Picture Appalachia in your head right now.

I'd bet money you saw a man. A miner with a headlamp, maybe. A fiddler on a porch. A mountaineer with a rifle.

That's the postcard. It's not the whole picture. The icon of Appalachia has almost always been male — the coal miner, and before him, the mountaineer. The women got cropped out of the frame.

So with the country turning 250 next month, let's fix the photo.

Start before the country existed. Nancy Ward, a Cherokee woman from these mountains, picked up her fallen husband's rifle in battle and led her people to victory, earning the title of Ghighua — Beloved Woman. She spent the rest of her life trying to keep the peace between her people and the strangers pouring over the ridges. She didn't always succeed. Nobody could have. But she tried harder than most of the men on either side.

Then there's Mary Draper Ingles. Taken captive in 1755, hauled to the Ohio country, and she escaped and walked somewhere around 500 miles home through untamed wilderness, eating berries and bark, with winter coming on. Forty-some days. No map. No shoes worth mentioning.

I get winded carrying groceries up the porch steps.

Jump ahead. The coal camps. The mills. Here's the part they really don't tell you. When the mines would only hire men, women became the labor movement's secret weapon — they couldn't be fired from jobs they weren't allowed to have, and soldiers were a lot less eager to shoot them. Mother Jones figured that out and organized them into an army of brooms and washboards. The owners called her the most dangerous woman in America.

She was in her seventies at the time.

It wasn't just the famous ones. Aunt Molly Jackson, a coal miner's daughter and a coal miner's wife in Harlan County, wrote protest songs giving voice to miners killed, children starving, and women trying to feed their families through all of it. Florence Reece wrote "Which Side Are You On" — a question this region has been asking for a hundred years.

In 1965, a Knott County, Kentucky widow named Ollie Combs laid her body down in front of a bulldozer that was about to strip-mine her Kentucky farm. She spent Thanksgiving in jail. Her stand helped push strip mining legislation through the Kentucky General Assembly in 1967, and ten years later she was invited to the White House for the signing of the federal Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act.

One widow. One bulldozer. Federal law.

Eula Hall, over in Floyd County, watched her neighbors go without doctors and decided that was enough of that. She turned her own trailer into a clinic — the Mud Creek Clinic, free health care for all. When an arsonist burned it to the ground in 1982, she rallied the community and rebuilt it. It's still serving patients today.

And the contributions didn't stay in the hollers. Katherine Johnson, born in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, did the math that put John Glenn in orbit and helped land men on the moon. Glenn famously wouldn't fly until she personally checked the computer's numbers. A girl from the West Virginia mountains, double-checking the machines.

A girl from Sevier County, Tennessee, did alright too. Dolly Parton's Imagination Library has put more than 100 million free books into the hands of children, starting right here and spreading across the country and beyond.

Coal, cloth, songs, clinics, rocket math, and a library the size of a nation. That's the Appalachian women's ledger, and I've barely cracked the cover.

Here's what strikes me about every name on this list. Not one of them set out to be in a history book. They set out to get home. To feed somebody. To keep a farm, a union, a clinic, a child's chance.

The country they built turns 250 this summer.

Took a lot of women holding these mountains up to get it here.