Appalachian Figures Boyd Davis Clay grew up in Hohenwald (Lewis County), Tennessee, and became a standout lineman at DuPont Highin the Nashville area before heading to the University of Tennessee. Decades later, The Tennessean included him in its “Nashville’s next 50 greatest high school football players,” a nod to the reputation he built before college.

Appalachian Figures A Lewis County story that briefly touched the majors For two crowded weeks in June 1913 the St. Louis Cardinals handed the ball to a right-hander tied to a small Tennessee town with Swiss roots. Walter William “Walt” Marbet’s major-league line is short. Three games. One start. An 0–1 record with a 16.20 ERA.

Appalachian Figures In the 1970s a hardware-store plainspoken delegate from Maryland’s mountaintop counties learned how to work the levers of Annapolis without losing his Oakland accent. DeCorsey E. Bolden represented Garrett County in the Maryland House of Delegates from 1971 to 1982, sat on Appropriations, and became a reliable voice for local control.

Appalachian Figures William Gay wrote himself out of the backroads around Hohenwald, Tennessee, and into American letters with a voice equal parts lyric and flint. A construction worker for decades who didn’t publish until his mid-fifties, he turned the creeks, hollows, and hard bargains of Middle Tennessee into a personal territory readers now recognize on sight.

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.