Brown Water, Black Dust: Lonesome Death of a Coal Town

The last straw was a ruined load of wash.

She looked at it when the rinse cycle ended and Opal Dillon, a widow, a patient mountain woman long accustomed to inconvenience, picked up the phone and called the mayor.

“The water that came out of the tap was the color of coffee,” she was saying the other day in her parlor. “Strong coffee. I lost a blouse that I paid $15 for. I’m not one to complain, but I had reason to be angry.

“The mayor explained and explained, but I already knew the explanation. I guess I was just letting off steam.”

What the mayor’s explanation boiled down to was what the 2,000 people of Gary, including Opal Dillon, now reluctantly admit. Their town is dying.

“We’ve become essentially an old folks’ town,” said the mayor, Ron Estep. “We’ll be down to about 1,600 people next year, when some who plan to leave have left. After that, who knows? It’s pitiful. Some of our families have lived in Gary for generations.

Hard to Leave

“It’s hard for some to leave for that reason. Their people are buried here. It’s even harder for a middle-aged man who has no skill except mining coal to find another job somewhere else. Face it. The town has been on its deathbed since last July.”

It was then that U.S. Steel shut down the last of its operations here. Now the word has reached Gary that they will stay closed.

The machinery at the washing plant, the powerhouse, the mine portals stands silent now. The union hall is padlocked. There is no noise, no traffic on Main Street at midday. A hen pecks in the yard of an empty house.

One by one, the downtown businesses have vanished--the bank, the theater, the several restaurants, the recreation center, the boarding houses for transient miners, the clothing stores and beauty shops. All that remain are a small grocery store, a small filling station, a car wash and a pool room.

The last work to be had in Gary will be in dismantling the mine machinery, and some are hoping to land those few jobs, even though it will seem like robbing a corpse.

Gone too is the $90,000 a year in local taxes the company paid. Gary relied upon that. Other local revenues are trivial. In the mayor’s view, Gary’s only remaining support system is its fast-failing waterworks.

“A town can’t live without water,” he said.

Yes, it’s hard for rooted people to leave Gary--and not all that easy for strangers to get there either.

The way you do it is to hang on to the steering wheel until your knuckles turn white and drive over corkscrew roads lined with black dust, until you come to a valley surrounded by knife-edge rock ridges and steep mountains honeycombed with mine tunnels.

Gary is near the place where West Virginia, Virginia and Kentucky touch--the gritty heart of Appalachia, where, over the last 25 years, the government has spent $15 billion to bring the people a better life--which conceivably includes street lights and clean water.

Gary, in fact, is six miles down the Tug River from Welch, the seat of McDowell County. It was in Welch, 25 years ago, that a group of desperate people lined up to accept the nation’s first issue of food stamps.

After a generation, that Appalachian scene, like the mountains and the river, hasn’t much changed.

Farther downriver, where the Tug is the border between West Virginia and Kentucky, the waters once ran red with the blood of Hatfields and McCoys. They crossed the river on primitive footbridges suspended from ropes.

Residents of Gary and Welch still build rope-slung footbridges so their children can get to the school bus and their old people can go to church. For all the highways that federal tax money has built, that scene in the remote hollows of Appalachia hasn’t changed either.

Neither has this scene:

“When I was a little girl,” said Opal Dillon, “we got our water from a mountain spring because that’s all there was. Here I am again, at my age, carrying jugs to a mountainside spring to get water for my tea because the stuff that comes out of my faucet is mud.”

Dillon, 67, clearly is a self-sufficient woman with a sense of irony. She stands about 5 feet 2. Her hair is steel gray; her eyes are pale blue; her face is a sunburst.

Her grandfather was one of Gary’s earliest settlers. He built a log cabin on the spot where the U.S. Steel headquarters now stands--vacant, of course, except for a uniformed guard. The guard is her son, Phillip. He works for a security agency based in Atlanta and will have a job somewhere else, he figures, when the Gary death watch ends.

Dillon was born in a coal camp, a true daughter of Appalachia. She walked three miles to school in shoes with pasteboard soles, and learned to cook and sew and make do.

Her five brothers were coal miners, and she took a coal miner husband. Some of her sons were coal miners too, until they decided to get out of the valley while the getting was good. Her daughters have left, too.

Coal camps were company-owned clusters of look-alike cabins at the mine entrances. The camp where Dillon was reared with nine brothers and sisters, and where she reared her own six children, was Camp Number Six.

There were 15 such camps when the valley was producing coal at full tilt. U.S. Steel owned all the mines and shipped the coal to its blast furnaces in Pittsburgh. The furnaces are cold now, although Gary’s idle miners say there is plenty of coal left to mine.

That’s another reason some will stay in Gary and hope against hope. After all, the layoff of 1981-82 lasted 14 months. They figure that somebody else, if not U.S. Steel, might want to go after that coal.

The first coal miners came to this valley in 1895. It was wilderness then, but rich in promise. It became a town with schools and churches and cemeteries. It survived the Depression, and in the ‘40s, it was home to 15,000 people.

‘Always Up and Down’

“With all of our children,” Dillon said, “we always tried to put a few dollars aside for an emergency. We bought bonds. But every time we got a little ahead, along would come a union strike and we were right back where we started. It was always up and down.”

The first great exodus from Gary came during the 1950s, when mechanization caused massive layoffs at the mines.

“My husband was laid off for five years,” Dillon said. “I took a job as a postal clerk. He worked where he could. We got along.”

Gary was incorporated in 1970. Good times, the ‘70s. America couldn’t meet the demand for coal, owing to the boycott of Arab oil. Coal towns like Gary had jobs to spare and streets crowded with shoppers. Parties. Laughter. Lights.

In 1970, U.S. Steel turned over its water system to the confident--and solvent--new city. The system was old even then, dating back to the ‘30s, but functioning. Its newest pipe is now 40 years old.

The hitch is that Gary’s population is spread through five hollows fanning out from the river to the sites of all those old coal camps. The company long ago sold the housing to the people living in them and tore down the rest. The old cabins have been replaced, mostly with mobile homes, but the settlements remain.

One of them is nine miles from downtown, another seven. In this corner of West Virginia, not only are the towns isolated from one another, but parts of towns are separated as well.

At one time, each settlement had its own general store, theater, bowling alley, filling station, soda fountain. They were self-contained neighborhoods, all on one water line.

As a result, this town of 800 families has to maintain 50 miles of rusted-out water pipes.

The mayor figures that if he can save the water system, the town might survive. He is trying for federal and state loans, but has no idea how Gary would repay them.

Plans to Stay

Opal Dillon, muddy water or not, has no plan as yet to leave Gary.

She lives with her sister in a tidy frame house that is a long way, in more ways than one, from Coal Camp Six, but a stone’s throw from where her grandfather’s log cabin once stood.

“I have been fortunate,” she said. “We have managed through the bad times and enjoyed the good times.

“We never had to rely on food stamps, but I certainly understand why some have. They have no place to turn.

“I have read articles that are embarrassing to the people around here, but we like it here. We shouldn’t be looked down on for being caught in situations that aren’t our fault.

“I don’t know what’s going to become of Gary. We’ve been down before and have struggled and come back. I hope and pray we will again.”

‘We’ve become essentially an old folks’ town. We’ll be down to about 1,600 people next year, when some who plan to leave have left. After that, who knows?’--Mayor Ron Estep