Appalachian Figures When historians tell the story of the Food and Drug Administration, the main characters are usually big city reformers, New Deal politicians, and Washington lawyers. Missing from that picture is an Appalachian attorney from Knox County, Kentucky, who quietly helped build the regulatory state that still watches over our food and medicine.

Appalachian Figures “A Native of Strunk, Kentucky” On 30 October 1944 a young private from McCreary County held off wave after wave of elite German troops near the French village of Saint Jacques. For more than five hours he fired a single light machine gun, refusing to withdraw even when his company was nearly destroyed and his own ammunition was gone.

Appalachian Figures A Kentucky Birth, A Texas Legacy On paper, William Pitt Ballinger belongs to Texas history. His name is on a West Texas town, in railroad casebooks, in studies of Confederate law and Reconstruction politics. Yet his story begins far up the Cumberland River, in the small Appalachian courthouse town of Barbourville, Kentucky.

Appalachian Figures Barbourville Roots and a Family of Mountain Republicans James Stephen Golden was born on September 20, 1891, in Barbourville, the small river town that serves as the seat of Knox County in southeastern Kentucky. By the time he arrived, Barbourville was already a crossroads of regional politics, education, and law.

Abandoned Appalachia If you grew up in Perry County in the 1980s or 1990s, it is hard to imagine Highway 15 without Fugate’s Entertainment Center. For a generation of mountain kids, the castle-front cinema, the boat-shaped water park, the roller rink, and the Bowl-A-Rama were where you spent birthday parties, youth-group trips, first dates, and long summer afternoons. By 2016 that world was already gone.

Appalachian Churches “For with God nothing shall be impossible.” – Luke 1:37 KJV Constructed in the late eighteenth century, the Old Stone Church, formally known as Old Providence Church, stands as one of the state’s oldest surviving church buildings. Nestled away on Boonesboro Road in Clark County, Kentucky, the limestone walls have witnessed the growth of frontier faith and community division and reunion.

Appalachian History A Little Mountain At The Crossroads In the nineteenth century Mount Sterling looked like a small county seat on the edge of the Bluegrass. Its courthouse and brick storefronts clustered around a public square, while the old Little Mountain mound, built by Adena people centuries earlier, had already been leveled to make room for houses. Location gave the town outsized importance.

Appalachian History A Border County at War In the summer of 1862 the war along the Upper Cumberland was already older than the official battle names suggest. Monroe County, Kentucky, sat on a rough frontier between the Bluegrass and the Cumberland Plateau, tied by road and river to nearby Celina and Livingston in Tennessee.

Appalachian History On top of Big Hill, motorists on U.S. 421 cross three county lines in a matter of seconds. To the south lies Jackson County, carved from surrounding counties in 1858 and tied to older paths that long predate the Civil War. Historical markers at Gray Hawk recall the Warrior’s Path, an Indigenous route that followed War Fork Creek before climbing toward the Bluegrass.

Appalachian History On a quiet day in Edmonton the brick courthouse on the public square and the stone jail a block away look like ordinary pieces of a small Kentucky county seat. Their lines are simple, their scale modest. Yet the records that survive around them tell a story of cavalry scouts surprised on a local farm, courthouse records turned to ash, and a community trying to govern itself in the middle of a border state at war.

Appalachian History On a summer morning in 1864 a small Union scouting party rode west from Mud Lick Springs toward a narrow cleft in the hills. When they reached McCormick’s Gap they suddenly drew fire from “four or six rebels,” one man dropping from the saddle with a slight wound before the patrol pulled back to safety.