Appalachian Community Histories – Wayne, Wayne County: From Trout’s Hill and Fairview to a County Seat
Wayne, West Virginia, did not begin with a railroad station, a coal company, or a commercial crossroads. It began with a courthouse.
The town lies along Twelvepole Creek in the hills of central Wayne County, removed from the Ohio River communities that would later grow around Ceredo, Kenova, and the western edge of Huntington. Its location helped shape a history different from many Appalachian towns. Wayne was never chiefly a mining camp or an industrial boomtown. Its reason for being was government, and from the beginning the courthouse stood at the center of community life.
That beginning can be traced directly to an act of the Virginia General Assembly. On January 18, 1842, lawmakers created Wayne County from the western portion of Cabell County and named the new county in honor of Revolutionary War general Anthony Wayne. The act did more than establish county boundaries. It specifically ordered that the permanent place for holding the courts of Wayne County be located on the land of Abraham Trout along Twelvepole River, at or near Trout’s residence. The county court was authorized to obtain land there for a courthouse and the other public buildings required to conduct county business.
With those words, Virginia lawmakers effectively determined where the future town of Wayne would grow.
Abraham Trout and the Beginning of Trout’s Hill
Abraham Trout was living along Twelvepole before Wayne County existed. Wesley D. Kirby, an instructor in history and civics at Wayne County High School who published a community history in 1926, described Trout’s home as standing on the west side of Twelvepole, on elevated ground overlooking the winding creek. The place naturally became known as Trout’s Hill.
Soon after the county was organized, Abraham and Mary Trout provided land for the new government. A deed dated May 9, 1842, conveyed one acre to four Wayne County justices for county public buildings. The tract was the site on which the courthouse complex developed, tying the geography of modern Wayne directly to the Trout property.
The county seat began forming around it. Kirby identified Daniel Stephens, David Fry, Samuel Wellman, William Ferguson, Jessie Adkins, Benjamin Davis, Burwell Ferguson, Milton Ferguson, and Jacob Adkins among the early settlers who followed Trout. Hugh Bowen was remembered as the first merchant, Benjamin Davis opened a shoe shop, Calvin Cyphers established an early blacksmith shop, and Dr. William Maupin became an early resident physician.
These details come from a local history written more than eighty years after the county’s founding and should therefore be treated differently from deeds and court orders. Still, Kirby was writing in Wayne in 1926, when nineteenth-century community memory remained close at hand, and his work provides one of the fullest surviving descriptions of how the small courthouse settlement developed.
The original records support the larger picture. Deeds were already being recorded in the new Wayne County clerk’s office in April 1842, and a 1926 examination by the Wayne County News found that the original deed books were still being preserved in the courthouse. By then, more than 140 deed books documented generations of property transfers throughout the county.
Wayne was taking shape one parcel at a time around a piece of land selected for public business.
Trout’s Hill Becomes Wayne Court House
The community surrounding the courthouse carried several names during the nineteenth century, and reconstructing their use can be confusing.
Trout’s Hill remained a familiar local name. Wayne Court House, often abbreviated Wayne C. H., also became common because the settlement was identified with the county government and post office. The name Fairview appeared as well, eventually becoming the town’s legal municipal name.
Surviving property records show just how loosely town names could be used in the early years. Howard Osburn’s examination of Wayne County courthouse records found that many deeds simply described property as being at the county seat without giving the settlement a formal name. One pair of deeds even used the name Mount Carmel, a designation that apparently never became common.
By the Civil War era, Trout’s Hill and Wayne Court House both remained understandable descriptions of the same place.
That overlapping identity explains why the town can appear under different names in censuses, military documents, newspapers, deeds, and later histories. The settlement existed long before it possessed the firmly established municipal identity that the name Wayne carries today.
Civil War at Wayne Courthouse
Wayne’s position in the hills did not shield it from the Civil War.
Wayne County sat in a divided region where political loyalties, family ties, military recruitment, and guerrilla activity crossed one another. Western Virginia itself was breaking apart, and Wayne Court House became one of the places where that struggle turned violent.
