CBS highlights child hunger surge in McDowell County, America’s poorest

The hunger line in McDowell County is getting longer, and Linda McKinney is seeing it first among children and young mothers in Welch. At Five Loaves & Two Fishes, the county’s largest food bank, the pressure comes as one in three households depends on SNAP and families try to stretch school meals across weekends and summer breaks.

CBS News used a recent 60 Minutes segment to spotlight a county that sits deep in the Appalachian Mountains, spans 533.5 square miles and has just one traffic light. It is also a place where more churches than could be counted stand alongside the hard arithmetic of poverty: McDowell’s population peaked at 98,887 in 1950, fell to 19,111 in the 2020 Census and dropped again to an estimated 16,878 in the Census Bureau’s Vintage 2025 count. That is a loss of more than 82% from its mid-century high.

The county’s struggle is tied to the collapse of the coal economy that once made it the nation’s largest producer. Today, McDowell is still widely described as one of the poorest places in the United States, and the food bank load reflects that reality. McKinney’s warning about child suffering lands in a county where the safety net has been thinned by population loss, job loss and the continuing dependence on public aid.

McDowell also carries a deeper national history. The U.S. Department of Agriculture says President John F. Kennedy announced pilot food stamp programs on Feb. 2, 1961. A West Virginia history source says the first recipients were Mr. and Mrs. Alderson Muncy in McDowell County on May 29, 1961. Six decades later, the county that helped launch the modern food stamp program is still relying on it heavily.

The strain worsened after the Feb. 15-18, 2025 floods in West Virginia, which killed three people in McDowell County. CBS News reported about $12 million in federal relief had trickled into the county, a sum residents and local officials said was nowhere near enough for rebuilding. That has left schools, DHHR-linked providers and charities as the main stopgaps for food and emergency help.

For McDowell’s children, the question is not abstract. It is whether enough food is available when the school cafeteria closes for the weekend, and again when summer arrives. In a county that helped start the nation’s food stamp era, that gap is still wide open.