Some lives are remembered long after the end, yet some breaths are all too easily neglected. Our remembrance is a conscious and collective choice. Our mourning is, at its core, deeply political (Heather Pool).

From 1870s to 1930s, many coal mines opened in West Virginia, including Nuttallburg. Thousands of native Appalachians, African Americans, and immigrants from Europe came to the coal fields for work. They lived in “coal camps,” where existed segregation by status, race, and ethnicity. When mines got increasingly mechanized during the 1950s, black miners were the first to lost jobs, and they left in search of a home elsewhere. Now, their lives are forgotten, and only the name of the ghost town Nuttallburg persists.