Appalachian Figures In the summer of 1930, Memphis fans crowded into Lewis Park to watch their Red Sox face the best Black ballclubs in the country. Somewhere on the infield dirt of that segregated ballpark stood a third baseman whose story began in the hills of eastern Kentucky.
Appalachian Figures If you stand on the hill at Williamsburg and look toward the campus of the University of the Cumberlands, it can be hard to imagine that one of the U.S. Navy’s early carrier admirals began his life here.
Appalachian Figures On an April morning in 2011, the cafeteria at Whitley County High School felt like any other school day in the mountains. Students clustered at tables, the smell of biscuits and gravy hung in the air, and teachers moved through the noise in that half vigilant, half routine way that comes with long years in a classroom.
Appalachian Figures A country doctor on the Tennessee border If you drive Kentucky Route 92 east out of Williamsburg today, the road winds past timbered ridges and small clearings before a sign quietly announces Carpenter. There is no incorporated town government here, only houses along the highway, a church and cemetery, side hollows like Poplar Creek, and the echo of a name that belonged first to a nineteenth century doctor.
Appalachian Figures In the fall of 1864 a Kentucky born farmer’s son found himself riding through brushy Missouri pastureland, hunting one of the most feared guerrillas on the border. Lieutenant Colonel Samuel Porter Cox, commanding a mixed detachment of Enrolled Missouri Militia, had spent weeks tracking William “Bloody Bill” Anderson, whose men had already left a trail of burned farms and massacred prisoners across central Missouri.
Appalachian Figures In June 1917 readers of the Indianapolis News opened their paper to find a Black woman schoolteacher explaining why the new suffrage law mattered to her community. Frances Berry Coston urged that “colored people should be awakened to their own needs and should use their political influence” in ways that would not harm them, a careful, strategic appeal in a city where Black voters still faced harassment at the polls.
Appalachian Figures A Whitley County Birth, A Life Between Mountains And City In the summer of 1938, a boy named Frank F. Drowota III entered the world in Williamsburg, the seat of Whitley County, Kentucky.
Appalachian Figures Walk through Knoxville National Cemetery and near the front you will see a plain government headstone with the inscription for Joseph Alexander Cooper, Brigadier General, United States Volunteers. His story begins not in Tennessee but just over the line at Cumberland Falls in Whitley County, Kentucky, and runs through some of the hardest questions the Civil War and Reconstruction ever put to the Appalachian borderlands.
Appalachian Figures On an overcast October afternoon in 1925, a rookie pitcher with only a handful of big league innings stepped onto the mound at Griffith Stadium in Washington. The Pittsburgh Pirates were clawing back into the World Series. Player manager Bucky Harris of the Washington Senators called for a reliever: Win Ballou, a right hander from the hills above Williamsburg in Whitley County, Kentucky.
Appalachian Figures A Grave on the Hill Above Town On a rise above Williamsburg, Kentucky, Highland Cemetery looks out over the Cumberland foothills and the town that grew up along the Cumberland River. Cemetery listings and gravestone transcriptions for the old section record one of the most controversial names in Kentucky politics: Charles Finley, born in Williamsburg in 1865 and buried there in March 1941.
Appalachian History On a quiet day in Greensburg you can stand on the public square and hear little more than traffic around the old limestone courthouse. The two story building looks older than the rest of the square because it is. Built in 1802, it is one of the oldest surviving courthouses in Kentucky and the oldest courthouse west of the Alleghenies.