Poor Wayfaring Strangers: Can Appalachian Studies Survive the Age of Trump?
A 93% white, 88% male legislature gutted West Virginia University’s Appalachian Studies program. The New Deal-era town of Arthurdale is fighting back, building a living laboratory for tradition, inclusion, and resilience.
Appalachian Studies | Arthurdale West Virginia | Appalachian cultural preservation
I grew up in Upper East Tennessee, a child of the chemical and paper plants in Kingsport. In 1989, I moved to the coalfields of Eastern Kentucky to take a job with Appalshop, a media arts center in Whitesburg. There I peddled documentary films about the Appalachian region’s politics, art, and social justice movements, primarily to college and university professors. Before I came to Kentucky, I mostly thought of myself as Southern. Now, I usually identify as Appalachian. This is in no small part because once at Appalshop, I quickly became enmeshed in one of this country’s most vibrant, hopeful, and undercelebrated organizations: the Appalachian Studies Association.
I’d been involved in an academic American Studies program, and around people who did Southern Studies, Women’s Studies, African American Studies, people learning and thinking in spaces where one can look at things from different angles. Appalachian Studies is where I learned both to think about and act on what’s happening around me. These days, I’m worried that all these interdisciplinary ways of celebrating our strengths and thinking about our challenges are at risk. In reflecting on the threats to Appalachian Studies, I’m wondering if we aren’t experiencing an even larger assault on thinking itself.
Unlike many academic conglomerations, ASA has, from its beginnings in the 1970s, stressed the importance of connecting life on campus to the lives of people in the region’s communities. From its conception, college faculty, community activists, and regional artists have made up ASA’s membership. One of the early collaborative projects of ASA members was the 1979 completion of the Appalachian Land Ownership Study, which documented the huge percentages of Appalachian land owned by absentee and corporate entities, a key contributing factor to the exploitation and destruction of that land by mining and timber companies. That work led to work in multiple states to ensure absentee landowners pay their fair share of taxes.
Appalachian Studies | Arthurdale West Virginia | Appalachian cultural preservation
ASA members have also documented and helped ensure the perpetuation of many of the region’s most important cultural contributions: old-time and traditional music, storytelling and literature, dance and craft, filmmaking and visual art. ASA members have written about labor history, environmental conditions in the region, Appalachia’s role in the global economy, and the work of the region’s many social justice organizations. Particularly in recent years, ASA’s members have done much to expand understanding of the diversity of the Appalachian region, telling indigenous, African American, and Latinx stories, women’s and LGBTQIA+ stories, and stories of the land itself.
The Appalachian Studies community, centered on ASA but not totally defined by it, has been a second family to me since I arrived in Kentucky. As I moved from Appalshop to work at a community college in Harlan County, Kentucky—where I have worked with my community to produce theater about what’s happening in Harlan—ASA and its members have been audience, collaborator, critic, and supporter of our work. When I began to write fiction, ASA and Hindman Settlement School’s Appalachian Writers Workshop were where I turned for guidance and training.
The Appalachian Studies community has enabled the work of thousands of scholars, activists, and artists. At colleges and universities across the region, there are Appalachian programs, Appalachian Studies centers, and regional research institutes. These campus-based entities are part of an ecology that includes community organizations, grassroots movements, arts centers, publishers, and individual artists, organizers, and ordinary citizens in communities scattered across a dozen states. The Appalachian Studies community has become a model for how colleges and universities can serve the communities they inhabit and from which they draw support.
Attacks by local, state, and federal governments on programs that support diversity, equity, and inclusion of people who have been historically discriminated against ... have imperiled the work of Appalachian programs on college campuses.
It will come as no surprise to many of you that Appalachian Studies programs are under threat on many campuses. Attacks by local, state, and federal governments on programs that support diversity, equity, and inclusion of people who have been historically discriminated against—as well as attacks on the humanities and social sciences generally—have imperiled the work of Appalachian programs on campus and thus the ecology of which they are a part.
