In 2021, Anne Cornell stood in the parking lot of a shuttered coal plant in Coshocton, Ohio, the county she’d called home for 45 years.
“[We] stood and looked at this hill of coal and ash, that was maybe two and a half miles from the plant,” Cornell said. “And, Tom said, ‘I don’t know how we would ever represent the monumentality of all of this.’ The stack, the highest stack, was 800 feet tall.”
Tom Dugdale is an associate professor of theater, film and media arts at The Ohio State University (OSU). Dugdale is part of the Ohio Coal Communities Project, some of whose members gathered that day with Cornell in the plant’s parking lot as part of their research on coal transitions in Appalachian Ohio.
To Coshocton, the coal plant was monumental in more ways than one — it was an economic and social lifeline for decades. To help the community begin to reconcile the plant’s loss, the Ohio Coal Communities Project team partnered with Cornell, who is director of the local Pomerene Center for the Arts, in hopes of memorializing the plant through a theater production.
Coshocton County — where the village resides — is just one among the crescent-shaped belt of 32 Appalachian counties that run along Ohio’s eastern border, where the transition away from coal energy is a familiar yet often overlooked plight.
“Everywhere in the country, but Ohio especially, we have a long history with coal,” Jeffrey Jacquet, an Ohio Coal Communities project member and expert on the social impacts from the development of renewables and fossil fuels, said. “It’s in our backyard, but in some ways not receiving a ton of attention.”
The project team focused on three case study communities going through significant coal transitions: Belmont, Noble and Coshocton counties. They interviewed around 50 people, including residents, coal industry workers, elected officials and community leaders.
According to one study from OSU, “U.S. coal industry employment fell 94% over the last century and is expected to almost disappear by 2050” as economies transition to cheaper natural gas, or, in fewer cases, renewable energies like solar and wind. Energy transitions have been particularly devastating for the Appalachian region, which has been reliant on coal for many decades.
“You’re losing a job, you’re losing that opportunity. A family loses an income. Across all of these communities, we heard and witnessed the trauma of the loss of a coal plant,” Professor Gwynn Stewart, Ohio Coal Community Project member and assistant professor of community development for OSU Extension in Noble County, said. “[Ohio coal workers] were helping keep the lights on. They were helping the nation power through all kinds of times. Coal’s been a presence in our nation for a long time.”
For Coshocton Ohio, a small town of 12,000 people, the American Electric Power Coal Plant in Conesville did indeed keep the lights on — for more than six decades. At its height, the plant employed 600 people.
But amid the pandemic in 2020, and halfway through the Ohio Coal Community Project’s work, the plant closed. The Conesville Elementary School, which the plant had adopted, also closed, resulting in a $2.2 million loss for the surrounding school district in Coshocton.
“One thing that we were realizing was that, essentially, there was no sense of closure around it,” Jacquet said. “It closed right during the middle of COVID lockdowns, and so people were just kind of left wondering.”
The plant’s final smokestacks were demolished in August 2023. The space where the plant once stood is set to be turned into an industrial park housing businesses, including a 50-megawatt solar array. While solar energy developments might signal a cleaner and more sustainable future, transitions from coal are hard to bear.
That’s why, when Jacquet started the Ohio Coal Communities Project, he started by considering what mediums could be useful in helping communities handle loss.
“Can art, performance, theater, be a tool to assist these communities, especially [with] these really closely held, emotionally fraught experiences — people that worked their entire lives at this plant, or people who have had a multi-generational relationship with it?” he said.
One of the project’s final products is “Calling Hours,” a play written with the interview material Jacquet and his team had been compiling, along with a couple other conversations Cornell was having with community members.
“Calling Hours” is performed entirely by actors from Coshocton and comprises seven eulogies that memorialize the legacies of coal work, each from a different viewpoint. The play was performed for about 200 community members in the Coshocton artPARK in early May 2023 on the third anniversary of the plant’s closing.
Julie Grant, a reporter for the The Allegheny Front, covered “Calling Hours” when it was first performed in Coshocton. She writes that an actor, Russ Fehrman, who played an older resident, addressed the plant directly during his performance, as if speaking to a loved one.
“Feels important to name you, neighbor. You were huge. And at the end of the day, you were the life and the blood of the community, or a big piece of it,” Ferhman said, monologuing to the crowd, and surrounded by a grand wash of charcoal drawings projected onto the artPARK’s exposed brick walls.
Like all funeral services, “Calling Hours” looks, at once, backward and forward: backward to a community built on the plant’s existence and forward to a community on its own, without the smokestacks, once a tall and familiar comfort on the Appalachian horizon.
Jacquet called the play a “smashing success,” and it has since been billed for another performance, this time at the Global Coal Transitions Research Network, a conference headed by Jacquet, in July.
“I showed up at the performance and I was just completely blown away, and so was everyone else, just sitting in this venue, arm at arm with these former plant workers who are laughing, they’re crying,” Jacquet said. “It’s just amazing. It’s amazing to see my interview data — our interview data — being used in this way.”
In writing “Calling Hours,” Dugdale and Cornell wanted to present a more human perspective, and avoid moralizing the character of the coal industry.
“If we just step back for a second and think about [the plant] less in political terms and more in human terms, maybe that’s appropriate, because when we’re talking about grief and loss, I think it becomes very difficult to take sides,” Dugdale said.
While the project has taken off — and other new interdisciplinary projects have sprung up — Cornell continues to return to her community, the people of Coshocton.
“[‘Calling Hours’] at the most basic level was cathartic,” Cornell said. “It was for the people — the people who worked there — it was a thing for them. It’s easy, as it grows and things open up, to look at the larger goals. But, I constantly bring myself back [to the people].”
