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The Great Depression hit West Virginia as hard as anywhere in America.

Dixie Accord: Men worked for nothing and they had nothing. It was very hard living when beans was ten cents a pound and bread five cents a loaf, but who had it? Who had a dime to buy beans, and who had a nickel to buy bread? Very few had it. They lived hard. If they didn’t raise it, they didn’t have it.

B. J. Evans Gee: We would go down to the railroad track and we would walk along the track and pick up lumps of coal. Each one of us would fill our bag with as much as we could carry, probably a third or a fourth of the way. We would bring it home because we had no central heat in the house. We had fireplaces. It was tough, really tough.