Think of it as a Sunday paper for Appalachia. Culture, history, food, and the kind of stories that don't make the evening news.

Somebody forwarded this your way. Good. Subscribe and make it official at thewaynetrain.com

I changed the name of this column.

You might've noticed. It's right up there.

Blame a dead man for it. Fella named W.B. Townsend, who ran a little paper called The Dahlonega Nugget down in the gold country of north Georgia. Ran it off a hand-cranked press for thirty-some years, right up until the day he quit breathing in 1933.

His column was called "Observations from a Peak in Lumpkin." The whole country read it. Big-city papers, all the way up into Canada — they'd clip his stuff and run it like scripture, and half the time the man had spelled the words wrong.

Townsend never got much past a grammar-school education, if that. Couldn't spell worth a lick. And he didn't write his columns out first and hand them off to some typesetter like everyone else. No sir. He stood at the case and set the thing letter by letter, backwards, out of his own head, while he was still writing it. No draft. No second look. Whatever came out of him went straight into lead and onto the page, warts and all.

And the country loved him for it.

He was tight, too. Lord, was he tight. The town poured concrete sidewalks and Townsend took it as a personal insult — money thrown down a hole, he figured. Hated them so bad he wouldn't set foot on one. Walked in the mud alongside a perfectly good sidewalk out of pure spite.

Town water came off a spring up by the graveyard. Tested clean. Townsend didn't care what the tests said. Called it "graveyard juice" and drank from a well like the good Lord intended.

And somehow, running that paper single-handed, he still found time to be the banker. And the mayor. And the justice of the peace. And the tax collector. And the constable. And the city marshal. Sold herbs on the side. One man, half the town's payroll, and he still set his own type.

The paper got so popular the little press couldn't keep up. So Townsend did what any sensible skinflint would do. He didn't buy a bigger press. He capped it. A thousand copies, take it or leave it, and everybody else could wait their turn.

Then one week he set four words of type.

"Ye editor is sick."

Last thing he ever wrote. He was gone before the next issue came off the press. A man who never once printed an obituary in his paper went and set his own — by hand, backwards, and didn't even know it.

So that's my hero. Not some Pulitzer fella in a good suit. A broke, stubborn, misspelling old cuss on a peak in gold country who worked himself into the ground and made the whole nation read a county seat weekly newspaper.

I onced edited The Dahlonega Nugget, too.

I sit on a peak too, more or less. Berea, Kentucky.

Only difference is Townsend had gold under his hills. I've got banana peppers and a bad knee.

Wayne Knuckles is a veteran of the newspaper industry and publisher of The Wayne Train. He began his career as a sports writer for his hometown weekly newspaper, The Pineville Sun.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
🗞 APPALACHIA IN THE NEWS
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Growing teachers at home
Seventy percent of schools in this country can't find enough special ed teachers. Seventy percent.

In North Carolina, the vacancies jumped 28% in just one school year — 1,544 empty seats where a teacher's supposed to be, working with kids who need more than most classrooms are set up to give them.

Appalachian State University just landed a $1.4 million Department of Labor grant to do something about it — a new program launching this fall for Watauga, Caldwell, and Catawba county schools. Over a hundred teaching assistants, teachers, and administrators are already signed up, getting training, mentoring, and financial help to move into special ed roles.

Caldwell County alone has 57 staff enrolled.

One of the graduate assistants working on it, Lauren Young, grew up in rural Appalachia and is headed back there to teach. Says the work's close to her heart. Close to her future too.

👉 Read the full story

Appalachian Underground Railroad sites newly documented
There's one road in and out of Green Bottom.

Back before the war it was a plantation. 4,400 acres, biggest in western Virginia, up to a hundred people enslaved there. Three of them — Moses, Joshua, and Joe — decided the situation wasn't one a man could live with. So they forged their own papers and walked out.

Joshua and Joe got caught. Nobody knows what happened to Moses. That's the whole story, most times. Not every escape ends clean.

Historian Cicero Fain, working out of Marshall University, just helped document more than two dozen previously unknown underground railroad sites across nine counties in Kentucky, Ohio, and West Virginia — three of them in Cabell County alone, which more than doubles the number of known sites in all of West Virginia.

Churches. Stores. Homes. Cemeteries. Trails through the woods that somebody walked once, scared to death, trusting people they'd never met.

Fain talked about a man named Asbury Parker, who escaped from Cabell County, made it to Canada — then came back to help others do the same thing. That's the part that stands out. Not just running. Coming back.

👉 Read the full story

Can Appalachian newspapers survive by working together?

Six counties in Kentucky don't have a news source. Not a bad one. None.

Eighty-eight more are hanging on by a thread. That's not my number, that's Medill's, out of their 2025 State of Local News study, and it's the reason a new outfit called the Appalachia News Exchange just launched, connecting print, radio, and digital newsrooms across eastern Kentucky.

Who's in it? The Berea Citizen. The Jackson County Sun. The Pineville Sun. The Manchester Enterprise. Barbourville Mountain Advocate. Mt. Sterling Advocate. Kentucky Lantern. And seven public radio stations, including West Virginia Public Broadcasting and our own WEKU out of Richmond.

The idea's simple. Stories move freely across all of it — website, radio, print, social media — no subscription wall anywhere.

