Tom Gish, Noted Appalachian Publisher, Dies at 82

Tom Gish, publisher of The Mountain Eagle newspaper of Letcher County, Kentucky for more than fifty years, died on November 21, 2008 at age 82.

To read about his long and eventful publishing career: Click Here.

My branch of the Maggard family migrated from Letcher County to Arkansas around 1890. By the late 1950s, with my great grandfather Elihu Maggard dead more than thirty years, the memory of our connection to Letcher County had been essentially forgotten. At that time Bud Phillips, the husband of one of my grandfather's half-sisters, began trying to research the family history but could get nowhere until my grandfather happened to remember that when he was a boy his father once talked about Whitesburg, Kentucky, the county seat of Letcher County. Bud wrote to The Mountain Eagle asking if there were any Maggard families in Letcher County -- which was a little like asking if there are Kennedy families in Ireland -- the ultimate result of which was the Maggard family history Coming Down Cumberland.

If you have an interest in Maggard family history, Coming Down Cumberland is certainly recommended. Indeed, it is one of only two books ever written on the subject. I will caution you, however, that everything in it prior to the coming of Samuel Maggard and his wife Rebecca Robertson to what is now Letcher County is, so far as I can tell, highly speculative and without any real documentary foundation.