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In the final years of his legendary life, Popcorn Sutton put his wife up on a pedestal – and on the catwalk above the 2,500-gallon pots where his moonshine was being distilled. It’s only fitting the woman the notorious moonshiner was sweet on learned to stir the sugar. “He made the best moonshine this side of the Mississippi, and I don’t care what anybody else says,” Pam Sutton told Knox News. “A lot of these so-called moonshiners would come and buy it from Popcorn and take it back home and sell it as their own and tell people they made...

Deep in the woods of North Carolina is a man name Joe Hollis who's lived of the grid for 50 years. Here he's mastered the techniques of a life tuned to nature, dependent on his natural environment for survival. He also has the largest collection of native Appalachian and Chinese medicinal herbs in the Eastern US. Join me on this most epic look into a lifestyle that is becoming more attractive to many in this rapidly developing world. This is part of our greater Appalachia series: • APPALACHIA 🇺🇸

Deep in the hills of Appalachia is a land of beauty laced with heavy dr*g abuse. In some of these communities up to 50% of the 20-40 year olds are addicted to hard dr*gs creating a generation of children being raised by grandparents. Join me and the locals as we travel into the hills of Eastern Kentucky to show you the gravity of this situation, and also introduce you to the people who are creating positive ways out.

Deep in the woods of rural Appalachia is a man that lives alone on his land. He grows his own food, has no government ID, his overhead is $140 a month, and he possesses a claimed happiness by being free from the system, inspired by faith. Join me as we travel into the sticks of Kentucky to dive into the fascinating world of Titus Morris. If you want to connect with Titus you can email him at: titusmorrisministry@yahoo.com Make sure to leave your phone number and he will try to call you back!

Southern West Virginia to Eastern Kentucky is the largest region of economically distressed counties in the country. In many ways, it's a different America here. But what's it feel like to travel through this region in Appalachia and what do the locals have to say? ...

At his new restaurant, Hickory at Nicewonder Farm and Vineyards, chef Travis Milton celebrates the people and produce that make Appalachian food so special — but he had to learn to take care of himself first.Travis Milton didn't set out to be an evangelist for Appalachian cuisine, and he seems borderline surprised that he's ended up making a name for himself as a chef. But if you get to chatting with him for just a minute or two, it makes all the sense in the world. After earning his degree in education, the Castlewood, Virginia-born Milton was barely making ends...

Vice President Kamala Harris promoted the Biden administration’s "critical" coronavirus "American Rescue Plan" this week in a pair of interviews with local TV stations in West Virginia and Arizona. But U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., said he was surprised by the Harris interview in his state, claiming no one from the administration had called him to discuss the appearance, WSAZ-TV of Huntington, W.Va., reported. The communication gap was a departure from the national "unity" theme that Harris and President Biden have promoted, he suggested.

Any mother who has had to bury her child — one of the most devastating and enduring tragedies of motherhood — can take heart on Mother’s Day. You are not alone. The mother who was the very inspiration for the holiday, Ann Marie Reeves Jarvis, lost seven of her 11 children during the mid-1800s in rural Virginia. The dedication to honoring and supporting mothers displayed by Ann Marie Reeves Jarvis inspired her daughter Anna Jarvis, who never married or had children, to lobby for a holiday to honor “the best mother who ever lived — your mother.” After a few...

NEW YORK - U.S. oil output from seven major shale formations is expected to rise 84,000 barrels per day (bpd) in March to a record of about 8.4 million bpd, the U.S. Energy Information Administration said in a monthly report on Tuesday. The largest change is forecast in the Permian Basin of Texas and New Mexico, where output is expected to climb by 43,000 bpd to a record 4.024 million bpd in March. A shale revolution has helped boost the United States to the position of world's biggest crude oil producer, ahead of Saudi Arabia and Russia. Overall crude production...

BECKLEY, W.Va. — Bluestone Resources announced on Thursday it is hiring 290 additional workers for the company’s coal mines in West Virginia, Virginia and Kentucky. Bluestone Resources Inc CEO Jay Justice Most of the new positions will be at the Keystone Surface Mine in McDowell County and at the Bishop Surface Mine in Tazewell County, which is reopening. Bluestone also will be hiring miners at its Wise, Virginia, and Pike County, Kentucky, sites. Jay Justice, who operates the mines for Justice Companies, said in a press release that a variety of jobs are being offered, and that a new training...

