A high school sophomore, Emalee dreams of being a veterinarian or maybe a marine biologist. The house and yard ring with the yelps of a dozen Chihuahuas and other small dogs, some of them strays dropped off by neighbors.

A confident teenager in a “Twilight” T-shirt, Emalee is enrolled in Upward Bound, the federal program that offers Saturday classes and summer school for bright students aspiring to college. “I want to be one of the ones who gets out of here,” she said. “I don’t want people to talk about me” — meaning the recitation of damaged young lives that is a regular part of catching up.

Another photo in the album shows Randy Jr., the McNeelys’ son, known as Little Man. Little Man dropped out of high school six months shy of graduation, “with me sitting here crying,” Ms. McNeely said. He has been in and out of jail but is one of the lucky ones who have found work, at a junkyard run by a family friend.

Although Ms. McNeely encourages her granddaughter to aim for college, which would mean leaving McDowell County, she said that “her other mommy and daddy” — meaning Emalee’s biological parents — “and all her aunts and uncles, they don’t want her to go.”

“They’re scared she’s going to get hurt,” Ms. McNeely said.

Food Stamps and Coal

Many in McDowell County acknowledge that depending on government benefits has become a way of life, passed from generation to generation. Nearly 47 percent of personal income in the county is from Social Security, disability insurance, food stamps and other federal programs.

But residents also identify a more insidious cause of the current social unraveling: the disappearance of the only good jobs they ever knew, in coal mining. The county was always poor. Yet family breakup did not become a calamity until the 1990s, after southern West Virginia lost its major mines in the downturn of the American steel industry. The poverty rate, 50 percent in 1960, declined — partly as a result of federal benefits — to 36 percent in 1970 and to 23.5 percent in 1980. But it soared to nearly 38 percent in 1990. For families with children, it now nears 41 percent.

Today, fewer than one in three McDowell County residents are in the labor force. The chief effort to diversify the economy has been building prisons. The most impressive structure on Route 52, the twisting highway into Welch, is a state prison that occupies a former hospital. There is also a new federal prison on a mountaintop. But many residents have been skipped over for the well-paying jobs in corrections: They can’t pass a drug test.