Reclaiming and Revitalizing Resources in West Virginia’s Southern Coalfields

*Note: this is the second of two stories on how faith and community leaders are working together to address clean water and healthy food infrastructure in McDowell County, W.Va. Read part one here.

Even in times of drought, the Tug Fork River runs with surprising strength along the town of Gary in West Virginia’s McDowell County. With more than 9,000 creeks and streams, West Virginia is one of the most water-rich states in the nation. 

But the safety of that water for drinking is suspect. In a ditch just outside town, it’s orange and contaminated with runoff. 

That’s why on a hot September day, city workers, including Gary’s mayor, are helping to distribute 16 pallets of bottled water to county residents. A line of cars stretches through the parking lot of Gary’s town hall. Vehicles keep coming, and by mid-afternoon only one pallet of water remains. 

This bottled water is a temporary solution. But for Rev. Brad Davis and his colleague Rev. Caitlin Ware, providing clean water in the short term while working with community partners to solve the systemic problems of water access is directly tied to their interpretation of Christianity. 

“Preach the gospel at all times, and if necessary use words,” says Davis, quoting St. Francis of Assisi. “Modeling our ministry on the life of Jesus means meeting folks’ needs and in rehumanizing people, marginalized people.”

This is a key tenet of Davis and Ware’s work, which they’re undertaking as United Methodist pastors in a place where the UMC has a complicated history.

Gary was created by the United States Steel Corporation and named for the company’s founder. Under the banner of a subsidiary, U.S. Coal and Coke, these hollers were for decades home to one of West Virginia’s most productive coal mining operations. 

The relationship was a paternalistic one. The corporation owned and operated everything. The objective, Davis says, was passive contentment. Workers often had no option but to buy all their goods at company-run stores using company-issued currency, known as scrip. Company towns had no elected officials; even local police forces were controlled by the company. 

Then in the 1980s, U.S. Steel pulled out, and Gary, along with a number of other former company towns, have been dealing with crumbling water infrastructure and contaminated water for decades. A 2019 study showed 36 of West Virginia’s 55 counties, including McDowell, ranked in the worst third of U.S. counties for health-based violations of the Safe Drinking Water Act. 

The town of Keystone was under a boil water advisory for nearly a decade before the McDowell County PSD used grant funds to make a $6.2 million fix to that system in 2022. 

It will take $6-7 million to repair the town of Anawalt’s water system, and federal funds from the American Rescue Plan Act received by the state could be used for that project, Davis says. 

Meanwhile, the state has sent ARPA funds earmarked for water infrastructure elsewhere. A Charleston Gazette-Mail investigation found that the West Virginia Water Development Authority recently awarded up to $5 million from the Economic Enhancement Grant Fund, to a conservative Catholic college in Steubenville, Ohio. The Water Development Authority had previously appropriated $427 million of ARPA money into that fund for use on projects across the state, according to its website. In addition to building a branch campus in the West Virginia town of Weirton, St. Joseph the Worker  plans to use $1 million of the grant monies to construct a “Center for Common Good” in Weirton that would engage in political advocacy by supporting “broadly life-affirming policy in West Virginia.” 

As of publication, the Anawalt project has received only $1 million from that same fund. The project is on hold. 

“When the very body tasked with improving our woefully inadequate water systems awards much of its funding to other areas of the state while thousands of southern West Virginians are forced to rely on bottled water for drinking, washing, cooking and bathing, it’s easy to understand how the prevailing feeling is that nobody cares about this place or its people,” wrote Davis in a January 15 op-ed published in the Gazette-Mail. 

The demand for clean water in McDowell County is but one element of a groundswell of community-based activism to reclaim and revitalize resources. 

Calling forth the concept of jubilee, an Old Testament practice that, among other things, restored land to its rightful owners, Davis has written, “Our time of liberation — rooted in the return of and to our land — is here.” He urges landholding companies to do their part, to give back the land that generated immense wealth for them to the people of McDowell County. 

For Ware, the return of the land is critical: “Southern coalfield people have been so othered on so many different levels for so long, they need to know that their personhood has value to God,” she says. 

This work, Davis and Ware believe, is exactly what Jesus would want them to do. 

“That’s sharing the good news with folks,” Davis says.

‘Everything’s Interrelated’

There have been numerous efforts to help improve life for McDowell County residents. DigDeep, a California-based nonprofit, has been in the county for years, working with the community to build water infrastructure. Reconnecting McDowell built housing in downtown Welch in an effort to attract teachers. And federal and state support is available in emergencies.

But the underlying systemic issues remain: the need for broad-based economic development and living-wage jobs; access to affordable health care and other essential amenities. 

“Everything’s interrelated,” says Reconnecting McDowell’s Mark Kemp. “When you tackle these problems one at a time, it’s like you’re on a hamster wheel.”

Nonetheless, for now that piecemeal work must be done.

Dressed in a black Chicago White Sox T-shirt, Kemp has arrived in Gary on this September day to hand out bottles of cold water. Without Davis and Ware, Kemp says, these water distributions wouldn’t be happening. It’s natural for folks to lose momentum. “Weeks down the road, the enthusiasm becomes a slog.” But Davis has been “good at keeping us all motivated.”

It seems as if the whole community has shown up for this event. McDowell County Public Service District worker Darrell Williams stops by to help out. He was waiting for two other workers to join him in repairing a nearby waterline break. “We’re fixing a leak every two seconds, it feels like,” he says. 

“Doing this thing,” he adds, “is better than just sitting around.” 

Another resident, in line to get a couple of cases of bottled water, is hesitant to share her name. She says she pays her $75 water bill faithfully each month. 

