During part of my spring break last March, I travelled to Mullens, West Virginia. Mullens is located in Wyoming County, in southern West Virginia. It is in the heart of coal country.
Mullens, like most of the region, suffers from high levels of poverty. I first learned about Mullens through a friend, an experienced international traveler and medical student, who had volunteered in Mullens during the previous summer with the Rural Appalachian Improvement League (RAIL). He told me how the region’s poverty compared with some of the poverty he experienced in Peru. I was intrigued by his description of the region and RAIL’s work to address some of the root causes of poverty in the region, so I contacted RAIL and arranged my visit.
My interest, though, went beyond the fact that the area has a high poverty rate (20% of the population lives below the poverty line, and this is probably underreported). Rather, it was the story behind the poverty rate that intrigued me. For me, it was a chance to see firsthand the interconnectedness of the themes of Energy, Environment, Equity, and Enterprise and the societal implications when this interconnectedness is either not understood or is ignored.
For someone unaccustomed to being the mountains, the road to Mullens felt like a journey into a fortress. The mountains hug you in that part of West Virginia. Streams rushed alongside of the narrow roads. A layer of snow remained on the mountainsides, shielded from the sun’s rays. And of course, my cell phone didn’t work (though everyone else seemed to have a functional phone – thanks, Sprint). I thoroughly enjoyed my drive into Mullens.
Mullens itself was noticeably larger than the many old coal mining hollers nestled in the mountains nearby. Conforming to dictates of the mountain geography, Mullens snaked through the long and narrow space between the bottoms of the mountains.
Not long ago, Mullens was a booming coal town. One of the world’s most productive mines was located just outside of the town. Thousands of coal-mining families lived there, and the town had dozens of restaurants, movie theaters, hotels, and multiple car dealerships. That all vanished as the large mines closed. Without other forms enterprise, the local economy collapsed. Today, most of the buildings in downtown Mullens are abandoned. Some of these abandoned building were quite beautiful, even grand. Relics of a more prosperous time.
A once beautiful hotel, abandoned in downtown Mullens.
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The coal hollers outside of Mullens told an even more dramatic story of the consequences of coal’s demise. During the peak of the coal-mining, these hollers were packed full of small clapboard houses – wherever they could be fit—to accommodate the miners and their families. Today, most of these houses are gone, although in some hollers the houses were simply abandoned, leaving behind ghost-towns. However, some families remain in these hollers, often in very poor conditions. Tarps covered holes in the houses and PCB pipes running from the houses directly into nearby streams represented the extent of the home sewage systems. I saw houses like this mile after mile.
“This is our coal heritage, one of squalor and filth” – an oft-repeated statement by my host, Dewey Houck, founder of RAIL. Dewey grew up in Mullens working in the mines. As a young man, he started working for the railroad and eventually worked his way up to a management position, where he was able to build a prosperous life for his family in Atlanta and on the east coast. Away from Mullens. He returned to Mullens upon retirement and has since dedicated himself to engage in the root causes of poverty in the region. RAIL seeks to improve the region through a number of initiatives, including a business incubator space, community orchards, and the coordination of AmeriCorps and Boy Scout projects.
RAIL faces an uphill battle. The root causes of the area’s poverty are deep and the persistent poverty has created a devastating cyclical affect. When the coal industry left, there was no other enterprise to fill the void. Nor was there a culture of entrepreneurship or the infrastructure to support it. So how does one foster new business in the region? There is shortage of human capital and lack of a consumer class to help business grow. Moreover, the area’s population faces additional impediments brought by sustained poverty. For example, there is an obesity epidemic. Grocery stores with fresh produce are often a 45 min. trip away; rather, gas stations and Dollar Generals fill this void with cheap, processed food. This in turn impacts the region’s overall health and productivity.
The continuing environmental impacts from the coal industry add another dimension of challenges. Mountain-top removal altered the landscape. Contaminated water from the mines often drains into the mountain streams. Those streams contain amazing fishing opportunities, but because of the pollution, the fish cannot be eaten. Along with the fact that the coal industry still owns most of the land, remaining environmental impacts from the coal industry have limited to extent to which a secondary economy around the region’s rugged beauty may be built.
The coal mining has forever altered the landscape. See that feature that appears to be a ridge? That’s actually the fill from a mountaintop removal operation.
Learning about the poverty in Mullens has stuck with me. I’ve experienced poverty in the U.S. and encountered poverty abroad, but my reaction to the poverty in Mullens has been different. Perhaps it is because the deep poverty is located only four hours away from my home Columbus, a vibrant city, full of energy and prosperity. The dichotomy is striking. Perhaps it is because the people in Mullens are fellow U.S. citizens but have been left behind. I recall RFK’s 1968 trip to Appalachia and reflect on the limited progress made in addressing poverty in Appalachia in the years since.
But I think the main reason that the story of Mullens remains on my mind is that the area was incredibly wealthy in energy resources. Tens of billions of dollars of coal was extracted from the region, through the hard, dangerous toil of its people. Like the extracted coal, the wealth derived from the resource left the region. The wealth was not invested in the region. Instead, the people there worked, the resource was taken, and then many of the people were left behind. The relevancy of this story goes beyond the region. The coal from Mullens helped fire our industrial expansion and provided abundant and cheap electricity for the Midwest. The story of our collective prosperity has its roots, in part, in Mullens.
There are lessons for Ohio. We are in the beginnings of a multi-decade energy boom with our shale gas resources. The wealth derived from the resource will be worth tens of billions of dollars. Notably, this resource is located in the parts of the state most underdeveloped. And while the consequences of an eventual energy bust in the region would differ significantly from the experience in places like Mullens, Ohio has an incredible opportunity to avoid an energy bust and instead use part of the shale gas wealth to invest in the long-term prosperity in the region. In many ways, I believe that achieving this balance—and acknowledging the interconnectedness of Energy, Environment, Equity, and Enterprise—will be the one of the great leadership challenges in Ohio over the next decade.
Squalor, mile after mile.
A reminder of Mullens’ coal heritage in one of the few remaining local businesses.
An old church in a coal mining ghost town.
