This week we have a virtual conversation with Robert Thompson.
Robert is a Wayne County native, school teacher, county commissioner, author of 18 books, & former House of Delegates member, all at the age of 33.
To get a copy of Roberts books for yourself, check out his author page at https://www.lulu.com/spotlight/robt1687/.
We will be releasing new episodes bi-weekly, sometimes even more regularly, for the remainder of 2021!
https://coalfield-development.org/
This week we have a virtual conversation with Robert Thompson.
Robert is a Wayne County native, school teacher, county commissioner, author of 18 books, & former House of Delegates member, all at the age of 33.
To get a copy of Roberts books for yourself, check out his author page at https://www.lulu.com/spotlight/robt1687/.
We will be releasing new episodes bi-weekly, sometimes even more regularly, for the remainder of 2021!
https://coalfield-development.org/
This is Change in the Coalfields, a podcast by Coalfield Development, all about change in Appalachia. What change has happened, what change is happening and what change still needs to happen. I'm your host Brandon Dennison, founder and CEO of Coalfield Development. Really excited this week to have Robert Thompson, who's a Wayne County Commissioner, and also a Wayne County author who's written extensively about Wayne County, West Virginia history. So Robert, thank you so much for being here today.
Robert Thompson:Thank you for having me.
Brandon Dennison:So were you born and raised in Wayne County?
Robert Thompson:I was, yeah, lived here my entire life. I grew up at East Lynn or outside East Lynn on Big Lynn Creek. You mentioned that I write about local history and the fact that my family lived here for over a century, it always interested me that, you know, my family was from this area. And that's kind of what got me interested in family history. And I kind of branched out from there to the communities that they lived in. I grew up, like I said, till I graduated from college at East Lynn. Lived in Westmoreland for a while now, I've been in Wayne in the town of Wayne for eight years. So I've kind of experienced and lived in a little bit every place in the county.
Brandon Dennison:Tell the listeners about Big Lynn Creek.
Robert Thompson:Well, it's a very rural area, you could probably substitute it for any community of its size and general description in the state and you would feel pretty much at home. Just some basic farmland, little small country plots, you know, small homes, mobile homes, barns you know, the normal, the normal standard little two-lane road pretty standard fare for West Virginia, I'd imagine.
Brandon Dennison:and then also near a big lake, which is also not abnormal in West Virginia.
Robert Thompson:You know, that was one thing we did a lot when I was small is ATV ride on the on the East Lynn Lake property which we probably weren't supposed to be doing. But my family's farm border the Corps of Engineers property, so in a way, it was almost like we had an additional 8,000 acres of empty forest adjoining our farm. So that was kind of kind of unique, I imagine.
Brandon Dennison:Pretty great place to grow up.
Robert Thompson:Yes, definitely.
Brandon Dennison:I've sort of heard a lot of resentment from some folks about the lakes, sort of how that went down of buying up the properties and folks feeling like maybe they didn't get fair prices? Would Did you hear any of that growing up?
Robert Thompson:I've heard that, and I don't, I can't speak to whether or not the prices were fair. But I think it had more to do with the fact that you know, these people, this was family farms that had been in the in the families for generations, you know, since the early 1800s, in some cases. And I don't know that there was any monetary amount that would have seemed fair, that could, you know, could pay for that sort of historical background. So I think, I would imagine that that probably had more to do with with actually losing the family farms and their communities than it did being compensated. That's just my...that would be that'll be my impression, having talked to these people and kind of grown up in that area.
Brandon Dennison:So then you went to Marshall University for college. Is that right?
Robert Thompson:Yes. Kennedy Sloan Elementary, Wayne High School, and then Marshall University. I started out in engineering, and then switched to education, went through social studies education, got my bachelor's degree in that and I've been a teacher in Wayne County since 2011. Now, so a decade with - it flies by, it's amazing how quick and how quick it goes. Yeah.
Brandon Dennison:So you're still teacher and a commissioner right now?
Robert Thompson:I am. Yes. Yes.
Brandon Dennison:Teaching. Has that been? Has that been about what you expected? Harder than you expected? What's it like to be a teacher in West Virginia?
