– 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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