Appalachian Figures If you follow Caney Creek up through the narrow valley of Knott County, you eventually reach a campus that looks almost like a small town of its own.

Appalachian Figures In the spring of 1940, a national newsmagazine sent a reporter into a narrow Kentucky valley where students hauled their own coal, scrubbed their own floors, and climbed stone steps to class on a hillside campus that seemed to grow straight out of the rock.

Appalachian Figures In the spring of 1877, the brick jail at De Kalb, Mississippi became the stage for one of the most notorious Reconstruction lynchings in the South. A Republican judge, William Wallace Chisolm, sat behind its walls with his teenage son John, his daughter Cornelia, and political allies J. P. Gilmer and Angus McLellan.

Appalachian Figures Harlan born, Skin Fork raised Kenneth Ray “Kenny” Shadrick entered the world in Harlan County, Kentucky, on August 4 1931. Later reference works and wartime profiles agree on that mountain birthplace. He arrived in a coalfield family at the height of the Great Depression, one of ten children, in a county that was itself becoming shorthand for hard times and labor violence.

Appalachian Figures For most Kentuckians who follow basketball, the name McBrayer is not a person so much as a place. It is the arena in Richmond where Eastern Kentucky’s Colonels have hosted generations of opponents, a loud concrete bowl filled with maroon, pep bands, and the echoes of Ohio Valley Conference title runs.

Appalachian Figures A Harlan boy who never really left Green Wix Unthank started life in a coal camp town, jumped into some of the hardest fighting of World War II as a young paratrooper, then came home to spend more than sixty years inside Kentucky courtrooms. By the time he died in 2013, people in Harlan County simply called him “Judge Unthank,” a title that blended local respect with federal power in one mountain name.

Appalachian Figures A Bell County Son in a Global War In the spring of 1945, a balding American colonel sat behind a desk in war torn Europe, his uniform crowded with campaign ribbons. In photographs from the period, Francis Pickens Miller looks more professor than warrior, a calm eyed Southerner who had somehow washed up in the middle of the secret war against Hitler.

Appalachian Figures Every time someone taps a phone screen in Bell County, punches an order into a fast food kiosk in Harlan, or checks out at a self service register in Lexington, a quiet piece of Appalachian history flickers to life. The resistive touch technology that made early touch screens practical around the world grew from the mind of a farm boy from Ponza in Bell County, Kentucky, named George Samuel Hurst.

Appalachian Figures A coal miner, ballad singer, and union man from Martin County Eastern Kentucky and southern West Virginia produced thousands of coal miners. Very few left as much of their own voice behind as Nimrod Workman. Born in Martin County in 1895, he spent more than four decades in the mines of Mingo County, West Virginia, before black lung and a damaged back forced him to quit underground work.

Appalachian Figures A Bell County boy in a world of blue water Bell County is usually associated with coal seams, timber, and the tight bend of the Cumberland River under Pine Mountain. Yet one of the most influential American naval aviators of the twentieth century first opened his eyes in that narrow valley. John Madison Hoskins was born in Pineville on 22 October 1898, the youngest of six children of Thomas Jefferson and Lucy Renfro Hoskins.

Appalachian Figures “Charlie” from Mary Helen Charles W. “Charlie” Berger was born in Harlan on January 12, 1936, the son of Benjamin Southard Berger and Rebecca Ethington Berger, and grew up in the Mary Helen coal camp at Coalgood. In that company town he absorbed the social world he would later represent: union men and coal operators, courthouse politicos and Green Dragon athletes, Baptist pews and hunting buddies scattered up the