Night Comes To The Cumberlands: A Biography Of A Depressed Area by Harry M. Caudill

Author:Harry M. Caudill [Caudill , Harry M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Spruce Publishing
Published: 2017-11-02T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen: The Legacy of the Thirties

The massive passing of coal companies shut thousands of miners off from even the scanty benefit of two or three workdays per week and closed the doors of the commissaries and scrip windows on which they were dependent. Only a vast expansion of federal relief programs saved their families from starvation. The Works Progress Administration in particular endlessly multiplied projects to absorb the legions of marooned miners and the almost equally numerous starved-out hillside farmers.

The efforts of the Federal Relief Directors to find employment for these myriads of destitute, frightened men were sometimes comical. Sometimes worthwhile projects could not be organized rapidly enough and “gin work” or “little piddling jobs” were resorted to.

The clamoring workmen greatly outnumbered the available tools and on occasion this deficiency was circumvented by requesting the men to bring their own picks, mattocks, shovels and sledgehammers to the job. But sometimes, even when the tools were available, an interval had to pass before the fiscal courts and the federal agencies could give the projects the required clearance. During these red-tape delays the harassed local relief directors had to find something on which the men could work.

In the building of roads countless blast-holes were drilled in the rocky hillsides. Gangs of men drilled them along stretches of several miles at a time, and to prevent the holes from refilling with dirt and gravel they were plugged with wooden pegs. In some counties the relief directors set hundreds of men to work on the timbered hillsides hewing these pointed foot-long plugs. Other workmen carried them to convenient places near the rights of way. The armies of workmen piled up small mountains of these “stobs” in numbers dwarfing the actual need for them. So many were accumulated in some areas that long after the roads were completed families hauled them away by wagonloads for firewood.

Sometimes two dozen men could be seen raking loose stones off the yard surrounding a battered, dilapidated schoolhouse. Other crews laid stepping-stones across creeks. Still others laid up walls of uncemented stones to retain creeks that were prone to overflow their banks.

But despite the fantastic waste the circumstances unavoidably entailed, the relief projects brought a great amount of needed public improvement to the region. Since those years most high school graduates have studied in “W. P. A. buildings” and traveled to school over “Relief roads.” A determined effort was made to raise health and living standards by improving rural water supplies and building sanitary privies. Hundreds of the latter were constructed in each county and it was hoped the mountaineers would appreciate their advantages and build others as a matter of course — a hope which has gone unrealized. Cased and sealed water wells were put down on many creeks, largely as demonstrations. Sanitarians tested the water supplies of thousands of residences and reported the startling fact that few of them were unpolluted.

It cannot be questioned that without the gigantic Federal Relief efforts many hundreds of people would have died for lack of food and utter anarchy would have reigned.

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