We wanted and needed to create a coal mining heritage park that could combine history, education, science, and recreation…it was a big job and we didn't have the expertise to do it, didn't have the training, didn't have much of the technical support that we needed…And then we needed to collect our oral history because our people are dying so rapidly-and so the university [Radford University] helped us do that. It was a creation of a larger community of actors. And so it just sort of doubled or increased our power to do what we needed to do. This partnership of ours has been great. It's been ten years, and counting. (Jimmie L. Price, President of the Coal Mining Heritage Association, March 19, 2005)
