Appalachian Figures On winter Sundays in mountain churches from North Carolina to eastern Kentucky, somebody still calls out a number for a Christmas carol that is not in the high-church hymnals. Voices rise on “Beautiful Star of Bethlehem,” stitched into four part harmony from memory and from a little red or maroon songbook that has seen more revivals than holidays.

Appalachian Figures On a summer stage at Newport in the 1960s, a slight woman in a simple dress sat behind two microphones with a long, heart-cut instrument across her lap. The photographs show her face intent and calm as her fingers moved over the fretboard of a mountain dulcimer. For many in that audience it was their first glimpse of the old Kentucky instrument. For Jean Ritchie it was simply home carried onto a festival stage.

Appalachian Figures In February 1974 the Senate Commerce Committee met in Washington to consider two Coast Guardsmen whose careers had begun in the anxious days before Pearl Harbor. One was Rear Admiral Owen W. Siler, nominated to be Commandant. The other was Rear Admiral Ellis Lee Perry, a soft-spoken Tennessean from Lawrenceburg, nominated to become Vice Commandant, the second in command of the entire United States Coast Guard.

Appalachian Figures In the summer of 1843, a boy named Benjamin Franklin Burkitt was born just outside Lawrenceburg in Lawrence County, Tennessee. Later generations would know him simply as Frank, the editor in the wool hat from Okolona, Mississippi, who took on railroads, bankers, and the “Bourbon” Democratic establishment on behalf of small farmers.

Appalachian Figures On an election day in Perry County in the late twentieth century you could expect a knock at the door. Neighbors remember a stocky man in a sport coat or a color coordinated outfit, smiling at front porches all over the hills around Hazard.

Appalachian Figures In most ecology textbooks, Carl Barton Huffaker’s name shows up beside a jagged predator and prey graph or a passing reference to “mites on oranges.” It is a tidy way to remember a complicated experiment and an even more complicated life.

Appalachian Figures In the middle of the twentieth century, when most Kentuckians still expected the courthouse and the statehouse to be run by men, a woman from the coal country on Pond Creek quietly took charge of the Commonwealth’s checkbook. Pearl Frances Runyon was born in 1913 at Belfry in Pike County, the youngest of thirteen children of merchant and timber dealer James Epperson Runyon and his wife Ella Murphy.

Appalachian Folklore & Myths Giant birds haunt Appalachian stories. In northern Pennsylvania people talk about thunderbirds with twenty foot wingspans darkening the sky above ridgelines. In the southern mountains another bird already lived in the stories long before the word thunderbird ever reached the region.

Appalachian Folklore & Myths On the Maryland side of the Appalachians, where South Mountain rises above the Middletown and Hagerstown valleys, people still swap stories about a flying creature with metal claws, a beak like a saw blade, and a taste for blood. The Snallygaster shows up in trail lore along the Maryland section of the Appalachian Trail, in Frederick County tourism copy, and at an entire museum devoted to its legend.

Appalachian Folklore & Myths If you turn off US 27 behind the Stearns Ranger District office and follow Barren Fork Road into the woods, the modern highway sound drops away faster than it should. The pavement gives way to a narrow loop beside a hillside graveyard shaded by hardwoods. This is Barren Fork Cemetery, the last visible piece of a vanished coal company town in McCreary County.

Appalachian Folklore & Myths High above the roar of the Cumberland River there is a rock shelf that feels both exposed and strangely enclosed, hemmed in by laurel and pine. Visitors step out to the railing, look down on the sixty-plus foot curtain of water, and pose for photographs with mist on their faces. The overlook is part of the modern trail system at Cumberland Falls State Resort Park, yet it carries an older, more romantic name.