The story below is an excerpt from our September/October 2017 issue. For the rest of this story and more like it subscribe today, log in to read our digital edition or download our FREE iOS app. Thank you!
“In the deep dark hills of Eastern Kentucky,” sings Darrell Scott, born in London, Kentucky. “That’s the place where I trace my bloodline / And it’s there I read on a hillside gravestone / You will never leave Harlan alive.” He’s singing about coal. And home. And life. In Eastern Kentucky they’re all deeply intertwined.
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Rolling southward on timeless U.S. Route 23 in Eastern Kentucky, travelers are flanked by the Big Sandy River on one side and the Allegheny and Cumberland plateaus on the other. Near Louisa, two great structures arise out of the landscape: a natural gas-fired power station and an oil refinery.
At sunset, their exhaust mixes with shafts of light to cast a carbon rainbow over part of the Eastern Kentucky Coalfield—comprised of the eastern-most 30 counties in the state.
The Country Music Highway, as it’s called, runs the length of the this part of the Bluegrass State, from the Ohio River in the north to the Kentucky-Virginia line at Pound Gap. Aptly named for its collection of country-western music stars like Ricky Skaggs, the Judds, Sturgill Simpson, Darrell Scott, Dwight Yoakam and others, the area surrounding this thoroughfare co-mingles history, tragedy and deep tradition as few places in the country do.
Today, it is among the most impoverished regions in the United States. The Ohio River gives way to Ashland, a once-proud Rust Belt burg that has since gone the way of Gary, Indiana and Erie, Pennsylvania. Cruise through downtown, and the art-deco architecture alludes to its rich history as a 20th century manufacturing hub. Roll deeper into the state, and Prestonburg, Paintsville and Pikesville—all struggling to re-establish themselves—quiver with the specter of America’s mid-century boon.
To understand the region’s present state, it’s first important to explore its past.
Sturgill Simpson sings, “I done Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran / North Korea tell me where does it end / Well, the bodies keep piling up with every day / How many more of ‘em they gonna send.”
Far before any of the conflicts referenced in “Call To Arms,” civil war descended upon the United States. President Abraham Lincoln identified Kentucky as a buffer to northward-marching Confederate armies and, therefore, key to the Union’s preservation. If Kentucky fell, he said, then Missouri and Maryland would, too, and the Union soon after. Its position as a border state not only granted it noble responsibility, but also befell upon it bleak illustrations of fratricide.
Just north of Prestonburg, at the Battle of Middle Creek, saw fellow Kentuckians—neighbors, brothers and cousins—pitted against each other.
The battlefield, now an open grassland encircled by a grandstand of natural forest and brush, serves as a foundation for both Eastern Kentucky’s long narrative of affliction as well as its people’s tenacity. It’s notable that future-president James A. Garfield, though an Ohioan, led the Union forces that day. Having risen from humble roots, he would be assassinated six months after taking office.
So it goes in along the Big Sandy. Kentucky rivers that flow into the Ohio inevitably dye a deep burgundy.
The Hatfield-McCoy War gave the waters little time to clear.
Popular culture would like the public to believe that the bitter feud began with either a quaint disagreement over the ownership of a hog or in the throes of a forbidden love affair, a la Romeo and Juliet. Many historians, though, mark its beginnings in the post-war murder of Union soldier Asa Harmon McCoy at the hands of a Confederate militia that included a few key Hatfields among its ranks.