A particularly egregious attack on Appalachian Studies came at West Virginia University in 2023. In the name of fiscal austerity, the WVU board gutted Appalachian Studies at West Virginia University along with dozens of other programs across the university. It is difficult to see the cuts at West Virginia University as being solely about fiscal responsibility, taking place as it does in the current national climate, which is marked by:
- The banning of books from public libraries
- Threats to the expression of free speech on campuses, particularly when that speech is critical of imperialistic and exploitative behaviors
- Editing of public history in our national parks, historical sites, and public websites to exclude the stories of women, queer people, and persons of color;
It is a pivotal time for everyone who is concerned about the survival of thinking and learning in this country. People at universities do the research that leads to advances in medicine and technology that save lives and enable prosperity. Universities are also the place where we make space to ask questions and reflect on the decisions we are making as a society. Appalachian Studies is just one example among many of programs where we as a people allow ourselves to think critically.
Appalachian Studies | Arthurdale West Virginia | Appalachian cultural preservation
Where will reflection happen if our institutions fail? Or if their stewards fail us?
In late 2024, West Virginia authors Neema Avashia and Glenn Taylor began talking to me about a community-based approach to Appalachian Studies emerging in the New Deal planned community of Arthurdale, about forty minutes from WVU in Preston County, West Virginia. In February, I sat down for this interview with Elizabeth Satterfield and Mary Linscheid of Arthurdale Heritage and Ann Pancake, a noted author and former WVU creative writing teacher who lives in Arthurdale.
I was interested in what these women are thinking and doing in Arthurdale in part because I’m working on a book about the Kentucky author Gurney Norman. Gurney is an icon in Kentucky. He wrote one of the most important novels of the Southern counterculture, Divine Rights Trip, originally written in the early 1970s and due for a re-release in August. He also wrote one of the cornerstones of Appalachian literature, the 1977 short story collection Kinfolks. Gurney taught creative writing at the University of Kentucky for forty years and is one of my most important mentors. I met him when Appalshop was making a film of one of his short stories, “Fat Monroe,” and got to know him better as we worked on several community workshops and camps designed to give mountain kids more opportunities to take part in the arts and teachers more tools for teaching about the region. One reason I undertook to write about Gurney is the vital role he and others of his generation played in establishing the infrastructure to support those who wanted to make a living talking about the history and culture of the Southern mountains, or make art based in the region’s traditions. As a result of their labors, ASA, Appalshop, the Appalachian Writers Workshop, and hundreds of organizations and Appalachian Studies programs were established in the mountains and beyond. It is important to capture the story of that work not as an historical exercise, or a eulogy, but as a way of sustaining our movement.
Hundreds of organizations and Appalachian Studies programs were established in the mountains and beyond. It is important to capture the story of that work not as an historical exercise...but as a way of sustaining our movement.
The current work at Arthurdale is resonant with the strategies employed by Gurney and his contemporaries in the 1960s and ‘70s. Just as they worked to establish and maintain institutional beachheads for the work of Appalachian scholars and artists, they also experimented with working outside the strictures of the academy. Arthurdale’s legacy as a product of not only the New Deal era’s optimism about public investment but also that era’s institutional racism make it of interest as we ponder what to keep and what to throw away. The following interview excerpts reveal Arthurdale to be a case study for how our young can move forward, building on the best of what’s come before, staying positive and action-oriented even as they pursue accountability and atonement for the wrongs of the past.
Appalachian Studies | Arthurdale West Virginia | Appalachian cultural preservation
Robert Gipe: Tell me about Arthurdale.
Elizabeth Satterfield: Arthurdale is an unincorporated community in Preston County. About a thousand people live in Arthurdale. The whole community is on the National Register. There were originally 165 homesteads. We are well over 400 dwellings now. Our organization, Arthurdale Heritage, occupies the historic community center built in the 1930s. We have a twenty-three-acre campus and thirteen buildings. The organization revitalized and preserved the buildings. In doing so, they preserved this as a strong rural community. We’re not just a historic site. It’s very much a public space, even though we’re a private organization.
Mary Linscheid: We have several programs that are closely connected with what they used to do in Arthurdale. We have a blacksmith’s forge that will be having its first class in years. We have a woodworking class. We have weaving classes. This year we’re looking to highlight more traditional crafts at our New Deal Festival in July. They had a music festival in Arthurdale in the 1930s with a fiddle contest, ballad singing contest, jaw harp contest, jig dancing, a big square dance contest. We’re trying to shift to more of that type of community folk festival.
