With support from Cable Partners this weekend, we traveled to charleston, West Virginia. Coming up in the next hour we speak with local authors about the citys history starting with the link to booker t. Washington. In 20 minutes the Chemical Spill that contaminated charlestons water system and in 50 minutes the teacher strike. We begin with booker t. Washington. Booker t. Washington, the spokesman and leader of africanamericans in america, at the time, had horrible jim crow race codes in the south. That didnt happen in West Virginia. What he observed in his boyhood heroes was the building of a black middle class that became his path, his career path from teske to being a National Celebrity. Booker was born south of corona, virginia, 225 miles from here. And those nine years he was a slave boy, he didnt have pants, he wore a slave boy shirt, shoes, across the top, he wanted very much to go to school and he wasnt able to do that. He left the farm in 1865 after the civil war end, there was a soldier who comes to the farm and reads the emancipation proclamation, they can leave. His mother cried, never thought she would live long enough to see her children liberated. After the civil war, West Virginia did not have the devastation the confederate south did. This area went through a short period of 4 months, practically the whole war. You did not have the economic devastation you had in the confederate south. The other thing that was different is the slave population is very small, the smallest of any area in the slave south. There was Something Like 4 of the states population were africanamerican. There wasnt that threat by number of the power elite in West Virginia that was posed in the deep south. The family came because washington ferguson, the stepfather, was working here in their salt factory and their coal mines. He sent money to his wife to get a horse and buggy to bring her and the kids to malta. Once they arrived, they found a Wonderful Community of christian believers centered in the ruffner slave quarters and she got the job first as a chambermaid and as a cook and she gets the ruffners to hire booker as a house boy knowing he would learn social graces, had a library available to him and a lot of opportunities that otherwise he wouldnt have. As an important part of being with the ruffners he delivered a familiar your relationship with the yankee later, she was a second wife, she like booker. He could do no wrong. He is hardworking, always asking how am i getting on, am i doing well, what do i need to do . He was honest and hardworking. She appreciated his talent. I think she did something for him that gave him a selfconfidence that carried him through his career because it was dark hours but he was able to see himself in her eyes reflected as a perfect being. He was here until he was about 15. He went to hansen, to school for three years. He would go and come back in the summers. The second summer he came back his mother passed away and it was a hard time for him. He credits mrs. Ruffner for helping him get back to hampton for a third year. When he graduates from him to and he is the top student in his class and comes back to teach school and he came back and taught school in malta but he was restless. This wasnt enough so he went to seminary to see if he wanted to be a minister, he tried reading for the law, that didnt fit. He was trying to figure out who he was and what he wanted to do. One of the things he did that was very important for his future career, West Virginia was having a referendum on where to place the state capital and charleston was one of the cities. People in charleston had a republican and democrat leader to organize talks to convince other counties to vote charleston and booker was one who was supposed to go along the siena Railroad Route and go to four or five counties to choose charleston. It was his first speaking tour. The county voted overwhelmingly not because of booker but he was able to speak to the africanamericans in the county, mostly coal miners and farmers. That put him on the road as a public speaker. I am not sure he would speak to thousands of people every year. He would have to doors. He would be on stage with the governor and congressman and senator and would always be the star speaker. He was incredible. Booker was working at hamilton as a teacher when folks from teske, alabama requested an educator start a school so booker winds down at age 25 and on july 4, 1881, he started a school at teske key. He was using abandoned buildings. Everything had to be built. 20 years later or so, president mckinley, had a president ial visit to teske. He celebrated as a great educator. His philosophy was we will educate people here to send back home to their hometowns to educate others and build the black middle class. That was his goal. He got that from his heroes, his parents bought a house in malta and he saw them, Church Members working to help future generations rather than themselves and they were successful and he thought that was the path that out to be taken in the deep south. He was very devoted to his history and he would come every year. He was a National Celebrity after he gave the state exposition, the atlanta compromise but it made him a National Celebrity and he always called it that. He was always photographed in a coat and tie. There was a wonderful newspaper article when he comes to West Virginia to hunt and fish and he is hunting and had a gun hunting with a coat and tie and also fishing. He would not be photographed looking casually or anything else. At a time when celebrity was new, he was very conscious about