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.

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Appalachian Figures Shelbiana sits where railroad tracks, coal seams, and the Levisa Fork all meet. On paper it is an unincorporated community and coal town in Pike County that grew up around a major rail yard on the Chesapeake and Ohio line, now CSX. In practice it is one of those places where the tracks run so close to the houses that children grow up measuring time in passing coal trains.

Appalachian Figures On a sharp bend of Kentucky Route 92 as it drops toward the Cumberland River, a green sign tells drivers they have entered the Joe C. Paul Memorial Highway. The words hurry past in the blur of the windshield. For most people, the name is only another roadside marker, one more reminder that Kentucky is thick with memorials to wars fought far from its hills.

From a narrow hollow in Pike County to college arenas up and down the East Coast, the story of Carl Johnson Slone begins in a place that barely shows up on most maps. Majestic, Kentucky is a coal town tucked against the Tug Fork, a run of houses, market, and post office strung along the highway in eastern Pike County.

Appalachian Figures In the middle of the nineteenth century, the public square at Monticello in Wayne County could feel very far from the marble floors of the United States Capitol or the brick corridors of the Confederate Congress in Richmond. Yet for more than twenty years one lawyer from that square tried to move comfortably in all three worlds.

Appalachian Figures On a summer weekend in the southern Chesapeake, sailboats race across the bay for the Leo Wardrup Memorial Cape Charles Cup, a two day regatta that has become one of the big social events of the Broad Bay Sailing Association calendar. For people in Virginia Beach, the Wardrup name belongs to a retired Navy captain, long serving Republican delegate, and passionate sailor.

Appalachian Figures In the summer of 1959 a young New York musician and photographer named John Cohen turned his car off the hardtop road in Perry County and followed a dirt lane into the little lumber mill village of Daisy. He had spent weeks driving through eastern Kentucky looking for songs about hard times. Neon, Bulan, Vicco, Viper, Defiance, and other coal and timber towns had already slipped past his windshield.

Appalachian Figures On a cold December evening in 1863, a young woman in Wayne County opened a package from Frankfort. Inside was a new photograph album and, tucked among the cartes de visite, a promise from her brother-in-law, Ephraim L. Van Winkle. When he could get to Louisville, he wrote, he would have his own portrait taken and place it “in front” for her.