Traveling back in time

May 31, 2023

Traveling back in time

Joe and I met in Eastern Kentucky almost 40 years ago. He was a community organizer, one of the founders of what was to become a statewide citizen’s group – the Kentucky Fair Tax Coalition (KFTC), later renamed Kentuckians For The Commonwealth. I was a reporter at the Appalachian News-Express in Pikeville, and wrote a story about his work helping a local community whose well water was polluted by a coal mining operation. We got to know each other better after the floods of 1984 wiped out the water system in the town of David, where he lived, and he was invited by one of my roommates, a teacher at the David School, to come use our shower whenever he liked.

Rosenbergs & Szakoses

The first major stop on our journey west was back to the scene of these early meetings – and the beginning of our life together. We had thought we were just going to see our friends John and Jean Rosenberg in Prestonsburg. They had visited us in Charlottesville, and we were eager to see them again.

As it turned out, it was old home week(end). John, who is 91, had helped organize a commemoration of a local man, Fred Shannon, who was lynched in 1919, with a pilgrimage with soil from the lynching site at the Wayland Jail to the Equal Justice Initiative center in Montgomery. Now, every Memorial Day weekend, KFTC members from around the region gather in Wayland to tend the old Black cemetery there, in memory of Fred Shannon. We saw friends we hadn’t seen in 30 years, from Floyd, Magoffin, and Laurel counties and Berea, and made some new ones as well.

Fred Shannon was lynched in the Wayland Jail,
the small stone building at left.

After a morning of hard labor, we had a wonderful lunch and heard stories from descendants of local Black residents of what life was like for them and their ancestors.

Some of the cemetery crew

Learning from the past

Angie Ousley and the house

Later that evening, Joe and I set out in the trusty campervan to see if we could find the house I lived in when we first met (where Joe took his showers). It was up a deep holler outside of Prestonsburg, and had been hand-built out of found materials by a local couple. I remembered the road as rutted dirt, with loose planks across the three stream crossings that necessitated jumping out and straightening them before carefully placing the car wheels on the boards. Today, the narrow road was mostly paved, and the planks had been replaced by culverts, but it was otherwise very familiar. When the road started to narrow and I began to worry that maybe the house was gone, and that we wouldn’t be able to turn around to get out, I saw it – the switch-back driveway up the hill on the right. I jumped out and walked up the hill to the house. It was still there! Some calling out and loud beagle barking finally brought Angie Ousley to the door (they don’t get many drop-in guests!), and she was a wealth of information about the house, the people who had lived there, and even the neighbors I remembered.

In the morning, in a persistent drizzle that hung on the mountains like smoke, we visited Joe’s old house in David. It had been one of a small row of coal camp houses built in the early 1940s. When we moved away, we couldn’t find a buyer for it, and we gave it to a couple whose house had burned down. Several years later, this house burned down, too, and they stuck a singlewide trailer and a camper in beside the charred remains. It was sad to see the site of so many good memories brought so low.

David, Ky., in the rain

Where the house used to be

We left Floyd County in 1993 because it didn’t feel like a healthy place to raise our kids. This visit didn’t contradict that, but it was a wonderful visit nonetheless.

Big Ben's Barbecue

Another highlight of the trip so far was southern Indiana, which was way hillier and forested than we knew. We enjoyed learning about the Underground Railroad and the early Black history of the region. Big Ben’s Barbecue in Jeffersonville, was closed, but the owner let us in to see a series of Black history posters featured there. Very interesting.

Camping in the Hoosier National Forest

Then it was on to Hoosier National Forest where we had some wonderful hiking and visited the site of a 19th century Black community, Lick Creek, before a night of free camping on the National Forest Service.

Now we are halfway across the country, camped on a dairy farm in southern Iowa, ready to arrive in Grinnell tomorrow for my 40^threunion (42^nd really, but we’re in a cluster of three classes because of the pandemic). The land has flattened out and the temperatures have risen steadily as we head north and west. We are excited about the next stages of our adventure.

News flash: Darwin had a seizure on Tuesday evening, but seems to be back to his old self today. We talked with his vet, and are hopeful it was a one-time thing. Fingers (and toes) crossed. We’ll keep you posted, but for now, he is enjoying the smells of the nearby cows on the dairy farm where we are camped.

Some more Eastern Ky. photos