Appalachian Figures When Ohio historians talk about Madam Lizzie Lape, they usually start in Marion or Akron or Stow. They talk about the White Pigeon, about raids on “houses of ill fame,” about an early test of the Winn Law and the Married Women’s Property Acts. Very few start where the paper trail actually begins, in the hill farms of Whitley County, Kentucky, with a girl the census takers called Amy or Elizabeth Rogers.

Appalachian Figures If you stand at the mouth of the hollow where Packard once sat, there is no marquee and no sign that an Academy Award winner first opened her eyes there. The coal tipple is gone. The company houses are gone. What remains is a quiet Whitley County hollow above Big Patterson Creek where, for a few decades in the early twentieth century, several hundred people tried to make a life in the shadow of a mine.

Appalachian Figures When racing fans see the red and white Ramsey silks flash past the finish line at Churchill Downs or Keeneland, they are watching a global operation that grew from some very small places on the Cumberland. The story of Kenneth Lee and Sarah Kathern Ramsey usually gets told in the language of purse money, Eclipse Awards, and Breeders’ Cup wins. It is also a Knox County story.

Appalachian Figures On a stretch of Cumberland Avenue in downtown Middlesboro, the traffic signs suddenly change. For a few blocks the road becomes the Leonard F. Mason Medal of Honor Memorial Highway, a reminder that one of the most celebrated Marines of the Pacific war began life within sight of Yellow Creek and the surrounding Bell County ridges.

Appalachian Figures On a fall night in Bluefield, Virginia, a Graham High School senior named Bill Dudley lined up for what everyone in the stands understood as a desperate kick. The ball sat on the Princeton forty yard line, too far out for most high school kickers of the late nineteen thirties. Dudley swung his leg, the ball sailed through the uprights, and an underdog team from the coalfields stunned a favored rival.

Appalachian Figures In the winter of 1907 a quiet judge from St. Joseph took his seat on the Supreme Court of Missouri. On paper he was a Midwestern Democrat with a farm upbringing, a Washington University law degree, and a reputation for careful rulings in railroad and criminal cases. Yet the official manual that introduced him to Missouri voters began with a different place: Knox County, Kentucky.

The sudden death of Judge Micah Chrisman Saufley in August 1910 startled readers from Wayne County to the Bluegrass. Stanford’s Interior Journal and other Kentucky papers told the same story in slightly different words. A respected circuit judge collapsed at his barn in Stanford, Lincoln County, after a workday that still mixed courthouse business with feeding chickens.

Appalachian Figures On the ridge between Monticello, Kentucky and Livingston, Tennessee, the Cullom name keeps showing up in courthouse minutes, church rolls, and cemetery stones. In a previous story I followed William Cullom from Elk Spring Valley to the halls of Congress as a Whig who fought the Kansas Nebraska bill and clung to the Union even while he owned enslaved people. His older brother Alvan walked a different path.

Appalachian Figures Shelbiana sits where railroad tracks, coal seams, and the Levisa Fork all meet. On paper it is an unincorporated community and coal town in Pike County that grew up around a major rail yard on the Chesapeake and Ohio line, now CSX. In practice it is one of those places where the tracks run so close to the houses that children grow up measuring time in passing coal trains.

Appalachian Figures On a sharp bend of Kentucky Route 92 as it drops toward the Cumberland River, a green sign tells drivers they have entered the Joe C. Paul Memorial Highway. The words hurry past in the blur of the windshield. For most people, the name is only another roadside marker, one more reminder that Kentucky is thick with memorials to wars fought far from its hills.

From a narrow hollow in Pike County to college arenas up and down the East Coast, the story of Carl Johnson Slone begins in a place that barely shows up on most maps. Majestic, Kentucky is a coal town tucked against the Tug Fork, a run of houses, market, and post office strung along the highway in eastern Pike County.