^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Folklife Center News American Folklife Center The Library of Congress Summer-Fall 1993 Volume XV, Numbers 3 and 4 ISSN 0149-6840 Catalog Card No. 77-649628 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ The American Folklife Center was created in 1976 by the U.S. Congress to "preserve and present American folklife" through programs of research, documentation, archival preservation, reference service, live performance, exhibition, publication, and training. The Center incorporates the Archive of Folk Culture, which was established in the Music Division of the Library of Congress in 1928 and is now one of the largest collections of ethnographic material from the United States and around the world. Administration Alan Jabbour, Director Timothy Lloyd, Acting Deputy Director Doris Craig, Administrative Assistant Carol Moran, Clerk Camila Bryce-Laporte, Program Coordinator Jennifer A. Cutting, Program Coordinator Acquisitions Joseph C. Hickerson, Head Processing Stephanie A. Hall, Archivist Catherine Hiebert Kerst, American Memory Project Programs Peter T. Bartis, Folklife Specialist Mary Hufford, Folklife Specialist David A. Taylor, Folklife Specialist Publications James Hardin, Editor Public Events Thea Caemmerer, Coordinator Reference Gerald E. Parsons, Reference Librarian Judith A. Gray, Folklife Specialist Administrative Office Tel: 202 707-6590 Reference Service Tel: 202 707-5510 Federal Cylinder Project Tel: 202 707-1740 Board of Trustees William L. Kinney, Jr., Chair, South Carolina John Penn Fix III, Vice Chair, Washington Nina Archabal, Minnesota Lindy Boggs, Louisiana; Washington, D.C. Carolyn Hecker, Maine Robert Malir, Jr., Kansas Judith McCulloh, Illinois Juris Ubans, Maine Ex Officio Members James H. Billington, Librarian of Congress Robert McCormick Adams, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution Jane Alexander, Chairman, National Endowment for the Arts Sheldon Hackney, Chairman, National Endowment for the Humanities Alan Jabbour, Director, American Folklife Center FOLKLIFE CENTER NEWS James Hardin, Editor David A. Taylor, Editorial Advisor Timothy Lloyd, Editorial Review John Biggs, Library of Congress Graphics Unit, Designer Folklife Center News publishes articles on the programs and activities of the American Folklife Center, as well as other articles on traditional expressive culture. It is available free of charge from the Library of Congress, American Folklife Center, Washington, D.C. 20540-8100. Folklife Center News does not publish announcements from other institutions or reviews of books from publishers other than the Library of Congress. Readers who would like to comment on Center activities or newsletter articles may address their remarks to the editor. FOLKLINE For timely information on the field of folklore and folklife, including training and professional opportunities and news items of national interest, a taped announcement is available around the clock, except during the hours of 9 A.M. until noon (eastern time) each Monday, when it is updated. Folkline is a joint project of the American Folklife Center and the American Folklore Society. Dial: 202 707-2000 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ EDITOR'S NOTES Heritage Areas ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ In 1991, the American Folklife Center was invited by the National Park Service to conduct a cultural survey in southern West Virginia and to participate in discussions about the development of a heritage center near Grandview (see Folklife Center News, winter 1992). The project is one of many around the country that is leading to a national system of cultural heritage areas. Alan Jabbour describes the movement as follows: "Heritage areas" is by now the generic term for the constellation of organizations dedicated to conserving the heritage of a certain area, corridor, or district through cultural planning and programming, done through partnership arrangements with local, state, and national organizations and agencies. Certain national parks dating from the 1970s, like Lowell [in Massachusetts] and Jean Lafitte [in Louisiana], can be seen in retrospect to have been harbingers of the movement. A clutch of Pennsylvania heritage corridors, fueled by federal legislation, developed in the 1980s [see Shalom Staub, "The Pennsylvania Heritage Parks Program," Folklife Center News, Spring 1992]. Then, inspired by the accomplishments of their Pennsylvania colleagues, other senators and congressmen began sponsoring legislation for other heritage areas--mostly in the East but more and more in the Midwest, South, and West. By now there are dozens of examples of heritage-areas legislation pending. In this special issue of Folklife Center News, Center folklife specialist Mary Hufford writes of her experience working with the Park Service and the residents of the New River Gorge area in West Virginia. Center Authorized for Two Years In 1992, when a bill to reauthorize the American Folklife Center was introduced in the House of Representatives, a climate of fiscal conservatism led the Congress to limit authorization to one year. This surprising development prompted many persons from the folklife community around the country to write their congressional representatives in support of the Center. During 1993, a bill authorizing the Center for an additional four years (with a no-growth budget) passed the Senate, and a similar bill was taken up by the House. On July 22, 1993, the House Subcommittee on Libraries and Memorials approved unanimously the reauthorization of the American folklife Center for two years at the present budgetary level. The bill was then taken up by the full House Administration Committee to resolve the discrepancy in numbers of years. On August 5, the House Administration Committee approved unanimously and reported to the House floor a bill, H.R. 2074, reauthorizing the Center for fiscal years 1994 and 1995, and, on September 21, the bill passed the House of Representatives. On September 23, the Senate agreed to and voted to pass the same bill. It was signed by the president on October 8. More on the Minstrels of Ukraine A letter from Florida provides a chilling footnote to the story told by William Noll in the spring 1993 issue on the Ukrainian Cylinder project: Congratulations for a very interesting article in Folklife Center News, Spring 1993. Mr. William Noll did an excellent job when he authored the article on "Music, Life, and Death Among the Village Minstrels of Ukraine." The article reawakened long dormant feelings of nostalgia and sympathy for my unfortunate former homeland. I respectfully wish to bring to your attention an incident relating to "kobzari" of Ukraine which may not be known generally. The Russian composer Shostakovich, due to his talent and fame, was privy to many secrets of the Communist Party. When he passed away his family published his diary. It revealed that in 1930 the rulers in the Kremlin ordered that a gathering of all Ukrainian "kobzari" be held in Kharkiw. After the gathering a sumptuous banquet was held in their honor. After the banquet every "kobzari" attending the convention was executed. What a triumph it must have been for the Kremlin to murder 600 to 800 old and mostly blind men. Sincerely yours, Joseph Iwaniw Venice, Florida ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Breaking the Time Barrier: Folklife and Heritage Planning in Southern West Virginia By Mary Hufford ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ In 1991 and 1992, the American Folklife Center joined the National Park Service in planning for a cultural heritage center at the New River Gorge National River in Southern West Virginia. Congress added the New River Gorge to the national river system in 1978, incorporating within its boundaries fifty miles of the river and adjacent towns from Hinton to Hawk's Nest, including Grandview, a former state park and the proposed site for the cultural heritage center. The American Folklife Center's role was to identify a place for a cultural heritage center in the region's cultural and economic life. Field research by Rita Moonsammy (the project's field coordinator), Dillon Bustin, Karen Hudson, and me (the director) led to programmatic recommendations. These form a partial basis for the Park Service's Draft Development Concept Plan, which describes five alternatives for cultural heritage programming at Grandview and is slated for public review in December of 1993.1 Beyond scores of conversations with area residents and attendance at a variety of performances and community events, the Center's research also involved mapping the terrain of cultural administration and documenting portions of the planning process in which the field team participated. Early on, the researchers attended public hearings and formed an advisory group of community leaders, cultural administrators, and other specialists. The guidance of these advisors shaped both research and a planning document entitled: "The Grandview Cultural Heritage Center: Recommendations," much of which is included as Appendix B of the Draft Development Concept Plan. These recommendations distill the concerns voiced by area residents and project advisors into four basic issues: (1) economic development, (2) local involvement and partnerships, (3) control of public images, and (4) cultural change and continuity. These issues encapsulate a familiar catch-22. Residents value their locale for its sense of community and place. Yet, a flagging economy makes it difficult for many to continue living there. Tourism seems to hold out a promise of economic recovery, yet residents express misgivings about the impact of tourism on