Robert Thompson:Well, that's definitely harder than I expected. I mean, there's, I imagine with many careers, you don't really you don't really know exactly how it's gonna work until you get out and start doing it. And no matter how well you're prepared with training, until you actually hit the ground and experience it day-to-day, you don't realize how difficult something is. But I will say that I definitely enjoy it. You know, like, as you say, I write, I'm a County Commissioner, served in the House of Delegates, but I will consider myself a teacher above(all else). You know, if somebody asked me what I do, I tell them I'm a teacher. That's my, that's kind of my, my main focus. I was say.
Brandon Dennison:Were you a delegate during the teacher strikes?
Robert Thompson:I was yes.
Brandon Dennison:What was that like? I mean, did you feel a little bit torn between two worlds there or? I mean, I imagine you were representing teacher interests as a delegate. I just...it must have been amazing to be in that capital during that time.
Robert Thompson:It was and I definitely wasn't torn. As you say it, I did my best to put the interests of the teachers and students to the forefront. I think I did that, I have no reservations of how I voted on anything. I really think that I put my full effort into that. But it was interesting. It was as you said, it was an amazing time to get to see both sides of it. Because you know, before the sessions would start I would go out talk to people from all over the state and we had teachers from Wayne County up there every, every day and from all the different schools so I would get to see them and experience it from their side, from that side, on the outside. And then to get to sit inside the chamber and actually participate on, you know, in voting on the bills and working on the bills and hear the chanting on the outside, it was a truly remarkable experience, one that I'll never forget.
Brandon Dennison:From inside the chamber, you could still hear the chanting.
Robert Thompson:Oh yes, yeah. And there were there were like two sets of doors, you've got an outer set of doors and inner set of doors. And then there's, then there are two big security sliding doors that they have that shut. And it was so loud at some points that you know, it was hard to actually hear what was going on on the floor. And for the delegates that weren't necessarily as friendly to the teachers, it was, you could tell it was very frustrating to them. From my perspective, I enjoyed it. But just to be able to see this, you know, democracy in action. They finally, on a couple occasions, had to shut the outside and security doors to just help block out some of the sound. I enjoyed it. And I think we stopped quite a bit of bad stuff coming down the pipe back then.
Brandon Dennison:So you, you started teaching in 2011. When did you start writing?
Robert Thompson:Well, I actually started writing in, probably in high school. Actually I started, I started doing family history, genealogy when I was in middle school. I remember sitting on my great grandma's floor and trying to write out just on notebook paper, a little family tree and asking her, you know, her parent's names and birth dates and things like that. When I was in middle school, I had several teachers that really helped get me interested in family history and helped me point me in the right direction. And they got me in contact with the Wayne County Genealogical and Historical Society. And they showed me the right way to do things and the charts and all that. And by the time I got into high school, I had the bulk of my family tree completed or well, as much as you could complete it. When I was in high school, I started to branch out into local history and what got me started on that, as I said, I grew up near East Lynn at the time I was growing up so today, there's not much there. You know, just there's very few businesses, I had seen pictures that my grandparents had of East Lynn in the 40s and 50s of these big buildings along the streets, you know, it look like a little wild west town with boardwalks and everything else. And driving through when I was a kid, there was nothing there, nothing like that. And it just fascinated me how you could go have that much change in, you know, a 50 year period. I started researching it and kind of went from there. I after I got done with researching East Lynn, I moved on to the town of Wayne and then just had so slowly branched out into different areas of the county's history.
Brandon Dennison:How many books have you written now?
Robert Thompson:18.
Brandon Dennison:So you are...Robert, you're a full time teacher, county commissioner, and you've also written 18 books, and you're how old? If you don't mind my asking?
Robert Thompson:I'm 33.
Brandon Dennison:That is incredible. How, how do you do that? For lack of a more artful question? Do you carve out a little bit of time every day to work on writing? Or does it come in big bursts?
