By Danielle Moore November 5, 2025 Photos courtesy of the author. Cover photo: Danielle (second from right) with her sisters, her cousins, and her great-grandmother, Mamaw Blanche. There is a scene in the movie O Brother, Where Art Thou? where George Clooney’s character, Ulysses, yells, “Well, ain’t this place a geographical oddity, two weeks from everywhere!” Often, this is how it felt growing up in Buchanan County, Virginia. In the middle of coal country, Buchanan County is situated in far Southwest Virginia, bordering both West Virginia and Kentucky. Pilgrims Knob, the community where I grew up, is the same community where my mother grew up. The house my parents live in now— the house I grew up in—was my mother’s childhood home. My father grew up on the other side of Buchanan County and my paternal grandparents still live there. My family struggled a lot when I was growing up. My dad owned his own masonry and carpentry business, but in my small community, there were not always opportunities for work. With mine closures and layoffs, my hometown kept dwindling as people moved away to find jobs. When I was three years old, my family moved to Moneta, Virginia in search of better opportunities. Moneta was near Smith Mountain Lake, and someone my dad knew at the time told him they were building a lot of new lake houses there and they needed someone who could do masonry. Being close to the lake did afford my dad more jobs, and when I was eight years old, we were able to move out of our trailer and into the house my dad built on our three-acre property. Two years later, though, the Great Recession hit and my family lost the house. Luckily, we still had our home in Pilgrims Knob. All of our family still lived in Buchanan County, so we traveled home often to visit family for holidays and would stay for weeks at a time during the summer. So, moving back home was the obvious choice after the devastating loss of our house in Moneta. We had never moved any of our stuff out of our house in Buchanan County, so when we moved back, it was almost as if we never left. Rural was not a word I heard a lot when I was growing up. Looking back, I know we must have talked about the definition in social studies class, but it was never a word that folks around me used to describe where we lived. The words I heard to describe my community were in the mountains, Appalachian, coal country, in-the-middle-of-nowhere, creeks and hollers, poor, rundown, white trash, redneck, religious, drugs, and teenage pregnancy. I saw a lot of the dark sides of my community, racked with persistent poverty, drug addiction, job loss, and crime. However, those things were not at the forefront of my mind when I was young. Instead, I saw the kindness of friends and neighbors. Danielle (left) with her older sister, Desiree, playing in the snow. When we moved back to Buchanan County, our neighbors came together to help buy us a new washer and dryer when ours suddenly died. One of the local churches helped us pay our electricity and water bills (more times than I would like to admit), and the local food pantry donated food and clothing items. Through it all, no one ever made us feel small, but they always made sure we were taken care of. There were a lot of times money was tight, and there were times we had to pay for gas with rolled change, but we never went hungry and we always had clothes, thanks to our friends and neighbors. Buchanan County does not have a big college-going culture because a lot of the jobs available are trade or extraction jobs that do not require a college degree. Still, all my teachers, neighbors, family members, and fellow church-goers insisted that I needed to go to college and get a good job. I didn’t have a real career plan, but I knew I didn’t want to do any of the jobs traditionally designated for women back home, which included being a teacher, nurse, social services worker, or stay-at-home mom. I remember the shock of moving from Pilgrims Knob to Blacksburg, Virginia for college. In Pilgrims Knob, you had to travel at least 30 minutes to the grocery store, 90 minutes to the nearest mall, and there were no fast food options for 20 miles. In contrast, Blacksburg was a place with roundabouts, tons of stop lights, sidewalks and crosswalks, limitless food options, and people galore. It was said to be a “small town taken over by the university.” I remember thinking how massive Virginia Tech felt at my freshman orientation. Trying to find parking near Lane Stadium, having to get on a bus and be shuttled to the building where orientation was, and not knowing where any of the buildings were was very intimidating. At first, I questioned my decision to go to school there. While in college, I ultimately decided I wanted to be an editor because that was the only job people said you could do with an English degree if you didn’t want to teach. To be a more competitive applicant, I decided to pursue my master’s degree after undergrad. It wasn’t until graduate school that I really recognized and embraced my love for my rural community. I married my high school sweetheart the summer after graduating from Virginia Tech, and a week later, we moved to Chicago, Illinois so I could start my master’s program. Chicago is one of the largest cities in the United States, and when we moved there, we were in the middle of a pandemic. To say my perception of the world changed would be an understatement. I remember my husband being freaked out the first day that he saw the sun set all the way down—before that, we had only seen the sun vanish behind the mountains. Not only was the scenery different, but the pace of living in Chicago was different. Living in Chicago was the first time I didn’t have to rely on a car to get around, I could walk to work and I took the “L” everywhere else. There were more people in some apartment buildings in Chicago than there were in my hometown of Pilgrims Knob. I was used to hearing crickets chirping and frogs croaking at night, but in Chicago we could hear the “L” running, people walking and talking on the sidewalks below our apartment, cars passing, and horns blaring at all times—it never truly got quiet. Danielle with her husband, Brandon, after her graduation from DePaul University in Chicago. I don’t know if I would have noticed the stark differences as much if my major hadn’t been Writing and Publishing. Because most of my classes required weekly writing assignments, I found myself always returning to my rural roots for inspiration, so much so that my portfolio was titled “Events from Appalachian Eyes.” I did not know how rural I was until I was placed in one of the most urban spaces in America. Often when people describe rural places, one of the first words they think of is farming or cows. There are definitely a lot of farms where I am from, but my family did not have a farm. We would plant large gardens, but for the most part we did not own farm animals. One of the next words that people talk about is nature. Although I didn’t live down a dirt road in the middle of the woods—I lived on the hillside above the creek with a handful of neighbors—I considered myself close to nature. My father would go into the woods and hunt deer, ginseng, and dryland fish and sometimes I got to go with him. My sisters and I would climb trees, make dirt houses, walk around barefoot, and play in the creek. One of the next words people think of is poverty. While we weren’t the poorest family around, we were definitely poor, but there were lots of people in my community that weren’t. A lot of my neighbors were well off because they were able to benefit from the coal mining boom in the 1970s. The word rural can also inspire an image of dilapidated buildings, overgrown with kudzu. Yes, there are a lot of rundown buildings back home (every time I drive back home there seem to be more businesses closed and houses deserted), but for the people that are still there, it is home. It is and will always be my home. Looking back, I have come full circle. I work at the big, intimidating university I started my college journey at, where I now have the opportunity to help rural students from across Virginia realize their plans after high school. This spring, I began my PhD in Rural Education at Virginia Tech with a goal to further learn the needs of rural youth. My aim is not to save rural students from their communities; instead, I want to help students highlight what is special about their rural communities and the unique knowledge they can gain from them. Danielle on her family’s front porch in Pilgrims Knob, Virginia. Appalachian Home Bursts of orange and yellow maple leaves attached to supple olden trees, float aloft the road serenely above my head as we climb home. The mountain tops at wintertime erased by silver darkened skies, above the silent icy creek, reach down to meet me from their peaks. Dogwoods bloom along the fences, their petals flutter past the cattle, breathing the smell of new turned earth and the soundless falling of fresh seeds. United by the southern sun, my sisters and I catch crawdads down in the creek until we hear the crickets chirp, warm dirt sinks under shoeless feet. Danielle Moore is a first-year PhD student in Rural Education at Virginia Tech. Subscribe here! * indicates required Email Address * /* real people should not fill this in and expect good things – do not remove this or risk form bot signups */
