A Town Celebrates 100 Years of a More Sophisticated Name

Adapted in part from the memoir Eisenhower Babies: Growing Up on Moonshots, Comic Books, and Black-and-White TV.

By Ronnie Blair

New York City began as New Amsterdam. Atlanta was originally called Terminus. San Francisco was Yerba Buena.

Cities don’t always stick with the first names bestowed on them.

My hometown, Cumberland, Kentucky, is a less famous example.

Cumberland was founded in the 1830s with the uninspiring name Poor Fork, a case where geographic happenstance took precedence over shrewd marketing. The town lay along the Poor Fork of the Cumberland River. It took nearly a century for anyone to realize — at least officially — that this was an undignified name if the community wanted the respect due it. Finally, in 1926, town leaders opted for something classier and less emblematic of hard times.

This year, Cumberland is celebrating 100 years of its reenvisioned identity, with the centennial the theme of the annual Swappin’ Meetin’, a festival hosted Sept. 18-19 by Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College.

Cumberland’s population was about 4,200 when I was born, but it was less than half that in the 2020 census, a decline that coincides with the loss of coal mining jobs. But it proved to be a nice place to grow up from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. At that time, the mines thrived, and each day trains hauled coal out of our community to parts unknown — at least unknown to me. Train tracks crisscrossed the town, and traffic on the main streets would come to a halt as train cars rumbled past with mounds of coal peeking out from their open tops. My parents waited patiently through these interruptions, but I fidgeted anxiously in the back seat until the welcome sight of the caboose appeared. 

When no trains were in sight, we children walked those tracks because they provided shortcuts to a friend’s house, a store, or a swimming hole. We balanced on the rails or skipped from tie to tie, avoiding the gravel packed in between. Our journeys were always limited, but the rails stretched into infinity.

Books, Local Eccentrics, and a Supermarket Baron 

Like many small towns, Cumberland had its characters. One man walked the streets loudly talking to himself, as if explaining something of importance to an unseen companion. He was harmless, though, much like the character Elwood P. Dowd in the movie Harvey. We ignored him and any 6-foot, 3½-inch invisible rabbits tagging along at his side. 

Books weren’t that easy to come by in Cumberland, but the community did boast the Rebecca Caudill Public Library. The town named the library in honor of a children’s author born in Cumberland in 1899 when the community was still Poor Fork. Rebecca Caudill wrote more than 20 books, including Tree of Freedom, a 1950 Newbery Honor Book, and A Pocketful of Cricket, a 1964 Caldecott Honor Book. 

For me, though, Rebecca Caudill was the name of a building, and that building held enchantment. On an otherwise dull Saturday afternoon, I could entertain myself by examining the titles on the spines of a seemingly endless supply of reading material. I would pluck from the shelves a biography of Stephen Foster or a copy of Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days and dedicate the remainder of the day to immersing myself in a book’s pages, roused only when my parents reminded me it was my night to wash dishes.

During my childhood, Cumberland showed signs of economic progress, and Little League baseball gave me my first taste of how such progress could nonchalantly bulldoze tradition and never look back. Soon after my first summer in the league, we fledgling baseball players learned unsettling news. Our beloved baseball field was slated to be demolished and paved over to make way for a Cas Walker Supermarket, a grocery chain with several dozen stores in Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia. 

The chain’s crusty founder, Cas Walker, lived in Knoxville, where he served on the city council and often embroiled himself in controversy, such as in 1956 when a heated debate with fellow council member J. S. Cooper exploded into a fracas. Life magazine published a photograph of Walker with his fist drawn back, ready to slug Cooper as they tussled. Walker’s supermarket empire had grown steadily since he opened his first store in 1924 — presumably without fisticuffs. 

By 1967, Cas Walker and his chain set their sights on Cumberland and the one piece of land in the town’s commercial district large enough to hold a store and a sizable parking lot — our baseball field. The construction crew could knock down a couple of dugouts, dismantle the backstop behind home plate, and get right to paving and building.

The Cas Walker Supermarket became a popular destination for Cumberland grocery shoppers, so Walker certainly knew what he was doing. But we 9-year-olds did not see a shrewd and knowledgeable businessman. Cas Walker was our Dr. No, whose evil emissaries invaded our small town and carried out his diabolical plot to overthrow our childhood happiness. 

