Appalachian Figures Born in Hyden in Leslie County in 1934, Jim Morgan became a hardwood star at Dayton’s Stivers High School and the University of Louisville, then chose the classroom over the NBA before crafting a second, celebrated career as a thoroughbred trainer in Ohio. He died in Dayton in 2019 at age 85. From Hyden to Dayton Morgan’s family left the Hyden area for Dayton in the early 1940s.

Appalachian Figures Few Leslie Countians have written a song that climbed to No. 1 on the Billboard country chart. One did it from Hyden. Betty Jean Robinson, born Betty Jean Rhodes on June 17, 1933, grew up in the hills around Hyden and later carried that upbringing to Nashville as a working songwriter and, in time, a prolific gospel artist.

Appalachian Figures On paper Charles Counts was a potter. In practice he was a builder of communities who linked clay, quilts, and economic hope from the Kentucky coalfields to the hills of north Georgia and classrooms in northern Nigeria.

Appalachian Figures Leland Eugene “Hammer” Byrd began life in the coal camp of Lynch, Kentucky, and grew up in Matoaka, West Virginia. He reached Morgantown in 1944 as a left-handed forward, became one of West Virginia University’s earliest hardwood stars, and later helped steer college athletics through a transformative era as an athletic director and conference leader.

Appalachian Figures A coal camp beginning Clara Juanita Morris was born in Lynch, Kentucky, a model company town built by the U.S. Coal & Coke Company, a U.S. Steel subsidiary. Lynch rose quickly after 1917 with stone public buildings, graded streets, schools, a hospital, and a massive coal tipple.

Appalachian Figures Introduction Robert Burns “Bob” Conley was born in Mousie, Knott County, on February 1, 1934. He reached the majors with the Philadelphia Phillies in September 1958, starting two games in five days. His brief stay still matters here because it shows how a mountain kid from a small bend of Troublesome Creek climbed all the way to a big league mound.

Appalachian Figures Leila Feltner Begley’s time as Kentucky’s Secretary of State was short, but the paper trail she left behind is unusually clear. Appointed by Governor Louie B. Nunn after the death of her husband and predecessor, Elmer Begley, she served through the fall of 1970 into early 1971.

Appalachian Historian A mountain childhood “I know that you were born in Cumberland, Kentucky in 1931,” the interviewer begins. “I grew up in that little town in the Depression,” Betty Lentz Siegel replies, then sketches the geography of her Harlan County world: the market town of Cumberland, flanked by the company coal towns of Benham and Lynch just up the mountain toward Virginia.

Appalachian Figures Born in Knott County in 1942, Elijah Haydn “Lige” Clarke grew up between Cave Branch and Hindman. He carried Appalachian sensibilities into national activism. Historian Jonathan Coleman argues that Clarke’s mountain upbringing shaped a politics that rejected respectability and favored personal freedom and experiment. Coleman’s peer-reviewed study is the deepest scholarly treatment of Clarke’s life and Kentucky roots.

Appalachian Figures Lynch, Kentucky, as a beginning Lynch was carved out of Harlan County by the U.S. Coal & Coke Company, a U.S. Steel subsidiary, beginning in 1917. It grew into a model company town with miles of planned streets, graded house types, a hospital, schools, churches, and one of the most advanced coal loading plants of its era.

Appalachian History A feud comes to the railroad On an April morning in 1921, a long running mountain feud flared beside the tracks at Heidrick in Knox County, Kentucky. Businessman Beverly P. White stepped off the train that had carried him back from Manchester and walked toward the small restaurant at the Cumberland and Manchester Railroad stop. John Bailey, a member of a rival family clan, shot him multiple times.