Appalachian Community Histories – Cracker Neck, Wise County: Farms, Coal, and Life Beneath Powell Mountain
A few miles outside Big Stone Gap, Virginia, the road climbs into a section of western Wise County that generations have known as Cracker Neck. Older records often called it Cracker’s Neck or Crackers Neck, and although the community never grew into an incorporated town with a courthouse, downtown business district, or government of its own, its name has survived for well over a century.
Cracker Neck sits against Powell Mountain near the South Fork of the Powell River. That location helps explain much of its history. Farms occupied the more workable ground, families built homes against the slopes, coal seams ran through the surrounding mountains, and Big Stone Gap developed close enough to pull Cracker Neck into the economic and cultural orbit of one of Southwest Virginia’s most important coal towns.
The name itself is memorable, but its exact origin is much harder to establish. No reliable early source located for this history clearly explains who first called the place Cracker Neck or why. Rather than attach a later legend to the community, the historical record allows a safer conclusion. By 1887, Cracker’s Neck was already familiar enough that photographers and visitors could use the name simply as a geographic reference.
That makes Cracker Neck an example of a type of Appalachian community that can disappear from conventional histories even while remaining very real to the people who live there. It was neither a major coal camp nor an incorporated mountain town. It was a collection of farms, roads, houses, schools, churches, stores, and families whose history became intertwined with the rise of Big Stone Gap.
Cracker’s Neck in 1887
One of the earliest unmistakable records of the community is not a deed or census entry, but a photograph.
In 1887, photographer John Robert Procter traveled through the Big Stone Gap area as part of a group whose surviving photographs now belong to the Rogers Clark Ballard Thruston Photograph Collection at the Filson Historical Society. One image, cataloged as RCBT-MT-297, is described as a group standing at the foot of Powell Mountain near Cracker’s Neck. The photograph identifies Young Ewing Allison, Judge Adolphus Edward Richards, John Robert Procter, and sons of Richards and Procter.
The importance of the photograph extends beyond the people standing before the camera. Other photographs in the same 1887 sequence show the South Fork of the Powell River, Roaring Fork, mountain scenery, wagons, survey parties, and men examining maps. Together they capture the Big Stone Gap region just before enormous investments in coal, railroads, land, and industrial development transformed the surrounding countryside.
Cracker’s Neck was therefore not a name created by the twentieth-century coal industry. It already belonged to the landscape before Big Stone Gap reached the height of its industrial ambitions.
That distinction matters. Communities around the Appalachian coalfields are sometimes described as though they appeared only when outside companies opened mines. Cracker Neck had an identity tied to mountain, river, farm, and road before coal became the dominant economic story of Wise County.
Coal Beneath Powell Mountain
Only a few years after Procter’s photograph, the United States Geological Survey provided another important early reference.
Geologist Marius R. Campbell examined the region for his 1893 report, Geology of the Big Stone Gap Coal Field of Virginia and Kentucky. Campbell described the complicated seams and formations surrounding Big Stone Gap and recorded reports of coal at Cracker Neck on the South Fork of the Powell River, along the north face of Powell Mountain.
Campbell did not claim to have personally inspected that particular exposure. He carefully wrote that coal was reported there and suggested that it probably occupied approximately the same geological horizon as a heavier coal seam found at Big Stone Gap.
That brief entry is one of the strongest early geographic descriptions of Cracker Neck. It places the community in relation to three features that continued to define it: the South Fork of the Powell River, Powell Mountain, and the coal-bearing formations surrounding Big Stone Gap.
By the 1890s, Big Stone Gap had become the focus of ambitious efforts to create a major industrial center in Southwest Virginia. Coal deposits, railroads, iron furnaces, timber, and speculative land companies drew investors and workers into the region. Cracker Neck stood close to that transformation without becoming simply another row of company houses.
Its residents lived beside the coal economy while also maintaining an agricultural landscape that survived well into the twentieth century.
A Place Known Well Enough for John Fox Jr.
Cracker Neck also entered the literature of the region.
John Fox Jr., whose fiction made the mountains around Big Stone Gap nationally recognizable at the beginning of the twentieth century, repeatedly used Cracker’s Neck as part of his local geography. His fiction cannot be treated as a documentary record of particular people or events, but his use of the name demonstrates how familiar the locality had become.
