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🗞 APPALACHIA 250
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Get on I-75 north out of Berea and you're riding the same groove a few million people wore into the road before you. Most of them weren't headed to a ballgame.

They were leaving.

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Across the middle of the last century, as many as seven million people came out of these mountains and the hill country around them. The rush came hardest after the war. Coalfields, hollers, hill farms. Eastern Kentucky, West Virginia, Tennessee, the Carolinas.

They packed what fit and pointed the car north. Folks called the route the Hillbilly Highway, and they didn't mean it kind. U.S. 23 ran them out of Pikeville and through Ashland into Ohio. I-75 hauled them from Knoxville clear up to Detroit.

It was the biggest migration nobody talks about. And we mostly remember it as a country song.

Dwight Yoakam wrote it. "Readin', Rightin', Route 23." Three R's for a Kentucky kid: read, write, and the road out. He had it right. The schools couldn't promise a future the mines were busy hauling off, so the highway became the third subject.

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Why they went isn't complicated. The coal left first. In 1945 the Appalachian mines worked 475,000 men. By 1970 it was down around 107,000. The machines came in and did the loading, the oil and gas men ate coal's lunch, and a company town with no company is just a town waiting to be left. So the companies left it. Took the profit, closed the store, kept the mineral rights, drove off.

Up north, the factories were hungry. Armco steel in Middletown sent men down into eastern Kentucky to recruit, and they'd pay to move your whole family, not just you. Whole hollers got transplanted into Ohio neighborhoods. Chicago's Uptown filled so thick with mountain people they called it Hillbilly Heaven. Cincinnati's Over-the-Rhine. Akron's North Hill. The south end of Detroit. Same accent, new zip code.

It worked, mostly. The paychecks were real. Most who went did better than the cousins who stayed.

Not all of them, though. They got to the city and got called hillbilly to their faces. Their kids got set back a grade for talking funny. A third of the Kentucky and West Virginia families in the big northern cities were still poor in 1980. They'd been pulled from the poorest piece of the poorest region, and you can't outrun that in a U-Haul.

—

Now. The ones who stayed.

Don't let anybody tell you they stayed because they were slow. They stayed because the graves were here. The creek their daddy fished was here. You don't sell a ridge your great-great-grandmother cleared by hand. For a lot of mountain people the land isn't something you own. It's something you're part of, and it's part of you.

They paid for that love in hard currency.

The young ones left, and the tax base left with them. Schools thinned. Hospitals closed. Roads cracked and stayed cracked. McDowell County, West Virginia — once packed wall to wall with coal families — watched a quarter of its young adults walk off in a single stretch. The educated ones went and didn't come back.

—

Want the whole thing in one picture? Go to Martin County, Kentucky. That's where a president sat on Tom Fletcher's front porch in '64 and declared war on poverty. Sixty years on, the county's still better than a third poor, and the water system's so broke they rent diesel pumps for thirty grand a month just to keep something coming out of the tap.

War on poverty. Poverty's still standing.

—

But the road was never really one-way. When the plants up north laid off, as many as a third of the migrants came right back home to wait it out. The mountains called and they answered. Every summer the Ohio and Michigan plates came back down that same highway, RVs and ski boats, kin returning to the lake their folks had pined for on the assembly line.

—

I watch birds. I know what it looks like when something flies home.

And here's the turn nobody saw coming.

The Hillbilly Highway has mostly quit running north.

These days three out of four people who leave eastern Kentucky don't leave Kentucky. They go to London. They go to Somerset. Both of them sitting right down the road from me, hospitals and jobs strung along the same I-75 that used to carry everybody to Ohio. Grandkids of the people who left are buying houses back in the hills and working laptops from the holler their family fled.

—

I'd love to tell you it's fixed. It isn't.

Central Appalachia's still bleeding its young. The opioid years dug a hole we haven't climbed out of. And in the pretty parts — Asheville, the Blue Ridge — the houses are getting priced clean out of local hands, which is just the old leaving wearing a nicer coat.

Still. First time in my life the arrow's pointing back toward the mountains instead of away from them.

Seven million people drove out of here hunting a better life.

Some of their grandkids are driving home to find it.

