Appalachia

O n Thanksgiving afternoon, I was traveling through Estill County with my Wife’s family. We had dinner at a restaurant called Michael’s in a railroad town called Ravenna. Most of the workers that built the railroad yards in the early 1900′s were Italian and requested that the main station be named after their native Ravenna, Italy. Prior to this, they just called it “The Village”.
I pulled off of old Richmond Road and grabbed my 7d for this shot. Railcars loaded with coal stretched into the distance as far as the eye could see. Where did they come from? Floyd County? What was their final destination?
The railroad always takes me back to Eastern Kentucky. Though not a native of Floyd County, I am certainly a product of it. I grew up admiring the rough and ready men, and following the gritty women arond the house that cooked and provided a home in those unforgiving hills. The excitement of leaving the city and entering another world as a kid was indelible. I would leave the sanitary life of Lexington and bound into a world of guns and cuss words and trash fires. My senses were filled with the aromas of tobacco, biscuits and gravy, and my Great Grandfather’s bay rum. The high lonsome sound of the banjo and fiddle were never far away and the blast of the train whistle in the distance would echo and ricochet off the mountain walls.

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