McDowell County

John Hardy worked on the railroad, not to be confused with John Henry, who was a steel driving man.

Hardy worked in McDowell County in West Virginia.

It was spring of 1893 when, one day after a hard shift, Hardy went to the local watering hole near Keystone in West Virginia.

He was throwing back the drinks, as were the fellow patrons, when he and a man named Thomas Drews began shooting craps.

He went to West Virginia.

And my father was born in Philbert, West Virginia, which is in McDowell County, the poorest county in the country right now.

And right after my dad was born, a person knocked on the door and it was his name was Condido.

And he said, we're your family and our father's sick and you need to come home.

And I delivered those, and that story in and of itself was a miracle.

delivered those into southern West Virginia, into McDowell County, into a church where two women had been on their face before God praying, and literally the carpet was wet, where they had been on their knees and their faces praying for God to send in something for the children for Christmas because the floods had taken away everything.

So when I arrived and began to tell that story, suddenly it grew.

And by 2004, we were doing thousands of shoeboxes and Georgia Baptist WMU made a decision to change over to Christmas backpacks under the leadership of Barbara Connett in order to be able to do a better service to the children.

The state as a whole is in a bleak situation, but even within that average, there are shades of bleakness.

Essentially every issue reaches its most acute form here, McDowell County.

This southernmost slice of the state regularly ranks as its poorest and one of the absolute poorest in the nation.

Per capita income is just 14,000, which means the economic situation of its residents is roughly analogous to that of those of the nation of Panama.

Straddling such rough country, Welch has been forced to compromise, adopting not a traditional grid, but a street pattern that follows the contours of the rivers below and the mountains above.

And just as McDowell Street, Virginia Avenue, and US Route 52 follow the path cut by cascading West Virginian waterways, so too does the railway—this single piece of infrastructure that explains why this town, split by rivers, hemmed in by mountains in all directions, even exists in the first place.

Before Welch, or McDowell County, or southern West Virginia was known for what it lacks, where it falls behind, or why it's so different from the rest of the country, these rails made this region the middle of American might.

Since before the Civil War, West Virginia's wealth in coal was well understood.

West Virginia space pioneer Homer Hickam is excited about the potential of the state hosting or being the host site for the United States Space Academy, typical or comparable to, say, maybe West Point or the Naval Academy.

The McDowell County native and former NASA engineer talked a little bit about the aerospace industry on Metro News Talk Line and said that, you know, now that NASA is not the only player in the aerospace industry and you've got private companies that are looking to send rockets up into space for orbits or make moon trips or even like Elon Musk talks about a potential trip to the planet of Mars.

Well, that aerospace industry is going to need a whole lot of technical support, and a lot of that support is really already here.

If you take a look at what's going on at the North Central West Virginia Airport, some of the training programs in aerospace at WVU, Marshall, also Fairmont State University and Pierpont, So he says, you know what, even if we don't get that Space Academy, there's a great chance that maybe some advanced manufacturing opportunities or things like that could follow.

You can almost throw a rock and hit it.

Uh, McDowell County is the biggest coal producing county in the country.

It's dead now, but it was a fantastic place to grow up.

I was hitchhiking when I was six or seven years old.