50 Fun Facts About Appalachia

Which state, split off during the Civil War, is the only one lying entirely within Appalachia's official boundaries?

West Virginia has all 55 of its counties inside the region mapped by the Appalachian Regional Commission. The twelve other states on that map are only partly in.

Which country star, born in a one-room cabin in East Tennessee, gave her name to a theme park in Pigeon Forge?

Dolly Parton grew up as one of twelve children in the hills near Pigeon Forge. Her Imagination Library, which mails free books to children, honours her father, who never learned to read.

The most visited national park in the United States lies in which Appalachian mountain range?

The Great Smokies park has led the national visitor count for many years, with the Tennessee–North Carolina line running through its middle. The range is named for the natural fog that hangs over it.

Which animal was at the centre of an 1878 ownership trial that inflamed the Hatfield–McCoy feud along the Tug Fork?

A hog claimed by both families went before a local justice, with Randolph McCoy insisting the notches in its ears were McCoy marks. The Hatfields won the case, and the witness who swung it was later killed.

Which insects draw crowds to Elkmont, Tennessee, each June by flashing in unison across the Appalachian forest?

Fireflies of the Elkmont species were the first in North America found to flash in synchrony. The males blink together and then go dark together, which lets them spot a female's fainter reply.

Which red-eyed winged creature, reported around Point Pleasant in 1966, now has its own yearly festival in Appalachia?

Mothman was first reported by two young couples who told police a large black creature with glowing red eyes had followed them to the edge of town. A 1975 book later tied the sightings to the collapse of the town's Silver Bridge.

Wi-Fi and mobile phones are restricted around Green Bank in Appalachia to protect which kind of scientific instrument?

A radio telescope at Green Bank listens for signals so faint that staff patrol the area for leaky microwave ovens and stray Wi-Fi. The quiet zone around it was created in 1958.

Which motorsport grew out of Appalachian bootleggers outrunning the law in souped-up cars during Prohibition?

Stock car racing began with drivers who tuned ordinary-looking cars to haul untaxed liquor past the police. Some kept racing each other for pride, and NASCAR was founded in 1948 to organise the sport.

Which holiday was first celebrated in 1908 at a Methodist church in the Appalachian town of Grafton?

Mother's Day began with a service arranged by Anna Jarvis at the church where her own late mother had taught Sunday school. Jarvis chose the carnation as its emblem because it was her mother's favourite flower.

Which luxury Appalachian resort hid a secret Cold War bunker built to shelter the whole United States Congress?

The Greenbrier kept its bunker stocked for thirty years under the code name Project Greek Island. The government shut it down after a newspaper revealed its existence in 1992.

Which North Carolina peak, named for a professor who explored it in 1835, is the highest in the Appalachian Mountains?

Mount Mitchell stands 6,684 feet high and honours Elisha Mitchell, who fell to his death nearby in 1857. He had gone back to check his own measurements of the summit.

Which Appalachian city stands where the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers meet to form the Ohio?

Pittsburgh grew into the Steel City at that river junction, a spot the French and British empires both fought to control. It is the largest city usually counted as part of the Appalachian region.

Which Deep South state has 24 counties at the south-western end of Appalachia's official federal region?

Mississippi is better known for its delta, yet its northern counties are on the Appalachian Regional Commission's map. Some geographers leave the state out of the region altogether.

The Appalachian Mountains rose when ancestral North America and Africa collided to help form which supercontinent?

Pangaea's assembly pushed up a chain that also ran through what are now the Scottish Highlands and Morocco's Atlas Mountains. Plate tectonics later tore the range apart.

Which frontiersman was hired in 1775 to blaze the Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky?

Daniel Boone set out that March with a crew of axmen to cut the trail through forest and mountain. It became the main road for settlers crossing the Appalachians.

Moonshine, the illicit liquor long tied to Appalachia, is traditionally distilled in America from a mash of which grain?

Corn was costly to haul out of the mountains, so farmers turned it into liquor: one horse could carry ten times more value that way. In Scotland and Ireland the same kind of spirit starts with barley.

Which acoustic music genre takes its name from the band that Bill Monroe formed in 1939?

Bluegrass is named for Monroe's Blue Grass Boys, who took their own name from the grass of his home state, Kentucky. The style crystallised in the mid-1940s, and Monroe is called its father.

Which instrument, central to Appalachian old-time music, descends from gourd-bodied lutes played by enslaved Africans?