community life and values, and about whether the economic benefits of tourism would be equitably distributed. Like its industrial predecessors, tourism relies heavily on investment from outside the region, perpetuating a pattern of resource control that in Appalachia is historically linked with the manipulation of cultural images. A cultural heritage center might change that pattern by involving area residents in the planning and implementation of programs, and by encouraging the ongoing exploration of how culture, economy, and history interrelate. An Overlook, An Overview Grandview, as its name suggests, affords a spectacular view of the New River. From an overlook at a bend in the river one can survey seven miles of the only northward flowing river in this hemisphere. A celebrated geological remnant of the ancient Teays river system, the New River is the second oldest river in the world, junior only to the Nile.2 From an elevation of one thousand feet, the river appears almost pasted in place, but the roar rising from the gorge signals its power as it moves imperceptibly beneath the bridge at Prince, a railroad town on the opposite side where railroad workers, some retired, still make their homes. Train tracks running along both sides of the river have transported coal and timber out of the region since the 1870s. The surrounding coal-rich plateau and ridges in Raleigh, Fayette, and Summers counties were settled by Europeans during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, largely English, French, German, Irish, and Scots-Irish immigrants who came by way of Pennsylvania and Virginia. During the railroad, timber, and coal booms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, southern West Virginia absorbed thousands of immigrants from Eastern Europe and Italy, as well as Black migrants from the southern United States.3 Since World War II, cycles of depression in the mines have contributed to a pattern of out-migration and a sense of industrial decline, but the sonorous whistle of a train two hundred cars long and full of coal is testimony that coal is still West Virginia's number one industry, extracted in record quantities over the past few years. In the decades following World War II, as mines were "worked out" and as increased mechanization in working mines eliminated jobs, mountain residents poured into metropolitan areas to find employment, initially with northern factories in Ohio and Michigan, and more recently with construction projects in the Carolinas. Murray Shuff, of Beckley, whose father "worked the New River Gorge" in mines from Prince to Hawk's Nest, commented that "World War II migrated us out, whether we wanted to or not."4 Thus one hears it jokingly stated that "Reading, 'Riting, and Route 77" are West Virginia's three Rs. "When they hit that Hillbilly Highway," said Buford Harzog, who interprets the pioneer village near Beckley's Youth Museum, "There aren't enough to fill the schools, so they have to close them." "We probably have a contingent in Ohio: 'Little West Virginia,'" quipped Mary Wagner during the Thurmond Reunion, held in a National Park Service picnic pavilion beside the New River.5 Community and family ties are cultivated through reunions, and, exemplifying a pattern of "reverse migration," a number of residents have returned to retire after decades of working in places like Detroit, Pontiac, Baltimore, Columbus, Dayton, Akron, Cleveland, and Washington, D.C. "Fifty years later," declared Murray Shuff, "People are retiring and returning to these hills and coming back to their homes!" For Murray Shuff, the history of New River did not begin with coal, nor will it end when the coal is gone. "My people were here before industry, and they got along just fine. And the people here behind us will get along just fine, and we won't be tied to a coal economy." The state's number two industry occupies the river itself. From the overlook at Grandview, one may see whitewater rafters drift into view during the placid portion of a trip that will become more challenging when they reach Thurmond. It is to the rising tourism and recreation industry that the National Park Service visitor's map is oriented. Simplifying a complicated region, the map of the New River Gorge National River orients visitors to the river and to contact points via major roads and points of access. Not depicted on the Park Service map are dozens of coal towns connected to the river by railway spurs. The spurs were built to convey coal to major shipping points at Quinnimont and Thurmond, and were at one time the only means of access to communities like Red Star, Harvey, Prudence, Scarbro, Carlisle, Kilsyth, Price Hill, Sun, Minden, Summerlee, Lochgelly, and Oswald. "There's so many little tiny places that have names," said Pam Caldwell, who grew up in Glen Jean, where her father managed the New River Company Store. She visited recently after thirty years of being away and found the National Park Service headquarters occupying the site of her childhood home. "The town names," she said, "That's one of the things that started before I came here, remembering the town names. I had forgotten about Prudence until yesterday, I drove to Harvey and saw Prudence. I had a girlfriend that lived there."6 On a map of New River Company property in the early 1900s, the railroad is the principal feature, girding the landscape and eclipsing the gorge it traces. In Bon-Bon's, a mom-and-pop-style hardware store and confectionery in Mount Hope, Floyd Bonifacio and Provi Marchio construct a drawing locating the coal towns that at one time surrounded Mount Hope, which Floyd, the mayor, characterized as "the hub, the axle of the coal industry." "In the twenties," says Floyd, "people came from overseas, the Italians and the Polish. They came to Mount Hope for the coal rush like they went to California for the gold rush. There was twenty working mines in walking distance of Mount Hope." "One of the mines right at this powerhouse was named Old Side Mines," Provi picked up. "That was Kilsyth. Then . . . right off from the Old Side Mines on your right as you go out of town, that's Siltex Mine. I worked in that, Dad worked in that. And on up the road there was Price Hill mines run by Dixon. Right on up the next mine was Calloway Mines. Run by the Calloways. And went on up to Tamroy, Oswald, and run by Billy McKell, Kilsyth. And on up there was Tamroy Mines, run by McKell Coal Company. McKell, that was his name, he lived right down here at Glen Jean, right across from the [NPS] people down there."7 William G. McKell is remembered as an eccentric, the Scottish entrepreneur who commemorated both his homeland and his wife in naming the town Glen Jean. He owned the eight-mile KGJ&E (Kanawha, Glen Jean, and Eastern) railroad and paid to ride it, preferred hitch-hiking to driving himself, and he dramatically stopped a run on his personal bank. "You know, back there in 1932, Depression time," said Quincy Painter, of Scarbro: Old Man Bill McKell had that bank there, and he built up everything from Thurmond into Glen Jean, up through Price Hill, Mount Hope, and Oswald. He even built them railroads, that C & O got now. Someone put out that that bank was gonna go broke. If people had money you better go in and get it out, and Old Man Bill McKell come in there and people were drawing their money out, he asked them why. They said, "Because this bank is broke." He said, "Like heck it is!" He went and opened a vault, said, "Y'all come in, I'll show you!" He went in there and took a number four coal shovel and shovelled money out in a big pile. He said, "Don't you think this bank is broke! There's what I've got to back your money up with, and I've got three times that much where that come from!"8 In Bon-Bon's, Floyd and Provi use their extemporaneous map to introduce me to history, using place names as a threshold, interpreting the entire landscape as a modulating historical artifact. "See all these little towns," said Floyd, pointing to their sketch, "Every one of them was communities, and every one of them had a New River company store." Reading the map of Fayette County in West Virginia County Maps, one can see the creation of landscape as a succession of overlays, waves of colonization traceable in names for settlements, company towns, topographic features, waterways, and transportation arteries. Names for branches, creeks, hollows, coves, and ridges, a preindustrial legacy, are all the knowledgeable local person needs to navigate the mountainous terrain in conversation. Early industrialists added to this set of inscriptions the names of their own family members and ancestral terrains, and stringing their lumber camps and coal towns along railroad spurs that paralleled waterways and conveyed timber and coal to distant markets. Paving the way for a post- industrial service economy in recent decades, the highway industry has blasted a straight course through the mountains, closing the distance in time and space to metropolitan areas. Linking nodes in an emerging system of national parks and heritage areas, superhighways also obscure the logic ordering industrial and agricultural landscapes. Certain elements of the landscape taking shape around tourism emerge as fixed points. Thus former centers of coal and railroad activity, like Glen Jean, Thurmond, and Hinton, are being transformed into new headquarters and points of contact for visitors. Their continuity in this sense is striking. Where coal companies used to "run coal" in the New River Gorge, whitewater entrepreneurs now "run the river." Some of the loftily placed mansions of former mine superintendents and company doctors have become bed and breakfasts; the Ginn Linn (also known as "Jenny Lind") style