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  • From: bobf <bobford79 AT yahoo.com>
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Homestead] Stinking Creek Kentucky story & video
  • Date: Sun, 28 Dec 2008 11:33:12 -0800 (PST)

I enjoyed this article about these two women who have been homesteaders,
farmers, midwives, and teachers in an enclave of kentucky for the past 50
years. They started out as 'do-gooders', but stayed and actually did good.
there are (2) links -- to a video and to a photo gallery --that show images
of their farm and community. So much negative news to read lately, I thought
this was a positive story.....................................................

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'The nurses' birthed a better place at Stinking Creek


Nurse and midwife Peggy Kemner wraps up her gardening for the evening with
her dog Fluffy at her side.


MAKING A DIFFERENCE



WALKER, Ky. — Midwife Peggy Kemner, 78 years old and bent over with
osteoporosis like a tiny question mark, climbs into her dented car, peers
over the dashboard and hits the gas.
"Hold on," she says.

The next 20 minutes of gut-twisting turns take Kemner on a familiar route: up
a mountain hollow to help.

"I could've made it faster if these roads were straighter," she says with a
laugh.

For 50 years, "Miss Peggy" and her schoolteacher friend, Irma Gall, have
volunteered as missionaries along the winding watershed of Stinking Creek in
Knox County, Ky., one of the poorest counties in America.



VIDEO: How 2 missionaries helped Kentucky community
PHOTO GALLERY: Looking toward a better life in Stinking Creek

Kemner has been midwife for the births of 507 children, most in bleak
mountain cabins with no running water and one light bulb stuck in the
ceiling. She's nursed the sick, sat with the dying.

Gall has been a teacher and farmer, riding her horse up the hollows on muddy,
rutted roads to teach at one-room schoolhouses in the late 1950s and 1960s.
Together, they set up a community center called Lend-A-Hand Center, taught
Sunday school and 4-H classes, and ran one of the nation's first home health
care services.

Quietly, they advocated birth control and education for women. Viewed at
first with suspicion and distrust, the women known as "the nurses" have, over
the decades, proved how much hands-on caring can make a difference in the
lives of individuals.

"We just wanted to lend a hand," says Gall, 72.

Back up in the hollows of Stinking Creek, where a couple of hundred people
live, times are still tough. Nearly 35% of the 32,000 people in Knox County
live below the poverty line, a rate three times higher than the national
average. Still, life is better on Stinking Creek today than it was back then.

President Lyndon Johnson's "War on Poverty" brought billions of dollars in
federal aid to the Appalachian region, from food stamps and health insurance
for poor children to Head Start early-education programs and payments for men
who suffered from black lung disease after mining the coal-packed mountains.

Women went to work, family incomes doubled and more children graduated from
high school. More went to college, too. As throughout Appalachia, many people
left for better opportunities elsewhere. But for those who stayed,
particularly women, opportunities grew.

As family size shrank, the abject poverty that encased Stinking Creek began
to ease.

The mountains opened up, and the people could see out.

Bringing quiet change

Sometimes it's hard to imagine just how hard, just how remote, life was 50
years ago for many of the people of Stinking Creek.

When Kemner and Gall arrived in August 1958, almost no houses had running
water. Coal stoves provided the only heat. One electric plug worked the
light, then the radio, then the light again. Big families — 13, 14, 15 kids —
lived in tiny, three-room, hand-built, wooden cabins. Few houses were painted.

"Gray and brown and black," says Gall of the hills, the houses, the dust on
the children's faces. "Everything was gray and brown and black."

Almost everyone had a pig or a couple of chickens, a garden and an outhouse.
Land wasn't flat enough on the mountainsides to grow money crops such as
tobacco. For the most part, families ate what they grew.

"There wasn't a lot of money left lying around," says Esco Smith, who runs a
gas station and mini-grocery on Stinking Creek. He remembers the cabin he
grew up in was so rickety, "You could see a chicken running around under the
floorboards."

To scrape by, men did a little logging, a little mining and a little hunting.
Most children didn't graduate from high school, and women had baby after baby
after baby for 30 years.

"They didn't know any better," Kemner says.

Kemner and Gall brought a social revolution to the remote hollows of
southeastern Kentucky.

They advocated birth control, civil rights, education for women and health
care. All were seen as radical ideas. "People called us communists," Gall
says.

