Appalachian History Series – The Story of the Elkhorn City Railroad Museum On the edge of the Kentucky Virginia line, Elkhorn City sits where the Russell Fork cuts out of the Breaks of the Sandy. It looks like a small river town at first glance, but for most of the twentieth century it was also a hinge in the railroad map of Appalachia.
Appalachian History Series – The Elkhorn City Walk Bridge over the Russell Fork On a quiet morning in Elkhorn City the Russell Fork looks almost gentle. The river slides past sycamores and willows, the light catches on riffles below the cliffs, and coal trains roll along the far bank toward the Breaks.
Appalachian History Series – Winchester City Hall: The Tower on Wall Street If you walk up Wall Street from Lexington Avenue and stop between the courthouse lawn and the high wall of the Brown Proctor Hotel, Winchester City Hall still commands the block.
Repurposed Appalachia Series – Brown Proctoria Hotel of Winchester On the corner of Main Street and Lexington Avenue in Winchester, the Brown Proctoria Hotel still fills an entire city block, its limestone base and brick walls catching the light the way they did more than a century ago. For travelers arriving from the Bluegrass and the eastern hills, this corner was once the first glimpse of modern Winchester.
Abandoned Appalachia Series – The Kingdom Come School of Linefork, Letcher County On a clear day at Kingdom Come State Park the overlooks pull your eyes outward to black bear country and the sawtooth ridges of Letcher and Harlan counties. Look long enough down into the Linefork valley though and another landmark begins to stand out. In the bottom, beside Highway 160, the roofline of a brick school building breaks the tree line.
Repurposed Appalachia Series – Harlan County Extension Depot: From L&N Station Site to Community Classroom On a short bend of River Street in downtown Harlan, a long, depot-shaped building sits with its wide eaves turned toward the tracks. On the county extension website it appears in plain bureaucratic language as the Harlan County Extension Depot, 110 River Street, listed alongside the main office on South Main Street.
Forgotten Appalachia Series – Dunham High School: Letcher County’s Only Black High School in Jenkins, Kentucky If you drive up No. 4 Hollow above Jenkins today, the road climbs past St. George Catholic Church and a handful of houses before it levels off on a narrow shelf of ground. Here, on a bend in the hollow, a low concrete-block wing stands in the weeds.
Appalachian Churches Series – Jenkins United Methodist Church in Jenkins, Kentucky On the uphill side of Main Street in Jenkins, Kentucky, a two story brick church with a row of tall arched windows still looks out over the old company town. Across the street the former depot holds the David A. Zegeer Coal Railroad Museum, and behind both buildings the hills rise steeply toward former mine camps and company houses.
In this post I’ll use R to recap my running data from 2025. Previous round-ups are here (2021, 2022, 2023, not sure why I didn’t post one for 2024…). I had a goal of running a total distance of 3650 km in 2025.
Sandwich compounds are the colloquial term used for molecules where a metal atom such as an iron dication is “sandwiched” between two carbon-based rings as ligands, most commonly cyclopentadienyl anion (the “bread”) as in e.g. Ferrocene – a molecule first discovered in 1951.
Do it yourself. I don’t mean that as a descriptive phrase. It’s a complete sentence, in the imperative. Do it yourself. Pick up the pencil, pen, stylus, paintbrush, airbrush, mouse, keyboard, scissors, rolling pin, hammer, drill, wrench, saw, welding torch, sewing needle, instrument, guitar pick, pickaxe, shovel, dumbbell, jump rope, paddle, piton, hiking pole.