Gary, WV: Home of the Coaldiggers in McDowell County, Southern West Virginia

hey guys it is shane simmons the appalachian project coming at you today and this is the companion video to the one from thorpe cemetery i just put out which is in part of gary west virginia now and this will be the rest of gary and uh you'll notice i didn't realize when i was originally doing this that thorpe and gary are the same thing now thorpe was incorporated into gary back in 1971 so that's why there's a lot of overlap between the two thorpe used to be its own coal town and it just became uh it was dissolved once there was no real use for it and it became incorporated into gary so and they both uh both gary and thorpe were part of the united states colon coke which was part of u.s steel and that was one of the premier coal mining operations back in their day and that's why these are places these houses are a little nicer than what you normally see in these coal camps and uh so it's pretty quality place to go and if you remember too this is way way way back lynch kentucky was part of u.s uh coal and coke as well and that is super well done coal camp but anyway that's why they survived a little bit better than some of the other ones u.s steel u.s coal colon coke was major players of course the type of coal they used was the metallurgical which was used in making uh steel and iron so it made sense for them to own their own coal company and cut out the middleman and so a little bit i guess competition with pocahontas fuel company but um you know there was plenty to go around there in good old mackinaw county uh but anyway i'll let you watch this video and i want to do a big shout out to james royal and patricia um peregrine i'm sorry no no no no yeah yeah yeah that was a patricia i'm sorry again my name's overlap but i want to catch up because they sponsored this video and helped me to get out here and make this happen a little bit more difficult for me to get to mcdowell county some of these days and uh but thank you so much for your generous donations which helped me get out here and hopefully i'll be back again soon thank you guys and enjoy the video hey guys shane simmons coming at you in from mcdowell county in a little town called gary west virginia or should i correct that as too friendly gary welcome to friendly gary i love that little sign i'd something about it as you'll see on the start the video actually will begin at the other end of town for any locals you'll think well how many hit you you skipped about half of this but i just wanted to start here because i just love the sign i don't know it makes me feel good it's uh one of those things that somebody took the time to um put that up and i just i don't know i like it i hope you do too anyway uh i'll get on the road here and let you guys take a look around here we went through gary and thorpe um and some of that bleeds into each other and you'll hear a little bit more about the significance of gary into history and hopefully you enjoyed this one and i'll see you here in just a second okay guys around this corner i'm heading into a little town called gary west virginia and gary is in mcdowell county and people from here there's a lot of pride about gary as you heard in the intro but there's this is a place where more you're more apt to see people take care of their homes and that type of thing too as you can see here these are in really good shape and there's just something about gary people love it from here they'll darn sure let you know of course like all of mcdowell county for the most i mean almost only say the most part pretty much all of it uh is basically completely built on the back of coal mining so no surprise to see the railroad tracks to the right and all the houses bunched together in the typical cool camp fashion uh gary i do believe it's still a town i think they stop a mayor i'm not mistaken pretty sure i actually heard from a guy a few years ago nice little church here on the left so it looks like we passed gary and into thorpe so that was a quick trip anyway i will see you on down the road you just got a little bonus action thorpe side road down here in gary and went down to the back side along the river don't usually get a chance to do that so i figured what the heck say these are some of the nicer houses you'll see in mcdowell county they take really good care of them here which is great great to see i'll call back on the road i'll see you down the road here in a little bit somewhere just passed up pinchback alleyway there so but anyway i'm on the main road still and as you can see these houses are a little bit varying conditions some in really good shape somewhere as you can see right there and we'll need a repair of some sorts and on the hill hopefully you can see that there's a few houses up through there and all of them seem to be in really good shape it's the gary city hall so let's pull up in here and this building would be interesting because it looks very similar to the ones you see in lynch kentucky and which was not surprising because u.s coal and coke had something to do with both of them so this is gary city hall the entrance to it now i'm wanting to say that maybe gary is a city and not a town i get it when i get over here get confused it's so small and you don't think of a town as being a city or you know a small area as being a city but if you look up on the hill here there's our whole row of super nice houses i'll try to keep it focused on that as we exit get back this way and i hope i didn't miss it but there's a cool place still acknowledges the fact that the gary high school mascot was the cold diggers one of the coolest nicknames right up there the brahmo millionaires and the man hillbillies hopefully i'll find that here in a minute i don't think i passed it up yet but we shall see all righty i'm fixing to head down this little holler right here which is venus drive let's see what's down here now these signs say gary again so i don't know where thorp ends gary begins or gary begins and thorpe ends or if they're all kind of lumped in together or what but apparently i am back in gary and you can see that's a nicer house that got abandoned kind of sad so we're close this gary pentecostal holding his church and then there's coming down nursing and revalidation center so cut down here and give you guys a little bit of a view of that oops i thought my camera looks from so all right well i'm gonna turn this ship around so i'll see you back here in just a few seconds branch road here gary too and it's um interesting to see all these houses again same it all starts to look a little bit alike after a while