In August 1861, Federal troops moved out from Camp Pierpont at Ceredo toward Wayne Court House. A contemporary account later published in Frank Moore’s The Rebellion Record described a detachment reaching the county seat and taking possession of it as Union forces attempted to break up secessionist activity in the area. West Virginia’s official Civil War timeline records Federal occupation of Wayne Court House followed by skirmishing on August 26 and 27, when Confederate forces attempted to retake the town and were repulsed.
This was not a great battle in the scale of Gettysburg or Antietam. For Wayne residents, however, it was war at the courthouse door.
The fighting also reveals why the community mattered. Control of the county seat meant access to roads, officials, records, local political influence, and a central position within Wayne County. The same roads that connected farms to the courthouse could carry armed detachments through the hills.
The conflict had not disappeared by 1864. On January 27 of that year, Union captain John S. Witcher of the 3rd West Virginia Cavalry pursued a Confederate force led by Hurston Spurlock. Witcher reported that the Confederates were moving in the direction of Wayne Court House after taking prisoners. His men caught part of the force about six miles from town and fought a roughly half-hour skirmish before the Confederates scattered into the woods.
Wayne thus experienced the Civil War in a form familiar throughout Appalachia: not simply opposing armies on formal battlefields, but scouts, raids, prisoners, divided neighborhoods, armed local men, and sudden violence along roads and creek valleys.
The Execution That Drew Thousands
One of the most dramatic events in nineteenth-century Wayne occurred after the Civil War.
On November 29, 1879, Laban T. Walker was executed at the county seat for the murder of Patrick Nolen. A retrospective account published by the Wayne County News in 1924 called it the only civil execution that had taken place in Wayne County and remembered it as one of the outstanding events in county history.
The hanging became a public spectacle. Local historical research indicates that officials expected thousands of spectators and called upon the Rifle Guard of Wayne County to help maintain order. The unit had been formed only months earlier and included dozens of local men who supplied their own uniforms.
The episode illustrates how central the courthouse had become to Wayne’s public identity. Trials, elections, executions, political gatherings, legal transactions, and public ceremonies all drew residents from the surrounding hills into the county seat.
Wayne was still small, but for much of the county it was where public life became visible.
The Incorporation of Fairview
Few parts of Wayne’s history have created more confusion than the date when the town was incorporated.
Some later accounts have given 1860. The surviving incorporation records, however, support 1882. The research material assembled for this article likewise identified the discrepancy and concluded that 1882 is the documented date unless an earlier charter can be produced.
The courthouse documents are unusually detailed.
On January 18, 1882, G. F. Ratliff filed a census of the area proposed for incorporation. It counted 34 heads of families and 157 people altogether. Among the households were families bearing names that would remain familiar throughout Wayne County history, including Adkins, Bowen, Ferguson, Napier, Wellman, Wilkinson, Burgess, Prichard, and Shumate.
A vote followed on February 18. Thirty-one voters supported incorporating Fairview while only two voted against it. The next day surveyor R. B. Hamilton completed a survey of the proposed municipality, which enclosed approximately 224 acres around the courthouse community and Twelvepole Creek.
The legal proceedings reached the county court in June. On June 21, 1882, the court reviewed the election, publication requirements, and other legal steps and ordered the clerk to issue the certificate of incorporation. Washington Adkins soon became mayor, with Chapman Adkins serving as recorder.
The West Virginia Encyclopedia and the state’s historical place-name records likewise identify 1882 as the year Fairview was incorporated.
The documentary record therefore points strongly toward 1882, not 1860.
Yet official incorporation did not settle what residents actually called their town.
A Town That Would Not Stay Fairview
Fairview may have been the legal name, but Wayne Court House remained deeply rooted in local usage.
The 1870 federal census used Wayne Court House. By 1880, sources could refer to the place as Fairview or Wayne Court House. Even after incorporation, residents and businesses continued using older names, and the local post office reinforced the association with Wayne C. H.