of company box house has been appropriated into the New River Gorge National River superintendent's headquarters at Glen Jean;9 a scarlet canid appears on the sign of a Fayetteville enterprise named "Red Dog Antiques," appropriating the term for the distinctive red rubble (burned slag from the mines) that makes up roads, driveways, and shoulders in mining towns. In such a post-industrial service economy, it becomes more profitable (and in some views desirable, given the dangers of mining) to represent a way of life than to live it. Thus, Lloyd Lewis, of Lansing, is employed by the National Park Service to interpret, among other things, the mines at Oswald and Nuttalburg, in which his grandfathers lost their lives. And Donald Honaker, a former miner who now guides tourists through the Beckley Exhibition Mine, jokes with them at the first stop: "Did I park anybody directly under a drip? Now if you get wet, don't tell anybody outside. They'll charge you for a shower. You know how these people are. And if lime water gets in and dries your hair, they'll charge you for that!"10 Some scholars relate a mounting interest in heritage to an accelerating rate of change, rooted in global economic restructuring. James Abrams, working on America's Industrial Heritage Project with the National Park Service in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, observes that "Heritage discourse is formulated during and after periods of significant social transformation, and it functions as an act of cultural redefinition and repair."11 The depopulation of industrial communities and the generalized dispersal of family networks creates a rupture between past and present that current residents and former residents and their descendants are already trying to mend in various ways, unaided by official heritage programs. Bridging disjunctures in space and time, periodicals such as The West Virginia Hillbilly, The Mountain Eagle, and innumerable family and church newsletters circulate among the dispersed, who also cultivate ties to "homeplaces" through homecomings that reassemble members of families, churches, towns, and former employees of coal companies. At such events, history is abundantly reconstituted, its meanings vigorously debated. Old photographs and artifacts appearing in store windows or on kiosks set the stage for conversations that conjure the past. In conversations about genealogy, reunion goers establish and explore connectedness. Officially, coal may be enshrined as the region's great accomplishment, but the real achievement from the perspective of reunion goers, was and is community life. "It's family," said Mary Wagner, of Charleston, at the Thurmond Reunion, "That's what brings everybody back. Our lives were so intertwined with each other in school, in church, in everyday living." "It was a nice little town when I lived here," said her mother, Mrs. Robinson. "They say they're going to get it like it used to be, but I don't think it'll ever be like it used to be. It used to be a nice little town, and the best people lived here."12 Occasions for celebrating community life, reunions can also occasion reflections on the historical forces and social relations that first restructured and then dematerialized community life in the coal towns. At the Mount Hope Jubilee Days (which was also the New River Company Reunion) in 1992, I sat for a while in the basement of the Princess Playhouse on Main Street, where Michael Martin was screening four hours of newly recovered film footage. These films, made by the New River Coal Company in the 1930s and 1940s, feature home and garden contests, competitive safety meets, coal tumbling down chutes until dust obscures the image, and men at work in machine shops. Most of the houses are painted a color that Charles Ward, of Price Hill, called "New River Gray." From the back of the darkened theater, I watched residents of Scarbro, Lochgelly, Collins, McDonald, Sprague, Mabscott, Whipple, Cranberry, Prudence, Carlisle, and Harvey wave from a distance of more than half a century--many dressed in their Sunday best, against backdrops lush with dahlias, gladioluses, coleus, and whitewashed trees and rocks. In frame after frame children scramble to sit on whitewashed frame fences. "The company did this," said Martin, who grew up in Mount Hope, and whose acting career led him through Hollywood back to New River, where he founded the Princess Arts Group. "The [New River Coal] Company made these films. And you notice how idyllic this looks? Flowers in the yards and pretty faces of the children? These people were told to dress up--they didn't dress up like this every day--they were told to clean up and dress up, for the Lawn and Garden Competition. There's something that these films don't speak. They don't speak what life was actually like in the Company Towns." "Who was their intended audience?" I asked. "Maybe it was me, maybe it was us," Martin mused. "Years and years and years down the road. But the people who grew these flower gardens didn't own the homes and the yards that they grew them in. These were all company houses. The power, they purchased from the company. "And I'm not saying the New River Company was a bad company to work for," he added. "In creating these [lawn and garden] competitions between neighbors throughout the summertime, New River Company was guaranteeing the good care of their real estate. New River Company brought the lime out and mixed it for you, for you to whitewash your trees and your fences, and you didn't say 'Gee, I don't feel like it.'" "What's with whitewashing the trees?" I asked. "I think it kills the insects that would bore into the tree trunks," said a woman in the audience. "You know, after watching these things, I have decided that next summer I'm going to whitewash my trees," Michael Martin announced. "Let's bring back whitewashing," agreed another woman. "My grandmother always whitewashed her rocks," said Martin. The scenes flow on in silence: boys boxing, women and girls carrying babies, old men greeting one another, miners operating loading machines. A power station whistle issues a silent blast, signalling a day's beginning, middle, or ending, or an accident. "I can remember days when the news come out about somebody done got killed or hurt," Bessie Reid, of Harvey, would recall later. "All of us would be running to the tipple, with the apron strings flying, and I see them all pulling them aprons off, throwing them down. You wouldn't know who it was." Watching the films in the Princess Theater, another woman observed, "They don't show the town being segregated." Company towns gave form to coal operators' notions of social order: black, white, and ethnic arranged in separate enclaves, always in view of the homes of superintendents. "Okay, this is Red Star proper," Mary Francis Pugh, who runs the Red Star Market, explained to me. "We had a little section called Laury Bottom. Then we have the hill that's called Red Star Hill. Now I understand when the mines was operating most of our Black people lived on the hill. Then your White lived here down in the Bottom."13 Coal operators did not whitewash trees only. In a chilling reconstruction of history they detached the past from the present by renaming the sites of disaster. "Some of these towns that you'll see pictured, before that were named something else entirely," said Michael Martin. "Lochgelly was not always Lochgelly. It was renamed because there was a huge mine disaster there and a lot of men were killed. So what did they do? They renamed it. You rename it, people forget."14 At one public hearing the question arose of whether the past would be sanitized in representations at Grandview. Conversations at reunions offer those with a sense of shared history and destiny a chance to come to terms with history's disquieting aspects--not least of which is the use of language to invoke, revoke, and recycle reality. The Wild, the Civilized, and the New Frontier The notion of the frontier, deeply embedded in our national psyche, powerfully models a particular process of laying claim to economic resources. Roger Cunningham observes that this process, which Western "civilization" has recycled since the conquests of the Roman Empire, occurs in tandem with the manipulation of cultural images. Thus, a wave of frontiering to mine coal and timber in the nineteenth century was linked with what Cunningham calls the first period of Appalachian tourism. Contradictory images of mountain residents generated in that period are still with us. In some images, the mountains are a wild region to be tamed. In others, the mountains become a repository of the oldest and purest forms of Anglo-Saxon culture.15 Some of the emerging imagery surrounding tourism likens the new entrepreneurs to their industrialist predecessors. How are cultural images manipulated in tandem with this new wave of frontiering? The region called Central Appalachia has historically played the role of frontier to the Eastern Seaboard, an identity elaborated in historical interpretations. Thurmond, the turn-of- the-century railroad town destined for reconstruction by the Park Service, is often termed the Dodge City of the East, site of the Dunglen Hotel, where the world's longest poker game, by some accounts, was played nonstop for nearly eighteen years. In Thurmond, some say, it was not unusual to find the dead bodies of union organizers along the tracks. "When my grandfather went up there to see about this hotel job," said George Carper, of Cincinnati, Ohio (whose grandfather, George Flauts, was the barber at the Dunglen Hotel), "he went up to see what the job would be like, and he stepped off the train and he said he almost stepped on a dead body. And it was