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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 [115 Line —— 3.80 —— Norm PgEn [115 Everything you wanted was right here in Dante. . . . And now we don’t have anything. FOURTEEN Company Town with No Company Kathy Shearer: Right now, and we’re talking about October 2003, this is what was once a bustling coal town. And right now, it’s almost a ghost town. Not in terms of the residences—there’s still probably three hundred houses here. The ghost town aspect is the downtown section. You’ve got the empty office building of the coal company, which vacated in May. You’ve got a post office and a little general store. You have the concrete platform that used to be the foundation for the old theater, and another office building and barber shop, newspaper stand—all that was torn down. You have a large green grassy area where the company store used to be, one of the largest company stores in the area. You’ve got an old depot, what used to be the Clinchfield railroad depot. It’s now owned by CSX, and it’s vacant and falling down. And you’ve got a lot of other buildings that are just gone. You have vacant buildings, or you have just the foundation of the building that’s been removed. So there can’t be a business there now. It’s a pretty sad-looking downtown. The old bank building is still there. It’s in pretty bad shape, but it was built around 1908. It’s one of the two original Clinchfield Coal Corporation buildings , the other being the old steam heat plant next to it. And the bank is the focus for a new community revival group which is just getting going, and they hope to become the owners of the building, fix it up, and make it a cultural center. Dante was the headquarters of the Clinchfield Coal Company, which became a subsidiary of Pittston in the ’40s. But in 1972, they built a brand new building over in Lebanon, which is several miles away, still in the same county. It’s not clear to me exactly why they did that. They had plenty of space here, I think, for what they needed to do. But they wanted to be in Lebanon. So they built this new building, and the Dante building became simply a building for 115 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 [116 Line —— 0.0p —— Norm PgEn [116 the field force, the people who would go out and supervise the operations, and the engineers. So that was a big bump for people, when they realized this was no longer the headquarters; this was no longer the main office. But still they had people coming and going. So they hadn’t lost it all. They tore the store down in about 1975. That was a blow to the community. The hotel was torn down in the mid-50s to make room for the office building. And people who can remember the beautiful hotel still really are sad. They miss the hotel, but at least it was replaced by the office building. When they tore the company store down, it was simply grass. So that was the first major building to be removed without anything going in. So by the mid-70s, I think they were getting the idea that something major was going on here. Now the mines in Dante all closed down by 1959—that early. So miners at that point—people here who still were mining coal—were sent out to other coal mines in the area. They had Duty, they had some mines north of here—Clinchco, Clintwood area. So it was obvious—certainly by the mid70s , maybe late ’70s—that things were not going well for the coal industry, for the people here. They said actually at the end of World War II, when the mining equipment came in, for every piece of equipment that came in, ten men came out of the mine...

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