In 1883, educator Taylor Bascom McClure established what became Oakview Academy, initially known as Fairview High School. McClure would become one of the important figures in Wayne County education, and Kirby later credited him with influencing generations of students and helping establish the modern county high school.
The town’s institutional life continued to expand. Churches, schools, merchants, lawyers, physicians, newspapers, and government offices clustered around the county seat. The Wayne Advocate, founded in 1874, later became the Wayne News and eventually the Wayne County News. By the twentieth century, that newspaper would become one of the richest surviving records of everyday life in the community.
Still, Fairview never fully displaced the Wayne name.
In August 1911, B. J. Prichard, T. B. McClure, and other petitioners went before the Wayne County Circuit Court asking that Fairview’s charter be amended. After the required publication and legal proceedings, the court acted on November 20, 1911.
The change was simple but permanent. “Fairview” was removed from the municipal charter and replaced with “Wayne.” From that point forward, the legal name of the municipality was the Town of Wayne.
After decades of Trout’s Hill, Wayne Court House, and Fairview existing side by side in local usage, the name by which the community was already widely known finally became official.
Schools, Churches, Newspapers, and a Growing Town
By the 1920s, Wayne had developed the institutions expected of a small Appalachian county seat.
Kirby’s 1926 community history described four churches within town, Baptist, Methodist, Christian, and Holiness, along with a county high school and graded school. He credited early circuit riders such as Burwell Spurlock with establishing religious life in the area and described a cooperative spirit among Wayne’s churches during the early twentieth century.
Education had become equally important. Wayne County High School had around 190 pupils when Kirby wrote, and the community was preparing a new brick graded school building. Oakview Academy and the work of T. B. McClure formed part of an educational tradition that reached beyond the town into rural Wayne County.
Wayne also served as a center of banking, law, commerce, journalism, and county politics. Kirby counted two banks, garages, a hotel, restaurants, boarding houses, stores, a drugstore, and a chamber of commerce among the town’s assets.
Agriculture remained important to the surrounding countryside. Farmers raised grain, fruit, and truck crops, while the arrival of the Norfolk and Western Railroad and growing oil and gas development connected the community more closely to outside markets. Kirby believed that Wayne’s industrial development had been slow but steady, a description that fits much of the town’s history.
Unlike some Appalachian communities, Wayne did not suddenly explode because one coal seam or factory transformed its economy. It accumulated institutions gradually.
Fire, a New Courthouse, and the World War Memorial
The courthouse remained Wayne’s defining landmark, but the building standing there changed repeatedly.
Early county government operated from modest structures. A courthouse erected in 1852 served for decades before being replaced in 1891 by a more imposing building. That courthouse burned in 1921. County officials were forced into temporary quarters while a replacement was planned on the same historic courthouse site. The present courthouse originated in construction during 1923 and 1924 and was enlarged repeatedly during the twentieth century.
At almost the same moment, Wayne County was preparing another monument on the courthouse grounds.
In February 1922, the county contracted with the Sears Monument Company of Charleston for a World War I memorial costing $12,000. Local newspapers asked families to submit names of county residents who had died in service, and 42 names were eventually included.
The courthouse fire appears to have complicated the schedule. The monument was originally expected earlier, but its dedication finally took place on May 30, 1923. Contemporary reports described an enormous gathering, with the Kenova Reporter suggesting that it may have been the largest crowd ever assembled in Wayne.
The memorial still stands on the courthouse lawn. Its placement says much about Wayne’s civic geography. The courthouse square was more than government property. It was the symbolic center of the county, the place where Wayne County remembered its wars, conducted its politics, administered justice, and gathered for important public events.
The Wayne County World War I Memorial was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2024, preserving one of the clearest physical links to that era of town life.
John F. Kennedy, David Brinkley, and the Bridge Heard Across America
Wayne unexpectedly entered national political history during the 1960 West Virginia presidential primary.
On April 25, 1960, Senator John F. Kennedy came to Wayne while campaigning against Senator Hubert Humphrey for the Democratic presidential nomination. The Wayne County News estimated that about 250 people gathered in the courthouse square to hear him speak. NBC television correspondent David Brinkley was there as well.
