Used to be, Sunday meant a fat newspaper on the porch and nowhere to be.

That's still the idea here. Appalachian culture, history, food, and the kind of stories that were never going to make the six o'clock anyway.

If somebody passed this along to you, do 'em a favor and stick around. thewaynetrain.com

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🚂 WELCOME ABOARD
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This week on The Wayne Train:

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🗞 APPALACHIA 250
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Before the maps. Before the forts. Before the official version of things.

There's a particular kind of man the history books don't know what to do with.

He didn't file reports. He didn't write letters to Congress. He didn't plant a flag and make a speech. He just picked up his rifle, kissed whatever he was leaving behind, and walked into the dark until he ran out of dark to walk into.

They called them Long Hunters.

Not because they were tall, though some were. Because they were gone a long time.

We're talking about the 1760s and 1770s, that stretch of years when Kentucky was still just a rumor — a whispered thing, passed around at trading posts and campfires like a story that couldn't possibly be true. Fertile ground so thick you could smell it. Buffalo by the thousands. Rivers full of fish.

Nobody official had been there. Nobody with a commission or a title or a government behind him.

But the Long Hunters had.

Men like Kasper Mansker. Elisha Walden. James Knox. John Redd. These weren't gentlemen explorers with supply wagons and servants. These were backcountry Scots-Irish and English and a few others who didn't fit neatly into any category — the kind of men who'd grown up on the fringe, who knew that the fringe kept moving west and figured they might as well move with it.

A Long Hunt wasn't a weekend trip.

Some of these men were gone for two years. Two years in country that had no roads, no resupply, no rescue if things went sideways. They wintered in rock shelters and makeshift camps. They cured their own skins. They navigated by memory and instinct and the position of stars they'd known since childhood.

They went in groups — sometimes ten, sometimes twenty — because a solo man in that country was just a meal waiting to happen. They split up to cover ground. Reunited at agreed spots. Kept going.

The Cherokee and Shawnee considered Kentucky their hunting ground. That wasn't a misunderstanding. That was a fact, and the Long Hunters knew it. Sometimes the encounters were peaceful. Plenty of times they weren't. Men came home missing friends. Some didn't come home at all.

What they brought back wasn't just meat and hides, though they hauled out thousands of deerskins — enough to outfit a small city in leather breeches. What they brought back was knowledge.

Not written knowledge. Not cartographer's knowledge.

Knowledge that lived in the body. In the bones.

They knew where the gaps were in the Cumberland range. They knew which rivers ran which direction and where they widened out and went calm enough to ford. They knew where the good limestone springs were. Where you could shelter a hundred horses. Where the canebrakes were so thick a man could get turned around and wander for a week.

Daniel Boone gets most of the ink. And Boone earned it — the man was a genuine article. But Boone himself would have told you he wasn't operating in a vacuum. He was walking into a country that other Long Hunters had already begun to understand. When he led settlers through the Cumberland Gap in 1775, he was using knowledge that had been accumulating in backcountry heads for fifteen years.

The official story usually starts with Boone.

The real story starts earlier, in the camps of men whose names you've probably never heard.

I think about this every time someone talks about Appalachian people like they were always behind — always late to things, always in need of somebody from somewhere else to come show them how it's done.

The Long Hunters weren't behind anything.

They were first.

They charted a continent in their heads while the coastal cities were still arguing about trade routes. They walked into the unknown not because anyone sent them — nobody sent them — but because that's what you did when you came from a people who'd been figuring things out for themselves since before there was a country to belong to.

No commission. No glory. No statue in a park.

Just a long walk into country nobody else had the nerve to enter.

Kentucky didn't discover the Long Hunters.

The Long Hunters discovered Kentucky.

Big difference.

Next week in The Wayne Train: Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road

If somebody you know would appreciate stories like this one, send them our way. Growing this thing one reader at a time.

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📡 FROM THE DIGITAL HOLLER
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The Kentucky Derby is this Saturday.

Ninety miles up the road from where I'm sitting. Churchill Downs. The Twin Spires. The hats. The mint juleps served in a commemorative glass that costs twelve dollars and holds four dollars worth of bourbon.

I have watched this race my entire life.

I have never once felt like it belonged to Kentucky.

Don't misunderstand me.

The Derby is ours in the way that a famous relative is yours. You claim them at Christmas. You mention them when it comes up. You're proud, mostly, with a few asterisks you keep to yourself.

