Appalachian Figures
If you follow Caney Creek up through the narrow valley of Knott County, you eventually reach a campus that looks almost like a small town of its own. For much of the twentieth century, the person most closely identified with that place was not a governor or an industrialist, but an educator everyone simply called “Miss June.”
Dr. June Buchanan spent nearly seventy years in Pippa Passes, Kentucky, helping to build the Caney Creek Community Center and what became Alice Lloyd College. Her story winds from a small town in upstate New York to a one room shack in the mountains, and it survives today in letters, photographs, oral histories, and the institutions that still carry her name.
From Moravia to the mountains
June Buchanan was born on June 21, 1887, in Moravia, a village in upstate New York. Her parents, Frank and Julia Buchanan, were active churchgoers and community people, and later accounts emphasize that she learned both financial discipline and a sense of service by watching her family at work.
Buchanan graduated from Syracuse University with a bachelor’s degree in 1913, then taught school in Groton, New York, before enrolling at Wellesley College for graduate study in the liberal arts. While she did not complete a formal graduate program, Wellesley would change the course of her life.
During the 1910s, women at Wellesley heard about a Massachusetts journalist named Alice Spencer Geddes Lloyd who had moved to Knott County, Kentucky, and begun organizing schools under the banner of the Caney Creek Community Center. They raised money for a multi purpose recreation hall on Caney Creek, and their reports of this work found their way to Buchanan.
Inspired, she wrote a letter to Alice Lloyd offering to visit and help. Lloyd accepted. In January 1919 Buchanan arrived on Caney Creek to assist at the community center, stepping into a young institution that had already begun experimenting with rural education long before the college existed.
That first stay was brief, but it convinced Buchanan that her future was in the mountains. She returned, adjusted to “country life” and to her students, and gradually took on more responsibility in both the classroom and the office.
Building a school on Caney Creek
When Buchanan joined Lloyd in 1919, the Caney Creek Community Center was still centered on what is now remembered as the “Founder’s Shack,” a small structure where Lloyd had organized a general school for mountain children in 1916. Historical markers today credit those early years with laying the groundwork for the Caney Creek Community Center, the later college, and a network of more than one hundred small schools across eastern Kentucky.
In 1923 Lloyd and Buchanan helped charter Caney Junior College, a small institution built on the community center’s work and located along the same stretch of creek. It would not take on the name Alice Lloyd College until after Lloyd’s death in 1962, but from the beginning Buchanan was intertwined with its development.
College and community center operated together. Lloyd and Buchanan opened grade schools in neighboring hollows, expecting that promising students would eventually continue their education on Caney Creek. The college embraced a work study model in which mountain students helped operate the campus so that tuition would not shut out those without money.
Institutional records from the founding era survive in the Alice Lloyd–Caney Creek Community Center papers at the University of Kentucky’s Special Collections Research Center. The collection, covering roughly 1915 to 1972, preserves early correspondence, reports, and administrative files that show the experiment Buchanan joined in 1919 was as much about community development as it was about classroom instruction.
Buchanan herself quickly became indispensable. Later institutional histories and campus narratives describe her as both teacher and financial manager, the person who balanced budgets, kept donors informed, and trained mountain students to run a campus far from any city.
Letters, interviews, and the archival “Miss June”
For a figure who worked in a relatively remote corner of Appalachia, Buchanan left a surprisingly wide archival footprint.
One of the clearest glimpses of her in mid career comes from the James Still Correspondence Database, which indexes letters in the Kentucky writer’s personal papers. Among them is a piece of correspondence simply labeled “Buchanan, June,” dated April 29, 1965. The database describes her as “Co founder, Alice Lloyd College” and notes that the letter was sent from the “Office of the President, Caney Creek Community Center, Pippa Passes, Kentucky.” Even in the 1960s, decades into her work, Buchanan was still writing in the name of both the college and the community center.
Her own voice survives more directly in an oral history interview preserved by the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky. Cataloged as “Interview with June Buchanan,” the recording is part of a Kentucky history student project and is available through the Kentucky Oral History website. While the full transcript and audio must be consulted in the archive, the record stands as one of the few structured interviews in which Buchanan tells her story herself.
