11/17/2025
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The Lantern Walkers of Mingo, 1934
In the deep valleys of Mingo County, West Virginia, the winter of 1934 pressed against the mountains like a fist. The coal companies had closed for months, leaving families without heat. Nights grew so cold that even the river froze at the edges, and the hollows went dark except for a few weak fires.
That was when the children—barely taller than the coal buckets they carried—created something the grown-ups would never forget.
It began with little Nora Adkins, age nine, who tied a bit of coal oil cloth around a jar and made her own lantern from scraps. She lit it at dusk, saying she was “keeping the dark from eating the town.” Her brothers followed. Then the neighbor kids. By the end of the week, nearly forty children marched through the hollow each night carrying handmade lanterns: jars, tin cans, broken miner lamps wired together.
They called themselves The Lantern Walkers.
They went door to door, checking on the elderly, carrying small bits of chopped wood, and bringing leftover cornbread wrapped in newspaper. Their lights flickered along the mountainside like a wandering constellation, turning the hollow into a place of warmth again.
Men weakened by starvation stood on porches wiping their eyes. Mothers who hadn’t smiled in months began humming lullabies again as the lantern glow flooded their kitchens. And in homes where the fires had gone out completely, the children stayed until the grown-ups felt steady enough to face the cold night.
When spring finally broke, the Lantern Walkers held one last march. Every home placed a lantern on its porch in their honor—an entire mountain valley shimmering like a sky turned upside down.
The people of Mingo still say: “In the darkest winter, it was the children who carried the light.”
