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.

Appalachian History Series On a sweltering July dawn in 1973, the sleepy hamlet of Brookside woke to the rumble of coal trucks and the sight of cardboard signs nailed to wooden staves: UMWA ON STRIKE—NO CONTRACT, NO COAL. By nightfall gunshots echoed off the Clover Fork valley walls, and Harlan County was once again poised to earn its nickname, “Bloody Harlan.” Over the ensuing thirteen months,

Appalachian History Series On a gray Tuesday morning—May 5, 1931—a handful of laid‑off coal miners shouldered rifles along the Poor Fork Road just east of Evarts, Kentucky.

Repurpose Appalachia Series​ Being perched between 4,100 and 4,223 feet on the rugged spine of Stone Mountain, the modern High Knob Observation Tower greets each sunrise with a gleam of galvanized steel on sandstone. Long before it became a scenic waypoint for motorists and hikers near Norton, Virginia, High Knob’s summit served an urgent purpose: keeping watch for wildfire.

Forgotten Appalachia Series Tucked away in downtown Harlan, Kentucky, an unassuming patch of grassy ground at 206 East Clover Street conceals one of the county’s oldest and most intriguing burial grounds. Once hidden behind the walls of a crumbling Ford dealership building, this “secret cemetery” has only recently come back into public view—and with it, the faded chapter of Harlan’s early settlers and their storied feuds.

This is the Fourth in a series exploring once-thriving Appalachian towns left behind by shifting energy markets and changing times.