Appalachian Figures On a cold December day in 1927 thousands of Kentuckians crowded into Frankfort to watch a mountain lawyer from Barbourville take the oath as the Commonwealth’s forty second governor. Born in a Laurel County log cabin and educated at Union College and Valparaiso University, Flemon Davis “Flem” Sampson carried into office both the ambitions of Knox County Republicans and the suspicions of Bluegrass Democrats.

Appalachian Figures In the mid twentieth century, Kentucky politics was often framed as a contest between coalfield Republicans in the mountains and Democratic courthouse machines in the Bluegrass and river cities.

Appalachian Figures For most of the twentieth century, people in Barbourville knew Kenneth Herndon Tuggle as a familiar figure on Main Street. He was the hometown lawyer you might meet on the courthouse steps, the banker whose name hung over the corner building, the lay leader at First Methodist, and the local boy who kept sending scholarships back to Union College.

Appalachian Figures On paper, John Henry Wilson looks like a textbook Gilded Age politician. He rose from a small town practice to the Kentucky Senate, spent four years in Congress, helped launch a national fraternal order, and ended his days in a Louisville townhouse far from the farm country where he was born.

Appalachian Figures When Knox Countians talk about their “distinguished men,” the list usually starts with Governor Flem D. Sampson, federal regulator Walter G. Campbell, and a quiet lawyer who once sat in the United States Senate. In a single lifetime William Abner Stanfill went from Barbourville’s Union College classrooms to Hazard’s coal company boardrooms to a brief spell on the floor of the Senate in Washington.

Appalachian Figures A Nelson County Birth, A Barbourville Future James Love’s life began far from the sandbars of Galveston. He was born in Nelson County, Kentucky, on 12 May 1795, and educated in the schools around Bardstown. The official congressional biography and the U.S. House History office agree on that date and place and describe a young man who volunteered for military service while still a teenager.

Appalachian Figures From a Knox County river farm to the governor’s chair On paper, Silas Woodson looks like a Midwestern politician. He practiced law in St Joseph, Missouri, served as a Union militia officer during the Civil War, and in 1873 became the first Democrat elected governor of Missouri after the war. Look a little closer and the story runs straight through the hills of southeastern Kentucky.

Appalachian Figures A Revolutionary pension and a mountain judge On autumn court days in Harlan, the docket could run long. Old men who had marched with Washington or fought in Carolina hobbled into the courthouse and told their stories to a clerk, a lawyer, and a judge who knew something about frontier fighting himself. In October 1833, Revolutionary veteran Jesse Brock stood in Harlan Circuit Court to give a sworn statement for his pension.

Appalachian Folklore & Myths A haunted highway through the coalfields If you drive US 119 at night, the road feels older than the concrete beneath your tires. The four-lane slices through coal country from Pineville, Kentucky, up through the Tug Valley and Logan into central and northern West Virginia, before continuing on to Uniontown and Punxsutawney in Pennsylvania.

Appalachian Folklore & Myths If you drive the back roads of Appalachia long enough, someone will eventually warn you about a girl in white who may be waiting just past the next curve. Sometimes she is a bride on her wedding night. Sometimes she is simply “the lady in white,” a stranger who steps out of the fog and into your car. She asks for a ride, rides in silence, and then vanishes before you reach town.

Appalachian Folklore & Myths In a bend of the Red River in Robertson County, Tennessee, a farming family named Bell took root in the early nineteenth century. Two centuries later, their homestead is remembered less for corn and tobacco than for a talking spirit that slapped children, quoted Scripture, and claimed it had murdered the family patriarch.