100 Days in Appalachia

100 Days in Appalachia

Subscribe to our email newsletter to keep up with the latest from 100 Days in Appalachia. Note – We are currently undergoing technical maintenance and our ...
100 Days in Appalachia

W.Va. Opioid Settlement Funds are Supposed to Reverse Years of Crisis. In Several Counties, They’re Being Used to Pay Regional Jail Bills.

In rural Wyoming County, West Virginia, Ann Reed is the sheriff’s department’s only social worker. Funded through a temporary grant from a local mental health center, Reed provides resources and care ...
100 Days in Appalachia

The first time I went to Muskingum Island was in 2024, before the work began.

Listen to the sounds of the island. On an unusually cool and dry morning in late July, I met Victor Elam, the Refuge Manager of the Ohio River Islands National Wildlife Refuge, at a boat launch just ...
100 Days in Appalachia

What is the New Apostolic Reformation? How a Religio-Political Movement is Affecting U.S. and Appalachian Politics

Apostles and prophets. Spiritual warfare. Dominionism and the New Apostolic Reformation. You might come across these terms if you follow politics these days. Here’s some context and clarity about the ...
100 Days in Appalachia

Big Tech Comes to Tucker County, WV

Pamela Moe was reading the paper in late March when she spotted a public notice from a company she’d never heard of. Fundamental Data, a Virginia-based company, had applied for a permitfrom West ...
100 Days in Appalachia

Five Years After It Became a National Park, There’s a Growing Divide In West Virginia’s New River Gorge

The New River Gorge is a jagged area in the middle of Southern West Virginia’s coalfields. Shaped by one of the oldest rivers in the world, whitewater rapids roll under its high petrified sandstone ...
100 Days in Appalachia

Tyler Childers’ Appalachia: How the Country Singer Challenges our Relationships with Addiction and Religion

The first time I heard Tyler Childers’ voice I was riding in the passenger seat of a 15-year-old car late at night through the back roads of West Virginia. It was 2019, and I was 17 years old. And ...
100 Days in Appalachia

Across Appalachia, Photo ID Requirements Complicate Voting

When Amanda Saint went to vote in the 2020 election, she didn’t anticipate having any problems. For years, the 36-year-old nurse had been living and voting just outside of Huntsville, Alabama. But ...
100 Days in Appalachia

‘In the Boat Together’: Post-Helene, Faith Communities Have Been Central to NC’s Long-Term Recovery

In late September of last year, Tropical Storm Helene dumped up to 20 inches of water in parts of western North Carolina. In Ashe County, where Reverend Blake Smaar leads the congregation at West ...
100 Days in Appalachia

For My Indian-American family, West Virginia Will Always Be Home

“West Virginia” is never what people are looking for when they ask where my family is from. The first week of January, my dad and I drove five hours from our house in North Carolina to visit his ...
100 Days in Appalachia

Finding Solace in Stories: How Narrative Medicine Transformed an Appalachian Doctor’s Practice

In the 1990s when I started medical school, nobody warned me how my job was going to hurt me emotionally. Maybe it’s better they didn’t, as I might have been scared away. I must admit, there were a ...
100 Days in Appalachia

In West Virginia’s Southern Coalfields, a Grassroots ‘Jubilee’

On a late spring day in 2022, Rev. Brad Davis was riding along the twisting roads of McDowell County, West Virginia. Davis was soon to start his current job pastoring five United Methodist churches ...