Appalachian Figures In the summer of 1815, a boy named Reuben May was born on Robinson Creek in what is now Pike County, Kentucky, into one of the most connected families on the Big Sandy. Later records from Wisconsin and a century’s worth of genealogical work agree on those basic facts: he was born June 23, 1815, in Pike County, son of Thomas Phillips May and Dorcas Patton, and he grew up on his father’s substantial mountain estate.

Appalachian Figures At the entrance to Morristown Regional Airport in East Tennessee, a bronze bust of a woman with neatly waved hair greets visitors. The plaque beneath it reads “Evelyn Bryan Johnson” and “Mama Bird.” Behind that nickname sits one of the most remarkable aviation careers in American history.

Appalachian Figures If you drive along the Sacramento River today and cross over to Grand Island, you will find the tiny town of Ryde pressed in between levees, orchards, and the slow brown water of the Delta. Local lore sometimes says Ryde got its name because its founder was born in Ryde on the Isle of Wight, across the Atlantic. The land records tell a different story.

Appalachian Figures By the late 1970s a woman in her sixties from rural Laurel County began turning the stories she had carried all her life into a public record. She had spent decades on a farm along Muddy Gut Creek, raised children, worked tobacco auctions in London, and buried a husband. Then a Corbin newspaper editor asked her to write about a church trip to the Holy Land, and the door opened.

Appalachian Figures On the hill above modern Pikeville, Kentucky, Dils Cemetery looks down on a town that has grown far beyond the nineteenth century river village Randolph “Ole Ran’l” McCoy knew. His stone stands among those of his wife Sarah, their daughter Roseanna, their son Sam, and other kin whose lives were tangled with one of the most written-about family conflicts in American history.

Appalachian Figures Corbin High School students in the twenty first century mostly know Rodger Bird as a name on a wall, a retired number, and a story their grandparents tell about an undefeated season in 1960.

Appalachian Figures On a November day in 1829, in a hill country courthouse town not far from the Cumberland River, a baby boy named Shelby Moore Cullom came into the world. Most history books remember him as an Illinois politician, a longtime United States senator, and a key architect of federal railroad regulation and the Lincoln Memorial. Yet the paper trail of his life, from bank notes to obituaries, never stops reminding us where he began.

Appalachian Figures In the hills of southern Lawrence County, Tennessee, the unincorporated community of Westpoint sits close to the Alabama line, a small place where farms and timber once defined daily life. In 1903 a boy was born there who would spend his adulthood in steel hulls under the Atlantic and Pacific, help test lifesaving submarine escape gear, and take part in one of the most famous undersea rescues in American naval history.

Appalachian Figures In the summer of 1927 a barber from Corbin, Kentucky carried his banjo across the mountains to a makeshift studio in Bristol.

Appalachian Figures Born in a railroad town on the Tennessee and Alabama line, Robert Hitchcock Spain entered the world in 1925 as one small line in a county birth book. Long before he became a United Methodist bishop, an author, or a chaplain in Nashville, he was simply “Robert Hitchcock Spain” in the clerk’s hand at Lawrenceburg, the son of two public school teachers in Loretto.

Appalachian Figures In one often shared photograph from the Thacker coalfield, a teenage miner named Vito Ragazzo stands in a coal car at Aflex, Pike County. The caption notes that the picture was taken in 1944 and that the young man in work clothes would someday play college and Canadian professional football and then coach at Virginia Military Institute and Shippensburg. That single image holds several stories at once.