by William H. Turner

“The Raven”, that famous Gothic narrative poem [i], captured a good bit of the spirit behind my memoir, The Harlan Renaissance: Stories of Black Life in Appalachian Coal Towns. As melancholy as it sounds, I, like the narrator in Poe’s poem, now in my 80^th year, often find myself spending many wee hours “downcast,” as I ponder—quite sapped and drained, often grieving over the volumes of my experiences in my otherwise quaint and now almost forgotten hometown, Lynch, in Harlan County, Kentucky. Ravens—which represent grief, loss, death, and the supernatural in folklore and mythology—were plentiful on Black Mountain, Kentucky’s highest peak, which loomed above Lynch not unlike a part of the sky.

I feel sad in much the same way as Poe’s character for the loss of his beloved Lenore for the loss of my hometown, Lynch, for which I will always feel an unfathomable affection. The populations in Lynch and nearby Harlan, Hazard, Jenkins, and Wheelwright—as in all Central Appalachian coal towns (Gary, Welch, and Keystone in West Virginia and Appalachia, Stonega, and Big Stone Gap in Southwest Virginia)—fell precipitously with the mechanization of coal mining, which started around the time of my birth—1946. The Black populations in these spaces have fallen by as much as ninety-five percent since I left home 60 years ago. I left Lynch, but not before Lynch was also left by the coal industry, capital, and policy.

Not only have most of the people left, but the unique cultural elements of Black Appalachian coal town life and culture have vanished, virtually, in real time—my lifetime. Attitudes. Coping skills.  Folktales. Legends. Music. Recipes. Sermons. Stories. Entire streets of company-owned houses now stand empty and deteriorated and kudzu covered; black bears now roam about liberally; silence sways where coal-laden trains once rumbled 24/7/365, past what was “the largest coal tipple in the world,” the once elegant company store is now a graffiti-covered carcass of granite and limestone. I speak of “quaint and forgotten lore.”

In The Harlan Renaissance, I wrote not only about the impacts of the people migrating out, but also about the loss of our distinctive cultural practices and physical spaces that once defined our lives in these coal towns, how that has disappeared also. The rhythms, the social institutions, and the physical landscapes that sustained us have largely vanished.

“Oh, please don’t tear that little brown building down,” our outhouse. Our “colored” school and the built environments that anchored our coal-camp lives are all gone. Colored traditions: the loss is not merely demographic.

As people departed, the cultural lifeways and physical markers of Black Appalachian existence—churches, “juke joints,” meeting halls, and all gathering places—slipped quietly into extinction, into oblivion. What has been lost is more than population. With the departure of its people came the slow unmaking of a distinct Black Appalachian world—its cultural practices, social bonds, and physical spaces. The loss is communal, historical, and very, very personal and intimate. Quote this Black Appalachian: Nevermore!

When my mother was born in Harlan County, Kentucky in 1924, white immigrants from Europe were passing through Ellis Island eyeing in awe at the Statue of Liberty.  They were transported to and through the Western Pennsylvania coal fields, on over the Allegheny Mountains into West Virginia, Southwest Virginia, and Eastern Kentucky, where Black Americans— but a generation removed from slavery—waited for them, having been recruited to the Central Appalachian coalfields from Alabama, “in and around Birmingham,” where many had worked in the coal mines (some as convict laborers leased to coal companies by the state). From the beginning of the 20^th century, coal mining operations—from small family-owned “dog holes” to highly-capitalized model towns, such as the ones owned by US Steel, Wisconsin Steel, and International Harvester—were sprouting up like collard greens in grandma’s garden.

Lynch, Kentucky and Gary, WV, for example, were planned, social engineered, communities—company-owned towns—where paid work, housing, health care, social coherence, and a shared rhythm of life (shift-change whistles, schools, and recreational facilities) were secured by “The Company.” The decline of Lynch—this early-on, intentionally-designed place—was not merely just buildings, but it was more like an agreed-up social contract between a company and the people who worked for it. Built to be sustainable, Lynch—an extraction zone—was never sustained beyond the economic interests of “The Company,” United States Coal & Coke Company, which is still headquartered in Pittsburgh. As of June 2025, US Steel (“X” on the NY Stock Exchange) became a wholly owned subsidiary of Nippon Steel, following the finalization of a merger agreement.

The very system that made it “orderly and model” exposed it to collapse: it’s what happens when a company town is abandoned by its company. Corporations, by nature, are not burdened by sentimentality; after all, in a commodified consumer culture, people (workers) are valued only for their labor and their land.  Am I leaning towards romanticizing? Guilty as charged. Did coal camp kids become scattered and rootless as adults? Which side are you on?

I have not intended to say that Appalachian coal towns like Lynch should have survived unchanged; that would be absurd.  I am simply bearing witness that something worthy existed in these spaces and that their disappearance has moral weight and holds important lessons here in the age of Artificial Intelligence and advanced corporate-controlled free enterprise.

I ponder what other people might feel like if they too outlived the place that formed them.

And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting

On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;

And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming,

And the lamp-light o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;

And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor

Shall be lifted—nevermore!

For me, the presence of Appalachian coal towns, like Lynch, will always survive in remembrances. Evermore!

[i] The Raven and Other Poems, by Edgar Allan Poe. Wiley and Putnam. 1845