Appalachian Figures On the night of May 28, 1977, when fire tore through the Beverly Hills Supper Club in Southgate, Kentucky, one of the 165 people who never came home was a coal camp quarterback from Harlan County.

Appalachian Figures South Carolina “Carrie” Bronson started life on the Kentucky side of the Tug Fork and ended it as a former first lady of West Virginia, living quietly in Huntington. Her name nods to a South Carolina family past, her life unfolds in the coalfields and courthouse towns of the Central Appalachians, and her paper trail runs from the Big Sandy News to the Governor’s Mansion in Charleston.

Appalachian Figure On a hot August day in 1886, a tall, fashionably dressed engineer rode his horse up the Tazewell Road, crossed Cumberland Gap, and looked down into the Yellow Creek Valley. Where local farmers saw timber, shallow coal banks, and floodplain, Alexander Alan Arthur saw chimneys, rail lines, electric lights, and a planned city of 250,000 people in the middle of the mountains.

Appalachian Figures On a cold January afternoon in 1900, gunfire echoed through the Capitol Hotel in Frankfort, Kentucky. When the smoke cleared, three men lay dead. At the center of the chaos stood Colonel David Grant Colson of Middlesboro, a former congressman and Spanish American War officer who had once argued for “Free Cuba” on the floor of the United States House of Representatives.

Drawing is how I understand things best, and it’s one of the ways I teach myself new subjects. My top advice for anyone wanting to be a paleontologist is “learn how to write” and “learn how to draw”, which really boil down to, “practice writing and drawing”. You only get better by doing.

Appalachian Figures On a cold November day in 1921, women across Kentucky stepped into voting booths for the first time in a presidential election. In Boyd County, a former Pikeville schoolteacher and Ashland journalist named Mary Elliott Flanery did more than mark a ballot.

Appalachian Figures In eastern Kentucky political memory, few names draw as mixed a reaction as Leo A. Marcum.

Appalachian Figures If you walk the streets of The Market Common in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, the name “Reed” appears on a street sign and on the General Robert H. Reed Recreation Center. City markers explain that the building honors a retired four star Air Force general who helped turn a shuttered base into a thriving neighborhood, and who insisted that its military history not be forgotten.

Appalachian Figures On an autumn morning in 2024, flags across Kentucky dipped to half staff in memory of a state senator from Harlan County. Governor Andy Beshear’s order was brief, but it marked an extraordinary thing for a boy who had once walked from a Pine Mountain homeplace to a mission school in his bare feet.

Appalachian Figures On a ridge above the Pine Mountain valley in Harlan County, a stone house still looks west down the long hollow. Its terraces are dry laid from local rock, its chimney and foundation fitted so tightly that a century of rain has barely opened the seams. Local tradition remembers the place simply as Zande House, after the man who built it by hand.

Appalachian Figures If you follow Caney Creek up through the narrow valley of Knott County, you eventually reach a campus that looks almost like a small town of its own.