Appalachian History

Out rolling Easter eggs on the lawn instead! Happy Easter to all of you; we’ll be back tomorrow. Tweet Send to Kindle

On a cold day in March 1881, three masked men on horseback, brandishing revolvers, held up an army paymaster on the banks of the Tennessee River near Muscle Shoals, AL. The paymaster was on his way with the payroll to pay the construction workers digging a canal near Muscle Shoals. The masked men kidnapped the [...]

From a 13-year-old bellhop at Wheeling, WV’s McLure House to a business giant and multimillionaire—Ellsworth Milton Statler, virtually without benefit of formal education, climbed to the pinnacle of the hotel business. In 1950 he was proclaimed by his industry as the person who had contributed most to the science of inn-keeping and was hailed as [...]

“Rattlesnakes are brought into existence in the following manner: “The female snake deposits twenty or thirty eggs in the ground, where the warm earth gives them life, and at the proper time the old one comes and receives them into her body, where they remain until she enters her den in October. “In April and [...]

When Bessie Smith sang the blues she meant it. Smith (1894-1937) was the greatest and most influential classic blues singer of the 1920s. Dubbed “The Empress of the Blues,” Smith embodied the blues feeling, while her songs, drawing from her sordid lifestyle, rang true with rural and urban audiences alike. Smith was born on April [...]