By Rebekah Sager
According to an announcement from Virginia Tech, the Monuments Across Appalachian Virginia project, led by two VT faculty members, recently received a $5 million grant from the Mellon Foundation.
The grant, part of Mellon’s Monuments Project, will fund a continuation of the Appalachia project’s work in the creation of monuments that highlight the histories, stories, and challenges of people living in Appalachian communities.
Monuments Across Appalachian Virginia, which launched in 2023 with a grant of $3 million from the Mellon Foundation the year before, has produced nine projects, all focused on historical events in Appalachia.
Emily Satterwhite is the director of the Appalachian Studies program in the Department of Religion and Culture at Virginia Tech and one of the co-leaders of Monuments Across Appalachian Virginia.
Satterwhite told the Virginia Independent that the project is important because it is an “opportunity for people in Appalachia who take care of their communities and their histories to have some authority over how they get to tell those stories in public places.”
She said the latest funding will support the creation of 10 to 12 new monuments.
“When we started the work in 2023, we were talking about unearthing untold histories, and what we realized is there are already flame keepers,” Satterwhite said. “We’re not unearthing the stories. There are people who have been protecting these stories and preserving these stories in oral tradition. … We’re really enabling people to share beyond that close circle of caretakers of these histories, and to share it when possible in public places, not simply in — also important spaces, but archives or descendants’ communities or tribal communities.”
One of the projects Satterwhite mentioned is titled “Green Pastures.” It focuses on the history of a group of Black Appalachians, led by the Reverend Hugo Austin, who, along with the Clifton Forge Chapter of the NAACP, fought to have the Works Progress Administration build a recreational area for African Americans. In 1936, the Green Pastures Recreation Area was set aside by the U.S. Forest Service to be used by Black residents in response to existing de facto whites-only segregated parks.
“A lot of times, it feels like Black history gets collapsed into urban history in a way that’s not true,” Satterwhite said. “We have so many Black farmers and Black rural people whose stories aren’t told. In this case, it was town people, but every weekend they were out at Green Pastures, picnicking and swimming, learning how to swim in a space that they had wrested from the powers that be and created into their own joyful space.”
The physical monument for Green Pastures is a renovated picnic shelter and a plaque that documents the history of the efforts it took to create the park.
Another project, called “Raising the Shade,” is a bronze and granite monument in Rocky Mount in Franklin County, Virginia, honoring 70 members of the United States Colored Troops, Union Army regiments that fought in the American Civil War. All 70 were born in Franklin County.
Satterwhite said moving forward, project leaders will begin seeking out people to tell some of the notable and still untold stories of the region.
“There are histories that need to be told that no one’s applied to us to tell, and we know this because we’re Appalachian scholars, and we’re in conversation with Appalachian scholars,” she said, mentioning the Hawks Nest Tunnel Disaster as an example.
One history Satterwhite mentioned is the construction, beginning In 1930, a three-mile-long tunnel called Hawks Nest. It cut through Gauley Mountain, located between Ansted and Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, and was built to carry water to power Union Carbide metal plants. During the work, large amounts of toxic silica dust were released into the air, causing an untreatable lung disease called silicosis in workers. According to the National Park Service, 764 workers died as a result.
Another is the Pittston Coal Company strike in 1989 in southwest Virginia, which was led by the United Mine Workers Association and was sparked when the owners of the mine announced the elimination of retirement and health benefits of the miners. The strike ended in 1990 with a new contract that included medical benefits for retirees, widows, and disabled miners.
“What if we start with, what are the histories that desperately need telling, and then go and look for the people who might be willing to roll up their sleeves and tell them?” she said.
Satterwhite noted that the projects underscore the diversity of Appalachia.
“The stories that have been told about Appalachia been so overdetermined by certain preconceptions,” she said. “That is particularly rich because there is this really interwoven history of Indigenous and Black and European and Filipino and Latine, and these stories that have not gotten to see the light of day, in part because of the one big story that’s told about the region that doesn’t make room for them.”
“The one big story about Appalachia is often that people are all white, all poor, all rural, and all accepting of their fates. Rather than that they are people who are from many, many different racial and ethnic backgrounds who have figured out how to take care of each other, even when that means resisting really powerful players,” Satterwhite said.
Rebekah Sager wrote this story for the Virginia Independent
