You're holding proof that some things still get made by hand.

No sponsored content. No trending topics. No "based on your browsing history."

Just somebody sitting down and writing. The way people used to.

Stories from the hills. History that got edited out. Food worth a real argument. The kind of thing that used to travel by word of mouth before everybody got a device in their pocket.

If this found you through a friend, do yourself a favor. Make it permanent. Subscribe at thewaynetrain.com.

If it's already yours, pass it on. That's still how the good stuff spreads.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
🚂 WELCOME ABOARD
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

This week on The Wayne Train:

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
🗞 APPALACHIA 250
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Thomas Jefferson saw it first.

Poking around the mountains of Virginia, he noted the "fine veins of coal" in the ridges and creek banks and wrote it down. Smart man. He just didn't know what he was sitting on. Or maybe he did, and the country wasn't ready yet.

It would take railroads to crack those mountains open.

Three trunk lines changed everything. The Baltimore and Ohio. The Chesapeake and Ohio. The Norfolk and Western. By 1883, they'd punched through some of the most remote terrain in the eastern United States, and suddenly Appalachia wasn't a barrier anymore. It was a warehouse. The mountains that had kept the outside world out for a century now had a loading dock.

What followed was a gold rush without the gold.

Outside money poured in from the Northeast. Investors bought mineral rights from mountain families at prices that would make a used car salesman blush. Small operators got squeezed out. Consolidation happened fast. By 1900, America was pulling 269 million tons of coal a year out of the ground. The country needed every bit of it — to fire steel mills, power steam engines, heat cities, and float a Navy.

Coal wasn't just fuel. It was the skeleton of industrial America.

To keep the mines running in remote mountain hollows, coal companies built entire towns from scratch. Houses, stores, churches, schools — all owned by the company. They paid miners in scrip, a privately issued currency redeemable only at the company store. Miners earned $3 to $5 a day, then watched the company deduct tools, blasting powder, and utilities right off the top. Boys as young as eight worked the mines alongside their fathers.

A company town was a full-service trap.

World War I turned the spigot wide open. Nearly 12,000 mines were operating across the region. More than 700,000 men were underground. National production hit 700 million tons a year. Appalachian coal was powering the war industries of the Allied nations, which is a polite way of saying it was helping win a world war.

Then came December 6, 1907.

An explosion at Mines No. 6 and 8 in Monongah, West Virginia, shook buildings off their foundations. At least 361 men and boys died. Most historians believe the real number topped 500 — the mine's records were destroyed, and the unofficial helpers and subcontractors were simply never counted. The victims were mostly recent immigrants: Italians, Hungarians, Poles, Russians, and Black workers from the South. Congress later made December 6 National Miners Day. That same year, 3,200 miners died nationally.

In a single year.

The men who survived decided they'd had enough. The United Mine Workers organized. Mine operators hired private armies — Baldwin-Felts detectives, mostly — to stop them. What followed earned its name: the Coal Wars.

In 1921, between 5,000 and 10,000 armed miners launched the largest armed labor uprising in American history since the Civil War, marching on Logan County, West Virginia to force unionization of the southern coalfields. The federal government sent in troops. And airplanes. Against coal miners.

The miners lost that round. But the red bandanas they wore as solidarity symbols gave the English language a new word.

Redneck.

The 1970s gave the region one last gasp. The Arab oil embargo spiked energy prices, coal demand surged, and for about a decade it looked like the old days were back. They weren't. What the boom actually bought was mountaintop removal mining — a method where companies used explosives and earth-moving equipment the size of apartment buildings to blow the tops off mountains, scoop out the coal seams, and push the leftover rubble into the valleys below. Since the 1970s, more than 500 Appalachian mountains have been leveled. More than 2,000 miles of headwater streams buried.

The mountains that built the country got blown up as a thank-you.

When cheap natural gas flooded American energy markets in the 2000s, utilities switched fuels without looking back. U.S. coal production peaked in 2008. By 2018 it had dropped nearly 40 percent. Appalachian production fell almost 45 percent in just ten years. More than half the region's mines closed between 2008 and 2018.

By the early 2020s, the entire American coal mining workforce — every man and woman in every mine in the country — was smaller than the number of people who used to work at Bed Bath & Beyond.

And black lung is back.