Midwife Kemner birthed babies in the middle of snowstorms and in the middle
of the night. She tucked bottles of hot water next to tiny newborns to keep
them warm. She washed babies in cooking pans and, once, in a hubcap. Gall,
though not a registered nurse, often helped.

Now, the mountains are filled with girls named Peggy.

Shrinking families

Looking back, Kemner and Gall say it was birth control, as much as anything,
that changed the fate of Stinking Creek.

The daughters of women who had 14 or 15 children in the 1950s and 1960s grew
up and had three or four. Their daughters and granddaughters now have one or
two, or none.

"I saw how my momma lived, and I weren't gonna live like my momma," says Suzi
Carnes Brown, who was born with Kemner's help. Her mother had nine children.
She had four. Her daughter has one.

"I put a coil in, then I had my tubes tied," she says of the birth control
she used on Kemner's advice. "I weren't gonna have no more babies."

Kemner and Gall came to Knox County because it was the only county in this
part of Appalachia where they could find a doctor to sponsor Kemner's work as
a midwife. Gall's earnings as a schoolteacher were supposed to support
Kemner's volunteering.

When "the nurses" got here, no one would rent them a house. Finally, a man
offered a house that had been flooded so many times that snake paths were cut
through the mud on the floor. They cleaned up and got to work.

It wasn't long before the men of Stinking Creek were coming to their house in
the middle of the night because a baby was being born.

In the still after the births, Kemner and Gall would strike up a conversation
just loud enough for the women in the cabin to hear.

"You know, it doesn't have to be like this," one would say to the other, Gall
recalls. "You don't have to be pregnant all the time."

Later, a sister or a female cousin would stop one of them and ask, "What were
you talking about?" Then Kemner or Gall would explain birth control methods,
such as the IUD or spermicidal foam and, later, the birth control pill. Women
could come down to the health clinic at Lend-A-Hand and get birth control.

"I'd talk to them when their husbands weren't around," says Kemner. "Men
didn't like it at all. Back then, a man's worth was the size of his family."

Shrinking family size meant more money for food, clothing and housing because
there were fewer to feed, clothe and house.

Average household size in Knox County fell from 3.92 people in 1960 to 2.51
people in 2000. That was faster than the decline nationwide, according to the
U.S. Census. Women went to work and family incomes jumped. The average income
of women who worked in Knox County more than doubled to $21,000 in 2000 from
$9,000 in 1960, adjusted for inflation, according to a report in July by the
Population Reference Bureau and the Appalachian Regional Commission.

More children graduated from high school. More went to college, too, though
still far fewer than nationwide. College graduation rose to 8.8% in 2000 from
7.3% in 1980, much below the 24.5% graduation rate nationwide.

For the young girls of Stinking Creek, Kemner and Gall were the first women
they'd ever met who had college educations and were independent and living on
their own.

"Miss Peggy's been an inspiration to me," says Myrtle Brown, 29, who is
graduating from Eastern Kentucky University soon with a degree in nursing.
She's got $40,000 in student loan debt and borrowed money from Kemner, too,
to go to college.

"What's being done in Appalachia is the classic strategy for the developing
world," says Greg Bischak, senior economist at the Appalachian Regional
Commission. Birth control, education, health care and infrastructure work
together to ease poverty, he says.

"It works here, too."

New chances

In a crowded trailer perched on a hillside above Stinking Creek, three
generations of Sizemore women sit and visit every week.

The grandmother, Margaret "Baby Lu" Sizemore, had 10 children and raised them
on her own after her husband left her. Kemner helped at the birth of half of
them.

"I raised my own hogs, I killed 'em, and I made my own ham," says Sizemore,
79.

She sent all her children to Sunday school and 4-H classes at Lend-A-Hand.

One daughter, nicknamed Peggy after Nurse Peggy, left Stinking Creek after
high school and lives in a suburb of Atlanta with her husband and two
children. "My life isn't anything like my mother's," says Alice "Peggy"
Pruett, 48.

"From the time I was a teenager, I always knew there wasn't anything (in
Stinking Creek) for me. There just wasn't, wasn't any jobs, wasn't anything."

Her other siblings are closer by. But none has a big family like their mother
did.

