HON 251: Encountering Appalachia: Film, Photography, and Material Culture: Oral Histories

These interviews focused on the coal camp of Barthell, founded in 1901 in McCreary County, Kentucky as the first camp of the Stearns Coal and Lumber Company. Stearns later became one of the three largest coal producers in the United States in the 1920s. Former residents provide information on the physical layout of the camp and camp life; material culture and the company story; mining work routines, accidents, company policies; recreational activities, schools, and churches; and migrations out of the camps in the 1950s and 1960s.

This project concerns the social and cultural history of coal communities in eastern Kentucky, with emphasis on Auxier and Van Lear. Family issues and gender roles are explored, as well as modernization, consumerism, religion, farm life, class distinctions, poverty, the Great Depression, company stores, birth control, divorce, company doctors, immigrants, home brew, homosexuality, blacks, the Ku Klux Klan, and the roles of women in the community.

This project documents the lives of immigrant coal miners in eastern Kentucky. In the early twentieth century, people from Belgium, Hungary, Italy, Mexico, Poland, Scotland, Russia, and Yugoslavia settled in Hazard, Himlerville (now Beauty), Jackson, Lynch, and other eastern Kentucky towns. Immigrants and their descendants discuss schools, prejudice and other problems they have experienced, the roles of women in mining camps, social activities, ethnic clubs, moonshine, World War II, housing, coal mining, mechanization, union activities, the United Mine Workers of America, Miners for Democracy, United States Steel, wages, mine safety, company stores, scrip, and mine bosses.

These interviews with moonshiners and revenuers in Wayne County document their lives, the making of moonshine, its economic benefits, the tactics used by officers in pursuing the distillers, and the tactics used by the distillers to escape them.

These interviews focus on the social and cultural changes in the Marrowbone Creek area of southern Pike County (the Elkhorn coal fields) in the 1920s and 1930s, when the largely agrarian economy became an industrial one. The living standards, labor practices, and working conditions that marked this transformation of local, independent farmers into industrial wage-laborers required adjustments and provoked intense resistance and labor activism among residents. Miners, operators, labor organizers, and area residents discuss Elkhorn City, the Edgewater mining camp, and the Wolfpit, Dunleary, and Weeksbury mines.

This project documents the origins of the craft industry in Eastern Kentucky and that of the various organizations that have had, and continue to have, a significant impact on the industry and crafters. More particularly, interviewees discuss the diverse ways in which they have come to be involved with the Kentucky craft industry, the nature and challenges of their particular trades, and the personal, financial, and structural challenges that they have faced, and continue to face, as members of, or leaders in, respective Kentucky craft organizations.

This project documents not only the history of the craft industry in Eastern Kentucky, but, also, the more recent histories of emergent independent craft cooperatives: organizations that have come to provide alternative options to the neoliberal economic practices supported by many preexisting Kentucky craft organizations.

This oral history project explores the legacies and impact of Appalshop by documenting the lives of people who have been a part of its story. A Kentucky-based organization, Appalshop has been making media and art since its founding in 1969.

These interviews document the history of the Frontier Nursing Service (FNS), an organization begun in 1925 by Mary Breckinridge to bring primary health care to remote areas of eastern Kentucky. Nurses, doctors, Eastern Kentucky residents, and supporters of the FNS discuss Appalachia, farming, logging, home remedies, education, social activities, coal mining, corn hoeing, dancing, quilting, moonshine, canning and preserving, midwives, government relief programs, infant mortality, "haint" tales (ghost stories), the unionization of the coal mines, stonemasonry, mountain diseases, the influenza epidemic of 1918, snake handling, churches, the Presbyterian church in Leslie County, the Great Depression, transportation, fund-raising, feuds, the Frontier Graduate School of Midwifery, the Red Bird Center, Oneida Baptist Institute, Mary Breckinridge Hospital, the Philadelphia Committee, the Washington Committee, the Cutshin Clinic, Mary Breckinridge, Richard M. Nixon's visit to Hyden in 1979, Flat Creek, Big Bullskin Creek, Leslie County in the 1920s, and Leslie County politics.

Present and former residents of Jenkins, Kentucky discuss the history of the area and their lives there. (Also, note who conducted these interviews!)

The Queer Appalachia Oral History Project captures the diverse stories of gay, lesbian, transgender, bisexual, and questioning individuals who grew up, and/or currently live in the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) designated Central Appalachian Region, especially Eastern Kentucky. The stories collected depict the conditions of growing up queer in Appalachia, starting with the 1960s onward. Interviews include a diverse group of subjects, including medical doctors, accomplished authors, journalists, hair dressers, public health professionals and artists. Topics covered include violence and discrimination, religion, rural to urban migration, health (including HIV/AIDS, drug abuse, mental health), sexual activity, education/carrer choices, public health, and art and humanities.

This project documents the War on Poverty in the Appalachian Region of Kentucky. Topics discussed include the Appalachian Volunteers, Head Start programs, the Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA), the Community Action Program, conflicts between natives and "outsiders", charges that volunteers were spreading communism, the Pike County Sedition Case, and the founding of the Appalachian Research and Defense Fund.

This project documents the role of women in the strikes by the United Mine Workers of America and Coal Workers of America in Pikeville and Brookside from 1972 to 1974. Topics include organizing, picketing, child care, health benefits, the Brookside coal mine, Pikeville, unions, coal operators, and coal miners.

This project consists of interviews concerning women coal miners in Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia. Topics include coal mining, coal camps, unions, Great Depression, sexism, poverty, Native Americans in Appalachia, economic conditions, political activism, and environmental pollution.