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📡 FROM THE DIGITAL HOLLER
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The famous fathers get the statues.

Daniel Boone. Abraham Lincoln. Davy Crockett. Their names end up carved in granite, printed in textbooks, painted on the wall down at the courthouse. We hand their stories to schoolkids because those men helped build a country.

But Father's Day in these hills points me toward a different sort of man.

The kind whose name never made it onto anything but a mailbox.

The father who got up before the sun to milk before he ever walked into the mine. The one who spent all week in a textile mill or a timber camp or out on the railroad, then came home Saturday and fixed the porch step that had been wobbling since March. Tended the garden. Showed a kid how to thread a worm on a hook without losing a finger.

Men who never wrote a book. Taught lessons their children never forgot anyway.

Appalachia has always passed down more than money. There usually wasn't much money to pass. What got handed down was skill, and stubbornness, and stories.

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Take Boone. Father of ten. The man led his whole family through the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky when there were no roads, no stores, no promises of anything. Just woods, and the nerve to walk into them. Ten kids trailing behind you into the unknown. That's either faith or foolishness, and out here we've never been sure there's a difference.

Lincoln came out of a one-room cabin on the edge of these mountains and went on to be about as big as a man gets. But the folks who knew him talked less about the speeches and more about how he let his four boys run wild through the house. Climb on him. Get away with murder. Drove the serious men around him half crazy.

Crockett, father of six, turned into a tall tale before he was even cold. Coonskin cap and all. Before any of that he was just a daddy trying to keep a family fed on hard ground.

Even Colonel Sanders — white suit, string tie, the face on a thousand buckets — spent his early years scrambling to keep food on the table. Long before the chicken made him rich, he was a father like any other. Coming up short. Trying again.

Famous, all of them. But the things that made them famous weren't rare around here.

—

Hard work. Not quitting. Making do. Going without so somebody else didn't have to.

You'd find all of that in ten thousand fathers whose stories never left the supper table.

A lot of mountain kids grew up with daddies who didn't say "I love you" much. Wasn't their way. They came from men who said it sideways.

Love was a bicycle chain fixed and waiting in the garage.

Love was a man standing in the cold at a Little League game after ten hours on his feet.

Love was a pair of busted work boots by the back door, still holding the shape of him.

Love was making sure you got the chance he never did.

—

You don't catch all of it when you're young. You catch it later. You hear yourself hand your own kid the same advice you rolled your eyes at. You hear his voice come out of your mouth. You go looking for the meaning and there it was the whole time, sitting quiet in a pair of boots.

Maybe that's the real inheritance.

These men didn't just build the homes and the farms and the roads and the mines.

They built us.

So sure, this Father's Day, raise one to Boone and Lincoln. Tip your hat to Crockett and the Colonel.

But save a thought for the other one. The man in the photo down the hall. The pocketknife in the dresser drawer. The old Bible nobody's moved. The chair at the table nobody sits in anymore.

History won't ever know his name.

His family always will.

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.

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🗞 APPALACHIA IN THE NEWS
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The government just released its annual distressed county map. For the first time in 21 years, the number is the lowest it's ever been.

Every year, the Appalachian Regional Commission grades all 423 counties in the region on a scale that runs from distressed to attainment. Think of it as a report card nobody wants to be on the bottom of.

For fiscal year 2027, 76 counties are classified as distressed — the lowest number recorded in the 21 years ARC has been keeping score. That's progress, and it's worth saying out loud. It's also worth noting that 85 counties are still classified as at-risk, and 240 sit in the middle category called transitional — which is a polite way of saying they're not sinking, but they're not swimming either.

The map is free, interactive, and worth pulling up to see where your county lands.

👉 Read the full story

A 1,500 person music festival in the Kentucky woods sold out before they even announced who was playing …

There's a spot in Pineville, Kentucky, tucked into hemlock and rhododendron, that people are comparing to Red Rocks. It's called Laurel Cove. Capacity is 1,500.

That's it. No jumbotrons, no twelve stages, none of that. Just a natural amphitheater in the mountains and a lineup that keeps proving the festival has an eye for who's about to blow up — Evan Honer played under a tent last year, Kashus Culpepper before anybody outside the region knew his name. This year's headliners were Evan Honer, Kashus Culpepper, and The Creekers, a band out of Leslie County making good on a lot of promise.

