CHAPTER 5
Jonestown
While
Jordan Mines may be lost to history, Jonestown remains and
relatively little has changed since Austin left. After turning off the Potts Creek Road, you just need to follow the road, more like a country lane, for a piece, just past some faded red snow fences lining a field. Then the road dips, passing through what Austin called a tree tunnel as you descend into the holler. The small road runs right through Jonestown before rising again after a few hundred yards. Jonestown itself covered perhaps a dozen acres of land.
The first Jonestown residents to greet visitors were most often dogs. They were everywhere, and some
homes boasted two or three. Most folks kept them on a chain, not far from the front doors of their homes, and those dogs guarded their property. They scared off both human and animal intruders with their growls and barks. Champ was like that, too, but he just seemed friendlier than the others. A small tear formed as Austin said, "I sure wish Champ bit the hell out of Uncle Junior before he was poisoned. Any man separating a boy from his dog deserves hell as his reward. And I hope Junior is still burning."
Austin first recollection of electricity in Jonestown was around 1948 or 1949 with the power lines reaching down from the
first big power plants in Covington. Some folks didn't trust it and refused to have their homes wired, fearing unprovoked sparks would set their place ablaze. Other folks used it sparingly for electricity was mighty expensive. A couple years after that, new telephone lines were strung bringing telephone service to Jonestown. The irony is that few homes actually
had a telephone. Privacy was not a
consideration, however, and the first telephone in Jonestown had five party lines. The phone company gave each line a different
ring, one for each family. In tight knit communities like Jonestown, privacy was not really possible. Folks tried to keep to keep to themselves and that explains the ‘No Trespassing’ signs one finds everywhere in the holler. They were nailed to the trees, attached to fences and even tacked on to doghouses.
Salesmen and uninvited visitors are still not welcome. And if the ‘No Trespassing’ sign didn't stop you, one of the Jonestown dogs would. "You know, the thinking was that if you weren’t from around here," Austin explained, "you weren’t supposed to be here."
Since most homes lacked running water, residents had to rely on fresh spring water for cooking and cleaning. Outhouses took care of the rest. Grandpa and his sons dug deep pits, much like military-style latrines, and covered the pit with a wooden outhouse. Once the
hole had appreciably filled, they dug a newer pit nearby and used that soil to cap the old pit. "Our outhouse was perfectly
equipped with Montgomery Wards and Sears Roebuck catalogs," it was noted, "It was easier to find a catalog than affordable toilet paper." If toilet paper had been available, people would have killed for it. No one really liked the glossy pages of the catalogs.
The folks in Jonestown had plenty of
land, but they were far from wealthy. "Land rich, cash poor. We could not afford to make mistakes or not work together, it was always a struggle to survive. But we were Valley folks and our tradition was to endure," recalled Austin. It
was a hardscrabble life and you needed family to survive. "I was lucky since most folks living
in or near Jonestown were related to me. But they were all
good folks there, even the ones we weren’t actually related to," he added. Folks from these parts possess certain attributes;
besides being strong, sturdy and reliable, they were - perhaps forced by nature
and their limited resources - inherently clever. Most were hard-working
people who didn’t think of themselves as heroes. Those folks
had to be resourceful ‘cause no one was going to help them.
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