Appalachian History Series On December 30, 1970, a powerful coal dust explosion ripped through the Finley Coal Company’s interconnected Nos. 15 and 16 mines on Hurricane Creek near Hyden in Leslie County. Thirty-eight miners were killed. One man, A. T. Collins, survived after the blast hurled him out of the portal. Another miner, Harrison Henson, was outside the mine when the explosion occurred.
Abandoned Appalachia Series Crossroads in Coal Country Smith Garage once stood at 192 State Highway 72 in Baxter, Kentucky—an unincorporated hamlet where KY-72 meets the old alignment of US-421 at the confluence of Martin’s Fork and Clover Fork, head-waters of the Cumberland River. Mid-century travelers approaching the junction first glimpsed the black-shining Harlan County Coal Monument, a blocky obelisk of quarried coal
Repurposed Appalachia Series The Early Years Tucked away in Burke County, North Carolina, the Henry River Mill Village tells a story of industrial ambition, close-knit community life, and cinematic fame.
Appalachian History Series 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.
Appalachian History Series 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. Charles H. Beeres to ride east with four companies of the 16th Illinois Cavalry and a section of the 22nd Independent Battery, Ohio Light Artillery (three guns under Lt. A. B. Alger).
Appalachian History Series 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;
Appalachian History Series 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. The Harlan Torch, financed by the coal operators it championed, turned ink into ammunition—painting striking miners as foreign “Reds” and Sheriff J. H. Blair as a defender of God, country, and coal.
Appalachian History Series 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.
Abandoned Appalachia Series 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.
Appalachian History Series 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.
Abandoned Appalachia Series 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. Whitesburg’s answer was a stout, cinder‑block water‑treatment plant erected at the foot of School Hill, just yards from Main Street and the North Fork of the Kentucky River.