Robert Thompson:Honestly, the writing that I can say, that's like my hobby. So when I have free time, when I'm not working on lesson plans or doing something related to county commission, the writing and research is my hobbies. That's what I do for fun, which probably would be a surprise to people that that's what you do for fun, but that is for me.
Brandon Dennison:Yeah, that's wouldn't be the number one thing most people would list. That's incredible. And what's the next book?
Robert Thompson:I'm actually I'm finishing up one on Laban Walker. There was, back in 1879 he was the only person ever executed in Wayne County. And he was hanged on the courthouse lawn here in the town of Wayne and he was 18 years old. So it's kind of been...as a teacher, it's strange that you can kind of make these connections because as a teacher, you know, with so many negative things going on in our community with drugs and things like that, you can see connections over a 140-year period of history about how you know a young person like that, a kid, can get in so much trouble so easily. And it really hits home when you when you have that teaching background. So that's my next project.
Brandon Dennison:Wow. What was the hanged for?
Robert Thompson:Murder. He killed a saloon keeper on Virginia Point, down outside.. well, we're Konova is now basically.
Brandon Dennison:Wow - I honestly, I can't wait to read that. What was your favorite book to write?
Robert Thompson:Well, probably my first one - "East Lynn Booming." And I actually just, I just redid it within the last couple of weeks I finished it and republished it. But "East Lynn Booming" was about my hometown, it's the first one I started on. When I first did it, I was planning on just doing like a newspaper article. As I went, I found enough information to turn it into a book. So with anything the more you do it, the more experience you get, you find access to more information and new processes and things like that. So over the past 14 years, I published that book in 2007. And since then, over the last 14 years, I found you know when I would be researching another topic, I found a lot more information about East Lynn as well. So I've continued to collect that information. And I recently did, I completed a revised version of that book.
Brandon Dennison:Has anything about Wayne County history really surprised you? Or is it more of a deepening, just a deepening of your understanding? Like as you, being from here and of here - does it all sort of make sense and add up? Or are there some surprises that you can't quite wrap your head around yet?
Robert Thompson:I think, you know, anytime you find an interesting historical fact or event that you didn't know, um, that's, that's kind of a surprise. It's remarkable in a way how the culture has remained the same. Obviously, you can't go back and talk to the people that lived it. But based on the sources that you find, the letters, the newspaper articles, things like that - it appears to me that the culture is not that much different than it would have been 150 years ago, as far as the mindsets of the people, the passion that they feel for their families, religion, things like that. The cultural aspects of it have not changed that much in many ways.
Brandon Dennison:How would you describe the culture of of Wayne County, West Virginia?
Robert Thompson:People really care about their families, they care about their churches, their communities. Well, I'll say there's kind of a dichotomy there, you have, I think, unfortunately, you've got a lot of people that do care, care about those things. But then you have, I think apathy, unfortunately has had a major impact on our society in our area, from litter to way people that keep their homes and properties and things like that. And I think that's become one of the biggest negative factors.
Brandon Dennison:So that would be one of the negative changes you've seen in Wayne County's history. And of course, this is a tough one, but what's caused that apathy?
Robert Thompson:That would be a good topic for a book, if I could figure that one out? I'm sure. I really don't know. And I don't know that if we, if that's, if that's common across the state or across the region. I know, it doesn't seem like when you go to other parts of the state, whether it be the New River Gorge or the EasternPanhandle, you don't see as much, you know, you don't see as much trash beside the roads or the creeks jammed up with milk jugs and tires and things like that. And I don't know, if they have a better way of just dealing with that. Or if the people have almost more pride in their communities and things like that. I don't know, I don't know the answer to that.
Brandon Dennison:You mentioned the title of your first book was"East Lynn Booming," was that boom, was that - and I've read several of your books, I haven't read that one, but I'm gonna read the new one you mentioned - is the boom, was that associated with the coal boom?