“And orange water comes out our taps. So here I am.” 

A Self-Sustained Community

In a pocket of southern McDowell County, a half-dozen miles from the Virginia border, Jason Tartt is advancing the vision of a coalfield jubilee.

Tartt is the cofounder of Economic Development Greater East, a training, demonstration and research farm. Some of this land has been in his family for generations; he grew up on it in a historically Black community then called Hartwell. Tartt points out the former site of the community’s school and a long-ago shuttered brown-and-beige shingled church. “It was a self-sustained community, largely. The people took care of each other,” he says. 

Listen: Jason Tartt on partnering with the faith community

Tartt made a career in the military and as a defense contractor, then returned home. After planting a garden, he read an article in a West Virginia Department of Agriculture publication about attracting veterans to farming, then attended a meeting in nearby Logan. 

He was advised to plant potatoes.

“​​Me, I don’t know anything about farming,” he says of his perspective at the time. “You say, ‘Grow potatoes,’ all right, I’ll go get my little four or five acres and I’ll put potatoes on it.”

Fortunately, he was soon introduced to Sylvester “Sky” Edwards, the man who would become his mentor. Edwards schooled Tartt on the business side of agriculture. What made sense to grow in this steep terrain with relatively narrow valleys? Edwards advocated, quite logically, for a practice called mountain farming. 

Together, they founded EDGE. 

“We listened to what the mountains were telling us,” Tartt says, “and the mountains say we’ve got walnut trees all over the place. Mountains say we’ve got apple trees, we’ve got pear trees, we’ve got peaches.” There are also plenty of maple trees — “beekeepers’ dreams.” 

There’s an apiary. A sawmill. A tomato-based sauce that EDGE markets under the brand Appalachian Gold.

Among Tartt’s co-conspirators in this initiative are Amelia Bandy, who met Tartt while working just across the border for the Virginia Department of Health (the two shared their concerns about persistently poor health outcomes and health disparities), and Donnie Hairston, who, like Tartt, left the region, served in the military and returned home, now an “elder statesman soil expert.” Hairston is overseer of “Donnie’s Lovely Ladies,” a brood of natural-fed chickens that yield brilliantly yellow-yolked eggs local bakers clamor for.

Sustainability is a core EDGE principle, based partially on research that shows Central Appalachia is projected to be the largest habitable area in the continental U.S. by 2050, but that supporting the incoming population will require water-control efforts, hydroelectric-energy generation and mined-land remediation.

Listen: “You never want to leave it.” Donnie Hairston on his love of the land

​EDGE is taking a proactive role in that remediation. One example is an agreement with the Natural Resources Conservation Service to create new stream pathways to reduce the likelihood of flooding. They’re also planting along stream banks to reinforce them. 

There are also plans for a sustainable timbering initiative with a group called the Hatfield Union Timber cooperative that would practice silvopasturing, which integrates trees and livestock on the same land. 

“​​It’s essentially the way that mountaineers used to farm,” Davis says. A variety of livestock — from cows to goats to chickens — are rotated in to roam and forage on land that’s also timbered. A sawmill will provide employment and a portion of the wood can be made available for the construction of affordable housing in the area. 

Here on the EDGE farm, goats mingle with Donnie’s Lovely Ladies.

People for whom goat is a dietary staple are moving into the area, but no one has stepped up to accommodate it,” Tartt says. “EDGE is doing that. That’s what we do.” 

EDGE is identifying the economic drivers in this region and training future entrepreneurs to take advantage of them. Through its American Youth Agripreneur Association, EDGE offers internships to local young people with the objective of creating “a pipeline of young agripreneurs.”

“Walmart should not exist in rural communities,” Tartt says. “It’s a rural America killer. For every Walmart that exists here, you’re talking about, how many, 100 small businesses that could be created right here in this community?” 

EDGE is the entrepreneurial engine.

‘Not How God Intends Things To Be’

For United Methodist pastors Davis and Ware, EDGE’s work aligns with the idea of the holler gospel, of coming alongside those in the “low places” to work with them toward a better future. It’s the discipleship they believe their faith demands. 

“We’ve got to be in our communities, being signs, demonstrating the kingdom, pointing people to the kingdom and saying, ‘Hey, dirty, contaminated water, not having access to clean water, that’s not how God intends things to be,’” Davis says. 

“The very term ‘disciple’ means follower,” he notes. “If we’re actually following Jesus, following his example that he gives us, then we will be in the community embodying the kingdom, which is what he did.”

Sometimes that means doing the immediate relief work like water distributions. But it also means leveraging the power of the church as an institution and using the clergy to make the moral and ethical case for the work of groups like EDGE.

Davis set up a fund with the United Methodist Foundation of West Virginia to provide financial support for EDGE’s efforts to create an independent food system. The goal is to provide fresh, affordable food in McDowell County, which is very much a food desert: 500-plus square miles and only two supermarkets. 

The vision is for local food to be sold in those supermarkets and in a network of local farmers’ markets. But for that vision to be realized, growers like Tartt need access to land, an argument Davis makes in a letter written with other faith leaders to land-holding companies. He writes that the return of local land to local people and communities would “lead to economic freedom and social empowerment — a reset of the socioeconomic order.” 

West Virginia ranks at the bottom of the nation in numerous health outcomes. It’s second to last in per capita income. Repairing the land in McDowell County, Ware believes, could show a way forward for the rest of the state. 

“It’s God moving from below.”

Laura Harbert Allen covers religion, culture and democracy for 100 Days in Appalachia and is a Report for America Corps member. Taylor Sisk is 100 Days in Appalachia’s health care correspondent.