Poverty in Appalachia: New at Reason

Reason’s Ron Bailey returns to his grandparents’ home of McDowell County, West Virginia, the iconic symbol of poverty in America to ask: Why don’t people who live in places with no opportunity just leave?

I do not long for the chilly, dusty, impoverished life I remember—my experience of the past is whatever the opposite of nostalgia is—but in retrospect, I was witnessing the tail end of McDowell’s golden era. Mechanization, especially the development of continuous mining machines, enabled coal companies to mine much more coal with many fewer workers. Out of a population of nearly 100,000 in 1950, 15,812 worked as miners. By 1960 that number was just 7,118. Today there are only about 1,000 employees working for coal companies in the county, out of a population of less than 20,000. The county’s dwindling economic prospects were further devastated by massive floods in 2001 and 2002 that destroyed hundreds of houses and businesses and killed four people.

In recent years, McDowell has attracted attention for the worst possible reasons. It consistently shows up at the bottom of rankings, with the lowest levels of employment and the worst level of overall health in West Virginia, and the shortest male life expectancy in the nation. But it sits very near the top of lists of counties with the most drug overdoses, obesity, and suicides.

The rather unsentimental question I set out to answer as I made my way back this autumn: Why don’t people just leave?

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