Appalachian Figures
For most Kentuckians who follow basketball, the name McBrayer is not a person so much as a place. It is the arena in Richmond where Eastern Kentucky’s Colonels have hosted generations of opponents, a loud concrete bowl filled with maroon, pep bands, and the echoes of Ohio Valley Conference title runs.
Behind that arena, behind a scholarship for Anderson County students and stacks of letters from former players, stands a man whose story reaches from Bluegrass farms into the Appalachian classroom and gym. Coach Paul Sullivan McBrayer grew up in what archivists have long labeled simply “Kavanaugh, Kentucky,” a vague place-name that has since helped misplace him on maps and in online biographies.
Tracing McBrayer’s life means tracing two Kavanaughs. One is the unincorporated rail-side community in Boyd County along the Big Sandy River, anchored by Kavanaugh Chapel United Methodist Church and its small school. The other is Kavanaugh High School in Anderson County, a college preparatory school in Lawrenceburg that sent a remarkable number of students on to the University of Kentucky.
Untangling those Kavanaughs, and the McBrayer families attached to them, helps us see Paul S. McBrayer more clearly as a figure whose life was shaped in the Bluegrass but whose greatest work took place in a college that served eastern and Appalachian Kentucky.
A boy from “Kavanaugh”
Eastern Kentucky University’s own archivists give us the most compact early biography of McBrayer in the finding aid to the Paul McBrayer Papers, a 3.33 cubic foot collection of correspondence, photographs, programs, and memorabilia donated by his wife Kathryn in 2001.
The “Collection Historical Note” begins with a simple line: “Paul McBrayer was born October 12, 1909 in Kavanaugh, KY. He attended Kavanaugh High School where he played basketball. In 1926 he started playing for the University of Kentucky where he was selected as an All-American in 1930.”
Those few sentences already hold the seeds of later confusion. The finding aid supplies only “Kavanaugh, KY,” with no county, yet immediately links that place with Kavanaugh High School and with a pipeline that led directly into the Kentucky Wildcats program. That cluster fits Anderson County far better than Boyd. Kavanaugh High School stood near Lawrenceburg in Anderson County, evolving from Kavanaugh Academy into a county high school under educator Rhoda C. Kavanaugh and serving local farm families and town students alike.
Basketball historians at the University of Kentucky back up that Anderson County reading. A list of Wildcat All Americans places “Paul McBrayer” at forward on the 1930 team, while BigBlueHistory’s player entry gives his hometown as “Lawrenceburg, KY (Kavanaugh)” and notes his pre-UK career at Kavanaugh High School. Genealogical databases like FamilySearch and Wikitree, which compile vital records and user-submitted family research, likewise tend to place his birth in Anderson County and often specify Ninevah, a rural community near Lawrenceburg.
Taken together, these strands point strongly toward an Anderson County childhood: a boy raised in the countryside around Ninevah, educated at Kavanaugh High School, and then plucked into the growing machine of Kentucky basketball in Lexington.
From Kavanaugh gym to Rupp’s bench
By the late 1920s McBrayer was on the floor in Lexington. He joined the Wildcats in 1926 and was recognized as an All American in 1930, one of the early stars in a program that was still building its national reputation.
When his playing days ended, he moved into the classroom and onto the sideline. The EKU finding aid notes that his first coaching stop was Morton Junior High School, followed by two years back at Kavanaugh High School, this time as coach rather than player. In 1934 he joined the University of Kentucky staff as an assistant under Adolph Rupp, working primarily with freshmen and learning the sharp practices and motion-heavy offense that would define mid-century Kentucky basketball.
World War II interrupted careers all over the Commonwealth, and McBrayer was no exception. During the war he left Kentucky to serve as a staff sergeant in the United States Army. When he returned to Lexington after the war, the staff chart had shifted; Rupp told him there were no assistant positions available.
That setback opened the door to his life’s work. Soon afterward, Eastern Kentucky State College president William F. O’Donnell invited McBrayer to take over as head coach in Richmond.
Building Eastern’s program and serving a region
When McBrayer arrived in Richmond in 1946, Eastern was moving from small-college competition toward a larger stage. Over the next sixteen seasons, he guided that transition and left a record that still stands at the top of EKU’s coaching list.
The athletics department’s official “All-Time Head Coaches” page credits him with a 219 win, 144 loss record between 1946 and 1962, the best in school history, with three Ohio Valley Conference regular season titles and two NCAA tournament berths. The Hall of Fame biography adds color to those numbers: in his first season he led Eastern to 11 straight wins and a 21 4 record, and at one point he won 38 consecutive home games in Weaver Gymnasium.
The EKU finding aid emphasizes his role in lifting Eastern from the Kentucky Intercollegiate Athletic Conference into the world of Division I basketball, noting that “he accomplished more than any other coach before or for decades afterward” in building the program.
Eastern’s mission as a regional teachers college meant that the players who filed into Weaver Gym under McBrayer’s whistle often came from the hills and hollows of eastern and southeastern Kentucky. EKU drew heavily from Appalachian counties for its student body; its rosters reflected that catchment area. Oral histories and Hall of Fame entries for figures like coach Guy Strong, who played at Eastern after returning from Army service, describe playing for McBrayer as a pivotal step in their own careers.
