Dave Tabler, Author at Appalachian History

Robert Carlyle Byrd, the longest-serving member of Congress in US history, who questioned the state’s powerful coal industry, died Monday.

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We open today’s show with a look at the Collins Company, “one of the most important business enterprises of modern Pennsboro [WV].”

The characters who created Knoxville now lie in a hilly, craggy old graveyard that sits just north of downtown called Old Gray Cemetery.

Little Switzerland was much the same til the 1960s, when William Cessna purchased The Switzerland Inn, razed it, and started fresh.

She came up with the name after hearing his description of a recent trip to Switzerland; the terrain here resembled the European country.