Appalachian Figures Porterville and the Hopper family in Kemper County Robert Clay Hopper was born on 3 October 1902 in Porterville, a tiny railroad town in Kemper County, Mississippi. Contemporary gazetteer data and modern mapping place Porterville firmly inside Kemper County, along the Kansas City Southern Railway, with a post office dating back to 1890 and a population of about 200 in 1906. That Kemper County setting mattered.

Appalachian Figures On a cool October afternoon in 1929, the Washington Senators wrapped up a long and mostly forgettable season with a meaningless game against the Boston Red Sox. In center field for Washington stood a twenty six year old rookie from a fading river town in Kemper County, Mississippi. His name on the lineup card was simple enough. Land, center field.

Appalachian Figures In the late twentieth century, thousands of families left the hills and hollers of Appalachia for the auto plants of the industrial Midwest. Mountain men and women who once cut timber or mined coal found themselves under fluorescent lights, tightening bolts on assembly lines in places like Detroit, Flint, and Sterling Heights. Those plants were dangerous.

Appalachian Figures In most stories about Benjamin Vernon “Ben” Lilly, the hunter appears fully formed. He pads through the Gila Wilderness with a pack of hounds, slips after lions in the Sierra Madre, or guides President Theodore Roosevelt on a black bear hunt along a Louisiana bayou.

Appalachian Figures In the piney woods of Kemper County, the mill town of Electric Mills once advertised itself as the brightest town south of St. Louis. Built around a fully electric lumber mill, it had its own hospital, theater, and even company currency before the trees gave out and the town slowly emptied. From that fading industrial outpost came a girl who would spend nearly three decades in the Mississippi House of Representatives.

Appalachian Figures On a warm May day in 1865, at Meridian, Mississippi, a Confederate cavalry colonel from tiny Scooba stood in line and signed his name to defeat.

Appalachian Figures A reformer with a lawyer’s pen In 1903 Pennsylvania adopted one of the nation’s sturdier tenement-house codes for its “cities of the second class,” the statutory category that included Pittsburgh. The law did not fall from the sky.

Appalachian Figures A Garrett County life Darvin C. Moon grew up and worked around Oakland, Maryland, in the western Panhandle at the foot of Backbone Mountain. He built a small logging operation with family, played home-game tournaments at places like the Elks Lodge, and preferred the quiet of the woods to the bright lights of Las Vegas.

Appalachian Figures Garrett County’s lake country is a long way from the coasts that usually make American sailing history. Yet in the late 1950s a small shop near Deep Creek Lake began turning out a 19-foot dinghy that families still race across the United States. Designer Gordon K. “Sandy” Douglass brought his know-how to Western Maryland;

Appalachian Figures Boyd Davis Clay grew up in Hohenwald (Lewis County), Tennessee, and became a standout lineman at DuPont Highin the Nashville area before heading to the University of Tennessee. Decades later, The Tennessean included him in its “Nashville’s next 50 greatest high school football players,” a nod to the reputation he built before college.

I was on the road for most of August, September, and October, and in particular I made a ton of museum collections visits. When I visit a museum collection, I bring a specific set of gear that helps me get the photos, notes, and measurements that I want.