Ann Pancake: Elizabeth and Mary are putting together programs and creating an atmosphere where everybody feels at home. That ranges from queer people who come to square dances to older people whose parents homesteaded here to local people who would not necessarily consider themselves progressive but want to come and hear the music, come and take the classes. If you teach a class here, you’ve got a cross section that is really, really special.
ML: We do this partly in a response to WVU, which cut all its Appalachian Studies programs. Even though we’re not doing hyper-academic stuff here, we’re doing stuff that’s deeply rooted in West Virginia history. Very hands-on and very deinstitutionalized, which I think is important because our institutions are failing us. This is more of a grassroots approach to teaching.
RG: How did each of you get to this work? What came before?
ES: I grew up in Taylor County, West Virginia. When I finished high school, I went to West Virginia University. I focused on West Virginia and Appalachian history as well as rural community development. I got master's degrees in public history and public administration. I started at Arthurdale Heritage in January of 2022. They received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, which allowed them to hire me as a curator and director of education. I manage our museum collection, which is more than 5,000 pieces, all focused on the community of Arthurdale. I organize programming and events. I do grant writing and management, exhibit development, and oversee our bricks-and-mortar preservation projects.
ML: I grew up in Monongalia County on my grandma’s ancestral farm, very connected to the land. I grew up doing all the farmhand stuff with my grandpa. Both my parents are classical musicians, so I grew up playing classical violin, but fell into West Virginia and Appalachian fiddling styles when I was twelve. When I graduated high school, I didn’t want to leave West Virginia, so I went to WVU. I was an English major with Appalachian music and Appalachian studies minors. I had a class with Ann [Pancake] about Appalachian literature and the environment that changed my life. I knew about Arthurdale because I fiddled for the square dances here. Six months after I graduated in the summer of 2023, I applied to be the Americorps member at Arthurdale. I did Americorps here for a year, and then I became the Appalachian programs coordinator in October 2024.
ES: Our new director, Kenny Kidd, started in August 2024. He has a background in social work and community development and also studied Appalachia when he was in college. He’s from St. Albans, West Virginia. When he was in grad school at WVU, he was the first student to live in our museum house. He served as a living history interpreter, dressed up and took care of the garden and the farm animals. Kenny is excellent. With his social work background, he’s constantly thinking about whoever is forgotten in the community, asking how can we serve everybody? He’s also great at thinking about how we sustain ourselves.
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Appalachian Studies | Arthurdale West Virginia | Appalachian cultural preservation
AP: I came back to West Virginia eight years ago, to work at WVU. I came to Arthurdale to look for a house and found an extremely cool one with four acres within forty minutes of my work in Morgantown. After my partner and I got here, we started to understand what was going on in Arthurdale, what a real community it is, and how many different types of people it was serving—people of all ages, of all socioeconomic classes, but also across Republican and Democrat. When I left WVU, there was no way I was going to leave here. I don’t plan to ever leave here. There’s really good juju here from Eleanor Roosevelt. Lorena Hickok, one of Eleanor’s women friends, a journalist, went to Scotts Run, a coal-mining community north of here that was very degraded. She went back to D.C. and told Eleanor she should look at doing something in West Virginia. Arthurdale was born from a collaboration between Eleanor and her lesbian friend. That continues to inspire.
ES: After Lorena Hickok wrote to Eleanor about the conditions in Scotts Run, Eleanor visits in August of 1933, a few months after her husband’s inauguration. She doesn’t really announce herself as First Lady and meets with people and sees how they’re living firsthand. She goes back to Washington and pushes for the first of the subsistence homestead communities being formulated by the Department of the Interior to be located in West Virginia. The federal government purchases 1,200 acres in Preston County by the end of October 1933. They break ground in November of ’33. People are moving in in early 1934. A hundred and sixty-five families move here. Not all of them are from Scotts Run. Not everybody who came here was an ex-coal miner. Many were, but the government chose farmers and skilled craftspeople to move here, so there would be a diversity in terms of skill and trade. You had to be a traditional family unit to move here—husband, wife, and children. They had a whole application process, asked you lots of questions about how well you work with other people. They asked about your ambition, how you feel about the future of your children, and they were interested in your agricultural knowledge.
