Appalachian History

Feature film ‘Coal Dust’ gets underway

Coal Dust depicts a modern lobbyist who is called home to see her family. She reflects on her town/family’s history with coal mines.

When I first wrote about our Grandma Gatewood project for Appalachian History in 2013, we were at the half-way point of our shooting schedule.

75 years ago the definitive Appalachian novel was published—James Still’s River of Earth. ‘Appalachian’ literature did not exist then.

200 ft. below Lake Keowee sits Ft Prince George, an early British military outpost, & the Cherokee village Keowee–“land of mulberry groves.”

“The idea of Ole Cap just sort of grew on me after I met an old man who had gone to work in the mines when he was 7 years old,” says Swiesz.