What happened next made Wayne famous for something Kennedy had not intended.
Brinkley encountered the aging bridge carrying U.S. Route 52 over Twelvepole Creek. Built in 1907, the narrow structure had a loose wooden floor that produced a tremendous racket whenever vehicles crossed it. Brinkley placed a microphone near the bridge and allowed a national television audience to hear the noise.
The report embarrassed state officials and delighted many Wayne residents who had long wanted improvements. Within days, the bridge was closed while workers removed the old flooring, sandblasted and repainted the steel, and installed a new deck.
Wayne embraced the publicity.
On June 17, 1961, Brinkley returned for an elaborate celebration. The repaired structure became known as the Brinkley Bridge, and the town organized a parade, speeches, music, and public ceremonies in his honor. Plans called for Brinkley to receive the key to Wayne and serve as honorary mayor for the day.
The bridge’s second life did not last forever.
On September 22, 1970, it collapsed beneath an overloaded tractor-trailer carrying heavy equipment. The two men inside escaped serious injury, although a school bus carrying a football team had crossed the bridge shortly before the accident.
A new bridge opened in October 1971 at a cost approaching half a million dollars. Governor Arch Moore attended the dedication, closing one of the strangest chapters in Wayne transportation history.
For a town accustomed to appearing in county court books and weekly newspapers, the Kennedy campaign and the Brinkley Bridge briefly placed Wayne before a nationwide television audience.
The Courthouse Town on Twelvepole
Wayne’s history is unusual precisely because the town has never needed to become large to remain important.
The West Virginia Encyclopedia describes Wayne as a small county seat situated away from the more heavily populated northern part of Wayne County near Huntington. That geographic reality shaped its development. Ceredo and Kenova benefited from the Ohio River, railroads, and proximity to a growing city. Other portions of the county were shaped by timber, coal, transportation, and the Big Sandy Valley. Wayne remained what it had been created to be in 1842: the governmental center of the county.
That continuity is visible in the landscape.
The courthouse remains where Abraham and Mary Trout helped provide land for public buildings. Twelvepole Creek still curves below the hills that gave Trout’s Hill its first identity. Roads still enter town from communities whose families have been making courthouse trips for generations.
Yet the names layered across Wayne’s past tell an even richer story.
Trout’s Hill recalls the pioneer family whose land became the county seat. Wayne Court House recalls the decades when government itself defined the settlement. Fairview represents the community’s formal incorporation in 1882. Wayne, made official in 1911, connected the municipality permanently to the county whose affairs it had administered from the beginning.
The buildings have burned, been rebuilt, enlarged, and replaced. Bridges have rattled, collapsed, and disappeared. Newspapers have changed names. Schools and businesses have come and gone.
The basic purpose of the place has endured.
Wayne grew because people needed somewhere to record deeds, settle estates, try cases, elect officials, attend school, publish a newspaper, buy supplies, worship, argue politics, remember wars, and conduct the thousand ordinary transactions through which a county becomes a community.
Its history is therefore not the story of one great boom or one famous event. It is the history of an Appalachian county seat accumulating nearly two centuries of public life around the same hillside above Twelvepole Creek.