At Pippa Passes, the McGaw Library and Learning Center administers Alice Lloyd College’s own archives, including an Appalachian Special Collection, the Appalachian Photo Archive, and the Appalachian Oral History Collection. The Photo Archive features historic images of the central Appalachian region, while the Oral History Collection contains more than 2,000 taped interviews from the 1970s that document local history and folklore. Many of those interviews were created through a four college collaboration known as the Appalachian Oral History Project, which deposited its master transcripts at the National Agricultural Library in Maryland and published a Union Catalog in 1977 to help researchers locate specific interviews by place and topic.
Photographs add another layer. In the Earl Palmer Appalachian Photograph and Artifact Collection at Virginia Tech, one image is simply titled “Students at Alice Lloyd College, Kentucky,” dated broadly to the 1940s through 1970s. While Buchanan herself is not named in the catalog entry, this sort of visual record preserves the look of the campus and the student body during the years she was most active.
Perhaps the most unexpected cache of Buchanan related material sits far from eastern Kentucky, in the Kansas City Browning Society Records at the State Historical Society of Missouri. The society, founded to study the poetry of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, maintained close ties with Browning enthusiasts in New England and beyond. Within its boxes are folders labeled “Alice Lloyd College and Caney Creek Community Center,” including correspondence with the college and center from 1970 to 1977, college newsletters from the 1970s and 1980s, a copy of Miracle on Caney Creekautographed by Buchanan, and correspondence about the June Buchanan School as late as 1987.
The same finding aid lists an essay titled “Brownings’ Pippa Passes” by Kansas City club founder Ola Jones Nisbet, tying the society’s literary interests directly to the Browning poem that inspired the name of the Kentucky town where Buchanan worked. The Kansas City club’s files therefore document not only literary study, but also the way Browning societies around the country funded and remembered the Caney Creek experiment.
Taken together, these letters, interviews, photographs, and club archives show that “Miss June” was not only a local figure. She lived in correspondence networks that stretched from Pippa Passes to Kansas City, from Knott County to national audiences who read about “miracles” in the mountains.
Purpose Road and the work college experiment
Alice Lloyd College is perhaps best known today for its status as a private work college that does not charge tuition to students from its Appalachian service area. That model grew from the intertwined educational and moral philosophy that Lloyd and Buchanan taught on campus, known as the Purpose Road.
The Purpose Road Philosophy originated with Harvard professor George Herbert Palmer, but Lloyd and Buchanan adapted it for a mountain work college. In college publications the philosophy is described as a path of character formation and “world service,” encouraging students to understand their education as preparation for serving both God and community, then returning to their home counties to lead.
Institutional histories and later ethnographic work emphasize Buchanan’s role in translating that ideal into daily practice. P. David Searles’s A College for Appalachia: Alice Lloyd on Caney Creek situates the college in the broader history of Appalachian education and notes how the work program and Purpose Road ideals were meant to develop local leaders rather than encourage out migration.
Lindsey Mica Rudibaugh’s dissertation, Helping the Way We Are Needed: Ethnography of an Appalachian Work College, conducted at Alice Lloyd College in the early twenty first century, shows how those principles persisted into the modern era. Rudibaugh describes a campus culture where students continue to work their way through school in exchange for tuition and where staff members repeatedly invoke the language of service and Purpose Road as they mentor students.
Campus stories about Buchanan illustrate how seriously she took this ethic. In a centennial article titled “Honoring Miss June’s Legacy,” the college recounts how, during a December 1920 fire, Buchanan rushed back into a burning office to save a basket of Christmas donations intended for the community center, underscoring the degree to which she linked money, mission, and responsibility. College sponsored “Crusades” sent students around the country on fundraising and speaking trips, teaching them to talk about their education as a shared Appalachian project rather than a private good.
Legacy in schools, clinics, and a small mountain town
In 1962, after Alice Lloyd’s death, Caney Junior College was renamed Alice Lloyd College. Buchanan remained on campus, teaching, managing finances, and representing the institution to donors and visitors. By the 1970s she had become, in effect, the living link between the Founder’s Shack generation and a modern four year college.