Nolan Group Media's CEO Jay Nolan put it plainly: folks don't know what to believe anymore, and this is an attempt to hand them something they can.

Whether it works is a longer conversation. That it exists at all says something about where local news in this region stands right now.

👉 Read the full story

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
🗞 KAY’S CORNER
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Sitting outside on the porch at night brings back a lot of memories. Watching the lightning bugs blinking across the yard. As a young child I used to catch several and put them in a pint jar, set them in my bedroom at night, and drift off to sleep watching them blink and light up like Christmas lights.

I’d like to say I consider myself to have had a blessed childhood. Now these blessings include some good, and well, might I say, some not-so-good times. My parents were somewhat lenient, but at the same time, they were very strict.

One thing for sure was respect in our home, especially to Mommy. We knew better to backtalk or sass her. It didn’t take us long to learn a lesson if we disobeyed that rule. One of the not-so-good times we would experience if we didn’t take heed to that rule. Need I say more?

Another rule in our home, “I’ll tell you once and you better listen,” that's what Daddy told us often. As long as we listened, we were good, but it’s the time we didn’t listen that wasn’t pleasant, if you know what I mean. You’d think after a few times, we would learn a hard lesson. Those lessons seemed to live short in our minds, before long we were reminded all over again.

When Daddy was gone to work, I’m sure sometimes we tried Mommy’s patience. I guess my brothers and I thought we didn’t have to behave when Daddy wasn’t home. We would misbehave to the limit when Mommy would say, “Wait until your Daddy gets home and I’ll let him take care of you.” Well by that time, we knew we had gone too far in our rambunctious ways. My Mommy had the best memory, I do believe; she never forgot to tell Daddy when he came home about our misbehaving. Let me just say that was not the lenient time I was referring to earlier.

Mealtime when Mommy called to come and eat, you best get yourself to the table. There was no waiting, “I’ll eat later.” No, you ate when mommy called.
We would eat the meal she cooked for us, no going to the fridge for a snack. That just didn’t happen at our house. You either ate the meal she prepared or wait until the next meal. And by the way, there were three cooked meals a day. Remember I said there were some good blessings? Mom’s meals are what I’m talking about!

Saturday was a great day for us kids. That’s the day Mommy and Daddy went to the grocery store to get needed supplies. What was special is the fact that each of us kids got a soda pop, usually an RC Cola and sometimes a bag of peanuts to put in the RC Cola. You talk about good, yes it was!

Sunday’s were always set aside for church. We would wake up each Sunday morning to the gospel music show on the television, Jubilee. I can still remember and seemingly hear The Florida Boys singing, “Jubilee, jubilee, you’re invited to that happy jubilee.” After a good hefty breakfast off to church we would go.

I’ll forever be grateful for my upbringing as a child. I’ve done a lot of things in my life and have had a lot of experiences, some good, some not so good.  But, the one thing I am grateful for is my childhood!

The song that comes to my mind is Supper Time.

Many years go in days of childhood
I used to play till evening’s shadows come
Then winding’ down that old familiar pathway
I’d hear my mother call at set of sun.

Come home, come home, it’s suppertime
The shadows lengthen fast
Come home, come home it’s suppertime
We’re going home at last.

Bible Verse of the Week

Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.
Proverbs 22:6

Gospel singer Kay Himes Knuckles has been sharing her music ministry in Eastern and Central Kentucky for more than 40 years.

The Wayne Train visits all 423 Appalachian counties, one week at a time.

Before there was a Bradley County, there was a capital.

Not Nashville. Not Washington. The capital of the Cherokee Nation, moved to a patch of ground called Red Clay in 1832, after the state of Georgia stripped the tribe of every legal right it had — banned their meetings, took their land, dared them to object. 

So they came north. Just across the state line, into what's now southern Bradley County.

There was nothing there. A spring called the Blue Hole and a stand of trees. They built a council house and a few cabins and held eleven councils there between 1832 and 1838, trying everything a people can legally try. Appeals to the president. Appeals to Congress. Lawsuits in federal court. 

They did it all by the book.

The book lost.

👉 Read the full story

The moon is doing you a favor this week. Take it.

We're in the waxing crescent stretch to start, that thin fingernail hanging in the west after supper. It fattens up fast. First quarter hits Tuesday morning, July 21, which means by that evening the moon sits high at sundown and drops below the ridge around midnight. From then until dawn, the sky belongs to you.

That matters. The Delta Aquariid meteors are already running. The Perseids started up on the 17th. Both showers peak later, but late July brings a full moon that'll wash the whole show out like somebody left the porch light on. So the dark mornings this week — after midnight, before the birds start — are the best seats you're going to get.

Look southeast. Be patient. Meteor watching is 90 percent sitting there feeling foolish and 10 percent hollering at nothing.

Venus is the easy one. Look west after sunset and you can't miss her — brightest thing up there, steady, not twinkling. Jupiter's gone. It's sliding behind the sun this month and won't be back for a few weeks. Saturn comes up in the east before midnight by the end of the week. Mars is a rusty little dot low in the east before dawn, over in Taurus.

Two nights worth stepping outside for.

👉 Read the full story

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
📜 THE BACK PAGE
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The Wayne Train rolls out every Sunday morning.

If somebody forwarded this to you, climb aboard:
👉 thewaynetrain.com