But Churchill Downs on the first Saturday in May is not Kentucky. Not really. It's a television event that happens to be located in Louisville, which itself is a city that the rest of Kentucky has a complicated relationship with and always has.

The people in the expensive seats didn't drive down from Harlan County. The celebrities in the infield didn't fly in to experience Appalachian culture. The reporters filing stories about the most exciting two minutes in sports are not, by and large, people who know what a tote board is.

They showed up for the spectacle.

Nothing wrong with that. The spectacle is real. I'm not going to pretend watching those horses come around the final turn doesn't do something to me, because it does, every single time, and I have seen it enough times that it should have stopped working by now.

It hasn't.

I spent the last month at Keeneland.

Keeneland is what the Derby is pretending to be.

Small. Serious. A track where the people in the stands actually know the difference between a closer and a presser, where the racing form gets read instead of used as a sun visor, where you can stand at the rail and feel the ground shake when twelve horses come past you at full run and understand for one clarifying second exactly why people have been doing this for three hundred years.

I got there early enough one morning to watch the track crew drag the surface before the first horses came out. Just a tractor and a guy in a vest who'd probably done it ten thousand times. He didn't look up. Didn't need to.

The horses followed eventually. One by one.

Nobody in the celebrity boxes rolls in at that hour. They show up for the race. I showed up for everything before it.

That's the one thing I've got.

Here's what I'll do Saturday.

I'll watch it the way I always watch it. Probably from the couch, if I'm being honest, because I've been to Churchill on Derby Day and what I mostly remember is standing in a line for forty-five minutes for a bathroom and missing the race.

I'll watch the post parade. I'll look at the horses the way Keeneland taught me to look at horses — how they're moving, whether they want to be there, what the body language says underneath all the noise and pageantry.

I'll make a pick.

I'll probably be wrong. The Derby has humbled better handicappers than me since 1875 and shows no signs of stopping.

But I'll watch that final turn the way I always do, and something will happen in my chest that I can't quite explain and wouldn't want to, and for two minutes I'll forget everything except those horses running.

Kentucky does that to you.

Even when Kentucky is dressed up in a hat it doesn't normally wear.

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 ‘Little Winters’ of East Tennessee
Spring in Appalachia has a way of fooling you. One day it feels like summer has arrived. The next morning there’s frost on the ground and folks are digging jackets back out of the closet. Around these parts, they’ve long had a name for that trick of the season.

WBIR in Knoxville takes a look at the “Little Winters” of East Tennessee, those sudden cold snaps with names, stories, and mountain wisdom attached to them. It’s a reminder that in Appalachia, even the weather comes with folklore.

👉 Read the full story

A camera, a community and a path to healing
In Athens, Ohio, a woman named Elena Caple walked into a photography program in 2010 because her psychiatrist thought it might keep her busy.

Sixteen years later, she's still there.

The Athens Photo Project has been running since 2000 — born out of the hole left when The Ridges, the old state mental health hospital, closed its doors and released its patients into a region that didn't have much waiting for them. Appalachian Ohio has roughly ten fewer mental health providers per 100,000 people than the national average, which was already short. So somebody handed people cameras instead.

Every week, participants show up, take photos, make prints, and talk about what they made. That's most of it. No clinical setting. No waiting room with fluorescent lights. Just a prompt, a walk outside, and other people who showed up too.

The waitlist has stretched for years. They're growing faster than they can handle.

The Athens Post tells the story. Worth your time.

👉 Read the full story

The man who keeps iconic Snuffy Smith comic strip tradition alive

There was a time when nearly every newspaper reader turned first to the comics page. And tucked among the giants of American cartooning was a scruffy hill-country character named Snuffy Smith, carrying a little Appalachian mischief to readers across the nation.

This feature, published by Inside Appalachia, takes us inside the life and work of cartoonist John Rose, the man keeping that comic-strip tradition alive. It’s a look at humor, heritage, and how Appalachia still speaks through ink on paper.

👉 Read the full story

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🗞 KAY’S CORNER
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Do you remember childhood games before technology?

There was no sitting in front of a computer, television, gaming system, using any cell phones or handheld devices to entertain you.

Television was only for family time when Mommy and Daddy would choose a show for all of us to watch together.

Saturday mornings we got to watch cartoons, which kept us kids occupied for a bit.