the body of a union organizer." "You talk about the Wild West," Carper continued, "This was it."16 As Central Appalachia historically played frontier to the Eastern Seaboard, whitewater rafting recreates the relationship to provide a recreational frontier. Along the New River, the whitewater industry's quarter-century history bears the hallmarks of classic frontier narrative. The pioneer in this narrative is John Dragan, an entrepreneur who left the whitewaters of the Youghiogheny River in Pennsylvania to do what few had previously dreamed possible. In the early 1960s, Dragan rafted the New, and thus paved the way for the twenty or so rafting companies that now take tourists down the river at roughly eighty dollars a pop. Whitewater history has entered into local lore. In 1968, using Thurmond as their base, the Dragan family launched "Wildwater Expeditions Unlimited." They hired guides and housed them at Thurmond. To become acquainted with the New River, each guide writes a research paper on local history. These exercises provide stories for entertaining guests who are borne down the river in rafts named for historical personages like R. M. Holliday, John Nuttall, John Beury, and Harrison Ash. Beury, the son of an Englishman from Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, who founded the railroad town of Quinnimont, and for whom Beury town is named, was the first to mine the "fabulous, legendary, smokeless" New River coal. Harrison Ash was a colorful deputy who maintained order in the Gorge.17 Over the next two decades, other companies moved in, and the industry, as whitewater literature represents it, launched a new era in the region. The use of frontier imagery articulates a connection between the present and the earlier periods of settlement and industrialization. One guide I interviewed compared John Dragan to Joseph Beury. Jeff Proctor, cofounder and part-owner of Class VI River Runners, compared whitewater guides to miners--a cadre of workers unfazed by the dangers of their occupation, on whom both whitewater guests and industry depend for survival. Proctor also compared them to cowboys--itinerant adventurers who follow whitewater seasons throughout the Western hemisphere. As seasonal employment, whitewater guiding allows teachers and others available for summer employment to play with alternative, sometimes flamboyant, identities. Thus, whitewater guests are placed in the care of such dramatis personae as Rat, Weasel, Jarhead, Bulkhead, and Psycho Bob, who render a history that ties the river's new boom and bustle to the one of the past. "My name is Ricky Loco," said a guide named Clinebell, "and believe me, I earned it." Some of this "history" is pure theater, wherein guides test the limits of their guests' credulity, mingling fact and fantasy to account for the landscape. "There's a coal tipple at Kaymoor," recalled Linda White, who for several summers guided for Wildwater Unlimited. "And there's a perfect outline of Superman flying through this coal tipple. It's just rotted away, but it made a perfect outline of Superman, and we would have various stories about the day Superman visited the coal tipple to save a damsel in distress."18 Given an imperative to stretch the truth, consistency of interpretation is hardly a goal. Indeed, social differentiation is one aim of mock historical narratives whereby guides dupe their guests. Interpretations of the Kaymoor tipple are limited only by a guide's imagination and abilities to gauge an audience. "The fun of telling a story," said Jeff Proctor, "is also to twist it to a point where it is not believable, but folks who are not from around here believe it: One of the examples was at the Kaymoor Mine as you floated by. In the tipple there were several holes in the wall. One . . . looked somewhat like a body imprint, and then there were two little holes nearby. . . . One of the stories was that, at the end of the day, the miners would ride the monitor car down into the tipple, because they lived down at the bottom and that was six hundred feet they didn't have to go up or down. And at one point a car broke loose, and all the men jumped off to their death except for one who rode the monitor car into the tipple. It slammed into the tipple, and he went flying out of the wall. He lept with such force his boots were sucked off his feet and made the two little holes in the side. He flew into the river and lived. Here Proctor paused for dramatic effect. "Now people will look at that hole, and then they'll look back at you and then they'll go, "Wow!"19 "You can always tell when your guide is lying," said Chuck Garrett, himself a guide. "His lips are moving."20 In language resides an almost magical power to recreate the world. Naming and renaming towns, or omitting them from a map, is a way of shaping reality. Names for rapids index the whitewater world, anchoring it in place. To name is to claim, and, in that sense, whitewater rafting recycles both frontier images and the frontier process by inscribing yet another new world onto the New River. Names for rapids allude to the whitewater experience. The names for rapids, rocks, and hydraulics--which are not employed consistently from one whitewater company to another--register facets of whitewater lore and experience: "Swimmers Shoals," "Stripper Hole," ""Breadloaf," "Greyhound Bus Stopper," "Thread the Needle," and "Dudley's Dip," named in honor of Lysander Dudley, who was at one time commissioner of commerce for the state of West Virginia. "Dudley's Dip" has several etymologies. By one account, a raft carrying Dudley was overturned at that point, and the name commemorates the "dip" he took. In another, the rapid caused him to swallow his "dip" of snuff. Similarly, "Harmon's 99" commemorates Richard Harmon and the number on his racing boat in a spot where he foundered. "Shoals," the local term for rocky portions of the river, reflects a very different orientation toward them as barriers, associated in name and anecdote with local families, towns, structures, historical events, environmental perceptions, and recurrent experience. "Surprise," the whitewater name for rapids at Brooklyn, names the sensation rafters experience when suddenly encountering these rapids after a long and leisurely float. Paul Bennett, a consummate fisherman from Summerlee, said the local name is "Bouncin' Shoals." Lloyd Lewis thought that "Miller's Folly Rapids" may have been "Fern Creek Shoals" and that "Nuttalburg Shoals" is known by some in the whitewater business as "Sunset Rapids," relating the site to the time of day when a whitewater raft usually approaches it. Because it was also the site of a drowning, some prefer to call it "Double Z," a name descriptive of the course it causes a raft to take. Names are a powerful way to constitute reality, and multiple names for a particular resource may signal its status as a threshold to multiple or even competing realities. Fish, another resource for which the New River is famous, are as receptive as rapids to a varied nomenclature. "Names change from one location to the other," said Joe Aliff of Rock Creek. "It's like the bluegill. . . . Well, you go on down and it's a sunfish, and over here it's a brim, but we're talking about one fish."21 "White bass," said Mike Menarchik, who guides for a local enterprise called "Gone Fishin'," "[are] called 'Sand Bass,' 'white perch'--Lord knows how many other names. Stripers, they call them 'Line Sides.' Rock Bass, it's commonly called a Red- Eye."22 This diversity of vernacular terms for fish, which extends to flora and fauna throughout the region, indexes in a small way the New River's diversified constituency. In fact, one could argue that ignoring these names in official representations of natural resources is a way of marginalizing the very local knowledge celebrated in other settings as heritage. What messages about this constituency does the whitewater industry create? These messages are by no means consistent, but consider the cultural images used by a former guide in a well- intentioned effort to characterize and ameliorate friction between rafters and fishermen: We were always very careful. We had instructions that if we came upon a fisherman to go to the other side of the river and try to keep people from yelling and screaming and slapping their paddles on the water, which of course the fishermen don't like. Some of the other companies weren't quite as respectful. I remember going down with another company, and the guide in front of me came upon a trotline, where they string a rope across the river with baited hooks attached and sink it down to the bottom to get catfish. And she didn't like the fact that there were trotlines. And I saw her pull it up and take her knife and cut it, and at the end of the day I said, "Did I see you cut a trotline?" And she said yes, and I said, "Why'd you do that?" She said, "One of my people could get a fish hook in them when they're out swimming." In August, they do a lot of floating around in the river. And, to me, that was a pretty dangerous thing to do, and I told her that. "You better be careful. If the owner of that trotline was up in the woods, he might shoot at you or something, if he sees you do that." So a lot of the guides that came in didn't really understand the local culture and how people did, and that it was like sort of a no man's land--you went down there to fish--and that these were mountain people and they value privacy and space, and they wouldn't take favorably to someone messing with their trotline. The narrator, in an effort to maintain peace, seeks to modify the errant guide's behavior. To do so, he calls on the image of the dangerous mountain man who resolves disputes with his gun. This