'The nurses' birthed a better place at Stinking Creek

WALKER, Ky. -- Midwife Peggy Kemner, 78 years old and bent over with osteoporosis like a tiny question mark, climbs into her dented car, peers over the dashboard and hits the gas.

"Hold on," she says.

The next 20 minutes of gut-twisting turns take Kemner on a familiar route: up a mountain hollow to help.

"I could've made it faster if these roads were straighter," she says with a laugh.

For 50 years, "Miss Peggy" and her schoolteacher friend, Irma Gall, have volunteered as missionaries along the winding watershed of Stinking Creek in Knox County, Ky., one of the poorest counties in America.

Kemner has been midwife for the births of 507 children, most in bleak mountain cabins with no running water and one light bulb stuck in the ceiling. She's nursed the sick, sat with the dying.

Gall has been a teacher and farmer, riding her horse up the hollows on muddy, rutted roads to teach at one-room schoolhouses in the late 1950s and 1960s. Together, they set up a community center called Lend-A-Hand Center, taught Sunday school and 4-H classes, and ran one of the nation's first home health care services.

Quietly, they advocated birth control and education for women. Viewed at first with suspicion and distrust, the women known as "the nurses" have, over the decades, proved how much hands-on caring can make a difference in the lives of individuals.

"We just wanted to lend a hand," says Gall, 72.

Back up in the hollows of Stinking Creek, where a couple of hundred people live, times are still tough. Nearly 35% of the 32,000 people in Knox County live below the poverty line, a rate three times higher than the national average. Still, life is better on Stinking Creek today than it was back then.

President Lyndon Johnson's "War on Poverty" brought billions of dollars in federal aid to the Appalachian region, from food stamps and health insurance for poor children to Head Start early-education programs and payments for men who suffered from black lung disease after mining the coal-packed mountains.

Women went to work, family incomes doubled and more children graduated from high school. More went to college, too. As throughout Appalachia, many people left for better opportunities elsewhere. But for those who stayed, particularly women, opportunities grew.

As family size shrank, the abject poverty that encased Stinking Creek began to ease.

The mountains opened up, and the people could see out.

Bringing quiet change

Sometimes it's hard to imagine just how hard, just how remote, life was 50 years ago for many of the people of Stinking Creek.

When Kemner and Gall arrived in August 1958, almost no houses had running water. Coal stoves provided the only heat. One electric plug worked the light, then the radio, then the light again. Big families — 13, 14, 15 kids — lived in tiny, three-room, hand-built, wooden cabins. Few houses were painted.

"Gray and brown and black," says Gall of the hills, the houses, the dust on the children's faces. "Everything was gray and brown and black."

Almost everyone had a pig or a couple of chickens, a garden and an outhouse. Land wasn't flat enough on the mountainsides to grow money crops such as tobacco. For the most part, families ate what they grew.

"There wasn't a lot of money left lying around," says Esco Smith, who runs a gas station and mini-grocery on Stinking Creek. He remembers the cabin he grew up in was so rickety, "You could see a chicken running around under the floorboards."