Welcome to Beautiful Parkersburg, West Virginia
Home to one of the most brazen, deadly corporate gambits
in U.S. history.
“Hold on to something,” Jim Tennant warned as he fired up his
tractor. We lurched down a rutted dirt road past the old clapboard
farmhouse where he grew up. Jim still calls it “the home place,”
although its windows are now boarded up and the outhouse is crumbling
into the field.
At 72, Jim is so slight that he nearly disappears into his baggy
plaid shirt. But he drives his tractor like a dirt bike. We sped past
the caved-in hog pen and skidded down a riverbank. The tractor tipped
precariously toward the water, slamming into a fallen tree, but Jim just
laughed.
When we had gone as far as the tractor could take us, Jim climbed off
and squeezed through a barbed-wire fence. On the other side was a lush
field teeming with crabapple and sycamore, and beyond that, the muddy
trickle of water, known as Dry Run Creek, that has brought Jim’s family
so much heartache. “This is what Dry Run looks like in the wet season,”
Jim told me. “Summer grazing was in the hollow up there—before they
destroyed everything, at least.”
READ MORE:
http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/welcome-to-beautiful-parkersburg/
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