RG: Eleanor Roosevelt had a whole idea of what Arthurdale was going to be, that it was going to be this diverse American community, and it didn’t end up being that diverse.
ES: Eleanor wanted this to be a place to think about how a community can be diverse, but also self-sufficient. She encouraged Black folks and immigrants in Scotts Run to apply to come to Arthurdale. Their applications were received but completely ignored. The federal government gave the rationale that if they allowed people of color, there would have to be two of everything. It would still have to be segregated, and that would cost too much money. There were a lot of racist and discriminatory policies built into New Deal programs. Eleanor was really disappointed in this and pushed back against it. But ultimately, that was how Congress delineated things, and the different departments and programs decided to go. The white folks were plucked out of Scotts Run and moved up here. Everybody else was left behind.
Eleanor Roosevelt visited over thirty times during her husband’s administration. She was incredibly involved in the project. ... Eleanor brought in an architect, and he designed the ... houses and a lot of the community structures.”
—Elizabeth Satterfield
The whole thing was very fast, so the houses they constructed were...I don’t want to say shoddily built...but they were. They were modular houses, and they didn’t fit on the foundations they laid. They were drafty and leaked and only had two bedrooms. If you have four or more children, as most people did, that’s pretty tight. So they have lots of problems. They were also trying to get the ground ready to farm, and to build factory spaces so they could make things to sell. They had a hard time getting any kind of manufacturing to stick here.
Eleanor Roosevelt visited over thirty times during her husband’s administration. She was incredibly involved in the project. After the debacle with the first house style, Eleanor brought in an architect, andhe designed the rest of the houses and a lot of the community structures. She put her foot down, saying if we are going to do this project, we should do it right. That meant spending millions of dollars the Federal Government never recouped.
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Appalachian Studies | Arthurdale West Virginia | Appalachian cultural preservation
Mining wasn’t a part of the homestead community. The goal was to take ex-coal miners and have them become farmers and work in some kind of cooperative industry. But quite a few ended up going back into the coal mines, especially during and after the war. A lot of them still lived in Arthurdale but ended up working in strip mining in the ’50s.
Arthurdale Heritage got started right after Arthurdale’s 50th anniversary in 1984. They had this big homecoming. One of the Roosevelt boys came. Politicians came. Many original homesteaders and their kids came back to a community in disrepair. Buildings had burned or were collapsing. A group of mostly women got together and decided to do something. They incorporated Arthurdale Heritage in October of 1985 and started fundraising to purchase the community buildings and restore them. Community members came forward with archival documents and photographs and woven items and furniture. By the end of the nineties, we were a historic site open to the public, with a museum and one of the original houses set up as a demonstration house. In the 2000s, there were ups and downs. Darlene Bolyard, our previous director, helped us secure our buildings. Of the thirteen buildings we own, ten have been fully restored. She oversaw us during the Covid years. During that time, we were able to take a step back and figure out what we wanted to be. We came out of COVID with a new idea of where we wanted to go. Our mission is to build a resilient community inspired by the history, legacy, and folk arts of the first New Deal community and its people. We have a beautiful hall. We have gorgeous grounds. We have museum buildings. We have a blacksmith’s forge. We have multiple houses. They should not be empty. They should be full of life all the time.
Our programming for the last few years was really intermittent but well received by the public. People seemed eager to get together and learn new things. We were trying a lot of different things, which is one of the ideas Arthurdale was founded on. Let’s try it and see what happens. When Mary started, with her expertise and connections with Appalachian history and folkways and music, we decided all our programming should be rooted in the history of this place. Now, the programming is way more focused. It feels a lot better. And it’s working.
ML: This semester we have twenty-three events and programs scheduled. They’re selling out quickly. People seem hungry for real connection with other people and connection with the land and connection with our history. We’ve become more intentional about the audiences we’re serving and trying our best to reach a diverse audience—different ages, different socioeconomic backgrounds, different genders.
“In our guided museum tours, we interpret the discriminatory, racist practices that barred people of color from moving to Arthurdale as homesteaders in the 1930s.”
