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It is almost hard to believe we are nearing the end of another year. I'm sure I am not alone in the marvel of how quickly the months can race by. We want to extend our best wishes to you and your family over this holiday season.

We are absolutely thrilled that our Documentary, Between Two Hills, The Pocahontas, Virginia Story, will air in January on WVPT PBS . We are hopeful that it will have an opportunity to be aired on other stations as well and will post all air dates and stations if that should happen. I thought it would be interesting to try to explain why we made this film. So here goes and yes I am long winded, sorry about that.

When I met Janet almost a decade ago

I was on my way to the Knoxville Museum of Arts to make balloon animals for children. It was their annual fundraising festival. She was surprised when I told her this. I think even a little impressed. (Or maybe she just thought, 'aha, so this guy really IS a clown...) She was more surprised to find out that I had never made balloon animals for children before in my life.

When asked why the museum would put a rank amateur in charge of something so important and a task that obviously required skill, my reply was really only a guess. I told her that I think I was the only one who was willing.

Years later when Janet and I visited Pocahontas, Virginia on a weekend exploration of the mountains, we were both in awe and just a little horrified at the condition of the town’s buildings. About one hundred years ago this had been the epicenter of the largest seam of coal in America. This seam stretches from Pennsylvania to Alabama. The Pocahontas Fuel company was headquartered here and employed tens of thousands of people. The money flowed generously into this small community with enough wealth to build the town an opera house, several churches, schools, and almost anything a person could desire. Saloons lined the streets and the trains that steamed up and down the tracks were packed with folks from surrounding areas. The coal eventually played out by the nineteen fifties and, like a parent abandoning its children, the company owned town was left to its own devises. Without a sustainable economic foundation the town began to fall into disrepair, or more appropriately it began to show its age. Water slowly dripped through the hundred year old roofs, the decades old mortar began to crumble and soon buildings began to fall literally into the streets. It was a classic case of demolition by neglect. By the year two thousand the population had dwindled from its peak, in the nineteen twenties, of nearly five thousand residents to a meager four hundred and forty. This was by far the most interesting place we had visited yet.

It wasn’t until a few years later, when I started tinkering with making videos, that Janet suggested we ride up to Pocahontas and get some of these things on tape. She was sure they wouldn’t be around for long. She also offered one of the smartest suggestions that I have ever received concerning the preparation to go film a location. Janet suggested that we call first. We did and after a couple attempts to convince someone at city hall to talk to us on tape we were told that we should probably call Amy Flick over at the Exhibition Mine. We did. The enthusiasm Amy projected on the phone got Janet and I both very excited about visiting. Amy said she had a key to almost every building in town. We met up with Amy and another mine tour guide, Dianna Miller, and filmed a seven minute video about the town. After posting on YouTube, and begging the YouTube Editor to feature it, the video was featured on the Travel and Places page and it received almost eighty thousand views within a couple of days. Wow. I spoke to Amy about the video after it had been viewed by so many people and she shared a cute story with me. She said the day after we posted it, she saw that eighty two people, yes just eighty two, had seen it and thought; wow it may reach a hundred. She was thrilled with just a

hundred views. Eighty thousand was beyond thrilling for all of us.

Several months had past after our Pocahontas video had been post

ed on YouTube, climbed up the charts and then diminished to a few dozens views a day. Janet and I had many and long conversations about Pocahontas. We felt so connected to Amy, Dianna, the town, its fate, and for lack of better words, our homesickness. You see, Appalachian folks don’t just let anybody come and make videos of them. Appalachian folks don’t just immediately trust outsiders and more so outsiders with cameras. I was probably viewed as

more of an outsider than Janet. I was from Tennessee and Janet was from nearby Lebanon, Virginia. She actually had grown up, in part, in Southwest Virginia. In the end we felt that we had treated the town and people with respect and decided that was the only way we would ever film anyone or anything. We wondered what would become of the town and our new friends.

One night, several months later, Janet and I were sitting around and talking about Pocahontas. We reflected on the obscene amount of money the US Government was currently spending on rebuilding towns and buildings in Iraq and Afghanistan while entire buildings were falling over into the streets in Virginia! We talked about the countless dollars being poured into building schools in these foreign lands all the while the historic community school in Pocahontas was closed down for financial reasons by Tazewell County, Virginia. We both expressed to each other

our desire that the town’s history should be seen and known by more people. I suggested that we should try to make a more in-depth documentary about the town. Janet either didn’t take me seriously or dismissed it initially. She has a way of allowing my “big ideas” to grow or wither with time. This usually takes about a week. Exactly one week later I suggested it again. She, played Devils advocate and told me that it wouldn’t be right to get people all worked up about something that big and especially if I couldn’t finish it. She also said that she believed in my ability, but if we decided to do this we weren’t going to half do it or rush it and that we needed to think about it a little more. I had my own self doubts. Another week had passed and we both came to the conclusion that we had to try. We both felt that people need to see this town in the actual state of Virginia, in the United States of America, with buildings collapsing into the streets.

We also thought it was important that people see and know the kindness and generosity of the folks living there. Maybe if they knew things would change.

Janet was insistent when she told me that there are two things you must do if we are to continue with this idea. Number one, We must ask permission from the people there. Number two was to video tape oral histories of the people and provide each participant, as well as the historical society, a copy. This way the town and its history would benefit whether or not we ever completed the documentary.

In November of 2007 we met with the Historic Pocahontas Society and asked permission to create a documentary about the town. In March of 2008 we had completed the oral histories of over thirty five people and by April of 2009 we completed our Documentary, titled Between Two Hills, the Pocahontas, Virginia Story. It is also worth noting that we did this over a period of two years. Janet and I both work full time and make videos as a hobby. So we spent weekends, vacations, and evenings driving up into the mountains. We interviewed congressmen and college professors. We interviewed retired coal miners and homemakers. We interviewed just about anyone who would talk to us about coal, the town, or any history of the region. During those two years I stayed in constant communications with Wanda Zimmerman, WVPT -PBS in Virginia. I originally sent Wanda a link to our video after it reached nearly ninety thousand views back in 2007. I told her that I thought it was amazing that so many people cared about this town and region. She told me that it would be great to see a longer, more detailed version. She said that she liked our YouTube video and was interested in seeing what we would come up with if we were to pursue an expanded version. Wanda never promised that it would air on PBS but was always encouraging and polite. I sent her regular updates, sometimes monthly. In August of 2009 we sent the final version to the folks at Wanda’s station in Virginia. They generously assisted in getting the Closed Captioning and plan on airing the final hour long segment in January 2010.
In conclusion, I know there are more qualified filmmakers that could have presented a more technically polished look at the town of Pocahontas, Virginia. I am certain there are fantastic directors with greater audio and video experience than I that could far exceed our effort. I imagine that they would have created cinematic art utilizing the numerous Victorian era buildings that are aging and crumbling into the streets. I know that Ken Burns probably would have captured the coal industry, mining and the Appalachian Culture in a multi part series with every stone unturned and every photo zoomed to perfection, but this mountain coal town couldn’t wait for an experienced film maker. This story was fading as fast as the population.

We would have been just as happy to watch some one else capture this on film or tape, but just like the balloon animals gig, I think we may have been the only ones willing.

Look for the Documentary to air on Virginia's WVPT PBS station in January of 2010. Again, we will post specific dates, additional stations if any, and times as we know them. In the mean time if you just can’t wait for January or don’t live in Virginia our DVD is on sale now! A portion of the profits benefit the town's historical organization. LINK TO BUY