Improving the Impoverished
January 20, 2009 • By Ford Prior, Contributing Writer
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HARRISONBURG, Va. — JMU students worked to rebuild small town after devastating fire
The cold dropped to 16 degrees the December night Greg Hogan returned to the little poverty-stricken town of Welch, a town hidden in the mountains of West Virginia. This wasn’t his hometown. Unlike most of his peers, the JMU senior hadn’t retreated home after final exams to wind down and snuggle by the fireplace in his pajamas.
He instead decided on this town of about 2,600, along with JMU junior co-leader Mike Maguire and a hardy team of JMU students. Their goal was to give second life to a burned-out apartment building, which they would clean, gut and leave for future use.
Fifty JMU students spent their first week of Winter Break laboring in the wreckage, doing their part in lifting Welch, the eighth most impoverished town in America, back into the light.
“We came into a building that hadn’t been touched since the night of the fire, and in the combined days that we’ve been there have done enough work as to where contractors can come in,” Hogan said of the week.
Rummaging through the rubble one day, the students uncovered a black-and-white photo, taken in the 1950s.
“They had told us that Welch used to be called ‘Little Manhattan,’” said Allison Herrick, JMU senior team member. “Well, we saw this picture, and it actually looked like Times Square. People were hanging out of cars in bumper-to-bumper traffic, smoking, singing, dancing.”
JMU students got the call to help after some other charity work caught the eye of an organization.
The story is simple: Aid for America, a nonprofit organization, was operating in Mississippi when its representative witnessed a group from JMU doing hurricane-relief work. Their representative, Nathan Plowman, took note of their remarkably positive attitudes and hard work. When Plowman was reassigned to Welch to spearhead a brand-new project, he knew who to call.
“The JMU students were by far the best, hardest working they had, so he wanted JMU to be the first big group to come into Welch,” Maguire said.
The group’s first trip to Welch was this past Thanksgiving Break. For three days, they renovated an old house, and on Thanksgiving Day, they handed out free turkey dinners to families in town. All 500 turkey dinners were gone within two hours, forcing students to painstakingly turn away hungry families.
“When we ran out, the first to come up was a family with a small child, and we had nothing to give them,” Herrick said. “It was awful.”
They knew they had to come back.
Hogan and Maguire returned in December with more manpower since their next project was a colossal, 93-room apartment complex, which had been condemned after a devastating fire in June 2008.
“It took a lot of teamwork moving furniture down five flights of stairs,” Herrick said. “If you didn’t know someone at the beginning of the day, you knew them by the end.”
The team hopes to revive such life like the one in the ’50s picture to Welch, but according to Hogan, it requires a sustained, long-term effort. In other words, this is just the beginning.
“We’ve gotten this trip out of the way, and it’s been a huge learning experience,” said Hogan, who plans to lead another trip this spring. “We’ve seen what we’ve done right, and what we need to improve on, and those kinds of things. The idea is to pass those down to the younger guys here, and maintain that relationship with the Welch community.”
The trip to Welch was freshman Craig Cravath’s first experience with intensive volunteer work, and was changed over the week. Cravath, a finance and management major, has already signed up to volunteer there for a month this summer.
“Just starting out, we made a lot of change fast,” he said. “We really made noise down there. People are starting to realize that they can help themselves, and that’s the first goal: to go down there and get them to stand on their own.”
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You did a wonderful job in readying the Tyson Towers Building in Welch, West Virginia . However, the sad thing is that nothing that is visible from the outside
has been done to continue the improvemenmt.
McDowell has been my home for 75years.. Another sad thing is that the high school ,from which I graduated in 1952 ,shall not exist after this year as the result
of consolidation of two high schools. My hope is to preserve the remaining buildings, if possible, for the use of the Iaeger High Alumni. My problem is I
do not know where to start to get help for the recovery of these two historical buildings. One was built in 1919.
Any advise you could give me will be very much appreciated.