Introduction On the fog‑soaked morning of May 14 1892, rifle‑shots rang out atop Pound Gap on the Kentucky–Virginia line. Within minutes five members of moonshiner Ira “Bad Ira” Mullins’s caravan lay dead, another gravely wounded, and the gunmen slipped into the hardwood forest.
Strategic Context By the icy winter of 1863-64, Cumberland Gap in Union hands formed a doorway into the Virginia-Tennessee-Kentucky corner. Acting on instructions from Brig. Gen. Orlando B. Willcox, Col. William C. Lemert ordered Maj.
Salt, Strategy, and Civil War Kentucky In the fall of 1862, the American Civil War surged into the salt‑rich hollows of Perry County. Confederate armies had just retreated from the state after the bloody Battle of Perryville, yet detachments and partisan bands lingered in the southeastern mountains, hunting provisions the South could no longer import. Chief among those essentials was salt. Without it, armies starved; with it, they marched.
In the depths of the Great Depression, as rifle fire echoed through Harlan County’s hollows, a four‑page weekly tabloid fanned the flames of war.
A Newspaper Born in the Fire of Bloody Harlan In early May 1931 thousands of miners in Harlan and neighboring Bell County, Kentucky, walked off the job to protest brutal conditions and another round of wage cuts. Their walk-out erupted into gunfire at the Battle of Evarts on 5 May, a fifteen-minute exchange that left three company guards and one union miner dead and carried “Bloody Harlan” onto front pages nationwide.
Nestled in the hills of Wise County, Virginia, stands an abandoned orphanage, its concrete façade half-swallowed by trees and briars. Built early in the 20 th century, in an era before modern foster care, county orphanages typically provided shelter, education, and basic necessities to local children in need.
A Center Sparked by Two Lifelong Educators When Dr. Edsel T. Godbey arrived in Cumberland in 1959 as the first president of what would become Southeast Kentucky Community & Technical College (SKCTC), he saw more than a campus-in-waiting tucked against Black Mountain’s northern flank. He saw a chance to give Harlan County’s coalfield youth the same break that a scholarship had once given a Casey County farm boy named Edsel Godbey.
This is the Fifth in a series exploring once-thriving Appalachian towns left behind by shifting energy markets and changing times. A Mid‑Century Push for Modern Utilities In the years after World War II, small cities across the southern Appalachian coalfields raced to install the public works that bigger towns already took for granted.
This is the Second installment in the Appalachian History series, which delves into the rich, complex past of the Appalachian region—exploring the people, events, and forces that have shaped its identity over generations. On a sweltering July dawn in 1973, the sleepy hamlet of Brookside woke to the rumble of coal trucks and the sight of cardboard signs nailed to wooden
This is the first installment in the Appalachian History series, which delves into the rich, complex past of the Appalachian region—exploring the people, events, and forces that have shaped its identity over generations. On a gray Tuesday morning—May 5, 1931—a handful of laid‑off coal miners shouldered rifles along the Poor Fork Road just east of Evarts, Kentucky.
This is the First in the Repurpose Appalachia series, highlighting the transformation and revitalization of Appalachian mountain communities. Being perched between 4,100 and 4,223 feet on the rugged spine of Stone Mountain, the modern High Knob Observation Tower greets each sunrise with a gleam of galvanized steel on sandstone.