Banjo ancestors had a gourd body and a skin head, much like lutes still played in Senegal and Mali. Enslaved musicians in the antebellum South spread the instrument to the rest of the population.

Which singer from Butcher Hollow, Kentucky, turned her childhood in a mining family into a 1970 country number one?

Loretta Lynn's song Coal Miner's Daughter became her signature, and its title was reused for her 1976 autobiography. The 1980 film of the book won Sissy Spacek an Oscar for playing her.

Which steel-driving hero of Appalachian rail legend is said to have outpaced a steam drill, then died hammer in hand?

John Henry is often placed at the Big Bend railway tunnel near Talcott, dug in the early 1870s, though tunnels in other states claim the contest too. In the legend he wins the race and his heart gives out.

Which Native nation's Eastern Band holds the Qualla Boundary in western North Carolina, on land it bought in the 1870s?

Cherokee families who hid in remote mountains or held state citizenship escaped the forced removal of 1838. Because their descendants bought the land themselves, it is a trust, not a government-made reservation.

The Scotch-Irish settlers who filled Appalachia's backcountry in the 1700s had emigrated from which province of Ireland?

Ulster had been settled a century earlier by families from the Scottish Lowlands and northern England, and their descendants moved on to America. Back in Ireland the same people are known as Ulster Scots.

Which scenic road, the longest linear park in the United States, runs 469 miles along the Appalachian crest?

Blue Ridge Parkway mileposts count up from zero in the north-east to 469 at the southern end in North Carolina. Along the way the road crosses 29 counties in two states.

Which North Carolina mountain city is home to Biltmore, the largest privately owned house in the United States?

Asheville's Biltmore was built for George Vanderbilt, who opened it to his guests on Christmas Eve 1895. The name joins De Bilt, his family's Dutch home town, to an old word for rolling land.

Which Tennessee city beneath Lookout Mountain became the site of the world's first Coca-Cola bottling company in 1899?

Chattanooga got the business because two local entrepreneurs talked Coca-Cola's owner into selling them the bottling rights for one dollar. He never collected the dollar and later saw it as a grave mistake.

Which Appalachian city hosted the 1982 World's Fair and still keeps the fair's gold-globed Sunsphere tower?

Knoxville built the 266-foot Sunsphere as the symbol of a fair devoted to energy. Its developers had borrowed the idea after visiting the 1974 fair in Spokane.

Which Appalachian 'Secret City' was built behind a fence from 1942 to enrich uranium for the Manhattan Project?

Oak Ridge ran so short of copper for its giant magnets that the Army borrowed 14,700 tons of silver from the Treasury to wind the coils instead. The town was also nicknamed the Atomic City.

Which fretted instrument, played flat on the lap, first appeared among Scotch-Irish settlers in Appalachia?

Dulcimer players pick the tune on the top string while the others drone beneath it. Although it arose among immigrants, the instrument has no known ancestor in Ireland, Scotland or northern England.

Which garlicky wild plant, prized as a spring tonic, do Appalachian towns celebrate with festivals and eating contests?

Ramps smell so strong that a newspaper editor in Richwood once mixed their juice into his printer's ink as a prank. Cosby, Tennessee, started its ramp festival, one of the oldest, in 1954.

Which snack was first sold in 1927 by an Italian baker in Fairmont as a lunch for Appalachian coal miners?

Pepperoni roll lunches suited miners because they keep without refrigeration. As the bread bakes, the fat in the meat melts and soaks spicy oil into the crumb.

Which state holds Springer Mountain, the southern end of the Appalachian Trail since 1958?

Georgia's Springer Mountain took over in 1958 from Mount Oglethorpe, about 14 miles further south. Hikers who start there face a walk of more than 2,000 miles to the far end in Maine.

Which Appalachian coal town has been almost emptied by a mine fire burning beneath its streets since 1962?

Centralia had about a thousand residents in 1980 and only five by 2020, and the Postal Service withdrew its ZIP code in 2002. The fire under the Pennsylvania town could burn for another 250 years.

The name Appalachia comes from the Apalachee, a people Spanish explorers met in 1528 in which present-day state?

Florida's Panhandle was the Apalachee homeland, with a capital near today's Tallahassee. The Spanish stretched the name far inland, making it one of the oldest surviving European place names in the country.

Which amphibians, many of them lungless, are more varied in the Appalachian Mountains than anywhere else on Earth?

