>>My dad moved us out in 1959 and for two decades after WV lost population. So many people did leave for a better life.
My grandfather left his WV mining family in 1918 when he signed up “for the duration” in WW1 (and fortunately for me and a multitude of his descendants, he never even got on a ship to France before the Armistice was signed). His older brother left a few years before, but he was murdered when he had lived in Baltimore for less than a year.
You are very correct that the welfare and whining safety nets have destroyed that kind of hard-working spirit.
Wow he was early. I don’t know what my grandfather did during world war I. I know he was working the mines then. He had two children by then. My dad, aunts, and uncles, are gone now. No one to ask.
My dad signed-up in 1940 and was set to be discharged Dec 18, 1941. You can guess what happened.
My sister was a librarian in Oceana. She sent me a book called “Everything in It’s Path.”
It’s about the Buffalo Creek flood when a damn of slag and coal broke and killed a lot of folks and wipes out the little community on the side of the hallows and down below.
It describes how the government came in and “took care” of everything. People living in Katrina trailors for years. The author descibed it as the death of independence in in WV, thus the tile of the book.