COAL: a place in history, but what about the future...

My father burns coal to keep warm.

He lives in a house that dates back in places to about 1830. You know, the type house where almost every room is a different age than the rest of the house; the type of house where you can put a marble on the floor against one wall and it will roll across the room to the other wall.

In the middle of the house, in the dining room, there's a stove vented through one of the house's three fire places. Dad burns coal in it to keep the dining room and kitchen areas comfortable while the central heat keeps the rest of the house from freezing up....

The black rocks piled up in a shed by my Dad's dog pen used to be more than a way to keep warm in the winter in Southwest Virginia. Wealth, prosperity and political influence once hung suspended in the dust around the coke ovens at the Mouth of Dismal in Buchanan County, Va. You could write your name in the promise of prosperity stuck (in the form of black dust) to people's trucks and cars in coal camps like Jewell Ridge and Amonate, Va., Pikeville, Ky., and Bradshaw, W.Va.. And you could smell prosperity, you could feel it, at Norfolk & Southern's train yards in Bluefield.

It's still out there: my wife brings a little of it home with her everyday when she drives over War Mountain and through Bishop on her way home from work. But the promise appears to be spent; and every few weeks we find some time to wash it off her Ford.

If he still rules at all in these parts, King Coal is no longer the monarch that he once was. His subjects now are left with empty pockets, union memberships, the memory of the glory of the good ole days. And their hats - which they try to hold properly in their hands when they go to beg Richmond, Frankort, Charleston, or Washington for economic help...

The history of coal in the region is a rich one...

...rich in politics and tension, conflict and bloodshed. And sometimes rich in generosity and contribution to the community.

Some of that tension continues.

I remember when I first started writing editorial page material for the Bluefield Daily Telegraph. I was describing a trip to Buchanan County. And being new to the region and maybe a little out of touch with public opinion, I threw in what I thought was an innocuous little line for this particular column:

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