In A Knight of the Cumberland, Fox described people coming into Big Stone Gap from Bum Hollow, Wildcat Valley, Wise County, Kentucky, and the slopes leading toward Cracker’s Neck. Elsewhere he placed Cracker’s Neck beside Roaring Fork, Pigeon Creek, Turkey Cove, and other communities and landmarks familiar to people around Big Stone Gap.
In another story, Fox wrote of a woman who had previously lived at Cracker’s Neck before appearing at the Gap. Again, the value is not in treating Fox’s fictional characters as real Cracker Neck residents. The value lies in the fact that he expected the name itself to mean something.
By the turn of the twentieth century, Cracker Neck had become part of the cultural geography surrounding Big Stone Gap, recognizable alongside valleys, creeks, hollows, and mountain settlements that Fox drew upon when creating his fictionalized Appalachia.
School, Chapel, and a Scattered Community
Cracker Neck never needed a dense Main Street to function as a community.
The 1935 United States Geological Survey map of East Stone Gap provides one of the clearest surviving pictures of the area during the first half of the twentieth century. The map marks Cracker Neck School and places Dortons Chapel nearby, surrounded by roads, scattered buildings, mountain slopes, and the rural landscape east and southeast of Big Stone Gap.
The presence of a named school is particularly significant. Small community schools were among the institutions that bound rural Appalachian neighborhoods together. Children who lived too far from larger towns attended local schools that were often close enough to reach on foot. The teacher might know nearly every family in the surrounding valley, and the schoolhouse could become a gathering point even for households separated by considerable distance.
Unfortunately, the map tells us more about where Cracker Neck School stood than about the people inside it. Establishing its opening date, teachers, enrollment, and closing would require further work in Wise County school board minutes, school census records, teacher registers, and superintendent files. The surviving map nevertheless proves that by 1935 the school was important enough to appear as a recognized feature of the community.
Dortons Chapel provides another glimpse into that local world. Like the school, a rural chapel could serve people who were geographically scattered but socially connected. Churches, schools, family cemeteries, and country stores often formed the institutional framework of communities like Cracker Neck where there was no municipal center.
Skeen’s Store and the Country Store Era
One of the best documented Cracker Neck businesses was Skeen’s Store.
A 1995 architectural survey conducted for the Virginia Department of Historic Resources recorded the store at the southeast corner of the junction of State Routes 602 and 613 near the Cracker’s Neck community. According to the survey, Cecil Skeen built the one-story store in 1931 and continued operating it until it closed in July 1977.
Forty-six years of operation carried the store through the Great Depression, World War II, the postwar coal economy, highway improvements, increased automobile ownership, and the gradual consolidation of rural commerce into larger towns.
For people in communities such as Cracker Neck, a country store meant considerably more than groceries. Before families could easily drive into Big Stone Gap for every purchase, these establishments offered a nearby place to buy necessities and exchange news. Neighbors who might live considerable distances apart along mountain roads crossed paths there.
Skeen’s Store therefore gives Cracker Neck something historical maps alone cannot provide. It shows where some of the ordinary interaction of community life took place.
Its closure in 1977 also reflects a transition seen across Appalachia. Better roads, automobiles, supermarkets, changing employment patterns, and declining rural populations steadily undermined the economic role of the small country store.
Clinch Haven Farms and the Agricultural Side of Cracker Neck
Coal dominates the historical image of Wise County, but Cracker Neck also belonged to Powell Valley’s agricultural world.
The same Virginia architectural survey documented Clinch Haven Farms on both sides of State Route 612 near the Cracker Neck section of western Wise County. The farm began in 1932, and its collection of buildings developed over approximately thirty years.
Its most impressive feature was a three-story frame dairy barn with a gambrel roof, stone-block foundation, milking stalls on the first floor, and hay storage above. As dairy regulations changed, the farm added a more modern milking parlor designed to meet updated sanitation requirements. Other agricultural buildings were eventually adapted to new purposes as farming practices and the local economy changed.
Clinch Haven Farms complicates any description of Cracker Neck as simply another coalfield settlement.
