Memories Draw Generations Back to Lynch

Field: Social Sciences (Social Sciences)

Memories Draw Generations Back to Lynch Andy Mead Biscuit Jackson stopped a car on narrow Mountain Street to talk to the people inside, and soon half a dozen more were lined up behind it. No one honked to hurry the conversation. On Memorial Day weekend in Lynch, visiting with old friends always has the right of way. The former coal camp, tucked into a Black Mountain hollow on the north end of Harlan County, is bulging this weekend with hundreds of black coal miners' sons and daughters who left to seek a better life elsewhere. Biscuit is in from California, where he is Sgt. William Jackson of the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department. "These are my people, my roots," he said. "I come back and walk up and down these streets, and I'm home." Joyce Hall Petteway came back from Waterbury, Connecticut, where she is a securities trader. "This is just a different atmosphere from city life," she said. "You can hear birds singing here. I like to just sit on the porch and listen to water running down the mountain." Clara Hayes is from Detroit. She's a retired teacher who works in a juvenile home. She moved away more than thirty years ago, but Lynch keeps calling her back. "I was born here," she said. "My dad is buried here. We had to leave when the head of the family died, but I was baptized in that church on the corner there." Hayes and her sister, Ardella Jackson, have been back every Memorial Day for twenty-six years. "We don't even know what Detroit looks like on Memorial Day," she said. Probably less crowded than Lynch, Mrs. Hayes. Cars hugging street curbs in Lynch this weekend have license plates from Michigan, Indiana, New York, Virginia , Connecticut, North Carolina, Alabama , New Jersey, Florida, Ohio, Maryland , Massachusetts, Illinois, Tennessee, and Texas. The 1990 census found 1,166 souls living in Lynch, but on Saturday night more than twice that number crowded in and around the former Lynch Colored School for a dance sponsored by the Eastern Kentucky Social Club. On Sunday morning, 350 people packed the Mount Sinai Baptist Church. The Rev. W. B. Rutland said Sunday service usually draws 110 to 120 people. Today, many will drive to Monte Vista Cemetery—it's a few miles away, on the far side of a cemetery where white people are buried, to place flowers on relatives' graves. Three generations of the Baskin family were there Saturday, digging up! old pots of plastic flowers and putting new ones in. "All the people you see up here are coal miners and their wives," said Sylvester Baskin, the grandfather. "This one here was a classmate of mine. That was my neighbor; that one was my father-in-law. Sam Houston over there was a motorman . I'd say two-thirds of them, I knew them." Lynch is a tight little town of homes that once were owned by the coal company . The town was born in 1917, when the United States Steel Corporation decided to build a town to house people who would dig coal for its steel mills. Terraces for houses and roads were 20 blasted out of the mountain above Looney Creek. An army of men was brought in to build homes, boarding houses, bathhouses, churches, a machine shop, a company store, and what was then the world's largest tipple. The place was named after Thomas Lynch, the first president of United States Coal and Coke, a U.S. Steel subsidiary. The company brought in white coal miners from Pennsylvania and elsewhere. From Alabama, Virginia, and other southern states, it brought in thousands of blacks, many of them sharecroppers. U. S. Steel later sold the town to another company, which in the early 1960s sold the houses to the people who lived in them. Lynch always stood apart because it was one of only a handful of places in Eastern Kentucky where blacks live. Now, says city council member Bennie Massey, about 80 percent of the population is black. Like many other towns in Eastern Kentucky , Lynch is shrinking as mining jobs dwindle. Up the mountain from the last...