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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

Appalachian History Series Why the cove mattered In the spring of 1864 Ulysses S. Grant pushed on all fronts in Virginia. One prong sent Brigadier General George Crook to wreck the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad at Dublin Depot and to burn the big railroad bridge over the New River at Central Depot, today’s Radford.

Appalachian History Series Why Marion mattered In the last winter of the war, southwestern Virginia still fed the Confederacy’s armies with salt from Saltville and lead from the mines along the upper New River. Those resources moved over the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad through Wytheville and Marion. Any serious Federal raid into the mountains would try to break that industrial chain.

Appalachian History What happened At daybreak on April 30, 1863, Union Col. Abel D. Streight’s provisional brigade was pushing east along Sand Mountain when Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest’s pursuing cavalry struck the column’s rear at Day’s Gap in present-day Cullman County. The Federals stood, repulsed the first assaults, and kept moving.