My four brothers and I entertained ourselves outside, which was our playground.

Some of the games I remember playing with my brothers were Hopscotch, Hide and Seek, Tag-You’re-It, Red Rover,  Marbles, Mother May I, Mumblety-Peg, basketball, softball (we would use a big stick if there was no bat), jacks, checkers, and jump rope.

There was usually one or two bicycles that we all had to take turns riding.

Then there were the times I played alone. I would play with a hula hoop, yo-yo, make paper airplanes, slingshot, dolls, and of course making mud pies outside.

One of my favorite things to play with was paper dolls. I anxiously watched and waited each Christmas season for the Sears & Roebuck catalog. I would dress my paper dolls so nice and pretty with clothing I would cut out from the catalog.

There are probably more games that have left my memory for the time being.

I’m sure you’ll remember some games you played as you read this.

Memories are a wonderful thing, especially when you can smile about your childhood!

Bible Verse of the Week:
Lo, children are an heritage of the Lord: and the fruit of the womb is his reward.

Psalm 127-3

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 at random, one week at a time.

There's a phrase they use in Estill County.

"Where the Bluegrass kisses the Mountains."

The county sits right at the contact point between two Kentucky worlds — the rolling Bluegrass to the west, the Cumberland Plateau to the east. One foot in horse country, one foot in the hills. It's a description that sounds like a tourism slogan but also happens to be true geology.

That borderland quality runs through everything about the place.

Population: About 14,000 souls.

County seat: Irvine, tucked into the Kentucky River bottoms.

Twin cities: Irvine and Ravenna, side by side on the river, like two brothers who never moved far from each other.

The county was formed in 1808 and named for Captain James Estill, a militia officer who died in a fight with the Wyandots during the Revolution. He'd come from Virginia, settled on Muddy Creek over in Madison County, built a station that bore his name, took a rifle ball in the arm in 1781, and then went right back out in the spring of 1782 with about 25 men to chase a similar number of warriors across the Kentucky River. He didn't come back from that one.

They named the county after him.

The Iron That Could Have Been

Before coal swallowed Eastern Kentucky's identity, there was iron.

Estill County was one of the first places in the United States to experience early industrialization, with iron mining and smelting beginning in 1810. For a while in the 1800s, Kentucky was the nation's third-largest iron producer, trailing only Pennsylvania and New York.

Then Estill County went and built something nobody else could touch.

Constructed in 1868, the Fitchburg Furnace operated at the peak of the iron industry. In 1870, with 250 men, Fitchburg produced 900 tons of pig iron. The thing that makes your jaw drop: at 81 feet tall, the dual-stack furnace is considered the largest charcoal iron furnace in the world — and it was the last of such furnaces to be built in America. Its intricate dry-stone masonry places it among the largest 25 such structures on earth.

Built by hand, out of sandstone, in the hills of eastern Kentucky.

The nearest railroad was 55 miles away in Lexington when the furnace started running. Any iron produced had to be loaded on wagons pulled by oxen and transported to barges on the Kentucky River.

And they did it anyway.

Richer iron ore was discovered in other parts of the country, better furnace technology came along, and a financial panic forced Fitchburg to close in 1874. The town of Fitchburg that grew up around it? Gone. Today nothing remains to indicate the town of Fitchburg ever existed.

The furnace is still standing.

Go see it. It looks like a castle that got lost on the way to somewhere else.

The Rich and Famous Came Here to Sweat

The county was historically known for the Estill Springs summer resort, situated near mineral springs in Irvine — a popular vacation site for many prominent Kentuckians in the 19th century. Henry Clay, John Crittenden, and John C. Breckinridge were among those who summered there.

Henry Clay enjoyed taking the waters in Estill County.

The resort operated from 1814 until the hotel burned in 1924. A hundred and ten years of Kentucky's finest showing up to drink sulphur water and call it medicine.

The Backstreet Boy from Irvine

This is the part people don't believe.

Kevin Richardson — yes, that Kevin Richardson — was born in Lexington but his family moved to Estill County in 1981. He graduated from Estill County High in 1989.

In school he played football and was captain of his team, the Estill Engineers. He earned the nickname "Train" because he ran through opponents like a locomotive.

The man they'd later know as the deep voice of the Backstreet Boys was first known in Irvine as Train.

