Appalachian History A border county on the Cumberland In the summer of 1863, Williamsburg was a small courthouse town on the Cumberland River, better known as Whitley Court House than as a battlefield. Whitley County itself was relatively young, carved from Knox County in 1818 with Williamsburg planted at the center as the county seat. The county sat in a dangerous place. Its southern edge touched the Tennessee line.

Appalachian History On winter mornings in the early 1920s, coal dust hung over Jenkins, Kentucky, while miners and store clerks climbed the steps of the big recreational building to buy their paper. Upstairs, on the second floor of that four story complex, a tiny shop ran the town’s one newspaper, the Jenkins Recorder.

Appalachian History On a February evening in 1948, nearly fifteen hundred people streamed into a freshly remodeled storefront on Main Street in Jenkins. The Champion Dairy Bar offered bright red-and-cream décor, ice cream, and a free carnation to every woman who walked through the door.

Appalachian Churches Tucked against the hillside at the foot of No. 4 Hill in Jenkins, Kentucky, St. George Catholic Church looks like a simple white frame church.

Appalachian History A Mountain County on the Front Line When the Civil War reached Kentucky in 1861, Laurel County sat in a place that generals on both sides could not ignore. The Wilderness Road threaded up from Cumberland Gap through London and the Rockcastle Hills toward the Bluegrass. Whoever held that narrow corridor could threaten Lexington and the Ohio River or shield East Tennessee from invasion.

Appalachian History On a late September night in 1861, lamplight spilled from the tall windows of a brick mansion just south of Grayson. Inside Landsdowne Hall, a circle of young men passed plates around Dr. Andrew Jackson Landsdowne’s table and spoke in low voices about rifles, road junctions, and the long ride ahead toward Confederate lines in eastern Kentucky.

Appalachian History A New County on the Eve of War When the Civil War began, Wolfe County itself was only a year old. Created in 1860 from pieces of Breathitt, Morgan, Owsley, and Powell Counties, it became Kentucky’s one-hundred-tenth county, with its seat at the little river town of Campton. That timing helps explain why wartime records can be confusing.

Appalachian History On a foggy September morning in 1861, the American Civil War arrived in Knox County. About 800 Confederates under Colonel Joel A. Battle, sent forward by Brigadier General Felix Zollicoffer, marched toward a small Unionist training ground called Camp Andrew Johnson on the edge of Barbourville.

Appalachian History A New Mountain County Caught In A National Crisis When the Civil War began, Letcher County was a very young place on the Kentucky map. The General Assembly created it in 1842 from parts of Harlan and Perry Counties and fixed the seat at Whitesburg on the North Fork of the Kentucky River. This was not plantation country.

Appalachian History Clay County does not appear on lists of famous Civil War battlefields. There was no great set piece fight at Manchester, no endless lines of blue and gray charging across open fields. Instead, Clay County’s war centered on something far more basic and far more valuable than glory. It centered on salt.

Appalachian History On quiet days the Cumberland River at Burkesville looks like any other Appalachian waterway. Fishing boats idle past bottomland fields, and the courthouse lawn hosts farmers’ markets rather than soldiers. During the Civil War, though, this bend in the river was a nervous frontier. Steamboats from Nashville pushed supplies to its wharf. Cavalry regiments mustered and marched through its streets.