Abandoned Appalachia A stone schoolhouse above a future lake If you drive up Yellow Creek toward Building Mountain today, you can still spot it. Before the road tips over the ridge, a stone building sits on the flat ground across from where Roosevelt Honeycutt once kept a store.

Abandoned Appalachia On a narrow side road off U.S. 460 at Millard, an aging brick school sits behind a chain link fence and tall grass. Locals still call it Millard Grade School or “the Rocky Road school,” after its address at 20 Rocky Road in Pikeville. For generations this was where Millard’s youngest students learned their letters, lined up for class pictures, and watched Christmas plays in a low ceilinged gym.

Abandoned Appalachia If you stand at the Baxter Coal Monument and look toward the river, a narrow lattice of riveted steel still rises above the trees. That is Baxter Bridge, a Baltimore through truss that once carried U.S. 119 over the Cumberland River’s forks and now hangs quiet over the reengineered channel and floodplain.

Appalachian History Series High above the coal camps of Cumberland and Benham, a narrow road climbs onto the crest of Pine Mountain and enters a landscape that feels older than the highways that reach it. Kingdom Come State Park is Kentucky’s highest state park, perched around 2,700 feet on the thrust-up backbone of Pine Mountain and protecting roughly 1,283 acres of cliffs, forests, and wind-scoured rock.

Appalachian Figures Hardy Myers is usually remembered as Oregon’s long serving attorney general, the lawyer who helped defend the state’s Death with Dignity Act at the United States Supreme Court and who made consumer protection and open government central to his office. Less well known is that his story begins in a company lumber town on the edge of the southern Appalachians.

Appalachian Figures A Lewis County start David Fain “Dave” Sisco was born June 26, 1937, the son of Ira Guy Sisco and Cuba Irene Fain. He later made his home in Bon Aqua and died on July 25, 2016. He was a U. S. Army veteran and was buried at Edwards Cemetery in Hohenwald. Those core facts come straight from the funeral home record and contemporaneous obituary, which also list the service and burial details.

Appalachian Figures John Jones Pettus is usually remembered as Mississippi’s fiery secession governor. He helped pull the state out of the Union and tried to hold it in the Confederate war effort through conscription, militia policy, and heavy use of enslaved labor. Yet before Pettus ever signed a proclamation in Jackson, he was a boy on the move and then a young lawyer on the cotton frontier of Kemper County along the Alabama line.

Appalachian Figures On paper, Henry “Hank” Presswood’s life reads like a tidy baseball biography. Born in a Mississippi company town in 1921, he worked in the lumber mill, served in the Army during the Second World War, played shortstop and third base in the Negro American League, then spent three decades in a steel mill in industrial Chicago. The reality is harder and more interesting.

Appalachian Figures John Cornelius Stennis started life on a small Kemper County farm and ended it as one of the longest serving United States senators in history. Born near De Kalb in 1901, he spent more than sixty years in elected office, from the Mississippi House of Representatives to national prominence on the Armed Services and Appropriations Committees. For Kemper County, his story is both local and global.

Appalachian Figures Nelson Robinette “Robb” Webb grew up in a Letcher County household where school calendars and mountain stories mixed around the table. Decades later, his voice opened Sunday nights for millions of viewers as the familiar sound that introduced 60 Minutes and the CBS Evening News.

Appalachian Figures From Kona on the North Fork to the wider world Martin Van Buren Bates was born on 9 November 1837 in Letcher County, Kentucky, probably in the crossroads settlement of Kona near Whitesburg on the North Fork of the Kentucky River. He was the youngest of a large farm family headed by John Wallis Bates and Sarah Walthrop (Wallis) Bates, early settlers whose land lay at the foot of Pine Mountain.