Men from the community certainly worked in mines, and coal shaped the economy surrounding them, but cattle, cornfields, dairy barns, gardens, timber, and family farms remained part of daily life. A household could be connected to coal without abandoning agriculture. One family member might work underground while others milked cows, tended crops, raised livestock, or found employment in Big Stone Gap.
John W. Peace II later drew heavily upon that agricultural and coalfield mixture in A Boy From Crackers Neck, a book based on stories passed down by his grandfather, Jimmie Galloway. Peace grew up around the family dairy farm and describes a community in which farming, mining, church, family, war service, and neighborhood relationships existed alongside one another. Because the book reconstructs scenes from family memory, individual details deserve comparison with contemporary records, but it preserves a local perspective rarely found in government reports.
Childhood in Cracker’s Neck
Oral history provides another window into the community.
Virginia Honeycutt Meador was born in 1924 and later recalled that she lived in Cracker’s Neck until she was six years old before her family moved into Big Stone Gap. Her 2007 interview for the Appalachian History Archive discussed childhood, family, education, recreation, and neighborly life in the region.
Her memory helps bridge the space between the lines on a topographic map and actual family life.
Cracker Neck existed close enough to Big Stone Gap that residents participated in the life of the town, yet it remained distinct enough that people described themselves as having lived in Cracker’s Neck rather than simply Big Stone Gap. That pattern continued for generations.
Even today, the name survives in Crackers Neck Road and in property descriptions, a reminder that an unincorporated community can retain a powerful geographic identity without ever possessing official town boundaries.
When Cracker’s Neck Made National News
For a brief period in 1953, reporters across the United States suddenly learned the name Cracker’s Neck.
The reason was Corporal Edward S. Dickenson, a local soldier captured during the Korean War. Dickenson had initially been among American prisoners who declined immediate repatriation after the armistice, but in October 1953 he changed his decision and returned to American control.
National reporters quickly descended on his family home in Virginia.
The resulting newspaper and magazine coverage offers something unusual. Reporters who came because of an international Cold War story inadvertently documented everyday life at Cracker Neck.
TIME described Dickenson’s parents, Bessie and Van Buren Dickenson, living in a three-room cabin on the side of Powell Mountain. They learned of developments involving their son through the radio and through neighbors Keith and Thelma Marrs. News of Edward’s decision soon brought relatives, neighbors, children, reporters, and photographers to the home.
Another contemporary account reported that the house stood among cornfields on the mountainside and overlooked the valley. It also noted that Keith Marrs had one of the nearby telephones and had to travel up the mountainside to bring news to the Dickensons. Big Stone Gap was described as several miles away.
Those details have considerable value beyond the Dickenson story. They show how communication worked in rural Cracker Neck during the early 1950s, when a radio might bring the first hint of international news and a neighbor with access to a telephone could become the link between a mountain household and the outside world.
When Dickenson finally came home in November, Associated Press correspondent Don Whitehead reported directly from Cracker’s Neck. He described a homecoming continuing into the early morning as family and friends crowded around the hillside cabin. Dickenson wanted to rest, eat familiar home-cooked food, and consider what came next after years of captivity and worldwide attention.
For a few weeks, a place that rarely appeared in national newspapers became a dateline.
Cracker’s Neck was suddenly printed in papers thousands of miles from Wise County.
Beyond the National Stereotype
The Dickenson coverage is valuable, but it must also be read carefully.
Mid-century national journalists frequently approached Appalachia with assumptions about isolation, poverty, and the supposed primitiveness of mountain life. Cracker Neck offered plenty of imagery that could be fitted into that narrative: a small cabin, cornfields, steep roads, a family listening to the radio, and neighbors carrying news from the nearest telephone.
Those things were real, but they were not the entire community.
The same Cracker Neck also contained established farms, a community school, churches, long-operating businesses, families connected to nearby Big Stone Gap, veterans who served around the world, and residents participating in the broader economy of Wise County.
The Virginia architectural survey is especially useful in correcting the flattened image created by national journalism. Clinch Haven Farms was not an isolated relic untouched by modern life. It adapted dairy facilities as regulations and technology changed. Skeen’s Store operated for nearly half a century. Roads linked residents with Big Stone Gap. Children moved between community schools and larger consolidated institutions.