Sources & Further Reading
Virginia General Assembly. “An Act Establishing the County of Wayne of Part of the County of Cabell.” Chapter 60, Acts of the General Assembly of Virginia, 1841–1842. Passed January 18, 1842. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/hiStory/counties/wayne01.html
Wayne County, West Virginia. Wayne County Deed Books. Beginning 1842. West Virginia State Archives, Charleston, WV. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/bluenote.html
Wayne County, West Virginia. Wayne County Court Records. Beginning 1842. West Virginia State Archives, Charleston, WV. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/bluenote.html
Trout, Abraham, and Mary Trout. Deed conveying land to the justices of Wayne County for public buildings. May 9, 1842. Wayne County Deed Records, Wayne County, West Virginia. Transcribed and discussed by Howard Osburn. https://waynewv.com/wcghs/oldsite/Abraham%20Trout%20and%20town%20of%20Fairview.pdf
Wayne County, West Virginia. Surveyor’s Book, 1842–1857. West Virginia State Archives, Charleston, WV. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/bluenote.html
Wayne County, West Virginia. “Census of the Proposed Town of Fairview.” January 18, 1882. Wayne County Court Records. Transcribed and discussed by Howard Osburn. https://waynewv.com/wcghs/oldsite/Abraham%20Trout%20and%20town%20of%20Fairview.pdf
Wayne County, West Virginia. “Election for Incorporation of the Town of Fairview.” February 18, 1882. Wayne County Court Records. Transcribed and discussed by Howard Osburn. https://waynewv.com/wcghs/oldsite/Abraham%20Trout%20and%20town%20of%20Fairview.pdf
Hamilton, R. B. “Survey of the Proposed Town of Fairview.” February 19, 1882. Wayne County Court Records, Wayne County, West Virginia. https://waynewv.com/wcghs/oldsite/Abraham%20Trout%20and%20town%20of%20Fairview.pdf
Wayne County Circuit Court. “Proceedings Incorporating the Town of Fairview.” June 1882. Wayne County, West Virginia. Transcribed and discussed by Howard Osburn. https://waynewv.com/wcghs/oldsite/Abraham%20Trout%20and%20town%20of%20Fairview.pdf
Wayne County Circuit Court. “Proceedings Changing the Municipal Name of Fairview to Wayne.” August 25–November 20, 1911. Wayne County, West Virginia. https://waynewv.com/wcghs/oldsite/Abraham%20Trout%20and%20town%20of%20Fairview.pdf
United States War Department. The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. Series 1, vol. 5. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1881. Includes the August 26–27, 1861 operations at Wayne Court House. https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth154608/
Moore, Frank, ed. The Rebellion Record: A Diary of American Events. New York: G. P. Putnam, 1862. Contemporary account of Federal operations at Wayne Court House in August 1861. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/sesquicentennial/18610827.html
Witcher, John S. “Report of Capt. John S. Witcher, Third West Virginia Cavalry.” January 29, 1864. In The War of the Rebellion: Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, ser. 1, vol. 51. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/sesquicentennial/18640127.html
United States Census Bureau. Fourteenth Census of the United States, 1920: Population, West Virginia. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1921. https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1920/bulletins/demographics/population-wv-number-of-inhabitants.pdf
United States Census Bureau. 1950 Census of Population: West Virginia. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. https://www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/41609260pc1-4ch1.pdf
Library of Congress. “[Survey of a Tract of Land on Twelve Pole Creek, Wayne County, West Virginia].” ca. 1880s. Jedediah Hotchkiss Papers, Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3893w.cwh00328/
Krebs, C. E., and D. D. Teets Jr. Cabell, Wayne and Lincoln Counties. Morgantown: West Virginia Geological Survey, 1913. https://books.google.com/books?id=9MgbAAAAMAAJ
West Virginia Legislature. West Virginia Blue Book, 1921. Charleston, WV: State of West Virginia, 1921. https://www.wvlegislature.gov/legisdocs/publications/bluebook/WVS_Bluebook_1921.pdf
West Virginia Legislature. West Virginia Blue Book, 2002. Charleston, WV: State of West Virginia, 2002. Municipality profile for Wayne. https://www.wvlegislature.gov/legisdocs/publications/bluebook/WVS_Bluebook_2002.pdf
Kirby, Wesley D. A Brief History of Wayne Community, Wayne County, West Virginia. 1926. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/hiStory/agrext/wayne.html
Wayne County News. “Wayne County of Forty Years Ago Pictured in Local Papers of the 1880s.” January 15, 1925. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn250115.html
