Appalachian Figures Walk through Knoxville National Cemetery and near the front you will see a plain government headstone with the inscription for Joseph Alexander Cooper, Brigadier General, United States Volunteers. His story begins not in Tennessee but just over the line at Cumberland Falls in Whitley County, Kentucky, and runs through some of the hardest questions the Civil War and Reconstruction ever put to the Appalachian borderlands.

Appalachian Figures On an overcast October afternoon in 1925, a rookie pitcher with only a handful of big league innings stepped onto the mound at Griffith Stadium in Washington. The Pittsburgh Pirates were clawing back into the World Series. Player manager Bucky Harris of the Washington Senators called for a reliever: Win Ballou, a right hander from the hills above Williamsburg in Whitley County, Kentucky.

Appalachian Figures A Grave on the Hill Above Town On a rise above Williamsburg, Kentucky, Highland Cemetery looks out over the Cumberland foothills and the town that grew up along the Cumberland River. Cemetery listings and gravestone transcriptions for the old section record one of the most controversial names in Kentucky politics: Charles Finley, born in Williamsburg in 1865 and buried there in March 1941.

Appalachian History On a quiet day in Greensburg you can stand on the public square and hear little more than traffic around the old limestone courthouse. The two story building looks older than the rest of the square because it is. Built in 1802, it is one of the oldest surviving courthouses in Kentucky and the oldest courthouse west of the Alleghenies.

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Appalachian History Most people who pass through Pikeville today remember the Cut-Through, the bypass, and the steep hills that hem the Levisa Fork into a narrow river bottom. During the first years of the Civil War, that same narrow valley became one of the most hotly contested corridors in eastern Kentucky.

Appalachian History Clark County never hosted a Shiloh or a Gettysburg. The war here arrived on horseback, in sudden raids, in the rumble of distant cannon, and in petitions scratched out to the governor from Winchester law offices.

Appalachian History Wayne County sits where Kentucky leans into Tennessee, a high ridge country that looks down on the Cumberland River. In the 1860 census the county was still mostly small farms and stock raisers, with only a handful of enslaved people compared to the Bluegrass. That did not keep the war away. Local politics were tangled from the start.

Appalachian History On a February night in 1865, riders splashed out of the hills and into the farms along Bolts Fork in western Boyd County. By dawn, horses were gone, homes had been stripped, and a Union cavalryman on leave lay dead near Cannonsburg.

Appalachian History Leslie County did not appear on the map until 1878, when the legislature carved it from Clay, Harlan, and Perry Counties and named it for Governor Preston H. Leslie. Its new seat, Hyden, rose at the mouth of Rockhouse Creek on the Middle Fork of the Kentucky River, in a landscape of steep ridges and narrow bottoms. That geography matters.

Appalachian History Rowan County on the War’s Ragged Edge When the Civil War reached the upper Licking River, Rowan County was still a young place. Created in 1856 from parts of Fleming and Morgan Counties, it had a new courthouse at Morehead, scattered farms along Triplett Creek and the Licking, and roads that threaded east and west toward Mt. Sterling, Flemingsburg, and the Virginia line.