Started: August 12
Finished: August 13
Notes: After my father passed away a couple of months ago, I had to spend more than a little time in the area where he lived, McKee, Kentucky, which is the capital of Jackson County, Kentucky. My mother and father are from Jackson County, as are all my family going back as far as I am aware, and I've always considered Jackson County my second home, though I did not grow up there and never lived there, at least not longer than a week or so at a time. The region is considered "in the mountains," but they're not tolerably high mountains, more what I think of as overly-large hills, more like foothills into the Appalachians than actual mountains like you'd see further east in Kentucky and into West Virginia and western Virginia and even western North Carolina. It's a pretty region, and I like it there though it's a little too removed from the beaten path for me to likely ever consider moving there. Anyway, I've long wanted to know more about the history of the area, but there are not a lot of sources available to those living outside the region. As fate would have it, I walked into the town's phone company to settle up my dad's bill when I saw they had these books for sale. I picked one up and looked it over, and while it's not a hardcore history book, it more than suits my needs for background on the area, and it includes a number of photographs to add interest. It's time to step into the past.
Mini review: As might be expected, this is mostly a chamber-of-commerce-esque look at the economic and social history of Jackson County, but that's not a bad thing. This book provided some basics of which I had been unaware, and it was interesting to look at all the photos from the 19th and early 20the Centuries and to see how familiar places had looked different once upon a time. For more depth I will have to look elsewhere, but this was a nice start, brief and easy to read.
I picked up a local book on Maine while we were there. As I mentioned in my blog. WE also got quite a few of those pamphlets about local stuff. I still need to go through those. Nice to know the lay of the land.
ReplyDelete