Introduction
By Mary B. La Lone
The new Huckleberry Trail is a great greenway and recreational asset to Montgomery County. Already, it receives a large amount of daily use. In cultural and historic terms, one of the high points of the trail is that it runs right through the middle of the site of Merrimac, where the county’s largest coal mine and a dynamic mining community once stood. However, as walkers, runners, and bikers pass through the site of Merrimac, they have no way of knowing that they are actually passing through an area of great cultural significance to the New River Valley ‹ that on this site once stood a huge mining tipple, a whole community of miners’ houses, a company store, a hotel, and much more. Nothing currently marks the mining and community sites, or interprets their historical significance to those who pass by. It would be a great addition to the Huckleberry Trail to create a heritage park alongside the trail, where trail users could stop, rest, and contemplate the past. A heritage park could also serve as a focal point for community and family gatherings, and a place where school children could come on field trips to learn about their county’s mining history. In creating a heritage park, the county would be making a statement that the region’s past heritage continues to have meaning.
Interest in the region's mining history and a mining heritage park has been growing. The county planning office and trail supporters recognized the need to add heritage features to the Huckleberry Trail, and in 1996 they started a project to develop interpretive signs along the Huckleberry Trail, including mining-heritage signage for Merrimac. The Coal Mining Heritage Association of Montgomery County participated in that project and continues to have a strong interest in having the county's mining story told through signage at Merrimac. The state archaeologist has been working to locate the remains of buildings and other features at Merrimac (Klatka et al. 1999). The county's interest in its mining history has been sparked by numerous newspaper articles and books published on New River Valley mining, including a book by Garland Proco on the Merrimac mines (Freis 1994a-d, 1995b, 1996a-b, 1997, 1998; S. Linkous 1998; Berrier 1997; Price et al. 1994; Proco 1994). Two books of oral histories ‹ Appalachian Coal Mining Memories (La Lone 1997) and Coal Mining Lives (La Lone 1998) ‹ have been collected from county mining families by Radford University research teams, including many interviews relating to Merrimac. The oral history project was a three-year countywide effort, linking students and community members in an effort that rekindled and focused the county's attention on its mining heritage (La Lone 1999). In recognition of its mining heritage, the Montgomery County Board of Supervisors designated an annual Coal Miners Day, which is marked by a yearly celebration organized by the Coal Mining Heritage Association. Finally, of greatest significance, Montgomery County has purchased land along the Huckleberry Trail at the site of Merrimac for a possible park. Clearly, the interests of many people and groups converge around the development of a historic park at Merrimac. The time and support are right for a Coal Mining Heritage Park in Montgomery County.
This report is the result of a semester-long class project for the Fall 1999 "Applied Anthropology" class (ANTH 495) at Radford University. The idea behind the project was to link my university class together with numerous agencies and groups into a partnership. This partnership which would serve both as a "teaching partnership" for educating students and a cooperative effort at community development, a next step toward planning a heritage park at Merrimac. Specifically, I joined forces with Montgomery County’s Planning Office and other county offices, the Coal Mining Heritage Association of Montgomery County (CMHA), and the state archaeologist at the Roanoke Regional Preservation Office to create the foundation for this project. We began planning for the class in April 1999, and the students came on board in August.
The project served as an experiential learning component for the Applied Anthropology class. The semester was 15 weeks long, beginning the week of August 23 and ending December 10, 1999. The project was a valuable component to the class since it provided the students an opportunity to actually gain hands-on experience in applying anthropology in a project of cultural heritage value to Montgomery County (an example of what educators call "service learning"). I served as the professor for the class and the project director, organizing and supervising my students’ work, and editing the final consulting report. The students formed a research team charged with studying the potentials for developing the property owned by Montgomery County at Merrimac into a heritage park.