familiar image, elaborated in Theater West Virginia's Hatfields and McCoys production at the Grandview amphitheater, posits an essential difference between "mountain people" (who might be lurking in the woods) and rafters from outside the area. This near mythical distinction resonates with a rafting package called "Dueling Rivers," which pairs a trip down the Gauley with a trip down the New in order to answer the question, "Which is more exciting?" The title of the package, of course, alludes to "Dueling Banjos," the theme from the movie Deliverance, which casts in archetypal terms the conflict between rafters on a river and hostile "natives."23 Meanwhile, up on the plateau, away from the view of whitewater guests, the history declared dead on the water shows vital signs in the pickets and marches of miners in Districts 29 and 17. Resurrecting the past with serious intent to make history, the strikers have over the past few years used protest to posit a direct line of descent from events related to the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921 to current relations between coal operators and miners. John and Dreama Bowman, of Pine Branch, described a recent march in which striking miners retraced several routes taken by ten thousand armed miners who in 1921 marched on Blair Mountain in Logan County against Sheriff Don Chafin for keeping the union out of that part of the state. In the 1990s, issues include safety in the mines and the safeguarding of union mines, together with health and retirement benefits--achievements undermined by deregulation in the 1980s, according to John Bowman. "I was the one that led the crew of men from Beckley Coal Mines," said John Bowman. "I led the crew that walked. . . . The other crew, men from District 17, they started over around Welch. They marched across Blair Mountain. They made it a point that they walked all the way across it." The crews converged at Marmet, where, on the eve of the Battle of Blair Mountain, Mother Jones exhorted marchers to call off the march that ended when the U.S. government sent in armed forces (including aircraft) to stop the protest. Consequently the marchers, whose intention had never been to overthrow the government, surrendered.24 This time headed for Charleston, marchers of another generation lifted their spirits and feet, clogging to the music of the Picket Line Pickers, a local bluegrass band. There is a connection, is one of the messages, between the system seventy years ago, now officially villified, and present practices like "double-breasting," whereby a company closes down a union mine and reopens a nonunion mine nearby under a new name. "Like Mystic Energy," said John Bowman, "Just pick a name out of the air, and call it a coal company and then open it up nonunion. . . . They're fixing it where you can't trace the parent company down." Thus, even as heritage work officially celebrates the region's role in labor history, the theater of that struggle has never closed. "They're just fighting for survival of the union, mostly," said Chetty Morton, a former miner in District 29 who drives a bus for Class VI River Runners. "Because, I figure, the companies is just trying to break the unions is what it's all about. It's not about the wages or nothing like that. Cause the companies just raise the price of the coal and make that up. But they just want rid of the union."25 Crafted out of local historical consciousness, history becomes a resource for making sense not only of labor disputes, but of seemingly unrelated crises such as environmental degradation, which residents attribute to ongoing industrial disturbances of the landscape. In 1991, residents of Rock Creek, another community on the Coal River, staged peaceful demonstrations to secure clean drinking water from the county. More recently, residents attempting to publicize the rapid deterioration of trees, especially yellow poplar, on the community's forested slopes relate stories of aggressive bureaucratic resistance. Joseph Aliff, who has been leading the effort to diagnose and treat the problem, said he has been harassed by officials from the timber industry. For him, local history is a resource for making sense of such experiences. "I want to show you something here," he said, and opened the book Kanawha County Images: A Bicentennial History, by Stan Cohen. "See that group of tents?" Joe said, pointing to a picture. "Well, my mother lived here when she was twelve years old." The caption reads: "Tents on Cabin Creek of Striking miners who were forced from their company homes in 1912."26 "Well," said Joe, "the coal companies simply came in and threw everybody out of their houses, and the government brought tents in to give them a place to live. . . . "You see, the history of West Virginia is unknown. Everybody thinks the last war ever fought in the United States was the Civil War. It wasn't. It was the war that took place right here on Coal River. . . . We have a few individuals that tried to tell the truth about our history, but up until today it is not acknowledged by the government. But you see these weapons? The government weapons? Mother lives in this last row. Mother, being only a little barefoot girl twelve years old, they would let her go out of this place. It was guarded. You know, they're simply prisoners. . . . My mother would take her little bucket and go to get milk. And they would put shells in her bucket, and she could walk by the guard, and she smuggled shells back into this camp." "You mean gunshells?" I asked. "Yeah," said Joe Alliff. "Where did she get them?" I asked. "Well, people on the outside that weren't associated with the coal mines, she would go to their house under the pretense of getting milk, which they would get milk too, but they would drop the shells in the milk bucket, and she could carry them back then." "So was this connected to the March on Blair Mountain," I asked. "That is the starting," said Joe. "These are the bombers they used against our men as they marched to Blair Mountain." Joe's account is not just family folklore or a story about the bad old days. "You see," said Joe matter-of-factly, "this intimidation that we learned under the coal industry is still used against us today."27 Consequently, in Rock Creek and elsewhere, forms of protest and resistance are a historical and cultural legacy, along with herbal medicine, family cemeteries, squirrel hunting, quilting, ginseng gathering, remodeling log cabins, clogging, and moonshining. History is indeed a powerful resource for understanding why it may be a struggle to get clean drinking water, why it is difficult to obtain official recognition of tree death, and what it may cost to defend community life and values. Dueling Realities: A Tale of Two Narratives Geographic isolation is often cited as a leading shaper of cultural distinctiveness in the Appalachian mountains. "In many parts of the Southern Appalachians," wrote Andrew Kardos in the Park Service's New River Gorge Newsletter, "the traditions survived because of the isolation of rugged terrain and difficult access to and from the outside world."28 However, while superhighways and electronic communications render barriers in space less significant, a barrier in time remains, held firmly in place by cultural stereotypes. A desire to defuse Appalachian stereotypes underpinned local enthusiasm for a cultural heritage center at Grandview. At public hearings and advisory meetings, area residents said that in addition to boosting the local economy, the center should stimulate pride in the region and its cultures. Scott Durham, superintendent of Twin Falls State Park in Pineville described his unsuccessful effort to break reporters from the grip of the stereotypes: We brought in a reporter from the Washington Post, we brought in a writer from National Geographic, and we spent our entire time talking about life and culture and the things that are appealing here, and every single one of those people left us and went back and made a product that was impacted by what they saw, not what they heard or what they experienced, simply what they saw. The most dramatic one of these was the guy from the Washington Post. We took him to Matewan, showed him around the area. We explained to him that the crime rate in West Virginia is the lowest crime rate in the country, and the crime rate in southern West Virginia is the lowest in West Virginia. . . . So it's safer here than it is anyplace in the world. And he went back and wrote an article about the violence in the area, and how frightened he was, and how he was overwhelmed by this sense of fear that he had. It's my opinion that the visual impact of this area creates a barrier that people can't get past.29 Other residents recalled as well the outrage stirred by accounts in Life Magazine, Saturday Evening Post, and broadcasts by Charles Kuralt and Walter Kronkite that portrayed Appalachia as a region of poverty through a highly selective series of dreary and dismal images during the late fifties and early sixties. Dennis McCutcheon, of our advisory committee, pointed out that in protest thousands of residents throughout the state cancelled their subscriptions to the offending publications. John Flynn, a journalist from Rock Creek, recalled that issues of such publications were piled up and destroyed in public burnings in Charleston.30 Indeed, the association of West Virginians with Appalachia drew strong criticism at early public hearings and advisory meetings. Several residents pointed out that they only realized they were considered Appalachian when they moved to places outside of the region. "I went away an Allegheny girl, and came back an Appalachian woman," said Jacqueline Cook, of Beaver. Consider