Frank Kilgore, Southwest Virginia’s ‘unofficial chamber of commerce,’ dies

When St. Paul lawyer Frank Kilgore felt that the high test scores of Southwest Virginia students weren’t getting enough attention, he called up newspapers across the state — not to pitch a story but to buy $10,000 worth of ads trumpeting his region’s accomplishments.

When a speaker at an environmental event in Williamsburg declared that all of Virginia’s waters flow into the Chesapeake Bay, Kilgore stood up in the crowd and started listing all the watersheds in Southwest Virginia that flow west, not east.

When J.D. Vance made the best-seller list for his memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” Kilgore felt Vance’s account defamed Appalachia, and he responded by writing his own book — “J.D. Vance Is a Fake Hillbilly” — that detailed all the ways that Kilgore felt the region defies stereotypes.

“No one fought harder for Southwest Virginia than Frank Kilgore,” said former Attorney General Jerry Kilgore, who, despite the same surname, is not closely related.

Frank Kilgore died Sunday after an undisclosed illness. He was 72. “It’s a big loss for Southwest Virginia because we’ve lost the champion of our region,” Jerry Kilgore said.

Here’s how big a loss it is: The list above may be some of the most colorful things Frank Kilgore did, but they are by no means the most important. He was instrumental in the founding of the Appalachian School of Law in Grundy and is regarded as the founder of the Appalachian College of Pharmacy in Oakwood. His name is also synonymous with many of the trails in the region. He was involved in creating the Mendota Trail, which now stretches for 12.5 miles through Bristol and Washington County. He donated some of the land for what is now Clinch River State Park and personally blazed some of the trails in one section of the park. He pushed for the state to acquire the land that is now the Channels Natural Area Preserve on the Russell County-Washington County line. He helped promote the reintroduction of elk to Buchanan County.

“He’s done so many things, it’s hard to mention all of them,” said Michael McGlothlin, president of the pharmacy school.

“My wife, Debbie, described him as a Renaissance man,” said Del. Terry Kilgore, R-Scott County, who also isn’t closely related, if at all. “I can think of no better definition of Frank. He was just into so many areas where he was helping Southwest Virginia.”

Legislators from Southwest Virginia frequently heard from Frank Kilgore. “He was always in their office with some new scheme to market Southwest Virginia, and he was always right,” Jerry Kilgore said. “Frank was an idea man. He was just the ultimate salesman. He was the unofficial chamber of commerce.”

Legislators from outside Southwest Virginia often heard from him, too. “If you need somebody to really help you, to come to the legislature and lobby other members about what something meant to people of Southwest Virginia, man, he would drop whatever he was doing and he would come up,” said Del. Terry Kilgore. “That’s just the kind of guy he was.”

Journalists often heard from him, too. When Richmond Times-Dispatch reporter Bill Lohman and photographer Bob Brown embarked in 2002 to tell the story of  the state’s longest road — U.S. 58, which stretches across the state’s southern border — Lohman received a call from Frank Kilgore. “The gist of the call?” Lohman wrote then . “‘Don’t forget us.’” When Lohman profiled Frank Kilgore two years ago, he wrote that Kilgore, then 70, was scaling back his law practice, “which merely leaves him more time to promote — and fiercely defend — the part of the world he knows best and loves most.”

I can testify to this, as well. I count 340 emails from him in my in-box in the short time that Cardinal News has been in existence, many of them pitching a story idea or passing on some arcane piece of knowledge about the region or simply praising our work when he thought we did well. He also played a small role in helping Cardinal take flight. After we launched, and before our 501(c)(3) nonprofit tax status was approved, a foundation he created served briefly as our fiscal sponsor, allowing us to accept tax-exempt donations. He also once wrote a letter of recommendation for us to accompany a grant application.

Frank Kilgore never sought elected office but was involved in public policy nonetheless. He also supported (or criticized) politicians regardless of party, and his passing elicited tributes from both sides of the aisle.

“Frank Kilgore was a beloved figure in Southwest Virginia,” said Rep. Morgan Griffith, R-Salem, in a statement. “The region shared profound admiration for his knowledge of history, legal acumen and love of his community. He truly strove to make the Appalachian region a better place for all. Southwest Virginia has lost a great man in Frank Kilgore. His input will be missed.”

