Appalachian Figures In eastern Kentucky political memory, few names draw as mixed a reaction as Leo A. Marcum.

Appalachian Figures If you walk the streets of The Market Common in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, the name “Reed” appears on a street sign and on the General Robert H. Reed Recreation Center. City markers explain that the building honors a retired four star Air Force general who helped turn a shuttered base into a thriving neighborhood, and who insisted that its military history not be forgotten.

Appalachian Figures On an autumn morning in 2024, flags across Kentucky dipped to half staff in memory of a state senator from Harlan County. Governor Andy Beshear’s order was brief, but it marked an extraordinary thing for a boy who had once walked from a Pine Mountain homeplace to a mission school in his bare feet.

Appalachian Figures On a ridge above the Pine Mountain valley in Harlan County, a stone house still looks west down the long hollow. Its terraces are dry laid from local rock, its chimney and foundation fitted so tightly that a century of rain has barely opened the seams. Local tradition remembers the place simply as Zande House, after the man who built it by hand.

Appalachian Figures If you follow Caney Creek up through the narrow valley of Knott County, you eventually reach a campus that looks almost like a small town of its own.

Appalachian Figures In the spring of 1940, a national newsmagazine sent a reporter into a narrow Kentucky valley where students hauled their own coal, scrubbed their own floors, and climbed stone steps to class on a hillside campus that seemed to grow straight out of the rock.

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Appalachian Figures In the spring of 1877, the brick jail at De Kalb, Mississippi became the stage for one of the most notorious Reconstruction lynchings in the South. A Republican judge, William Wallace Chisolm, sat behind its walls with his teenage son John, his daughter Cornelia, and political allies J. P. Gilmer and Angus McLellan.

Appalachian Figures Harlan born, Skin Fork raised Kenneth Ray “Kenny” Shadrick entered the world in Harlan County, Kentucky, on August 4 1931. Later reference works and wartime profiles agree on that mountain birthplace. He arrived in a coalfield family at the height of the Great Depression, one of ten children, in a county that was itself becoming shorthand for hard times and labor violence.

Appalachian Figures For most Kentuckians who follow basketball, the name McBrayer is not a person so much as a place. It is the arena in Richmond where Eastern Kentucky’s Colonels have hosted generations of opponents, a loud concrete bowl filled with maroon, pep bands, and the echoes of Ohio Valley Conference title runs.