about how it was hard at all. Even though we didn’t always have the money we wanted, and we didn’t always have the things we wanted, we still had everything we needed, and we had family. 

My grandparents were probably the greatest people you would ever meet in your life. My Papaw was a character. He did everything. If you lay down in the house and went to sleep, you had clothespins on your ears. If you went to sleep, he got a switch, and tickled your nose, until you swatted yourself in the face. He was always like that. When he was seventy years old, he would chase my kids up and down the road, and they’d hide under the car, and he’d hide until they came out, and chase them again. He was climbing a pine tree in the front yard and adjusting the TV antenna at eighty years old. 

He actually went across the river himself to work for a while. He went all the way to Mansfield, and worked in the GE Plant. He couldn’t read, but everyone loved him at the plant, because where he couldn’t read, he memorized where everything was. So, if they needed anything, they hollered at Charlie. My Mamaw was a quieter woman, but she still had a sense of humor like no one would believe. She didn’t get much chance to express it, because Papaw was always the clown, you know. He danced around the living room, singing ‘Going Up Cripple Creek’ many a day, or String Bean, or Grandpa Jones, or Hee Haw, something off Hee Haw. But both of them were some of the best people I ever knew. They gave me so many values, and they touched very aspect of my life. They helped me be who I am. 

Papaw taught me if you want something, you have to work for it, and he also taught me if you couldn’t have fun in your life, that you were wasting your life. If you couldn’t laugh and carry on, it wasn’t worth being there, because he had fun! I don’t care if we were digging sweet potatoes, or planting beans, there was something funny going on at all times. He made it that way. 

When Papaw got old he had to be in a wheelchair because he was getting so weak. But one thing he always done to Mamaw was, when he caught her with her back turned, he’d either pinch her, or slap her on the butt. Well, one day we were getting ready to take him in the kitchen, and Mamaw was going through in front of him, and I saw this little grin come on his face. I knew it was coming. As soon as she passed him, he reached out and just slapped her tail, and it made Mamaw grin. It made her so happy, because he hadn’t done it in so long. They were both in their eighties then. 

Mamaw taught me how to make quilts. She taught me how to manage. She saved everything because she was a child of the Depression. One of Grandma’s best tales she ever told was about how [frugal] they had to be during the Depression, because she was trying to get across to us what it meant to waste. She said that when the boys came home from the war, they couldn’t afford bullets. Everything was hard times. They went out and shot their guns, and they gave the kids little buckets made out of coffee cans to gather up the shells, so they could refill them. 

Mamaw also taught me that you could take nothing, and make something out of it. The quilts she made were beautiful, and they were made out of scraps of nothing, old clothes. I’ve heard her sit and tell, ‘well this was the dress that Hazel had when she was fourteen,’ and she would name off every person that was in that quilt. Well, by giving you that quilt, she was giving you those people to carry on through life with. It was just fantastic. I loved her.
Our people live long. My grandma was ninety-six when she passed. My papaw was ninety-two. They both passed at home with family, with all of us around. 

My mom and dad are good people. My daddy worked hard all his life. He was one of twenty children. There were nine of the first kids. His mommy died when he was three. My Papaw remarried, had ten more of his own, plus a stepchild. I was telling someone a while ago, we got a surprise at his funeral. There was a kid who showed up that nobody knew about. (Laughs) This lady walked in, and she was standing up at the casket, and she was acting weird, you know, and nobody recognized her. A couple of the kids walked up there, and they were talking to her, and they were like, ‘how did you know him?’ And she said, ‘I heard he was my daddy, and I thought I’d better see what he looked like before they put him in the ground.” And she walked out, and we’ve never seen her again. Have no idea who she was. 

