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.

Appalachian Figures William Miller Drennen began life in a brand new coal camp on Elkhorn Creek and ended it as a nationally known judge who helped reshape the United States Tax Court.

Appalachian Figures If you grew up in Jenkins, you probably heard the name Burpo in two different settings. Older railroad hands remembered engineer H. L. Burpo at the throttle of the first passenger train into town. Younger fans might remember another Burpo: a tall left handed pitcher who clawed his way from the coalfields to a brief stint with the Cincinnati Reds.

Appalachian Figures Rodney Leon “Rod” Brasfield turned a quiet Lewis County town into a running character on one of America’s biggest radio stages. From the late 1940s through the 1950s, the Grand Ole Opry’s premier comedian regularly told listeners he hailed from Hohenwald, and he worked that hometown into his bits with affectionate precision.

Anita Cherry: Like Father Like Daughter  History was made in the winter of 1973 in the coal seams of Jenkins, Kentucky. Alongside Diana Baldwin, Anita Cherry became one of the first two women in the United States to work underground in a coal mine.

Appalachian Figures From Double Creek to Hindman James Still was born on July 16, 1906, in the Double Creek/Double Branch community near LaFayette, Alabama. After studies at Lincoln Memorial University (’29) and graduate work at Vanderbilt (M.A., 1930), he arrived at the Hindman Settlement School in the summer of 1931.

Appalachian Figures A voice from Knott County Verna Mae Slone was born in Knott County, Kentucky, on October 9, 1914, and died in Hindman on January 5, 2009. She and her husband, Willie Slone, raised five sons. In addition to writing, she became known across Eastern Kentucky for her quilts and cloth dolls.