Repurposed Appalachia Series On the corner of North 20th Street in downtown Middlesboro sits a building that looks like it should not exist for very long. Walls glint with a dull black sheen, blocks pitted and irregular, as if the house had been carved straight out of a coal seam.

Repurposed Appalachia Series High above the green water of the Levisa Fork, a narrow one lane deck creaks and sways underfoot. Rough cut sandstone towers rise from each bank, their keystones carved with two simple lines: “W P A” and “1936.” For nearly a century, Pauley Bridge has carried coal camp residents, commuters, schoolchildren, and now tourists across the Big Sandy River at Pikeville, Kentucky.

Repurposed Appalachia High on the spine of Pine Mountain, where US 119 pulls itself over the ridge between Cumberland and Whitesburg, a white building with a green sign has quietly become one of the best known landmarks in Letcher County. Travelers talk about the sandwiches. Locals talk about the cakes and the coal camp stories.

Appalachian Figures On a summer morning in 1945, a silver P-51 with a green tail skimmed the clouds over central Japan. At the controls was a farm kid from Scooba, Mississippi, who had once picked cotton to stay in school. By the time he turned back toward Iwo Jima, his Mustang carried fresh cannon scars and three Japanese fighters had fallen from the sky.

Appalachian Figures On a hot July evening in 1935 a little Curtiss Robin monoplane drifted out of a hazy Mississippi sky and settled onto the grass outside Meridian. Two men climbed from the cockpit, unshaven and hollow eyed, and forty-odd thousand people surged forward to greet them.

Appalachian Figures In the hill country of east central Mississippi, county courthouses still anchor courthouse squares, and much of the real work of justice happens far from television cameras. For more than half a century, attorney and judge Johnnie Max “J. Max” Kilpatrick worked inside those rooms.

Appalachian Figures Series If you drive the switchbacks up Pine Mountain long enough, you reach a hand-painted world: pink flamingos in the fog, a homemade stage, a sign that says you are at the end of the whirled. For more than twenty years that ridge was Jim Webb’s chosen home and battleground, a place where poetry, radio, and resistance came together under one name: Wiley Quixote.

Appalachian Figures Series Country music fans remember Gary Stewart as the “king of honky tonks,” the high-voiced outlaw who turned barroom heartbreak into art. People in Letcher County remember something more specific. They remember the kid from the Dunham coal camp who grew up in Jenkins, the miner’s son whose name ended up on a Route 23 highway sign and on RCA record labels in the same lifetime.

Appalachian Figures Series Second Lieutenant Darwin Keith “Gus” Kyle began life in a coal company town on the Kentucky side of the border and fell in battle on a frozen Korean hillside half a world away.

Appalachian Figures Jenkins miner to CIO vice president In 1904 a boy was born in the brand new coal town of Jenkins in Letcher County, Kentucky. Half a century later that same boy, John Vernon Riffe, sat in Washington as executive vice president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, one of the highest offices in American labor. Newspaper obituaries, congressional tributes, and union records agree on the broad outline.

Born in a coal camp on the edge of Jenkins in Letcher County in 1929, Francis Gary Powers grew up in a world of tipples, company houses, and steep hollows before his life carried him far above the clouds. On May 1, 1960, that same boy from Burdine found himself parachuting toward a Soviet field from a shattered U-2 spy plane, at the center of a Cold War crisis that nearly wrecked a superpower summit.