Mommy is one of two kids. There’s just her and her sister. Mamaw and Papaw didn’t think they should ever have any more kids because that’s all they could take care of. That’s all they could give plenty of stuff to. My dad, I have actually seen him take the shirt off his back and give to somebody else. They taught us to give to people. They said that if you had two things, you could share one. I came home and got off the school bus [and] I didn’t have my shoes on. I’d just got brand new shoes. Daddy and Mommy were both sitting in the car waiting on me, and they were like, ‘Where’d your shoes go?’ I said, ‘Well, Mommy, that little girl had a hole in her shoe, and I gave her my shoes.’ And that’s what you’re supposed to do. (Laughs) 

Dad always said, you know all these people are always saying, you see people begging along the road, and you don’t give them money, because they’re going to go get drunk, or they’re going to go get high, or something. Daddy always said that you don’t know what they’re going to do, and someday that may be you standing by that road, and you give them that dollar. That’s one thing I’m really proud of my son for. When he was going to MSU, there were some men working out in the heat doing the landscaping. He saw them eating, and they were all drinking out of one jug of water. They had a little bit of food each. He took his meal card, and bought them food. I was never prouder in my life, than that day. Mommy and Daddy raised me good, and they cared about who I was, and they cared about what I had, and they’re still proud of me to this day. 

At age eighteen, I went to work at McDonald’s, and I worked there probably for a year and a half. Then, I went to work at Rose’s Department Store when it opened, and that’s when I got pregnant with Misty. I was an unwed mother, but I was unwed because I decided to be unwed. The man that is her daddy, I didn’t feel like he’d be good to her, or us so I didn’t get married. It definitely bothers some of the people in my family, especially the preacher. He said I was cheating her. I think she turned out pretty good. I’m not worried about it. 

All the time, I was doing little art projects and stuff. Then, I started doing my art more fulltime, and we got actually got to where we were selling more. [I was setting] up a show, and it was raining cats and dogs, and Minnie and Garland Atkins pulled in. Minnie got out, and she come over and looked at our stuff, and she was like, ‘Well, y’all don’t need to be here. You need to come to Day in The Country.” And that’s how we got started with Minnie and over there. Minnie is a folk artist, and what she started doing was carving her roosters to make ends meet, and setting up beside the road and selling them, and then somebody [discovered] her. 

She has found so many artists in the area and helped them. Minnie was like a driving force, and Garland was right there with her, helping her, and then she lost Garland to cancer. Garland was funny as a monkey. We were set up at ‘Day in the Country’ up in the holler, and it was like a party, all of us artists. It would be as high as fifty artists set up, all the way up Gizzard Holler. We all brought potluck, and then we put watermelons in the creek, and the kids played in the creek all day, and we sold art. 

And we had buyers come in from everywhere. The first year I was there, we had the Olympics tour; the guys that were running it came. They bought a bunch of our pieces, so I have pieces that are all over the country, and I don’t know where. The funniest thing was Garland. He’d walk up and down the holler all day. He was hyper, and he had his dog with him, an old shepherd dog following him behind. He’d come past me and there was nobody at my booth and he said, ‘Well Sissy, ain’t they nobody up here?’ And son, he turned around and went back down that holler. In a few minutes I had six, seven people up in my booth buying art. He did that all day long, back and forth. All of a sudden the dog was so tired, it just went and laid down and watched him go back and forth. It gave up! 

I decided I was going to be an artist when I was in Kindergarten. They gave me a little paper ship, and they were having everybody write what they would do, if they got to the new land. And my little scribble, I’ve still got it, it said, ‘An artist. That’s what I would be in the new land.’ And when I got more confidence in my art, was when Misty started Kindergarten. Our school in Elliott County didn’t have an art class in elementary level. So I volunteered, and I started teaching. To those kids, I couldn’t do any wrong. Everything I did was good, you know, and it built my confidence up, and I started putting my art out in public more, and from then on it’s been growing and growing. So I’ve done shows. I’ve been everywhere. I feel like it anyway. 

When I first started, I started woodcarving. Well, my hands got so I couldn’t wood carve anymore. I decided that I needed cheap material because I’m not wealthy. I hate when everybody says poor, because I feel wealthy all the time, you know. But I didn’t have the kind of supplies I would have liked to have. I took newspaper and white school glue, and I wanted to make not to make papier-mâché, but solid sculpture. 
I developed my own technique, and started putting the white glue on the paper, and working it almost like clay until I made it into a solid sculpture. That’s what I’m doing now, and so far everybody tells me they’ve never seen anything like it, so that’s pretty good. [I make] Whatever hits my mind, really. Right now, I’m working on ‘The Munsters’ in black and white, but I just finished doing Marilyn Monroe. I’ve done Johnny Cash. I do crucifixes, which I really love to do. The first Dolly Parton I did is my most fun one, and the best story that goes with that Dolly Parton. 

