A patch of spilled coal on a Martin County roadway Monday was enough to stop more than traffic. It stirred memories.

For those who have lived here long enough, coal scattered on the pavement was once no sight at all. It was ordinary. Coal trucks rumbled the roads daily. Loose chunks bounced from overloaded beds. Black settled along shoulders, in ditches and in the medians.

In eastern Kentucky and southern West Virginia, coal was not a novelty. It was part of the landscape.

There was a time when no one in this country much worried about finding coal to burn for heat. It was abundant. It was close. In many places, it was free for the taking if you were willing to shovel it, haul it and carry it home.

Families heated houses, warmed bathwater and got through hard winters with fuel that seemed as common as the hills themselves.

That was the old economy, and old memories have a way of arriving all at once.

A little coal on the road near Coldwater can still bring back a hundred images: trucks laboring uphill, blackened creek banks, blackened creeks, tipples humming, miners changing shifts, coal piles beside houses and the smell of a stove doing its work on a bitter morning.

But memory should not blind us to fact.

Martin County has given up hundreds of millions of tons of coal over the years. The wealth beneath these hills did not stay beneath them, and much of the wealth it created did not stay here either.

What was taken out built fortunes, powered cities and fueled industries far beyond our borders. What remains is a county still fighting for basic infrastructure, stable jobs and the kind of economic security that should have been guaranteed by such extraordinary natural wealth.

That is the contradiction every Appalachian coal county knows by heart.

We remember when coal was everywhere. We remember when it lined the roadsides and when people could heat their homes with what seemed to fall from the stream of commerce itself. Yet in the long arc of history, abundance did not become security. Extraction did not become permanence. Rich land did not make rich people.

Now, seeing coal on the road is rare enough to make us look twice.

And maybe that is why Monday’s spill felt like more than a spill. It was a brief glimpse of another era — one when coal was so common it barely deserved a second glance, and one that still asks hard questions about what this place gave and what it got in return.

The coal may no longer line our roads.

But the story of where it went and what it left behind still does.