Appalachian History

“Coal is like layers in a layer cake. And where you’ve got it cut by erosion by the valleys, why, it’s just in fingers, and these fingers went miles and miles back in there. Six or seven miles to the back side of the property. And then they retreated the mine back almost to the [...]

We post a new episode of Appalachian History weekly podcast every Sunday. Check us out on the Stitcher network, available on mobile phones, in-car dashboards and tablets worldwide. Just click below to start listening: We open today’s show with the most astonishingly successful journalistic hoax of the early 20th century. In 1917 H.L. Mencken wrote [...]

“The clouds were blowing away from a densely instarred sky; the moon was hardly more than a crescent and dipping low in the west, but he could see the sombre outline of the opposite mountain, and the white mists that shifted in a ghostly and elusive fashion along the summit. The night was still, save [...]

Long before the well-endowed Hollywood starlet of the 1950′s, there was a Dagmar car, built from 1922-1926 in Hagerstown, MD by the M. P. Möller Motor Car Company. This luxury sedan was named for the one of Dr. Mathias P. Möller’s daughters. The make’s emblem was a pipe organ. The Danish industrialist by that point [...]

In 1170 A.D., a certain Welsh prince, Madoc ab Owain Gwynedd, sailed away from his homeland, and set down in a wondrous new land at what is believed to be the location of modern day Mobile Bay, Alabama. There are a series of pre-Columbian forts built up the Alabama River, and a tradition handed down by the Cherokee Indians of the “White People” who built them.