I made Dolly, and a Chicken McNugget box was her belly so she opened up, but the only way you could open her was to grab her by her boob. So what happened was, we went to a show at Louisville. Everybody was so excited about it, because inside of her, Dollywood was in there. A roller coaster with Dolly in the front car, you could actually see her in the car. We were sitting there, and all of these people were coming over and opening her up and opening her up. All of a sudden I could see this man standing up there, and he’s acting so weird. So I went up to talk to him, and he said, ‘I really would like to see inside Dolly.’ And I said, ‘Well, honey, all you got to do is reach over there and pull and you know she’ll open right up. He says, ‘I’m a preacher, and I cannot bring myself to grab her like that.’ (Laughs) I got so tickled, and everybody else wanted to know what I was laughing about. That was the best story of the day. I opened Dolly for him, and he got to look inside, but he turned as red as a beet when he told me why he couldn’t open Dolly.

[Art] makes me breathe. It’s my outlet, calms my mind, it calms my soul, makes people smile. I make people smile [and] it tickles the crap out of me. Especially at shows when they come up, and they find something that blows their mind. I have a habit of kind of throwing political stuff into my art, which causes problems. I’ve lost buyers because of it actually. I’ll take the ones that like me, that’ll be okay.

The doctor just told me I have nerve damage in my hands, and my back, and my legs and stuff. And he said, ‘You know, you may have to stop doing what you’re doing. It’s too hard on you.’ When he said that, I thought, well Lord have mercy, I’m not going to make art. Oh, I can paint with my mouth. I told my friend, ‘I could go chimpanzee and use my toes.’

I didn’t think about how I’m going to feed myself, or how am I going to put on my clothes. I don’t know what would happen if you took my art away. 

I’ve thought a lot about, ‘What are you going to leave for your legacy?’ I have a book in MSU Children’s Library right now. ‘I Can Change the World,’ is the name of it, and I feel like that’s something I left. But most of all, I want people to remember I laughed and I cried, and I loved, and that I tried my best. I tried to be a good person, because I feel like if we don’t try to be a good person there’s nothing. My art, I think is going to be here long after I’m gone. I did a piece with doves where I did suitcases, and I called them ‘Mamaw Told Me’ and ‘Papaw Told Me.’ I put little stories in them. And I would do a piece of art, like I told about this ghost story Mamaw told me, and then I took and wrote the story and put it inside. So that is part of what I’m passing on to generations. 

We were having a hard time recently. My TV tore up and I couldn’t buy a TV. One of the [art students] I worked with in Elementary School [sent a Facebook message] and said, ‘I’ve got a extra TV. Come get it.’ I said, ‘Lord, I appreciate it.’ He said, ‘No. Every kid that you worked with should’ve offered.’ 

And that was my legacy. Yeah, that was my legacy right there.”

Richard Vogel

“Learning English was kind of hard. When I was first living with my sister, I couldn’t go to work, so I more or less, had to babysit for her kids. I watched a lot of Sesame Street and stuff like that, and that helped me along. If you go to a country, you have to learn the language. If you don’t want to learn the language, just stay where you're from.” 

Richard Vogel, Railroad Worker; Tiptop, Virginia, (Originally from Germany):

“I was born in a little town called Bad Vilbel, next to Frankfurt, Germany. My sister, she’s eight years older than I am, she met a G.I. over in Germany. They got married, and they were living in Bluefield, West Virginia. I came over to visit a time or two, and it might sound funny to y’all, but what really got me to come over was the trees and the mountains. Where I grew up it was kind of crowded, so I really liked that. I came over here in 1977 when I was eighteen. I had to finish school, and I had to promise my Mom I’d finish my apprenticeship. I took an apprenticeship as an office clerk. 

We did have English in school, but you know I wasn’t too good. If you go through the immigration process, and you do it right, it’s not as easy as just crossing the border. For one thing, they would not let me work until I got my Alien Registration Card. Naturally you got to apply, do all the paperwork. The first thing I had to do, I’ll never forget it, I had to go to Pittsburgh to get a physical to make sure I had no diseases. So here I was. I couldn’t speak a word of English, got on a bus at Bluefield, and went to Pittsburgh. But I made it. After that I got my Alien Registration Card that allows you to work. You have to register once a year where you live, and you couldn’t run for president or anything like that, but other than that about the same rights. 

