Appalachian Figures On November 29, 2024, Robert Elledy “Bob” Gable died in Lexington at the age of ninety. Obituaries described him as a Navy veteran, Stanford trained engineer, governor’s candidate, arts patron, and for seven years the chair of the Republican Party of Kentucky. Beneath that public résumé is a story that belongs squarely in Appalachian history.
Appalachian Figures On a farm called Strawberry Hill outside Grantsville, Maryland, a sickly girl once spent more time in the woods than in a classroom. She memorized wildflowers instead of spelling lists and pressed ferns into homemade notebooks.
Appalachian Figures Gridiron Glory on a Garrett County Shore When most people scan the long lists of “notable people from Garrett County, Maryland,” they expect names tied to timber, railroads, or the ski slopes at Wisp. Tucked among them is a different kind of figure.
Appalachian Figures On a quiet day in Edinburg, Virginia, you can walk into the Shenandoah County Library and find a doorway that opens into the past. The sign over that doorway reads “Truban Archives.” Inside are shelves of county records, family photographs, oral histories, and rare local publications that might otherwise have disappeared.
Appalachian Figure From Appalachian boyhood to Denver rings and Hollywood lots If you know Richard “Fighting Dick” Gilbert at all, you probably know him as the burly cop or henchman in Laurel and Hardy and Our Gang shorts, forever being tripped, drenched, or humiliated for a laugh. For decades he was part of the Hal Roach stock company, the dependable heavy in the background of other people’s jokes.
Appalachian Figures On a Monday morning in May 1919, a Knox County lawyer who had grown up on Big Richland Creek took the oath as Kentucky’s thirty ninth governor. The Louisville Courier Journal marked the moment with the headline “Black Becomes 41st Governor” and reminded readers that James Dixon Black’s promotion came not by election but by succession when Governor Augustus O. Stanley departed for the United States Senate.
Appalachian Figure On the ridges around Oakland, Maryland, road cuts slice through layer after layer of sandstone and shale. For most drivers they are just brown walls along the highway. For Daniel E. Wonderly, a kid from Mountain Lake Park who grew up to be a biologist and Bible teacher, those layers were what he later called God’s “time records” in stone.
Appalachian Figures When historians tell the story of the Food and Drug Administration, the main characters are usually big city reformers, New Deal politicians, and Washington lawyers. Missing from that picture is an Appalachian attorney from Knox County, Kentucky, who quietly helped build the regulatory state that still watches over our food and medicine.
Appalachian Figures “A Native of Strunk, Kentucky” On 30 October 1944 a young private from McCreary County held off wave after wave of elite German troops near the French village of Saint Jacques. For more than five hours he fired a single light machine gun, refusing to withdraw even when his company was nearly destroyed and his own ammunition was gone.
Appalachian Figures A Kentucky Birth, A Texas Legacy On paper, William Pitt Ballinger belongs to Texas history. His name is on a West Texas town, in railroad casebooks, in studies of Confederate law and Reconstruction politics. Yet his story begins far up the Cumberland River, in the small Appalachian courthouse town of Barbourville, Kentucky.
Appalachian Figures Barbourville Roots and a Family of Mountain Republicans James Stephen Golden was born on September 20, 1891, in Barbourville, the small river town that serves as the seat of Knox County in southeastern Kentucky. By the time he arrived, Barbourville was already a crossroads of regional politics, education, and law.