Nestled in the heart of Appalachia.

The University of Virginia's College at Wise is where students experience unique regional culture and the great outdoors.

UVA Wise empowering students to learn and lead in their communities and the world.

[uplifting music] [Joshua Deel] Everything here tells a story.

Some more than others.

The hills, the valleys, the rocks and streams, the people.

This place is as old as time itself.

More than a cheap tourist destination, this truly is one of the last great places in the world, rich in cultural heritage and permeated by the near-sacred natural wonders of the Appalachian Mountains.

[♪♪♪] I've heard it said, "Where we are affects who we are."

And I think we have the chance to understand ourselves better if we understand where we come from.

Hi, my name's Josh, and I'm producing this series with PBS Appalachia to explore the towns that so many people still call home, their hometown.

To unearth remarkable stories and the people behind them.

Hometowns is about exploring the communities that make small-town America unique.

This season, I'll take you on a journey off the beaten path through Southwest Virginia.

And don't get me wrong, this place has its warts, but if that's all I showed you, you'd miss out on the remarkable beauty of its natural wonders, and the rich depth of its cultural heritage, that in a sense, are at the heart of what it means to be an American.

[♪♪♪] Once extending from east of the New River in present-day Giles County all the way to the Kentucky border to the west, today Tazewell County, Virginia is over 500 square miles, situated and split along the eastern continental divide, making it home to many headwaters and streams.

[♪♪♪] I wanted to learn more about Tazewell's history, so I met up with local resident Amanda Killen to see where I should start.

This also gave me a chance to learn about Tazewell's more recent progress.

-That's the sound of commerce.

-Yeah, motorcycles going by.

- That's right.

I am from Tazewell, yes.

I grew up here, graduated from high school here, and I've lived all over Virginia and meandered my way back here around 2015.

I lived up in Northern Virginia.

I lived right outside of D.C. and that was definitely not the environment for me, so I really missed that small-town environment.

I missed, you know, having a village of people to help me look after my kids, which is essentially what we all have here.

Everybody looks out for each other, and it's a relatively safe place to live.

So, growing up here, Main Street was a thriving area of commerce .

We had a lot of businesses.

We had a couple of car dealerships on Main Street, believe it or not.

-[Joshua Deel] Wow.

-And, you know, all the businesses would paint their windows in support of the Tazewell Bulldogs, and they would paint the players' silhouettes and numbers and everybody just, it was just a really tight-knit community, very supportive of our athletic programs.

You know, a lot of things happened here.

We had a jewelry store, we had a pharmacy on Main Street, we had a Dollar Store, shoe store, you know, anything you would really need right here on Main Street.

And then we saw that start to decline sometime around the late '90s.

And a lot of the buildings became abandoned and then we were left with attorney offices and a bank.

We are a coal-filled county, and although we don't have any coal mines right here in Tazewell, but we had a lot of coal miners.

We had a lot of people who were indirectly employed by the coal industry here by, you know, driving a coal truck or repairing mining equipment, which is what my family was into.

So, you know, a lot of people were supported directly and indirectly by the coal industry.

So, the decline of coal has had a devastating impact.

We, you know, we were left here with a depleted economy, really, which is, you know, typical of all of our coal-filled counties here in Southwest Virginia.

In 2015, you know, I'm going to quote the town manager here because he says this all the time and I make fun of him for it, so I have to say that disclaimer.

You couldn't buy a bottle of water or a cup of coffee here on Main Street in 2015.

[Joshua Deel] Wow, that's nuts.

[Amanda Killen] We've come an incredible distance since then.

[Joshua Deel] In a short time.

[Amanda Killen] Right, in a very short time.

We started a grassroots non-profit called Tazewell Today and it was focusing on the revitalization of downtown.

We saw progress happening in Southwest Virginia, and we started holding events here on Main Street.

So, we closed the street down and would hold an event that would bring 1,000 or 3,000 people.

We've seen 3,000 people on the street before, multiple times.

And before you know it, we were a destination for events.

We would have music and car cruise-ins and lots of exciting things happen that wasn't happening anywhere else in the region.

And that, in conjunction with the Back of the Dragon, really inspired entrepreneurship on a local level.

And then we started to see restaurants open, and retail stores reopen.

And we saw people buying property and investing in those properties like this building, and renovating them and bringing them back to life.

You can buy a big, beautiful home here for what you would be able to buy a, you know, very small home somewhere else.

The cost of living is relatively low.

We are a very determined group of people here in Tazewell, and we've bounced back from a lot, a lot of adversity.

And we've gotten pretty good at swimming upstream.

We've always had a fighting spirit, from the very beginning.

