Gov. Flem D. Sampson

Barbourville, KY

Incorporated in October 1879 in the mountains of southeastern Kentucky, Union College conferred its first degrees in 1893. Several of its buildings — Centennial Hall, Speed Hall, and the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Gymnasium — have since been listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The college became a lasting center of learning for the Appalachian region.

London, KY

Opened in 1897 and named for a Madison County promoter, the Sue Bennett Memorial School was founded by local people and the Methodist church to educate the children of the Kentucky mountains. It taught all grades and evolved through a commercial department, a normal school, and by 1922 a junior college. Over a full century it educated more than 11,000 students before closing in 1997.

London, KY

Laurel Seminary grew from an 1826 act of the Kentucky legislature that set aside land to fund education in Laurel and other counties. The land was eventually sold and the seminary opened in 1858, only to be pressed into service as a hospital during the Civil War. In 1900 Governor W. S. Taylor even convened a special session of the legislature here, and the institution carried on as a common, private, and public school into the twentieth century.

Burnside, KY

Two years before the Boy Scouts of America was chartered, a schoolteacher named Myra Greeno Bass gathered fifteen boys in the Cumberland River town of Burnside, Kentucky, in the spring of 1908 and began leading them on hikes and camping trips. Working from the official handbook of the British scouting movement that Robert Baden-Powell had launched only a year earlier, she taught woodcraft and outdoor skills that would look entirely familiar to a scout today. Her group called itself the Eagle Troop, and it predated the national American organization that would soon sweep up boys across the country.