Good morning!

This week we complete our series on Appalachian newspapers by asking: Who Writes Down The Dead? We also discuss the difference between reporting and reminiscing.

Be sure to scroll to the bottom for a new weekly poll.

This week’s Snow Watch in Berea: Nary a flake so far.

Have a great week!

- Wayne K.

The Welch News opened in 1923. It closed in March 2023.

One hundred years, give or take, and gone in a press release. Three people worked there. Owner Missy Nester had taken out a loan in 2018 to keep it going. When it folded, McDowell County, West Virginia, lost its only local news source.

McDowell had about 100,000 people in 1950. Today it's closer to 17,850. A third live in poverty. No interstate runs through it.

Here's what went missing.

Legal notices, the dry little ads that tell you the water rate is going up. Church listings. Basketball scores. Graduating seniors with their pictures in a spread. School supply giveaways nobody announces now. Water and sewer projects with federal money headed their way and nobody assigned to watch it land.

And the obituaries.

Virginia Dickerson, then 79, a deputy magistrate court clerk, told the AP in 2023: "Now when people die, a lot of people don't even realize they're dead."

Howard Wade, then 97, a World War II veteran and retired professor, said the Welch News "was like a heartbeat, like a thread that ran through the community."

Nester called the wave of newspaper closures "terrifying for democracy." In May 2022 her paper had helped knock down rumors of election tampering in the primary. Now that job goes to Facebook.

A paper like that isn't just a record of the dead and the high school box scores. It's the thing standing between a county and whoever figures nobody's looking. Researchers have found that towns lose their paper and then pay more to borrow money, because lenders figure nobody's watching the books. Nobody reads those studies on a porch. They know it anyway.

Compare that with a paper that stays. The Charleston Gazette-Mail's Eric Eyre chased court filings the drug companies fought to keep sealed. He found that drug wholesalers shipped about 780 million hydrocodone and oxycodone pills into West Virginia over six years. Four hundred thirty-three pills for every man, woman, and child in the state. Wyoming County's overdose death rate led the nation. He won the 2017 Pulitzer for investigative reporting.

Some of those counties had a reporter. Plenty don't now.

A 2025 study of 249 Central Appalachian counties, reported by the Kentucky Lantern, found 93 with no full-time local journalist. Letcher County's Mountain Eagle, with two on staff, sits above the national average, which tells you how low the bar has dropped.

Ike Adams grew up on Blair Branch in Letcher County and wrote a humor column for papers across eastern Kentucky about gardens, fishing, and storing potatoes. When he died in 2021, his wife said he "felt an intense obligation to the papers and to the folks that followed his columns."

Folks who followed his columns. Not users. Not traffic.

Somebody has to write down who died.

For well over forty years I got paid to ask who, what, when, and where.

Now I mostly ask myself. And I'm a terrible interview.

Reporting has rules. You need a phone, a deadline, and a source who'll call back. You need a second source, because the first one lied. You need an editor standing over you with a pencil, ready to cut your best adjective.

Reminiscing needs a chair.

That's it. A chair, and something to drink, and nobody close enough to correct you.

I grew up beside U.S. 25E at Log Mountain. In my head, that road carried nothing but coal trucks, and every one of them was on its way to something important. Did I count them? I did not. Nobody was standing there with a clipboard. Nobody ever is.

That's the beauty of it.

A reporter has to say "approximately." A reminiscer says "back then," and the whole county nods along.

Reporting is a job. You go where the story is, and the story is usually in a school board meeting, and the school board meeting is usually in a room with no windows and a coffee urn that's been on since breakfast.

Reminiscing comes to you. It shows up at the grocery store. It shows up at the pharmacy counter. It shows up in the middle of somebody else's sentence, and next thing I know I'm telling a stranger about a creek I haven't seen since I had hair.

Somewhere along the line the ratio flipped.

I used to spend ninety percent of my day finding out what happened and ten percent wondering what it meant. Now I spend ninety percent of it saying "I remember when," and the other ten looking for my glasses.

They're on my head. They're always on my head.

The sources have thinned out, too. In a newsroom you can get somebody on the line in four minutes. These days the folks who were there are either gone or deaf in the exact ear I'm talking into. The only witness left is me.

And I've got problems as a witness.

My stories get better every year, and I haven't checked a single one. The snow gets deeper. The dog gets bigger. A fish I caught one summer, I couldn't tell you which, has grown about a foot since then and now fights like a Buick.

Forty years ago that would have gotten me called into an office.

Now it gets me a refill.

I'll admit there's a little guilt in it. The reporter in me is still in there somewhere, tapping his pencil, saying "Source?" and I keep telling him the source is me and I was there.

He doesn't buy it. He never did.

Still, the chair's comfortable. The porch light's on. And I've got one about a coal truck I haven't told yet.

Pull up something to sit on.

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.

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

Mississippi.

Yes, Mississippi. Hang on.

Say Appalachia and most people see coal tipples, hollers, and a cousin named Junior. Nobody sees red clay and a courthouse square in a town called Ackerman.

The federal government does. The Appalachian Regional Commission carries Choctaw County, Mississippi, on its books, one of 24 Mississippi counties on the list. Right now it's rated "At-Risk," with one census tract flagged distressed.

