Appalachian History

Future champion college basketball coach Sonny Smith was born November 15, 1936 in Roan Mountain, TN, the son of a mill worker and a cafeteria employee at the local schools. His hometown, he said years later, wasn’t the end of the world—but that you could see it from there. He said there were so many [...]

One of the first geologic explorers of North Carolina’s Black Mountains, Elisha Mitchell, gave his name to the region’s highest peak, the one that claimed his own life on June 27, 1857. The Connecticut native was born in 1793 and attended Yale University as a theology student. Mitchell studied the work of Andre Michaux, a [...]