In the summer of 1913, a photographer clambered through the streets of Matamoros, Mexico, stepping past shattered walls and fresh graves with a camera and a pocket full of glass plates. The man who made some of the best known images of the Mexican Revolution on the Texas border was not a native of the Rio Grande Valley.

In the 1830s and 1840s, the clerk of tiny Harlan County, Kentucky, signed court papers with a practiced hand. On Revolutionary War pension files and land disputes alike, the formula appears over and over: “I, John G. Crump, clerk of the court of Harlan County, do hereby certify…” From that courthouse world on the upper Cumberland came a son who would spend his life on a very different frontier.

Appalachian Figures Dan Johnson Haley started life in a Cumberland River town best known for a courthouse square and a football field tucked against the mountain. Born at Pineville in Bell County in 1940, he grew from three-sport Panther to one of the most successful high school football coaches Kentucky has ever seen, with more than 250 wins and state title runs in Lexington, Paducah, and Bowling Green.

Appalachian Figures On summer evenings at Middlesboro Country Club, regulars still point toward certain fairways and talk about the scores that once came off that nine hole layout. For more than forty years, the course record on this little crater rim track belonged to one of their own, a Bell County kid named George Ancil Cadle.

Appalachian History Series On the edge of downtown Harlan, just off U.S. 421, stands a small brick Catholic church that most travelers never notice. Holy Trinity Catholic Church is easy to miss in a county better known for coal camps, labor wars, and union ballads than for Roman collars and rosaries.

Appalachian History A hilltop church in a coal town Climb the long concrete stairway above the old company town of Pocahontas, Virginia, and you reach a modest white frame church with a red metal roof and a square tower crowned by a cross. Inside, the little sanctuary opens like a storybook. Ten life sized oil murals ring the walls and ceiling, with the Last Supper spreading across the apse behind a carved white high altar.

Appalachian Figures For most of his life, Harry Monroe Caudill lived within sight of Pine Mountain and within walking distance of the Letcher County courthouse. A country lawyer, state representative, and local historian, he also became one of the most widely read interpreters of Appalachian crisis in the twentieth century.

Appalachian Figures On a winter night at the end of 1968, fire swallowed the McLain family’s house above Troublesome Creek in Hindman, Kentucky. The seven family members escaped, and so did the instruments that had already begun to stitch their lives together in song.

Appalachian Figures When people in Letcher County rattle off the local names that somehow ended up on the national stage, Emery L. Frazier sits in that small company. A Lawrenceburg native who made his career as a young lawyer and mayor in Whitesburg, he eventually became the twentieth Secretary of the United States Senate in 1966. For Appalachia, his story is not only about climbing the ladder in Washington.

Appalachian Figures On a summer day in 1965, a knot of clergy crowded in behind West Virginia governor Hulett Smith as he signed the bill that abolished capital punishment in the state. Somewhere in that black-robed cluster stood a slight, sharp-eyed Methodist minister from the coalfields who had spent years arguing that the state had no right to take a life.

Appalachian Figures Most people today know Rush Hospital in Meridian as Ochsner Rush Medical Center, a regional facility with hundreds of beds serving east central Mississippi and western Alabama. That big city hospital has its roots in a much smaller place: Kemper County, Mississippi, a rural Appalachian county just up the road from Meridian.