Squint if you want. It's on the list.

Welcome to Stop #141.

The county was organized in 1833, out of land the Choctaws had been forced to give up in the Choctaw Cession of 1830. It took its name from the people who were being pushed out of it.

That's the first thing to know. Everything else in the county sits on top of it.

It started big. Webster, Montgomery, and Grenada counties were all carved from its hide over the years, Webster in 1874. What's left runs about 420 square miles, with the Big Black River for a northern fence.

The county seat is Ackerman, and the name tells you who was running things.

William K. Ackerman was president of the Illinois Central Railroad from 1877 to 1883. Not a settler. Not a Choctaw. A railroad man with a desk. Appalachia knows that story. Towns named by the company, for the company.

But go west to the edge of the county and you hit something older.

Around 1812, a Frenchman named Louis LeFleur set up a stand on the Natchez Trace, a trading post and inn for anybody walking or riding through. Folks called the place Frenchman's Camp. It's French Camp now, Milepost 180.7 on the Parkway.

LeFleur married a Choctaw woman. Their son took the name Greenwood Leflore, became a Choctaw chief, and later served in the Mississippi Senate. The city of Greenwood and Leflore County carry his name.

The National Park Service says stands like that offered basic food and meager beds. Plenty of travelers slept outside anyway.

There's still a log cabin there, the Huffman Cabin, in the French Camp Historic Village.

French Camp had 420 people in 1880.

123 in 1920.

256 in 2020.

It bounced around in between, but it never got back to 420. Farm work thinned out as the machines moved in, and folks followed the paychecks. The county had 8,246 residents in the 2020 census, about twenty to the square mile. Ackerman holds 1,594 of them.

Still, the place has turned out some names. James Blackwood, the gospel singer. Turner Catledge, who ran the news desk at the New York Times as managing editor. J.P. Coleman and Ray Mabus, both governors of Mississippi, Mabus later Secretary of the Navy. Roy Oswalt, who pitched in the big leagues. Cheryl Prewitt, Miss America 1980.

Part of the Tombigbee National Forest sits inside the lines. So does a piece of the Natchez Trace Parkway.

And the Yockanookany River starts up near Ackerman and wanders off toward the Pearl.

Say it three times fast. I dare you.

THE SKY ABOVE

Mars caught Jupiter.

Sunday and Monday mornings before daylight, look high in the south. The two of them sit about a pinky's width apart, as close as they'll get. Jupiter is the bright one. Mars is the rusty one. After Monday, Mars starts pulling away.

Both are in Leo. Remember that, because the Leonids come out of the same part of the sky.

The Leonid meteors peak the mornings of Tuesday and Wednesday, the 17th and 18th. Midnight to dawn is your window. Figure 10 to 15 an hour under a dark sky. The moon is half full Tuesday and sets around midnight, so it's out of the way by the time the good part starts.

They weren't always this polite.

The night of November 12 into the 13th, 1833, the Leonids came down like a hailstorm. Estimates run from 100,000 to 240,000 an hour. People across the country remembered it as the night the stars fell. The comet that drops this gravel, Tempel-Tuttle, comes back around every 33 years or so. It's due again in 2031.

I'm not promising anything. I'm just saying keep the lawn chair handy.

Venus is still in the east-southeast before sunrise, sitting close beside Spica. Look below it and to the left, almost down in the trees, for a little spark. That's Mercury, at its farthest from the sun this week, which is as good as a morning showing gets. You need a flat eastern horizon and about 45 minutes before sunup. Hollow folks may have to drive to the top of the hill.

Friday evening the fat moon slides up next to Saturn in the southeast.

Sunrise Sunday is 7:17 a.m. and sunset is 5:26. By Saturday it's 7:24 and 5:22. Saturday is the first day this fall with less than ten hours of daylight. Barely. A minute and change short.

THE GROUND BELOW

The deer have lost their minds.

It's the rut. The bucks are chasing does across every road in the state, and they don't look both ways. The Kentucky Transportation Cabinet counted 3,406 crashes with deer on Kentucky highways in 2024, the most in five years. Wildlife collisions topped 700 in November, more than any other month. Six people were killed.

Dawn and dusk are the worst. If you see one cross, slow down. There's usually another one coming.

Gun season opened Saturday, so the woods are full of orange too. Between the hunters and the headlights, it's a hard month to be a deer.

Somewhere a tobacco barn is waiting on the weather.

Burley can't come down off the rails until it's in case. That's the old word for it. Some say in order. Dry cured leaf shatters like a potato chip. Let the air get damp for a few hours, about 70 percent humidity or better, and the leaf goes soft as an old dollar bill. You can squeeze it and it won't crumble.

So tobacco people watch for a foggy morning or a soft rain the way everybody else watches for snow.

Then comes the stripping room. A stove in the corner, a radio going, and the leaves pulled off the stalk and sorted by where they grew. Flyings off the bottom. Lugs above those. Then the leaf. Then the tips off the top.

There's a lot less of it than there used to be. But the word stuck around. Plenty of folks who never stripped a stalk in their lives will still tell you it's in case out there today.

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