The disease that the 1969 Coal Mine Safety Act was supposed to eliminate came roaring back in the 1990s and never left. Thinner coal seams forced miners to cut through silica-heavy rock. Twelve-hour shifts doubled their exposure. Today, one in five miners in Central Appalachia has it. Men in their thirties and forties. The federal rule that would have cut permissible silica exposure in half is currently tied up in court while the industry negotiates its way around it.

A hundred and fifty years of this, and the argument is still about dust.

Coal built the United States. The steel in the bridges, the heat in the cities, the ships that won two wars — all of it came out of these mountains, carried on the backs of men who went underground before sunup and came out after dark. Eastern investors got rich. The mountains stayed poor.

That's not opinion.

That's the ledger.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
📡 FROM THE DIGITAL HOLLER
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Ted Turner died Wednesday.

Bobby Cox died Friday.

Same week. Same franchise. Two pillars of the same church, gone before the month is half over.

I don't know what you do with that. I'm not sure anybody does.

I came to the Braves late, and I came to them sideways, and I came to them because of a cable wire strung to a house in the hills of eastern Kentucky where a man who had spent his whole life listening to baseball on the radio suddenly had a choice.

My daddy was a Reds fan. Not because he loved Cincinnati, particularly. Because that's where the signal came from. On summer evenings he'd go sit in his old truck — not to go anywhere, just to sit — and pull in the Reds on that radio like he was coaxing something delicate out of hiding. The warm static, the announcer's voice floating in and out, the crack of the bat arriving a half-second late like an echo from somewhere better. That's how baseball was supposed to sound. Like it cost you something to receive it.

Then TBS showed up.

Ted Turner had bought the Braves in 1976, and he'd figured out something nobody else had yet — that satellite technology could throw a local signal clear across the country, landing it in living rooms in places like ours where the nearest big-league city might as well have been on the moon. All of a sudden, my daddy could see the game. Color picture. No static. Free.

He didn't know what to think about that.

Neither did I, honestly. Because what he'd loved wasn't just baseball. It was the ritual of going out to that truck. The crickets. The dark coming on slow. The game arriving like a rumor. TV felt too easy. Too bright. Like something had been solved that didn't need solving.

But he watched. We both did. And somewhere in there, without either of us deciding to, we became Braves fans.

Ted Turner was the one who hired Bobby Cox the first time, back in 1978. Fired him too, eventually, which Turner himself seemed to recognize as an error almost immediately. Turner told reporters at the press conference afterward: "It would be Bobby Cox if I hadn't just fired him. We need someone like him around here."

That's a quote that aged well.

Cox came back. As GM first, then manager again in 1990. What followed was 14 straight division titles, five pennants, and the 1995 World Series championship. The most sustained run of excellence any franchise had seen in modern baseball, and it happened on our television sets, nightly, on a channel a billionaire with a mustache and a big mouth had willed into existence through sheer audacity.

Turner was the showman. Cox was the church.

Turner would do anything to get your attention. He once put on a uniform and managed the team himself for a game in 1977 before the National League told him to sit down. He was a spectacle wrapped in a sport. But Cox — Cox was something else. Steady. Blunt. Loyal to his players the way a good foreman is loyal to his crew. He holds the all-time record for ejections in baseball history — 158 of them — which tells you everything. The man would go to war for his guys. Every time. Without hesitation. Without a speech.

He just stepped out of the dugout and made sure the umpire knew.

My daddy never fully abandoned the Reds. Old loyalties don't dissolve that easy. But he'd watch the Braves with us, and when October came around in the early '90s and Atlanta was in the thing every year, he'd lean forward in his chair the same way he used to lean toward that truck radio.

Same posture. Different light.

I think about that a lot this week.

Ted Turner built the machine that carried baseball into our house through a wire. Bobby Cox gave us a reason to keep watching once it got there. Between them, they converted a generation of mountain kids who had no business being Braves fans into people who groaned at Tom Glavine's ERA and argued about Chipper Jones and stayed up past midnight for Game 7s.

That's not nothing. That's not even close to nothing.

Turner was 87. He'd been dealing with Lewy body dementia for years, stepping further and further back from public life. Cox was 84, had suffered a stroke in 2019, and had been mostly out of the public eye since. Both men had lived full lives. Both had earned their rest.

That's what you're supposed to say, and it's true, and it still doesn't help.

Because somewhere tonight there's a kid who grew up watching those Braves teams on TBS, in a house in the mountains or the flatlands or the mill towns, and that kid is now a grown person feeling something they can't quite name.

