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.

Appalachian Figures In the middle of the nineteenth century, the public square at Monticello in Wayne County could feel very far from the marble floors of the United States Capitol or the brick corridors of the Confederate Congress in Richmond. Yet for more than twenty years one lawyer from that square tried to move comfortably in all three worlds.

Appalachian Figures On a summer weekend in the southern Chesapeake, sailboats race across the bay for the Leo Wardrup Memorial Cape Charles Cup, a two day regatta that has become one of the big social events of the Broad Bay Sailing Association calendar. For people in Virginia Beach, the Wardrup name belongs to a retired Navy captain, long serving Republican delegate, and passionate sailor.

Appalachian Figures In the summer of 1959 a young New York musician and photographer named John Cohen turned his car off the hardtop road in Perry County and followed a dirt lane into the little lumber mill village of Daisy. He had spent weeks driving through eastern Kentucky looking for songs about hard times. Neon, Bulan, Vicco, Viper, Defiance, and other coal and timber towns had already slipped past his windshield.

Appalachian Figures On a cold December evening in 1863, a young woman in Wayne County opened a package from Frankfort. Inside was a new photograph album and, tucked among the cartes de visite, a promise from her brother-in-law, Ephraim L. Van Winkle. When he could get to Louisville, he wrote, he would have his own portrait taken and place it “in front” for her.

Appalachian Figures In the bourbon world the Van Winkle name usually calls up images of velvet bags, waiting lists, and impossible prices. Pappy Van Winkle has become a legend, and his face on a label now stands in for a whole story about Kentucky whiskey and American nostalgia.

Appalachian Figures On a June morning in 1914, readers in Barbourville picked up the Mountain Advocate and saw a single large photograph staring back at them from the front page.

Appalachian Figures Appalachia has produced generals, governors, and nationally known reformers, yet some of its most influential figures left their mark through business ledgers and charity board minutes instead of stump speeches. One of those quieter figures was Ben Mitchell Williamson of Pike and Boyd Counties.

Appalachian Figures On a summer night in 1964, the United States House of Representatives rushed through a joint resolution that would change the course of the Vietnam War. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution sailed through the chamber with a recorded vote of 416 to 0. Yet the roll call did not tell the whole story.

Roy “Dixie” Walker’s story begins a long way from Heinemann Park and the old Southern Association box scores that sometimes still list him only as “Walker, p.” It starts in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, in 1893, with a boy who grew up between a small county seat on Jackson’s Military Road and the industrial neighborhoods of East Nashville, then spent the next three decades trying to control a fastball that had more life than he did.

Appalachian Figures High above the traffic in downtown Hazard, a small hillside burial ground still looks out over the bend of the North Fork of the Kentucky River. Locals know it as Graveyard Hill.