two basic narratives about Appalachia. The first, inclining toward an allegory of loss and rescue, justifies the ongoing work--economic, cultural, missionary, environmental, and social--of outsiders in the region.31 The second debunks the first allegory, recasting it as a story of conquest and domination, challenging outsiders to recognize the social relations supported by their causes.32 The first narrative legitimizes a relationship that makes a region dependant on the nation. Many narratives in this vein marvel at the paradoxical copresence of poverty, abundant mineral wealth, and bucolic natural beauty. In this narrative, citizens and developers from outside the region are perennially poised to "help" mountain people. At one time the industrialist was a hero, developing the region for the progress of the nation, building houses, schools, and churches for his people, despite harassment from union luddites. To help the residents overcome backwardness rooted in ignorance or to protect Elizabethan heritage rooted in isolation, a parade of rescuers then streamed into the mountains to save souls, educate children in settlement schools, record folklore on the brink of extinction, and establish craft and vocational-technological schools.33 Consistent with the New River's celebrated natural and historical turbulence is an alternative narrative, a counter current riffling the smooth surface of the taken-for-granted allegory. In the counter narrative, the region has not been rescued, it has been colonized. This narrative informs the John Sayles film Matewan, recent novels by Denise Giardina set in West Virginia coal towns,34 films by Appalshop (such as Strangers and Kin and Long Journey Home), and the work of the Highlander Center in New Market, Tennessee. The alternative story details, in effect, America's ongoing effort to shape the southern mountains into Appalachia. Helen Lewis, a leading scholar and activist with the Highlander Institute, has assigned four stages to the process, corresponding to the waves of settlement documented on county maps. In the first stage, the captains of industry laid claim to the resources and reshaped the region and its residents from an agrarian/subsistence economy to a cash-labor economy, and formalized their conception of orderly society in coal towns. In succeeding stages, missionaries, educators, journalists, and government workers rationalize Appalachia's protection and management by outsiders who since the nineteenth century have mined it assiduously for coal, timber, tourism, scenery, mineral water, whitewater, journalistic grist, souls, soldiers, labor, folklore, and national heritage.35 What do cultural images have to do with the relationship between Appalachia and America? Working in tandem with the first narrative is an image of Appalachia as the locus of the nation's folklore, or "folklore's natural habitat," as folklorist Richard Dorson once put it. In the popular imagination, this folklore takes on two conflicting aspects. In a rational view that values "progress," folklore is backward and irrational, the province of the Hatfields and McCoys, Snuffy Smith, the Beverly Hillbillies, and the natives in Deliverance. But in a romantic view that fears "progress," folk culture becomes the uncontaminated remnant of pre-industrial society, the Elizabethan dialect, the Child Ballad, unelectrified music, and congenital craftsmanship.36 Seemingly in opposition, both perspectives constitute a political abuse of time.37 This abuse occurs when some citizens use their political power to locate other citizens in an earlier time in history. Positioning any group of people in an earlier time--whether pre-industrial or industrial--bars that group from full participation in the nation's present. This strategy of assigning different locations in history to contemporaries enables a politically empowered group to place "yesterday's people" in a position of dependence. Those located in the "future" oblige themselves to take charge of the anachronistic group. Planning for the heritage center has already opened an arena for debate over what constitutes the region's culture. At early hearings some residents cautioned National Park Service planners against focussing the center too narrowly on the sorts of arts and crafts demonstrations that have become generic tourist attractions. Like folklore and Appalachia, craft and Appalachia are so intertwined in the national imagination that a Washington, D.C., area entrepreneur markets crafts from all over the country under the name "Appalachian Spring." Historians of the region point out that crafts industries and schools were promoted by middle-class educators and missionaries in the twenties and thirties who saw crafts as a way for people to make a living in the mountains, while providing decorations for homes of middle- class metropolitans.38 This is not to deny that there are people practicing traditional skills that have been in their families for generations, but only to suggest that craft is less a natural fact of life--whether pre- or post-industrial--in the mountains than popular imagery would have us believe. "Outsiders taught us about Appalachian crafts," said Luther Lewallen, who grew up in Mount Hope, and who operates a bed and breakfast in Beckwith. In its romantic guise, craft is made to represent a world we have lost to industry, a vanishing rural way of life deemed to be more authentic than life in the modern metropolis, and this positive face on it makes it appealing. However, in a study of the educational uses of Appalachian crafts in the Cincinnati school system, Bobby Ann Starnes discerns the down side of craft, and counsels readers from the mountains to distance themselves from it: "By presenting primarily craft activities as strengths of the culture, urban Appalachian students are consistently sent a message that, as members of their cultural group, their talents lie in working with their hands rather than in more academic areas."39 Starnes is, in effect, advising her readers to resist the backward location in time, to recognize the role that romantic images can play as barriers to social and economic "advancement." On one trip to New River, I met Pam Caldwell, a woman whose father had run the New River Company Store in Glen Jean. The Park Service's headquarters now occupy the land where she grew up. She was returning, following a week of dance instruction at the Augusta Heritage Workshops in Elkins, West Virginia,40 after thirty years of being away. She was taken aback by the demise of some places, heartened by the renewal of others, and surprised at the prevalence of arts and crafts. She did not view craft as part of her heritage, though she characterized her grandmother, who lived in Harvey, as an exceptional quilter. I asked Pam what she saw as her heritage from the mountains. "Strength," she said, "especially for the women." She described her grandmother, who was pregnant with her eighth child when her husband was killed in a mine: Her name was Nettie Caldwell. Oh, she was so beautiful. There was an elegance about her. . . . One of the earliest memories I have of her, we were in a park in Virginia and she was sitting in a rowboat, and she tied a worm to a string and dipped it into the water and pulled out a fish, it seems to me, all in one motion. They have trophies of deer that she shot, and she had killed bear. She could cook. I finally realized this year that I can cook as well as my grandmother. I mean, it finally occurred to me. I got that from her. Pam Caldwell said that strength for her meant getting out of Glen Jean. Others cited strength as what it takes to stay in West Virginia, job scarcity notwithstanding. "The ones that really want to stay here," said Jimmy Costa, of Hinton, "they'll find a way to stay here. If you really love the area, and it's not a monetary thing, you'll let the money slide by just to be able to stay here. Everyone that I've met wants to come back." For those without capital to invest in business, a commitment to stay may mean piecing together a livelihood out of farming, seasonal employment, and "flea market work." It may mean fitting a prefabricated house into tight places far up a hollow against all bets to the contrary. Trailers become guest cottages, or starter homes, sometimes subsumed in a maze of additions. One manufacturer sells "Travel Logs," trailers that look like log cabins. More affordable to purchase, heat, and maintain than large houses, mobile homes can be a way of resisting dislocation and maintaining ties to homeplaces. Seemingly ephemeral, trailer- related dwellings provide an ironic counterpoint to industry's monuments, "facades of solidity" behind which historian Michael Wallace detects "the quicksilver reality of mobility and relentless transformation."41 This continuing process of transformation and its relationship to the culture and history of southern West Virginia falls rightfully within the purview of heritage work at Grandview. Breaking the Time Barrier: A Role for the Heritage Center "Mining Coal, Making History" is the subtitle of a history of the New River Coal Company.42 What kind of history do we make when we make heritage? As the economy is transformed from an industrial one to one based on tourism and recreation, a cultural heritage center has a profound role to play in reshaping a pattern of making history. Working closely with area residents in planning, research, and interpretation, the center can begin to make a different kind of history. The Draft Development Concept Plan emphasizes local involvement: The interpretation of Appalachian culture without the involvement of those who make up the local culture has contributed to negative stereotyping of the area. As