Salamanders stay concealed under leaves and debris on the forest floor, so few walkers ever notice them. By eating the tiny creatures there, they keep nutrients cycling through the woods.

Which Appalachian tree was all but wiped out after 1904 by an imported fungus that killed billions of them?

American chestnut was a dominant tree of the mountain forests until blight arrived on chestnuts imported from Japan. Saplings still sprout, but the disease kills most of them before they mature.

Which 1921 battle, the largest labor uprising in United States history, set 10,000 armed coal miners against lawmen?

Blair Mountain saw about a million rounds fired over five days before the Army stepped in on presidential orders. The miners were trying to unionise coalfields where joining up meant being fired.

Which federal campaign did a president promote in 1964 by flying to the Appalachian town of Inez, Kentucky?

The War on Poverty brought the president to Inez by helicopter, which landed on an abandoned miniature golf course. A year later Congress created the Appalachian Regional Commission.

Which 1790s revolt by Appalachian farmers against a new federal tax was crushed by an army George Washington led?

Whiskey Rebellion farmers were resisting the first tax the federal government ever placed on a domestic product. Washington rode at the head of 13,000 militiamen to end it.

The would-be fourteenth state that East Tennessee settlers declared in 1784 was named to honour which Founding Father?

Benjamin Franklin was being courted for support, so the settlers changed their state's name from Frankland to Franklin. It collapsed in 1789, when its last leaders swore allegiance to North Carolina.

Which Tennessee mountain marksman captured 132 German soldiers in 1918 and was later played on screen by Gary Cooper?

Alvin York came from Pall Mall, a hamlet in the hills of Fentress County, and won the Medal of Honor for the raid. The 1941 film about him was the highest-grossing picture of its year.

Which NASA mathematician from White Sulphur Springs was asked by John Glenn to recheck his orbital figures by hand?

Katherine Johnson was trusted over NASA's new electronic computers, and Glenn refused to fly until she had verified their numbers. Her story is told in the 2016 film Hidden Figures.

Which soul singer drew on a childhood in the Appalachian coal town of Slab Fork to write the hit Lean on Me?

Bill Withers wrote the song after moving to Los Angeles, where he missed the strong community spirit of his home town. It reached number one in July 1972.

Which 1999 film shows teenagers in the Appalachian coal town of Coalwood building rockets after Sputnik passes overhead?

October Sky is an anagram of Rocket Boys, the Homer Hickam memoir it is based on. The studio changed the title because its research said women over thirty would not see a film called Rocket Boys.

Which twin city, split by a state line along its main street, hosted the 1927 sessions called country music's Big Bang?

Bristol's sessions were held above a hat and glove company on State Street, which is the state line itself. In twelve days a producer recorded 76 songs there, among them the debut of Jimmie Rodgers.

Which 1925 court case in the small Tennessee town of Dayton put a schoolteacher in the dock for teaching evolution?

The Scopes Trial was staged on purpose to bring publicity to Dayton, and the teacher was unsure he had ever taught the subject. It was the first American trial to be broadcast nationwide.

Coal firms in Appalachia often paid their miners in which private currency, spendable only at the company store?

Scrip lost value if a miner tried to swap it for real money, so families had little choice but to shop where the employer set the prices. Federal law banned paying wages this way in 1938.

Which apple arose as a chance seedling on a Clay County farm in Appalachia and was sold to a nursery for $5,000?

Golden Delicious was first known locally as Mullins' Yellow Seedling, after the farmer who owned the tree. Stark Brothers launched it in 1914 as a companion to their Red Delicious.

Which name, long used as a slur, was given to mixed-ancestry families of Newman's Ridge in the hills of East Tennessee?

Melungeons were at first a group of about 40 families, and the label later spread to other communities of uncertain origin. A 2011 genetic study found their ancestry to be mainly European and African.

Which dystopian book series places its heroine's home, the poorest region of a future nation, in Appalachia?

The Hunger Games puts Katniss Everdeen's District 12 in Appalachia, where people regularly die of starvation. She enters the arena only by volunteering in place of her younger sister, Primrose.

Which test pilot, born in the tiny Appalachian community of Myra, became the first person to break the sound barrier?

Chuck Yeager did it in 1947 in a rocket-powered Bell X-1 that he had named Glamorous Glennis after his wife. He repeated the feat as a co-pilot in 2012, at the age of 89.