– A HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO PIKEVILLE, KENTUCKY The Times They Are A- Changin’ Gayle Compton (Note: The original version of the following was published in Coal People Magazine in 2015, seven years before Pikeville, Kentucky, would be celebrating its Bicentennial.  Changes in the names of some landmarks and certain demographics are slight, and no attempt…

Dedication This compilation of histories is dedicated to my first cousin Julia Wall, who safeguarded the notebooks and sent them to me along with original photos of Thomas Elliott; my daughter Ashley Korizis for hours of research in the DAR databases, and to family and friends in Pike, Floyd and Johnson counties, Kentucky. As the sixth…

LOIS SMITH HIERS One woman’s story is the word I write, And no invention, or the page is clear… She rises early, eager as the light To tend her garden, setting rose-roots where The world goes by, then leans upon her hoe In languorous daydream… –Lois Smith Hiers The name Lois Smith Hiers is not…

The first half of the twentieth century saw the emergence of several notable Appalachian poets and local colorists, including John Fox, Jr., Charles Neville Buck, Jesse Stuart and James Still.  With her poems appearing in an array of newspapers and national journals, Truda McCoy of Pikeville was one of the most promising.  However, her ties…

I was in for a surprise, more ways than one, when I signed up for Dr. Leonard Roberts’ Mythology class my senior year at Pikeville College in 1969.  I realized I’d just wasted five dollars on Edith Hamilton’s fat text when I walked into the classroom and saw all the chairs shoved up against the wall…

Story – The Master Detective Warrant and Court Record Pardon

Pike Countians have long been proud to claim Lillie D. Chaffin as one of their own.  Lillie was 37 and working as an elementary  school teacher at Johns Creek when her first children’s book, A Garden is Good, was published in 1963.  Meanwhile, she was gaining a reputation in another genre, with her poetry for adults appearing in hundreds…

Our history of Pike County, Kentucky, writers begins with Effie Waller Smith, and Effie’s story begins in 1860 at a public slave auction held in Pikeville, Kentucky. At a time when Kentucky was torn between loyalty to the national Union and her sister slave-holding states farther south, no county was more evenly divided than Pike….

Hopkins is best remembered as the author of three books of local and regional history: Spirits in the Field: An Appalachian Family History, Bright Wings to Fly: An Appalachian Family in the Civil War, and Hearts in Zion: Steel, Coal and an Appalachian Family. He also wrote poetry which appeared in a number of literary journals. His column “Notebook” ran…

Born in 1900 at McAndrews, Kentucky, Sylvia Trent Auxier became one of the finest lyric poets in Kentucky literature. Her traditional rhymed poems focusing on the symbiotic relationship between Man and Nature were popular among critics and readers. She was a prolific writer, and major anthologies such as Lillie Chaffin’s God’s Plenty and William S. Ward’s A Literary…

PIKEVILLE’S MARY ELLIOTT FLANERY In 1924 the Kentucky’s State Historical Society in Frankfort honored Mary Elliott Flanery as “Kentucky’s Most Prominent Female Citizen” in the state’s history to that point in time. As will be seen, she was a forceful and accomplished woman of eventual national import and notoriety as a champion of women’s rights…

William McKinley Justice was born November 27, 1893. The shy Pike County boy who would one day become a school teacher, a high-school principal and the author of five books of poetry, never saw the inside of a school room until he was nearly fourteen years old. With an over worked father and a sickly…

When Professor Wade Hall chose the poem “Blue Fall” for inclusion in The Kentucky Anthology: Two Hundred Years of Writing in the Bluegrass State in 2005, he referred to the “reclusive” Bruce Bennett Brown as “one of the least known of Kentucky’s important literary figures.” In fact, Brown’s obituary in 2016 makes no mention of his writings….

Quentin R. Howard is perhaps best remembered as the founder and editor of Wind, a nationally respected literary journal. To be fair, his reputation should not stop there. The Kentuckian who provided a forum for writers around the globe was himself a gifted story teller and poet.  Howard was born September 10, 1918 on a farm…

It was January in the El Nino winter of 1977 and Pike County lay prostrate under twelve inches of snow. The creeks were frozen, roads were closed, and all right-thinking humanity had retreated indoors. Nothing seemed to be stirring in this arctic landscape-except me. I was a mail carrier on Route 6, and I had…

Gayle Compton may be the only politically correct writer working in Appalachia. He is not impressed by the rich and famous. He writes about the most interesting and most misunderstood people in America, the common people of Eastern Kentucky–his people, from the hard-working to the bare-assed and proud. Son of a coal miner, Gayle was…