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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 [148 Line —— -0.1 —— Norm PgEn [148 We started to work with a couple of towns, . . . one of which was St. Paul, . . . not just for the town, but also for the river. SEVENTEEN Women, Conservationists, and the Economy Debbie Penland: When you look at St. Paul, you think, “The population’s a thousand. It probably couldn’t support businesses.” But the thing about it is, we’re a mountain people. The people in Dante all buy everything here in St. Paul unless they want to go to Abingdon or go on to Bristol. And if you go on past Dante to Nora and to Trammel and all the way across the mountain over into Haysi, people from all those communities and all those hollows and all up in there in those mountain areas all come here to buy groceries. That’s where they come. And that’s why we can support a larger base. And then the Castlewood area, the people in Russell County and that Castlewood area and all the farms and mountains and people who live over in there, either they come here or they go to Lebanon. They will come to St. Paul to eat. And that’s why the Burger King and Hardee’s and these restaurants have been supported so well. They’ll come to the doctor. You can’t get into the doctor at St. Paul hardly. You have to wait for hours. We have two medical facilities right here in the community, clinics. Our banks in this area are well supported by people that live in the mountains around. We have three banks in St. Paul and two banks in Castlewood. And they’re all well supported because people want to bank in the community closest to them. And any other service would be well supported—lawyers, any professional people. People from the mountainous areas would rather come to home, to St. Paul, than go to a larger place like Bristol or somewhere they don’t know. Mountain people want to do business with people they know. I know because I’m one. I’d rather do business with someone that I can talk to, that I can see, than someone over an automated system. 148 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 [149 Line —— 0.0p —— Norm PgEn [149 LeRoy Hilton: Used to, we used mussels as fish bait there was so many of them. We’d set trotlines and catch the red horse and what not, and the river was just teeming with fish. Used to, you could legally shoot fish. And I’ve seen twenty or thirty men stand on the car bridge, Bickley Bridge that runs across the Clinch River, with high-powered rifles shooting fish. And the state record is something like sixteen pounds for a walleye pike. Clinch River and the New River are two of the rivers in the state of Virginia that carries an abundance of walleye pike. And I’ve seen a man carry up the street on his back—he’d have a twenty- or twenty-five-pound walleye pike. Now the state record is like sixteen pounds. And this was common—the many varieties of fish that you could find in Clinch River. And in 1957, they had an acid spill from the coal company. And it killed everything in the river—turtles, everything you could think of, there was nothing left. Since then, they’ve restocked it, but the river’s not like it used to be. I could go catch any number of bass, red eyes, walleye pike. It was a common thing. If you wanted a mess of fish, you didn’t have to store them up. You’d just go every afternoon and catch you a mess of fish. There were that many. Well, I got up yesterday morning. It was sixteen degrees. I was missing fishing, so I went fishing at Whitetop [Mountain] yesterday morning. It was sixteen degrees. You throw your line out—I’m telling you the truth—when you’d...

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