After graduating, Richardson moved to Orlando and landed a job playing Aladdin at Walt Disney World. He answered an ad in a newspaper, auditioned for a new boy band, and called his cousin Brian Littrell back in Kentucky to come join up. Brian was pulled out of math class to take the call.

The rest of that story sold about 130 million albums.

Estill County.

The Festival That Makes No Sense Until It Makes Perfect Sense

Every spring, Irvine throws a festival for a mushroom.

The Mountain Mushroom Festival has been held each year since 1991, during the last full weekend in April, around the time that morel mushrooms are traditionally gathered.

Morels — or "dry land fish," as the old-timers call them — grow wild in the hills around Estill County every spring. Hunting for them has been a long-standing folk tradition in the county, the kind of insider knowledge passed down through families about where to look and how to respect the rights of other hunters.

At the festival, freshly foraged morels fly out of coolers and grocery bags at $100 a pound.

A hundred dollars a pound for a mushroom you find under leaves.

There's also a Mushroom Cook-Off, a Fungus 5K, a mascot named Morey the Morel, a Kentucky Agate show, cloggers, car shows, and a pancake breakfast.

It's free. Everything's free.

One Last Thing

During the Civil War, a larger proportion of Estill County's population volunteered for the Union Army than the population of any free state, or of any Kentucky county except Owsley County.

They didn't have to fight. They chose to.

That old borderland quality again. Always caught between two worlds, always deciding which side of the line they stood on.

Seems like they usually figured it out.

Estill County is about 20 miles east of Richmond on US-52. The Mountain Mushroom Festival runs this weekend, April 25–26, in downtown Irvine. Admission is free. Fitchburg Furnace is open for day use and is worth the drive down KY-975.

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📜 APPALACHIAN ALMANAC
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The Sky Above

What the moon is telling you to do

The moon is fat and getting fatter this week. Waxing gibbous, building toward full on Friday the 1st of May.

May's full moon carries the old name Flower Moon. Look outside Friday night. The whole ridge will be lit up like God left the porch light on.

Waxing moon means moisture is pulling upward through the soil. Good week for above-ground crops — beans, squash, anything that wants to climb. The old Appalachian planting signs say the waxing moon favors leaf and fruit. Your grandfather planted beans this week if the weather broke right. So did his father.

Sunday night, the moon passes close enough to Regulus — the bright blue-white heart of Leo — that you can catch them together with the naked eye. Most of us won't look up. The ones who do won't forget it.

There's a comet out there

Comet C/2025 R3 makes its closest approach to Earth on Monday the 27th, coming within 44 million miles. Forty-four million miles sounds like a lot until you remember that space is mostly nothing and this thing has been falling through the dark since before your county had a road.

It's sitting at about magnitude 7.7 this week — binoculars territory. Look for it in the predawn eastern sky, in the general neighborhood of Pegasus and Pisces.

Get up early one morning. Make a cup of coffee first. Take it outside. Look east before the sun beats you to it. Worst case, you drank good coffee in the dark.

The Eta Aquariid meteor shower is building toward its May 6th peak. The main show is next week, but stray meteors are already running. These are leavings of Halley's Comet — debris these mountains have been flying through since long before any of us arrived to notice.

The Ground Below

The morels are not going to wait on you

The 2026 morel season is on, and reports have been picking up through early April. At elevation in central Appalachia, this week is the window. Not a suggestion. A window. And it closes.

The soil thermometer is what matters. You're looking for ground that's hitting 50 to 55 degrees, with daytime air temps around 60 and nights holding above 40. Hit that after a good rain and you could wake up the next morning to a full flush. Most people don't own a soil thermometer. Most people watch for the mayapples to open up and head for the hollow. That works too.

Hunt south-facing slopes first — they warm earliest. Work toward creek bottoms as the week goes on. Look near dying elms and old ash trees. The mushroom knows something about those trees the rest of us haven't figured out yet.

One rule. Slice it lengthwise before you eat it. A true morel is completely hollow inside. A false morel has cottony fibers or chambers. When in doubt, leave it in the ground. No mushroom is worth bragging about from a hospital bed.

The low hollows go first. The ridges come later. If you missed the bottoms, head up.

This Week in Appalachian History

May 1 — The Flower Moon and what it meant to people who paid attention

May Day is older than the country. Long before it was a labor holiday, before it was political, before it was anything involving marches or speeches, it was a day people in these mountains marked by what was happening around them. The full moon falling on May 1st this year is the kind of coincidence the old almanac makers would have circled twice.

