Appalachian History A Mountain County on the Front Line When the Civil War reached Kentucky in 1861, Laurel County sat in a place that generals on both sides could not ignore. The Wilderness Road threaded up from Cumberland Gap through London and the Rockcastle Hills toward the Bluegrass. Whoever held that narrow corridor could threaten Lexington and the Ohio River or shield East Tennessee from invasion.

Appalachian History On a late September night in 1861, lamplight spilled from the tall windows of a brick mansion just south of Grayson. Inside Landsdowne Hall, a circle of young men passed plates around Dr. Andrew Jackson Landsdowne’s table and spoke in low voices about rifles, road junctions, and the long ride ahead toward Confederate lines in eastern Kentucky.

Appalachian History A New County on the Eve of War When the Civil War began, Wolfe County itself was only a year old. Created in 1860 from pieces of Breathitt, Morgan, Owsley, and Powell Counties, it became Kentucky’s one-hundred-tenth county, with its seat at the little river town of Campton. That timing helps explain why wartime records can be confusing.

Appalachian History On a foggy September morning in 1861, the American Civil War arrived in Knox County. About 800 Confederates under Colonel Joel A. Battle, sent forward by Brigadier General Felix Zollicoffer, marched toward a small Unionist training ground called Camp Andrew Johnson on the edge of Barbourville.

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.