Anita Cherry: Like Father Like Daughter  History was made in the winter of 1973 in the coal seams of Jenkins, Kentucky. Alongside Diana Baldwin, Anita Cherry became one of the first two women in the United States to work underground in a coal mine.

Appalachian Figures From Double Creek to Hindman James Still was born on July 16, 1906, in the Double Creek/Double Branch community near LaFayette, Alabama. After studies at Lincoln Memorial University (’29) and graduate work at Vanderbilt (M.A., 1930), he arrived at the Hindman Settlement School in the summer of 1931.

Appalachian Figures A voice from Knott County Verna Mae Slone was born in Knott County, Kentucky, on October 9, 1914, and died in Hindman on January 5, 2009. She and her husband, Willie Slone, raised five sons. In addition to writing, she became known across Eastern Kentucky for her quilts and cloth dolls.

Appalachian Figures Charles McElroy White grew up in the logging and rail hamlet of Hutton on the outskirts of Oakland, Maryland. He went on to lead one of the nation’s largest steelmakers during the most turbulent decades of American industrial history. His path ran from a mountain schoolhouse to the University of Maryland, from mill floors to boardrooms, and into the hearing rooms of Congress.

Appalachian Figures Why Baker matters Edwin T. Baker served eight years in the California Assembly, then two years on the Los Angeles City Council, during a moment when Southern California was growing fast and demanding a bigger voice in state government.

Appalachian History A round valley with a very old story Stand at the Pinnacle Overlook above Cumberland Gap and look down on the town of Middlesboro. The basin that cradles the streets is strikingly circular. For decades geologists mapped and argued about that circle’s origin.

Appalachian History What happened at Pound Gap On the night of November 29–30, 1927, a white mob seized Leonard Woods, a Black coal miner from Jenkins, Kentucky, from the Letcher County jail in Whitesburg. They drove him to Pound Gap on the Kentucky–Virginia line and killed him there.

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 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.