On a flat bench above the headwaters of Dry Fork in McDowell County, West Virginia, a woman named Polly Hatfield is on her knees with a soil knife, checking whether the partridge pea she seeded in September has germinated.
Hatfield is sixty-eight. She retired from the West Virginia University Extension Service in 2019 and then, in early 2024, came out of retirement when no one was hired to replace her.
The bench she is kneeling on was a surface coal mine until 1996, when the operator went bankrupt and the bond money was used to grade the site flat and seed it with tall fescue and sericea lespedeza.
Both species were chosen because they would hold the soil. They did. They also formed a thirty-year monoculture that excluded almost everything else and turned what had once been mixed hardwood ridge into a near-sterile pasture.
Hatfield's project, funded by a 184,000 dollar grant from the Appalachian Stewardship Foundation in late 2024, covers thirty-eight acres of that bench. The plan is to convert it, over six years, to a native meadow dominated by little bluestem, Indian grass, and a mix of about forty forb species.
The crew is six people. Two are former miners, both in their fifties, who were retrained through a Southern Coalfields workforce program. The other four are younger, mostly from Welch and Iaeger, and were hired through the McDowell County Action Network.
The work begins with the fescue. Hatfield's protocol calls for two consecutive growing seasons of glyphosate followed by a no-till drill seeding in September. She is aware of the politics of the herbicide and uses it anyway, on the grounds that without it the native seed cannot establish.
The drill is a Truax FLX-88 borrowed from the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection's reclamation program, which has six of them and uses two. Hatfield drives down to Charleston twice a year to pick it up.
The seed is purchased from Ernst Conservation Seeds in Meadville, Pennsylvania, which is the only commercial supplier in the region capable of providing site-appropriate ecotypes at the volumes the project requires.
The first eight-acre seeding went in on September 18 and 19, 2025, after the second herbicide pass. The forbs included partridge pea, lance-leaf coreopsis, black-eyed Susan, butterfly milkweed, and a small amount of cardinal flower for the wet swale at the bench's eastern edge.
On the April morning Hatfield checked the bench, the partridge pea was up at perhaps eight plants per square meter, which she said was acceptable. The coreopsis was thinner and the milkweed was almost absent.
She was not surprised. Butterfly milkweed has a low and unpredictable first-year emergence rate and is often planted at a higher seeding density than the eventual stand justifies.
The crew has begun a second eight-acre block on the western half of the bench, where the fescue is thicker and the soil is shallower. The herbicide passes there are scheduled for May and August of 2026.
What the project is not is a return to pre-mining conditions. The original forest was mixed mesophytic hardwood, dominated by sugar maple, tulip poplar, and white oak. To restore that would require not seed but planted seedlings, and the soils on the bench are too shallow and too compacted to support them for at least a generation.
The meadow, Hatfield says, is what the site can become in a human lifetime. The forest may come later, after the meadow has built soil and the trees have begun to seed in from the edges on their own.
She has noticed already, in the two-year-old test plot at the south end of the bench, the volunteer arrival of black locust seedlings from the adjacent woods. Black locust is a pioneer nitrogen-fixer, native to the region, and a sign that the site is beginning to accept successional process.
The crew's day ends at four, because the road back to Welch is bad and the youngest hand has to pick up his daughter from school. They load tools in a county pickup and lock the gate behind them.
Hatfield, on the drive out, said she does not expect to see the meadow at maturity. She expects to see the second seeding establish and then to hand the work to someone else.
She has been trying for two years to recruit a replacement. The position is funded, the work is honest, and so far there have been three applicants and no hires.
The bench, in the meantime, will keep doing whatever it does, with or without supervision. That, Hatfield said, is the part of the work she has come to find most reassuring.