Not just grief. Something older than grief.

The feeling you get when the last people who built the place you love are gone, and the place is still standing, and you're not sure who it belongs to now.

My daddy's truck is long gone too.

But I still know how to find a baseball game.

Wayne Knuckles is a veteran of the newspaper industry and publisher of The Wayne Train. He began his career as a sports writer for his hometown weekly newspaper, The Pineville Sun.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
🗞 APPALACHIA IN THE NEWS
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The Catholic Committee of Appalachia’s half-century mission to heal a wounded land

They didn't show up with a press release. They showed up with a notepad and two questions.

What is it like to be you? What is it like to be in this place?

That's how the Catholic Committee of Appalachia has operated for more than fifty years — conducting over 1,000 listening sessions with people from the region before putting a single word on paper. Coal miners. The unhoused. The imprisoned. People the church itself had hurt. Women, coal miners, Indigenous prison chaplains, gay and lesbian Catholics gathering for a retreat in Virginia — all of them got a chair at the table.

The C.C.A. wasn't waiting for permission from the bishops, either. "People have their own authority in the church," one member said. "We didn't feel it necessary to get their endorsement."

Fifty-plus years in, they're still at it. Active chapters in West Virginia, Kentucky and North Carolina. More than 280 official members. All volunteer now. Meeting in church basements, coffee shops, somebody's living room.

You know who else did that?

This is a long, rich piece by Jeffrey Webb — one of the better writers covering Appalachian faith and culture working today. Worth every minute of the read.

👉 Read the full story

Appalalchia outpaces nation in ‘diseases of dispair’
The numbers have a name now.

"Diseases of despair." That's the clinical term researchers use for drug overdoses, suicide, and liver disease — the three ways a region can quietly bleed out while the rest of the country looks the other way.

Appalachia is still bleeding faster than anywhere else. A new joint report from East Tennessee State University and the University of Chicago found that deaths from those three causes remain 37% higher here than in the rest of the nation. Rural communities are hit hardest — suicides running 17% above the Appalachian average, liver disease 18%, overdoses 5%.

There is a sliver of good news. The region has been clawing back faster since the pandemic peak than the country as a whole. That matters. It means something is working somewhere. It means people are fighting back.

But let's not bury the lead in optimism.

Appalachian household income sits at 82% of the national average. Nearly one in seven people here lives in poverty. In Central Appalachia — parts of northern Tennessee, eastern Kentucky, southwestern Virginia — it gets worse from there.

Despair doesn't fall from the sky. It grows in the gap between what a place was promised and what it got.

Tennessee Lookout has the full report.

👉 Read the full story

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
🗞 KAY’S CORNER
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The quaint country neighborhood we live in is quiet and peaceful for the most part.

Occasionally, the neighborhood children will ride their 4-wheelers, having fun outside entertainment. Sometimes, chainsaws can be heard as tree trimming is in full force this time of year. Every now and then, a neighbor will pass by and throw up a waving hand.

I’m truly enjoying my time spent setting out on the porch listening to the sounds of nature this spring season. The wind chimes chiming happy sounds, the birds chirping like they’re carrying on a conversation with each other. The woodpecker ever so rapidly pecking on the trees. The leaves rustling gently in the breeze.

I’ve enjoyed getting flowers and plants of various kinds around our home. As I was watering my hanging baskets of petunias, there seemed to be something different about it. So I took it down to investigate what was going on, and behold if there wasn’t a tiny bird’s nest right in the middle of the flowers. I considered taking it out, but then I thought to myself of the hard work these little birds had done to carefully build their little home, and decided to leave it. Will it be a home for hatching some eggs? Who knows, I’ll just wait and see.

Then there are the colors. Have you ever taken time to really look at the various shades of nature’s colors?

As we were driving on the interstate just recently heading home, I really began to notice the different shades of color in the trees. I don’t think I had ever taken the time to actually look and sort out so many shades of green.

And the sky, have you ever taken time to just concentrate on the colors of the sky and the clouds?

How many actual shades of blue and white are they?

What marvelous sights we look at daily and never realize the beautiful world we have been blessed to live in.

Does age have anything to do with paying closer attention to our surroundings? Maybe.

Take some time, I’m glad I did!

Bible Verse of the Week

Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your Heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?