—Elizabeth Satterfield
RG: Arthurdale wasn’t immune to the ills of racism that continue to plague our country. How do y'all reckon with that in your work now?
ES: In our guided museum tours, we interpret the discriminatory, racist practices that barred people of color from moving to Arthurdale as homesteaders in the 1930s and are working to interpret that history even more as we update exhibitions. We have also begun studying the site’s history before it became Arthurdale. This area was originally called “The Glades” and was purchased by Colonel John Fairfax after the Revolutionary War. Fairfax was one of the largest enslavers in the county, owning more than forty people at one time. No structures remain today from that plantation, but a cemetery exists where the Fairfax family and enslaved people are buried. Although we don’t know exactly who is buried in this cemetery, we have found the names of many people enslaved on this plantation and plan to include these names in future outdoor signage at the site. Our AmeriCorps members have coordinated clean-up days in the cemetery so we could start more documentation. In October 2024, we hired a cultural resource firm to conduct ground-penetrating radar in the cemetery. After we receive the final results from this survey, we plan to install interpretive signage later this year in the cemetery as well as on our main campus about the plantation and enslaved people who were once here. This is part of a statewide initiative to interpret sites of enslavement and important Black history.
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Appalachian Studies | Arthurdale West Virginia | Appalachian cultural preservation
In terms of our programming, we specifically try to include Black artists, both for literary and musical events. We also select books for our Appalachian Book Club that are written by people of color from the region, highlighting the region’s diversity.
We have seen a positive response from the wider community as we have addressed the racial disparity present in Arthurdale. It’s encouraging to hear school kids call out the injustice of the homesteader selection process when they take a tour. Or to hear from community elders who are excited about the cemetery project and honoring those buried there.
ES: In terms of museum visitation, about 55 percent of our tourists come from outside the state, and most of those are from Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia. Forty-five percent are from West Virginia. A lot of those are incredibly local. People riding their bikes around, taking a walk. We rent out our space for weddings and baby showers. People within the county use our space like a community center. Our book club has several really local folks involved.
RG: How do to the cuts and layoffs at WVU in 2023 inform your work?
AP: Although WVU did not directly eliminate Appalachian Studies, they indirectly eliminated it by firing professors, especially in the English department, and by making it impossible for people to continue to teach because of the toxic work environment the administration created. People who weren’t fired got jobs elsewhere, resigned, or retired early. WVU has never given much support to Appalachian Studies. In my opinion, WVU ‘s purpose has often been to prepare people to leave or, if they are staying, to run our state systems as they are, which is to say corporate-friendly and extraction-based. Appalachian Studies doesn’t exactly support that narrative.
“We hadn’t identified how or where we could restart Appalachian Studies, but we knew it was crucial to move it out of conventional institutions, out of institutional control, in order to save it.”
—Ann Pancake
As we saw the writing on the wall about the fate of WVU in the summer of 2023, [the late] Travis Stimeling, who was still the head of the Appalachian Studies minor, my partner Caitlin, and I were sitting in a bar in Morgantown, waiting for the Wild Shoats [Mary Linscheid’s band] to play, and we were saying, “What are we going to do? We got to take Appalachian Studies out of this oppressive institution and figure out another place to do it.” Of course, Travis was all over that, and there are other people we talked to, like Glenn [Taylor], and Neema [Avashia], Mary here, and Torli Bush, Elizabeth, and others who were interested, including some who were still at WVU. We hadn’t identified how or where we could restart Appalachian Studies, but we knew it was crucial to move it out of conventional institutions, out of institutional control, in order to save it.
We talked about Arthurdale, and when Mary started working here, it became a natural choice. Travis and I had already done a lot of volunteer work here, and Elizabeth had worked here for over a year then. After Travis passed away, I think we felt even more urgent about giving Appalachian programming a life here. The loss of Travis is an utter tragedy, and WVU had a role in damaging his health. Travis did so much in his short life to prepare people like Mary. He was a mentor to Mary and many others, showing them the rewards of being invested in this place, Appalachian Studies in West Virginia, and the culture here. Nobody can replace Travis. But he left a hell of a legacy in all the people he touched, who are carrying on his vision.
