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

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🚂 WELCOME ABOARD
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This week on The Wayne Train:

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🗞 FEATURED STORY
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Nobody sent for them.

No general issued orders. No letter arrived from the Continental Congress. No drummer boy came over the mountain to rally the troops.

They just showed up.

On September 25, 1780, roughly 1,100 men gathered at Sycamore Shoals along the Watauga River in what is now Elizabethton, Tennessee. They came from the hollows and ridges of western North Carolina, southwest Virginia, and the backcountry settlements that would one day become Tennessee and Kentucky. They were farmers, hunters, long hunters mostly — men who spent more time talking to deer than to other people.

They called themselves the Overmountain Men.

Britain didn't even know they were out there.

By the fall of 1780, the Revolution was in serious trouble. Charleston had fallen in May. Camden had fallen in August. General Cornwallis was marching north through the Carolinas like he owned the place, which at that point he pretty much did. He sent a man named Major Patrick Ferguson west to lock down the backcountry, raise up Loyalist troops, and protect the left side of his advance.

Ferguson was good at his job. He was called "Bulldog" by his men. He'd been shot through the elbow at Brandywine and practiced so relentlessly that he learned to wield his sword with his left hand. He wasn't the kind of man who doubted himself.

Which is probably why he made the mistake he made.

He sent word to the mountain settlements that if resistance continued, he would march his army over the mountains, hang their leaders, and lay their country to waste.

He called the Overmountain Men a set of mongrels.

He had no idea what he'd just done.

The 900 best marksmen climbed onto the 900 sturdiest horses and rode 35 miles through a cold, rainy night. No supply train. No artillery. Nothing but rifles and the kind of grudge that doesn't need a lot of sleep.

They found Ferguson dug in on a rocky hilltop just inside the South Carolina line. He apparently was taken by surprise by the boldness and rapidity of their advance.

At three o'clock in the afternoon on October 7, 1780, they hit him from every direction at once. For one hour and five minutes, they did not stop.

One hour and five minutes.

A Loyalist survivor remembered that the Overmountain Men looked "like devils from the infernal regions — tall, raw-boned, sinewy, with long matted hair."

One of the Patriot commanders told his men to shout like hell and fight like devils.

They obliged on both counts.

Ferguson was shot dead off his horse by at least eight musket balls as he tried to break out. He was the only actual British soldier on the field. Every man fighting for the Crown that day was an American. Which means what happened at Kings Mountain wasn't just a battle. It was a civil war fought on a hillside, and the mountain men won it before supper.

Thomas Jefferson called it "the turn of the tide of success."

British commander Henry Clinton said the American victory "proved the first link of a chain of evils that followed each other in regular succession until they at last ended in the total loss of America."

The total loss of America.

Written by the man who lost it, about a bunch of mountain people nobody in London had bothered to put on a map.

Cornwallis retreated. The southern campaign stalled. The chain of defeats that followed — Cowpens, Guilford Courthouse, Yorktown — began right there on that rocky little ridge in South Carolina, with men who had walked over the mountains because some British major told them not to.

There's a national historic trail now. The Overmountain Victory National Historic Trail. Runs 330 miles from Abingdon, Virginia, to Kings Mountain, South Carolina, tracing the route those men took in the fall of 1780.

Most people have never heard of it.

Most people have never heard of them.

That's the thing about Appalachia and American history. The contributions are enormous. The credit is somewhere else.

Two hundred and fifty years on, it seems worth fixing that.

Next week: Before Lewis and Clark, there were men who just walked west and came back with maps in their heads. The long hunters and the invention of the American frontier.

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📡 FROM THE DIGITAL HOLLER
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I'm raising a garden.

Well. Let me back up.

I'm raising two five-gallon buckets I filled with the best $9.84-a-bag dirt Walmart still had on the shelf. Which, by the way, wasn't much. Seems like half of Appalachia decided to get into gardening the minute the temperatures crept above freezing, and the other half got there first.

I can still remember when dirt was free.