My Mom passed away in 1981, and my Dad got real bad off. I had to go over there [Germany] to take care of him for a little while, so I went ahead and got my citizenship in 1985. I went over there and stayed with awhile. We got him squared away, then he came over here and lived with me a little bit, lived with my sister a little bit, and he’s passed on since that.

Learning English was kind of hard. When I was first living with my sister, I couldn’t go to work, so I more or less, I had to babysit for her kids. I watched a lot of Sesame Street and stuff like that, and that helped me along. If you go to a country, you have to learn the language. If you don’t want to learn the language, just stay where you're from. I still got my problems. The guys at work, they still kid me. They say always, the end of the alphabet, I always mess it up completely. But, it’s been good. Yes! I’m an American! 

My first job was the Sealy’s Mattress Company supplying the ladies on the line with material to make mattresses. From there, I went to work in a grocery store. There was another guy worked in the store, and he was friends with another guy. We started going and fishing together, and this other guy’s Dad, he worked on the railroad. One day, we were going to go fishing, We all made it to this guy’s house, and the guy that works on the railroad, his daughter met somebody and they wanted to go out on a date, but he wouldn’t let her go out on a date, unless my wife, who was her friend back then, would go with her. So they picked me to go on a blind date. That’s how I met my wife. Then the guy’s Dad got me a job on the railroad. I went to work on the railroad and got married in 1980. I’ve been working on the railroad since 1980, our first young’un was born in ‘81, and our second one was born in ’83. And it’s been good times and bad times.

[Living in the mountains] gives you a lot of freedom, and a lot of it’s up to you what you make out of it. You can sit there and starve, but you don’t have to. 

I guess it goes back to the history of the culture. Prior to the developing of the coalfields, this area here, there was nothing here. It’s kind of hard to really make a profit farming these mountains, so the land ended up being settled by the people who didn’t have the means to get much better places, and then they learned to make a living out of these hills. 

You see all these people [who think us] Appalachians are all just backwards, hillbillies, or whatever you want to call it. We’re just people like anywhere else. All we want to do is be happy and live a good life.

You have people called hillbillies, rednecks, or whatever. I guess the only thing different from somebody here, and somebody maybe living in D.C. or something like that, we still live a little closer to our land. We still raise gardens. We still kill a deer. We still know how to cut it up. We still know where our food comes from most of the time.

The first thing I would tell [outsiders], we’re just like anybody else. It takes all kinds to make the world go round. These people around here, we might be a tad more friendlier than other people, and I hope it stays that way. Just because we’re Appalachians, don’t be afraid of us. We ain’t going to hurt you. 

The happiest [times have been] marrying my wife, having my kids, meeting people and having good friends. Killing the first deer maybe. A lot of small things.

My sister, the guy she married used to work in the mines. He got cut off in the mines around maybe 1984 or ’85. They ended up moving next to Charleston, South Carolina. She’s going retire. He is retired, and they live down there. (Only family) That’s it. It’s me. The only time I went back to Germany was when my Dad was sick, and that was no vacation. It was trying to take care of him. [If I miss anything about Germany it’s] maybe the food, and maybe the beer. (Laughs) 

My hobbies got started out of boredom. The railroad used to be real bad. Because I work in the maintenance and weigh department, we used to get cut off every winter. There we were, about three or four months sitting at the house. Nothing. No money. So I started getting interested in working wood because it’s abundant [and] you don’t have to have much to get started. Then, I started watching Roy Underhill, ‘The Woodwright Show,’ [and] I really got started in working in traditional woodworking. From then it went to volunteering at the Crab Orchard Museum at Tazewell. [I started] meeting people, and then it got to the point, [I started] going and camping out at the rendezvous. You see all this stuff, and you start getting into tanning hides. It just developed like that.

I do traditional woodworking, or green woodworking. It’s all done with hand tools. I like to make bowls, spoons. I made stuff like hay rakes before, shoulder yokes. I like to make stuff that’s practical in a way. I like to carve walking sticks. But you know, it’s just things like that, nothing fancy. It’s not really carving, more or less whittling.

Tanning hides is just one way of using something that would have been thrown away, for one thing, and another thing it saves you a lot of money. If you have to go buy all these hides, they’re expensive. So, you know, just do it yourself.