The college and its neighbors began naming places for her even before she died. The June Buchanan Alumni Center opened on campus in 1976, and in 1984 the college founded the June Buchanan School, a K 12 preparatory school in Pippa Passes that serves local children and bears her full name. Campus publications underline that the school’s Crusader mascot is a deliberate nod to the fundraising and service “Crusades” Buchanan once led with college students.
Her name also extends into regional health care. The June Buchanan Medical Clinic opened in Hindman in 1974 and later became part of the University of Kentucky’s Center for Excellence in Rural Health. A history of the center notes that the clinic was named for Buchanan as a New York native who co founded Alice Lloyd College and served as mayor of Pippa Passes. Oral history interviews in the “Health Care Advocates in Eastern Kentucky” project at the Nunn Center document how community members saw the clinic as a crucial local resource for care.
Buchanan lived long enough to see many of these tributes. She died on May 31, 1988, at age one hundred, in a hospital in Martin, Kentucky, after a lifetime of service in Knott County. Contemporary accounts and later reference works remember her not only as co founder and longtime treasurer of the college, but also as mayor of the tiny municipal government of Pippa Passes.
Today her name appears on an alumni center, a school, a clinic, and on countless plaques and donor rolls scattered across campus. Yet her legacy is just as present in quieter things: the expectation that students work to pay their way, the language of Purpose Road, and the ongoing pattern of mountain students returning home to teach, practice medicine, and lead in their communities.
Sources & further reading
Alice Lloyd–Caney Creek Community Center papers, 1915–1972, University of Kentucky Special Collections Research Center, Lexington, Kentucky.
James Still papers, 1885–2007, University of Kentucky Special Collections Research Center. See the James Still Correspondence Database entry “Buchanan, June,” 29 April 1965.
“Interview with June Buchanan,” Student Projects: Kentucky History Class Oral History Project, Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, University of Kentucky.
Appalachian Oral History Project Collection and Appalachian Oral History Project: Union Catalog, National Agricultural Library Special Collections, Beltsville, Maryland.
Appalachian Oral History Collection and Appalachian Photo Archive, McGaw Library and Learning Center, Alice Lloyd College, Pippa Passes, Kentucky.
Kansas City Browning Society Records (K0003), The State Historical Society of Missouri Research Center – Kansas City, especially folders on Alice Lloyd College, Caney Creek Community Center, Miracle on Caney Creek, and the June Buchanan School.
Earl Palmer Appalachian Photograph and Artifact Collection, Ms1989-025, Special Collections and University Archives, Virginia Tech: “Students at Alice Lloyd College, Kentucky.”
Health Care Advocates in Eastern Kentucky Oral History Project, Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, interviews referencing the June Buchanan Clinic.
Jerry C. Davis, Miracle on Caney Creek: June Buchanan Joins Alice Lloyd in a Crusade to Educate Kentucky Mountain Leaders (Thoroughbred Press / Caney Creek Community Center, 1982).
P. David Searles, A College for Appalachia: Alice Lloyd on Caney Creek (University Press of Kentucky, 1995).
Lindsey Mica Rudibaugh, Helping the Way We Are Needed: Ethnography of an Appalachian Work College (PhD dissertation, Prescott College, 2015).
Carole Crowe-Carraco, The Big Sandy (regional history with discussion of Alice Lloyd College and interviews with June Buchanan).
“Our History,” “The Purpose Road,” and “Honoring Miss June’s Legacy,” Alice Lloyd College, alc.edu. Alice Lloyd College+2Alice Lloyd College+2
“The June Buchanan School,” Alice Lloyd College. Alice Lloyd College
“UK June Buchanan Medical Clinic,” University of Kentucky Center for Excellence in Rural Health. UK College of Medicine
“Alice Lloyd College,” Kentucky Historical Marker 653, ExploreKYHistory and related marker entries for the Founder’s Shack. Explore Kentucky History+2Kentucky History+2
“June Buchanan,” biographical entry, Wikipedia, with references to A College for Appalachia, Miracle on Caney Creek, and contemporary obituaries. Wikipedia