Appalachian History In the 1860s the old roads through Lincoln County carried more than drovers, migrants, and courthouse crowds. Armies from both sides marched the Wilderness Road, camped around Buffalo Springs, and fought sharp skirmishes in and around Stanford and Crab Orchard.

Appalachian History In the fall of 1861 Rockcastle County stood on the edge of a war that had not quite arrived. The county seat at Mt. Vernon sat at the foot of Wildcat Mountain on the road toward London and the Bluegrass. The Rockcastle River wound through steep hills that funneled travel onto a few narrow crossings. For Union and Confederate commanders studying their maps, those crossings and ridges looked like gates.

From the hilltops around Somerset you can still trace the old roads running toward the Cumberland River and the Tennessee line. In the winter of 1861 and the spring of 1863 those roads carried refugee families, hungry cattle, and two very different armies. Pulaski County sat on a military fault line. Whoever controlled Somerset and the fords of the Cumberland controlled the doorway between central Kentucky and East Tennessee.

Appalachian History On a hot day in late July 1863, a Confederate cavalry column splashed across the Kentucky River at Irvine and rode straight into local memory. The official records would call it a skirmish. The Kentucky Historical Society marker on Main Street calls it the Battle of Irvine and describes it as the only Civil War battle in the immediate area.

Appalachian Folklore & Myths On paper, the North Bend Rail Trail is a neatly measured thing. The official guides describe a nearly seventy two mile corridor along the old Baltimore and Ohio line from Interstate 77 near Parkersburg to Wolf Summit, with thirteen tunnels, ten of them still passable, and thirty six bridges crossing creeks and hollows between the small towns of Wood, Ritchie, Doddridge, and Harrison counties.

Appalachian Folklore & Myths Where Chiques Creek meets the lower Susquehanna, a wall of pale quartzite rises sharply above the water. Today hikers know it as Chickies Rock County Park in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, a scenic overlook with views of the broad river, rail lines, and bridges below.

Appalachian Folklore & Myths On clear evenings along the high ridges of western North Carolina, it is easy to see why people imagine something watching from the spruce and fir. The Great Balsam Mountains sit between the tourist glow of Asheville and the deep hollers that run toward Cherokee and Sylva, a high, folded country of fog, rhododendron thickets, and black bear sign.

Appalachian Folklore & Myths On a September evening in 1952, a handful of boys on a schoolyard in central West Virginia watched a bright object streak across the sky and vanish behind a hill on a neighbor’s farm.

Appalachian Folklore & Myths On a cold mountain night it does not take much to start a story. A house cat yowls in the yard. Something screams once down in the hollow. A bucket tips over on the porch. Before long somebody shakes their head and says that the wampus cat is out again. Across Appalachia that name covers a whole menagerie of fears.

Appalachian Folklore & Myths Late on a June night in 1964, a young newspaper reporter steered his car along Riverside Drive beside the Tygart Valley River at Grafton, West Virginia. On the river side of the road he saw what he later called a “huge white obstruction” that seemed alive, seven to nine feet tall, roughly four feet wide, with slick, seal like skin and no visible head.

Appalachian Figures In the summer of 1930, Memphis fans crowded into Lewis Park to watch their Red Sox face the best Black ballclubs in the country. Somewhere on the infield dirt of that segregated ballpark stood a third baseman whose story began in the hills of eastern Kentucky.