Opioids Decimated a Kentucky Town. Recovering Addicts Are Saving It.
Mandi Fugate Sheffel outside her book store, Read Spotted Newt, in Hazard, Kentucky. (All photos by Stacy Kranitz for The Free Press)
After the collapse of coal mining and the rise of the opioid epidemic, Hazard, Kentucky, seemed finished. Then locals started to rescue it.
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In early 2020, Mandi Fugate Sheffel, 42, opened a tiny bookstore in her hometown of Hazard, in eastern Kentucky. Everyone thought she was crazy.
Downtown Hazard was a forbidding place to start any business, much less a bookstore. The coal mines that once supported the area had closed over the past few decades. Many brick buildings from Hazard’s heyday we…
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