Wealth brings privileges to those who possess it.
Buckfield does not focus on the ambushes, killings, and feuds associated with Central Appalachia, but presents the story of Central Appalachia through the lives of the mountaineers, outside investors, and people, especially African-Americans and Southern Europeans, brought to the mountains as workers.
After becoming convinced that God chose him to create a ‘jewel’, where he could fulfill his righteous calling and place his name among America’s greatest men, William Riley constructed Buckfield. He never once thought that one man’s dream often becomes another man’s nightmare.
The mine superintendent, Thomas Harlow’s nightmare really began when he married William Riley’s niece. Later trying to imitate Mr. Riley, he resorted to thievery and concocted a scheme with a lawyer who carried a ‘curse’ to take property from companies who claimed the coal rights on the land.
Alvina Harlow, ten years younger than her husband, Thomas, saw her life as one of loneliness, married for the excitement and out of fear of becoming an old maid. Her excitement was short-lived, when life added boredom and rejection to her loneliness. She constantly struggled to escape her Hellhole.
A missionary found her Sodom, but soon realized that the mountains placed a burden on her life.
A Civil War veteran patiently waits for the opportunity to kill a certain ‘company’ bastard.
A Chief of police tries to keep order in a town with ‘more moonshine whiskey than pure drinking water’.
A young Black girl wondered who her White father was, yet she carried a secret about the father of her White child.
A Black maid knew a secret about William Riley, but could not reveal it because she and her badly crippled husband would be evicted.
Two Black workers labored and saved to build a high school. Mr. Riley strongly opposed the idea because he would give them ‘a job as soon as they reach proper age.’
A young Jewish boy, brought in as a reporter, soon learned that he ‘would be tolerated but never accepted.’
A farmer gives up mining and tries to explain mountain practices, superstitions, and myths.
A ‘Hell and Brimstone’ sermon not only set forth religious beliefs but also disrupted a whole valley.
The moon shiners, often resorting to violence, fought to protect their skills against overwhelming odds.
A young girl, raped by the son of a Big Boss, struggled to remove her ‘black mark’.
Symbolically with hundreds of run down mine camps, broken people, decaying buildings, innumerable cemeteries, Buckfield still exists but like a miner who struggles to breathe, uncertainty lies over the horizon.