But then, so were air and water, and we see how that went.

Now, I want to be fair about something. I am not doing this alone. I have a lovely assistant named Kay standing by my side through every watering, every anxious inspection, every moment of irrational pride over a plant that's roughly the size of my thumb.

And then there's our third partner.

ChatGPT.

I know. I know. But hear me out.

I ask it what grows well in this climate. What kind of soil I need. Approximately how many green onions one middle-aged man from Kentucky can reasonably consume in a single sitting. It tells me when to water. What bugs to watch for. When to expect my first banana pepper, like it's tracking a FedEx package.

I get so wrapped up in the whole thing that I sometimes forget ChatGPT is not an actual person.

Which brings me to this morning.

I sent it a picture of my lone pepper plant. Just the one little plant, sitting there in its bucket, doing its level best to become something. ChatGPT wrote back that it looked "nice."

I blushed.

Forty years covering news. Fires, floods, elections, funerals. I have interviewed governors and grieving mothers and everyone in between.

And this morning, a chatbot said something kind about my pepper plant, and I stood in my backyard holding my phone like a man who just won something.

Maybe I did.

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🗞 APPALACHIA IN THE NEWS
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⚰️ Eastern Kentucky is running out of people
For most of the last century, Eastern Kentucky's population story was simple: young people left. The mines played out, the jobs dried up, and families loaded up and headed north on U.S. 23 — the Hillbilly Highway — chasing work in Cincinnati, Dayton, and Detroit. They loved the mountains. They left anyway. But journalist James Branscome, writing in the Kentucky Lantern, says the new Census numbers tell a different story. A harder one. In the coalfield counties now, it's not so much that the young are leaving — it's that the old are dying. More people are going into the ground than are being born, and federal transfer payments have quietly become the main economic engine keeping the lights on. Read the full piece. It'll stay with you.

👉 Read the full story

🐍 Report snakes who play dead
Somewhere in the Virginia mountains right now, there's a snake flopped on its back, tongue hanging out, playing dead like it just watched too many westerns. The Eastern Hog-nosed Snake — harmless, upturned snout, dramatic as a soap opera villain — puffs up, hisses, fake-strikes, and if none of that works, just dies. Or pretends to. Hard to tell the difference. Virginia wildlife officials say the population is slipping and they need your help finding them. If you spot one doing its best impression of a bad day, fill out a form.

👉 Read the full story

💧500,000 abandoned U.S. coal mines are being converted Into giant underground water batteries

The old mines that carved out the bones of Appalachia may not be done working yet. Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have spent years asking whether the same shafts that once pulled coal out of the ground could push electricity back into the grid — and their answer, backed by the U.S. Department of Energy, is that many of them can. The concept is called pumped storage hydropower: pump water down when electricity is cheap, release it back through turbines when the grid needs power. A coal mine, it turns out, is in engineering terms a ready-made vertical drop — and the transmission lines are already there. For communities that watched the mines close and the jobs disappear, it's the kind of second act nobody saw coming.

👉 Read the full story

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🗞 KAY’S CORNER
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I’ve always loved traveling, as long as I can remember. It doesn’t matter if it’s close by or far away; I’m always ready for an adventure.

Israel was my farthest trip yet. It was an experience I’ll never forget. The flight itself was smooth and interesting. Let me tell you about at least one part of it.

There were four of us traveling together. We boarded in Knoxville, Tennessee, and changed planes in Atlanta, Georgia.

I got settled in my seat with an empty one in front of me. Well, that didn’t last long.

Let me say this: a hefty gentleman approached the seat to claim it as his. Not sitting down as you would think a person would or should, oh no, he plopped down with authority.

His seat rared back into my lap. I caught my breath, wondering just how this was going to work out. I thought to myself, “Hey there, mister, are you here to visit or spend the night?”

He finally, after what seemed a good while, raised his seat up to a normal setting position.