"They preached birth control, and we preached it to our kids," says her
sister, Debbie Smith, 45, who lives nearby in Bimble, Ky.

She says that because she had fewer children, she was able to work outside
her home and is now going to community college with her daughter, Ashley, 19.
She's getting a certificate to be a home health aide. Her daughter wants to
be a dentist.

Ashley is a modern girl who says she "can't imagine" how her grandmother
lived, raising animals, killing them, living with coal heat and having babies
at home with a midwife. She shivers. "I can't live without my iPod."

Stinking Creek doesn't look the same anymore.

Wooden cabins have been torn down and replaced by mobile homes. Almost
everyone has running water and indoor plumbing.

Satellite TV dishes hang off window sills. And some neat brick ranch houses
and bigger two-story colonials have sprung up in the wide, more-prosperous
land at the mouth of the creek. Most homes are neatly painted, some in bright
colors.

Lend-A-Hand has a computer, and most folks have cellphones.

Government programs have helped, of course. But they've also bred dependency
on welfare. Nearly 37% of people in Knox County got some kind of government
help in 2004, according to the Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family
Services.

And many people, including some along Stinking Creek, make money from growing
marijuana and selling drugs such as Oxycontin and methamphetamine. Kentucky
is the second-largest producer of pot in the nation, behind California, and
Knox County is one of the biggest growers in Kentucky, according to the U.S.
Drug Enforcement Administration.

"One thing's different, that's the drugs," says Ken Messer, whose father,
Elis Messer, ran a country store 50 years ago on Stinking Creek.

"You got to lock your doors now because they'll steal anything to buy drugs."

An uncertain future

Kemner and Gall say they are retired, but they both work all day long. "Nurse
Peggy" still makes the rounds of the hollows, checking on sick and elderly
patients, and runs a weekly health clinic where truck drivers can get a
checkup required by law for $25, instead of the $150 a doctor would charge.

The women grow almost all of their own food on a self-sustaining 600-acre
farm that itself is a thing of the past.

Gall breeds, raises and slaughters cows, goats, sheep and pigs. She's
rebuilding a split-rail fence and finishing rock work on a restored mountain
log cabin that she had moved onto the Lend-A-Hand property and expanded. She
lives there now.

Kemner and Gall, with some hired help, built two houses, a chapel, a barn and
several outbuildings. They hired a crane to build a rickety bridge across
Stinking Creek and even widened the creek with backhoes to ease its flooding.
"Like the River Nile," says Gall.

Each year, dozens of church and university groups volunteer to help at
Lend-A-Hand. They travel from cities across the nation to live and work at
the center for a couple of weeks. Kemner cooks all their dinners.

Through the years, fewer volunteers have come, as people in other areas have
gotten more attention than the poor in Appalachia. "We have a lot of
competition now," Gall says.

On a late winter day, two volunteers hunch over the garden, digging up
potatoes from last year for dinner.

Laura Hahnfeld and Kristen Borst are going to college in Michigan, and they
spend vacations and summer breaks helping Kemner and Gall. They teach Sunday
school and help run the farm.

One day, Kemner and Gall hope, the two young women might take over the work
they do at Lend-A-Hand. But the young women aren't sure if the work here is
relevant anymore.

"I wonder: What are the needs now?" says Hahnfeld, 26, of Midland, Mich. "The
face of poverty has changed. It's all about access to technology now."

Borst, 27, of Grand Rapids, Mich., agrees. "I wonder if it's the 'working
farm idea' that will keep Lend-A-Hand relevant in the future," she says. "The
kids are in danger of a total disconnect from the earth." At least, she says,
"We can show them that sweet potatoes don't come from the grocery."

It's a future Kemner and Gall don't worry about. If Lend-A-Hand goes on after
they're gone, that's fine. If not, that's fine, too.

They'll just keep working until they can't work anymore.

"If the Lord sees we need help," says Gall, "he'll send it."



****Mindy Fetterman's father, John Fetterman, who was a Pulitzer
Prize-winning reporter for The Courier-Journal in Louisville, wrote a book
about the area in 1967 called Stinking Creek: The Portrait of a Small
Mountain Community in Appalachia. She went with her father several times to
Knox County as a child.

http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/2008-12-25-stinking-creek-kentucky_N.htm








  • [Homestead] Stinking Creek Kentucky story & video, bobf, 12/28/2008

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