Grants will help communities share untold stories across Appalachia

The region’s mountains and valleys and hills and rivers hide stories that have gone untold for generations. Monuments Across Appalachian Virginia, a Virginia Tech project funded by the Mellon Foundation, has sought to rectify that.

On Monday, MAAV announced that it has awarded funding to project teams across the region for the creation of five new monuments that will recognize untold stories of bravery, labor and diversity. This announcement marks the second round of awards under this program.

“This is a huge thing for our citizens to be able to see a monument in their park,” Pound Vice Mayor Leaburn Kennedy said regarding the Wise County town’s award, which will fund a monument honoring Pound’s diverse labor force.

Unions have been a big part of life in Pound and other towns like it. They helped their members see better wages and better opportunities, Kennedy said.

The Pound monument, which received $217,000 from MAAV, will mark the residents’ work ethic and their spirit. Coal mining is a big part of the town, but it isn’t the only part. People have worked in several different industries over the years. Kennedy and her fellow committee members are planning to collect workers’ stories and incorporate them, along with the community’s history, in a town mural to be painted in a park. There’s some other work to be done in the park too, she said. The town is coming back from a long, hard road.

“We’re still plugging away to make things happen,” Kennedy said.

Across Virginia, monuments will rise:

• In Pound, a monument to laborers.
• In Pulaski, a quilt honoring 23 parents and 54 students who hand a hand in breaking the walls of segregation.
• In Rocky Mount, a statue for the 70 Black Franklin County-born men who fought for the Union in the Civil War.
• In Amherst County, an arbor marking a gathering space on Monacan Indian Nation land.
• In Alleghany County, a walking trail and a performance dedicated to generations of Black families who visited Green Pastures, the first and possibly only USDA Forest Service recreation sites that was open to Black families during the era of segregation.

Each project selected in this second round of awards has been awarded at least $200,000 in direct funds, according to MAAV communications coordinator Marti Wagnon. MAAV also has offered extra resources such as interns, resource team members and staff support, to be used at the discretion of each project committee.

“Total dollar amounts per project vary widely,” Wagnon said, citing that not every project team needs or wants those extra resources.

The committees leading these initiatives will have until fall 2025 to complete their projects. Each group will hold at least one public listening session to plan the final design of their monuments.

“A lot of times when you have a big project that comes in [and] they start thinking about building something, it’s a very top-down approach,” Wagnon said. With the listening sessions, MAAV hopes that longtime members of each community will share their own stories.

“Listening sessions help you think about, if we were going to do a monument that really symbolized community identity, what does that look like?” Wagnon said.

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In late 2022, MAAV was awarded a $3 million grant from the Mellon Foundation to explore representations of Appalachia’s history. It’s part of a larger $500 million Mellon Foundation initiative to transform the nation’s landscape of monuments into one that more accurately represents the land’s collective history, according to that foundation’s website.

With the funding, MAAV project leads and Virginia Tech professors Emily Satterwhite and Katy Powell set out to amplify the stories of those who have typically been silenced or excluded from the shared environment. They also sought to audit the monuments that already exist in Appalachian Virginia.

“We were kind of inspired by Monument Lab’s definition of a monument, which is ‘a statement of power in public,’” Plummer said. The Monument Lab is a Philadelphia-based organization that is auditing monuments nationwide.

“We’re really thinking about our history and [how] the things that are privileged are written across our landscape,” she said.

“A third of [the monuments] we have are [about the] Civil War. They’re predominantly white,” Plummer said, regarding the preliminary data MAAV has collected in Appalachian Virginia.

Plummer has found that a lot of regional monuments refer to Mary Draper Ingalls. Ingalls was a settler in the New River Valley area. As the story goes, she was captured during a Shawnee raid in 1755 and later escaped, walking hundreds of miles to return home by foot. According to Plummer, Ingalls is the most monumentalized woman in Appalachian Virginia, with at least 12 monuments of her own and another six that mention her last name.

Plummer has been researching the reasoning behind the high number of Ingalls’ monuments.

“What makes us feel good about [Ingalls] in terms of her as the central [female] figure of Appalachian Virginia, and why do we feel comfortable about her?” Plummer said.