Aw, I can breathe again. Well, glory be, that didn’t last long. Here comes the seat again toward my lap. It stays that way until we arrived in Paris, France. After we landed, I sat really still until the gentleman made his way up out of the seat and proceeded to exit the plane.

I didn’t really want to have any interaction with said gentleman; I had had enough of him!

We changed planes and traveled on to Tel Aviv, Israel. Our stay and tour of the Holy Land was absolutely wonderful.

Fast forward, time to return home. The flight from Tel Aviv to Paris was smooth, and I had a peaceful nap.

We changed planes in Paris heading back to Atlanta. I had taken my seat, gotten settled in, when I looked up and bust my britches, who is going to be in the seat in front of me again?

Yes, you got it!

I’m still traveling…….

Bible Verse of the Week

Now the Lord of peace himself give you peace always by all means. The Lord be with you all.

2 Thessalonians 3:16

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.

Population: just under 11,000.

Square miles: 233.

Median age: 50.7.

In other words, this is our kind of people.

They used to call it the Lost Province.

Not as an insult. Just as a fact. After the Civil War, roads fell apart and people turned inward. The joke around those mountains was that the only way to get to Alleghany County was to be born there.

Sounds like half the hollers I grew up knowing.

Alleghany County sits up in the northwest corner of North Carolina, right against the Virginia line. Most of the county rides a rolling plateau somewhere between 2,500 and 3,000 feet above sea level. So when your knees ache on a cold morning, they really ache.

Fifth smallest county in the state. Smaller than you'd expect. Bigger than it feels on a map.

The county seat is Sparta. It started life as Bower's Store, got renamed Gap Civil for a while, and finally landed on Sparta in 1879, named for the ancient Greek city.

Sparta, North Carolina. Named for ancient warriors.

They earn it every winter.

Now here's the thing about Alleghany County that stops you cold.

Running right through it is the New River.

Despite the name — which came from it being discovered in what were then new sections of North Carolina and Virginia back in 1749 — the New River is one of North America's oldest rivers, created somewhere between 10 million and 360 million years ago. Some geologists believe it's the second oldest river in the world.

Second oldest.

Only the Nile has it beat.

So you've got a river that predates the mountains it runs through, running through a county that used to be lost, sitting inside mountains that were old before most things on this planet figured out how to breathe.

And Zach Galifianakis has a farm there.

Sixty acres in Alleghany County. He calls it Farmageddon. Has horses and honeybees.

He's said it's where he goes to think clearly and pretend to know what he's doing.

Brother, I have driven past properties like that my whole life. Just never knew a movie star lived there.

The New River is an eccentric girl. She journeys north, joining the Kanawha, the Ohio, and finally the Mississippi, which carries her waters south to the Gulf of Mexico. Rain on Bald Knob in Alleghany County eventually flows past a riverboat casino in New Orleans.

Read that again.

Rain. Bald Knob. New Orleans.

That's Appalachian water doing a long slow crawl to the Gulf. We just never get credit for it.

Agriculture runs the place. Alleghany County grows about 1.2 million Christmas trees a year. It also grows more pumpkins than any other county in North Carolina.

Christmas trees and pumpkins.

They've cornered the market on two of the best days of the year.

Cattle and dairy round it out, and there are craft fairs, mountain heritage festivals, and something called Choose and Cut Day, which is exactly what it sounds like — you go pick your own Christmas tree.

I don't know why that delights me as much as it does. But it does.

There was also once a pipe factory in Sparta. The Dr. Grabow operation. About 350 employees at its peak. Smoking pipes. The kind your grandfather kept on a little wooden rack next to his chair.

The factory's gone now.

So is that version of Saturday mornings.

One of the county's notable people is Bertie Dickens, an old-time banjo player from Ennice who won the North Carolina Heritage Award in 1992. Born in 1902. Played most of her life.

I don't know a single thing about Bertie Dickens beyond those facts.

But I'd like to.

Alleghany County. 233 square miles. One river older than the mountains. Christmas trees by the million. A comedian farming honeybees. A banjo player who lived nearly a century.

Not lost anymore.

