Appalachian Figures Series Country music fans remember Gary Stewart as the “king of honky tonks,” the high-voiced outlaw who turned barroom heartbreak into art. People in Letcher County remember something more specific. They remember the kid from the Dunham coal camp who grew up in Jenkins, the miner’s son whose name ended up on a Route 23 highway sign and on RCA record labels in the same lifetime.

Appalachian Figures Series Second Lieutenant Darwin Keith “Gus” Kyle began life in a coal company town on the Kentucky side of the border and fell in battle on a frozen Korean hillside half a world away.

Appalachian Figures Jenkins miner to CIO vice president In 1904 a boy was born in the brand new coal town of Jenkins in Letcher County, Kentucky. Half a century later that same boy, John Vernon Riffe, sat in Washington as executive vice president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, one of the highest offices in American labor. Newspaper obituaries, congressional tributes, and union records agree on the broad outline.

Born in a coal camp on the edge of Jenkins in Letcher County in 1929, Francis Gary Powers grew up in a world of tipples, company houses, and steep hollows before his life carried him far above the clouds. On May 1, 1960, that same boy from Burdine found himself parachuting toward a Soviet field from a shattered U-2 spy plane, at the center of a Cold War crisis that nearly wrecked a superpower summit.

Appalachian Figures Milton Mitchell “Milt” Ticco grew up in the shadow of tipples and rail lines in Consolidation Coal Company’s planned town of Jenkins in Letcher County, Kentucky.

Appalachian Figures Willie Raymond “Ray” Collins began life in a Letcher County coal camp and spent it crossing nearly every institution that shaped twentieth century mountain life.

Appalachian Figures Porterville and the Hopper family in Kemper County Robert Clay Hopper was born on 3 October 1902 in Porterville, a tiny railroad town in Kemper County, Mississippi. Contemporary gazetteer data and modern mapping place Porterville firmly inside Kemper County, along the Kansas City Southern Railway, with a post office dating back to 1890 and a population of about 200 in 1906. That Kemper County setting mattered.

Appalachian Figures On a cool October afternoon in 1929, the Washington Senators wrapped up a long and mostly forgettable season with a meaningless game against the Boston Red Sox. In center field for Washington stood a twenty six year old rookie from a fading river town in Kemper County, Mississippi. His name on the lineup card was simple enough. Land, center field.

Appalachian Figures In the late twentieth century, thousands of families left the hills and hollers of Appalachia for the auto plants of the industrial Midwest. Mountain men and women who once cut timber or mined coal found themselves under fluorescent lights, tightening bolts on assembly lines in places like Detroit, Flint, and Sterling Heights. Those plants were dangerous.

Appalachian Figures In most stories about Benjamin Vernon “Ben” Lilly, the hunter appears fully formed. He pads through the Gila Wilderness with a pack of hounds, slips after lions in the Sierra Madre, or guides President Theodore Roosevelt on a black bear hunt along a Louisiana bayou.

Appalachian Figures In the piney woods of Kemper County, the mill town of Electric Mills once advertised itself as the brightest town south of St. Louis. Built around a fully electric lumber mill, it had its own hospital, theater, and even company currency before the trees gave out and the town slowly emptied. From that fading industrial outpost came a girl who would spend nearly three decades in the Mississippi House of Representatives.