part of the purpose of the center and in the best interest of the park, the center can benefit residents of southern West Virginia by involving them fully in the center's programs. In turn, it can best serve visitors to the region by facilitating direct and meaningful contact with local residents.43 The Draft Development Concept Plan cites a broad range of programmatic options for the Center, targeting two major constituencies and seasons: summer programs catering largely to visitors, and winter programs catering to local communities. Possible summer programs include concerts, festivals, workshops, demonstrations, tours, traditional dinners, family days, drama and participatory events like dance, storytelling, fiddle tune swaps and gospel sings. Community focussed programs in the winter might include traditional foodways, agriculture, gardening, family folklore, concerts, reunions, and other participatory events. The winter season would also include educational programs relating to West Virginia folk culture, cultural and economic development, preparation of tours, exhibits and media programs on local history and community life, and similar initiatives. How will these programs relate to the time barrier? Will they posit for New River an industrial Golden Age of achievement in the past, fashioning for residents a different time-space than tourists? Will they reproduce inflections of gender, class, and race that were part and parcel of that Golden Age? Or will they encourage residents and visitors alike to become "historically informed makers of history"?44 Will this be a place where whitewater rafters can meet the person behind the trotline? Where whitewater guides and fishermen might even compete for the title of champion liar? Where visitors can pick up maps and calendars that orient them toward local places and community fund-raisers? The answers depend on a commitment to breaking the time barrier, not only in terms of content, but in terms of the process for determining the content. The Grandview Center's summer and winter program duality corresponds to two public venues in the region--tourist productions and community events--a duality that roughly echoes a distinction some scholars make between "frontstage" and "backstage" tourist regions. The history leading up to the present production of heritage in Appalachia is the history of the relationship between region and nation, a history in which visitors and residents share. The Grandview Center,45 itself a product of that relationship, can serve as a resource for understanding how this historical relationship in the past bears on the culture and economy of the present, and for improving that relationship in the future by involving those to be represented in cultural images in every stage of planning and production. Would area residents be less qualified than professionals from outside the region to interpret their culture? Who would "authenticate" those hired as tradition bearers or tour guides? Such questions, raised in meetings convened by the Park Service, illustrate well James Abrams's observation that heritage is "a debate about cultural and material equity, about the right to cultural self-determinism and about the need to assail the class, culture, and gender blindness of America's dominant cultural sphere."46 The challenge is to develop heritage centers, areas, and corridors, in which residents and visitors can learn where and how their histories converge, and how that history might proceed. In such a model, "authentic" applies to social relations, not cultural forms. Notes 1. Draft Development Concept Plan, Environmental Assessment, Interpretive Prospectus: Grandview, New River Gorge National River (October 1993) United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Denver Service Center. 2. Raymond E. Janssen, "The History of a River," Scientific American 186, no 6, 1952, pp. 74-80. 3. For more on the history of the region's industrialization, see David Alan Corbin, Life, Work, and Rebellion in the Coal Fields (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981); Ronald Eller, Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982); John Alexander Williams, West Virginia and the Captains of Industry (Morgantown: West Virginia University Library, 1976); and John Gaventa, Power and Powerlessness (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982). 4. Interview, Mary Hufford with Murray Shuff, Beckley, West Virginia, December 28, 1991. See also Murray Shuff, "Life on the New River 50 Years Ago," in New River Symposium: Proceedings (Glen Jean: New River Gorge National River, 1984), pp. 15-32. 5. Interview, Mary Hufford with Mary Wagner, Thurmond Reunion, August 8, 1993. There is, in fact, a section of Cleveland, Ohio, called "Little West Virginia." 6. Interview, Mary Hufford with Pam Caldwell, Beckwith, West Virginia, August 10, 1993. 7. Interview, Mary Hufford with Floyd Bonifacio and Provie Marchio, Mount Hope, West Virginia, April 20, 1992. 8. Interview, Mary Hufford with Quincy Painter, Scarbro, West Virginia, May 27, 1992. 9. See Karen Hudson, Folklife Center News 14, no. 2 (spring 1992). 10. Donald Honaker, guided tour of Beckley Exhibition Coal Mine, May 15, 1992. 11. James F. Abrams, "Lost Frames of Reference: Sightings of History and Memory in Pennsylvania's Documentary Landscape," in Conserving Culture: A New Discourse on Heritage, ed. Mary Hufford (Champaign: University of Illinois Press). In Press. 12. Interview, Mary Hufford with Mary Wagner and Ethel Robinson, Thurmond Reunion, August 8, 1993. 13. Interview with Mary Frances Pugh, Red Star, West Virginia, August 9, 1993. 14. Conversation with Michael Martin, Mount Hope Jubilee Days, October, 1992. Stuart and Parral were sites of mine explosions in which many lives were lost. The Stuart Shaft explosion killed eighty-five men in 1907 and the explosion at Parral killed twenty five men in 1906. They were renamed Lochgelly and Summerlee respectively because the disasters made it difficult to secure labor. See John Cavalier, Panorama of Fayette County (Parsons, West Virginia: McClain Printing Company, 1985). 15. Roger Cunningham, Apples on the Flood: Minority Discourse and Appalachia (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987), p. 103. Allen Batteau traces the development of Appalachia as an archetypal realm in The Invention of Appalachia (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1990). 16. Interview, Mary Hufford with George Carper at the Grandview Reunion, August 7, 1994. 17. Interviews, Mary Hufford with Linda White and James Wriston, Washington, D.C., July 1993, and telephone conversation with Chris Dragan, December 3, 1993. 18. Interview, Mary Hufford with Linda White, Washington, D.C., June 15, 1993. 19. Interview, Mary Hufford with Jeff Proctor, Ames Heights, West Virginia, August 10, 1993. 20. Interview with whitewater guides at Class VI River Runners in Ames Heights, August 10, 1993. 21. Joe Aliff, guided tour of property in Rock Creek, West Virginia, October 3, 1992. 22. Mike Menarchik, fishing expedition to Hawk's Nest Lake, October 27, 1992. 23. Erika Brady, writing of the conflict between trappers and floaters on the Ozark National Scenic Riverways, describes the defining and polarizing role played by James Dickey's Deliverance and the film based on it: "One cannot float the river in the company of local people in the summer without hearing at least one passing canoeist derisively hum the first bars of 'Dueling Banjos'--and the person always seems surprised when there is a glare of recognition in response" ("'The River's Like Our Back Yard': Tourism and Cultural Identity in the Ozark National Scenic Riverways," in Mary Hufford, ed., Conserving Culture: A New Discourse on Heritage, Champaign: University of Illinois Press). In Press. 24. Lon Savage, Thunder in the Mountains: The West Virginia Mine War, 1920-21 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990). 25. Interview with Chester Morton, Ames Heights, West Virginia, August 10, 1993. 26. Stan Cohen, Kanawha County Images: A Bicentennial History 1788-1988 (Charleston, West Virginia: Pictorial Histories Publishing Company and Kanawha County Bicentennial, Inc., 1987), p. 146. 27. Interview, Mary Hufford with Joseph Aliff, Rock Creek, West Virginia, October 26, 1993. 28. Andrew Kardos, "Folk Traditions in the New River Gorge," New River Gorge Newsletter 9, no. 2, 1989, p. 1. Kardos was chief of Interpretation Services at the New River Gorge National River at the time of this writing. 29. This is not a new complaint. Karen Hudson cited a similar charge levelled against missionaries in 1916: "You missionary people do not treat us right. You come with your cameras and photograph our worst homes and our lowest people and then throw them on the screens to be seen. You never tell of our good people nor of the substantial things of the community" ("Architecture and Personal Expression in Southern West Virginia," Folklife Center News 14, no. 2, 1992, p. 3-7). 30. For examples of numerous articles that emphasized Appalachian poverty in the 1960s, see Anonymous, "The Tragedy of Appalachia," Saturday Evening Post (August 22, 1964), pp.34-42; and Richard Armstrong, "The Tragedy of Appalachia," Look Magazine (August 22, 1964), pp. 35-43. Several days before Christmas in 1964, CBS aired Charles Kuralt's "Christmas in Appalachia." For current depictions in the mainstream press of Central Appalachia as a subculture of poverty, see Guy Gugliotta, "War on Poverty: Three Decades and No Victory: In the Hollows of Appalachia, Jobs Are Still in Full Retreat," The Washington Post, December 26, 1993, pp. Al, A26-27; and Jack Anderson and Michael Binstein, "Prisoners and Poverty in Appalachia, The Washington Post, May 6, 1993, p. B23. 