[♪♪♪] [Joshua Deel] Although the boom-and-bust cycle of coal has caused places like Tazewell to rethink its economy, attracting people to visit and move here, while maintaining the intrinsic qualities and character that make it appealing in the first place, is a delicate balancing act.

But at its heart, you'll find that small-town community vibe is alive and well in Tazewell.

[♪♪♪] [Freddie Smith] Tazewell's been good to me.

I would say it's got the small-town feel but like a Mayberry feel.

You know what I mean?

It's just the people are friendly, and it's just a great place to be, actually.

Some people even call me Floyd.

I don't know, but I want to keep it going like an old-time feel.

You know what I mean?

Like an old barbershop small-town feel.

That's what I've got going on as far as the pictures.

I do Andy Griffith , and the different old shows.

But I want to do it with history, you know.

Yeah, everything's got like a little meaning to it.

And then the leg lamp, of course.

That was from some friends of mine.

That's a classic.

And then these booths right here, these little cabinets, well, I built those, but these got a little-- I used to have an oink joint up atop of Claypool Hill.

It's a barbecue shack.

And this was part of the smoker pit at the oink joint, you know.

Actually, the way small towns, in my opinion, and you can tell it with Tazewell, the reason they grow is because there's unity.

The ones that are here, when you can bring them together, it helps small business.

You don't see each other as competition.

[♪♪♪] Oh, they're moving in a great direction.

The growth, I mean, when you have that enthusiasm and you have that momentum going for you, you just keep building on that.

And even like the buildings that, you know, may be changing hands or the business is changing hands or stuff like that, the new owners and stuff, as far as I've seen and heard, is they've got that same enthusiasm.

And sometimes, you bring, you need change.

You need like a fresh look or a fresh ideal to come to your town and you just roll with it.

And the people here, these guys that come in here, we have solved the world problems a hundred times right in this barber shop.

And it's just a great-- I love it.

I wish that I'd done this years ago.

[♪♪♪] [Joshua Deel] Like Amanda said earlier, Tazewell has had a fighting spirit since the beginning.

At one time, Patriot militia from Tazewell County and other parts of Southwest Virginia rallied here on the way to the pivotal battle of Kings Mountain, which was ultimately the turning point in the struggle for American independence during the Revolutionary War.

The very musket that fired the first shot of the battle is on display here at the Crab Orchard Museum.

To this day, descendants of these brave fighting men still live in Tazewell.

[♪♪♪] One such descendant is a man I spoke with named Bobby, still living in proximity to an area known as Liberty, that at one time, was the county seat of Tazewell.

In talking with Bobby, I found the exact kind of obscure, nearly forgotten history I was looking for.

He told me the story of Lost Mill.

[♪♪♪] -Liberty Hill was a community here in the 17-1800s, thriving community.

It had a hospital, a couple of hotels, the courthouse, it was the county seat for Tazewell County, until a flood wiped it out in the early 1900s.

[♪♪♪] Residents here at Liberty had several businesses.

There was a lumber mill here, and the guy that owned this farm had tried to build a grist mill down here at the bottom of the hill, and it didn't work.

So, he came up here and built a grist mill in this sinkhole.

There's a big volume of water coming out of a cave down here, and he actually put his water wheel and a flume down there, built all that.

The power was transferred up here to the foundation , where you'll see the foundation, by a cable, and they ground corn or wheat or whatever here and transported it straight across here to the south to Saltville, to the salt mines to feed the people and the animals there.

During the Civil War, this was the only grist mill not destroyed by the Union Army.

They didn't know it was here.

It's not near a known... -It's pretty well hidden.

[Bobby] Yeah, and it fell apart and kind of got into disrepair and fell down.

We've never even been able to find a picture of it.

Anybody, we found pictures made during the era that this mill was here, but they had the-- the photographer had his back to the mill, shooting people this way.

So, we didn't have pictures of it, but we do have written history of it.

And a couple of...

I have seen pictures of the flume, and my mother could remember the water wheel that was in the bottom.

I told you, Liberty was destroyed by a flood.

At some point there in the early part of the 1900s, late 1800s.

A seismic shift occurred under this mountain and the whole thing caved down in on this water and shot the water out of the ground.

They said that water was shooting 20 and 30 feet in the air.

And of course, all of that then rushed downhill and ended up being down here in the valley which washed out the town of Liberty.

Some cave divers have dove into this a time or two and found out that there's a huge amount of water upstream here underground .

And when they went down here where the water sinks and went down, they actually found the hub from the water wheel, weighed several hundred pounds, and they floated it up, and we were going to take cables and go down, drag it all up out of there.

And Hurricane Hugo came that weekend and took it all back.