“It’s really going to be interesting and maybe even surprising for people to see the disparity and the lack of diversity [amongst the current Appalachian monuments]. Of course, that justifies … the choices that we’ve made with our grant projects,” she said.

When MAAV placed the call for grant proposals, it had a few criteria. The most obvious one: that the project be located in Appalachian Virginia.

MAAV took an expansive approach to defining the region. Its area of consideration covers 57 localities in Virginia, plus applicants living in lands that were home to the Yesah Indian Tribe,  including Bluefield County, West Virginia, where one round one grant awardee is located.

While community input is required for every project, the results might not be the kinds of monuments you expect to see. Many people think of a monument as a statue or a historic marker in marble or concrete. These new monuments won’t necessarily fit that bill.

Out of the two rounds, most monuments will be permanent structures, though not all. Permanence was not a requirement for funding, according to Wagnon.

In the first round of funding, grant applicant The Yesá:sahį Language and Sacred Places Project stated that its monument would be a series of biodegradable and temporary signs at a July language conference at Virginia Tech, designed to not do any harm to the land itself, Wagnon explained.

“Even though it’s temporary, [it] doesn’t mean it’s not a monument. It’s actually still telling a story in a public place, which is kind of our definition of a monument,” Wagnon said.

“The monument might not be there anymore, but the people who are impacted will remember that. We hope that by visiting [the] monument, it will inspire people to keep doing work like this,”  she said.

MAAV received 30 applications during the second round of awards, which will be the last round, Wagnon said. The team sought out stories that had been left untold, stories that would make an impact.

Some themes appeared more often than others, Wagnon said.

“We could have easily funded all African American stories for round two, and possibly for round one as well,” she said.

“So we really tried to, we did try to balance,” Wagnon added.

In the first round, MAAV funded four projects at a total of more than $300,000, according to Wagnon:

• A Yesá:sahį Language and Sacred Places conference to be held at Virginia Tech from July 11 to 13.
• The Montañitas Reimagined festival on Sept. 28 at VFW Post 621 in Luray, with a Lua Project album release. The festival, album and a corresponding curriculum will serve as the monument to the Latine Appalachian experience.
• The Travelers Inn: Black Appalachian History in Bluefield, which will result in a public art installation following an Aug. 29 community listening session.
• The Forest Botanicals Region Living Monument, is a storywalk trail and statue that will pay homage to the culture of foraging in the region, and the ways in which both historical and modern-day foraging have benefited that region’s population.

“We want to tell these stories and things not only for local histories, but for people to understand it. I taught for 21 years [starting in 1971], and didn’t know any of this stuff.” Hickman said.

The Monuments Across Appalachian Virginia projects

In addition to Pound’s planned monument to workers, four other projects received funding in this round of grants from Mountains Across Appalachian Virginia:

• The board of the Calfee Community and Cultural Center in Pulaski will create a quilt as a monument to the 23 families involved in the 1949 court case Corbin et al. v. County School Board of Pulaski.

In that court case, the families sued Pulaski County for failing to provide an equal education to Black students as was being provided to white students under the then-standing requirements of Plessy v. Ferguson.

At the time, Black students attended elementary school at the Calfee Training School and then were bused 30 minutes to the Christiansburg Institute for high school. According to CCCC board President Mickey Hickman, who attended both schools, the schools’ facilities were lacking.

Initially, a judge ruled in favor of the school board. The case, supported by the NAACP and filed prior to the landmark Brown v. Board of Education, went to the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, which determined that the schools were unequal.

“What we’ve gone on to see from this is that the Corbin v. Pulaski County School Board was, in fact, a precursor to Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 decision,” said national NAACP board of directors Chair Leon Russell, whose grandfather was a plaintiff on behalf of Russell’s uncle in the Corbin case. Russell himself attended the Calfee Training School as a child.

“It’s something that people need to be very much aware of. The legal history went through Pulaski County, from the concept of challenging Plessy vs. Ferguson, which talked about separate but equal. The parents who filed the lawsuit in 1947 were challenging the very concept that if you say separate but equal, you need to equalize the facilities,” Russell said.

