Echoes of Appalachia
“Stories, culture, and memories from the heart of Appalachia.”
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about
Author: Tim Carmichael
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Coopering—the making of wooden barrels, buckets, tubs, and casks—was once a common and essential trade throughout Appalachia. For centuries, it was part of daily life. If a household needed to carry water, store food, churn butter, or age liquor, it relied on the work of a cooper. The process is exact. Staves, usually of white…
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There’s a version of Appalachia you’ve seen on postcards and documentaries—the “poor but proud” caricature with bluegrass on the breeze and old folks rocking on porches. That version is a lie, or at best, a half-truth. The real Appalachia is harder, deeper, wilder. It’s a place full of contradictions that don’t resolve cleanly into slogans.…
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In Charleston, West Virginia, there’s a retired miner named Carl who plants trees on old strip mine sites. Not because somebody pays him—he just got tired of looking at what got torn up. He’s quiet about it. Packs a shovel, saplings, and water jugs into the back of his truck and hikes in before daylight.…
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You can drive the roads through these mountains a hundred times and still not see the real Appalachia. The true hollers, the bone-deep stories, the quiet struggles—those aren’t found in welcome centers or roadside overlooks. They’re tucked away, miles from four-lane highways, hidden behind rusted gates, dirt paths washed out every spring, and porches where…
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It’s been 187 days since Hurricane Helene hit the mountains of North Carolina and East Tennessee. The rain came hard. Towns like Marshall were left underwater. Businesses were destroyed. Homes were swept off their foundations. People who’d spent their whole lives in these places were left without a roof, without a job, without much of…
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I write of Appalachia because it is a part of me, stitched into the very fabric of my existence. It’s the smell of woodsmoke on a cold winter’s night. It’s the roughness of calloused hands after a day of backbreaking work for an honest day’s pay. It’s the creak of a rocking chair on a…
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Appalachia has always had a way of doing things that’s different from anywhere else. The coal mines have been a way of life for generations, shaping the culture and identity of the people here. It’s a hard life, but it’s a life of pride. The men and women who worked those mines were known for…
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It has now been 214 days since Hurricane Helene tore through the Southeast, leaving an indelible mark on Appalachia. And the clean-up still continues across North Carolina and Tennessee. According to the National Weather Service’s Tropical Cyclone Report, Helene is now considered the most destructive natural disaster in Western North Carolina’s history. Helene was the…
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Long before antibiotics were discovered, people placed their hopes in nature. And in the late 1800s, there were few places more sought after than Asheville, North Carolina—a mountain town that quietly became a place where the sick came to heal, or at least to hold on a little longer. In 1870, Dr. H. P. Gatchell…
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Donald Trump has long praised coal as the backbone of American energy. At campaign rallies, he often promised to bring back “beautiful clean coal,” painting a picture of revived small towns, strong working-class families, and jobs that would no longer be shipped overseas or lost to regulation. But beneath the surface of these political soundbites,…
Echoes of Appalachia 