JACKSON, Ky. — In the 24 hours since J.D. Vance became Donald Trump’s surrogate Republican presidential candidate, Stephen Bowling, a city council member and director of the Breathitt County Public Library, has fielded more than a dozen calls from news outlets enormous and compact.
The place that Vance wrote in his bestselling memoir that “will always have my heart” is back in the spotlight as the newly elected U.S. senator from Ohio prepares to address a national television audience and the Republican National Convention on Wednesday night.
The search for Vance’s traces in his childhood home leads down winding black asphalt through deep shadows of stream banks, past glowing fields of Queen Anne lace and lowland corn plots. It leads to people’s porches to ask for directions, where, contrary to popular stereotype, a stranger approaching is no substantial deal. It leads to a place steeped in political violence.
This place, as it came to be known, was the site of one of the bloodiest feuds in Appalachia.
The violence erupted in the behind schedule 19th century during a period of economic upheaval that sometimes fanned the flames of Civil War-era animosities. The arrival of railroads and the coal industry ushered in a boom that created winners and losers, as well as an “explosion of wealth” that Bowling says communities had trouble managing.
“We’re still shooting at each other,” he adds. “We’re just doing it on Facebook. We’re still firing warning shots over people’s heads. We’re shooting at people. We’re doing it from a keyboard.”
Breathitt County, still a hotbed of political loyalty, votes Republican in national elections, while most voters and local officials still registered Democrats. Breathitt sent a Democrat to the Kentucky House until Republicans redrawn the district. Republican Donald Trump beat Breathitt in both of his presidential runs. As did Democrat Andy Beshear in both of his runs for governor.
Breathitt County’s 13,500 residents have not escaped the bitter polarization that is dividing the country, said Mark Wireman, who guided the national news agency reporter.
Wireman who was Gatewood Galbraith’s Vice Presidential Candidate in Kentucky’s 2007 Democratic primary for governor, now describes himself as a “Rand Paul, Thomas Massie, Mike Lee Republican.” Wireman worries that the national debt is unsustainable and blames President Joe Biden and Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky for “putting this on the back burner.”
Wireman, a longtime family friend who knows Vance, says the former Marine, Yale Law School graduate and recent venture capitalist is “intelligent, conscientious and God-fearing.”
“I guess I’m happy for him. Some people, his family, are afraid for him because of what’s going on in the country,” referring to the failed assassination attempt on Trump last weekend. “It’s a crazy time. I’m going to pray for him and the country.”
Vance’s grandparents moved to Middletown, Ohio, where his grandfather worked at the Armco steel mill and where Vance was born in 1984. The family often returned to Breathitt County, where Vance also spent time during summers.
Vance drew on his Kentucky roots in speech on July 10 at a conference organized by the New Right group National Conservatism, where he criticized U.S. military aid to Ukraine, free trade policies and immigration. He spoke of driving down Kentucky Route 15 to Jackson, “where all my relatives come from, deep in the heart of Central Appalachia,” and recalled proposing to his wife. “I said, honey, I’m coming with $120,000 in law school debt and a cemetery plot in eastern Kentucky.”
He said he hopes he, his wife and children will be buried “in this little mountain cemetery,” bringing its residents closer to “seven generations of people who built this country, who created things in this country, and who would fight and die to protect this country if they were asked to.”
Whitney Haddix said a friend sent her a clip of Vance’s speech and his words moved her. Haddix, her husband Brandon and their three children live just a few hundred yards down the hill from Vance’s family cemetery, one of countless compact cemeteries dotting the mountains.
“I feel like he remembered where he came from, that he appreciated where he came from and that he didn’t forget, and that means more than words,” she said. “We’re not rednecks from Eastern Kentucky. We’re not just barefoot and pregnant. We’re people who work really hard and do what we can and who are the type of people who would give the shirt off their backs to help others. That’s what we do. It’s ingrained in us.”
The Haddix family home is near Frozen Creek in a three-acre clearing on the edge of a steep old-growth forest; they also own her grandparents’ farm nearby. Vance bought more than 100 acres of land in the area, a buffer that protects the cemetery and the gravestone of Bonnie Blanton Vance, the beloved “mamaw” who provided stability during Vance’s mother’s addictive childhood.
Sitting on her porch with a litter of kittens playing under it, Whitney Haddix said, “I feel like JD Vance would do the right thing. I feel like he would fight for our country. I’m not a Republican. I’m not a Democrat. I go by what I feel, but I feel like we need someone to stand up for us, for the people that they elected to protect and take care of.”
Haddix, a registered nurse, also praised Beshear, a Democrat, especially for his leadership during the pandemic.
“We are Trump supporters,” she said, adding intriguingly that she is also waiting to see who the Democrats will nominate for president.
How JD Vance Went from ‘Elegy for the Poor’ to Trump’s 2024 Vice Presidential Running Man
Breathitt residents know that the book that launched the 31-year-old Vance onto the national stage in 2016 for explaining the white working-class backlash that helped elect Trump also sparked a backlash among Appalachians. “Hillbilly Elegy” has been criticized for perpetuating the worst stereotypes about the region and its people. The memoir was adapted into a Netflix movie by producer Ron Howard.
“JD Vance is not representative of the Appalachian region I know and love,” says Mandi Fugate Sheffel, a Breathitt County resident and founder and owner of a bookstore in nearby Hazard. “It’s not for working people.”
He says he directs customers browsing the Appalachian section of Read Spotted Newt to books that offer a fuller, more nuanced picture than “Hillbilly Elegy” of the region’s ethnic and racial diversity and its complexities, including the systemic forces and extractive industries that have saddled it with widespread poverty.
Elizabeth’s Catte’s Recommends “What You Don’t Get Right About Appalachia” AND “Appalachia’s Reckoning” published by West Virginia University Press, as well as novels by Silas House and Robert Gipe.
“It’s so frustrating that people far away think ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ is about Appalachia. … It gives them permission to believe everything they believed about Appalachia” and to write off the region as unredeemed and unworthy of attention and lend a hand. She said Vance has leaned on his Appalachian roots to brag about overcoming them, and that he has changed his mind about his earlier opposition to Trump.
Bowling, the library director, says Vance “has done a great job of portraying his family over the years. The book has become more of a symbol of Appalachia than he intended.” If any place deserves to be hurt by Vance’s portrayal, Bowling says, it’s his hometown of Middletown, Ohio.
Vance returns to Breathitt County fairly often to pay his respects at the cemetery and to visit the public library, where he and his sister sometimes research family history, though less frequently, Bowling said, since winning the Senate election in 2022.
Behind the register at Indian Hollow Liquors in Jackson, Aaron Combs said he was familiar with Vance’s history and local connections, but his addition to the ticket didn’t seem to affect his view of the presidential choices facing voters. “I don’t like any of them, honestly.”
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