31. See, for example, David Whisnant, "Old Men and New Schools," in James Hardin, ed. Folklife Annual 88-89 (Washington, D.C.: American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, 1989), pp. 74-85. 32. For an introduction to this perspective, see Helen Matthews Lewis, Linda Johnson, and Donald Askins, eds., Colonialism in Modern America: The Appalachian Case (Boone, North Carolina: Appalachian Consortium Press, 1978); especially the germinal essay by Helen Lewis, Sue Kobak, and Linda Johnson, "Family, Religion, and Colonialism in Central Appalachia," pp. 113-39. For recent theoretical developments, see Stephen L. Fisher, ed., Fighting Back in Appalachia: Traditions of Resistance and Change (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993); especially the introduction and the essay by Alan Banks, Dwight Billings, and Karen Tice, "Appalachian Studies, Resistance, and Postmodernism," pp. 283-301. 33. For critical studies of the manipulation of cultural images and cultural intervention in Appalachia, see David Whisnant, All That is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983); and Henry Shapiro, Appalachia on Our Mind (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978); as well as Batteau's The Invention of Appalachia (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1991). 34. See Denise Giardina, Storming Heaven (New York: Ballantine Books, 1987); and the sequel, The Unquiet Earth (New York: Norton, 1992). 35. This history calls attention to how the "power of topography" conceals the "topography of power." Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, "Beyond 'Culture': Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference," Cultural Anthropology 7, no. 1, 1992, p. 8. 36. See Richard Bauman, "Folklore," in Richard Bauman, ed., Folklore, Cultural Performances, and Popular Entertainments (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 29-40. The images of Appalachia as a subculture of poverty and a forgotten frontier, which Karen Hudson related to views of New River's cultural landscape (see footnote 29), exemplify rational and romantic perspectives, respectively. 37. See Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). 38. See Henry Shapiro, "Creating Community: Culture, Folk Schools, the Crafts Revival," in Appalachia on Our Mind: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), pp. 213-43. 39. Bobby Ann Starnes, "Never Knew a Man Who Made a Basket, Never Saw My Daddy Cane a Chair," Journal of the Appalachian Studies Association 2, 1990, p. 178. Perceiving craft as remnant behavior, the romantic view upholds the time barrier, which, as David Whisnant argues, has contributed to regressive decision making in the region. See Whisnant, Modernizing the Mountaineer: People, Power, and Planning in Appalachia (Boone, North Carolina: Appalachian Consortium Press, 1981), pp. 156-58. 40. The Augusta Heritage Workshops are an annual series of workshops in traditional arts, performance, and other skills, sponsored for five weeks each summer by the Augusta Heritage Center at Davis and Elkins College in Elkins, West Virginia. 41. Mike Wallace, "Industrial Museums and the History of Deindustrialization," The Public Historian 9, no. 1, 1987, p. 15. 42. Robert W. Craigo, ed., The New River Company: Mining Coal and Making History, 1906-1976 (Mount Hope, West Virginia: The New River Company, n.d.). 43. Draft Development Concept Plan, p. 102. 44. Michael Wallace, "Visiting the Past: History Museums in the United States," Radical History Review 25, p. 92. 45. Though we use the term "center" here, two of the five alternatives under consideration would entail programming only, with no facilities constructed to serve as a physical center. 46. Abrams, in Hufford, p. 33. PHOTO CAPTIONS: Cover: Sid Lucas, of Livonia, Michigan, provides a cake each year for the annual Thurmond Reunion. Previous cakes have been frosted with images of the town's historic depot, a steam engine, and whitewater rafters navigating the New River. Lucas grew up in New River coal towns, where his father worked in the mines until he was killed in an explosion at Lochgelly. (NRG-MH-B016-7a) Photo by Mary Hufford, Thurmond, West Virginia, August 8, 1993 Performing at the Beckley Flea Market, a string trio makes an audience of passing shoppers. Open on Wednesday and Saturday mornings, the flea market is much vaunted for its livestock, a mix of new and recycled merchandise, and sociable atmosphere. (NRG-TE-B001-16) Photo by Terry Eiler The New River, as seen from Grandview. (NRG-RM-B033-36a) Photo by Rita Moonsammy Rev. William Carter, at his home in Prince, where he and his wife, Frances, have lived since 1954. Carter, who worked as a cook for the work crew on the railroad, preaches at Mount Zion Baptist Church in Garten. (NRG-LE-B018-16) Photo by Lyntha Eiler Ted Farley, of Rock Creek, refurbishes a mid-nineteenth-century on his property. The cabin was concealed within a house he intended to tear down. Repairing the roof are Bobby Joe Cantley and Azel Farley, Jr. (NRG-LE-B011-18) Photo by Lyntha Eiler Ted Farley's ranch home. (NRG-LE-B012-1) Photo by Lyntha Eiler The New River Gorge National River visitor information map, showing names for some of the rapids. Courtesy National Park Service Railroads and spur lines gird the region on this map showing coal towns and companies owned by the New River Company in the early industrial period. Shown here are Stuart and Parral, which were renamed Lochgelly and Summerlee respectively after mine explosions in 1906 and 1907 made it difficult to secure labor. From The New River Company: Mining Coal and Making History, 1906- 1976 Bon-Bon's, a confectionery and hardware store in Mount Hope. Floyd Bonifacio, the store's proprietor as well as the mayor of Mount Hope, may be seen through the window. The store was opened by Bonifacio's parents, who came to Mount Hope from Italy in the early 1900s. (NRG-LE-B016-30) Photo by Lyntha Eiler The New River Gorge National River headquarters at Glen Jean, modelled after the "Ginn Linn" box framing characteristic of coal company housing. (NRG-KH-B002-05) Photo by Karen Hudson Donald Honaker, a former miner, shows visitors to Beckley's Exhibition Mine how to light a carbide lamp. (NRG-MH-C012-08) Photo by Mary Hufford The home of Charles and Beulah Ward, Price Hill, with harvest decorations and white-washed trees. (NRG-LE-B017-7a) Photo by Lyntha Eiler Whitewater rafters with North American River Runners, nearing the bridge at Canyon Rim. (NRG-LE-B003-34) Photo by Lyntha Eiler "The porch" at Class VI River Runners, where (from left) guides Chuck Garrett and Ricky "Loco" Clinebell share jokes and refreshments after a day of running the river. (NRG-MH-B017-16) Photo by Mary Hufford Mike Menarchik inspects a small-mouthed bass he just caught on Hawk's Nest Lake. Menarchik is co-owner of "Gone Fishin'," a guide service based at Sam's Bar in Oak Hill. Like the Beckley Exhibition Mine, "Gone Fishin'" requires its guides to have extensive first-hand experience with the resource they interpret. (NRG-LE-B015-36) Photo by Lyntha Eiler "The murder of Ellison Hatfield by three McCoy boys," during Theater West Virginia's production of The Hatfields and McCoys, an outdoor drama that played at the Grandview amphitheater for more than two decades. Photo courtesy of Theater West Virginia Chester "Chetty" Morton, a retired miner who drives a bus for Class VI River Runners. A bar inside of the company's restaurant is named "Chetty's Depot" in his honor. The restaurant is named "Smokey's Grill" after Chetty's brother, who entertained passengers on the Class VI busses he drove before he died. (NRG- MH-B017-17) Photo by Mary Hufford William Carter, preaching for the Men's and Women's Day service at the Mount Zion Baptist Church in Garten, one of the area churches he pastors. (NRG-LE-B032-14) Photo by Lyntha Eiler The Mount Zion Baptist Choir, with the church register and covenant, in Garten. (NRG-LE-B034-2a) Photo by Lyntha Eiler Margaret Matthew and Lucille Booker preparing food for the Men's and Women's Day during the service at Mount Zion Baptist Church in Garten. (NRG-LE-B032-33) Photo by Lyntha Eiler Wall hanging representing the bridge at Canyon Rim, which is celebrated as the world's longest single span steel arch bridge. The fabric piece, designed and produced by menbers of the New River Gorge Quilter's Guild, is desplayed here at one of the Guild's meetings, April 24, 1992. (NRG-RM-B010-28a) Photo by Rita Moonsammy Mobile homes and other prefabricated structures are found throughout the region, but postfabrication is a reigning architectural practice, accounting in part for the distinctive character of the region's cultural landscape. Expanding his living space, this Carlisle homeowner joins a trailer house and a box dwelling under one roof. (NRG-MH-C019-19) Photo by Mary Hufford Margaret Jackson and Alice Hanna serve desserts at the annual ramp dinner in the town fire hall in Renick, West Virginia, April 25, 1992. Ramps are wild cousins of the leek and among the earliest wild food to emerge on the mountain slopes. Ramp dinners are fund-raising events for community churches, schools, fire halls, and union locals, and ramps are served with potatoes and eggs, and boisterous humor about the tuber's pungent aroma. While ramp dinners are seasonal, community fund-raisers featuring other foods are held on weekends year round. (NRG-MH-B003-24) Photo by Mary Hufford Pam Caldwell, whose father managed the New River Company Store in Glen Jean, recently returned from Oklahoma to visit the area. (NRG-MH-B017-19) Photo by Mary Hufford The CSX train yard at Quinnimont, West Virginia (NRG-RM-B026-32a) Photo by Rita Moonsammy