Robert Thompson:Yes, it was. Definitely. East Lynn originally was just a little farming village, you know, like you would probably imagine on Twelvepole Creek. After the Civil War timber along Twelvepole Creek and Big Sandy, that was kind of the first boom, I guess you would say. So timber had an impact for sure. But in the early 1900s, when they built the railroad out to East Lynn, that's when the coal industry took off. And at one point in 1917, there were 12 coal companies operating in East Lynn alone. So you had approximately 400 people. The town itself had about 400 people that lived there. And then the coal companies themselves employed 400 people in that one little town. So I mean, obviously that's bringing in people from the outside areas, as well. You had, you had people that were Polish immigrants and people from Alabama and Virginia all over that came to East Lynn just to work.
Brandon Dennison:And did the boom end because they mined it out - and there was nothing left? Or what what caused the bust?
Robert Thompson:I guess the first bust kind of happened during the Great Depression, which you know, the coal industry declined throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s. East Lynn's first boom kind of declined along with that, but starting in the late 30s and then through World War II, of course, as the coal industry came roaring back, the need for steel for the war effort, it came back with, you know, a vengeance throughout the 1940s. And it's always been cyclical, for sure, the coal industry has. That second little boom lasted until the early 60s, probably. And then for the next 25-30 years, the coal industry kind of fluctuated. But from 1993 to 2015, you had Rockspring Development up there. And they produce more coal than all the other coal mines, probably in East Lynn combined. The big difference was in the past, so even though you had this massive output from Rockspring, you had the people that worked there came from all over the, you know, the county, Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky, so you didn't have to live right in the community to work there. And as you had back in the early 1900s, the people you know, you didn't you couldn't drive 45 minutes to work, you had to live in the town. So it really made the community vibrant, it brought in a lot of money and people and businesses into the community itself.
Brandon Dennison:Is it fair to say like in the early days of the industry, it wasn't quite as extractive whereas more modern times, it's tied in with the bigger corporations and more of the money goes out of the community?
Robert Thompson:I think that's probably a fair statement, because most of the companies...well, obviously the actual operations, the day-to-day operations were managed in the early days by local people, local people who formed the companies and manage the companies and things like that. The mineral rights, on the other hand, were typically still at that time owned by outside interests in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, New York. So I still would think that a lot of the money went out, the profits probably went out in that way. But the ancillary businesses, the, you know, the stores, the blacksmith shops, all those different necessary - the timber industry even, for example, I was actually talking to my grandfather yesterday. He's fairly sick, and he's 88 years old, but he was talking about when he was 10 years old he grew up in East Lynn, of course, he was talking about his dad and grandfather timbering and they would send the post, it was called post timber, and they would sell it to the mines to use to, you know, to prop up the roofs in these coal mines. So you had a lot of that extra business, just occurring in the community to support the coal industry. That isn't really necessary, unfortunately, to a certain degree anyway.
Brandon Dennison:Because now it's a modern global supply chain. And that's, that's fascinating. Wayne County Civil War history - I've read some of your work on that. And I feel like Wayne County really was the epitome of a little bit of brother against brother but also just the northern part of the county and the southern part of the county almost was split, like two different counties, right? And I wonder for those who aren't from Wayne County in modern times, there's still this sort of split between folks in the northern part more towards Huntington, the folks in the southern part towards like Dunlow and Crum, it's like two different counties in a lot of ways. Do you feel like some of that goes back to that split still? Or am I reading too much into it?
Robert Thompson:I think it does. No, I think it does, to a degree. And I think it's more probably more complicated than saying, you know, at the time during so where you had the northern part of Wayne County in the southern part, because you had the biggest Union settlement in the county was actually in the Kiahsville area, like southeastern Wayne County. So it was, there were pockets, there were more pockets than there were anything else. But it was certainly heavily divided. I mean, as you said, there are multiple instances of brothers actually serving on opposite sides during the war. Families splitting between the different sides. And for many years after that, certainly into the 1930s, politics was heavily influenced by that. Speaking of that, like the union settlement in the Kiahsville area, that region remained heavily Republican well up into the 1920s and 30s, based on their ancestral unionism going back 70 years to the Civil War. So I'm sure some of that probably carries over to the day, I don't know how much.