building and maintaining that. When booker would talk about being in West Virginia, he sighed as a way of manipulating, there were several instances. When he went to hampton, it was a puzzle and i didnt know what to do. On the second night, he couldnt have lived all those years and not known what sheets were for. And it hamilton, this is shocking, he learned about tablecloths and napkins, he didnt use the tablecloth, he wasnt very far away from it. He tells that to make it clear, it isnt about tablecloths but he did not in his Life Experience experience of those normal social graces. That simply wasnt true. He was trying to tell a story. The story is more important than the fact that get involved. When he wrote up from slavery he serialized it in a magazine called outlook magazine. There is a photograph of the home. The caption says of this was the home of booker t. Washington when he went to hampton. It has a whitewashed friend, nicelooking plate, and use the photograph again. It was, clotheslines falling down, really sad. When they brought the home in 1869 four years after they were slaves it looked pretty good. It was a good nice substantial home and he didnt want folks to know that because it would make it look like a pretty blessed life. Governor William Mccorkle wrote memoirs, all those complaints booker t. Washington had about this werent true. He lived a very comfortable life. Biographer liz harland said it is something he wanted for himself but also that life was important for him to prove, he used his life as an example to the nation at large, look at me. I am a successful person and happen to be africanamerican. Hes using his life as an example, encouragement a blacks, an example of proof. And it is informative for him, because of frontier values that were here where it was not aristocratic like virginia but believe people were worth. It was a combination of all these things coming together is that gave him an idea of an american dream. We are at jq dickinsons saltworks in charleston, once the thought capital of the United States. Up next we learn about the history of the salt industry and how dickinson is reviving it. It is a revival of family business. And sister started evaporating and crystallizing salt with 50 manufacturers in the region which made this Little Valley in West Virginia. We are on top of a trapped ancient see. And a 600 millionyearold source. It is dissolved by a freshwater aquifer which means it runs under it. This was pushing up in springs in places which is how it was discovered by large animals, deer and elk and buffalo were here, native americans came for hunting and gathering salt for themselves and as european settlers moved west across Allegheny Mountains they found this valuable course of salt which we take for granted today, how important salt was before refrigeration. It started to grow in the early 1800s. The ruffner family, the dickinsons, really started to grow this industry. It was an industry that grew on the backs of slaves. The valley was one of the largest industrial slave systems like many other industries, 500,000 plays in the valley and 250 on the property alone. By the 1840s we were the largest salt making region of the country. Most of the salt was leaving and going to cincinnati, the farming going on in ohio, one meatpacking industry started growing up in chicago, the market in cincinnati started to wane. It started to go away. In 2013, i grew up in the cannot valley, it was shared. I started digging in to Family History, and at the same time filling up my pantry at home with salt because it was so fascinating, and then it was just that moment. We decided to revive the salt industry because several key points, we had this amazing Family History our ancestors made for 160 years but also the movement of chefs and consumers toward high Quality Foods made by producers they can trust so we dont add anything and with evaporation and we hand harvest it. It is a product of Mother Nature rather than the product of a machine. We are here outside. And through the salt harvesting process which starts here, 350 feet to draw the brine to the surface to fill our tanks. We pump 7500 gallons of brine a week. These are our holding tanks, we have three of them, 2500 gallons each. We need to settle the brine, seated into sun house is where it starts to evaporate. We are in the quincy sun house which is one of our three evaporating son houses. We put the brine in these big beds where it evaporates. We take it from 4 to 15 salinity. During that time we have Calcium Carbonate precipitate out and we feed the brine into crystallization. This process takes anywhere from 5, 10, to 15 days depending on the weather. The building called the granary which is what our ancestors call the building where the actual grains form or the salt crystals. We are looking at a bed here that is fool of salt, we fill each of these 26 beds, an inch of evaporated brine down 15 person salinity and continue evaporating until it crystallizes which happens at 25 when solids form. We use big scoops and scrapers and scrape the salt into a pile. Like this. And put it into the scoop. And then we put it into a bucket where it drains back into the bed and stays for a day and so we put it in the Production Facility where we dry it. We are in our Production Facility. The salt comes in here after it is drained in the granary for a day and put it in the drying room where we have the humidifier the pools extra moisture off of the salt. Then it goes through a cleaning process that goes through the salt and for Quality Control make sure it is 100 salt, pull out anything