Early in the semester, in cooperation with the participating county and community groups, we set up a series of orientation readings and "orientation sessions" for the student research team. This included tours of the Merrimac site in which members of the Coal Mining Heritage Association, the county planners, and the state archaeologist oriented students to the layout and history of the site and the planning considerations. After this initial orientation period, the student team began their research stage. During this stage the student team: 1) met with members of the Coal Mining Heritage Association to gain a better understanding and appreciation of the mining heritage, gain mining families’ perspectives and feedback to incorporate into plans for a heritage park, and discover what resources the CMHA and mining families might contribute; 2) similarly, they met with members of the Merrimac community to gain public input and visions on how this land might be developed into a heritage park; 3) they worked closely with county planning officials to be educated and gain guidance on the potentials and limitations of development at the Merrimac site from the county’s perspective; 4) they visited living history museums at Explore Park and Beckley to gain visual examples of what might be done on a smaller scale at Merrimac; and 5) they conducted community meetings at Merrimac and developed a survey to gain input on facilities and features desired at the park by the community. Some of these research activities are described at greater length later in this chapter.
About midway through the semester, the research team turned its attention toward developing a set of recommendations for the park. During numerous class "brainstorming" sessions, the team took the information gained through the research process and crafted it into an overall conceptual plan of the park. In addition to the overall plan, we developed recommendations for "phasing" the park development. The phases consist of a series of actions that might be "staged-in" in the development of a heritage park, starting with early activities such as the development of heritage signage, graduating to developments requiring greater resources such as the construction of trails and a community recreation area, followed by the construction of interpretive history structures such as a replicated miner’s house and a museum/visitors center (see Chapter 2). The research team then developed its ideas for potential heritage, environmental, community recreation activities, and park facilities at greater length (see Chapters 3-6). During the last part of the semester, the team was engaged in compiling its research and recommendations into a consulting report for the Montgomery County Planning Office and the Coal Mining Heritage Association. The final draft was completed in December 1999 and edited during January 2000.
As a follow-up to the "Applied Anthropology" class, we formed a "Practicum in Anthropology" class (ANTH 493) for Spring 2000, which is enabling some of the student participants to continue working with the county planning office on selected projects that will help carry the park development forward.
As mentioned, this study was undertaken as a project for the "Applied Anthropology" class at Radford University. Because of this context, the research team approached the park planning project with anthropological perspectives that we feel are important strengths of our study. We want to discuss the field of applied anthropology briefly for a clear understanding of our approaches, methodology, and recommendations.
Anthropologists are specialists in studying people’s behavior and culture, with expertise both in working with present-day communities and in preserving past cultures. Anthropologists are increasingly working in the public arena, outside of a university setting, in the growing field known as "applied anthropology." In applied anthropology, anthropologists "apply" their perspectives and methods (put their cultural knowledge and research techniques into practice) to assist communities and groups, often in the regions where they live. Applied anthropologists work in economic development, community planning, heritage preservation, cultural resource management, public policy, and many other areas, putting their community-oriented approaches and methods to work in development for citizens.
The Merrimac park project presented us with an excellent opportunity to put our collective knowledge of Appalachian culture and communities, regional mining history, ethnographic research techniques, and archaeology to work, in order to assist Montgomery County’s efforts in park planning. All participants had studied ethnographic research techniques (interviewing, participant-observation), many had training in archaeology, and some had classes and experience working in Appalachian communities. The professor/project director has a 10-year history of studying and working with southwest Virginia communities, documenting coal mining oral histories and working on heritage tourism. She also has a background in museum studies that she applied to the park planning. For the three years prior to this park project, the professor and numerous classes of anthropology students had worked with the Coal Mining Heritage Association of Montgomery County, and had established a strong bond of rapport while collecting a wealth of oral history documentation on the New River Valley mining way of life (La Lone 1997, 1998). So, this class was especially suited to take on the challenge of studying the possibilities for developing a heritage park at Merrimac.
We brought two special emphases from applied anthropology to the study of this heritage park: 1) concern and knowledge for cultural heritage preservation, and 2) the community-oriented emphasis of applied anthropology.