Wayne County News. “First Deed Recorded in This County 84 Years Ago.” January 28, 1926. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn260128.html
Wayne County News. “Wayne’s Seven Wonders.” December 23, 1923. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn231223.html
Wayne County News. “Execution of Walker Here Is Outstanding Event in History.” February 7, 1924. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn240207.html
Wayne County News. “Monument To Be Built.” May 11, 1922. Cited in the National Register of Historic Places documentation for the Wayne County World War I Memorial. https://wvculture.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/WV_WayneCo_WayneCountyWorldWarIMemorial_form.pdf
Wayne County News. Coverage of the Wayne County World War I Memorial unveiling. May 31, 1923. Cited in the National Register of Historic Places documentation for the memorial. https://wvculture.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/WV_WayneCo_WayneCountyWorldWarIMemorial_form.pdf
Wayne County News. “Notice of Application for Telephone Franchise.” October 27, 1927. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn271027.html
Wayne County News. Local news concerning Wayne’s graded school, teachers, stores, and Newtown Addition. June 16, 1927. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn270616.html
Wayne County News. “Kennedy Addresses Wayne Audience; Town Put in National TV Spotlight.” April 29, 1960. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/hiStory/1960presidentialcampaign/newspapers/19600429waynecountynews.html
Wayne County News. Coverage of repairs to the Twelvepole Creek bridge following David Brinkley’s nationally televised report. May 6, 1960. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/hiStory/1960presidentialcampaign/newspapers/19600506waynecountynews.html
Wayne County News. “Dedication of Bridge at Wayne.” October 14, 1971. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/transportation/waynebridge01.html
West Virginia State Historic Preservation Office. Wayne County Courthouse Historic Property Form, WA-0256. Charleston: West Virginia Division of Culture and History. https://mapwv.gov/shpo/docs/PDFs/ArchitecturalSites/WA-0256.pdf
West Virginia State Historic Preservation Office. Wayne County Courthouse Historic Property Form, WA-0256, Revised. 2018. https://mapwv.gov/shpo/docs/PDFs/ArchitecturalSites/WA-0256_Rev01.pdf
West Virginia State Historic Preservation Office. Reconnaissance Historic Resource Survey for Pleasants, Lincoln, Jackson, Mason and Wayne Counties. 2017. https://mapwv.gov/shpo/docs/PDFs/ArchitecturalSurveys/RMU-51.pdf
West Virginia State Historic Preservation Office. National Register of Historic Places Registration Form: Wayne County World War I Memorial. Charleston, WV. https://wvculture.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/WV_WayneCo_WayneCountyWorldWarIMemorial_form.pdf
National Park Service. “National Register of Historic Places Weekly List, March 29, 2024.” U.S. Department of the Interior. https://www.nps.gov/subjects/nationalregister/weekly-list-2024-03-29.htm
Massey, Tim R. “Wayne.” The West Virginia Encyclopedia. West Virginia Humanities Council. wvencyclopedia.org
“Wayne County.” The West Virginia Encyclopedia. West Virginia Humanities Council. wvencyclopedia.org
Taylor, Mildred. History of Wayne County, West Virginia. Wayne, WV, 1963. Listed in the West Virginia State Archives’ Wayne County bibliography. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/archives/counties/wayne.html
Wayne County Historical Publications. A Pictorial History of Wayne County. Wayne, WV: Wayne County Historical Publications, 1988. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/archives/counties/wayne.html
Williams, John Alexander. “A Note and Documents on the Wayne County Shooting Incident During the Election Campaign of 1894.” West Virginia History 33 (1971–72). https://archive.wvculture.org/History/archives/counties/wayne.html
Wayne Chamber of Commerce and Woman’s Club of Wayne. Wayne, Our Town. Wayne, WV, 1975.
Thompson, Robert Michael. Climbing Trout’s Hill: A History of the Town of Wayne. Digital ed. https://books.apple.com/us/book/climbing-trouts-hill-a-history-of-the-town-of-wayne/id459481255
West Virginia Archives and History. “Wayne County History Sources.” West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/archives/counties/wayne.html
Author Note: Wayne’s history is the story of a place whose importance has never depended on its size, but on nearly two centuries as the civic heart of Wayne County. I hope this article helps preserve the story of Trout’s Hill, Fairview, and the generations who made the courthouse town along Twelvepole Creek their community.