As Highway 119 cleaves through the mountains of eastern Kentucky, exposed bands of black gold stretch on for miles – come get us if you can, they tease. And for years, miners did: they had good employment that earned them upwards of $70,000 a year and built a legacy of blue-collar pride in the region. “We felt like what we did was important,” says Rusty Justice, a self-described entrepreneur who hauled his first truck of coal in eighth grade. And it was. In 2004, coal powered half of America’s electrical needs.
But by 2011, Justice and his business partner, Lynn Parish, who worked in coal for 40 years, began to worry. Natural gas was enjoying an uptick that would later turn into a surge thanks to new fracking technologies, and the men could see “Obama wasn’t going to be kind” to them. So the two coal men from Pikeville began thinking about how they could diversify.
Don’t get them wrong: coal in Kentucky is still very much king. But it is king the same way Queen Elizabeth is the monarch of the UK: a house of power to be revered, but no longer counted on for daily providence. For that, coal country must transform itself into something else, a new place on the map the hopeful call “Silicon Holler”.
In its own, proud way, Pikeville has a new message for America: we’re ready to move on if you’re ready to let us do it our way. That means some help from the government, but not a handout. “We need to identify the doers and facilitate their ideas,” Justice says.
Over a plate of barbecue and sweet potatoes, Justice recounts a doer’s quest to find a business idea outside of coal. “We considered just about everything. Windfarms, solar farms, hog farms – you name it,” he laughs. As unemployment tore through their 7,000-person town, Justice and Parish prayed for a business idea that would not just pay, but pay people what they had been making before in the mines.
“We thought about our greatest strengths and we said, ‘Our mountains, our people’. Then we thought about our greatest weaknesses and we said the same thing.” The mountains were beautiful, but they were expensive to transport anything across. The people were hard-working but lacked education. Their breakthrough came when Justice and Parish visited a workforce retraining expo in 2014 in Lexington, where they learned about coding.
The concept appealed to them. Each year, 600,000 US tech jobs go unfilled, jobs that ultimately go overseas but could be on-shored if more Americans had the right skills. Even better, the job paid the same as the mines.
Justice had seen first-hand how miners employed logic to solve life or death problems underground. Still, he wondered, could a coalminer really code? He called his computer-savvy friend Justin Hall with that question. “I don’t see why not,” Hall said. “Great, you’re hired,” Justice told him.
They placed ads for their new web and app design company, Bitsource, in 2015, then watched as more than 900 applications rolled in. From this pool, they chose 11 former miners who scored highest on a coding aptitude test. Two years later, in an old Coca-Cola factory by the Big Sandy river, nine men and one woman remain.
On a late March day, Hall stands at a whiteboard in front of three coders, diagramming a web app they’ve been commissioned to build that will track the outcomes of a health program that gives participants food vouchers to take to the farmers’ market. He fills the board with modules and nodes as the guys shout out ideas in lingo that eventually makes Garland Couch, a 55-year-old coder, pause at how far they’ve come. “Man, we’re nerds now,” he laughs, pushing his Under Armour cap back on his head. After the session, they break for lunch, then return to work with Drupal software on laptops whose Apple icons glow next to bumper stickers that say “Friend of Coal”.
Despite the team’s new profession, the stickers are a nod of respect to an industry they all got their start in, an industry that still employs some of their friends and family. As Parish is fond of saying, change is necessary, “but you don’t want to upset the one who brought you to the dance”.
Bitsource is not the only tech company changing Kentucky. After realizing how difficult it was to get coders to move to Louisville, Ankur Gopal, CEO of Interapt, began TechHire East Kentucky (TEKY) to train local talent in a program modeled off the success of Bitsource. In mid-March, Congressman Ro Khanna of California traveled to Paintsville, Kentucky, to meet TEKY’s first graduating class of 30, and to learn how Silicon Holler can meet the needs of Silicon Valley. The congressman said later by phone that he returned to his district shocked by the appetite for diversification he had encountered in former coal country. “More people need to go down there and see what I saw,” he said.
Despite the congressman’s enthusiasm, Silicon Holler faces two significant barriers to making its on-shoring vision a reality. The first is broadband. Most Americans living in cities are used to instantaneous internet, but broadband is rare in Kentucky and that means that most modern companies won’t even consider locating in their towns.