The special significance of Merrimac as a place on the county's landscape, is its key role in the mining history of the New River Valley. It was one of the largest semi-anthracite coal mines in the Valley Coal Field of Virginia. Merrimac has roots going back to the Civil War, when it was the site of a confederate mining colliery (a coal mining operation with housing for the miners). Supposedly, the site became known as Merrimac because the mine supplied coal to fuel the Ironclad Merrimac in its battle with the U.S.S. Monitor during the Civil War. The real heyday of Merrimac was in the early twentieth century, until the mine closed in 1935 (the management shut the mine rather than compromise with labor demands).
During its heyday, the site of Merrimac was alive with activity. The industrial complex included the mine and numerous buildings used to carry out mining operations. The dominant feature was the tipple, a huge structure where coal was sorted and then dumped down into railroad coal cars waiting below. Some of the other industrial structures included hoist houses, a boiler house, fan house, lamp house, wash house, mule barn, and combined shops (blacksmith, sawmill). The mine ran a hotel/boarding house and a commissary, which contained a company store, post office, and payroll offices. Merrimac was also the site of a dynamic mining community. The mine provided some company houses for mining families, located on Bunker Hill, and other miners built houses nearby. During its heyday, the site of Merrimac was alive with industrial sights and sounds, and the sights and sounds of children playing, families working in their gardens, and friends visiting on their front porches.
These are the images of the county's past mining life that the Huckleberry Trail user can no longer view at Merrimac since the people and buildings are now gone. One of the team's primary goals was to solve this problem ‹ to develop ways to make knowledge of the past cultural heritage readily available to trail and park visitors today. Our report shows how tasteful, accurate, historic interpretation can be built into a community-based park in the forms of signage, exhibits, reconstructed buildings, and educational activities, preserving knowledge of the county's mining way of life for future generations of park and trail users.
Our focus on heritage preservation also influenced the way we approached park planning. A central concern in developing the park design was in preserving the archaeological integrity of the site. Many of the clues that document Merrimac's past lie on or just below the surface of the land. Activities that disturb the land, disturb that archaeological documentation. We benefited from multiple discussions with archaeologist Tom Klatka, who shared his knowledge of the site and raised ideas for our consideration. Our team's goal has been to design the park so that today's citizens can enjoy the space and learn about the history, without development that unnecessarily disturbs the archaeological integrity of the site. Our recommendations for the location of trails and park activities are designed to use previous road beds and sections of the property where mine cleanup operations have disturbed the land, and to avoid disturbing land on which the archaeological record needs preserving. We also make suggestions to use archaeology as one of the educational tools at the park (ranging from an archaeology exhibit to archaeology "camps," which could involve the public in future efforts to uncover Merrimac's past). We have worked to strike a good balance between use and protection -- between using Merrimac as a park site for heritage education and community recreation while, at the same time, protecting the valuable archaeological record of mining life at Merrimac.
One of the strongest emphases in applied anthropology is planning and design "for" and "with" communities, providing extensive opportunities for community input and involvement in the development process. Anthropology has an extensive literature documenting the problems that occur when outside groups/agencies attempt to introduce change "to" communities as specialists taking the approach that they "know better" than the people themselves. Too often, designers and planners take this approach, only to find that they have alienated the communities for which they are working (see for example, La Lone 1995; ms.). One of the basic guiding principles of applied anthropology is that people from the community need to be consulted and given meaningful participatory roles from the very beginning of a development project. Therefore this community-oriented approach was a guiding feature of this project.
From the beginning, this project venture was founded on a "partnership" between the class, the county, and the Coal Mining Heritage Association. The partnership quickly extended to include the Merrimac community (via the Merrimac Pentecostal Holiness Church) and, at a wider level, the state archaeologist from the Roanoke Regional Preservation Office. A variety of people from these different partner organizations visited the class early in the semester to orient the research team to the history, archaeology, and planning considerations for development of a park at Merrimac, and continued to advise us throughout the research process. As the project progressed, we searched out and developed ties with other park user-groups from the community, including Friends of the Huckleberry, the principal and teachers from Price’s Fork Elementary School, and park users from Warm Hearth retirement home. Members of these groups served as "resource people," and were interviewed by the research team during the research "fact-finding" stage of the project. We also made a day-long site visit to Explore Park, and received extensive consultation on considerations for living history park planning from curator Rich Loveland. This shows the network of connections, ranging from community to regional level, supporting this project.
