Town And Country At Harlan

Merlene Davis: Ties that bind Social Club grew out of Eastern Kentucky coal ...

It's not unusual for residents of small towns to bond by ties to family, vocations and geography. It's not unheard of for former residents of those small towns to host a reunion occasionally.

And it's relatively normal for former residents, who have settled in other areas, to have gatherings celebrating the good ol' days in their adopted cities.

But what is unusual is for those residents to establish chapters throughout this country, for those chapters to unite in a central location annually, and for that celebration to be still going on more than 40 years later.

That is exactly what black residents and former residents of Harlan County have done since 1970 as members of the Eastern Kentucky Social Club.

Many of them, some say 1,500 or more, will be in Lexington on Labor Day weekend for the club's 42nd meeting. What that means for me is a two-week vacation to prepare for, attend, and then recover from that reunion.

My husband has very deep roots in Lynch, a coal mining town in Harlan County, built in 1917 by U.S. Coal & Coke Co., a subsidiary of U.S. Steel. The town is named for Thomas Lynch, a president of U.S. Coal & Coke Co., not for a brutal means of death.

Carolyn M. Sundy, vice president for diversity and special programs at Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College, was born and raised there. "My mom came from Alabama and my granddaddy was a moonshiner and union organizer."

The coal companies recruited labor from other countries as well as other states.

Although those hard and dangerous jobs provided a decent living for the miners, most wanted their children to strive for more, Sundy said. Many did just that, especially after mining slowed in the 1940s and 1950s. Younger folks left for college or manufacturing jobs up north and started families far away.

But Harlan County was never far from their hearts.

Sundy, who is a member of the Lynch Chapter of the EKSC, said she received a call recently from the daughter of a 94-year old woman who was making plans to attend the reunion this year.

Discovering Urbanism: Harlan Douglass: The Little Town

New Ideals in Planning - John Nolen The Little Town - Harlan Douglass Cities in Evolution - Patrick Geddes (upcoming ) All of these reviews are truthful, but they are also selective and editorial . I'm not a trained historian; I only play one on TV. In other words, don't steal this for your class paper. I don't care, but you're professor probably will. Americans, today, have a schizophrenic relationship with small towns. We consistently tell pollsters that we want to live in one above any other kind of place, yet we just as consistently choose not to. The Atlantic just ran a story about an idyllic small town in Missouri that, like many around the county, can not attract enough doctors. They've determined that it's not the economic incentives, but the lifestyle that's deterring them. Even small towns that have been engulfed by expanding metro areas tend to receive a scant share of the new arrivals compared to the exurbs around them. Yet the ideal lives on and we like imagine ourselves on the inside of a tight community as we enjoy, at the same time, our freedom from its responsibilities and constraints. The small town ideal did not exist in 1921. Harlan Paul Douglass wrote The Little Town especially in its rural relationships as a heartfelt defense of what was, in the eyes of many, a pitiable character. He quotes the president of the American Civic Association: "God made the country, man the city, but the devil the little town." From the urban perspective, the townsfolk were unsophisticated, incurious, and many steps behind the moving edge of history. At the same time, rural areas were being lauded by the "county life movement," which had made substantial inroads into the federal government. The farmer was the hero, and the townsfolk were, at best, parasitic middlemen and, at worst, emissaries of corruption from the big city.

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