Brandon Dennison:Really interesting. And the last book, I wish we could hit on it all 18, but we don't quite have time. You wrote a great book about the Wayne County Poor Farm, what was called the poor farm. And I wonder if you could just tell the listeners a little bit about that book. And specifically, I want to know, as we try and figure out how to help people come out of poverty, are there any takeaways from that book that you think might help us answer that question?
Robert Thompson:The Poor Farm basically it is where Wayne High School is today, if you're familiar with that. Of course, at the time, there was very little in any form of public assistance, you know, no food stamps or anything like that. Orphans, or the elderly or mentally ill people, people who had no families, any person who couldn't support themselves, in many cases, they, for lack of a better word, they would sentence them to the poor farm, the county farm. On this farm, they, you basically you were required to support, to work to your abilities, they would provide your food, they will provide your housing, and if you were capable of working, then you would actually do the work, you would work in the fields or raise the crops, things like that, of course some people were not capable of doing that. And some situations that would actually assign indigent people to families around the county. The overseer of the poor, would actually send people out and pay families a small amount of money to care for an elderly person or an orphan. And that was, overtime that slowly transitioned into the county farm where instead of sending them out in the county to some family, they would send them to the county Farm instead. I think possibly there is some, there would be some benefit to that mindset that you know that you you give these people a little bit of pride, you know, they're living there and on the farm. And certainly, they're receiving benefit from the local government. But they're also, they're working and providing this, you know, they're growing these crops, they're putting the effort in, they're the ones holding the corn and picking the the beans and stuff like that. So sure, they're getting some support. But they're also, they still have this little bit of sense of pride in the fact that they're doing it themselves as much as they can.
Brandon Dennison:Once you had the New Deal and the Great Society, there just wasn't a need, sort of the federal government became more responsible for helping to take care of the poor than local governments. Is that accurate?
Robert Thompson:Yeah, I think so. Eventually, of course, you had what, in different situations you had, you know, for orphaned children you had you know, programs coming in like DHHR and Child Services to deal with those situations. Elderly people, you had systems like nursing home systems and things like that, that kind of took over that role. You had mental hospitals and things like that for people who had mental illness. So you had these other avenues to support each of those groups of people, and eventually toward the end, as you mentioned there (is) federal and state assistance to actually use the poor farm, its last kind of iteration was just as a site to distribute commodity goods, food to poor people throughout the county. I talked to many elderly people who when they were children used to, they would walk to the poor farm to pick up their government cheese or their government, ham, things like that. And by that point, there weren't any residents. They call them inmates, probably not a politically correct term for today. But, you know, there were no residents living there at that time other than just the overseer, but it was still used as kind of the central distribution point for government aid.
Brandon Dennison:In your research, you didn't find any mistreatment. But some other poor farms have been known for mistreatment of folks, is that right?
Robert Thompson:There were there are a few scattered, you know, cryptic phrases that there may have been some mistreatment early on. It will start in the 1878 and lasted until 1959, when they sold it to the Board of Education. There were some cryptic phrases that there might have been some mistreatment now what that was, I don't know - just that there were some bad things going on phrases like that, you don't really know what that meant. A few different times, you would find the county would send people down to investigate. And one particular time in like 1917, 1918, they found that it was filthy, you know, it was just filled with debris and broken furniture and things like that. Depending on who was overseer, which was a political appointee, depending on who was overseer of the farm at the time, you know, it varied as far as the cleanliness and the general situation.
Brandon Dennison:So for modern times, you've spoken to some of the change that you've seen. You're a public servant, you know, a teacher, but also an elected official, can you speak to why you made the decision to run for office and what some areas of focus are that you have as an elected official?
Robert Thompson:Well, I'd always been interested in my community since I was a child, you know, I started...ever since I started to realize, I guess the impact the community has had on my family going back 200 years in some situations, I've always felt that I had a role or I deserve to or didn't deserve, that the community deserved help from people who are invested in it, and people who had supported. And I felt like I was one of those people that my family had lived here for generations that they had live good lives, in most situations, thankfully, and that I wanted to give back in some form. And I think that was probably the, in addition to being interested in the history and wanting to see things you know, prosper based on, you know, the way we have in the past, and in many cases, those were the some of the things that I wanted to focus on once I got into, or that's why I decided to get into public service.
