08/27/2026
This describes several of my mom’s siblings. My uncles moved to Ohio & Michigan to work in the automotive factories there. They retired from those companies, but they are buried here in the Sandlin family’s cemeteries behind the Pleasant Run Baptist Church on Greenbriar & on Sandlin Branch.
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He worked thirty years in Ohio and he never once thought of himself as living there.
That sentence describes several million people, and it is the part of the Great Migration out of these mountains that almost nobody outside them understands. Between the nineteen forties and the nineteen seventies, families left the coalfields and the hill farms by the hundreds of thousands and went north to Akron, Dayton, Cincinnati, Detroit, Cleveland, Indianapolis and Baltimore. They found work. They bought houses. They raised children who grew up with flat northern vowels and no idea what a to***co barn or coal mine was.
And a great many of them never stopped calling the mountains home. Not as a figure of speech. As a legal and logistical fact, worked out in advance and paid for in installments.
Because the plan, for an enormous number of them, was to come back. Not to retire back, though plenty did but to be buried back home.
Funeral homes in the northern industrial cities learned this early and built whole parts of their business around it. A man dies in a hospital in Cincinnati, Ohio on a Tuesday. By Thursday a hearse is coming south down US Highway 25 with the family strung out behind it in cars, and by Friday afternoon six of his family and friends are carrying him up a hillside in Laurel County, Kentucky to a grave in ground his great grandfather cleared many years ago for a family cemetery.
Some of those cemeteries cannot be reached by any vehicle at all. The road quits at the bottom and the last two hundred yards are straight up through grass. The men carry him. That is simply understood, and the suits get grass stained, and nobody minds.
People up north sometimes read that as sentimentality. It is not. It is a claim. A person buried in that ground is on the list of people who belong to that place, permanently, and no number of years spent in a automotive factory can take him off it.
There are hollows in eastern Kentucky where the population of the cemetery on the hill is larger than the population of the houses below it, and where most of the names up there died a very long way from here.
They went where the work was. They came back where they were from to be buried. This is still happening today.