The community-oriented approach guided the research methodology for this project. For the park to be used and embraced by the community, it is critical that community members and potential park/trail users have an active role in voicing ideas, desires, concerns, and solutions for park development. We wanted to provide various forums for gaining community input. Therefore, we structured the project to include: 1) visits to Coal Mining Heritage Association meetings to gain input; 2) a set of two community meetings held in Merrimac for the purpose of gaining community input and discussion; 3) a survey mailed to residents of the Merrimac community and other target groups; and 4) interviewing with key "resource people" from the Coal Mining Heritage Association and the user-groups discussed above. We asked people what they’d like to see at the park, and listened and recorded what people told us.
In particular, two of these research techniques deserve further discussion since they demonstrate the high level of community involvement in generating ideas for the park. The class organized and held two community meetings at the Merrimac Pentecostal Holiness Church Fellowship Hall on October 21 and October 23, 1999. The two Merrimac community meetings were designed specifically to involve the community in the park planning process. To plan the meetings, we first held a joint meeting of representatives from the research team, the county, the mining association, and the Merrimac church to plan the dates and discuss the most effective structure for the meetings. We then consulted with Bobby Parker, Public Relations Director for Montgomery County, and Lori Shepherd, a MIRA community organizer, on strategies for advertising and effectively organizing the meetings. While we borrowed many of their ideas, we also put a distinctly anthropological twist into it, drawing extensively from the anthropological rapport-building techniques that we’ve found effective in Appalachian community contexts (see La Lone ms.). We wanted to create a community meeting atmosphere that felt comfortable to the participants rather than formal. This was particularly important because we wanted community members to open up and generate ideas rather than feel inhibited. We knew we had attained our goal of creating a comfortable Appalachian community meeting environment when one participant described the meeting as having a "church social" feeling. We incorporated music and food into the meeting ‹ good ways to gain a comfortable feeling in Appalachian community contexts. After short introductory informational speeches, we invited the participants to get some food and then join for small-group discussion at one of three interest tables: a table discussing ways to exhibit heritage at the park, a table developing educational ideas for the park, and a table discussing ideas for recreation and facilities desired at the park. As the group discussions got underway, people became quite involved in generating ideas, voicing their concerns, and then discussing solutions to deal with concerns. (Please see Appendix B for the community-generated list of ideas that came from these community meetings.) The meetings were extremely productive in gaining public awareness and creating a community-based set of potential ideas for park development. The input we received during those meetings formed much of the basis of being able to design a park "for" the people, using peoples’ own ideas.
The second technique used to generate community-based input was a written survey. The surveys were mailed to residents living in Merrimac and the immediate vicinity, and to the members of the Coal Mining Heritage Association. Additional questionnaires were placed in grocery stores, gas stations, and other public locations. Sixty-four questionnaires were completed and returned.
Drawing on anthropological methodology, we designed a short, fairly simple questionnaire based primarily on "open-ended" questions. An open-ended question is one that encourages the respondent to answer at length with original ideas and responses (rather than short "canned" responses). The use of open-ended questions is a preferred anthropological technique for gaining input because it allows for people to come up with their own ideas. We considered this most appropriate, since the idea was to hear what people themselves had to say about the possibility of a heritage park. (Please see the Appendix for questionnaire responses.) The responses largely emphasized the importance of making park visitors aware of the mining history, both at the site and in the New River Valley, especially through the use of informational heritage signage. Other responses emphasized the desire to see educational activities at the park and basic facilities for park and trail-user comfort.