you start seeing the same type of layout but it's kind of cool to see these places and the reason why this like i said gary is so popular around for mcdowell county and people have a ton of pride if they're from here because like i said it was part of u.s colon cove part of u.s steel and they built this place to last because you got to remember back in those days i mean this part of west virginia uh was incredibly sparsely populated so you wouldn't like you could come in here and uh just find plenty of miners to go in and go to work for you the people that did live here were farmers and that type of thing so they weren't that easy to persuade to even do it in the first place so they had to attract top workers and it was a competitive thing because at that time pocahontas fuel company was a huge major player as well and is right here and operating in the same area so how did you get the best employees well you offered them better things got better pay better housing better benefits and all that kind of stuff typical thing that you'd see now but it was a super competitive thing back then so they had to build these places really nice and that's why they still stuck around and while you see a lot of pride in it too a lot of people like i said they're proud to be from gary because gary was a major major factor in that matter of fact unless unless it's gone out recently i do believe there's still an operating mind and gary it's just such a huge part of national history really i mean it's not hyperbole to say that these places were such a big factor in our country being what it is today i mean coal heated homes and powered the ships in the navy and it did all kinds of things that i know it's demonized and hated today and but mcdowell county and cole built a big part of this country and it's a shame that it's not more appreciated certainly is by me and i know a lot of our viewers that's why you're here now for the most part i would say but um you know this is a a big part of american history right here and it's a shame that more is not done for the folks to still live here but i mean that's life moves on unfortunately as we all know but yeah you compare these homes to some of the other cold camps that were just kind of fly by night that's why a lot of those have disappeared this place was built to last built to attract the top talent had the best miners a lot of pride in that when they were recruiting you go to new york catch people coming in and at dallas island and then you go to the deep south and recruit african americans for a better way of life and you came in here and had a really the true meaning of the great american melting pot was right here and it's why you don't have nearly as much issue with racism here i mean racism is a problem everywhere obviously i'm not discounting that at all but when you actually know an individual it's hard to hate a person when you know them as a human and as a as a man and as a woman and you know their story and these folks have lived together for years and years and years and they know it's family and family history and so it's in some senses the best part of the country is for that is that people live right beside each other and there's no no type of segregation at this point and like i said i'm not discounted at all i'm sure racism exists everywhere but it's not that places like this are proof that we can all get along when we know each other give it to every other chance and this little retaining wall here is pretty neat thing too you'll see around this corner just a bit is an old cemetery too it's just along the side of the hill i don't know how much i can pick up but there is an old there's a piecemeal there's no flatland around here that's the thing too you see a lot of these cemeteries built on top of mountains and everything else and they had to be they had no choice and i do believe that starts right around this corner if i'm not mistaken yeah here we go you can barely see him probably but there's a few little headstones and whatnot up through here but again i want to spend as much time as i could on welch i mean not much but not that too but gary because it's a underrated part of it's just i don't you just don't hear nationally people talk about it some of the neat house designs over there too matter of fact let me pull over here so we can get a shot of that it's kind of neat how those houses were built on the same floor plan and but they're super nice zoom in and see if you can get a good look at that help if i'd focus now wouldn't it there we go well thankfully some of the leaves have gone so you can see a little bit better but it's covered up in the summertime but like i say gary i'm sure this probably ended up being one of my more popular videos i'd be surprised if it's not some day when it catches on because gary was and nobody's done justice to gary it's um a lot of people heard a welch a lot of people heard of some of these other places harlan kentucky a lot of things but gary was a major major force in coal mining history and i'll get on down the road here okay we're having a miracle mountain road here it's a really pretty church our lady of victory catholic church in gary see a lot of catholic churches around because of the european influence [Music] it was a predominant religion in a lot of the european countries that migrated here like i said man you just didn't just carry the screams uh just to search you can just tell what a nice camp it was it was uh i'm being a dead horse with all this stuff but it's important to let you know and never know where we end up with these side roads this way backyard let's see well there's lovers lane might get out of here it doesn't sound like a place i need to be got me in enough trouble my life and you'll see this little building along the railroad tracks and i'm thinking that they were going to make that into a museum or something at one time i don't know what happened out of that but again gary needs to be celebrated i know you think of the rocket boys and all that stuff from out of this area but that's just a cool building right there you'll see the building of which i speak here in just a minute last almost here look it's been several years but last time they were making it into a museum but i wonder if they got adequate funding for that it looks like they're doing some sort of construction here but it doesn't necessarily look like a good thing a good place to get a flat tire yeah it looks like it's there's been no progress on that so oh well i see a lot of advertisements for atvs around here that's a huge industry for mcdowell county's basically saved it in a lot of ways i'm kind