Cracker Neck was rural, but rural did not mean frozen in time.
War, Work, and the Cracker Neck Generation
Edward Dickenson was not the only Cracker Neck resident whose life reached far beyond Powell Mountain.
Family histories preserved from the community include numerous men and women whose experiences crossed mining camps, military bases, industrial cities, and overseas battlefields. Among the best documented in modern local memory is Jimmie Galloway, whose story became the center of John W. Peace II’s A Boy From Crackers Neck.
Galloway grew up within the agricultural world surrounding the community and eventually became a B-17 pilot during World War II. Peace built the book around stories he heard repeatedly from his grandfather and other members of that generation, connecting their wartime experiences to the farms and coal communities from which they came.
The pattern was common across Appalachia. Young people raised in places outsiders considered isolated were suddenly sent across oceans during World War II and Korea. Some returned to farms and mines. Others used military experience, education, industrial employment, or migration to build lives elsewhere.
Cracker Neck remained the point from which those journeys began.
The Landscape That Held the Community Together
Historical Cracker Neck makes the most sense when viewed as a landscape rather than a town.
There was no courthouse square defining its center. Instead, the South Fork of the Powell River, Powell Mountain, local roads, family farms, Cracker Neck School, Dortons Chapel, Skeen’s Store, cemeteries, and scattered homes formed the geography people understood as their community.
That geography also explains why Cracker Neck appears unevenly in historical records.
Federal census takers did not ordinarily provide an independent population count for the community. Deeds might identify a property through adjoining landowners, streams, mountain ridges, or roads rather than the community name. Newspapers might report that someone lived near Big Stone Gap rather than specifying Cracker Neck. The historical record therefore has to be reconstructed by bringing together maps, photographs, land records, oral histories, newspapers, architectural surveys, and family accounts.
The surviving evidence already stretches from at least the 1887 photograph through the modern preservation of the Crackers Neck Road name. The research material gathered for this history also points toward Wise County deeds, surveyors’ books, chancery cases, wills, census schedules, newspapers, and school records that could reveal considerably more about individual families and properties.
Remembering Cracker Neck
Cracker Neck has never needed incorporation to have a history.
Its story is written in a photograph taken near Powell Mountain in 1887, in an 1893 geological report describing coal along the South Fork of the Powell River, in John Fox Jr.’s fictional mountain geography, in the symbol for a school printed on a 1935 government map, in the weatherboards of Skeen’s Store, and in the great gambrel-roofed dairy barn at Clinch Haven Farms.
It is preserved in Virginia Meador’s memories of childhood and in the stories Jimmie Galloway passed to his grandson.
For a short time in 1953, it was even carried across the country by wire services reporting from a little mountainside community most Americans had never heard of.
That combination makes Cracker Neck important to the history of Wise County. The great coal towns tell one part of Southwest Virginia’s story, but places like Cracker Neck reveal what existed between them. They show the farms beside the mines, the schools beyond town limits, the country stores at road junctions, the families whose members moved between agriculture and industry, and the small communities that could remain recognizable for generations without ever appearing prominently on a modern highway map.
Cracker Neck was never simply the outskirts of Big Stone Gap.
For the people who called it home, it was a place of its own.
