Appalachian Figures When Ohio historians talk about Madam Lizzie Lape, they usually start in Marion or Akron or Stow. They talk about the White Pigeon, about raids on “houses of ill fame,” about an early test of the Winn Law and the Married Women’s Property Acts. Very few start where the paper trail actually begins, in the hill farms of Whitley County, Kentucky, with a girl the census takers called Amy or Elizabeth Rogers.

Appalachian Figures If you stand at the mouth of the hollow where Packard once sat, there is no marquee and no sign that an Academy Award winner first opened her eyes there. The coal tipple is gone. The company houses are gone. What remains is a quiet Whitley County hollow above Big Patterson Creek where, for a few decades in the early twentieth century, several hundred people tried to make a life in the shadow of a mine.

Appalachian Figures When racing fans see the red and white Ramsey silks flash past the finish line at Churchill Downs or Keeneland, they are watching a global operation that grew from some very small places on the Cumberland. The story of Kenneth Lee and Sarah Kathern Ramsey usually gets told in the language of purse money, Eclipse Awards, and Breeders’ Cup wins. It is also a Knox County story.

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The annual “Molecules of the Year” selections are available for the year 2025.

Appalachian Figures On a stretch of Cumberland Avenue in downtown Middlesboro, the traffic signs suddenly change. For a few blocks the road becomes the Leonard F. Mason Medal of Honor Memorial Highway, a reminder that one of the most celebrated Marines of the Pacific war began life within sight of Yellow Creek and the surrounding Bell County ridges.

Green and gold of autumn My annual selection of favourites from the photographs I took in the past year is now available on Flickr. Do people still use Flickr? I have broken my usual rule of not including family photos because of the very exceptional and very happy occurrences of both of our daughters’ weddings this year. It would have felt wrong somehow to omit pictures that captured the sheer joy of these events.

Appalachian Figures On a fall night in Bluefield, Virginia, a Graham High School senior named Bill Dudley lined up for what everyone in the stands understood as a desperate kick. The ball sat on the Princeton forty yard line, too far out for most high school kickers of the late nineteen thirties. Dudley swung his leg, the ball sailed through the uprights, and an underdog team from the coalfields stunned a favored rival.

Appalachian Figures In the winter of 1907 a quiet judge from St. Joseph took his seat on the Supreme Court of Missouri. On paper he was a Midwestern Democrat with a farm upbringing, a Washington University law degree, and a reputation for careful rulings in railroad and criminal cases. Yet the official manual that introduced him to Missouri voters began with a different place: Knox County, Kentucky.

The sudden death of Judge Micah Chrisman Saufley in August 1910 startled readers from Wayne County to the Bluegrass. Stanford’s Interior Journal and other Kentucky papers told the same story in slightly different words. A respected circuit judge collapsed at his barn in Stanford, Lincoln County, after a workday that still mixed courthouse business with feeding chickens.

Appalachian Figures On the ridge between Monticello, Kentucky and Livingston, Tennessee, the Cullom name keeps showing up in courthouse minutes, church rolls, and cemetery stones. In a previous story I followed William Cullom from Elk Spring Valley to the halls of Congress as a Whig who fought the Kansas Nebraska bill and clung to the Union even while he owned enslaved people. His older brother Alvan walked a different path.