Word: brumley
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...they always have in Brumley Gap, the men and women sit separate. Outside, the evening cold has already crept in, and the hard outline of Virginia mountains has softened into darkness. Inside Hunter Holmes' one-room country store, three worn couches, a board placed on milk cases, and a few wooden chairs make a circle around a Buckeye 135 wood stove. The room is filled with people. The walls are lined with canned goods and staples like salt, sugar, cornmeal and motor oil. A blue denim jacket hangs from one shelf, and a few feet below it hangs...
This is a meeting of the Brumley Gap Concerned Citizen's Association. Geographically Brumley Gap is a chip in the rim of a natural cup shaped by the South Virginia Hills. APCO is the Appalachian Power Company, which wants to put a 200-foot-high dam in the notch, turning the bowl into a reservoir for the largest pump-storage facility in the U.S. and putting the old homesteads of nearly all Brumley Gap's 119 families under water. The hope of finding Indian graves and getting the whole area protected from APCO by having it registered...
...worldly standard Brumley Gap is hardly in a position to stand against a $1 billion water project. The village is set in the middle of what the inhabitants proudly refer to as Poor Valley. The soil is rocky and hard to farm. Most families cultivate an acre or so of tobacco, the town's only cash crop, and a vegetable patch, with a little meager grazing land for a few cows. The families in the scattering of wooden houses and log cabins have a median income of about $6,000 a year. To eke out a living, many...
...really college-educated types, yet within themselves they are secure." An extreme sense of self-reliance, growing rarer by the day in urbanized America, and at the same time an odd reliance on each other against the outside world may be the strongest bonds for the people of Brumley Gap. "You don't want to take welfare. That's a disgrace, forever," says McDaniel. "Everybody knows, though, that when the time comes and if someone needs help, you're going to know it and they sort of expect you to be there...
...thought they told us they'd leave everything the way they found it," a man in the back calls out. Everybody laughs. Crickett Woods, 53, says she wrote Johnny Cash's sister-in-law asking if he would sing at a Brumley benefit. "She said she didn't think so," Woods reports. Debbie Maretz has written President Carter, and letters have gone to Senator John Warner, who came out against the APCO project during the fall campaign. After the serious business is disposed of, Roby Taylor, a wizened man in blue coveralls, begins showing around color pictures...