Word: appalachians
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Folks in Tazewell County know they better keep their eyes open, their toolsheds locked and their barn doors shut. Junkies, addicted to prescription pills and looking for anything to steal to pay for their next fix, have turned this 520-sq.-mi. patch of Appalachian Virginia--a bucolic tangle of wooded mountains, steep hills and rolling pastures dotted with sagging barns and country churches--into a society plagued by pilferers. They swipe guns from unlocked cabinets and push motorcycles out of garages in the dead of night. They swap or sell stolen watches, lawn mowers and sneakers for potent painkillers...
...taken seven years for the full measure of the pill's stranglehold on Appalachian counties like Tazewell to become obvious--in clogged and crowded courts, in villages whose jails are so full that inmates sleep on the floor, and in neighborhoods focused on leaving nothing valuable lying around. The number of robberies, burglaries and thefts has shot up 48% in Tazewell in only five years, from 483 crimes in 1998 to 716 in 2003, even as the national property-crime rate fell 25%. "People are stealing anything that's not nailed down," says county commonwealth's attorney Dennis Lee. Testimony...
...Project Alabama line. Chanin is a former film stylist (she handled costumes) who while on hiatus in New York City needed an outfit for a party. That's when she deconstructed and refashioned a T shirt using the quilting stitching techniques that she learned growing up in the Appalachian foothills of northern Alabama. Individual style soon turned into a high-demand fashion business. She eventually created a line of dresses, skirts, jackets and T shirts, but she couldn't find anyone in New York to hand render her designs. So she went home to Florence, Ala., a small town that...
Koenig will also get a look at the extreme economic poverty of many Appalachian communities...
...There’s definitely a romance to the big three trails: The Appalachian mountains, the Pacific Crest trail out in California, and the Continental Divide trail [in] the Rocky Mountains,” said Koenig. “That air of romance will always have an appeal...