No one knows that better than Donovan Blackburn, the city manager of Pikeville, who is partly responsible for curbing Pikeville’s unemployment rate, which still has not dipped below 10%. He is another one of the charismatic tech visionaries in eastern Kentucky who thinks Silicon Holler is part of the answer. But he’s also a realist. If Pikeville doesn’t get broadband – and fast – it will be shut off from the modern economy, no matter how many capable coders live in the area.
The predicament is maddening to Blackburn. Pikeville can’t get new jobs without broadband. But it can’t get broadband without the $15m it would cost to connect Pikeville to the backbone of fiber optic cables the state is building across Kentucky in a broadband initiative of its own called KYWired. Blackburn is hopeful that the federal government will step in with a subsidy, although he admits the Trump administration has not looked eager to spend more money in Appalachia.
The 2018 budget the White House submitted to Congress eliminated both the Appalachia Regional Commission and the US Economic Development Commission, two organizations specifically appointed with $340m to help places like eastern Kentucky recover from coal’s collapse. But Blackburn remains confident that the administration will play ball, driven by his conviction that they have a moral responsibility to do so. “The federal government broke it, so the federal government needs to fix it,” he says, referring to the Obama-era regulations most in Pikeville selectively blame for coal’s collapse. “That money is going to come out of their pocket one way or another,” he says, either in the form of welfare payments, or through investments in infrastructure. “We don’t want a fish,” Blackburn says, echoing Justice. “We want to learn how to.”
On another day, Hall and his young creative director, Payton May, are having lunch at Mona’s, a family restaurant. May mentions the calls they have gotten from several companies asking “how they can do a Bitsource, too”. One of them was Google. The other was a mining company in Australia. Hall says they were uncomfortable that anyone thought what they were doing was so unique, and they were unsure of what to say. “Well,” May says looking over at Hall across his glass of Pepsi, “you might want to tell them to collapse their economy first”.
It was a reference to what every coder at Bitsource named as the principal reason they were able to do what they did: starvation is the mother of motivation.
If Bitsource didn’t work out, their next option was leaving Pikeville for some place like Louisville or Lexington. No one wanted to pull children out of school, or sell homes. So for the first 22 weeks, Couch, the 55-year-old coder, says, he didn’t look up from his tutorials to learn his neighbor’s last name. Although Couch says there were many times he felt like giving up, particularly when they got to JavaScript, what saved him was a perfectionist’s mentality he’d developed working over 30 years in the mines. Couch’s colleague, William Stephens, agrees. “In the mines, if you messed up, you could either kill someone or cost your company millions of dollars,” he explains, cracking peanuts on a Friday afternoon after work. “Failure for us was just not an option.”
It’s a work ethic Hall believes could benefit companies – if they can get over their culture shock.
Two years in, Hall says, teaching the miners to code hasn’t been the hardest part. It’s finding enough clients to hire them – despite staffers having completed more than 60 projects and getting Drupal-certified, Hall says, companies are still cautious to take a chance on them. Part of that is because they are new, but part of it, he believes, is because some companies still hold regional biases. “I’ve gone to friends in Louisville and they’ll say, ‘You guys in Pikeville? You’re kind of a bunch of hillbillies, aren’t you?’” Blackburn says he has encountered similar dynamics. “People will say, ‘Oh, you’re going to Pikeville? Better make sure you’re packin’! There’s this idea still out there we’re all still barefoot and pregnant.”
For all the negative stereotypes associated with it, Pikeville has no interest in divorcing itself from its hillbilly roots. For one thing, it’s the only identity residents have ever known, and nothing else has ever fit. “Every other part of the country I’ve ever gone to, I’ve always felt uncomfortable,” Justice says. The guys at Bitsource also view being a hillbilly is something positive. “A hillbilly is someone who is hard-working, thoughtful, and loyal,” Couch says. “And rugged,” he adds. “Because we’ve seen some tough times.”
As eastern Kentucky scrambles to connect with the modern economy, it is certain they will see some more. But Pikeville is no stranger to transformation, and working with Washington is part of its civic DNA.
In 1960, Pikeville’s mayor, William Hambly, went to the capital with a big ask for the town. He wanted funds to reroute the railroad and the river through the Peach Orchard Mountain. The first polluted Pikeville and made his patients sick; the other flooded often and created successive disasters. Washington agreed, and, in a feat of dirt-piling rivaled in the western hemisphere only by the Panama Canal, the so-called “Cut Through Project” created 400 new acres of flat land to build on, changing the trajectory of development in Pikeville forever. It would change the culture, too.
“In Pikeville we already moved the mountain,” Justice says. “Nothing really much scares us.”
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