When it rains here, they don't pack up and leave like the big festivals. They dance in the mud.

👉 Read the full story

… And is drawing fans from around the world to Southeast Kentucky

Dylan Irvin is 25, from Belle Plaine, Kansas, and he's hitchhiking to all seven continents on nothing but trust. No car. No cash to speak of. Just a thumb and a working theory that people are basically decent. The road brought him to Bell County, Kentucky, and the Laurel Cove Music Festival, where a stranger picked him up in the heat because a Nicholas Jamerson song came on the radio and reminded him to do the right thing. From the moment Irvin arrived at the festival, he was, by all accounts, a bright light — making people laugh, dancing, making the most of every minute. He's headed for Europe next. You get the feeling the road will take care of him.

👉 Read the full story

They pulled Hellbender eggs out of Helene-wrecked streams, raised them in a lab, and sent the babies home

Hellbenders have been losing ground for decades, and Hurricane Helene took out some of their last good streams back in 2024. So a team out of Virginia Tech tried something they weren't sure would work. They pulled eggs out of the damaged water, raised the babies in a lab, then carried them back to the exact creek they came from and let them go. The professor who's spent twenty years on this said he got chills watching it happen. It's not a fix. It's a stall tactic while they figure out what's actually poisoning the water. But for an animal that's outlasted the dinosaurs, a stall tactic from people willing to wade in and try might be enough.

👉 Read the full story

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🗞 KAY’S CORNER
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I’m very thankful for those who have helped shape my life. My teachers, especially. There are some that made a huge impact on me during my school days. Because  of these many teachers, I can read, write, do arithmetic, and maybe sing a bit.

When I was in the fifth grade, there was a PTO meeting called for all the teachers and parents that could possibly attend. I don’t remember why the meeting was called, but what I do remember is what our class did  during that meeting.

Letters had been sent home for all participating students to wear white shirts or blouses and black skirts or pants.

Mommy asked if I was sure I wanted to go. She didn’t know just how or where the money was going to come from to buy the clothing requested to be worn. But somehow, she did buy the outfit for me to wear.

The evening of the PTO meeting, all who attended gathered in the library.
We students were going to get to perform what we had been planning for. The speaker of the evening introduced our class to those in attendance.
We proudly stood as instructed by our teacher and sang a song that I never have forgotten, God Be With You Till We Meet Again.

I felt proud standing in my new outfit and singing.

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In elementary school, I was a straight A student in every subject. I enjoyed learning. When I was in the seventh grade, my family moved from one county to another, which meant that I would be going to a new school. I was quite nervous to meet new students, new teachers, and a totally new surrounding.

I caught on pretty quickly to most every subject, even though it was different from the school I just came from. Every subject except math; the math was so ahead of what I had in the previous school. I tried hard, I really did, but just couldn’t get the hang of it very well and certainly not very fast.

It came time for the report cards to go home with the students. I just couldn’t believe it when I opened my report card to see straight A’s except for one subject, that was math. I had an F, the first F I had ever had in my whole life.

I was devastated and certainly discouraged. I cried and cried. I just couldn’t believe I had received an F.

So as bad as I hated to, I took it home to my parents, expecting the worst to happen as punishment. But to my surprise, my mommy asked me if I had done my best, and I promised her that I had. She encouraged me to try harder for the next report card.

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I went back to school the next day so disheartened and felt so down trodden.
My teacher, Mrs. Barbara Rader, saw how upset I was and pulled me aside to talk with me about the situation. She let me know that I could catch up, and she would help me with the math I was having problems with.

Well, sure enough, when the next six weeks’ report card came out, I was so thrilled and happy when I opened it up to see there were all A’s again.

I had the opportunity a few years ago to visit my Mrs. Rader, before she passed away and thank her for encouraging me and taking time to help me catch up on that difficult subject. She told me she saw something special in me and just knew I could do it!

Don’t forget those who helped mold and inspire you. If you get the chance, try to thank them. And let’s try to be one who encourages and helps those who cross our path.

