Bradshaw couple received nation’s first food stamps in 1961

Alderson Muncy of Bradshaw and his wife, Chloe, received the nation’s first food stamps in Welch on May 29, 1961, then used them at John Henderson’s supermarket to buy two watermelons. Muncy was an unemployed miner and father of 15, and the ceremony tied McDowell County to the start of a federal anti-hunger program that would become part of daily life far beyond West Virginia.

McDowell County was not an accident of history. President John F. Kennedy’s 1960 Welch remarks described the county as a place marked by poverty, want, hunger, and high unemployment, and his Feb. 2, 1961 announcement launched eight pilot food stamp projects across the country. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s history says those pilots reached 392,400 people at a federal cost of $29 million. West Virginia was the first of eight states to issue food stamps and the first state to implement the program statewide.

The program became permanent with the Food Stamp Act of 1964, went nationwide by October 1974, and took the name Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program in 2008. That policy line still runs through West Virginia today, where the Department of Human Services Bureau for Family Assistance administers SNAP. In 2015, West Virginia Public Broadcasting reported that nearly one in five West Virginians received food stamps, the sixth-highest per-capita rate in the country.

The early returns on the program helped explain why Kennedy and Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman pushed it so hard. A White House retrospective said typical pilot areas saw average retail food sales gains of 8 percent after the program began, and that by its fifth anniversary it had reached more than 1 million people in about 300 areas. In McDowell County, the first exchange was modest, a $95 issuance for a family of 15, but the moment in Welch opened the modern food stamp era and put Bradshaw at the center of a national safety-net program that still matters in county and state poverty today.