Strong and others carried McBrayer’s lessons back into Kentucky high schools and college programs, spreading his influence across the region’s gyms. Local Hall of Fame biographies from Madison County and EKU repeatedly refer to him as a “legendary” or “famous” coach, a sign of how deeply his tenure shaped basketball culture in and around Richmond.
Letters, reunions, and a name in concrete
If the wins and losses show up in record books, the deeper story of McBrayer’s relationships sits quietly in the boxes of his papers at Eastern Kentucky University. The collection’s scope note makes plain that the largest single category of material is correspondence from former players who kept in touch for decades, along with photographs of their families.
Box 7 alone includes a folder of “Paul McBrayer Newspaper Articles,” general correspondence, a dedicated McBrayer Arena folder with letters and clippings about the decision to name the court after him, and a folder documenting the Anderson County Paul McBrayer Scholarship, with thank you notes and local newspaper stories about recipients. Another folder holds a carefully sequenced scrapbook from “Paul McBrayer Appreciation Day” in 1973, filled with letters and articles celebrating his career.
Those papers show how Eastern’s decision to bestow his name on its primary basketball facility was not a simple administrative act but the culmination of years of alumni lobbying and formal resolutions. The athletics department today notes that “the current home of Colonel Basketball is named in McBrayer’s honor,” and describes him as “a name synonymous with Eastern Kentucky University Basketball.”
His recognition reached beyond Richmond. In 1987 he entered the Kentucky Athletic Hall of Fame, and in 2006 he was inducted into the Ohio Valley Conference Hall of Fame as one of the league’s foundational basketball coaches.
Back home, his name became attached to educational support. The EKU finding aid notes that “a scholarship was named in his honor for Anderson County students,” and statewide scholarship directories list a “Paul McBrayer Memorial Scholarship” among Kentucky’s named awards.
McBrayer died of cancer in Lexington in 1999, as summarized in his finding aid’s note drawn from obituaries in the Lexington Herald-Leader and The Anderson News and echoed in contemporary sports coverage. Yet his paper trail, and the arena that bears his name, keep his story within reach for anyone willing to trace it.
Boyd County’s McBrayers and the Kavanaugh problem
So where do Boyd County and the Big Sandy figure into this story?
Part of the answer lies in the power of a single ambiguous word. When the EKU archivist wrote that McBrayer was born in “Kavanaugh, KY,” modern readers and database editors had to decide which Kavanaugh they thought that meant. Many online catalogs and even Wikipedia’s category system have taken it to mean Kavanaugh in Boyd County, along U.S. 23 north of the Lawrence County line.
That Kavanaugh is very real. The community grew up around Kavanaugh Chapel United Methodist Church and cemetery, founded in 1866 and named for Bishop Hubbard Hinde Kavanaugh. A small Kavanaugh School operated beside the church until consolidation in the mid twentieth century.
McBrayer is also a long-established surname in that corner of Boyd County. Teresa Martin Klaiber’s genealogical essay “Who Is Buried in McBrayer Cemetery, Boyd County, Kentucky?” follows James R. and Anna Sanders McBrayer from earlier homes in Greenup, Lawrence, and Carter Counties onto land at the end of Four Mile Creek near Kavanaugh Chapel. Her research, anchored in eighteenth and nineteenth century deed books and court records, shows James R. securing title to roughly two hundred acres after protracted litigation in Carter County Circuit Court, then selling the land to the Lexington and Big Sandy Railroad in 1875.
Klaiber’s narrative describes how that “company land” was later surface mined, destroying the family burial ground whose stones she had visited in 1968. It also sketches a web of relations that includes James R.’s son Solomon S. McBrayer, a drayman whose Civil War service ended tragically after he volunteered with the 39th Kentucky Infantry and died from a gangrenous wound.
The Civil War Governors of Kentucky project adds further documentation. Its subject entry for “Solomon S. McBrayer (drayman, Boyd County)” ties him to the 1860 federal census in Catlettsburg and to a Boyd Circuit Court case, while a related subject entry for “German Mays” lists both Solomon and James R. McBrayer among the farmers and townsmen named in the same legal files.
In other words, the surname McBrayer and the place-name Kavanaugh are tightly woven together in Boyd County history. It is easy to see how a later reader, encountering “born in Kavanaugh, KY” in a finding aid, would assume Boyd County and then classify Paul S. McBrayer as a Boyd Countian.
What the records we can see now suggest instead is a more layered picture. His immediate family and schooling are rooted in Anderson County, and his own life never appears in the Boyd County census or newspapers. The Boyd County McBrayers are a different branch whose story also deserves attention: frontier migrants who carved out land along the Big Sandy and then saw their cemetery erased by modern industry. Whether and where the Anderson County and Boyd County lines join is a question for deeper genealogical work using the deeds, census pages, and probate records that Klaiber and the Civil War Governors project point us toward.
