Freak Thoughts

This section of Freak Thoughts is dedicated to research and media for the creative space of Husher for the Spring 2010 semester of Creative Writing.

Below you will find links to video, picture, and other media related to our creative space to help you in researching your story. If there is something you would like to see added to this page, please contact either Red or Dean.

Posted by marti084:

AppalachianFolk: A Collection of Appalachian Stories

background:

A collection of information on coal mines.

Mines in media.

Pictures of miners.

Health

Health/Environment

I have found more resources for our 407 collabrative story. Here’s a link to a site with a bunch of stories from Appalachian people who worked in coal mines. I found it very helpful

Posted by AppleBee:

Historic Streets of Colorado

This is just a link to some photos of Colorado mining town streets from different decades. These pictures helped me visualize the main street of the town and what it might have looked like.

Posted by Red:

This is a collection of media from a trip I took to Pennsylvania to research a mining town.
Click here for a master list of the photo albums that I posted online from the trip.
In order, they are:

Centralia: Our final destination. Centralia was a mining town that has been burning underground since 1962. You can learn more about it on the (actually) informative wiki. As you can see in this photo album, there was next to nothing left of the town.

Danville: a pretty typical town in Pennsylvania. There are a lot of mining operations within these townships, and most of the towns were broken up into small clusters of residence just like this. Note the bi-colored houses, probably rental duplexes.

Hershey: this set is from Hershey, PA. Probably the largest town we saw in our entire trip through the state. There really is a Hershey Highway. Some portions of the town looked new but there was a large amish presence right outside the border. You can tell how old the city was by how narrow the streets were and the architecture of the municipal and religious buildings. This was not uncommon throughout our travel in the mining towns. A lot of preservation.

Landscape: these are various pictures from the mountains of PA. They look different from the rockies, but the stratified rock faces and sheer cliffs are the same. The plants, trees, the type and color of the rock vary but the structure and texture of it doesn’t. These are very scary roads to drive on. Especially when it is snowing. All along these roads you’ll see the familiar barriers to prevent cars from going off of the cliffs, but more often than not, the barriers had sustained damage. More than once, I had seen the barrier completely ruptured and it was very haunting. Looking at these pictures, it isn’t hard to imagine why the houses and other residences are spread so far apart. It is a very secluded life, but the mountains are where the coal lives.

Mt. Carmel: this town was down-right scary. I was even afraid to take pictures of it. It couldn’t have been more than a couple of blocks, less than one square mile, but it was a very haunted place. It shares a border with Centralia. I cannot describe in any exact way what it was that made this place so desolate, destitute. There was a hardship that floated through the place like a fog.
I’ve been to a lot of small towns, but this place was just something else.

Strasburg: this city is right outside Hershey, and they have a fairly large amish population. Lots of jelly shops and stuff like that. Most notably, they had the train museum. Now, the train museum was quite fascinating. I had seen trains before, obviously, but I had never stood right next to one and it was quite amazing. I took pictures and even a dumb little video of the trains that they used to use to haul coal, and the trains that they use today.

Strip mines: these are fly-by pictures of different strip mine operations. Obviously, we weren’t allowed to go in.

Trains: this section contains the pictures from the train museum.

Urban: these are simply flavor pictures from the trip. The contrast is quite startling.

I will let some observations speak for themselves (but keep in mind that this is Pennsylvania and not Colorado, and the histories of the state are drastically different):

Below you will find two videos. The first one is from the train museum in Strasburg, PA. The second one is from Centralia.
I will mention that it was very, very windy in Centralia and my microphone built into the camera is not very good.

As stated above, if there is something you would like to contribute to this page, then please contact Dean or Red and it will be placed.