KERMIT — Jim Webb stands under an awning with produce and jars of sauce lined up on a card table on the side of U.S. Route 52. Webb is a natural salesman – he touts a bottle of barbeque sauce for a limited time only, on account of the lady who made it dying before passing her recipe on.
Webb, 88, said he might be the oldest man in town. Another gentleman died last week at the age of 92. From his produce stand, he points across the railroad tracks at a gas plant.
“My great-grandfather owned all that property, sold it for $300. That was before my time,” he said. “Now my grandfather retired out of there and had some uncles who did too. They made out pretty good.”
When the coal trains ran through town every 25 minutes, Webb owned a couple of supermarkets and some other businesses.
Now, everywhere Webb points, everywhere he recalls, is gone. It’s either been torn down, fallen in, or just turned into something else.
When Webb was born in the 1930s, Mingo County was still growing in population, spurred on by the coal industry. By the time he was a young man in the 1950s, the county had nearly 50,000. Seventy years later, the latest census shows less than half remain. But poverty has ballooned. A little more than a quarter of the residents in the county live below the poverty line and nearly 40% of all children do too.
When asked by Mountain State Spotlight what he wants to hear candidates talk about in the upcoming election, Webb laughs – he’s served as mayor, councilman and even sheriff at one point.
“I don’t believe any of them. They’ll tell you anything,” he said.
With a population around 300, Kermit sits on the northern edge of Mingo County along the Big Sandy River, across from Kentucky. This area is coal country — next to a pawn shop selling revolvers and leaf blowers is the meeting hall for the United Mine Workers local.
The town was foisted into the spotlight a few years ago when it was revealed millions of painkillers had flooded the community.
The current mayor, Charles Sparks, was one of the first mayors in the state to file a lawsuit against Big Pharma. Sitting in his office, wearing a pocket t-shirt and a pair of sunglasses on his head, Sparks said he gave interviews to about 16 different reporters, from as far away as Germany.
“I actually got to the point where I quit doing it because you’re just beating a dead horse at this point,” he said.
Despite all that attention, all those reports, Sparks said his town is only getting $40,000 out of the settlements with drug companies. He had hopes of building a new community center, a splash pad for the kids and a substation for the fire house, on the other side of the railroad tracks that divides the town.
“Everytime you go to court, it was Kermit this, Kermit that, Kermit’s the epicenter,” he said. “But when it was all said and done, we got the shaft.”
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Today, drugs aren’t the top of mind for Sparks — it’s the drought. The Big Sandy, which supplies water for the town, is the lowest he’s seen in years.
“We’re not out of water and we’re not expected to be, but we’re prepared,” he said.
Despite the problems, Sparks said he has a bit of hope for tourism growth – and that hope comes in the form of dust kicking, engine revving, tire squealing side-by-side riders on the Hatfield-McCoy Trails.
“I think that could be a good opportunity – it could be a blessing, it could be a curse. I don’t know yet,” he said.
Investing in state attractions could cause tourism boon
Just a few miles up U.S. 52 in Wayne County, business owners are already competing for tourism dollars, thanks to the large tracts of public land that attract fishermen, hunters, off-roaders and nature lovers.
For the time being, that’s pretty much the only sector people there can hop onto immediately according to David Lieving, executive director of the county Economic Development Authority.
While the northern portion of Wayne has industry and easy access for goods and services by boat, rail, air or truck, a 20-minute ride south towards Kermit is a different county, he noted.
And Lieving said that’s mostly due to infrastructure. Most of U.S. 52 is still a two lane road. That’s all supposed to change with the completion of the King Coal Highway and Tolsia Highway which would expand the road to four lanes and link I-77 with I-64, cutting through the southern coalfields.
But the projects have been on the books since the 1990s, and the Wayne end is not anywhere close to being finished.
About 30 miles north of Kermit in Wayne County, Joe Bofo stands at the check-in desk at the Rustic Ravines, a cabin resort destination atop a ridge in Genoa. Outside are cabins and yurts, a bar and restaurant, a zip line, archery targets and most important of all, trails.
The resort is strategically located for ATV riders to tackle both the Hatfield-McCoy Trails and the “outlaw” trails found at the East Lynn Wildlife Management area.