—

Bible Verse of the Week

Romans 15: 5-6
Now the God of patience and consolation grant you to be likeminded one toward another according to Christ Jesus: that ye may with one mind and one mouth glorify God, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

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

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📜 KNOW YOUR NEIGHBORS
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The Wayne Train visits all 423 Appalachian counties, one week at a time.

Some counties sit low and let the water come to them.

Pocahontas County is not one of those.

This is the high ground. The roof of the whole state. Mean elevation better than 3,200 feet, and up on Cheat Mountain a spot called Thorny Flat tops out close to 4,848. Up here the rain doesn't arrive. It leaves.

Eight rivers are born in this one county — the Greenbrier, the Elk, the Gauley, the Cherry, the Cranberry, the Williams, the Tygart Valley, and Shavers Fork of the Cheat. They call it the Birthplace of Rivers, and for once a tourism slogan is telling the truth.

Stand on the right ridge and the trickle at your boot is making up its mind whether to run for the Gulf of Mexico or the Chesapeake Bay. That's a lot of weight on a little water.

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People showed up here in 1749. Two of them, anyway. Jacob Marlin and Stephen Sewell, the first European settlers in this stretch of the mountains. They built a cabin where Marlin Run meets Knapp's Creek.

Then they fell out. Over religion, the story goes. Couldn't agree on it, couldn't share four walls because of it. So Sewell moved out.

Into a hollow sycamore tree.

Wintered there. Two grown men, one cabin, one tree, and a church argument neither would let go of. The county seat that grew up on that ground got named Marlinton, after the fellow who kept the roof over his head. History always remembers the one who stayed inside. But I'd buy the tree man a cup of coffee.

—

The county got its name and its lines in 1821, carved out of Bath, Randolph, and Pendleton. When the war came, Pocahontas didn't hedge. It voted to leave the Union 360 to 13 and sent close to 700 men to fight for the South.

Then West Virginia got born around it. A Union state. Nobody up here was asked. The last real battle in the new state happened at Droop Mountain in November 1863, and the Union won it. The men who'd backed Richmond couldn't vote for years after. You can walk that battlefield today. It's quiet now. Most things up here are.

—

The railroad took its sweet time. The mountains saw to that. Laying track over this country was slow, costly, miserable work, and it didn't start in earnest until 1899.

Once it came, the timber went out fast. West Virginia Pulp & Paper built a mill at Cass and a whole company town to feed it, and the geared Shay engines clawed up grades that'd scare a billy goat.

The big trees are gone now. The trains aren't. They still run at Cass, hauling tourists up Bald Knob behind the same kind of engine that once hauled the logs. A second life. Better than most things get.

—

Up in the corner of the county sits the strangest thing in it. Green Bank. The Robert C. Byrd telescope stands there like a white catcher's mitt the size of a football field, tilted at the sky, listening. The land around it is a National Radio Quiet Zone. Your cell phone won't work. Your microwave's a suspect. They will track down your bad spark plug if it muddies the signal.

The one place in America where you legally cannot get a bar of service — and they did it on purpose, so a machine could hear a whisper from the far side of the universe. A holler with no reception, straining to hear the stars. I can't think of a truer picture of this place.

—

The most famous person born in Pocahontas County never really lived here. Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker came into the world at Hillsboro in 1892 and got shipped to China as a baby with her missionary parents. Grew up speaking Chinese before English. But she came back to that house.

As Pearl S. Buck she wrote "The Good Earth," won the Pulitzer for it in 1932, and in 1938 became the first American woman to take the Nobel Prize in Literature. The girl from Hillsboro. The farmhouse where she was born is a museum now, out on Route 219, and they teach quilting in it. A Nobel laureate's birthplace, full of quilts. That's about right for here.

—

The music came out of these hills without a record deal. The Hammons family — fiddlers, banjo pickers, and ballad singers who drifted down out of Kentucky before the war and settled along the Williams River — kept tunes alive that the rest of the country had forgotten it ever had. Edden Hammons, born back in the 1870s, was the fiddler people traveled to hear.

