On the trail of J.D. Vance’s Kentucky mountain roots

The family cemetery in Breathitt County where J.D. Vance's grandparents and other ancestors were laid to rest, a place he evoked in a recent speech. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Kevin Nance)

JACKSON — In the 24 hours after J.D. Vance became Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s running mate, Stephen Bowling, city council member and director of the Breathitt County Public Library, fielded more than a dozen calls from news media outlets large and small.

The place that Vance in his best-selling memoir wrote “would always have my heart” is back in the spotlight, as the freshman U.S. senator from Ohio prepares to address a national television audience and the Republican National Convention Wednesday night.

Searching for traces of Vance in his ancestral home takes you down winding blacktop through the deep shade of creeksides, past bright fields of Queen Anne’s lace and bottomland plots of  corn. It takes you onto people’s porches to ask directions, where, contrary to popular stereotype, an approaching stranger is no big deal. It takes you into a place that is steeped in political violence.

Bloody Breathitt, as it came to be known, was the scene of one of Appalachia’s deadliest feuds.

The violence unfolded in the late 19th century at a time of economic upheaval that sometimes inflamed lingering Civil War animosities. The arrival of the railroad and the coal industry set off a boom that created winners and losers and an “explosion of wealth” that Bowling says communities struggled to manage.

“We still shoot at each other today,” he adds. “We just do it on Facebook. We still shoot a warning shot over people’s heads. We snipe at people. We do it from a keyboard.”

Still a place of conflicting political loyalties, Breathitt County votes Republican in national elections while most of the voters and local elected officials remain registered Democrats. Breathitt sent a Democrat to the Kentucky House until Republicans redrew the district. In both his runs for president, Republican Donald Trump carried Breathitt. So did Democrat Andy Beshear in both his runs for governor.

Breathitt County’s 13,500 residents have not escaped the bitter polarization dividing the country, says Mark Wireman, who was giving a tour to a reporter from a national news outlet.

Wireman, who was Gatewood Galbraith’s running mate in the 2007 Kentucky Democratic primary for governor, describes himself now as a “Rand Paul, Thomas Massie, Mike Lee Republican.” Wireman worries the nation’s debt is unsustainable and blames President Joe Biden and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky for “kicking that can down the road.”

A longtime family friend who knows Vance, Wireman says the former Marine, Yale Law School graduate and recent venture capitalist is “intelligent, conscientious, God-fearing.”

“I guess I’m happy for him. Some people, his family are scared for him due to what is going on in the country,” a reference to last weekend’s assassination attempt on Trump. “It’s a crazy time. I’ll be praying for him and the country.”

Vance’s grandparents migrated to Middletown, Ohio, where his grandfather worked in an Armco steel mill and where Vance was born in 1984. The family often returned to Breathitt County, where Vance also spent time during summer vacations.

Vance evoked his Kentucky roots in a speech July 10 at a conference organized by the New Right group National Conservatism in which he criticized U.S military aid to Ukraine, free trade policies and immigration. Building to a conclusion, he spoke of driving down Kentucky Route 15 to Jackson “where all my relatives came from, the deep heart of Central Appalachia” and recalled proposing to his wife. “I said, honey, I come along with $120,000 worth of law school debt and a cemetery plot in Eastern Kentucky.”

He said he hopes he, his wife and children will be laid to rest “in that small mountain cemetery,” bringing its inhabitants to “seven generations of people who have built this country, who have made things in this country, and who would fight and die to protect this country if they were asked to.”

Whitney Haddix said a friend sent her a clip from Vance’s speech and his words touched her. Haddix, her husband, Brandon, and their three children live just a few hundred yards down the hill from Vance’s family cemetery, one of countless small cemeteries dotting the mountains.

“I feel like he remembered where he came from, that he has appreciation for where he came from and that he hasn’t forgotten, and that means more than words,” she said. “We are not Eastern Kentucky hillbillies. We are not just barefoot and pregnant. We are human beings who actually work hard and who do our best and who are the type of people who will take their shirt off their back to help people. That’s what we do. That’s what’s ingrained in us.”

The Haddix family’s home is near Frozen Creek in a three-acre clearing on the edge of a steep old forest; they also own her grandparents’ nearby farm. Vance has bought more than 100 acres in the area, a buffer that protects the cemetery and tombstone of Bonnie Blanton Vance, the beloved “mamaw” who brought stability to a childhood roiled by Vance’s mother’s addiction.

Sitting on her porch, under which a litter of kittens played, Whitney Haddix said, “I feel like J.D. Vance would do what is right. I feel like he would fight for our country. I’m not a Republican. I’m not a Democrat. I go with what I feel, but I feel as though we need somebody who will stand up for us, for the people they are elected to protect and take care of.”

A registered nurse, Haddix also  praises Democrat Beshear, especially for his leadership during the pandemic.

“We are Trump supporters,” she said, adding, intriguingly, that she also is waiting to see who the Democrats nominate for president.

Breathitt residents are aware that the book that put a 31-year-old Vance on the national stage in 2016 to explain the working-class white backlash that helped elect Trump also spurred a backlash among Appalachians. “Hillbilly Elegy” has been criticized for perpetuating the worst stereotypes about the region and its people. The memoir was made into a Netflix movie by producer Ron Howard.

“J.D. Vance is not representative of the Appalachia I know and love,” says Mandi Fugate Sheffel, a Breathitt County resident and founder and owner of a bookstore in nearby Hazard. “He’s not for working people.”

She says she guides customers browsing the Read Spotted Newt’s Appalachian section to books that provide a more complete, nuanced view than “Hillbilly Elegy” of the region’s ethnic and racial diversity and its complexity, including the systemic forces and extractive industries that have saddled it with widespread poverty.

She recommends Elizabeth’s Catte’s “What You Are Getting Wrong about Appalachia” and “Appalachian Reckoning” published by the West Virginia University Press as well as fiction by Silas House and Robert Gipe.

“It’s so frustrating that people who live away from here think ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ is the narrative of Appalachia. … It gives them permission to believe everything they believed about Appalachia” and to write off the region as unredeemable and unworthy of attention and assistance. She said Vance leaned into his Appalachian roots so he could brag about overcoming them and that he has flip-flopped from his earlier opposition to Trump.

Bowling, the library director, says Vance “accurately portrayed his family over the years. The book became a bigger symbol of Appalachia than he intended.” If any place has a right to be aggrieved by Vance’s portrayal, says Bowling, it’s his hometown of Middletown, Ohio.

Vance returns to Breathitt County fairly often to pay respects with family at the cemetery and to visit the public library, where he and his sister sometimes research family history, though less frequently, says Bowling, since winning the 2022 Senate race.

Behind the cash register at Indian Hollow Liquors in Jackson, Aaron Combs said he’s familiar with Vance’s story and local connections. But Vance’s joining the ticket does not seem to have swayed his view of the presidential choices awaiting voters. “I don’t like either one of them, to be honest.”

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