And Hurricane Hugo actually filled this sinkhole almost totally up with water.

[Joshua Deel] How deep do you reckon that is?

[Bobby] A good 40 or 50 yards from right here to the bottom.

Went up here after Hugo, and of course, Hugo had been over with for several hours before I got here.

You could barely see the water turning like this and it was dead silent.

You couldn't hear anything.

And you could see that the water was receding.

And then, once the water got equal with the mouth of the cave here, it would start sucking air, just like pouring water out of a bottle, and you'd hear it go whoop, whoop, like that.

And it kept getting faster and faster and you'd see the water rise back up, and then get dead silent again.

And it was unreal.

So, we know- [Joshua Deel] That the mountain was taking a drink.

-The mountain was taking a gulp of air to let loose more water.

[♪♪♪] You know, one of the things we are seeing in the county in different places, particularly Burke's Garden, is you are seeing some people move here from other places, sometimes people call them halfbackers.

They moved to Florida and tried to make, or Atlanta, from New York or wherever, and tried to make a living and then figured out that down there really wasn't the friendliest place to be, and they, for some reason, and they moved halfway back.

And so, they're buying, you know, these little properties, and they are buying up what used to be big farms that are split down into smaller ones.

And some of those people are trying to make a go of it on the land, some of them aren't.

But you know, it'll be an interesting transition.

There's going to be more land change hands in the next ten years, they tell us, ten to 20 years, than has probably changed hands, than has ever changed in the history of this country.

Because of the average age of the American farmer is, you know, darn near 60 years old.

[Joshua Deel] In discussing the flow of history over these hills and valleys of who came before who, and who is next to call this place home, Bobby told me about pictographs on nearby Paint Lick Mountain.

They've lasted thousands of years, made of soft mudstone rich in iron oxide, providing a red pigment.

Researchers think they were left here by people predating the Cherokee and Shawnee, but who were long gone before pioneers ever arrived.

Bobby told me that changes in weather, including more acid rains of recent decades, have taken their toll on the images.

2009 was the last year researchers assessed and photographed them, however, the pictographs were listed on the Virginia Landmarks Register and the National Register of Historic Places.

I'm told these are the only such pictographs east of the Mississippi.

Whether or not it was all the climbing in and out of that giant sinkhole, I was feeling hungry.

The Frog Level Yacht Club has been closed for some time now, and there are several options nearby like Cuz's, but I settled on Fisher and Company to meet with another area filmmaker, Rey, who recently moved to Burke's Garden.

[♪♪♪] -Yeah, I grew up in a small southern town in Florida, and then I spent decades serving our country as a soldier, traveled around the world a lot, saw a lot of America and overseas, and then after my time with the government, I was ready to come home, you know?

And, you know, home's kind of a loaded term.

Home...

I'm not saying I want to come home to necessarily just a place because I think home is more like an idea, right?

It's a feeling you have when you're-- when you're in a place where you feel the love and support of those around you, that's home, and home can be really not necessarily where you grew up.

I mean, obviously, I'm very far from where I grew up, but you know, I found home in this unlikely valley here in the heart of Appalachia.

-Yeah, man, yeah.

[Rey] In the America where I grew up... -Yeah.

-...you knew your neighbors, you trusted each other, and home was where families like, felt safe.

And I think a lot of people are always trying to like, relocate that age of innocence, that feeling of innocence.

So after my government service, when it was time to find my home again, I was looking for a place where I could reconnect and find those same feelings of, this is the right place for me.

So, we just sort of cast about and we came upon this unexpected, unlikely valley here in Appalachia, and it just-- it felt like home because it reconnected us to that age of innocence I was talking about.

And that is so refreshing to be around people who just live with-- live with such ease with themselves.

You know?

And it's hard to describe, but the people here in Tazewell just are really just genuine, honest, good neighbors.

They look out for each other, and they have welcomed us with great worth.

I can't complain about any of that.

After I arrived, I was looking for a non-profit entity that I could devote some of my filmmaking services to.

And in that journey, I met an amazing, incredible woman, Teri Crawford Brown, who lives here in Tazewell County.

And she operates a non-profit that helps people who have lost everything and are now starting over.

So, Teri Crawford Brown has really helped me to understand the people of Appalachia, and to really become connected to this community here in Tazewell.

[♪♪♪] [Joshua Deel] Rey piqued my interest.

I wanted to meet this individual whom he spoke so highly of.

So, we met at the church, well, Teri's home, who I found to be a modern-day saint.

But she'll tell you she's a typical Appalachian who simply found her thing, and living her best life in the process.

-When I say where I'm from, I generally say Tazewell County or Southwest Virginia because I wasn't raised in the town of Richlands.

