Editor’s note: This is part one of a two-part series on how Shallmar was saved from starvation in December 1949.

As principal of the elementary school in Shallmar, J. Paul Andrick knew all of his 50 students on a personal level. In a three-room school, that wasn’t too hard to do. What was hard to do was watching those students literally fade away.

Shallmar was a small coal-mining town along the Upper Potomac River in Garrett County. It was a town on the edge of life, and a short life it had been. Coal mining was the town’s only industry. The Shallmar Mining Co. had started large-scale mining in 1917 and the Wolf Den Mining Co. took over operations in 1929.

During the peak-demand years of two world wars, 90 miners worked in the mine. Now only 53 miners lived in the company town and they hadn’t worked full time for years. In 1948, the Wolf Den Coal Co. mine had operated for three months, and before the mine closed at the end of March 1949, it had operated only 19 days that year.

The miners weren’t giving up on the town, though. One unidentified miner told an Associated Press reporter, “I was born just up the river and I guess I’ll die here.”

His words came close to being prophetic for the entire town of 230 people.

Since school had reopened in September 1949, Andrick had watched his students lose weight and become listless. Some simply stopped coming to class. When one young girl fainted from hunger in mid-December, Andrick’s eyes were finally opened to what was happening in the town.

He sent the girl home and when he checked up on her later, Andrick discovered that the family “had literally lived on apples for two weeks,” he told a reporter for the Associated Press. Other families in Shallmar were just as bad off. “At another home a mother of seven told of feeding her family on bread, potatoes and beans for a similar period, then added, ‘today for a change we had cabbage for supper,’ ” reported the Associated Press.

Nearly all the 53 families in the small coal-mining town were starving. The company store had extended credit to the families after the mine closed in March, but the families were all maxed out by the fall. Not only that, but unemployment benefits to the miners had run out at the end of the summer. Some miners had tried to find work at other mines, but there was little work to be had. While other towns still had working mines or other industries, they could see their futures in Shallmar’s present.

“Without a great amount of help from the outside, these people cannot hope to survive the winter,” Andrick said.

When hunting season came in the fall, the miners had taken their rifles into the woods and brought four deer back to be shared among the town. It wasn’t a great bounty, but to those families with nothing, it was a feast.

One resident said, “I never cared much for venison, but it was the first fresh meat in this house in three months.”

Andrick called the press’ attention to Shallmar’s woes and within days the story had been published in newspapers all over the world. The story touched people’s hearts, particularly because it was less than two weeks before Christmas. Readers began to take action.