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February 3, 2010

Lee Ward: Watching a town pass away — 02/07/10

Anonymous The Daily Independent Wed Feb 03, 2010, 03:41 PM EST

Although I have a special love for Kentucky, I am a mountaineer.

I think of West Virginia and Kentucky as a package deal.

I grew up on the border of Pike County, Kentucky, and Mingo County, West Virginia. There, we went back and forth between states so much we didn’t think about whether we were in one state or the other. There was no state rivalry, no real school rivalry, except for a little hard feelings between Williamson and Belfry. Our real nemesis was Logan.

My parents still live in Williamson and I’m there about once a month, but it’s always a sad trip. Mom and Dad are elderly and having a difficult time taking care of themselves. Dad tries to keep the house up and take care of Mom and the dog, but it’s too much work for him and many important tasks go undone. Like them, the well-decorated house in the nice neighborhood just isn’t what it used to be.

Of course, neither is the town.

Corridor G, an updated, four-laned U.S. 119, is still an odd sight to me, cutting its way through the mountains and straightening out roads on which I used to be constantly motion sick. Every time I ride that road, I think of the citizens’ movement my aunt and uncle started in the 1970s, trying to get the state to reroute that road through a less-populated part of town. Their version of Corridor G would have taken fewer houses and displaced fewer people. Of course, the original version of the road was the one that was built and it didn’t seem to make a difference either way.

The town suffers from an economic decay that you would have expected a nice highway to help counteract. But it hasn’t.

Williamson isn’t even a place to stop to gas up. The road runs on the Kentucky side parallel to downtown. There is an “exit” to downtown Williamson, but there is nothing there. Business has built up right alongside the road, in Pike County.

I drove around the block in town and, like many small towns, I saw many empty storefronts. Places that once had been department stores were now parking lots, dollar stores, churches and missions. A few doctors bought some buildings on the main street and put in fancy apartments, a coffeehouse, a bookstore, even a wine shop. But it seems as though those businesses are for their entertainment and make no difference to the general population. I don’t even think I saw more than two cars in town as I circled the block on that Saturday afternoon.

As with people, the death of a town is inevitable; the key to living with it is acceptance.

LEE WARD can be reached at lward@dailyindependent.com or (606) 326-2661.

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