MINDEN, W.Va.—“Every one of these houses, I can tell you the people that has died,” Susie Worley-Jenkins told me as she nosed her pickup down the steep ravine into her hometown. “A woman right there, she died, her dad died, her mom died. All with cancer.”
Minden, West Virginia, is in a small holler—hollow, to non-Appalachians—and 40 years ago it was home to about 1,200 people. Today it’s home to 250.
"This woman here, she died of cancer. Her son’s right there now, he’s dying with bone cancer.”
There are around 25 homes on the main road into town, mostly low-slung or trailers, and we drove slowly so Worley-Jenkins had time to recount the dead.
“And the woman there died of cancer. This guy and his wife both died with cancer; he bought this to fix it up. He was our sheriff.”