Early Adopters of Cable TV

Progress involved more than supermarkets. Since Cumberland was deep in the mountains, TV reception with an antenna was problematic. In the 1950s, a cable TV company opened in Cumberland, giving us access to five channels — two CBS affiliates, two NBC affiliates, and one ABC affiliate.

Only years later did I learn that cable TV was a foreign concept to many people living in cities. How could my tiny town in the mountains have been more technologically advanced than them? 

The answer lies in the reason someone invented cable TV to begin with. As television gained popularity in the 1940s, it became apparent that many areas of the country were just like Cumberland — too remote or too mountainous for TV viewers to pick up a signal with an antenna. The problem began to be solved in 1948 when cable was introduced simultaneously to communities in Oregon, Arkansas, and Pennsylvania, according to the California Broadband and Video Association. “Community antennas” were installed on mountaintops or other high areas.

This magical device brought our family an enormous amount of entertainment and in my parents’ view was well worth the price to keep my sister, my brother, and me occasionally occupied. The three of us sat transfixed as we watched such shows as Wagon Train, The Rifleman, Bat Masterson, Dennis the Menace, and Car 54, Where Are You? 

My mother tried to dissuade me from television’s more intense offerings, such as Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Outer Limits, The Twilight Zone, and Thriller. “You will have nightmares,” she warned.

But I would plead, and she would relent. 

Then I would have nightmares.

Another source of entertainment in Cumberland was a one-screen movie theater. My first visit there happened when my teenage cousin and her boyfriend volunteered to take my sister and me to see a movie. At least I think they volunteered. Perhaps they already had a date planned and my parents suddenly needed emergency babysitting help. 

The details didn’t matter to a 4-year-old who had never stepped inside a theater. I knew I was in for an adventure, and that surmise proved correct as we entered to see rows and rows of padded seats facing a mammoth curtain. In a while, the lights dimmed, and the curtain parted to reveal an enormous screen. 

The featured movie was Bon Voyage, a comedy about a family embarking on a cruise. Bon Voyage starred Fred MacMurray, a familiar face to me because he played the father on one of my favorite TV shows, My Three Sons.

I never saw Bon Voyage again, and I recall no details, yet that two hours in Cumberland’s one-screen theater seemed magical, and I felt a little older sitting with my cousin and her boyfriend, basking in the glow of Fred MacMurray.

An Encounter with the Law

For the most part, Cumberland was a law-abiding town, and a small police force helped keep it that way. My earliest personal encounter with a police officer came around the same time I saw Bon Voyage. He arrived at our door investigating the case of a miscreant youth who, armed with a BB gun, had shot out windows in the neighborhood. A poorly informed stool pigeon told the officer that the Blairs had a son and perhaps the officer would be wise to interrogate my mother about her boy’s whereabouts at the time of the crime. 

The officer loomed large in our doorway, and I peeked out from behind my mother, wondering if I was about to be hauled off to jail like those evildoers on 77 Sunset Strip, my favorite TV detective show at the time. The officer appeared amused as my mother introduced 4-year-old me and assured him that I did not own a BB gun (she would not allow such a thing) nor was I permitted to roam far from her watchful eye. 

The investigation evolved into a friendly chat, easing my worries of being led away in ill-fitting handcuffs. The officer noticed that I could not take my eyes off his gun, which looked so much more powerful than the cap pistols my mother did allow me to carry. He winked at me. “You like the gun?” he asked. “When I run out of bullets, I’ll come back and give it to you.”

My young mind began to calculate how long it might take him to exhaust his bullet supply, and I prayed for a massive crime spree to hit Cumberland. This day was turning out pretty well after all. My name had been cleared, and I was a few Untouchables-style shootouts away from owning an extraordinary prize. My father laughed when my mother and I told him of the day’s adventure and the officer’s carefully crafted promise to me.

“I don’t think he will be running out of bullets any time soon,” Dad said.

Presumably, he did not.

Happy birthday, Cumberland, and thanks for the memories.

Ronnie Blair is the author of the memoir Eisenhower Babies: Growing Up on Moonshots, Comic Books, and Black-and-White TV.