Matthew 6:26

Gospel singer Kay Himes Knuckles has been sharing her music ministry in Eastern and Central Kentucky for more than 40 years.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
📜 KNOW YOUR NEIGHBORS
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The Wayne Train visits all 423 Appalachian counties, one week at a time.

Ohio will surprise you.

You drive down into the southeastern corner of the state, past Columbus and the flat corn country, and somewhere around Fairfield County the land starts making decisions. Hills appear. Hollows open up. The road quits going straight. By the time you reach Hocking County, you could swear you'd taken a wrong turn and ended up in West Virginia.

That is not an accident.

Hocking County sits on the Allegheny Plateau — the same long shelf of ancient earth that runs from central New York down through Pennsylvania and into West Virginia. It is, geologically speaking, one of us. The trees know it. The rock knows it. The people have known it for a very long time.

The name itself is an inheritance. Residents took the county's name from the American Indian word "Hockhocking," which means bottle — the Hocking River, flowing through the county, resembles the shape of one. The Wyandot knew this river well. Their village of Oldtown sat at the confluence of a small stream and the river, one mile below present-day Logan. They also apparently knew good real estate. The abundance of bears, deer, elk, and occasionally buffalo in the hills and valley, together with the river fishing, made this a desirable residence.

No argument here.

Hocking became a county in 1818 and settlement expanded with the completion of the Hocking Canal in 1840. Then the railroad came. Then they found the coal.

And that is when this story gets interesting.

The Hocking Valley Coalfield's boom ran from approximately 1880 until 1920. During that time it was one of the most important coalfields in Northern Appalachia. At the turn of the twentieth century, these fields were contributing as much as 40 percent of all of Ohio's coal.

Forty percent.

They didn't just mine it either. The region and its inhabitants contributed to Ohio's role in the Civil War by using locally extracted iron to manufacture ammunition and cannons for the Union Army. Before the coal boom even hit full stride, Hocking County was already supplying the sinews of war.

The Hocking Valley coal boom brought in a plethora of ethnically diverse immigrants to work the mines scattered throughout the hills and valleys. The Welsh had a large presence, in part because many already had prior coal mining experience back home in Wales. Scots, Irish, English, Germans, Italians, and Hungarians soon found their way to the hollows of the Hocking Valley.

Welsh Hill. Scotch Hill. Italyville.

Eastern Europeans settled alongside African Americans in communities such as Rendville and Paynes Crossing. This is the thing about boom country. It doesn't care where you're from. It just wants your back.

Two of the oldest chapters of the Knights of Labor — the first major labor union in America — were founded during the Hocking Valley Coal Boom, in New Straitsville and in neighboring Shawnee. These were not men who accepted things lying down.

Which brings us to the fire.

On October 11, 1884, a group of striking miners — unknown to this day — did something that makes every labor grievance you've ever heard about seem mild. The dispute centered on a reduction of miners' wages from 70 to 60 cents per ton of coal extracted. The company had responded by importing hundreds of immigrant strikebreakers to keep the mines in business.

So the men made a decision.

They pushed burning mine cars into six mines around New Straitsville to protest being replaced by scab workers. Mine operators attempted to plug all fissures to no avail.

At times, flames shot one hundred feet into the air from fissures in the ground. The well water used by citizens of New Straitsville came out of the wells steaming hot.

Ground collapsed under buildings and roadbeds. Mine gases seeped into schools and homes. Residents were evicted and homes demolished. Potatoes baked in the heated soil and roses bloomed in the winter.

Ripley's Believe It or Not broadcast a radio report on the fire and local landowners marketed it as "The World's Greatest Mine Fire." Thousands of tourists paid 25 cents to see guides cook eggs over fire holes and make hot coffee directly from a well.

I want you to sit with that for a moment. Six men, their wages cut a dime a ton, set a fire in 1884.

It still burns today, seen as puffs of smoke rising through the floor of Wayne National Forest.

A hundred and forty years.

That is not a grievance. That is a geological event.

Hocking County has another story to tell too, and it is a gentler one.

Perhaps no other area in the state of Ohio is as wild, romantic, and picturesque as Hocking Hills. The region is characterized by massive sandstone outcroppings, deep cool gorges, towering hemlocks, and glistening waterfalls.

The most famous spot in the park got its name from one of ours.

Old Man's Cave derives its name from a hermit named Richard Rowe. His family moved to the Ohio River Valley around 1796 from the Cumberland Mountains of Tennessee to establish a trading post. Richard eventually walked away from all of it. Left the trading post, left the family business, walked into the forest with two dogs, and found a gorge that suited him.

