LIKE MOST young couples, my parents responded to situations as well as they could with limited information, conforming to convention and social expectation. They were good Catholics, both virgins when they married at age twenty-three.
Mom was a McCabe and a McCarney, from Lexington’s tough Irish-Catholic community. Her grandfather, a career bartender, was known for having shot and killed a drunken customer. Other family members were bookies and gamblers. Her uncle embalmed the great racehorse Man o’ War. Her great-uncle studied for the priesthood, and her aunt became a nun. In high school, Mom began caring for her ill mother, a responsibility that steadily increased for four years. As eldest daughter, she took over the household—preparing meals for her sister and father—and began working at a bank.
At age twenty-two, she met Dad at a Catholic Youth Organization dance. On their subsequent first date Dad wore a suit and took her to the nicest restaurant in town. She was flattered by his attention—he was handsome, funny, and very smart. He behaved like a gentleman, which meant “not trying any funny business.” They were the same age, born a few months apart. At seventeen, Mom had lost her mother. Dad’s father had died the same year. They’d endured loss and economic deprivation, but they also shared a strong hope for the future, motivated by the prosperity and enthusiasm of the 1950s. Ten months after meeting, they were married and remained deeply in love the rest of their lives. I never heard them argue or even disagree.
Dad sold products for Procter & Gamble, supplying to small country stores, then coming home and writing late into the night. My mother read Dr. Spock and cooked from cans. In the evenings they drank martinis. Energetic and ambitious, my father moved into the insurance business and was offered a promotion selling policies to college students in the eastern hills. Not yet thirty, he related well to undergraduates. With three kids and a pregnant wife, he could bring his own circumstances to bear in a sales pitch: If something happened to me, what would my wife do? Who would feed my kids? You should ask yourself the same questions.
In 1963, weary from driving a hundred miles a day, Dad moved the family to a small rental house in the conservative town of Morehead. My parents strove for upward mobility in a place that offered little in the way of a toehold. They socialized with college professors and doctors. Mom was intimidated by their levels of education but learned to hide it behind an increasingly polished patina of appropriate conversation. Dad was contemptuous of medical personnel, whom he referred to as “body plumbers.” He believed himself far more intelligent than the professors and considered a Ph.D. nothing more than a union card to teach.
A year later Dad learned about a home for sale ten miles away, located on a ridge in the former mining community of Haldeman, population two hundred. The deceased town founder, L. P. Haldeman, had built a pair of fine homes and used the smaller house to entertain while living in the big one. His primary residence was for sale. It was a large house, solidly built fifty years before. The asking price was low due to a significant drawback. Situated at the bottom of the hill directly below the house was a factory that manufactured charcoal. The kilns produced a toxic smoke.
Dad drove the family out of town, following a creek fed by rain gullies clawed into the hillside. Gleaming railroad tracks ran on a raised bed of fist-sized gravel. There were no road signs. We crossed railroad tracks and immediately smelled smoke. In the sole wide spot available, lodged tight to the base of the main hill, was the enormous charcoal factory, pumping black smoke into the sky. Dad left the blacktop for a steep dirt road that ascended a hill beneath a canopy of trees. Rocks bounced against the car. At the top of the hill, Dad stopped in a flat spot where six ridges merged like spokes to a wagon wheel. Surrounding the crossroads were more trees, their bottom leaves coated with charcoal dust. My parents consulted directions and followed a dirt road that faded to a set of ruts with grass growing in the center. At the end of the road stood the house, surrounded by the Daniel Boone National Forest.
The windows lacked curtains and the interior was dim. Without furnishings, the house reverberated from our footsteps and echoing voices. There were three rooms downstairs and three bedrooms upstairs. It had been built with indoor plumbing, rare for the early 1900s in the hills, and had a bathroom on each floor.