of jumping around for locals anyway they're saying well wait wait you can't get there from there it was popping up with different interesting sides but i thought i'd stick a ride down through here uh there's a rock hill baptist church and then uh behind it is an old abandoned school building which i'm assuming i'm no genius here but i think this is probably gary's high school gary high school uh somebody please correct me in the comments if i'm wrong i'd love to know for sure what it was what this is but i'm assuming it's the gary high school maybe the gary elementary school together or something but anyway it um as i said earlier you know the gary high school was the cold diggers and i want to understand they have some pretty good athletic teams too so hopefully if people know more about that they can jump in the comments and fill in the gaps because like i said i know of a lot of these places i don't know them as well as others would i'm just trying to give you a view learn right with you to be honest with you i've still got it in the works to write a book about cold camp so the more i learn the better that will turn out just bring back some memories for some folks if you and it's kind of uh sad and depressing but also something good and homey about seeing things like this i think so i hope you feel the same way i better turn around here because i don't know where in the world i'm at but anyway let's take a look at it from this other direction coming back out um again people who know what this building is please clue me in that's the one great thing about youtube and all these other places is that people aren't shy they'll tell you exactly usually not the most pleasant language sometimes but as long as i find out what this building was i'll be a happy man anyway that brought back some memories from first for some folks here to the right pretty much the middle of the camera is the the gary post office then we got this little convenience store and hopefully my battery will hold up on my phone long enough to show you there's a couple more sites here but we shall see this is more housing another building it looks like it was used for business at some point completely abandoned now and again you see more of the nicer nicer housing that one time stood through here [Music] so it's a beautiful time of year too you can see back in the background with all the fall foliage out really makes adds to the ambiance if you will let's see something cool fine camera holds up there's a conveyor belt that comes out of the mountain and you can kind of sort of see it i'm gonna get close to i'm not that we drive right under no no it goes all the way out down the mountain you don't see that very one that big very often it goes all the way down and into there well i could end up eating my words about the other place being in high school because i'll be darned here's another old empty school building so if i'm wrong i'll stand corrected and i wasted some of your time but i don't know this may have been elementary school too i don't know it's hard to say but somebody will clear me right up on this one thank god um and here it is and homage to the cold digger sports club cold digger sports club that's really cool like i said i wish there's still good team names like that around you just don't see it anymore [Applause] so rest in peace to the cold diggers and bramwell millionaires and oh we still got the man hillbillies that's good we got one hanging in there for us anyway this should wrap it up here better trim my radio down before getting banned for playing music uh copyrighted music anyway there's uh we're in thorpe for west virginia still and there's a true line and this building looks a little older so maybe somebody can give me some history on that i don't know a thing about it but here's some of the old houses across the railroad into this little community in thorpe you see more of the houses know let's get people commenting on how they don't have yards and it's close together because you know that was kind of the thing for the cold camps they would make maximize space they were trying to make a big yard that would last forever it was more about utility although these are super nice houses up here too about u.s steel coal and u.s coal and coke and all that was a major player so they did it right compared to some other companies anyway it looks like i'm in for a dead end i'll turn back around here and wrap this one up becca didn't even see that just now but there's a chicken coop that's really cool they're checking me out much as i'm checking them out i get to see some fun things i gotta say man i'm a blessed man so it's coming back down off the hill there in thorp and i'll wrap this thing up give you a little idea of what this part of the county look like i said you can see these houses are super nice true story which is why they're still here and taken care of you see across the road there up on the hill i said that there was just only so much space to build on and there was so much need for manpower that they put these houses wherever they could fit which is obviously not the case now they're not needed so a lot of times you'll see those are just super nice houses that's why they're still in use but a lot of times you'll see houses up on the hills like that'll be the first ones people abandon okay guys thanks for watching subscribing liking commenting supporting with financial donations much appreciated and i will see you on down the road so wrap up this video i hope that did gary any kind of justice it's hard to do but i hope you guys appreciate taking a look at this and it's a real part of american history that needs to be examined and remembered and respected and i hope that that do not for my videos so much but maybe in the comments and some other things that some people can start doing that because i was really excited to when i found out my route took me right through uh through gary today because i plan on going to welch and i forgot that there's a couple different ways to get up here so i made it a point to go out of my way to come by here get you this video and i hope you enjoy it and thanks for [Music] watching [Music] you

Channel: Real Appalachia

Views: 46,890

Rating: 4.910913 out of 5

Keywords: west virginia, mcdowell county, gary, keystone, northfork, war wv, iaeger west virginia, iaeger wv, appalachian people, appalachia, tap, shane simmons, coal, coal mining, welch west virginia, kimball west virginia, gary west virginia, mcdowell county, shane simmons, appalachian project

Id: lFSqQeKBq0E

Length: 28min 7sec (1687 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 11 2020