And I've lived in the town of Richlands most of my adult life, but I was raised in Tazewell County, but on the other side of the road was Buchanan County.

And it was on Jewel Ridge Mountain, which a lot of people know about from the coal mines.

There's coal camps and things there, and it's infamous in... when people are studying engineering and in coal like, how the mountain still stands because it has been so mined, you know, the number of tunnels and all the things through it.

I didn't appreciate my life on the mountain when I was living it, and when I was a teenager, I used to lie and not say I was from Jewel Ridge, or from Bearwallow or Reynolds Ridge.

I was embarrassed of it because we were separate from town, and I felt like...

I don't really know why, but I felt embarrassed of it, just for a minute in my life.

Not long, because then, once I really got to know like my friends in town and things when I was in high school, like, I realized real quick like, oh, y'all don't have the same thing.

You know?

Because the way we were raised is my mom and dad were next door neighbors, who my mawmaws were best friends, and they got married.

And then they built their house there.

So I was raised but not between my two mawmaws, but right at my two mawmaws.

And then I had aunts and uncles like spread all around.

So, I'm not exaggerating when I say like 30 first cousins, you know, like in this area of people.

And their church was right in the middle of that, and that was central, you know, to our lives.

And I realize now that people my age, there's very few that are raised that way, that were raised... and like I was telling my friend that I went to the beach with last weekend, like water was a scarcity for us.

Like our well always got sunk by the mines, and we'd have a cistern, and we'd have to go fill up jugs of water.

And I can remember our next door neighbors being, you know, in the hospital, and a bunch of us like hoeing this huge garden just... and I was complaining, and I was like, "You know they can't eat all this food?"

Like, "Why are we hoeing all this?"

You know?

And then we're going to can it, and then...

But all the people that was doing it knew like they're sick for the rest of their life.

Do you know... and we were going to build them enough food to last a few years, you know.

And you don't learn that by me telling it to you.

You learn it by being out in the field, doing it, you know, and I wouldn't trade that, and I wouldn't trade that for anything now.

And I think it's what makes me like realize I do have the power to help other people.

And, you know, I'm not a big Bible quoter very often, but one of my favorite verses is "Faith without works is dead", that I don't think we need to talk about things a whole lot, I think we need to do things.

You know, like just do things because if each person did what was within their ability to help another person, we would have a whole lot less people that needed some help.

I know it's true, I see it, I'm doing it, yeah, and everyone thinks I do a whole lot, and I don't.

Like, I ran a charity, Blackberry Winter, that I created, and we've furnished, in less than five years, 510 homes.

And we've given 825 kids in this community beds.

Well, you would think I was working 40 hours a week on that, but I'm not.

I'm working about 15 hours a week or 20 hours a week on that .

It just takes a little.

I think when you are doing something in service to another person, the energy of that has its own motion.

And I swear, the more people you help in small ways, you create more people that, as they grow, help other people.

You know, if a child is left to sleep on the floor its whole life, it can never believe its community cares.

It can never think like anyone thought they deserved any better than that, you know.

Blackberry Winter gives a teacher a way to say, "I have a kid that's sleeping on the floor," and like fixing that problem.

Because that's not a problem that shouldn't be addressed.

That needs to be addressed every time.

And a kid can't grow, can't learn, but more than that, they can't feel like they're important, you know.

How important would I feel, sleeping on the floor every night?

I wouldn't, you know, and they don't have access to ways to make that better for themselves.

I have a very deep connection to my family, and as aggravated as I can get with the area, which I can get aggravated, because it's the same as any change.

It's three steps forward and then two steps back, you know.

It's like we push forward and then we go back, and we push forward.

But when it comes down to it, I could call or ask 80 percent of this community for help and they would help me.

And I love our culture, and here, I never feel pushed in on.

No matter who you are, or what, we respect your boundaries, you know?

And like I feel like I have room to breathe, and room to be myself, you know?

And I also think, who can help here better than me?

You know, like I love it.

And I see the problems very clearly .

But I think people that love it, who have the desire to change, are the ones who should stay and do the work.

But to me, Richlands is home, and it's people that's worth fighting for.

You know, that it's people worth doing the work for.

Our biggest commodity here are our people.

[♪♪♪] [Joshua Deel] In an age when things can be so cheapened by the distractions around us, the noise, it's encouraging to find the horizon, to find true north.

I'm humbled by the past, and inspired by those forging ahead into the dawn of the future.

[♪♪♪] [♪♪♪] [music fades out] Nestled in the heart of Appalachia.

The University of Virginia's College at Wise is where students experience unique regional culture and the great outdoors.

UVA Wise empowering students to learn and lead in their communities and the world.