Burnsville: Challenges accessing transportation, fresh food in a rural community

BURNSVILLE — For over a month in 2021, Beth Anderson and her family were stuck.

Her car broke down, and she wasn’t able to get the right part sent to her Braxton County home for six weeks. For that period, the Burnsville Public Library director had few transportation options.

“I walked to work,” Anderson said. “But we had to do all our grocery shopping at convenience stores.”

“I got so sick of bologna and hot dogs, and so did my kids.”

Anderson says these types of problems are typical for residents of Burnsville, a place with no public transportation and few fresh food options.

And there are other needs that she and her neighbors can’t meet as well. Anderson noted that many in Burnsville struggled to find close and affordable child care, mental health care and substance use disorder treatment.

“There’s so many small communities like Burnsville that have nothing,” she said.

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Anderson plans to vote after the library closes Tuesday evening, but she isn’t confident that new lawmakers will address these problems. While she’s heard politicians talk about the issues, they don’t speak about implementing solutions with the urgency she believes is necessary.

And Anderson knows conversations in Charleston aren’t always focused on West Virginia’s smaller towns and communities. In the 2000s, she lived in Clay County and worked for a homeless service provider. She was proud of the work her and her colleagues did, but she felt like the needs of the state’s more rural communities weren’t prioritized as much as they should have been.

“People would hate to see me coming into meetings,” she said. “Because I was always the one saying ‘And what are you doing for Clay County?’”

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