Mom wandered as if in a trance, her belly swollen with child, exclaiming again and again how much space there was in the house. Dad strode with purpose. The house was just what a young man needed for a growing family. He was not concerned that his wife had lived all her life in Lexington and had no idea how to raise children in a rural setting. He didn’t mind not knowing anyone in the community. He ignored the empty mines, old train tracks, trash-filled creeks, and charcoal smoke. He didn’t know Haldeman had the highest rate of unemployment and illiteracy in the county, among the highest in the state. Less than a mile away was a bootlegger, which spawned gunplay, arson, and drag races that often ended in spectacular wrecks. None of it mattered to Dad. The large house was a long way from the log cabin of his youth. He bought Mr. Haldeman’s home and lived there for fifty years.
Late at night after everyone else went to bed, my father listened for evidence of Mr. Haldeman’s ghost. At the slightest creak, Dad spoke aloud: Hello, is that you? He believed that directly addressing a spirit would provoke a response. Even as a child, I found it odd that he put forth such effort to communicate with the ethereal world but not his kids. He was always disappointed that the house remained silent, that the ghost ignored him.
During the 1960s, Appalachia experienced the biggest out-migration in its history due to economics. Hundreds of families moved to Michigan and Ohio for work. This diaspora made room for people such as my father, who needed a great deal of psychic space. We were the first new family to arrive in Haldeman in more than thirty years. Many of our neighbors lacked conventional plumbing. They grew subsistence gardens, raised hogs and chickens, and hunted for food. Some families grew a small tobacco crop for cash and gathered ginseng from the woods to sell. Many received welfare assistance. No one went to college, and very few finished high school. It was not uncommon for men to go about armed. The sound of gunfire became as normal to my ears as that of barking dogs. I learned to discern the differences in pitch among shotgun, pistol, and rifle.
My parents enjoyed their lack of local history and began severing relations with their own families. I grew up without direct benefit of cousins, uncles, aunts, or grandparents. Relatives were what other people had, not us. Mom and Dad scorned our neighbors as ignorant and unsophisticated. They taught my siblings and me to consider ourselves better than the families who surrounded us, the children with whom we played, and the culture we came to identify as our own. My experience was similar to that of children of career diplomats from the colonial era—we lived in the big house, we had extra money, we mingled with the locals but never fit in. We even spoke a different language, what my father called “the Queen’s English,” instead of the grammatically incorrect dialect of the hills. Other kids learned to hunt and fish; I learned to speak properly.
The surrounding hills held rich veins of dense, flinty clay, ideal for manufacturing sturdy firebrick to line blast furnaces for steel mills. In 1903 Lunsford Pitt Haldeman founded the Kentucky Fire Brick Company and hired men to lay narrow-gauge rail for mules to haul hand-dug clay to the brick plant. Business flourished through the 1920s, with the brickyard being the largest employer in the region, producing sixty thousand bricks per day, each stamped “Haldeman Ky.” The company town had brick roads, a public garden, a barbershop, a baseball diamond, and a train depot. There was a tennis court, several horseshoe pits, and a neatly cropped field for playing croquet. Workers were paid in a combination of cash and scrip, a form of credit against wages that could be exchanged only at the high-priced Company Store.
In the 1950s, General Refractories purchased the old brick factory and converted its kilns to manufacture charcoal. This was accomplished by burning railroad ties that were heavily soaked in creosote, an oily liquid obtained from coal tar and used as a wood preservative. The resultant char was sent north, chipped into briquettes, bagged, and sold for summer barbecues across the nation. The constant heavy smoke increased Haldeman fatalities among the elderly and infants. Everyone coughed. At night the humidity produced fog that blended with the smoke to create an opaque smog that car headlights couldn’t penetrate. Dad walked ahead of the car with a flashlight to illuminate the way for Mom to drive. Storekeepers in Morehead could identify us by the acrid smell of smoke on our clothing, and they used it as a means to discriminate against us. Haldeman people were at the bottom of a pecking order that didn’t start very high. Plus, we literally stank.
The factory stood two hundred yards from the grade school. Smoke drifted through the air as I walked to school, obscuring the woods like a lethal morning mist that never lifted. In 1968 my parents organized a small group called Struggle Opposing Smog, or SOS. To get attention, they withheld their children from the first week of school, drawing national media coverage for the unique boycott. Special devices were fastened to the smokestacks to measure the amount of particulates spewing forth. After two days every gauge broke, with their final readings listing higher pollution rates than those in Detroit. The charcoal factory shut down. Some people admired my parents for their effort, while others resented the loss of employment. None could deny that the quality of air had improved.
