Can one determined family stop the Mountain Parkway from swallowing Mamaw’s house?

They thought they’d planned ahead.

In 1969, Janet and Lowell Arnett bought their heavenly slice of Magoffin County, a narrow hollow between two ridge lines just off the Mountain Parkway outside Salyersville. For years, Lowell traveled as an electrician around Ohio and Kentucky to keep adding to the land until they had 60 acres of hollow and hillsides. Janet worked for a coal company and raised Janeah, Lanessa, and Lowell Jr. in a double-wide trailer near the two-lane road.

In 1998, the Arnetts had finally scraped together enough money to build a house, and they sited it way up the narrow hollow. Everyone knew that someday the Mountain Parkway would be widened along the stretch of Ky 114. They did not want their house to be in its way.

Lowell died in 2015, and so last October, Janet, now 76 years old, got the news by herself. The Mountain Parkway expansion to a four-lane highway was finally underway. But in Magoffin County, the parkway was not being widened; it was being recreated through the hills outside Salyersville.

Right through the Arnetts’ house.

“I have been here since 1969, on this place, living,” Janet said, standing in front of the tidy garden in the front of her yellow, one-story house. “I raised my children here, my grandchildren, my great grandchildren ... Why they couldn’t have arranged the road to have been a little further in front of my house or behind my house. Why right through my house?

“I think the road is a good thing,” she said. “It’s something we need. But not at my cost. Not at my me losing my home, or my children and grandchildren. This is known as ‘Mamaw’s house,’ and I pray they will continue even after I’m gone.”

A $1 billion road

The Mountain Park expansion is considered a jewel of Gov. Andy Beshear’s administration, a nearly $1 billion roadway that will widen and improve the highway from Campton to Prestonsburg.

“The 45-mile Mountain Parkway Expansion project is a nearly $1 billion transformational infrastructure investment in Eastern Kentucky that will provide economic benefits and improve mobility and accessibility for thousands of Eastern Kentuckians for generations to come,” officials from the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet said in an email statement to me when I asked about Arnett’s house.

The state identified the cross-county route — which starts just outside of Salyersville — as the preferred option instead of the KY 114 route because it significantly reduced home relocations from roughly 100 homes to approximately 30 homes.

“The Kentucky Transportation Cabinet understands the very sensitive nature of property acquisition and is committed to finding the best solution for all parties by participating in a fair and equitable process under the law,” the statement said. “When studying alignments for the final parkway segment in Magoffin and Floyd counties, KYTC follows strict federal regulations and guidelines during the property acquisition or relocation processes. A property owner’s or dweller’s personal attributes such as age, gender, family size, marital status, socioeconomic status or occupation do not factor into the acquisition or relocation process so as to ensure equitable transactions.”

Officials said they could not comment directly about Arnett’s case.

As soon as the Arnett children got the news, they zipped back to Salyersville from their respective homes. Janeah Gullett lives in Prestonsburg, Lanessa DeMarchis in Knoxville, Tennessee, and Lowell Jr. in Lexington.

The letter said simply that the state transportation department would be surveying the land in anticipation of buying 10 acres around the house. If an agreement could not be reached, the land will taken through eminent domain. The children set up a meeting with the district transportation people in Jackson in December.

“They literally put down a packet with an offer,” said Lanessa DeMarchis, Arnett’s youngest child who attended the meeting. “There are no options — we are going to take your home and land.”

When they asked about moving the house either further up the property or down closer to KY 114, which will now be a secondary access road for people who live on the other side of it, officials told them their side of 114 would be closed off for drainage and safety issues.

Janet Arnett got so upset during the meeting that her blood pressure spiked and she started vomiting, so the meeting ended without any resolution.

Then they received another letter saying they had until the end of February to put in a counter-offer to the state’s. The Arnetts declined to cite dollar amounts, but said the state’s offer was too low.

But it’s hard to get good appraisals or comparable sales because property rarely changes hands in places like Magoffin County, where people may move away, but will hold onto their property, or “homeplace.” And even if Arnett had wanted to move, there’s very little for sale, and nothing like what she would be leaving behind.

The Arnetts have heard that other neighbors have already made deals, like one family who bought some land across of KY 114 and are planning to build a house there. One other family is distraught: WMYT profiled the Coles, who say they have to exhume their mother, who is buried on property being condemned for the highway in Magoffin County.

Magoffin Judge Executive Matt Wireman confirmed that housing — especially accessible, affordable housing — is a huge need in Magoffin County.

The new road “can’t do anything but help our economy,” Wireman said. He said there are so many people living on the stretch of the parkway in Salyersville that going around that section through the hills would be the safest alternative.

“Unfortunately, Janet is right in the middle of it,” he said. “I’ve known her my whole life. It’s a bad situation, but it’s way above my pay grade to get it fixed. I hate it for her, but I don’t know what the answer is.”

The homeplace is priceless

So the Arnett children and grandchildren decided to start a social media campaign. They started posting across Facebook and Instagram, got friends from all over to send letters to the editor, and started a petition titled “Save Mamaw’s House from the Highway Expansion,” which has now garnered almost 2,000 signatures.

It’s not about money, the Arnetts insist. What they have at the homeplace is priceless.

“Everything you’ve ever heard or seen or done is at the homeplace,” Janet explained. “We grew vegetables, raised cattle, the kids learned to swim in the pond and fished in it, too. Everything that other people leave to do, we can do here, and it goes from one generation to the next.”

As Lanessa described it, a homeplace is much more than a house.

“It’s a destination, a refuge, a feeling, a release, an escape,” she said. “You grow up there, you’re surrounded by family and community ... Mamaw’s house is where it all happens ... it’s a way of life. I get people who say ‘buy her some place else.’ That’s not it. This is where you’re going to get homemade cookies and play in the creek. It is truly a place of refuge and comfort.”

On a recent visit to Salyersville, Janet and Lowell Jr. showed me where her vegetable garden goes in every summer, and up beyond it to the farm pond where her children learned to swim. Lowell has found rockhouses and arrowheads in the steep tree-lined hills that rise above the property. On both sides, his family has been in Magoffin County since the 1820s.

“Here, the land is who you are, it becomes part of you,” he said. “With this, you’re destroying a whole way of life. At 76, you don’t want to start over.”

Janet has developed anxiety, with high blood pressure and heart issues. She’s afraid if she has to move, she will get much, much sicker.

Transportation officials canceled the most recent meeting with the Arnetts, so they are hoping that maybe the engineers can come up with another idea. The Arnetts continue to support the project because, as Lanessa says, they know it will help Eastern Kentucky.

“I don’t want anyone to think we oppose progress,” she said. “But this is different than someone just having to move. Money has nothing to do with it. She just wants to be left alone.”