Pound, VA

Pound is the smallest American address in this archive — a town of well under a thousand people in Wise County, in the far southwestern tip of Virginia, where the Commonwealth narrows between Kentucky and the wall of Pine Mountain. This is the Appalachian coalfield: hollows and ridgelines, company-town memory, mountain gospel and old-time music as the ordinary furniture of life. The town grew where the Pound River gap opened a road through the mountains — the route north to the Breaks Interstate Park, the "Grand Canyon of the South", whose gorge is among the deepest east of the Mississippi.

Pound's brush with world history came through one of its sons: Francis Gary Powers, the U-2 pilot shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960 and exchanged on the Glienicke Bridge, grew up here, the son of a coalfield family — the Cold War's most famous prisoner swap traced back to this Virginia hollow. The "Center for the Performing Arts" of the source records awaits precise identification (a note for the registry); musical life in such towns runs through school stages, churches and the touring companies that once threaded the mountain circuits — which is exactly how a travelling opera reached Pound, and why this smallest of entries belongs in the archive at all.