Appalachian Folklore & Myths Giant birds haunt Appalachian stories. In northern Pennsylvania people talk about thunderbirds with twenty foot wingspans darkening the sky above ridgelines. In the southern mountains another bird already lived in the stories long before the word thunderbird ever reached the region.

Appalachian Folklore & Myths On the Maryland side of the Appalachians, where South Mountain rises above the Middletown and Hagerstown valleys, people still swap stories about a flying creature with metal claws, a beak like a saw blade, and a taste for blood. The Snallygaster shows up in trail lore along the Maryland section of the Appalachian Trail, in Frederick County tourism copy, and at an entire museum devoted to its legend.

Appalachian Folklore & Myths If you turn off US 27 behind the Stearns Ranger District office and follow Barren Fork Road into the woods, the modern highway sound drops away faster than it should. The pavement gives way to a narrow loop beside a hillside graveyard shaded by hardwoods. This is Barren Fork Cemetery, the last visible piece of a vanished coal company town in McCreary County.

Appalachian Folklore & Myths High above the roar of the Cumberland River there is a rock shelf that feels both exposed and strangely enclosed, hemmed in by laurel and pine. Visitors step out to the railing, look down on the sixty-plus foot curtain of water, and pose for photographs with mist on their faces. The overlook is part of the modern trail system at Cumberland Falls State Resort Park, yet it carries an older, more romantic name.

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.