Matewan Garden Club

written by Iris Lee Underwood

Eighteen-year-old Henry Blankenship dreams of building a house for his childhood sweetheart, Annie Dill, and his mother Gertie, known by their hill folk as the “woman with a shovel.” Annie dreams of six children and a room of her own to pen the unsung legacies of Appalachian women—yet Annie’s mother, Margaret Dill, President of Matewan Garden Club, has other, bigger plans for her only child. Unwittingly, Russian refugees Natalia Semenov and her son Olaf, Henry’s employers at Hunt’s Feed & Seed, come to Henry and Annie’s rescue. 
    Matewan Garden Club spans three generations and a multitude of dreams amongst the tight-knit immigrant coal camps and struggling towns along Tug Fork: Williamson, Blackberry City, Red Jacket, Thacker Holler, and countless hollers in between. Like the river’s many tributaries, these communities converge in Depression-era Matewan, West Virginia, to build enduring love amid the business of native flora and fauna—seedlings of a post-WWI Europe in chaos, the Bolshevik Revolution—and a brand new America.

Eighteen-year-old Henry Blankenship dreams of building a house for his childhood sweetheart, Annie Dill, and his mother Gertie, known by their hill folk as the “woman with a shovel.” Annie dreams of having six children and a room of her own in which to pen the unsung legacies of Appalachian women–yet Annie’s mother, Margaret Dill, President of the Matewan Garden Club, has other, bigger plans for her only child. Unwittingly, Russian refugees Natalia Semenov and her son Olaf, Henry’s employers at Hunt’s Feed & Seed, come to Henry and Annie’s rescue. ‘Matewan Garden Club’ spans three generations and a multitude of dreams amongst the tight-knit immigrant coal camps and struggling towns along Tug Fork: Williamson, Blackberry City, Red Jacket, Thacker Holler, and countless hollers in between. Like the river’s many tributaries, these communities converge in Depression-era Matewan, West Virginia to build enduring love amid the business of native flora and fauna–seedlings of a post-WWI Europe in chaos, the Bolshevik Revolution–and a brand-new America.