Virginia Tech Extension agent helps revitalize Virginia's coalfield region

A grassroots economic development movement is afoot in Dickenson County, the heart of Virginia's coalfield region. People there are building home- and farm-based businesses to capitalize on the region's scenic mountains and their own Appalachian heritage of self-reliance. More importantly, they are preserving their traditional lifestyles even as they invite the world to share their lives and sample their wares.

"Entrepreneurial development is a new approach to diversifying local economies and strengthening the coalfield region," says Virginia Cooperative Extension Agent Phyllis Deel, whose years of planning and work have encouraged residents to look at other economic avenues. The area's economy relied heavily on coal, and mechanization along with mine closings caused some of the highest unemployment rates in the country, at times reaching 23 percent. Though high, that number is misleadingly low. Local citizens who have depleted their unemployment benefits and remain jobless are not reflected in the figure, which sometimes exceeds 50 percent real unemployment.

Entrepreneurs in Virginia's coalfield region have taken diverse paths in turning their talents into businesses. Jenny Salyers (left photo) learns how to "throw" a pot from Jack Fleenor, a PACE potter. PACE Coordinator Jeannie Mullins (left, center photo) and Extension Agent Phyllis Deel pause inside the PACE store, which sells local crafts. Judy Stanley (right photo) has opened several new businesses: catering, restaurant, and cake supply. Deel played a major role in the region's economic development efforts.

The region's physical makeup hinders traditional economic development; steep terrain, winding two-lane roads, and a scattered population make industrial parks expensive to develop and products costly to ship. But Deel has helped turn those potential drawbacks into advantages by focusing, in part, on tourism. Here, visitors looking for a back-to-nature or an experience-history vacation find a perfect combination in the mountains, low traffic levels, and isolation.

"Phyllis is tourism in Dickenson County," says Geneva O'Quinn, Heart of Appalachia Tourism's interim director. "She has always been interested in economic development.

"Her Extension knowledge is invaluable. When someone has a question about small business, she has or can find the answer. She always follows through."

Deel provides local entrepreneurs with vital information and contacts and has helped set up conferences and workshops featuring Extension specialists from Virginia Tech and Virginia State University, Virginia's land-grant universities. Attendees have gone on to plan for and establish bed-and-breakfast accommodations, horse-and-trail riding ranches, lodges, and other tourism-related businesses.

Some are joining forces to take advantage of their collective knowledge and numbers. With a recent training program under their belts, a group called the Cumberland/Pine Mountain Trail Riding Club and others are forming a networking organization to plan what each entrepreneur can develop and what the group can market together to support hikers, horseback riders, and bird watchers.

Local farmers are adding tourism to their farming enterprises, creating agri-tourism businesses. Birchleaf Farm, near Breaks Interstate Park, offers visitors hands-on experiences with animals and farming techniques. Rick-Tres Farms has added a bed and breakfast to its horse farm so visitors can enjoy horse and pony rides, hiking, and bird watching on the grounds where they lodge. This enterprise may be the first of many horse-centered businesses in the region to take advantage of horse trails that already exist on private land, in the national forest, and in Breaks Interstate Park. Another entrepreneur is considering becoming a horse outfitter to offer boarding and other services to visitors who bring their own mounts for Appalachian trail rides.

Another area where Deel's advice has been incorporated is in crafts. Over the years, area crafters have supplemented family incomes by selling their traditional crafts at fairs and festivals. But this approach used their time and capital inefficiently, and several turned to Extension--and Deel in particular--for help. It took nearly 10 years of trial and error as the crafters tried to organize, but Deel and other family and consumer sciences agents, specialists, and community partners never gave up. As the responsibilities of her colleagues changed, Deel continued working with the crafters to help them gain marketing strength through quality and numbers. Skilled in getting individuals and agencies talking to each other about how cooperation advances their separate goals, Deel helped form the Purely Appalachia Craft Empowerment (PACE) program.

"Purely Appalachia Crafts was Phyllis' idea. She knew that tourists would buy high quality, local items," says O'Quinn. "She helped develop the program and has been in charge from the start."

According to Jeannie Mullins, the PACE coordinator, "PACE was originally a Heart of Appalachia Tourism initiative, and Phyllis was very instrumental in setting up the coalition with the seven-county Social Services Offices' Working Partners for Success that now sponsors the program."

PACE now has a store in downtown Coeburn and a website to serve retail and wholesale customers looking for traditional mountain products. It buys its products from the crafters and markets them, freeing up the crafters' financial and time resources to expand their production and teach Appalachian crafts to others. PACE's first big event was participating in the London (England) Home Show in the spring of 2000. Orders continue to arrive from retailers and other people throughout the world who attended the show or read about the PACE crafts in a New York Times article.

Another Extension-inspired effort, the Cumberland Regional Food Products Program, received a $50,000 Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) entrepreneurial initiative grant to help local entrepreneurs establish food-processing businesses. "It calls upon the cultural heritage of the people who settled here in the mountains and thrived by growing crops and raising gardens throughout the years," Deel says. "According to research, the market is wide open for any of the Southern heritage products, particularly if they are organically grown."

Deel was at the forefront of the efforts by Virginia Cooperative Extension to work with other community agencies and the citizens of Dickenson County to foster the development of a regional food products industry. Extension specialists at Virginia Tech and Virginia State are currently developing programs for business owners that will train them in crop and product development, as well as in food safety, production, and distribution.

Dickenson County schools are donating the use of a food-service classroom at the local career center for the program's first training and production site. A portion of the ARC grant will help the program purchase several critically needed pieces of equipment for the classroom and build requisite storage areas that meet state regulations. The Dickenson Industrial Development Authority has set aside two acres in its industrial park, which the program can use when it is ready to build its own incubator facility.

All of these grass-roots enterprises are bringing changes to Virginia's coalfield regionand to the Appalachian entrepreneurs engaged in them. "Families here have very strong feelings about being able to remain in the area and preserve their way of life," Deel says. "They seem to be taking charge of their lives by drawing on the entrepreneurial strengths of their forefathers, who settled and first began to develop the area. We are seeing more and more of them make a job for themselvesrather than taking a jobor at least increase their family income as they develop their home/micro businesses."

Thanks to Deel's unwavering support and the determination of local residents, the economic future now looks much brighter deep in the mountains of Southwest Virginia.