Editing McDowell County, West Virginia (section)

==Economy==
[[File:Coalwood, WV.jpg|thumb|right|Coalwood, home of the 'Rocket Boys," who experimented with home-made rockets in the 1950s, the subject of the film ''[[October Sky]]'']]

The county has been classified as a "[[food desert]]" by the USDA. In 2017, there were only two full-sized [[grocery store]]s to serve the county's {{convert|535|sqmi|km2|abbr=off|sp=us}}.<ref>{{Cite web |last=Coyne |first=Caity |date=April 7, 2018 |title=In McDowell County 'food desert,' concerns about the future |url=https://www.wvgazettemail.com/news/in-mcdowell-county-food-desert-concerns-about-the-future/article_df3ac520-9c30-53c8-9027-bd73f8b9b4f1.html |access-date=January 19, 2020 |website=Charleston Gazette-Mail |language=en}}</ref> The county's only [[Walmart]] Supercenter, the county's largest employer, closed in 2016.<ref>"What Happened when Walmart Left," ''The Guardian,'' [https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jul/09/what-happened-when-walmart-left], accessed January 19, 2020</ref>

Financial services remain scant in the area. In 1999, The First National Bank of Keystone, the only bank located in the [[coal town]] of [[Keystone, West Virginia|Keystone]] and the town's major employer at the time, was closed by the [[Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation|FDIC]] due to fraud. Management had been falsifying the bank's financial statements by booking income from loans the bank did not own, giving the appearance that the bank was generating large profits when it was in fact insolvent.<ref>{{Cite web |date=October 31, 1999 |title=Millions Vanish From West Virginia Bank |url=https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-oct-31-mn-28294-story.html |access-date=November 15, 2020 |website=Los Angeles Times |language=en-US}}</ref> At the height of the scandal, executives buried large volumes of documents in a trench in an attempt to conceal the fraud from the bank's accounting firm and from the [[Office of the Comptroller of the Currency]].<ref>{{Cite book |last=Pasley |first=Robert S. |title=Anatomy of a Banking Scandal |publisher=Taylor & Francis |year=2017 |isbn=978-1-351-53179-5}}</ref>

===Poverty===
In 2022, McDowell was the 16th-poorest county in the U.S. (out of 3,143 counties), with a median annual household income of $28,235. The percentage of the population living in poverty was estimated at 37.6 percent.<ref>{{Cite web|title=SAIPE State and County Estimates for 2022 |url=https://www.census.gov/data/datasets/2022/demo/saipe/2022-state-and-county.html |website=United States Census Bureau}}</ref><ref name="Quick Facts">{{Cite web |title=Quick Facts |url=https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/mcdowellcountywestvirginia/PST045223 |access-date=September 28, 2024 |website=U.S. Census Bureau}}</ref> This compares with a median annual household income of $67,521 and a poverty rate of 11.4 percent in the U.S. as a whole.<ref name="Income and Poverty">{{Cite web |title=Income and Poverty in the United States, 2023 |url=https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2024/demo/p60-283.html |access-date=September 28, 2024 |website=U.S. Census Bureau}}</ref>