A New Magazine: Split Rail from Beckley, West Virginia
This one's different from anything else in the collection. Not better, not worse—just different. When I pulled the first issue of Split Rail out of a garbage bag in a shed in Raleigh County, West Virginia, I thought I'd found somebody's homemade zine. The paper was rough, the binding was cheap staples, and the interior pages were entirely black and white. Then I started reading, and I didn't stop until I'd gone through all seven surviving issues.
The Earl Tackett Story
Split Rail Magazine was published out of Beckley, West Virginia from 1973 to 1976 by Earl Tackett—Vietnam veteran, former coal mine foreman, and the unlikeliest magazine publisher in America. Earl had saved enough money running a print shop to take a gamble on the one thing he knew he could do: show the world that Appalachia wasn't the hillbilly joke everyone made it out to be.
The name came from the split-rail fences on every mountain farm in the region. Earl liked the double meaning and wasn't shy about it. The tagline—"Where the Mountains Meet the Man"—appeared on every cover.
Earl did almost everything himself. He wrote the articles, sold the ads, took the photographs on a used Mamiya, and ran the pages through the cheapest offset press he could find. The result looks like what it is: a one-man operation running on bourbon and stubbornness. Color on the cover, black and white everywhere else. Newsprint-grade paper. Registration that sometimes drifted mid-run. And writing that could hit you like a freight train when you weren't expecting it.
Vol. 1, No. 3 (Summer 1973)
The first issue we've scanned is Vol. 1, No. 3, the Summer 1973 issue—the third issue Earl ever published. It's 29 pages plus a cover, which is smaller than our other magazines, but every page is full.
The cover girl is Jolene from Fayetteville. Earl found her working the lunch counter at the Court Diner, where she'd been slinging coffee and country-fried steak since she was seventeen. She gets the cover, a four-page spread, and the centerfold. In Earl's words: "She's got red hair, green eyes, and a smile that could stop a coal train."
Darla from Lewisburg is the second feature—a library clerk shot by firelight in a cabin on the Greenbrier River. Earl describes her as "quiet, smart, and photographs like a dream." Lorena from Richwood rounds out the pictorials, shot at a swimming hole on the Cherry River. Three mountain women, three different settings, all of them looking completely at ease.
Earl's Voice
What sets Split Rail apart from every other magazine in the collection is Earl Tackett's voice. His publisher's column ("From Earl's Desk") reads like a man who learned to write by reading Hemingway but talks like his granddaddy. He's blunt, sometimes crude, fiercely protective of his home, and occasionally beautiful.
The letters page ("The Mailbox") has a preacher from Lewisburg threatening eternal damnation, a housewife from Charleston calling Earl a disgrace, and a coal miner from McDowell County who just wants to know if Jolene is single. Earl answers all of them. The preacher gets invited to submit his wife for the Wildflowers page. The housewife gets thanked for the free publicity. And the coal miner gets told that Jolene "ain't lookin' for a man who comes home blacker than he left."
The Articles
"The Real Mountain Dew" is a two-page piece on moonshine culture in southern West Virginia that manages to be funny, informative, and only slightly illegal. Earl clearly knows his subject. The second feature is a road test of the 1973 International Scout II on the mountain roads around the New River Gorge—Earl's verdict: "It'll get you there. Whether you enjoy the ride is between you and your kidneys."
The Ads
The advertising is pure coal country. Mountain State Coal & Coke Company gets the inside front cover—a heavy, authoritative ad that's also hiring miners, electricians, and mechanics. Beckley Firearms & Sporting Goods runs a half-page with period pricing that'll make you weep (Remington 870 Wingmaster for $129). Wild Turkey Bourbon and the C&O Railway split a page, and Holliday's General Store in Fayette Station promises "If we ain't got it, you don't need it." Pabst Blue Ribbon gets the back cover with the perfect tagline: "What the Working Man Drinks."
The Wildflowers Page
Split Rail's version of a reader-submitted photo feature. "Send us your wildflowers. Wives, girlfriends, the girl down the road—if she's pretty enough to pick, she's pretty enough for Split Rail. Every photograph we publish pays ten dollars." Eight photos fill a grid page, and they look exactly like what they are: Polaroids and amateur snapshots of real women who somebody thought deserved to be in a magazine.
Condition
Remarkably good, considering where we found it. Earl's widow Loretta kept the magazines in a shed behind the house in Beckley until her grandson found them during a cleanout in 2025. They were wrapped in garbage bags, which may have saved them. The paper is yellowed and the staples are a bit rusty, but the pages are intact and legible. The cheap newsprint stock actually aged better than some of the glossier magazines in the collection, because there's less coating to crack and flake.
What's Next
Split Rail is the fifth magazine in the Dusty Mags archive, and it might be my favorite to read. Not because it's the prettiest—it isn't. Not because the photography is the best—it isn't that either. But because Earl Tackett's voice comes through on every page, and you can feel how much this magazine meant to him. He was trying to prove something, and in thirteen issues before the coal market took his advertisers away, he damn near did.
We've recovered seven of the estimated thirteen issues. I'll be scanning more as I work through the collection. Next up is either the Fall 1973 issue or Vol. 2, No. 1 from Winter 1974, depending on which one I can get clean scans from first.
— Glenn