PIKEVILLE, Ky. — On Election Day 2016, Jonathan Webb found himself on a lavish cruise liner with America‘s elite, gliding along the Atlantic outside of Miami. Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, was there, and so were Quentin Tarantino, Erin Brockovich, TV legend Norman Lear and singer will.i.am. Celebrity chefs were stationed at different eateries; yoga gurus offered spiritual talks and meditations. Webb, who was working with the Obama White House at the time, was used to being in rarefied company. But still, he found the experience surreal — and it was about to get even weirder. On TV screens...

Jamestown, Tennessee, is one of the poorest towns with a majority-white population in the US. The area overwhelmingly voted for Donald Trump and locals believe new jobs will now come - but will that be enough to turn around decades of economic distress? Nine years after his plumbing company collapsed at the height of the credit crunch, Clint Barta is feeling confident enough to start again. "It's only been days, so it's a bit slow," says Barta who has been in the business for 33 years. "But I'm meeting with a builder tomorrow." The plumber had to lay off 75...

Laura Reston and Sara Jones wrote an April piece in the New Republic about why Appalachia needs big government. In the article, they lay out why the Appalachian Regional Commission, or ARC, is an example of big government at its best. And with Trump’s budget taking aim at this extra layer of government bureaucracy, the authors declare that the president has abandoned this part of the country that helped propel him to victory last fall. Places like Hancock County, Tennessee, have seen manufacturing jobs disappear over the last decade. Plants are moving to China. Coal jobs are vanishing. Since Hillary...

WHEELING — West Virginia’s congressional delegation is showing a unified front in pushing for an ethane storage hub for central Appalachia, and they hope state leaders in Ohio and Pennsylvania join them. U.S. Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., were joined Thursday by Rep. David McKinley, R-Wheeling, and American Chemistry Council President Cal Dooley for a news conference to tout the economic benefits of placing the hub near oil and gas reserves in Appalachia rather than near chemical industry operations on the Gulf Coast. Manchin and Moore, along with Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, last week introduced the...

"... Nineteen sixty-five was the year everything began to change. First, there was Vietnam. Opposition to the war tended to divide the country along class lines, with the college-educated elite avoiding service and the fighting and dying left to the average man..."

In the weeks leading up to the inauguration, Yahoo News visited towns and cities across the country, speaking to voters who had supported Donald Trump in the election. As the shape of his administration emerged, we asked voters if they were happy with their choice and optimistic about the future. Here is some of what we found: SANDY HOOK, Ky.—It used to be known as the most reliably Democratic county in America. In a state that had long ago gone deep red, Elliott County, located here in the winding forested hills of remote eastern Kentucky, was a true anomaly. Since...

Over the summer, my little sister had a soccer tournament at Bloomsburg University, located in central Pennsylvania. The drive there was about three hours and many of the towns we drove through shocked me. The conditions of these towns were terrible. Houses were falling apart. Bars and restaurants were boarded up. Scrap metal was thrown across front lawns. White, plastic lawn chairs were out on the drooping front porches. There were no malls. No outlets. Most of these small towns did not have a Walmart, only a dollar store and a few run down thrift stores. In almost every town,...

On Thursday morning the "Today" show had a segment with a psycologist who was there to guide parents on how to explain Hillary Clinton's loss to their children. "Well that is interesting, they sure didn't have a child psycologist on to explain to my children the loss of Mitt Romney, or John McCain. You just simply did not have that," said a suburban mother sitting in the waiting room of a doctor's office with the morning show streaming on the television. The young mother, an IT professional who lives in Pittsburgh, the "Paris of Appalachia," said she was stunned once...

The Far East’s Ginseng root is best known for its medicinal (and aphrodisiacal) qualities. The root, in its natural state, is wildly popular in Asia—but also in short supply. To sate this demand, a black market for wild ginseng has cropped in the most unlikely of places: Appalachia. Currently, the global market for wild ginseng is around $2 billion. Long a staple in China and Korea, the root is finding new popularity in Singapore and Malaysia now, too. Most ginseng is grown in factory-like settings on a mass scale. But wild ginseng is considered more potent and, thus, more expensive....

An Appalachian people offers a timely parable of the nuanced history of race in America Head into Sneedville from the Clinch river, turn left at the courthouse and crawl up Newman’s Ridge. Do not be distracted by the driveways meandering into the woods, the views across the Appalachians or the shadows of the birds of prey; heed the warnings locals may have issued about the steepness and the switchbacks. If the pass seems challenging, consider how inaccessible it must have been in the moonshining days before motor cars. Halfway down, as Snake Hollow appears on your left, you reach a...