“There are two things we know,” said Mary Beth Brown one afternoon last November in the small Whoa Nellie Dairy store at her family farm.

“I’m going to die eventually, and we might lose this place.”

Ms. Brown, 37, has stage 4, metastatic breast cancer, meaning it has spread beyond her breasts — to her lungs and her bones. The place, which has been in her husband Ben’s family for more than 200 years, has not made a profit for the Browns and their three young children since they took it over from his parents four years ago. Dairy prices are simply too low, even after they began self-bottling part of their milk and selling it directly to customers.

Ms. Brown and her husband, 34, live every day worried that they will be the generation to lose the family farm, if they are unable to pay the loans they owe from buying the cows and machinery from his parents. Last year, they made just $10,000 to support themselves and their children Anthony, Oliver and Nellie, Ms. Brown said.

“We’re crossing our fingers that nothing’s going to break,” said Ms. Brown. And Mr. Brown does not get breaks: Twice a day, the cows need to be milked. He wakes up in the middle of the night to milk, and sleeps in shifts.

“We should be making $100,000, with how much he works,” she said.

Despite the sword hanging over their parents’ heads, “the kids are happy,” Ms. Brown said. “They go fishing, they shoot bows and arrows. They don’t know they’re poor.”

The Browns live on the border of Fayette County’s Saltlick and Bullskin townships, in the unincorporated post office location of Acme. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Saltlick is one of the Pittsburgh region’s municipalities where more than 50% of children are living in poverty — in fact, that describes nearly two-thirds of its kids. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is featuring a dozen such communities in its ongoing series “Growing Up Through the Cracks,” including two other communities in Fayette County, seven in Allegheny County and one each in Westmoreland and Armstrong counties.

In January, the Post-Gazette featured the Mon Valley borough of Rankin, close to Pittsburgh, where vacant lots and violence conspire to keep families down and drain local resources. Rural poverty manifests itself differently but is no less pervasive.

In rural Saltlick, government services are hard to access. The local officials don’t see social services as their job, while federal and state benefits are funneled through the county seat in Uniontown, a 40-minute drive with no transit options.

For the Brown children, a strong social network, centered on their family and their church, has shielded them from great hardship. They know little of the challenges likely to come.

Advertisement Advertisement

“Since Nellie turned 6, it’s time

to figure out what she can do.”

Even as they face Ms. Brown’s worsening prognosis, there is a lot of joy in the Brown household.

Shortly after New Year’s Day, the Browns’ children, Nellie, then 5, Oliver, 7, and Anthony, 8, excitedly showed off their Christmas presents. They included various knives, including hand-me-downs and county-fair purchases, Anthony’s first hunting rifle, and small gifts from Toys for Tots. Any time one brother brings out his knives, the other wants to show off his own collection.

One early April afternoon, two weeks after Ms. Brown had her ovaries removed to slow the cancer, Anthony, 8, excitedly described the “shelter” he and his siblings were building with their father on “Horseshoe Island,” an island in a nearby creek. Oliver, 7, played a Sonic the Hedgehog game on one of the two Kindle tablets he and his brother had received from their grandparents for Christmas. Nellie, 6, showed off how high she could swing, on the playset their father and uncle built, and the stuffed unicorn her grandmother had given her for her sixth birthday.