JACKSON, Ky. — Deep in a quiet mountain holler called Panbowl Branch, outside a decaying town of 2,000 in one of America’s poorest counties, sits a ramshackle red brick home. The roof is roughly patched with torn tarps, the front porch is heaped with discarded goods and the yard is littered with cars and boats in disrepair.
Three decades ago, this home sheltered a young JD Vance as he fled a tumultuous life in Ohio to spend summers with his grandparents — a period he cited as pivotal to his success in his speech last week accepting the vice-presidential nomination. Today, the battered house sits amid a community that has suffered deeper decline since Vance described the region’s ruin eight years ago in “Hillbilly Elegy,” his bestseller, which was turned into a 2020 film.
Vance’s experience with a dysfunctional extended Appalachian family here and in Ohio formed the backbone of the book, as he recounted how generations of abuse and violence had shaped him and his relatives. It includes tales of his uncle nearly killing a man by slicing him with an electric saw and his grandmother soaking his grandfather with gasoline and lighting him on fire.
Those dramatic stories primarily involve Vance’s close relatives — who are either deceased or did not respond to requests for comment. The incidents aren’t documented in court records in a community often loath to involve authorities in family disputes, but numerous friends and neighbors who are close to Vance’s family said they don’t doubt that the stories are broadly true.
What many in Jackson take issue with, though, are the conclusions that Vance reached in “Hillbilly Elegy” about the root causes of the area’s poverty and violence. In the book, Vance argues that a lack of personal responsibility is partly to blame, writing that “Public policy can help, but there is no government that can fix these problems for us.”
In fact, many in Jackson say government help is a key lifeline in a distressed region. At Jackson’s city hall, on a downtown street near closed-up storefronts, Mayor Laura Thomas ticked off the recent run of calamities that have required help from federal agencies: After the steep decline of coal-mining came the pandemic and then two successive historic floods in 2021 and 2022.
“Unfortunately, I would say that since I’ve been in office, we’ve had one disaster after another,” said the mayor, who is starting her sixth year in the nonpartisan job. “So it’s been hard to govern.”
Although registered Democrats vastly outnumber Republicans in Breathitt County, Trump won the 2020 vote here by a margin of more than 3 to 1, according to election records.
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Three decades ago, this home sheltered a young JD Vance as he fled a tumultuous life in Ohio to spend summers with his grandparents — a period he cited as pivotal to his success in his speech last week accepting the vice-presidential nomination. Today, the battered house sits amid a community that has suffered deeper decline since Vance described the region’s ruin eight years ago in “Hillbilly Elegy,” his bestseller, which was turned into a 2020 film.
Vance’s experience with a dysfunctional extended Appalachian family here and in Ohio formed the backbone of the book, as he recounted how generations of abuse and violence had shaped him and his relatives. It includes tales of his uncle nearly killing a man by slicing him with an electric saw and his grandmother soaking his grandfather with gasoline and lighting him on fire.
Those dramatic stories primarily involve Vance’s close relatives — who are either deceased or did not respond to requests for comment. The incidents aren’t documented in court records in a community often loath to involve authorities in family disputes, but numerous friends and neighbors who are close to Vance’s family said they don’t doubt that the stories are broadly true.
What many in Jackson take issue with, though, are the conclusions that Vance reached in “Hillbilly Elegy” about the root causes of the area’s poverty and violence. In the book, Vance argues that a lack of personal responsibility is partly to blame, writing that “Public policy can help, but there is no government that can fix these problems for us.”
In fact, many in Jackson say government help is a key lifeline in a distressed region. At Jackson’s city hall, on a downtown street near closed-up storefronts, Mayor Laura Thomas ticked off the recent run of calamities that have required help from federal agencies: After the steep decline of coal-mining came the pandemic and then two successive historic floods in 2021 and 2022.
“Unfortunately, I would say that since I’ve been in office, we’ve had one disaster after another,” said the mayor, who is starting her sixth year in the nonpartisan job. “So it’s been hard to govern.”
Although registered Democrats vastly outnumber Republicans in Breathitt County, Trump won the 2020 vote here by a margin of more than 3 to 1, according to election records.
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