Sinking Creek and Newport, Sacrificed
Within Appalachia is some of the planet’s oldest land, and in certain places that vast age feels tangible. There’s a certain solidity in the primeval forests, where sound is absorbed by the thick dark soil, and the air moves gracefully over rounded mountain contours. To happen upon these special spaces can feel jarring – they are that palpably different. The waterway now known as Sinking Creek in Virginia’s Giles and Craig Counties has such havens. It’s aptly named, since depending on the time of year and rainfall, Sinking Creek sometimes flows all the way to the New River. But in times of low flow, the many sinkholes that characterize the karst terrain here channel the water into underground cavities well short of the New River.
Sinking Creek has changed dramatically over time: there’s a sharp elbow in the creek at Rt. 42 that’s evidence of a ‘stream piracy’ event thousands of years ago, a geo-morphological event that occurs when a more forceful waterway erodes into a smaller one.
Evidence of humans here goes back more than 12,000 years, in this rightful home of the Yesan (Tutelo), Saponi, Monacan, S’atsoyaha (Yuchi) and Moneton Indigenous peoples.
********** ********** **********
The population of the town of Newport is about 1800 now, but in the late 1800s it was a bustling town with several newspapers, distilleries, grist mills, and sawmills. An iron foundry was powered by a dam across Sinking Creek. It was a bustling place… until the 1902 blaze that consumed most of the town. Only a handful of buildings escaped the blaze, including the Mt Olivet/Newport church that dates back to 1850, the slave cabin behind it and a few other structures. Those make up most of the buildings that are now listed on the Historical Register.
Rebuilding began almost immediately. It became a covered bridge mecca, boasting 4 in close proximity to Newport proper. Two crossed Sinking Creek and are still extant. One is on private property, and one was washed away 8 years ago.
Newport’s geology is similar to Tennessee’s, where Morris Fleischer grew up, and is just one reason for his affinity to the area. Some of his earliest and strongest memories are of his mother and grandmother putting out seed and suet for songbirds. Thus, the pollinator gardens at the Mt Olivet/Newport Methodist Church where Morris has served as minister for 16 years is a source of pride and sustenance for him. He revels in knowing that the nasturtiums there not only support the insect pollinators, but also amend community salads. As the town’s only full-time minister, he has opened the church to all as a community space, especially the gardens and the gazebo, which he points out retains the footprint of a former slave cabin, and utilizes that cabin’s original rock steps.
The congregation is a purple mix, with a 60%/40% split of anti/pro pipeline sentiment. The political ratio is a bit different: 60% conservative to about 40% progressive. ‘The pipeline issue transcends political boundaries and brought people together in a way unlike before,’ he states. In this farming community, property rights and eminent domain figure largely in people’s feelings about the pipeline. Many families here trace their lineage back 7 generations. When pipeline corridors dictate where and how cattle can be moved, what can be built on the right-of-way, and whether machinery can move across it, these factors all directly affect family heritage and income.
Morris, as he prefers to be called, intends for his church to be ‘a place where people can safely lament’ the pipeline’s harms. Likening the pipeline to a bodily wound, he’s acutely aware the pipeline will ‘forever remain a scar on the topography and psyche of this community.’ And so, the church has become a safe place for community gatherings to share information and conversations. The Preserve Giles group has met there weekly for 9 years. Although he aims to not take sides within his congregation, he recognizes that a livable future can’t include fossil fuels. To maintain his respect for humanity, he doesn’t disparage the workers from making a living. Once a source of deep community pride, Newport’s National Historic Register designation proved useless in altering the pipeline’s route. He mourns the community’s future generations that will suffer from the contaminated soils as a result of leached toxic compounds from the degraded pipe coating. He’s concerned for the community’s ecotourism revenue, for the negative effects that will result from unsightly stream crossings, and deleterious impacts of sedimentation that have already occurred on the 32 wild and scenic miles the New River courses through the county. He cites with pride and wonder that the New River is home to 4 aquatic species that exist nowhere else.
The mink that are part of the ecosystem here he feels have just as much right to be here as he does. Morris deeply feels the inter-relatedness of life forms to the point that ‘when one point is damaged, it all suffers.’ Morris fondly recalls a community member who started a Creation Camp Day, bringing in sheep and big rabbits. A 4H program translated photographs of animals into works in clay. Community trash pickup days were organized. Stewardship is important to him, and he fondly recalls trout releases into Sinking Creek nearby at Newport Park, where 12 fish species have been documented.
