Appalachian Folklore & Myths On clear days the road up from downtown Norton curls through hardwoods, past picnic pull offs and salamander habitat, until the pavement narrows and the world drops away. At Flag Rock Overlook, three thousand feet above the streets and parking lots, you can see the whole Powell Valley cupped below High Knob.

Appalachian History Stand on the lawn of the Casey County courthouse in Liberty and you are surrounded by memory in bronze and cast aluminum. The 1888 Romanesque Revival courthouse towers over a World War I doughboy statue and several Kentucky Historical Society markers that celebrate the First Kentucky Cavalry and its colonels Frank Wolford and Silas Adams.

Appalachian History On the courthouse lawn at Sandy Hook, two weathered highway markers tell a story that began before Elliott County even existed. One, titled “A Masterful Retreat,” remembers a starving Union column that slipped out of Cumberland Gap in September 1862 and marched two hundred mountain miles to the Ohio River.

Appalachian History On a narrow strip of land between the Cumberland River and Pine Mountain, the town we now call Pineville began life as Cumberland Ford. Long before anyone heard rifle fire from the heights of Cumberland Gap, this ford was a traffic jam of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Appalachian History Central Kentucky’s limestone ridges and creek bottoms did not look like a battlefield in 1861. Garrard County was a farm country of hemp, cattle, and small towns. Yet within a few months of Fort Sumter, the crossroads around Lancaster, Bryantsville, and the Kentucky River became one of the most heavily traveled military corridors in the interior South.

Appalachian History On paper, Lewis County looked like a quiet corner of the upper South. Vanceburg sat on the Kentucky bank of the Ohio River, opposite free soil in Ohio, with steep hills behind it and river trade in front. In 1861 the town counted only about two hundred people, but its population had nearly quadrupled over the previous decade as newcomers from Pennsylvania, New York, and Massachusetts drifted downriver and settled there.

Appalachian History On most Civil War maps, northeastern Kentucky sits in the margin, tucked between the Big Sandy Valley and the Ohio River. The names that dominate the chapter headings are far away: Shiloh, Antietam, Vicksburg. Yet along the riverfront streets of Greenupsburg, in the hill farms on the Little Sandy, and on the roads that led south toward the Cumberland Gap, the war pressed hard on Greenup County.

Appalachian History In the early eighteen sixties Floyd County sat in a long river valley that hardly looked like a battlefield. The Levisa Fork wound past small farms, river landings, and court day in Prestonsburg. Yet the same geography that tied the county to Pike, Johnson, and Lawrence also opened a door into the heart of Kentucky. Roads and streams that carried salt, livestock, and timber now offered an invasion route for Civil War armies.

Appalachian History At the fork of the Levisa and Tug forks of the Big Sandy, the little town of Louisa sat closer to steamboats than to turnpikes. That geography, more than any political speech, pulled Lawrence County into the Civil War. In December 1861 Union forces under Colonel James A. Garfield moved up the Big Sandy Valley and occupied Louisa to control river traffic and supply routes into the mountains.

Appalachian History Long before it was a dateline for national coverage of floods, Troublesome Creek was a narrow, twisting corridor through the central Appalachian mountains. Its headwaters meet at the Forks of Troublesome where Hindman now stands, then the creek runs west through what are today Knott and Perry counties before emptying into the North Fork of the Kentucky River near Haddix in Breathitt County.

Appalachian History Stand on the courthouse square in Brownsville and you are never far from the Civil War. The Green River curls just below town. The old roads still climb out toward Bowling Green and Leitchfield. On the lawn, a state highway marker titled “Civil War Skirmish” quietly insists that something violent happened here on 20 November 1861.