The woods behind Weston Lombard’s farm in Athens County is expansive.
“If you look around, we're just surrounded by oak trees and hickory trees and walnuts,” he said.
Birds dance through tangles of branches that reach toward the sky. A tiny snail curls up on the ground.
But it wasn’t always this way.
Lombard points out a crumbling concrete structure covered in moss.
“This is the mine entrance here,” he said. “That actually was a shaft that went down 200 feet into all these tunnels that crisscrossed the whole region.”
The Hocking Valley Coalfield in southeast Ohio was once one of the most productive in the world. It fueled the growth of a nation, but polluted the environment in the process.
Now, Lombard is part of a team of locals working to transform former mine land into a community forest. Healing the land, he believes, will benefit the people who live there.
A history of coal mining
Between 1800 and 1948, Ohio miners harvested more than two billion tons of coal.
“There were all these villages – Chauncey, Millfield, New Straitsville, Shawnee. They were very economically vibrant villages with thousands of people living there, working there, coming from all over the country to get jobs,” said Molly Jo Stanley, the southeast Ohio regional director of the Ohio Environmental Council.
“It was an economic boom.”
But the work took a toll on the people: one of the worst mining disasters in the state killed dozens of men just a few miles from these woods.
And it harmed the land. While mining in the area drastically declined about a hundred years ago, the environmental impacts of it are long-lasting.
“We're part of the Sunday Creek Watershed, which is one of the most polluted waterways in the state,” Stanley explained. “It suffered heavily from acid mine drainage.”
Piles of coal refuse still litter the landscape, but now, new trees have taken hold.
“We want to make sure they’re not cut again,” Lombard said.
Reclaiming the forest
Lombard and Stanley are two co-founders of Rising Appalachia. The nonprofit is revitalizing 45 acres of former mine land, once owned by the Sugar Creek Coal Company, that’s adjacent to Lombard’s farm.
It recently received $1.7 million from the state’s Department of Natural Resources to do so.
They plan to turn remnants of the mine entrance into a playground, building balance beams onto the old foundation and cleaning up the water pooling at its base.
“Kids could be interacting with this space,” Stanley said. “Maybe this is a vernal pool that could eventually be clean enough to support amphibians, and we could be playing and seeing these creatures, and have interpretive signage about what this used to be and how it's changed over the course of history.”
But the space won’t exist solely for recreation and education; they want to make it economically productive for the community again.
A nearby gravel road marks the route of old railroad tracks, once used to transport coal. Down it, the grant will also pay for the construction of a facility to process native fruits and nuts.
“These are foods that fueled indigenous civilizations for thousands of years, and most modern Americans have never eaten an acorn,” Lombard said.
Once built, locals could bring harvested hickory nuts and walnuts to the facility to crack them open and grind them into flour.
“We're very curious about economics,” Stanley said. “How do we create a system in which the land is not only tended by and benefiting a community ecologically, but how do we do it in a way that allows people to get their livelihood from tending the land?”
Future plans
The Sugar Creek Coal Company still owns 900 acres surrounding Rising Appalachia’s project.
Lombard, Stanley and other community members are trying to raise approximately $4 million to purchase the rest of it and establish a community forest.
The move would protect the land from future development and create a wildlife corridor between Strouds Run State Park and the Wayne National Forest.
Plus, Stanley says people can get involved in the management of community forests in ways they can’t with other public spaces.
Ohio has less public land than most states; it ranks 44th in the country. But even on those lands, there’s limits to how the public can be involved.
“People can hunt on the land, they can gather food on the land, they can be involved in submitting public comments for projects and management proposals,” Stanley said. “But it's not exactly managed by the community. A community forest in contrast, is designed by and managed by the people who live here and depend on the forest.”
In their and Lombard’s view, it’s a win-win-win.
“It'll have benefits to biodiversity, it'll have benefits to climate and to the health of the streams,” Lombard said. “And so we think that what we're going to show is that when people inhabit the land again that it's economically beneficial, it's culturally beneficial and it helps the environment.”
Rising Appalachia is waiting to hear about a grant that would enable it to purchase another 200 acres of the former mine land. It plans to keep raising money until every acre is protected for the public.
