Coal Companies Bury or Dig Up Family Cemetaries While Family Members Fight Back

While Coal Companies bury or dig up family cemeteries, a group of West Virginian families and the Sierra Club fight back to try to stop the practice.

If you are one of our many regular readers here at Twilight Earth, you may have heard me say this again, but it bears repeating. Every action that we take has a direct impact on the environment, and that impact has a direct impact on us. The standard operating procudure of Coal Companies tearing up grave sites is just one example.

Imagine your despair upon learning that your ancestors’ bones are lying at the bottom of a valley fill pit, or are part of the “overburden” used to shore up high walls from old mining sites.

Walter Young of Mingo County tells of his vanished family cemetery:

“So the coal waste impoundment up above me is being constructed each and every day now, ever since 2001, I guess. It’s being built in little stages, but upon completion and when full it will be 56 acres big, and could be allowed to expand. My ancestors were buried right at the toe of (what is now) that impoundment, in a little cemetery that I thought was safe. But it wasn’t.

“I called up one Memorial Day — my great-grandmother was buried there. And I asked the coal company because the cemetery is surrounded by mining, ‘What’s your rules or policy on me coming up to visit that cemetery?’

“And they said, ‘That cemetery is no longer there.’

“I said, ‘Where is it at? My ancestors were buried there.’

“The boy on the phone at the mining company says, ‘Well, I’ll find out for you and let you know.’

“So he calls back a couple days later and says, ‘I’m returning your call about the cemetery.’

“Yeah? Right. Where’s my family at?

‘I’m sorry, that’s the reason I called. We don’t know.’

Another Mingo County resident says,

“I went to Kayford Mountain and looked at Mr. Gibson’s plight. I watched them set a drill right in the middle of a family cemetery that had been there over a hundred years. I watched them drill a borehole right in the middle of it.”

Our society has deemed that we should have protected lands for the burial of our dead. These places are sacred, and they are the places that we go to visit and remember the people whom we loved, or the ancestors who helped bring us into this world.

While in Bosnia, I saw the desecration of cemeteries through war. I saw playgrounds turned into cemeteries, with headstones underneath swing-sets. People were afraid to enter cemeteries because they had been land mined. Land has many uses, and cemeteries are but one. Who are the mining companies to deem the importance of their profits over the lives and memories of those who have lived in those hills and mountains?

Stories like these will continue to multiply, and more and more pieces of our Appalachian past will disappear forever, unless we do something about it. If you’d like to get involved or have information or suggestions, please call Dianne Bady at 304-360-2072

Source: The Charleston Gazette