The waxing crescent and the days just before a full moon in late April and early May are also the best time of year to see Earthshine — the faint glow that lights up the dark portion of the moon, reflected sunlight bouncing off the Earth back up to the lunar surface. Leonardo da Vinci was the first person to explain it correctly. They call it the Da Vinci Glow now.

Your great-grandmother probably just called it pretty.

A word about this particular week

May is coming in the way May always comes in the mountains — not politely. One morning this week you'll wake up and the canopy will have closed overnight while you were sleeping. The ridge goes from bare brown to full green in about four days, and then that's it. The light changes. The woods go dark. The morels disappear. The ramps get bitter.

It happens fast. It always happens faster than you think it will.

New census data out this month confirms that every single one of West Virginia's 16 Central Appalachian coalfield counties is losing people — deaths outpacing births, and more leaving than arriving. McDowell County had nearly 100,000 residents in the 1950s. It has fewer than 17,000 now.

The mountains are still here. Some of the towns aren't.

Worth stepping outside this week and looking at what's still beautiful about this place. Not instead of caring about the rest of it. In addition to.

The comet. The Flower Moon. The morels in the hollow. The green coming in overnight.

Pay attention. It won't hold.

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🔮 APPALACHIAN ASTROLOGY
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Week of April 24
What the stars are saying from the holler to the high ridge

Now before anybody writes in, let’s be clear. Appalachia has always trusted signs in the sky. We watched the moon to plant beans, studied clouds to guess rain, and knew a red sunrise meant weather was up to something. So reading the stars is really just an old mountain habit with fancier branding.

Here’s what the heavens are whispering this week.

You’ve been charging uphill like a goat on bad coffee. Slow down before you volunteer for three projects and regret all of them by Tuesday. Good week for fixing fences, literal or personal.

You want comfort, and frankly you deserve it. Biscuit energy surrounds you. Just don’t mistake laziness for peace. One thing you’ve been avoiding needs doing. Handle it, then nap proudly.

Your mouth may outrun your better judgment this week. Double-check what you text, post, or holler across the yard. Good time for storytelling, flirting, and talking your way into free pie.

Home matters extra now. You may feel the urge to clean the porch, call family, or stir something in a cast iron skillet. Lean into it. Sentiment is not weakness.

You’ve been underappreciated, at least in your own estimation. This week brings a chance to shine without demanding applause. Let your work talk. If applause follows, accept gracefully.

You are one loose screw away from reorganizing the whole shed. Channel that energy wisely. Fix systems, make lists, and stop expecting everyone else to alphabetize their life like you do.

You’re trying to keep peace between people who enjoy causing chaos. Step back. Let grown folks carry their own drama. Your week improves the minute you stop refereeing.

Something hidden comes to light. Could be gossip, could be feelings, could be where you put that missing receipt. Stay calm and observant. Mystery is your home field.

You’re itching to roam. If you can’t take a road trip, at least take the scenic route home. New sights help your spirit. Reckless spending does not.

You’ve been carrying too much because you assume nobody else will. Fair enough, but still. Delegate one burden this week. Even mules get a break.

Your ideas are ahead of their time again. Explain them slower so the rest of us can catch up. Good week for starting something weird that later looks smart.

You feel everything. This week, protect your peace like it’s the last tomato plant before frost. Music, water, quiet, and kind people are medicine.

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🌙 MOUNTAIN MOON NOTE
The moon is waning this week, a good time for clearing clutter, ending foolishness, and finishing what you started. Bad time for arguing with stubborn relatives.

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Lucky Numbers: 3, 11, 17
Lucky Meal: Pinto beans and cornbread
Lucky Direction: Toward home, with a detour

Come back next week when we see what the stars, weather, and gossip are planning next.

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📜 THE BACK PAGE
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⛪ CHURCH SIGNS SEEN ALONG APPALACHIAN ROADWAYS

Somewhere between a Dollar General and a two-lane curve, wisdom still gets posted in big black letters. Appalachia has long believed truth can arrive with a laugh, a warning, or both at once. This week’s roadside sermon series begins with these classics:

Some folks preach from a pulpit. Some preach from plywood and changeable letters. Around here, both still work.

The Wayne Train rolls out every Sunday morning.

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