Deer hides are something, that once people know you do that, you get blessed. You get blessed with deer hides. There are some people below us. They love to hunt, but they don’t eat the deer, so around deer season you get a call. Alright, I’ll go get it.

I got some white tail deer. I’ve got some coyote. I got some fox. I do have a skunk, but I did not tan the skunk. I ain’t got my nerve up for that yet. I have an elk hide, and the way I come about the elk hide, some neighbors of ours went out west hunting, and they got lucky enough they killed two elk. They salted the hide, and they brought it back, and I guess they had intentions of doing it, but they never got around to it. They give them to a friend of mine. He knew I was doing hides, so he came up one day and asked me if I want an elk. I said, ‘Sure.’ He brought me two [and] I tanned them out. I gave him one, and I kept one.

I don’t sell the hides. I’m not a tanner, and another reason it’s too much work. Ain’t nobody would give you what it’s worth to do it.

The most difficult times [were] probably the times I was laid-off. I didn’t have any money. When we got married, we bought a little spot of land. It wasn’t but two acres with a trailer on it, and we bought it rent to own. Railroad unemployment didn’t pay much to start with. There was times when they was going to say, ‘Well you going to have to go,’ and stuff like that. It was real hard. [Another difficult time was] missing my parents. I kind of feel guilty for leaving them behind. 

(Importance of preserving history) For one thing, it’s the children. The kids. And even the adults, too, but especially the kids. It’s not that we’re trying to convert everybody to go back to tanning hides or whatever, but you need to know where you’re coming from, to know where you going go to. You know, everybody says, ‘Oh, kids nowadays, they ain’t no good. They ain’t no good.’ They’re just kids! You can expose them [to history], and their minds ain’t spoiled yet. You’d be amazed how some kids you can just see it in their eyes over the simplest things.

I want to be remembered just as myself. Just as somebody that’s trying to be happy. I’m not going to change the world a whole lot, but I hope not too many people got bad memories about me.”

Aaron Owens

“There always seems to be a sense of gloom or despair that hangs in the air when you look at the economic situation, and I think that’s dampened some really proud moments. I graduated with a Geology Degree, and I graduated about the time the coal industry really took its hit. That’s one of the reasons why I got an Education Degree. It seems like the happy is mixed with the sad around here.” 

Aaron Owens, High School Teacher; Princeton, West Virginia: 

“I’ve lived in Mercer County, well in Princeton, my entire life. My Grandfather worked for the coalmines, had a business running house coal from place to place. My Dad’s a mining engineer. We’ve got mining in our family going all the way back to just after the Civil War. My family’s lived in the Appalachian Mountains since right around mid to early 1800’s, some going back into the 1700’s, so we’ve been here a long time. 

I still see my grandmother quite a bit. Because I have summers off, I go out to eat with her every Wednesday, and see her at church. One of my grandfathers died when I was real young, then the other one died when I was in middle school so I didn’t really know them as well as I would have liked to have. But, I’ve spent a lot of time with my grandparents. I like listening to some of the stories that they’ll tell about when they were growing up. My grandmother, one of her favorite stories is of when she was growing up. She says that they used to take a pig bladder and inflate it and use it as a ball. 

[My grandfathers] did leave a legacy; you have to work hard to get ahead. I’ve always been taught to respect my elders, and to value your family, and to not do anything that would be embarrassing to them or my parents. I don’t think you could stress working hard enough. That’s something that’s really important, especially in my family, and in most families around here. Treat people with respect. Be honest. Just general things that I think have made America great over the years. 

I live on a road named after a creek. It’s the Twelve Mile Road, named after the Twelve Mile Creek. Well when they put in the train tunnel they actually drained the creek so the Twelve Mile Creek doesn’t exist anymore. [My grandparents would tell] stories about the coalfields, how people lived when they lived back in some of those hollers. Like I said, my family’s lived within this area for hundreds of years, so we’ve got a lot of ties to this area.

I haven’t really lived through any real hard times, but I’m not that old. I’m twenty-four. But a sad aspect of my life has been the fact that my grandfather was the only one of four of his siblings to stay in this area, so a lot of my cousins on that side of my family are gone; they’re in Tennessee and D.C., and places like that. A lot of that is because of the economic situation in this region. On the other side of the family, they’re real close. A sad part of my life is not being really able to get as close to those parts of my family as I would have liked to have. 

