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Following Trails Grown Dim

An Offer He Couldn’t Refuse

It was an offer he couldn’t refuse. Yet, there it was, scrawled across the coarse paper in a neat handwritten script by a man who had the wherewithal to back it up. George Washington Vanover could hardly believe the good fortune that had come his way. The offer had come in a letter from William…

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Ghosts In The Family Tree

By Sam Perry “I don’t know if I ever told you this before, but my grandfather was an Indian.  He ran away from the Army when the Indians were being rounded up and sent out west. He went up on the Big South Fork River and built a small cabin close to where Nevelsville is…

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A Kingdom Lost

By Sam Perry Early Sumner scraped the match on the sole of his shoe and touched the flame to the fuse of the blasting cap. Then, he walked away and waited.  The explosion was small, but it was big enough to do the job.  With a roar, the impounded waters of the lake came rushing…

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If You Build It, They Will Come

By Sam Perry In the 1989 movie, Field of Dreams, Ray Kinsella walks through his Iowa cornfield, trying to make sense of his life so far and musing about his future, when he hears a whisper, coming from deep within the recesses of the corn: “If you build it, he will come.”   Inspired by…

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The Longhunters’ Way West

By Sam Perry Note: This is an abridged version of an article I wrote for The Journal of the Early Americas and that appeared in the October/November 2012 issue. For a more scholarly presentation of this subject, I refer you to that periodical I was born near Cumberland Falls and make fairly frequent visits to…

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Hewing To The Lines Of Truth

By Sam Perry In addition to The Voice, one of the other newspapers that have served the people of McCreary County in the past was The McCreary County Record.  This venerable newspaper proclaimed on its masthead that “we hew to the lines of truth . . . and let the chips fall where they may.”…

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The Great Buzzard Ice Cream Social

“Blesssings on thee, little man, Barefoot boy with cheek of tan.” By Sam Perry John Greenleaf Whittier’s romanticized version of rural boyhood is a delight to read and conjures images of a past that many long to recapture, but it ignores an ugly truth that boys who run around without shoes in the countryside are…

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The Lady With The Beans

By Sam Perry The men had gathered twigs and kindled a small fire in a copse of Virginia pines that sheltered them from a wind that never seemed to cease. Shivering in the winter twilight, they pulled crumpled fedoras over creased brows and huddled before the fire, warming hands reddened by the cold. Their clothing…

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Which Side Are You On?

By Sam Perry The Chitwood family didn’t know whether they were Kentuckians or Tennesseans. They had papers, signed and sealed by a Kentucky judge, saying that they owned land on the headwaters of Roaring Paunch Creek, which was in Kentucky.   So, logic would have it that they were, truly, members of that community of…

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Sometimes It Takes A Hero

By Sam Perry Every boy needs a hero. Girls probably need them, too, but I don’t know enough about girls to render an opinion about that. For boys, however, heroes are essential elements of the maturation process.  Without them, they never, completely, grow up, but become locked in a closet of childhood and never learn…

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