ES: I find myself talking about WVU pretty frequently with friends and family and people who have been connected with the university. In how we present things to the public at Arthurdale Heritage, WVU isn’t mentioned. There’s just so much sadness and anger and grief, and we’re trying to be a positive space and a space for hope. We’re ready to do something that is our own. Not dictated by what we’re against.
RG: How do you pay for what you do here?
Appalachian Studies | Arthurdale West Virginia | Appalachian cultural preservation
ES: Much of our funding is private individuals and donors. A lot of them have a personal history with this place. Many are homesteader descendants. We apply for fifteen to twenty grants a year. Most of it, if it’s not direct federal funding, is coming from the state or foundations who get their money from the Feds. Right now, the grants we have are okay. Most have been passed in Congress or by our state legislature. But I’m worried about what things are going to look like in a year or two.
Tourism is the top industry in West Virginia. As a historic site and museum, we are part of the tourism industry. We had visitors from more than thirty states and four countries last year. That’s wonderful. I love those folks. But I’m more interested in serving locals. I’m also worried about tourism as an extractive industry. People come here and have a wonderful time. It’s a wonderful place with wonderful people and I’m glad they enjoy that. But they’re using our resources, and then they’re leaving. I worry most about our natural habitats, our wilderness areas where it’s just overrun.
With our new focus on serving our community, I’m hopeful we can carve our own path as an organization. We measure success in different ways than dollar signs. I love the nine-year-old girl who took a weaving class with us and loved it so much she asked Santa for a loom for Christmas, then spent the next year weaving Christmas presents for her entire family.
ML: Instead of the tourists coming in and out, we want people to come here and stay and contribute to the community that is already here.
AP: We have a huge history of brain drain and people leaving here. Part of what these two are doing is raising the quality of life, making it more attractive to people, including young people, to stay in West Virginia.
It’s important and unusual that all the staff here are long-term West Virginians. There are a lot of wonderful people who help out across the state who didn’t grow up here. They come here. They fall in love with West Virginia. They contribute great things for a while, and then they move on to their next thing. One reason I admire these two so much is they’re completely committed to the long haul. They grew up here in rural communities. They are familiar with the complexities of the culture here. They’re used to negotiating in a way that people from outside don’t have any idea how to do. That’s one reason they make this place come across as welcoming to all. It’s not easy to live here as a so-called progressive person. We have a whole lot of people we love who are not progressive. It’s not a place where you can go in a progressive bubble. Here, you’re with people who may not share a lot of your views, but there’s a lot of kindness and a lot of helpfulness and friendliness. That’s another way I think parts of West Virginia, like here, might serve as a model for the rest of the country. We don’t have the choice to isolate ourselves. We need to learn how to get along with everybody, and these two really do.
“We get lots of visitors who are very conservative, but they are often enamored with the Roosevelts, especially Eleanor Roosevelt. They love what the New Deal did for their parents and grandparents.”
—Elizabeth Satterfield
ES: Our festival in July is called the New Deal Festival. It’s more like a reunion for a lot of folks, and lots of families with young kids come. Same thing with our artisan markets in the spring and fall. Those are free, and we have four to five hundred people who come each year. Those are hyper-local people. This year’s the twenty-eighth New Deal Festival. There’s live music. There are heritage demonstrations like blacksmithing and weaving and spinning. There’s hayrides. There’s petting zoos. There’s a car show, kids’ activities, a big artisan market and food trucks. The museum buildings are open. We’re still figuring out what this festival looks like going forward. I think now we’re trying to figure out how we can incorporate the New Deal more.
RG: We have seen a lot of pushback regarding the New Deal and the Great Society and their impact on American life.
ES: We get lots of visitors who are very conservative, but they are often enamored with the Roosevelts, especially Eleanor Roosevelt. They love what the New Deal did for their parents and grandparents. At the same time, these are folks who feel disenfranchised by the federal government and think the federal government should have very little involvement in their lives. They don’t connect the New Deal with their current political beliefs, which allows us to still celebrate the New Deal.
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Appalachian Studies | Arthurdale West Virginia | Appalachian cultural preservation
RG: Tell me about some of your current partnerships.
