Listen Here: Appalachian History Weekly podcast posts today

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

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 photo below to start listening:

We open today’s show with guest author Ray Wright. Wright is the Curator of Historic Buildings at the Frontier Culture Museum in Staunton, VA. In this piece he’ll share with us the story of how the museum recently acquired a small log cabin where the congregation of Mount Tabor United Methodist Church once convened. The structure is believed to be the oldest surviving African American place of worship in Augusta County, VA.

We’ll pause in between things to catch up on a calendar of events in the region this week, with special attention paid to events that emphasize heritage and local color.

“While the interest in ghost stories seems to spike around Halloween, story telling couple Roberta Simpson Brown and Lonnie E. Brown claim that they heard many of their family stories while huddled around the hearth during the winter,” explains guest book reviewer Roberta Schultz in her analysis of the recently published Kentucky Hauntings. This review was originally aired on Cincinnati NPR affiliate WVXU in October.

“Something magical happened in Bell County, Kentucky, this past October,” explains guest author Janene E. Nielsen. “The first ever Cleudis Robbins Memorial Storytelling Contest was held in the auditorium of Bell County High School in honor of a man who nearly 68 years earlier had won a similar contest. In winning, the course of his life had been changed.”

We’ll wrap things up with a look at a freak snowstorm that walloped 22 states on Thanksgiving Day, 1950. The so-called “storm of the century” killed 353 people and caused millions of dollars in damages. Also known as the “Appalachian Storm,” it dumped record amounts of snow in parts of the Appalachian Mountains.

And thanks to the good folks at the Internet Archive, we’ll be able to enjoy some authentic Appalachian music from Ernest Thompson in a 1924 recording of The Little Rosebud Casket.

So call your old Plott hound up on the porch, fire up your corncob pipe, and settle in for a dose of Appalachian history.