In addition, to gain some statistical information on potential features for the park that the research team felt important, we included a checklist of possible facilities on the questionnaire and asked respondents to check all the features that they would like to see at the park. Figure 1.1 provides a summary of the responses:
|
|
|
|
TYPE OF PARK FACILITY |
NUMBER OF RESPONSES (n=64) |
|
Restrooms |
51 |
|
Picnic shelters |
46 |
|
Picnic tables |
44 |
|
Parking |
44 |
|
Historical signs |
44 |
|
Mining museum |
43 |
|
Water fountains |
41 |
|
Information center |
36 |
|
Trail benches |
35 |
|
Handicapped accessible trails |
30 |
|
Hiking trails |
27 |
|
Nature trails |
28 |
|
Grassy areas |
28 |
|
Reconstructed buildings |
25 |
|
Nature signs |
24 |
|
Educational activities |
22 |
|
Playground |
20 |
|
Pavilion/amphitheater |
11 |
The research team’s fact-finding activities included a literature survey of books and articles on park planning and design (Espeseth 1982; Fogg 1975; Hultsman et al. 1997; Marcus et al. 1998; Molnar 1986; Sharpe 1983), historical research on the mining way of life at Merrimac and the New River Valley (Proco 1994, Freis 1995, La Lone 1997, 1998), archaeological and geological research on Merrimac (Klatka et al. 1999, Whisonant 2000), and heritage preservation issues related to industrial sites (Copps and Abberger 1994; Dyen and Muller 1994; Herman 1994; Noble and Spude 1992). The fact-finding research activities also included conducting interviews with numerous "resource people" to gather needed information, perspectives, and ideas. For information and recommendations relating to the archaeological considerations for situating a park on the site of Merrimac, we consulted with Tom Klatka, state archaeologist at the Roanoke Regional Preservation Office, and Dr. Cliff Boyd, archaeologist in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Radford University. To better understand park development and maintenance possibilities and limitations in Montgomery County, we consulted with Tom Bain and Steve Phillips. For advise on planning considerations for living history parks, we consulted with Rich Loveland, curator of interpretive history at Explore Park. To acquire heritage information about the coal mines and mining families, as well as possible resources for developing mining signage and exhibits, we consulted with Fred Lawson, Hazel Hodge, Esther Jones, Alex Linkous, Lee Linkous, Sam Huff, and other members of the Coal Mining Heritage Association. For detailed information on the environmental features at the Merrimac park site, we consulted with Meghan Dorsett who is conducting an environmental survey of the site. We identified a variety of potential park user groups such as school teachers, Huckleberry Trail users, and Warm Hearth. This research, along with the community input, forms the basis for the discussion and recommendations in the following chapters.
This report is divided into three sections. In the first section, this first chapter has discussed the need for a park, plus the park project design, methodology, and emphases. Chapter 2 presents our overall plan for the Coal Mining Heritage Park at Merrimac, and suggested phasing for park development.
The middle section of the report goes into greater detail on specific aspects of the park. Chapter 3 focuses on the heritage aspects. It develops ideas for signage, exhibits, reconstructed buildings, a museum/visitors center, and suggestions for heritage-based educational activities. Chapter 4 discusses park facilities and conveniences that will make the park user-friendly. This includes restrooms, drinking fountains, trail benches and picnic tables, parking and security, as well as discussion of some of the recommended structures for the park. Chapter 5 focuses on the development of community recreation and trails. It describes a plan for a community recreation area on the east side of the park that will include picnic shelters, a playground, and an open-air pavilion for community activities such as music and storytelling. The chapter also describes our recommendations for a system of low-impact trails within the park. And Chapter 6 describes the park's environment and develops ideas for nature-based signage and educational activities at the park.
In the final section, Chapter 7 will conclude our report with a set of overall recommendations for proceeding with park development based on our study of the place, community, needs, and possibilities.
Montgomery County has an opportunity to make a significant step to create the county's first heritage park. Interest in the county's mining heritage is strong. Support from the community for a Coal Mining Heritage Park is strong. This project to study and plan for the park came together and has developed as a broad-based partnership which, in itself, demonstrates the multiple levels of interest and support for the Merrimac park endeavor. As we enter a new century, with growth so rapidly bringing change to the county's landscape and ways of life, it is a good time to create a park along the Huckleberry Trail where people can come for recreation, family outings, and to reflect on and celebrate the county's nineteenth and twentieth century mining heritage.
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Last Updated: 18 August, 2002
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