Artifacts of Appalachia
Goals and Services
This website is dedicated to the cataloging, archiving, and discussion of the artifacts that remain of West Virginia’s history. As Tyler Childers said poignantly, it is “a long, violent history.”
Scrip—the token monetary system used to pay lumbermen and miners—was one of the main catalysts to the Coal Wars in these hills. On the other side, you will find bottles—vessels of what once offered laborers and miners and their families reprieve in a difficult life. Finally, in honor of my own half-heritage, you will find another struggle archived here: that of the Filipinos who struggled against constant colonization by the Spanish, Americans, and Japanese.
Why am I doing this? The simple answer is that I love it. I love to give people the opportunity to see these objects as clearly as they would in their hand, as most of these items have never been photographed and preserved in high quality. And, notably, never have they been available to be viewed by anybody.
I want you to be able to see the life that it lived through scuffs, scrapes, and dings. This isn’t a traditional “catalog” website in that way, as hutchbook and tokencatalog might be. While that information is here informally, it is not in the limelight. I am trying to make the history of these pieces more accessible and bring it to the fore, as collections often focus on the item itself rather than its past.
I am constantly taking pictures of items and researching, so if you have an item that is not on here, it may be soon and I may already be aware of it. If you have something that is unlisted in any other catalogs (e.g., tokencatalog, hutchbook, any of my books), then please email me with images of the front, back, bottom, and sides. Thank you kindly.