“Frank was a sharp legal mind who played an instrumental role in expanding higher education in the coalfield region,” said U.S. Sen. Mark Warner, D-Virginia, in a statement. “He was a friend, a dedicated Virginian, and a champion for conservation and outdoor recreation in Appalachia. He will be missed, even as his legacy endures.”

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Frank Kilgore was the proud son of a coal miner and other coal miners before him. “The way I chose to think of Frank is knowing where he came from,” said Scott Mullins, his former law partner. “Frank was raised in a very poor environment. His family was poor.”

He never forgot that, either.  “He always had that chip on his shoulder,” Mullins said. Nothing riled up Frank Kilgore more than to see Southwest Virginia disparaged — especially its students. In 2018, he met with state officials in Richmond to pitch the region as a site for technology jobs. One of the officials in the meeting made the mistake of asking him if Southwest Virginia “has the DNA to fill cybersecurity jobs.”

Kilgore promptly told them otherwise — and lots of others in the state, too. He responded with an opinion piece (he was a frequent writer of those) that appeared in the Richmond Times-Dispatch under the headline: “ Smashing stereotypes in Southwest Virginia .”

“Most subgroups of Americans who are consistently demeaned by bigots or the merely misinformed have an organization or two that take to the streets when overtly insulted,” he wrote. “We Appalachians don’t have one, yet.” So he took it upon himself to be that defender — reciting statistic after statistic to make his case: “Our much-maligned region is home to eight school districts ranked in the top 25. In fact, three of the seven ‘coalfield’ counties, Wise (2nd), Russell (11th), and Scott (13th), are in the elite upper 10 percent, based on state test score rankings from Schooldigger.com.”

I’ve often found myself receiving copies of charts and graphs from various politicians or business groups showing how well Southwest Virginia schools have performed. Inevitably, when I researched where the data came from, it always came from the same place: data that Kilgore had collected and circulated. Earlier this year, Cardinal published a story about how half the schools that had won the Virginia High School League’s Scholastic Bowl were from Southwest Virginia. Where did that news tip come from? Frank Kilgore. He paid attention to things like that the way some people follow sports scores.

“Frank was always focused on the achievements of coalfield students,” Mullins said. For a time, they were on opposite sides of the law — with Kilgore representing teachers and Mullins representing school boards. “Whenever I talked to Frank and it came to issues of how students are doing, Frank would get laser-like focused on those issues. What Frank wanted, and this is not hyperbole — Frank was raised so hard, and because education gave him an opportunity to help people, he really focused on helping to make sure that coalfield kids are not maligned. Frank was so proud of the local schools and the robotics teams and all those things — truly, that’s the legacy that I don’t think people will remember. Everybody knows about the trails and his passion for those causes, but his passion for the youth and education, that is the thing most people will never really appreciate.”

Frank Kilgore graduated from what was then Clinch Valley College — today it’s the University of Virginia’s College at Wise — and worked for a time as a forester. He never lost his interest in the outdoors. The last email I received from him was a video about honeybees. Others dealt with coyotes, Appalachian hill cane and, of course, the elk herd. And that doesn’t count all the emails on other topics, from making sure we knew the chart-topping band 49 Winchester is from Russell County to how Southwest Virginia ought to pitch itself as a destination for data centers.

Unable to afford law school, Frank Kilgore took another route: He read for the law, an option Virginia law provides for someone to study under a practicing lawyer. “Early on, environmental causes were a big part of Frank’s reason to get that law degree,” Mullins said. “Frank fought for environmental causes when it wasn’t really cool. He was fighting for strip mine regulation when nobody else was speaking up about those issues. He represented things he believed in. Most attorneys are focused on earning a living, but Frank was focused on making a difference.”

In the late 1980s, Kilgore represented the United Mine Workers when the union was striking against the Pittston Coal Co. over health benefits. For that strike, the UMW chose a different approach, adopting the tactics of the civil rights movement with miners staging sit-down protests to block nonunion coal trucks from coming and going. In an email several years ago, Kilgore said he represented about 1,500 of the 4,000 people who were arrested — and successfully made the argument that their cases be dismissed if they weren’t arrested again. “He believed that those people — more importantly, his neighbors — were justified in their need to have health care and that civil disobedience was appropriate and the judicial system should give them a break,” Mullins said.