Bofo doesn’t sound like he’s from Wayne. His accent has a twinge of northeast, mixed with midwest with a sprinkling of Appalachian. He’s from Brooke County originally and spent a portion of his childhood in Columbus, Ohio.
Bofo looked at Wayne County, with two wildlife management areas, a state forest and a spur of the Hatfield-McCoy Trails, and saw potential. So in 2017-2018, he went in with a buddy of his and started building Rustic Ravines.
The resort gets reservations from all over the United States.
While giving an interview, Bofo takes a reservation from a large Ukrainian family living in Cleveland that comes every Thanksgiving and rents the whole place out for a week, riding ATVs and cooking up traditional fare from the old country.
Setting up shop in Wayne went remarkably well, Bofo said.
The Department of Highways paved the road all the way to his business, a few miles from state Route 152. The county worked with him to get water service. Some Abandoned Mine Land grants from the federal government also helped out – and he hopes to get more.
But one thing Bofo thinks could help the area – and possibly turn it into a tourism mecca along the lines of the New River Gorge – is investment in state attractions along Route 152, from Huntington to Crum and beyond.
And the way Bofo figures it, the state could fund it with those hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue surpluses the Governor has touted over the last several years.
Managing education among a declining population
Down the hill from the resort, Jessica Cornett walks through the side door of the Country Boy Market with her son, who is ready for ice cream after a day at Genoa Elementary. Cornett, a native of Eastern Kentucky, has owned the store for about eight years, but it has been open for nearly 40 years in total.
Business over the years has ebbed and flowed. She said more people did their grocery shopping there during COVID-19, when they got assistance in the form of food stamps.
She gets business from the riders coming from Bofo’s resort, but it varies. Right now, people are strapped from back-to-school shopping.
Sometimes customers ask her to open at 5 a.m., like back in the day when coal miners would come through before their shifts. But there just aren’t that many miners anymore, she said.
“I think people have just moved away to where there’s jobs,” she said. “People thrived on coal, and it’s just not around anymore.”
But there’s a silver lining with the lack of people. Cornett said her son can get individual attention at his school, with only seven kids in his class.
“I came from bigger schools, so I never experienced that, but it works,” she said. “If one of them fell behind, there was always somebody there to help get them back on track.”
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For Wayne County Superintendent Todd Alexander, maintaining those schools can be tricky with the population decline. Lower population means smaller student bodies, and state funding for schools is tied to the amount of students enrolled.
He said a few years ago, there was a proposal to combine Genoa with Dunlow Elementary about 20 minutes down the road. The school board decided against it.
“You got to keep an eye on it,” he said. “If we continue to lose enrollment across the district, then we’ll have to look at that again.”
Down in Dunlow, Bill Likens raises up a platform on a forklift so a man can change a light inside the town’s community center.
This portion of the center is a warehouse, filled with clothes, food and other donated goods. For the last 21 years, Likens has been a director of this outreach ministry, sponsored by the Cabwaylingo Appalachian Mission. He is a self-described “poor boy from Dunlow.” He spent his youth reading National Geographics at the school library.
Likens said back then the coal mines were booming, but it wasn’t necessarily good.
“People get all nostalgic about that, saying it was great then, but it wasn’t,” he said. “You did have more jobs. You had two big mines in Wayne County that employed about 500 people, and another 500 on the side with truck drivers, but other than that, there’s always been nothing here.”
Just a few miles up Coal Haul Road, past the pavement slipping down the hillside, is one of those mines, shuttered since 2013. All that’s left is some equipment and a couple of guys keeping an eye on things.
For the people who are left – many of them senior citizens – Likens said it can be tough. During a monthly food distribution, he estimates about 500 people, mostly elderly, come through for food.
And it’s not just them. The afterschool program put on by the ministry has about 70 kids come, where they can get a snack and have time to play.
The ministry also works with other organizations to build houses for people in need – that afternoon, Likens was going to install cabinets in a home.
But for the people here, just a few miles from the trailhead of the Hatfield-McCoy Trails, Likens said getting basic services, like water and broadband, is still a struggle. For those without cars, getting anywhere – to the doctor, to the grocery store – is a challenge, he said.
“There’s a lot of young people who want to do stuff like go to school or get a job,” he said. “If they don’t have transportation, they can’t go do that.”
“It’s pretty rough right now,” he added.