Stories-A History of Appalachia Podcast
1) A Christmas Morning Disaster: The 1882 Millboro, Virginia Train Wreck
This week Steve and Rod tell the story of a Christmas morning that ended in heartbreak instead of celebration.In 1882, a passenger train and a freight engine collided near Millboro, Virginia, killing ...Show More
2) The Long-Haired Red-Bearded Beast of Georgia: John Pemberton Gatewood
John Pemberton Gatewood was a notorious Confederate bushwhacker/guerrilla leader. Â Born in Fentress County, Tennessee, in 1844, Gatewood's life took a dark turn after a Union attack on his family led ...Show More
3) Moonshine, Murder, and Legend: The Story of Lewis Redmond
Major Lewis Redmond’s story sounds like it comes from a 19th century dime novel. He was a Carolina moonshiner, an outlaw and, thanks to actually being in some of those dime novels after the Civil War...Show More
4) Emma Gatewood's Walk in the Woods
In 1955, at the age of 67, Emma Gatewood became the first woman to solo thru-hike the Appalachian Trail, from Springer Mountain in Georgia to the top of Mt. Katahdin in Maine. In this episode, Steve a...Show More
5) Greed, Gold and Deception in Cocke County TN: The 1909 Murder of A. J. Slagle
In 1909, a Johnson City businessman named A.J. Slagle was lured by promises of buried Spanish gold hidden in a Cocke County house. What began as a desperate bid to recover from business losses ended i...Show More
6) The Death of Jack Allen: The Hillsville Aftermath
Four years after the Hillsville courthouse shootout shocked Virginia, another one of the Allen brothers met a violent end. Jack Allen, brother of Floyd Allen, and once a constable in that Carroll Coun...Show More
7) The Confederate Exodus: The Story of Ezekiel Pyles And The Confederados
After the Civil War, thousands of defeated Confederates refused to live under the Union flag. Instead, they packed up their families and headed for new lives in South America in a Confederate exodus f...Show More
8) The 1925 Asheville Sessions: The Spark Before the Bang
In August 1925, two years before the famed Bristol Sessions, Ralph Peer and Okeh Records set up a temporary studio on the rooftop of Asheville’s brand-new Vanderbilt Hotel.Over ten sweltering days, lo...Show More
9) Tenth Anniversary Special: Two Tales from the Dark Side of Appalachia
This Halloween marks 10 years of stories from Rod and Steve; to mark the holiday and our tenth anniversary, we’re going to take you deep into the dark side of Appalachia with two chilling tales from s...Show More
10) Two Men and a Plane: The Drug Smuggler Who Fell Out Of The Sky
We’ve told hundreds of stories about Appalachia, but few are as bizarre as the night a Kentucky drug smuggler named Andrew Thornton II fell to his death during a smuggling run over south Knoxville, Te...Show More