Larry Gibson

Larry Gibson (1946 – September 9, 2012) was an anti-mining environmentalist from West Virginia, who spent the majority of his adult life opposing mountaintop removal coal mining in the area, specifically at Kayford Mountain. He was president of the Keeper of the Mountains Foundation and lifetime member of the Sierra Club. He also was a board member for the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition. His father and grandfather were both coal miners and he had many other relatives who worked in the mines.

He returned to Kayford Mountain shortly afterwards, where he found that mountaintop removal coal mining operations had become so prevalent that one nearly infringed on his family’s cemetery plot. This cemetery plot was eventually desecrated by mining equipment, an act that he stood by to witness in the early 2000s.

Activism When Gibson returned to Kayford Mountain in the mid-1980s, mining companies had just started to buy small plots of land from the local communities to dynamite the mountain peaks and dig for coal. Gibson also wandered the state educating locals on the mining activities’ effects, having once walked from Harper’s Ferry across southern West Virginia to Huntington on his own, speaking to communities he encountered on the way of his campaign. Money was not the only tactic that was employed to stop Gibson; he is only too keen to show visitors bullet holes in the wood of his cabin, He had effigies of him burned, endured threatening phone calls and was beaten up more than once. He was also the subject of an ABC documentary in their 20/20 television series.

Death At the age of 66, Larry Gibson died of a heart attack on 9 September 2012 at his home in West Virginia. Gibson left behind a wife and three children.