“These parents had vision, but they didn’t know how far that vision would reach. They also had courage. They ran the risk of losing their jobs, being ostracized, punished in some kind of way for participating in that,” Hickman said.

“Once they signed their name [on the court case] there was no turning back, and they went ahead with that anyway,” Hickman said.

The project received $217,000 from MAAV. The quilt will find a home in the CCCC once phase one renovations and the quilt are complete.

“A quilt is both a prominent part of African American culture and Appalachian culture,” said Jill Williams, co-executive director of the CCCC.

The completed 8-foot-square quilt will consist of 24 blocks, each made by a member of the community or a descendent of one of the families that signed on to the court case.

“We wanted this to be an intergenerational project,” she added.

• In Monroe in Amherst County, the Monacan Indian Nation is building a 30-by-40-foot covered arbor with the funds it will receive, said Chief Diane Shield, who declined to disclose the exact amount of money her project will get.

“We want to give our generations, as well as our ancestors, a permanent place to come to, to meet at, to tell stories or just to come and have a picnic,” Shields said.

The monument will be called the Esah Community House.

“When you think of a monument, you think of a big brick something or the other, but that’s not what we’re about,” Shields said.

The more they spoke with the MAAV team, the more they realized that MAAV’s project was focused on re-envisioning monuments. The Monacan Indian Nation would be encouraged to design a modern monument to reflect the tent that the community raises for powwows, she said.

“This structure gives people a place to come to sit down and talk about planning the future of the property,” Shields said.

“It’s a powerful place,” she said.

• In Alleghany County , the monument committee is preparing its own gathering space. In response to the opening of several whites-only state parks during the Jim Crow era, the Clifton Forge branch of the NAACP petitioned for a recreational park for Black people, according to former Clifton Forge mayor and monument committee member Pam Marshall.

Green Pastures Recreation Area opened to Black families in 1936. As the only USDA Forest Service recreation site for Black families in Virginia, and possibly in the nation, the park offered a picnic space, a lake with a beach, bathrooms and hiking trails.

Marshall and other Clifton Forge community members campaigned for the park to be restored starting in 2017. Then-Gov. Ralph Northam started that process, but it has since stalled.

Using its $217,000 from MAAV, the committee will develop an interpretive trail with informative signs describing the park’s history. The group plans to install reflection areas, restore the picnic shelter, and create a theatrical production based on past visitors’ memories of the park.

“It’s such a historic story and it holds so many happy memories during a time that things were not happy,” Marshall said, adding that the monument will encourage people to visit and learn about the park’s history.

• The Rocky Mount branch of the NAACP has been working with Glenna and Larry Moore to recognize the 70 Black Rocky Mount-born men who fought for the United States in the Civil War.

Glenna Moore, a retired educator, was the first member of the committee to learn of these men, she said. Her son, Darnell Moore, initially brought the matter to her attention. She started with knowledge of three Black men who had been born in Franklin County and enlisted in the U.S.  Colored Troops. From there, she found records of 67 others. She thought they should be recognized, she said.

In the years since, Moore and her family members stood before a Franklin County Board of Supervisors meeting and read their names, one by one. She also paid for their names to be published in an ad in a local newspaper, she said. And she and husband Larry Moore have worked alongside a monument committee to bring this statue to Rocky Mount.

The monument, which has received $285,000 from MAAV, will be placed somewhere in the town. NAACP monument committee members initially requested that the town consider placing the monument in Veterans Memorial Park. The Rocky Mount Town Council unanimously approved the request and sent a letter to the town’s veterans commission requesting it do the same. It passed in a 6-5 vote.

The people of Franklin County have continued to discuss where their monument will go. The monument committee would like the town to consider placing it near the downtown farmers market. The group has not yet made a formal request, according to Rocky Mount Mayor Holland Perdue III.

“Monument building has always been, when you put something in the city square, who’s allowed to occupy the city square? Who’s allowed to be in that space? Who’s allowed to have their monuments there?” said Sarah Plummer, the Virginia Tech postdoctoral associate leading MAAV’s monument audit team.

“That’s literally what we’re talking about. This [project] was about how a community defines itself. And the people who define the community are the people who have the social power, the financial power, the governmental power,” Plummer said last month, before the veterans commission held its vote.

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