Why McBrayer belongs in an Appalachian history
If Paul S. McBrayer was born in the Bluegrass rather than the coalfields, why claim him as an Appalachian figure at all?
Part of the answer is institutional. From the 1940s through the early 1960s, Eastern Kentucky State College was the teachers’ college and later university for a swath of eastern Kentucky that stretched into the mountain counties. Students from Harlan, Letcher, Perry, Floyd, and other Appalachian counties made their way to Richmond for education degrees, business training, and the chance to keep playing ball. McBrayer coached many of those students, taught physical education courses, and became one of the most visible public faces of a campus that served the region.
Part of the answer is relational. The correspondents who fill his papers were often first generation college students who returned to small towns as teachers and coaches. Their letters, saved by McBrayer and now preserved at EKU, testify to the way a single coach’s philosophy could ripple outward through high school programs in Appalachia, shaping how the game was played and what it meant to young people.
And part of the answer, paradoxically, lies in the very confusion over his birthplace. The name Kavanaugh sits in both Anderson and Boyd Counties. The surname McBrayer is associated both with Anderson County farmsteads and with a lost cemetery on “company land” at the mouth of Four Mile Creek. As we untangle which Kavanaugh belonged to Paul S. McBrayer, we also see how families, churches, and schools connected the Bluegrass and the Big Sandy over the long nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Standing in McBrayer Arena today, it is easy to read the name as just another piece of athletic branding. The archival and genealogical work behind that concrete lettering tells a richer story of a coach who carried lessons from a small Anderson County high school into the broader eastern Kentucky region and of a surname that threads through both the Bluegrass and Appalachia.
Sources & Further Reading
Paul McBrayer Papers, 1940 2001, Eastern Kentucky University Special Collections and Archives. Finding aid with biographical note, box and folder listings, and descriptions of correspondence, photographs, McBrayer Arena materials, and Anderson County scholarship files. EKU Finding Aids+1
Eastern Kentucky University Athletics, “Men’s Basketball All Time Head Coaches.” Official record of EKU coaches and records, including McBrayer’s 219 144 mark, titles, and arena naming. Eastern Kentucky University Athletics
Eastern Kentucky University Athletics, Hall of Fame biography, “Paul McBrayer (Class of 2006).” Short narrative of his EKU career, first season winning streak, 38 consecutive home wins, and Hall of Fame honors. Eastern Kentucky University Athletics
Eastern Kentucky University, Sports Information Office collection. Finding aid listing folders on “Men’s Basketball – Coach – Paul McBrayer” and Naismith Hall of Fame materials with clippings, releases, and appreciation pamphlets. EKU Finding Aids
Civil War Governors of Kentucky, subject entry “Solomon S. McBrayer (drayman, Boyd County).” Brief biographical description tied to the 1860 Boyd County census and a Boyd Circuit Court transcript. fromthepage.com
Civil War Governors of Kentucky, subject entry “German Mays (Boyd County, Kentucky, resident).” Lists James R. and Solomon S. McBrayer among the figures connected to a Boyd County court case, confirming the McBrayer presence in the Four Mile and Catlettsburg area. dev.fromthepage.com
Teresa Martin Klaiber, “Who Is Buried in McBrayer Cemetery, Boyd County, Kentucky?” Eastern Kentucky Genealogy blog (2020). Genealogical essay that reconstructs the McBrayer Cemetery at Four Mile Creek and documents James R. and Anna Sanders McBrayer, their land transactions, and the later destruction of the burial ground, with citations to Boyd and Carter County deed books and the West Virginia Methodist News. easternkentuckygenealogy.blogspot.com
Lexington Herald-Leader and The Anderson News obituaries for Paul McBrayer, as cited in the EKU finding aid, along with regional coverage of his death in national outlets. EKU Finding Aids+2EKU Finding Aids+2
“Paul McBrayer” entry, UK BigBlueHistory. Statistical summary and biographical sketch of his playing career at Kentucky, listing his hometown as Lawrenceburg (Kavanaugh) and noting his later coaching career. Big Blue History
“List of Kentucky Wildcats men’s basketball honorees,” Wikipedia. Confirms his recognition as a 1930 All American. Wikipedia
Walter’s Wildcat World, “Paul McBrayer.” Narrative biography of his early life, UK career, wartime service, and coaching tenure at Eastern Kentucky (used here primarily as a guide to primary sources it cites). wildcatworld.com
Ohio Valley Conference, “OVC Hall of Fame.” Lists Paul McBrayer among the 2006 inductees representing Eastern Kentucky. ovcsports.com
Kavanaugh, Kentucky, Wikipedia. Summary of the Boyd County community, its Methodist chapel, and its school, giving context to the place-name confusion in later biographies. Wikipedia
KHS/Kentucky historical marker documentation for Kavanaugh School (Lawrenceburg, Anderson County).Marker text tracing Kavanaugh Academy’s evolution into Kavanaugh High School and linking it to educator Rhoda C. Kavanaugh. HMDB
KHEAA, Kentucky scholarships directories. Entries listing the “Paul McBrayer Memorial Scholarship” and related Anderson County awards among state scholarship programs. kheaa.com