ML: JAM is the Junior Appalachian Musicians program. They’re based out of Virginia. They have chapters throughout the Appalachian states. We’re one of the first in West Virginia. They provide resources to help communities implement after school programs to help teach middle schoolers how to play traditional mountain music together. They will be providing us with loaner instruments or funds to support instructors. The idea is if you teach the next generation how to play music together, they’re better equipped to make their communities resilient. As somebody who grew up playing traditional mountain music in a very intergenerational community, I definitely can attest to that. We’re partnering with the Monongalia Arts Center (MAC) in Monongalia County and Morgantown as sister chapters in JAM.
ES: The MAC has a similar story to us. It’s a traditional art center in the old post office in Morgantown, and they have done arts programming for a long time. My mom took classes there in the ’80s and ’90s, and they really struggled for a few years. They have a new program coordinator who lives here in Preston County, and we coordinate with her. A lot of the challenges she faces are the same we face. So that’s been a really positive connection.
In Arthurdale, we have a significant textile collection, so we did an exhibit about fiber arts. It opened here in November 2023, then traveled to Morgantown, the MAC, and the University. It was at the art center in Elkins through the first three months of 2025. We’ve partnered with them and the West Virginia Folklife Program and the local weaving guild there, the Mountain Weavers Guild, to help put on that exhibit and some additional programming. I’m really excited for that exhibit to travel, because Arthurdale has been in survival mode for a long time. Now we have the opportunity to get our name out there and work with other organizations.
“There’s always this mentality out there that we have to preserve this, or else it’ll be lost forever. I don’t like to approach it from a fear mindset or a scarcity mindset. I sustain tradition because tradition sustains me.”
—Mary Linscheid
ML: Beyond JAM, I’m close with the Augusta Heritage Center in Elkins. They do a lot of music programming.
ES: I work with the Preservation Alliance of West Virginia and the West Virginia Association of Museums. We have a program where all Preston County K-12 students can visit here for free. We do a lot of programming with the local K-8 school.
We just did Poetry Out Loud with the high school. Sixteen students participated. They had their final competition at Arthurdale Heritage, and we made it special for them. Ann was a judge. Torli Bush and Doug Van Gundy were judges. The state coordinator for Poetry Out Loud stopped by, and he said, “How did you get celebrity judges in Arthurdale?” Doug is a good friend. Torli is connected with Mary, and Ann is, you know, our very favorite neighbor. So it’s not hard to have cool people involved.
AP: We want to go beyond preservation into sustainability. A lot of the stuff these guys are teaching is going to become more and more important. There are people in West Virginia who still have skills and practices that have been lost elsewhere but that we’ll need in the near future. Mary and Elizabeth’s generation is helping share those skills and practices after generations who often let the knowledge lapse. I think of something Maria Gunnoe said in Shannon Bell’s Our Roots Run Deep as Ironweed. It’s something like, Yeah, people make fun of hillbillies, but there will come a time when outside people will come to us and say, “How was it you growed your garden?” I think that time is near.
ML: Tradition has to be dynamic and alive. It has to change with the people. There’s always this mentality out there that we have to preserve this, or else it’ll be lost forever. I don’t like to approach it from a fear mindset or a scarcity mindset. I sustain tradition because tradition sustains me. It makes my life richer and more connected with people.
AP: After the disaster at WVU, what’s happening at Arthurdale has been a healing thing for me, and for Elizabeth and Mary, and for others. What happened at WVU helped prepare us for what’s happening now on the national stage. The actions by the WVU administration were a micro version of that authoritarianism, purging, and cruelty in service of profit. When I look over here and see what Mary and Elizabeth are doing while still in their twenties, I think this place is hope. Arthurdale is a radiant light. It’s a model of what we can do in rural areas with good people who are open and compassionate and hardworking, and committed to a vision of a place they love. I’m always blown away that people in their generation still have this kind of attachment to the land here and the culture here. I can’t say enough about these two. They help keep me out of depression.
Robert Gipe is an award-winning Appalachian novelist, educator, and community arts leader, known for his Trampoline trilogy and decades of work connecting college, community, and cultural preservation in Kentucky and the wider Appalachian region.