Sources & Further Reading
Filson Historical Society. Rogers Clark Ballard Thruston Photograph Collection, 1882–1905. RCBT-MT-297, John Robert Procter, “Group at Foot of Powell Mountain near Cracker’s Neck,” 1887. https://filsonhistorical.org/research-doc/rogers-clark-ballard-thruston-photograph-collection-1882-1905/
Campbell, Marius R. Geology of the Big Stone Gap Coal Field of Virginia and Kentucky. U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 111. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1893. https://pubs.usgs.gov/bul/0111/report.pdf
United States Geological Survey. East Stone Gap, Virginia. Historical Topographic Quadrangle, 1:24,000, 1935. https://store.usgs.gov/product/920749
United States Geological Survey. “Historical Topographic Map Collection.” TopoView. Accessed September 10, 2026. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/topoview/viewer/
Commonwealth of Virginia, Department of Highways. Wise County, Virginia, Showing Primary and Secondary Highway Systems. 1947. Map-0181. Special Collections and University Archives, Virginia Tech. https://aspace.lib.vt.edu/repositories/2/resources/540
Hoeing, Joseph Bernard, and Big Stone Gap Improvement Company. Map Showing Location of Big Stone Gap, Va., and Its Relation to the South Appalachian System. Big Stone Gap, VA: Big Stone Gap Improvement Company, ca. 1890. Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3884b.ct009306/
Virginia Department of Historic Resources. Wise County and Norton Historic/Architectural Survey. 1995. Includes Skeen’s Store, DHR File 097-0337, and Clinch Haven Farms, DHR File 097-0339. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/pdf_files/SpecialCollections/WS-057_Wise_County_Norton_Historic_AH_Survey_1995_Cost_share_report.pdf
Meador, Virginia Honeycutt. Interview by Andrew Meador. Appalachian History Archive, April 11, 2007. https://www.hgs.k12.va.us/History/Appalachian_History/AHA/AHA_People/interviews/Virginia_Meador.html
Associated Press. “Their Son Coming Home.” Photograph of Van Buren and Bessie Dickenson at their Crackers Neck home. Medford Mail Tribune, October 22, 1953, 8. https://oregonnews.uoregon.edu/lccn/sn97071090/1953-10-22/ed-1/seq-8/
Evening Star. “Dickenson Court-Martial Coverage.” Washington, DC, April 19, 1954. Library of Congress. https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ndnp/dlc/batch_dlc_fidello_ver01/data/sn83045462/00280606819/1954041901/0712.pdf
Associated Press. “Paper Says Turncoat Sick, Deep in Debt.” Oregon Statesman, September 22, 1958, 12. https://oregonnews.uoregon.edu/lccn/sn85042470/1958-09-22/ed-1/seq-12/ocr/
The Big Stone Gap Post. Big Stone Gap, Wise County, VA, 1892–1928. Library of Congress, Chronicling America. https://www.loc.gov/item/sn88061179/
Library of Congress. “Newspaper Titles in Wise County, Virginia.” Chronicling America. Accessed September 10, 2026. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/titles/places/virginia/wise/
Library of Virginia. “Virginia Newspaper Bibliography: Wise County.” Accessed September 10, 2026. https://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/vnd/results.php?counties=Wise
Library of Virginia. “Wise County Microfilm.” County and City Records. Accessed September 10, 2026. https://www.lva.virginia.gov/collections/ccmf/VA/VA297
Wise County, Virginia. Deed Books, General Indexes to Deeds, Surveyors Book, Plat Books, Will Books, Court Order Books, Board of Supervisors Minutes, Marriage Registers, and Military Records. Microfilm holdings, Library of Virginia. https://www.lva.virginia.gov/collections/ccmf/VA/VA297
Library of Virginia. “Chancery Records Index: Wise County.” Accessed September 10, 2026. https://www.lva.virginia.gov/chancery/available.asp
National Archives and Records Administration. “Census Records: Online Resources.” Accessed September 10, 2026. https://www.archives.gov/research/census/online-resources
National Archives and Records Administration. “1950 Census: Wise County, Virginia.” Accessed September 10, 2026. https://1950census.archives.gov/search/?county=Wise&page=1&state=VA
Fox, John, Jr. A Knight of the Cumberland. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1906. Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/324/pg324-images.html
Fox, John, Jr. Christmas Eve on Lonesome and Other Stories. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1911. Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/10735/pg10735-images.html
Fox, John, Jr. “Hell Fer Sartain” and Other Stories. Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/410/pg410-images.html
Wise County Historical Society. Heritage of Wise County and the City of Norton, 1856–1993. Vol. 1. Wise, VA: Wise County Historical Society. https://wisevahistoricalsoc.org/news-articles/page/4/
Peace, John W., II. A Boy From Crackers Neck. 2023. Town of Big Stone Gap, Virginia. https://bigstonegap.com/local-author/john-w-peace-ii/
Author Note: Cracker Neck is the kind of Appalachian community that can be easy to overlook because it never needed incorporation or a downtown to develop an identity of its own. I wanted to preserve the story of the families, farms, school, store, coal connections, and mountain landscape that kept the name alive for generations.