Preserving Teges Creek

We are here tonight to testify to our belief that permits for strip mining the lands drained by Crane Creek and Teges Creek in Clay County, Kentucky, should be denied because of the historical significance of this geographical area. At the end of the nineteenth century, it was a conflict over timbering on Crane Creek that led to the troubles between Tom Baker and Isreal Howard. Their conflict spiraled into the Howard/White versus Baker/Garrard feud that played a prominent role in Clay County history. Teges Creek recalls the name of one of its first settlers who was said to have been a "tedious" fellow, Adoniram Allen, a Revolutionary War veteran of the Battle of Kings Mountain and first cousin of the New England Revolutionary War hero Ethan Allen. But even more importantly, we believe these neighborhoods are of inestimable historical significance because they include portions of the most thoroughly studied community in the entire Appalachian Region known in the scholarly literature as "Beech Creek." Dwight Billings, who could not be here tonight, and I have both been involved with these studies.

For seventy years, sociologists associated with the University of Kentucky have documented the changing ways of life along these and other nearby streams in a series of research projects known collectively as the "Beech Creek" studies (a pseudonym used originally to protect the identities and locales of the families interviewed). These studies were initiated by a University of Kentucky rural sociologist, James S. Brown, who first traveled into "Beech Creek" on horseback in 1941 to conduct fieldwork for his Harvard University dissertation. Dr. Brown had grownup in the eastern Kentucky coalfields and attended Berea College. Here, in this place now threatened by strip mining, he met the descendants of Adoniram Allen and the Howards, Whites, Bakers and Garrards. It was this place that he wanted to study precisely because it had never been mined and remained largely rural.

Brown provided an extensive ethnographic analysis of local family and kinship patterns, social stratification, economic activities, and community life. Later published as Beech Creek: A Study of a Kentucky Mountain Neighborhood (1988), Brown's work provides the most comprehensive eyewitness account of an Appalachian subsistence farming community ever carried out. In the book's preface, Berea College President John Stephenson described what Brown began here as "an extensive documentary of a kind seldom seen in the history of American social science" (p. ix). Because of this pioneering research, Brown has been recognized as one of the originators of Appalachian Studies as an academic field. In recognition of this fact, the Appalachian Studies Association has named its award for career contributions to Appalachian Studies in his honor.

Brown continued his research on the families and communities of the Beech Creek neighborhoods for another twenty years after his initial study. In the late 1960s, he then teamed up with two other sociologists, Harry Schwarzweller and J. J. Mangalam, to resurvey the population still living here and the many community members and their descendants who had migrated to far corners of the United States in search of work. Their comprehensive book, Mountain Families in Transition: A Case Study of Appalachian Migration (1971), has been called a "classic" in American sociology. It is the single most important sociological study of internal migration in the United States. In addition to a follow up dissertation study of residents of the Beech Creek neighborhoods in the 1970s by Virginia Watkins McCoy, University of Kentucky sociologists Dwight Billings and Kathleen Blee built on Brown's initial research to examine the history of the Beech Creek families and neighborhoods throughout the nineteenth century. Working backwards chronologically and using the detailed research of Dr. Brown, Billings and Blee linked genealogical data, manuscript census records, land deeds, and county court records for the families of Beech Creek from 1800 to 1910. Their book, The Road to Poverty: The Making of Wealth and Hardship in Appalachia (2000), is believed to be based on the most extensive and longest running sets of data currently available for an American rural population. It won the "Best Book" award for the...