Water is omnipresent in scripture, Morris recounts, as essential to life. These springs are the sole source of water for most households in the area. The church pulpit is positioned directly over the confluence of 2 creeks that run behind the church, giving his sermons energy, or humorously, he imagines a trap door opening to deposit him into the water should be deliver an unpopular sermon.
The visible and audible pipeline transgressions are constant and oppressive: Heavy machinery constantly lumbers along the road mere feet from the church. The cacophony of beeping machines and earth movers scraping rock penetrate the church’s inner rooms. Morris is acutely aware that at just 45 yards from the pipeline, his entire church is well within the incineration zone, where an explosion would instantly vaporize everyone and everything on the site. Tragically, Newport’s volunteer fire department is in the evacuation zone, and its rescue squad is in the incineration zone.
The pipeline’s presence runs directly counter to Morris’ core theology, which is to ‘care for creation, to increase gratitude, stewardship and care of the earth.’ He is acutely aware of the traumatic stress construction has brought to the area. The emotional toll on the community is palpable. Following the first week of tree felling, the church held a lamentation service with a harpist and brass band. Prayers from several denominations were offered, to represent the commonality of the plight. Morris commiserates with the community on the mourner’s bench, at services, and one on one. He strives to depersonalize the effects of the onslaught, to avoid depression. Even so, he must occasionally leave the church to walk amidst nature elsewhere, to temporarily escape the active destruction beside his sanctuary.
The dichotomy of the situation weighs heavily on him. Aware of the responsibility of caring for the gift of creation, Morris’ leadership provides for people who suffer more than he is. His acts of compassion and love serve to keep him sane. Community support projects fill the church, supporting food insecure K-7 schoolkids with anonymous backpacks filled with easy to prepare foods, baby blankets and adult coloring books are available for new families, there’s a library for young mothers and also a banned book library.
Outside in the pollinator garden, Morris recognizes the song of the towhee, which sparks a memory of his early maternal influences. It’s call to him means all is right with the world. And for that fleeing moment, it is.
~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~
This is a place that beckons to people to return. In 2004, Clarence and Karolyn Givens bought the historic 1836 Leffel Farm in Newport, at the edge of Giles County, very close to where Clarence had grown up in neighboring Craig County. He’d farmed the Leffel Farm since the 1980s, and while the couple lived on a farm in Blacksburg, they also farmed their Newport property, and enjoyed it for recreation, hiking, camping and hunting. Most importantly, this property was an investment for them – it was to be their children’s inheritance. The Givenses treasured this quiet, lovely spot on the side of Sinking Creek Mountain. But in 2015, Mountain Valley Pipeline LLC announced their intent to condemn the farm and take it through eminent domain proceedings in Federal Court.
In response, the couple helped start Preserve Newport Historic Properties in 2015 to protect the older portion of the town that had barely survived the devastating 1902 fire that burned all but the church and a few other buildings. With 14 historic properties on the route, the community was hopeful the town’s 1994 listing on the National Register of Historic Places would spare them. Preserve Newport formed when the MVP was announced, and in 2000, succeeded in getting a far larger area designated as the Greater Newport Rural Historic District, including mills, farms, 3 covered bridges, churches and schools. It became a tight knit group with Clarence serving as a most capable ambassador. The country’s first statewide historic preservation group, founded in 1889 as the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities (now ‘Preservation Virginia’) named Newport one of Virginia’s most endangered historic places in 2018.
The Givenses did all the right things. Their written history of the community they presented at a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) listening session in Roanoke. After speaking into a recorder her allotted 3 minutes, Karolyn knew it would never be heard or read, and that this was just another regulatory hoop they’d been made to jump through. Preserve Newport raised funds to hire a defense lawyer in preparation for what would surely be lengthy lawsuits. But tragically, on the day the couple was to sign their easement agreement, Clarence suddenly died . Through her grief, Karolyn nonetheless persevered, hearing Clarence’s voice clearly in her ear, urging her to ‘never, ever give up the land battle.’
Slogging through the paperwork to get up to speed, Karolyn came to realize the high level of corruption throughout the process: Lawyers, judges, and courts were merely procedural stops through the eminent domain process of property condemnation, through the ‘quick take tolling orders’ that allow construction to begin before a compensation agreement is reached. She saw the process as ‘They took the land, tore it up before they paid for it, turned us upside down, chewed us up, and spit us out.’
