HOW ONE KENTUCKY TOWN SAVED ITSELF

Downtown Hazard had lost its small-town mojo to drugs. Former addicts are helping to bring it back.

- Sam Quinones

In early 2020, Mandi Fugate Sheffel opened a tiny bookstore in her hometown of Hazard, in eastern Kentucky.
Everyone thought she was crazy.

Downtown Hazard was a forbidding place to start any business, much less a bookstore. The coal mines that once supported the area had closed over the past few decades. Many brick buildings from Hazard's heyday were gone, bequeathing a gap-toothed look to Main Street. The rest were empty or occupied by attorneys and bail bondsmen.

What's more, Fugate Sheffel couldn't afford a website or employees. She had never run a business before. And she had a complicated personal history to wrestle with.

But she loved to read, particularly contemporary Appalachian authors like Silas House, James Still and Gurney Norman, who told stories that felt real to her. She figured others in town were tired, like her, of driving two hours to Lexington to buy books.

So on Jan. 30, she opened Read Spotted Newt in a 250-square-foot space, the size of a small bedroom.

History had formed an image of Hazard as the buckle on eastern Kentucky's opioid belt. From Fugate Sheffel, though, you'll hear another storyone also heard elsewhere in eastern Kentucky and in West Virginia and southwest Virginia and the southern tier of Ohio.

"When you don't have industry, you're having ecological disaster and a drug epidemic-you would think all those things would get us to a place where the town would be uninhabitable," says Fugate Sheffel. "But that's not what I'm seeing at all. I'm seeing a lot of people rally."

The loping hills of eastern Kentucky are studded with scores of towns like Hazard and nearby Prestonsburg and Pineville and Corbin-that, over the centuries, emerged in the valleys and along its rivers.