Brandon Dennison:And so you first ran for delegate, what year?
Robert Thompson:2016. I served on the Wayne Town Council for three years prior to that, and then ran for House of Delegates in 2016.
Brandon Dennison:So 2013...you're coming up on, you've been a teacher 10 years, and you'll have been an elected official for 10 years here soon. Are you feeling better about Wayne County's future or worse about Wayne County's future compared to when you started out?
Robert Thompson:It's cyclical. There will be times when I think, you know, we're right on the cusp of, you know, great things, whether it be things like the Beech Fork Lodge, you know. It's like we're right there, we are right there. And then now all of a sudden, it's like the rug has been pulled out from under us. Or the Prichard Intermodal Facility over there, you think, man, we're right on the verge of - it's getting ready to take off and then things just come to a screeching halt. So it depends on the situation, sometimes I feel like we're getting ready to break through and we're headed for prosperity, and then something else will happen and it will just come to a screeching halt. And hopefully, we can keep the former up going forward.
Brandon Dennison:What are you hoping will change over the next few years? What what needs to change that hasn't yet?
Robert Thompson:Well, I hope some of the projects that have been worked on for decades now would finally come to fruition like the lodge you know, unfortunately, I'm not too optimistic about that. But we've worked on it...
Brandon Dennison:For listeners, there's a lake, Beech Fork Lake- and very grassroots, Wayne County citizens have been advocating and fighting to build a lodge there as an economic development project literally for more than 30 years now. Mr. Fink, Mr. Stanley Fink is a legend in the community who had started this. He has a file. The governor had a ceremony a couple years back and they they rolled in Mr. Fink's files that he'd been fighting for this lodge, and it actually got funded, right? We thought it was going to happen and there's a ribbon cutting and everything and then it's still, somehow it still hasn't happened.
Robert Thompson:Well, we thought it was going to be funded multiple times. Back in the 1980s, the House of Delegates passed a funding bill to build the lodge and the Senate killed it. So I mean, and then most recently in 2015 I think it was, they had the ribbon cutting and it never had, never happened. I can't help but feel like we always keep getting these promises in Wayne County and they never actually happen. The four lane from Prichard to Kenova is another. You know, it's crucial for economic development in the Prichard area. And we were promised these, this this new highway if we went out and voted for the bonds, the road bond issue, I personally asked the governor if this was gonna happen if we supported it. And he said yes. And of course, here we are four years later, and it's still never happened.
Brandon Dennison:So frustrating. We sort of lamented earlier a sense of apathy or cynicism, you know. Decades of broken promises, that may just be what forms an apathetic citizenry.
Robert Thompson:Absolutely. I think that's definitely part of it. When you, you're told that you're gonna get this, this new project, and you support it, you know, if you go out and vote for whoever is proposing it, or the bonds or whatever it may be, and that doesn't happen, you start to lose any kind of faith in in the system, but that the system is going to improve it and that there may not be any point in having pride or expecting anything better in the future.
Brandon Dennison:And so that's why we've got to band together and just figure it out anyways as local entrepreneurs and local community members. You do that you lead by example, Robert Thompson, I really admire your leadership, your commitment, your scholarship, frankly, on your books. And if it's okay with you, I'd like to have you back in the not-too-distant future. Because there actually several other books that we just run out of time. I really just admire what you've done for your community and appreciate your time today.
Robert Thompson:I certainly appreciate it and I'd be happy to come back anytime. Thank you.
Brandon Dennison:Thanks so much. Change in the Coalfields is a podcast created by Coalfield Development at the West Edge Factory in Huntington, West Virginia. This episode was hosted by Brandon Dennison, and produced and edited by JJN Multimedia. Become a part of our mission to rebuild the Appalachian economy by going to our website Coalfield-Development.org to make a donation. You can email us anytime at info at Coalfield-Development.org and subscribe to our newsletter for up-to-date information on the podcast. You can follow us on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn by searching for Coalfield Development. Check back soon for more episodes.