Appalshop in Whitesburg, Kentucky has the largest collection of Appalachian media archives in the world, but roughly 70% of its 30,000-item collection was damaged in the historic regional flooding of 2022.
The nonprofit received two federal grants last year totaling nearly $1 million to fully restore and digitize much of the damaged archive.
Now that funding is at risk of being zeroed out.
The grants are administered by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), two federal agencies that have been gutted in recent weeks by the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency.
Last week, DOGE told the NEH all of its outstanding grants would be cancelled and 80% of its staff placed on administrative leave. In March, all of the IMLS staff was placed on administrative leave, a move that is expected to essentially cancel all its grants.
Both agencies are responsible for funding programs of museums and libraries across the country. Appalshop and the Kentucky Humanities Council are two of the major recipients of such funding in Kentucky, with officials from both saying the cuts represent an existential threat to the services they provide.
Chad Hunter, the founding archivist of Appalshop, said the nonprofit’s grants to restore photographic collections and a vast amount of film, video and audio collections damaged by the 2022 flooding are likely gone. Unlike the preservation of normal archives, he says flood damaged items degrade at a much faster rate, “so we have a smaller window of time to save these collections.”
“That is what is at risk here. We are going to lose what we believe to be the largest collection of Appalachian media in the world,” Hunter said. “We're going to lose large portions of it without this funding.”
Bill Goodman, the executive director of the Kentucky Humanities Council, says they receive roughly $850,000 of NEH grants annually, which is nearly 70% of their total funding. In recent years, the council has distributed more than $1.3 million to libraries, museums and cultural centers for reading programs and exhibits, much of which is in rural areas.
“We're fortunate that we have friends and supporters, and we have a little savings in the bank, and we're going to continue to do the work that we've done for the last 53 years,” Goodman said. “But frankly, it's going to be tough, and we're going to do our best going forward.”
Goodman says the council is fortunate to have already spent its grant money for a Smithsonian Institute collaboration to have seven Native American history exhibits in rural parts of Kentucky this year, but other programs are at risk going forward. Noting the recent widespread flooding throughout Kentucky, he said the council was able to send NEH grants to flooded museums and cultural centers in the Appalachian region after the 2022 floods, but now “that money is gone.”
“We would be granting out that money today, if we had it, but last week, when the Department of Government Efficiency came in and slammed the door in our face and zeroed out our budget overnight, we can't do some of those programs now,” Goodman said.
The race to save the Appalshop archive
Appalshop received an NEH grant last year of $225,581 to preserve three large collections of photographic prints damaged in the flooding, as well as a $750,000 Save America's Treasures grant administered by the IMLS to salvage and preserve hundreds of hours of video and film from its damaged archives.
Hunter said the NEH grant has already been cancelled, though it fortunately has completed the preservation process for one of the three photo archives — 3,500 negatives of William R. “Pictureman” Mullins, a self-taught portraiture photographer, from the 1930s through 1950s. The remaining collections include photographs of the Brookside Coal strike in 1973, which was portrayed in the landmark documentary Harlan County USA.
Another of Appalshop’s NEH grants now cancelled is one for $150,000 to collect oral histories that document Black voices and experiences in Appalachia.
Hunter says Appalshop hasn’t yet received official confirmation that its $750,000 grant to preserve a large portion of its flooded film, video and audio archive is cancelled, but assumes it is a certainty, as the IMLS no longer has staff and other similar nonprofits were informed earlier this week that all of their grants were terminated.
He says the flood-damaged archives are currently in cold storage containers at locations in other states, “just waiting for the day that we can have further funding to try to salvage those, as well,” but notes that “there's evidence that those are degrading, even at low temperatures and humidities.”
With federal funding now also frozen — and the clock ticking to preserve the material — Hunter said finding a new funding source quickly is “absolutely critical to the work we're doing to save this vital collection.”
“We need to raise funding to preserve these collections that are for everybody,” Hunter said. “They're for the public, they're not for Appalshop. It's a historic and cultural record of central Appalachia, so we need to save it.”
Higher ed grants and potential litigation
The University of Kentucky Research Foundation, University of Louisville and Western Kentucky University have also received hundreds of thousands of dollars in NEH grants in recent years, according to its records database. Most of these grants involve efforts to maintain and preserve historic archives.
A spokesperson for U of L did not immediately return a request for comment on how the NEH cuts would affect its grants. Spokespersons for UK and WKU said they have not been made aware of any pauses to NEH grants affiliated with the universities.
Goodman of the Kentucky Humanities Council says he expects a group of state attorneys general across the country to soon file litigation against the DOGE cuts to the NEH, similar to what has happened with other litigation challenging the Trump administration’s cuts to other federal programs and funding appropriated by Congress.
He added that he has also forwarded information about the NEH cuts and its effects on Kentucky to the office of Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat who has joined Democratic attorneys general from other states in previous lawsuits against the administration.
Spokespersons for Beshear did not immediately return a request for comment on the NEH and IMLS cuts and potential litigation.
State government and politics reporting is supported in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Correction: This story has been updated to reflect the size of the William R. “Pictureman” Mullins negatives collection.