Just quiet.

Which, come to think of it, is better.

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📜 APPALACHIAN ALMANAC
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The old Appalachian almanac tradition says you plant by the signs, not the calendar. The moon is past full and pulling back this week — a waning gibbous, moving through Scorpio. That means the moisture in the ground is easing down, not rising up.

Good week for potatoes, if you haven’t put them in yet. Bad week to start beans. The Foxfire books will back me up on this. So will your grandmother, if she’s still around to ask.

Most of us just plant when the hardware store has the stuff in stock. But it’s worth knowing what the old way said. Especially when your cucumbers come in vine-heavy and fruit-light.

The signs tried to warn you.

Morel season. You’re either in it or you’re late.

April is morel month in the Appalachians. The soil thermometer matters more than the calendar — you’re looking for ground that’s sitting around 53 degrees, four inches down. Most people don’t own a soil thermometer. Most people just watch for the mayapples to open up and head for the hollow.

The Appalachian mountains can kick up ten different morel species across the spring season, running from mid-March clear through June depending on the elevation. The low hollows and creek bottoms go first. The ridges come later. If you missed the bottoms, head up.

Look near dying elms and old ash trees. The mushroom knows something about those trees the rest of us haven’t figured out yet.

Ramps are also still running in the higher elevations. You’ve probably already seen them at the farmers market, priced like they were hand-delivered by a sommelier. Go find your own. Bring a bag. Leave some behind.

What Germans brought to the mountains, and nobody talks about

When people picture Appalachian settlers, they picture Scots-Irish. And they’re not wrong. But the Germans came too, and they brought something the Scots-Irish didn’t: a whole system of planting by the stars.

The “Man of the Signs” — an old sketch that assigns body parts to astrological signs — is how the tradition got passed down. Gemini rules the arms. Cancer rules the breast. Plant beans in the arms. Make kraut in the right sign or it’ll go wrong. The almanac was practically a second Bible in some mountain households.

Berea College has been trying to document all this before the people who know it are gone. The older folks say their grandchildren don’t follow the signs anymore. The younger folks are coming back to gardening, but they’re coming back for the kale and the exercise, not the moon.

Something always gets lost in the translation between generations. This particular thing is worth mourning a little.

April 23rd is St. George’s Day, and if you’re out in the woods this week, the foragers’ calendar says to keep an eye out for St. George’s mushroom — Calocybe gambosa — which appears right around this date every year, reliable as a stopped clock being right twice a day.

The mountains have always kept their own calendar. Named after a feast day most people don’t observe anymore, remembered by a mushroom almost nobody knows to look for. That’s Appalachia for you. The old names stick to things long after anybody remembers why.

A word about spring in general

People talk about spring like it’s gentle. Like it eases in. That is not the Appalachian spring. The Appalachian spring is a fight between what’s still trying to be winter and what’s already decided to be summer, and the week of April 19 is right in the middle of that argument.

One morning it’s forty degrees and you can see your breath. Three days later you’re sweating through your shirt before noon. The redbuds are already burning out. The dogwoods are still holding. The creek is up from somewhere upstream that got more rain than you did.

It’s a good week to be outside. Even if outside doesn’t know what it is yet.

The signs, the moon, the mushrooms, the mud. The mountains don’t hand you a schedule. You just pay attention and try to keep up.

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📜 THE BACK PAGE
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Driving through eastern Kentucky on a two-lane that dips and rises like it can't make up its mind. No radio signal worth keeping. Just that piece running through my head from somewhere, the way music does when it decides to live in you rent-free.

Aaron Copland wrote it in 1944. A ballet. Set in Pennsylvania hill country. And somehow he captured something that most people who grew up in these mountains can't quite put into words — that particular mix of hard work and open sky. The lonesome and the hopeful sitting right next to each other on the same porch step.

Watch him conduct it here. The man is economy in motion. No wasted movement. Just enough.

That's Appalachia too, if you think about it.

The Wayne Train rolls out every Sunday morning.

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