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

Appalachian Figures Series When Judge Andrew Jackson Kirk died at his home in Paintsville on the night of 25 May 1933, the Big Sandy News told its readers that his life had been “interwoven with the very fiber of life in this section of the state.” For nearly half a century he stood at the center of eastern Kentucky’s legal and political world.

Appalachian Figures On the courthouse square at Pineville, the brick façades and tight mountain valley feel a long way from Addis Ababa or Riyadh.

Appalachian Figures A coalfield lawyer in a national spotlight In the spring of 1938, reporters crowded into the federal courtroom at London, Kentucky.

Appalachian Figures On the House floor in Frankfort, Charles “Charlie” Siler never stopped looking like what he said he was back home: a farmer from the hills who happened to hold a seat in the state legislature. White haired, soft spoken, and rarely flashy, he spent more than two decades representing the 82nd District of Whitley and Laurel counties, after an earlier career as a decorated Army lieutenant colonel.

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.