Physician. Historian.
Sara Lee Kaznoski, Mary Kay Rogers, Mary Matish, and Norma Snyder all kissed their husbands goodbye on November 19th, 1968. It was not a particularly remarkable day for them. Their husbands had been miners for years. Sara’s husband, Pete, had first went into the mines at the age of 14. All three of the men…
On this day in 1969, 2000 miners marched on the West Virginia State Capitol to demand recognition of black lung disease. Eight days before, on February 18th, the mines in the southern West Virginia coalfields emptied as miners walked off the job. This “wildcat” strike was not authorized or endorsed by the miners’ union, the…
Ollie Combs was the sort of tough Appalachian woman that all of us who live here can recognize. She was born in 1904, in Knott County, deep in the Kentucky coalfields. We know little about her early life, but we can speculate. Like other women born in the Appalachian coalfields in that time, she witnessed…
Harriet B. Jones was born in Ebensburg, Pennsylvania in 1856. However, her family later moved to Terra Alta, West Virginia, where she was raised. At the age of 12, her father enrolled her in the Wheeling Female College. The school’s aim was to provide women with a liberal arts education, not to mimic the presumably…
It’s October and time for ghost stories. Some of these are well known, some well-known but the details often glossed over, and some are not known to those beyond their small towns. Today we’re starting with the story of the Greenbrier Ghost. In November 1896, Erasmus Shue married Zona Heaster, making her his third wife.…
Individuals of all nationalities and ethnicities migrated to the Appalachian coalfields at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. Many of those groups are very familiar to today’s residents of Appalachia, for their descendants remain. Many communities in Appalachia, for instance, boast strong Italian American populations. The most beloved West Virginia…
This post is picking up from part one. Please go back and read it if you haven’t already. Things were not better at the end of World War II. Funding for schools, like funding for roads, remained a serious problem. West Virginia could not maintain competitive teacher salaries. Teachers began to leave the state in…
West Virginia teachers have went on strike twice in the past two years. The strike of 2018 set off a wave of teacher protests around the country. The strike of 2019 was brief. The state legislature apparently learned its lesson: don’t threaten public education. Currently, the Senate is at it again. On June 3rd it…
Harrison County Mayors Discuss Fixing West Virginia Roads[1] West Virginia Officials: Staffing Issues Slowing Road Repair[2] West Virginia’s commissioner of highways tours 50 miles of roads in Marshall County[3] Miller Brings Out Platform—Hits School Politics and Condition of Roads in Talk at Armory[4] Bad Road Conditions Trigger ‘Blockade’[5] Gov. Justice announces plans to fix secondary…
West Virginia is not only about coal. Our history cannot be simplified down to our relationship with only one industry. We have had many industries come and go over the years, for better or worse. Our identities do not come down to our relationship with this industry. However, to understand West Virginia today, it’s vitally…