To Frank Kilgore’s way of thinking, Southwest Virginia was the best place in the world to live and he wanted to make it better — and he wanted others to know about it. Kilgore was nothing if not persistent. Former state Sen. William Wampler Jr., R-Bristol, recalls that Kilgore insisted on taking him on a daylong tour of ridgetops in his district to inspect drinking water. He’d roll up to someone’s house and ask, “Do you mind showing Senator Wampler your drinking water?” They came away with Mason jars and jelly jars full of dirty water. “Frank helped me understand that even in the 1990s there were still people in the United States who didn’t have clean, safe drinking water,” Wampler said. That led him to secure funding for public water systems across Southwest Virginia.

Frank Kilgore’s love of the outdoors was reflected in his email address, which incorporated the word “outdoors.” In a 2022 social media post, the Mendota Trail’s Facebook page marked the opening of a new stretch of trail with a picture of Kilgore, declaring: “Without Frank, there would be no trail.”

Del. Terry Kilgore credits Frank Kilgore with being “the first one to put together The Channels recreational area,” a 721-acre site that is significant for what the state’s website calls a 400-million-year-old “maze-like system of sandstone crevices and boulders” on Middle Knob. “I remember him taking me all over it on a four-wheeler,” Terry Kilgore said. “He convinced me we need to get control of this piece of property. He was an environmentalist in a good sense of the word.”

While Frank Kilgore did not align himself with a political party — in 2001, for instance, he backed Democrat Mark Warner for governor and Republican Jerry Kilgore for attorney general — he was not averse to making his views known. When Republican gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie talked up coal in 2017, Kilgore criticized him, saying that coal wasn’t the future of the region. Kilgore was an attorney for Buchanan County in the early 2000s when the board of supervisors asked him to help find something that would help the county’s economy. He’d already been involved in helping start the Appalachian School of Law. The new project became the Appalachian College of Pharmacy, which accepted its first class in 2005, and whose board Kilgore chaired for many years. Frank Kilgore also was a quiet advocate for more women in judgeships in Southwest Virginia, Jerry Kilgore said. Frank Kilgore eventually married one of those judges: Teresa Chafin, who now sits on the Virginia Supreme Court.

Frank Kilgore was the author of multiple books about Southwest Virginia. His last, and most famous one, had the provocative title that referenced J.D. Vance, now an Ohio senator who on Monday was named as Donald Trump’s running mate. Frank Kilgore didn’t think much of Vance’s book, which he felt smeared the region’s people as lazy, ignorant and worse. Here’s what Kilgore wrote: “Despite a half-century of hard work reshaping our coalfields economy and breaking loose from very harmful stereotypes perpetuated by an elite media, J.D. took up the defamation flag and stuck it to us with gusto. This young traumatized man kneecapped some very serious efforts at economic recovery in Appalachia by providing excuses to the far right not to waste money on such a hopeless place and gifting fodder to radicals on the far left by excusing and reinforcing their longtime sniggering stereotypes of us. Simply put, J.D. gave culture bigots a chance to crow.”

The key part of that book isn’t the title though, but the subtitle: “Think Twice Before Calling (All) Coalfield Appalachians Racists, Sexists and Ignoramuses.” The book is not really about Vance; it’s Kilgore’s full-throated defense of Southwest Virginia, by making the case that it’s historically been more socially progressive than outsiders give it credit for. He talks about how the coal camps were melting pots of immigrants from across Europe, how one of the first two women elected to the General Assembly was from Buchanan County, how the first integrated Little League team in the South was in Norton. The book’s cover features a photo of that integrated Norton team. Whatever your thoughts on Vance, if you like Southwest Virginia, you’d like Kilgore’s book. It’s too bad he won’t be around to talk about it now that Vance’s nomination will surely bring it a new round of attention. I can imagine that Frank Kilgore would have seized the opportunity to talk to every reporter he could about what a great place Southwest Virginia is.

Kilgore was private about his health issues; many of the people interviewed for this column were unaware he’d been ill. The family has not released any information about services. I’ve been looking back through all the lines Frank Kilgore ever wrote to find a good closing line, but the best one comes from Terry Kilgore: “The Commonwealth would be a lot better place if we had more Frank Kilgores.”

Update: Kilgore’s daughter, Joyce, says that her faither’s charity of choice was Saint Jude’s Hospital “but he wouldn’t have been opposed to donating toward amenities for any of the trails or schools he was instrumental in creating.”

In this week’s West of the Capital

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