I went to Princeton High School, graduated in 2009. I was in the marching band. I was always into the country boy stuff. I wore cowboy hats and stuff like that. I started [Civil War] re-enacting as soon as I graduated high school because I had researched my family’s history and found out I had an ancestor who fought for the 47th Virginia Infantry. I found out now that I’ve got about five or six guys who fought for the Confederate Army. I’ve been re-enacting for about six years, and that’s pretty much what I do in my free time. I live on a small farm. We have beef cows. Most of us work, and kind of try to make things go. (Laughs)

My mother is an accountant and my father was a mining engineer. They both worked very hard. They’re still together [which is] becoming an increasingly rare thing amongst my friends. They both went to church throughout my entire life. Dad worked hard, but because of their education they didn’t have to work on Sunday so we went to church together. I’ve been going to church since I was a week old, so I grew up in a very Christian family. 

My mother’s real easygoing. She’s got a personality like myself. She’s fulfilled a lot of what you would consider the traditional role, the roles of a mother in a household. But in a lot of ways because she was working, [she] spent a lot of time outside of the house. 

My father, he’s a pretty ambitious guy. He’s always trying to improve our property, or do something different. We’re working on getting our orchard trees up and running. That’s kind of the big project he’s working on right now. His whole philosophy in life has been work hard and work harder. That’s just what he does. Living here around Princeton, there’s not a lot of higher level, good-paying jobs. I drive forty-five minutes to work, and he’s been driving forty-five. He drives from here to Charleston every day right now, because the economy’s taking a really bad hit, especially in the coal industry.

I’ve studied history, and one of the unique parts about Appalachian culture in this area is we’re fiercely independent. We value our privacy. We value working hard and having something. It’s always been pretty much driven into me that you have to go out and you have to make a living for yourself. 

I think people think we’re backwards. They conjure up this image of dueling banjos and walking around barefoot. Don’t get me wrong, I play a banjo, and I walk around barefoot a lot, but my house has electricity. We did tear down the outhouse from the farm about two years ago. (Laughs) We’ve had running water our entire life. It really doesn’t bother me because I’m a pretty easygoing person, but you know, I think [the stereotypes] have been used to exploit this region. I think they’ve used it as a justification; ‘Well those people are just backwards. They don’t know what they’ve got. Let’s take what resources we can from them, then roll over their rights as soon as we get a chance.’ 

Those of us here in Southern West Virginia and Southwest Virginia, we do cling to tradition, but at the same time, we’re not backwards. We’re the same as people everywhere else in the world. We wake up in the morning. We try to put food on the table. We value our lives. We value what we have, and we just try to make our way in the world about as best as we can. 

We live in a harsh environment. There’s a lot of wildlife and stuff here, even now, that can kill you. A lot of us work dangerous jobs. I’m the first Owens in a hundred and fifty years that hasn’t worked for the coal industry in some fashion, and probably won’t. I don’t know, I’ve got a geology degree, I might. But, working hard and making a living for yourself and providing for your family, that’s culturally important here. We have very strong family ties. I grew up on the same road my grandmother grew up on. We’ve got cousins on both sides of that road, basically, for the whole length of it. We grew up around those people that we were related to. Having a lot of respect for your family, and having respect for tradition was always a very important thing to us. 

I love it here. I’ve lived here my whole life. I like Appalachian culture, old timey music, and the fact that I’m around my family a lot. But even more than that, I think that if you keep your head about you, and you’re responsible and you work hard, you can have a pretty good life here in the Appalachian Mountains. It’s all about how you view things. People will always say, ‘Oh, we don’t have anything to do here in West Virginia.’ There’s more here to do in West Virginia, than anywhere else you could go. (Laughs) 

You go to a place like New York or even smaller cities like Beckley [and] what do you do? You go to a club or you go out to eat at a restaurant. That’s what you do day in and day out. Here, every day is something new. You can go white water rafting, you can build a new fence on your property, or you can work hard to get a bigger piece of property, but there’s always something new that you could do here. I’ve always loved that. The fact that it’s not the same generic, do the same thing over and over again for fun. I think this is the best place in the world where you can do that. We can grow our food here, we can hunt for food if we choose to, we can ride four-wheelers on our property, and do stuff along those lines, and that’s pretty much what kept me here. 