He lived there. Trapped there. Died there.

They wrapped his body in the bark of an oak tree and buried him with all the ceremony the wilderness could provide, in the sand on a ledge in his beloved gorge.

Nobody knows the exact spot.

A Tennessee mountain man wandered off into Ohio and left his name on the most visited state park in Ohio. That is an Appalachian story if I ever heard one. We have always been better at naming things than at getting credit for them.

Tourism is now a major industry in the county, with numerous bed and breakfasts serving visitors to Hocking Hills State Park. Cantwell Cliffs, Old Man's Cave, Cedar Falls, Ash Cave, and Rock House draw tens of thousands every year.

Good for them.

Most of the new population arriving in recent decades were former Columbus residents hoping to escape the busy life of the larger city. The hills fill up every weekend with people who need what the hills have always offered.

Quiet. Rock. Water. Space.

Hocking County has been providing those things for a long time. Before the tourists came, before the coal barons came, before the canal came — before any of it — people were coming to these hollows and finding exactly what they needed.

Sometimes that was iron ore for cannon shot.

Sometimes it was just a good place to be left alone.

Either way. Hocking County delivered.

Come see your neighbors.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
📜 APPALACHIAN ALMANAC
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

THE MOON

We're fresh off a New Moon — sliver thin as of Sunday, May 17, building toward First Quarter by Saturday the 23rd.

The moon is waxing all week long. Growing. Adding light one night at a time.

Old-timers knew what to do with that.

Plant above-ground crops when the moon is waxing — green beans, squash, cucumbers, tomatoes, greens. The moisture in the soil is on the rise. Your seeds feel it.

This is the week. Get them in.

Beans, squash, cucumbers — anything that sets fruit above the dirt line belongs in the ground right now. As the moon waxes from new to full, moisture levels in the soil are increasing. Seeds swell as the moonlight grows, coaxed upward toward germination.

Your grandmother didn't read a study. She just knew.

Cut firewood this week and it'll dry faster and burn better. Fence posts set tight when put in during the old of the moon — but hair cut now will grow back faster and thicker.

Pick your battles.

THE SKY

Sunday night, look west after dark.

Then Monday night, do it again. And bring whoever's sitting on the porch with you.

On the evening of May 18, brilliant Venus stands 2.4° to the crescent moon's lower left — the closest Venus-Moon conjunction of this evening apparition. One of the best evening sky scenes of the year, an easy sight for anyone stepping outside during twilight.

Magnitude -3.9. That's not a star. That's a headlight.

And it's not done. On May 19, the waxing crescent moon will lie between Venus and Jupiter. Then on May 20, the moon floats close to Jupiter above brilliant Venus.

Three nights in a row.

You've got no excuse. The porch is right there.

Venus and Jupiter are inching closer together on the sky's dome. Their conjunction falls around June 8 and 9. We'll be watching that one too.

THE SIGNS

May's got a personality. The mountains know it.

When leaves on trees flip over with their backsides showing, rain is coming. You've seen it. That silver underside flash right before a storm. The old folks read that like a headline.

Watch the cows. Cows laying down means it's going to rain. They've been right longer than any app on your phone.

Spring is a time of renewal and cleansing, with rituals designed to protect the home and its inhabitants in the coming year. That's a polite way of saying — go through the house. Open the windows. Move the stagnant air out.

May says so.

THE GARDEN

Waxing moon. Above-ground crops. We've been through this.

Beans prefer the full moon, and all the better if you plant them in new ground. You're building toward full. Close enough. Get the beans going.

Cucumbers do best when planted at the last quarter of the new moon, in the sign of Gemini. We're moving through Gemini territory this week. Worth noting.

Never plant the same plants in the same spot two years in a row. Rotate where they are and you'll save your soil.

That one's not superstition. That's just farming. It works either way.

ONE MORE THING

Step outside Monday night around 9 o'clock.

Face west.

The crescent moon will be there, barely a sliver. Venus below it like a nail-head. Jupiter above.

Three things that have been in this sky since long before any of us were watching.

It doesn't cost anything.

And for once the forecast looks clear.

Next week: We push toward the Full Moon — and the sky starts to get interesting again.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
📜 THE BACK PAGE
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The Wayne Train rolls out every Sunday morning.

If somebody forwarded this to you, climb aboard:
👉 thewaynetrain.com