Robert C. Byrd: "There were days and some weeks when there was no work in the coal mining community."

The Great Depression hit West Virginia as hard as anywhere in America.

Dixie Accord: "Men worked for nothing, and they had nothing. It was very hard living when beans was 10 cents a pound and bread was five cents a loaf, but who had it? Who had a dime to buy beans, and who had a nickel to buy bread? Very few had it. They lived hard. If they didn't raise it, they didn't have it."

B. J. Evans Gee: "We would go down to the railroad track, and we would walk along the track and pick up lumps of coal. And each one of us would fill our bag with as much as we could carry, probably a third or a fourth of the way. And we would bring it home because we had no central heat in the house. We had fireplaces. That was tough, really tough."