that is not salt with tweezers. Our finishing salt is our flagship product. We also produce popcorn salt or cooking salt and then grinding salt and flavored salt, West Virginia ramp salt, ramps are Wild Mountain onions and indigenous to West Virginia and we do an applewoodsmoke salt and also a bourbon barrel smoke salt. 600 accounts nationwide, restaurants and retailers and ecommerce worldwide. It is exciting. A little piece of West Virginia goes everywhere. The ambassador of the state of West Virginia, not a role given to us. For what we love. We love our state and we love the companies that are here. Anything we can do to lift each other up is important to me. In West Virginia, learning about the citys history and literary theme. Up next we speak with Emily Hilliard on her work to document a to is that make up appalachian heritage. In West Virginia, a lot of people across the state may not identify as artists that are extremely creative. It is important how they are preserving traditions, to storytelling. And practice these reforms. We document and support traditional artists, Cultural Heritage practitioners and cultural communities across the state. Basically i travel all over the state and do history and documentation of banjo players, fiddlers, neon signmakers, independent wrestlers, ramadan Fast Breaking dinners, serbian chicken roasts. Any kind of aspect of Cultural Heritage, and the practice of folk life in the state. Thinking how we choose stories for the Folklife Program there is so much to document, so many people to talk to and sometimes when i hear about someone in her 90s that will be a priority, someone who is very old and has stories to tell that will push something to the top of the list. Also stories that complicate the narrative about West Virginia internally or outside. Stories that show Real Community cohesion. I have done a lot of work in the swiss community. I worked pretty intensely with them over a year documenting their traditions and community festivals, their swiss version of mardi gras with papiermacee masks, a dance hall which is two blocks and carry lanterns and an effigy of old man winter and midnight they cut him down from the rafters and burn him on the bonfire and sing country road. How can you not document a story like that when you think about the term appalachian, we often think, this is inside the region too, we often think about scotch irish and the work i do, people think these are old timey ways of white folks in the mountains, but actually, there is a lot of diversity here. Maybe not statistically but looking at who is preserving and maintaining Cultural Heritage we have serbian communities, lebanese, muslim, africanamerican, italian, swiss, runs the gamut, and some of the narrative about this place is being homogenous we white. We have internalized so when we use the term appalachian we need to think about what that might be a code word for and how we can shift it so it is an inclusive term that includes everyone who lives here and is engaged in the place. My goal for my audience is not necessarily the world outside but the communities themselves, it is both but i really want the community to say you got this right, not necessarily this romantic but the perception of the place, you got it right, its complexity. In 2014 never the chemical leak that spilled into the river, a tributary right behind me. The effectiveness police had on the citizens of charleston and the issues they are dealing with today. January 2014 was when we experienced the chemical leak into the river that contaminated the Drinking Water of charleston. The effects of that leaky tank was profound. This isnt the first time weve had that contamination but it was the first time we saw it on this grand a scale. Affecting this many people. And the people who were affected which was everyone, not just this subset of people but everyone from every socioeconomic class, just paralyzing to charleston and the community. Charleston, i consider it, in the southcentral part of the state, the heart of West Virginia, centered around the cannot river where the elk meat it in the heart of town, it is one of our most population dense areas. Charleston in the valley have been coined as chemical valley because there has been a largescale chemical plant, it is one advantage big River Systems bring, they can accommodate the needs that Big Manufacturing Companies need. So several chemical manufacturing plants have been in the charleston area for years. We see these chemical storage tanks dotted along landscape and the rivers, something we are used to. I have driven by those tanks on a daily, weekly basis. It never occurred to me. I didnt know what was happening. They looked old and rusty and i thought it was just retired tank farm and not much was happening there. Little did i know there were dangerous chemicals being stored there, tanks that were not being maintained, and the corrosion, there was a hole in the bottom of tank 396, the chemical leaked into the soil, there was not a secondary containment, a way to contain the spilled fluid. It was moving into the elk river possibly for days. The approximations i have seen is 10,000 gallons eventually leaked out of the tape. Mch m is a cold cleaning chemical. It is associated with a process to clean coal so it can be used for production for burning whatever it is being used for, so it was being stored on the elk river just a mile and a half upstream from the largest thinking water system in West Virginia. That put in motion somehow the Water Company learned about it and just made decisions based on information that they have in