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.

Appalachian Folklore & Myths On clear days the road up from downtown Norton curls through hardwoods, past picnic pull offs and salamander habitat, until the pavement narrows and the world drops away. At Flag Rock Overlook, three thousand feet above the streets and parking lots, you can see the whole Powell Valley cupped below High Knob.

Appalachian History Stand on the lawn of the Casey County courthouse in Liberty and you are surrounded by memory in bronze and cast aluminum. The 1888 Romanesque Revival courthouse towers over a World War I doughboy statue and several Kentucky Historical Society markers that celebrate the First Kentucky Cavalry and its colonels Frank Wolford and Silas Adams.

Appalachian History On the courthouse lawn at Sandy Hook, two weathered highway markers tell a story that began before Elliott County even existed. One, titled “A Masterful Retreat,” remembers a starving Union column that slipped out of Cumberland Gap in September 1862 and marched two hundred mountain miles to the Ohio River.

Appalachian History On a narrow strip of land between the Cumberland River and Pine Mountain, the town we now call Pineville began life as Cumberland Ford. Long before anyone heard rifle fire from the heights of Cumberland Gap, this ford was a traffic jam of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.