Most rural childhoods are very isolated, but due to Haldeman’s past as a company town, people lived in clusters along creeks and ridges. The culture of the hills had long maintained the vestiges of the eighteenth-century pioneer mentality: self-sufficiency, hunting game for food, and a disregard for conventional law. Ten boys near my age lived within walking distance through the woods. We roamed the hills on foot and later on bicycles, careening our battered bikes along game trails and footpaths, plunging down steep hills. We were reckless and ragtag, fearless and rough, perpetually cut and bruised. Cheap army-surplus shirts from the Vietnam War were ideal for the woods. The tightly woven fabric repelled water and thorns. A couple of us were always limping, our unprotected faces bruised and cut. Occasionally I had two black eyes, a source of pride, since anyone could have merely one.
We found junked cars from the thirties with trees growing through the windows, foundations of houses filled with garbage, and dozens of empty holes in the ground. The woods were full of bricks, all stamped with the name of our community. We ate in one another’s homes, helped with chores, and shared gloves in winter. Our lives knew no boundaries save the distance we could travel on foot and still be home by dark. We loved one another in a pure way that none of us was loved at home.
I grew up in the shadow of a complex history mythologized by the faded glory days of a lost town. The popular story is that L. P. Haldeman did everything in his power to take care of his workers. He made sure that even the most poverty-stricken children living in dilapidated company shacks received a Christmas gift of fruit. One story that demonstrated his compassion was about a man who died on the job, leaving a family with no means of support. The oldest boy was thirteen. Mr. Haldeman directed that a special stool be constructed for the boy to stand on so he could work in his father’s place all day.
Employees received approximately ten dollars a week for working seventy hours. In 1934 they organized Local Union No. 510 and went on strike. The men wanted more money for shorter hours. Mr. Haldeman refused to meet with union representatives. Court documents quoted him as saying: “I will shut the damn thing down, and let it sit there, and possibly the rust will eat it up.”
The Rowan County judge sent a detachment of the National Guard to the brickyard, along with seventy-five local “deputies.” Plant operations resumed. Thirty-six men were denied a return to work. All of their names had appeared on a secret list obtained by a private investigator working for the company. In 1938 Kentucky Fire Brick lost a lawsuit filed on behalf of those men. Incensed at being legally forced to reinstate his workers, Mr. Haldeman sold the company to U.S. Steel. Included in the sale were the elementary school, parts of the railroad, a blacktopped portion of the old Main Road, several houses, vast acres of mined-out land, and in a very real sense, the people who lived there. Able-bodied men with families moved elsewhere for jobs. Most of the people who stayed had a disability, owned their own land outright, or received a military pension.
The surnames of the men named in the 1938 lawsuit were as follows: Adkins, Bailey, Christian, Davis, Eldridge, Evans, Glover, Hall, Hogge, Lewis, Messer, Oney, Parker, Pettit, Rakes, Sparks, Sturgell, Stinson, Sparkman, Stamper, Sammon, Stewart, Thomas, White, and Wilson. I recognize every name, having grown up with their descendants.
My understanding of the town’s decline was simple—ungrateful workers were to blame. I didn’t realize until much later that all the profits from Kentucky Fire Brick went out of state and that families didn’t own the mineral rights to their property. Lunsford Pitt Haldeman was the scion of a wealthy Ohio family who inherited Kentucky land. Under pressure to become an entrepreneur, he hired a childhood friend to run the company while he stayed in Ohio.
My hometown was nothing more than a business enterprise. When its profitability began to wane, L. P. Haldeman quickly rid himself of the responsibility. He never actually lived in the town that bore his name, and certainly not in our house. He left no spirit for my father to talk with. But like a ghost, his unseen presence was strongly felt. The remaining evidence of the despotic town founder is his last name on thousands of bricks, each one as chipped and battered as the people he abandoned.