Lawyers suggested she settle before going to court, but Karolyn was willing to take her case to the Supreme Court, and almost got there. But only 10% of cases filed to the high court each year are heard. Her case lost at the appellate court level. MVP asked her not to talk about the case and the true damages, otherwise she would get no settlement. Being a person of strong principle, she couldn’t agree, and rewrote the agreement so as not to sign away her First Amendment rights. She wasn’t about to be muzzled into not being honest that the farmhouse was within the blast/evacuation zone. She would never be able to sell a dangerous property without being honest about that. Contrary to MVP’s common reassurance, Karolyn’s farm’s assessment dropped by $100k the following year.
The article Karolyn wrote for the Roanoke Times about the ugly truth of the pipeline had the Newport Historic Property Group in tears when she read it to them. Everyone’s lives were in danger.
MVP’s token offering to the town in exchange for forever scarring the land, water and lives there was a video of a drive through Newport’s historic zone.
Newport lies within a significant karst area in western Virginia, thoroughly documented by geologist Dr Ernst Kastning in his 2016 comment to FERC, warning that the prolific caves and spontaneous sinkholes makes the area unsuitable for pipeline infrastructure. Karst is dissolved limestone, a fragile and ever-changing skeletal underground structure with streams and aquifers, the channels of which are largely uncharted. It’s the karst that’s responsible for redirecting Sinking Creek to underground channels. Nonetheless, construction began in Newport.
Tree felling to clear the 125’ right of way began. Constant chainsaw buzzing raised the hair on Newport’s residents’ necks, and then the violence of blasting, and then the relentless trenching through the land. Trucks with 3 sections of 40’ pipe on each clogged the narrow roads. The pipeline bisects Karolyn’s farm, roughly parallel to Sinking Creek Mountain.
Daily, after MVP finished working, Karolyn and her neighbors surveyed the damage. They quickly began finding odd rocks - speleothems – which are formed very slowly by water depositing minerals within caves. Because of the area’s numerous caves, there are a plethora of cavers in the area, and from them she learned that these rocks were evidence of a cave or a sinkhole. Both are evidence of karst formations and both are direct connections to the underground aquifer. She phoned the land agent, who called a supervisor, who came to the farm. Fingers pointed between the supervisor and engineers, the karst protection coordinator for the state denied the cave’s presence, but more evidence was unearthed daily that the ground underneath was anything but stable and solid. And daily, MVP buried that evidence. Karolyn and friends did their own detective work at a spot on the right of way, inserting a 12’ rod into a cavity. It was obvious when the rod found a void under the surface – a cave. Obliterating that significant cave was MVP’s first act of brutality at Karolyn’s farm. But construction continued, unabated.
If Karolyn hadn’t been on the farm on one particular day when MVP workers were blasting through the rock, she would have lost her water supply from an upland spring. When she shouted her warning at workers, they replied ‘There’s nothing there.’ But she made them stop, and saved her own water supply.
Pipe was laid in the trenches and buried. More sinkholes opened up. Flooding occurred on the land where there was none before – including significant portions of the pasture. Channels had to be dug to direct floodwaters away from the farmhouse. Erosion was obvious. The drainage patterns had been dramatically changed by the disturbance MVP created within the natural system formed over millennia. Clearing trees and vegetation, blasting, trenching, back-filling trenches and filling voids with impermeable materials all had a deleterious effect. MVP reassured Karolyn that the ‘original contours would be restored.’
Karolyn describes herself as a Pollyanna at the onset of the pipeline fight. Then she witnessed a law enforcement officer lie in a courtroom, she heard a caver and the state karst protection coordinator deny the existence of a known cave, and she agonized over MVP’s ignorance of the geological facts of the land and water she tends and loves. Karolyn’s 13 years as director of a graduate nursing program, teaching and guiding those whom we entrust to help heal our bodies, weren’t enough to prepare her for the permanent scars and wounds on the land, inflicted against her will, enabled by federal agencies doing the bidding of corporate interests.
If you are able, please donate to the legal defense fund for pipeline fighters: bit.ly/AppLegalDefense. Protectors face ever-increasing, expensive intimidation tactics and legal charges, but remain undaunted.
These worthy on-the-ground groups fight the disaster spelled MVP. Please support them, if you are able:
https://www.aapsolidarity.org/
https://powhr.org/
https://7directionsofservice.com/
Appalachia's Mountain Valley Pipeline Crime Scene bears witness to the ongoing harms MVP is committing. Both free & paid subscribers will receive all posts. Paid subscribers support my travel, and excess funds will be donated to AAP and POWHR. Thank you!
Thank you Deborah, for documenting these crucial stories with such poetry
Reading these chronicles always breaks my heart, and yet is crucial for bearing witness to the travesties taking place here. Thank you for what you're doing.