[The economy is] causing people to leave. I’ve been lucky because my parents were pretty well educated [and] they had pretty good jobs. Dad lost a pretty good job about a year back that was related to the coal industry. Something that he really liked doing. But, he lost that position and it’s really personally affected my family. It doesn’t make anything easier working in the school system, people move away because their parents have lost their jobs. It’s just sad to see how it affects these families in this area. The economy has gotten about as bad as it’s been since the eighties. 

I’ve done a little bit of geology; that’s part of what my education is based on. We have more abundant natural water supplies here than just about anywhere else in the country. You know where they’re doing those big DPIS Projects out in the Midwest and out in the West? They’re pulling groundwater out that won’t replenish itself for years. We don’t have to worry about that here. I think agriculture can be a big part of the [economic] solution in this area. Now we don’t have as good a farmland, we use our heads and put together some kind of greenhouses or something. I think that could be a big part of the answer [to economic sustainability]. 

On the other hand, we have here in the state of West Virginia more natural resources as far as coal, oil, (up in the northern part anyway0; natural gas, and we have a geothermal hotspot. Energy, I think, is going to be a part of our future. I don’t think there’s any way to get around that, because of how abundant it is. The Marcellus Shale Field, I mean it’s just absolutely astonishing how much natural gas that they discovered in just one layer of rock. But I think it’s a mixed approach. You have to look at primary industries, things that have worked successfully in this region in the past, and apply them in new ways that will make it more sustainable for the future. 

The happiest I ever am is when I’m back at my house. I love spending time with my parents. I love spending time with my grandmother. I love being outdoors, and doing stuff like this, living history. I was really happy that I graduated from a local college, Concord University. That was a very happy time that I’ve lived through. It has been a dreary atmosphere for the past ten years though, and I’m lucky in the sense that I’ve never had to suffer personally because of it. 

There always seems to be a sense of gloom or despair that hangs in the air when you look at the economic situation, and I think that’s dampened some really proud moments. I graduated with a Geology Degree, and I graduated about the time the coal industry really took its hit. That’s one of the reasons why I got an Education Degree. So it seems like the happy is mixed with the sad around here. 

I’ve always been big into history, and it really started with a third grade Social Studies Fair. We researched genealogy, and I did it all on the American Civil War. I found out that I had ancestors who fought, and that kind of really lit the spark. I went through high school, and I got to where I knew quite a bit about history, both this war [Civil War], the American Revolution, and World War II. Those were the three big highlights of my studies, but I personally studied and I actually sought out joining the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV). 

[SCV is] an organization dedicated to the preservation and remembrance of our Confederate ancestors. We’re all descendants of Confederate ancestors. I’m descended from five that I know of so far. When I joined the SCV, one of the guys recruited me as being a cannoneer. I just absolutely love it, I got addicted. I went to the 150th and 1st Manassas, and it was the first big event I went to. And it was 109 degrees, and when you considered in the humidity, it was like 120 or something crazy like that. It was burning up. 

We don’t cause any trouble; we’re out here remembering our ancestors and pretty much teaching people more about the way that their ancestors lived. We should really keep doing this, because if you don’t have living historians we just erase everything that our ancestors lived through. We can forget about all of it, and then we’ll just never learn anything. We will never advance forward. We’re out here so that we can learn from the troubled times of our ancestors’ past. 

In a democracy, it’s important for us to understand what the consequences of our decisions will be, because they are real. Things will happen because of the choices that we make; politically, economically, and socially. We have to suffer for it, or we benefit from it. There are bad and good things that come out of every situation, but to prevent us from being stuck, we need to learn from the past. 

It’s one of the most fun hobbies I could ever think of. I just love being outside. I’m an outdoorsman anyway. I like being out here, hanging out with the guys. We sit around the campfire and enjoy it. The real fun part isn’t battle re-enactments, it’s the camaraderie that we get from this, and we’re all a very close-knit group. All of us are friends and we’d all lay down our life for the other ones. I think it’s a really important part of developing a good, full life. You develop a good group of friends, and that’s what this is. This is about friendship. 

I want to be a person who doesn’t let his family down. That’s what I want my legacy to be. I want to be one of the generations that pushes his family forward, not backwards.”