Appalachian History A New Mountain County Caught In A National Crisis When the Civil War began, Letcher County was a very young place on the Kentucky map. The General Assembly created it in 1842 from parts of Harlan and Perry Counties and fixed the seat at Whitesburg on the North Fork of the Kentucky River. This was not plantation country.

Appalachian History Clay County does not appear on lists of famous Civil War battlefields. There was no great set piece fight at Manchester, no endless lines of blue and gray charging across open fields. Instead, Clay County’s war centered on something far more basic and far more valuable than glory. It centered on salt.

Appalachian History On quiet days the Cumberland River at Burkesville looks like any other Appalachian waterway. Fishing boats idle past bottomland fields, and the courthouse lawn hosts farmers’ markets rather than soldiers. During the Civil War, though, this bend in the river was a nervous frontier. Steamboats from Nashville pushed supplies to its wharf. Cavalry regiments mustered and marched through its streets.

Appalachian Figures In November 1937 a young Kentucky miner’s wife stepped up to a Library of Congress microphone in a New York studio. She introduced herself simply as Sarah Ogan, then poured out songs about starvation wages, dead children, and coal camp sheriffs who answered to company bosses instead of the law. Alan Lomax filed the discs away as part of the Alan Lomax and Mary Elizabeth Barnicle collection.

Appalachian Figures On a cold December day in 1927 thousands of Kentuckians crowded into Frankfort to watch a mountain lawyer from Barbourville take the oath as the Commonwealth’s forty second governor. Born in a Laurel County log cabin and educated at Union College and Valparaiso University, Flemon Davis “Flem” Sampson carried into office both the ambitions of Knox County Republicans and the suspicions of Bluegrass Democrats.

Appalachian Figures In the mid twentieth century, Kentucky politics was often framed as a contest between coalfield Republicans in the mountains and Democratic courthouse machines in the Bluegrass and river cities.

Appalachian Figures For most of the twentieth century, people in Barbourville knew Kenneth Herndon Tuggle as a familiar figure on Main Street. He was the hometown lawyer you might meet on the courthouse steps, the banker whose name hung over the corner building, the lay leader at First Methodist, and the local boy who kept sending scholarships back to Union College.

Appalachian Figures On paper, John Henry Wilson looks like a textbook Gilded Age politician. He rose from a small town practice to the Kentucky Senate, spent four years in Congress, helped launch a national fraternal order, and ended his days in a Louisville townhouse far from the farm country where he was born.

Appalachian Figures When Knox Countians talk about their “distinguished men,” the list usually starts with Governor Flem D. Sampson, federal regulator Walter G. Campbell, and a quiet lawyer who once sat in the United States Senate. In a single lifetime William Abner Stanfill went from Barbourville’s Union College classrooms to Hazard’s coal company boardrooms to a brief spell on the floor of the Senate in Washington.

Appalachian Figures A Nelson County Birth, A Barbourville Future James Love’s life began far from the sandbars of Galveston. He was born in Nelson County, Kentucky, on 12 May 1795, and educated in the schools around Bardstown. The official congressional biography and the U.S. House History office agree on that date and place and describe a young man who volunteered for military service while still a teenager.

Appalachian Figures From a Knox County river farm to the governor’s chair On paper, Silas Woodson looks like a Midwestern politician. He practiced law in St Joseph, Missouri, served as a Union militia officer during the Civil War, and in 1873 became the first Democrat elected governor of Missouri after the war. Look a little closer and the story runs straight through the hills of southeastern Kentucky.