I taught for 17 years, served an as assistant principal for 3 years, and as a principal for 17 years in Pike County Kentucky. I am married and the father of 3 grown children. I have traveled in 49 states, but prefer to roam through the coal mining towns of Eastern Kentucky, Western Virginia and West Virginia.
Buckfield is a 50 year record of stories and events collected during those travels.
The exploiters came to Central Appalachia not with guns and fixed bayonets, but with lawyers, surveyors, buyers and money. Several decades later, one by one they left leaving burning gob piles, polluted streams, dilapidated houses, useless office buildings, and broken people.
Buckfield is the story of their coming. Although fictionalized and symbolic, evidence of the stories and events can still be found throughout the region.
With mine records destroyed and no state or federal records, the name carved on a grave yard marker and inscribed with “gone but not forgotten” exists nowhere else.
Buckfield is an attempt to humanize and give life to those forgotten; an attempt to remove slurs, some racial; an attempt to remove demeaning misunderstandings; an attempt to give credit to workers and their families who without their pride, sufferings, and sacrifices, this nation may not be called “home of the brave and free”.
Phillip M. Johnson