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Epilogue: Another Reawakening? In the fall of 1971, John Denver’s recording “Take Me Home, Country Roads” hit the airwaves and became not only a hit in West Virginia but throughout the country. Being the object of so much negative attention for so long, West Virginians welcomed Denver’s song although Denver and his co-writers knew little about the state. The song mentions the Shenandoah River and Blue Ridge Mountains, which only pass through a few miles of the Eastern Panhandle. The key line was “Almost Heaven, West Virginia.” On the charts for several months into 1972, the song became something of an unofficial state anthem. Governor Arch Moore and his commerce commissioner Lysander Dudley recognized the benefits of the tune in an election year and arranged to have “Almost Heaven” stamped on license plates and tourist advertising.1 Politics and reality aside, most West Virginians happily embraced Denver’s ditty with its simple lyrics and catchy tune, even during the grim aftermath of the Buffalo Creek disaster. Despite the War on Poverty and all that has intervened in the four decades since, and despite the efficient and impressive technology of the coal industry a decade into the new century, much of the poverty and insecurity of the new machine age persists for many in central Appalachia. The eventful era from Farmington in 1968 to Buffalo Creek in 1972 inspired an Appalachian reawakening and successful grassroots-driven battles to improve coal mine health and safety and to reform the United Mine Workers of America. The civil rights movement, building on earlier achievements, continued to advance, and the women’s movement emerged. Efforts to ban or to judiciously restrict strip mining and to reform state politics proved less successful. After 1972, both Jay Rockefeller (who after his defeat 337 Epilogue in 1972 would serve as president of West Virginia Wesleyan College until resigning in 1975 to run successfully for governor in 1976) and Arnold Miller, the new president of the UMWA put in office by the reformers, abandoned the fight over strip mining, leaving the grassroots citizen’s groups without powerful allies. By 1972, the War on Poverty had ended. Some aspects of it, notably Head Start, Job Corps, and VISTA, continued for many decades thereafter and into the new century. Another monument of the era, the Appalachian Regional Commission, also continued (despite efforts to eliminate it in the 1980s) and was largely responsible for nearly 2,300 miles of roads built in the region by the beginning of the new century and improvements in water plants and sewer facilities . Some regional centers reaped the benefits. Raleigh County, for example, after suffering severe population losses in the 1950s and 1960s, resumed growth after ARC funds helped make Beckley a regional transportation and tourism hub. Beckley grew from the tenth to the third largest city in the state.2 Forty years after the launching of the War on Poverty, some areas in the thirteen-state Appalachian region had improved markedly, and the regional poverty rate had fallen from 31 percent in 1960 to 13.6 percent in 2000.3 But much poverty remained, especially in the rural counties of central Appalachia, where per capita payments for income maintenance programs more than doubled similar payments in other parts of Appalachia. Though Raleigh County reversed its population losses and seemed in some ways to exemplify the success of the ARC’s regional growth center concept, in 1998 26.6 percent of the population still relied on government transfer payments for income.4 McDowell, one of the early target counties of the War on Poverty, continued to languish with 38 percent of the population below the poverty line and median household income at less than half the national average. The poverty of McDowell, the other southern West Virginia coal mining counties, and other rural areas of Appalachia persisted even as the coal industry flourished and continued to find ways to produce more coal with fewer workers . In 2003, coal trains hauled more than 4 million tons of coal out of McDowell, but the industry employed only 700 coal miners.5 In 1948 it took 126,000 miners to produce 169 million tons of coal in the state.6 By 2002, the rising efficiency of the industry made it possible 338 Epilogue to produce 164 million tons of coal with just 15,377 miners.7 As Appalachian historian Ronald D Eller notes in Uneven Ground, like the rest of America, Appalachia moved away from an...

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