A WVU folklorist finally got him on record in 1947, better than fifty tunes. In the 1970s the Library of Congress set the whole family's music down for good. In 2020, nine Hammonses went into the West Virginia Music Hall of Fame at one time. They weren't chasing fame. They were just the best at something nobody outside the mountains knew was even happening.

—

And then there's the clown. Patch Adams — the doctor Robin Williams played in the movie, red nose and all — put down stakes in Hillsboro and started his Gesundheit! Institute, a long-promised free hospital meant to treat folks for nothing and laugh while it did. He's been raising money toward it since 1980. Some locals swear by him. Some call it a long con. Both can be true at once. That's a small place for you. Room enough for a saint and a question mark in the same man.

—

When you get hungry in Marlinton, go find Mim's Kitchen. It sits in an old country church, and the woman it's named for does the cooking, works the buffet line, and rings you up herself. Homemade, all of it. Salisbury steak, green beans, mac and cheese, and a cheesecake that'll make a table go quiet. Four entrees on a good day. Big plates. And when the food runs out, the doors close. No reservations, no pretense. You eat what Mim made, or you come back tomorrow.

—

There are fewer people here every census. Seventy-eight hundred and change at the last count, down from better than eight thousand the time before. The young ones leave the way the water does. Downhill, toward someplace bigger, gone before you've finished waving.

But the rivers keep getting born up here. Eight of them. Every spring. Whether anybody stays to watch or not.

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📜 APPALACHIAN ALMANAC
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Summer got here at 4:25 in the morning on Sunday. The longest day of the year. The sun climbed as far north as it ever gets, hung there a beat, and started back the other way. You slept through it. So did I.

Look west after sundown this week and you'll catch a parade. Venus burning bright and white, Jupiter up above it, and little Mercury scraping the horizon — fading fast on its way out the door (Planetary Society). String them together with Regulus, the moon, and Spica and you're looking at the ecliptic — the rail all the planets ride.

The moon hit First Quarter Sunday evening too, at 5:55. It fattens up all week, sliding past Spica on the 22nd and 23rd, headed toward the full Strawberry Moon on the 29th. That one's a runt — farthest from us all year, so it'll glow soft gold instead of showing off.

Early risers, look the other way. Saturn's climbing the eastern sky before dawn, with reddish Mars low beneath it, easing up on the Pleiades (NASA).

The Ground Below

The brambles are loading up. Blackberries just starting to turn, black raspberries already worth the thorns, and wineberries — those sticky red invaders from across the ocean — ripe and sweet along the roadbanks. Nobody planted them. Nobody has to.

Elderflower's blooming. Those flat cream-colored umbels on the elder bushes down in the creek bottoms. Pick the flowers now for cordial or fritters, because by August they'll be berries. Leave the leaves and stems alone. They'll make you sick.

This Week in Appalachian History

Ten years ago this week, the water came.

June 23, 2016. A storm parked itself over West Virginia and wouldn't move. White Sulphur Springs took 8.29 inches of rain in a single day — more than double anything in the record books going back to 1890 (West Virginia Encyclopedia). The Elk River rose to better than 33 feet, breaking a mark set in 1888.

Creeks you could step across turned into something out of a nightmare. In White Sulphur Springs, folks watched a house catch fire and float down Howard Creek, burning the whole way down. Twenty-three people died. Sixteen of them in Greenbrier County. The youngest was Mykala Phillips, fourteen years old. They didn't find her for seven weeks.

Third-deadliest flood the state has ever known (NOAA). Clendenin. Rainelle. Rupert. Richwood. Clay. The names still mean something to the people who were there.

A Closing Note

The longest day and the worst flood landed in the same week, ten years and a few hours apart. The light at its highest. The water at its meanest. The hills don't pick.

That's the bargain up here. The same ridges that hand you blackberries and elderflower and a sky full of planets will, on the wrong afternoon, send the creek through your living room. You don't get one without the other. You never did.

So we mark the long day. We pick the berries while they're here. And we say the names, because forgetting is its own kind of flood. Slower. Quieter. But it takes everything just the same.

The sun's already heading back south. Summer's barely started, and the light's already leaving.

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📜 THE BACK PAGE
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From the June 18, 1926 Greensboro Daily Record:

The Wayne Train rolls out every Sunday morning.

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