Appalachian Figures
If you drive into Middlesboro after dark and happen to look up, a lighted cross still glows on the ridge above Cumberland Avenue. Local memory ties that landmark to a coal miner from nearby Fork Ridge who spent most of the twentieth century trying to preach with concrete, corrugated metal, and whatever scrap he could scavenge. Henry Harrison Mayes signed some of his letters “God’s Advertiser.” By the time he died in the mid 1980s, he had scattered thousands of signs that told passing strangers to “Prepare to meet God,” “Jesus is coming soon,” or simply “Get right with God.”
Today the story of Mayes is split between archives and highways. His voice and image live on in reels of tape and film at the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian. His tools, jackets, bicycles, and unplaced markers fill a gallery at the Museum of Appalachia in Clinton, Tennessee. His concrete crosses and hearts still stand in pastures, on side roads, in small-town parks, and in church yards from Kentucky and Tennessee to Ohio, Alabama, Georgia, and beyond.
For those of us trying to write Appalachian history from the ground up, Mayes offers a nearly perfect case study. He was not a seminary-trained minister and not a professional artist. He was a Holiness-influenced coal miner who turned his near death in a Bell County mine into a lifetime roadside ministry. His archive is scattered across concrete, dirt, and magnetic tape.
Fork Ridge, Mingo Hollow, and a coal car that did not kill him
Most sources agree that Henry Harrison Mayes was born on February 8, 1898, in Fork Ridge, Claiborne County, Tennessee, just over the line from Bell County, Kentucky. He grew up in a coal camp world and went to work in the mines as a teenager.
According to later newspaper interviews and family accounts, the turning point came underground. As Atlas Obscura summarizes it, Mayes was working as a car coupler when a loaded coal car broke free in the mine and crushed him against a wall, shattering his chest. Doctors told his family he would not live through the night. Mayes prayed, promising that if he survived he would spend the rest of his life trying to win souls.
He recovered slowly and went back to the mines in Mingo Hollow, west of Middlesboro. He also began keeping that promise. As a teenager he had already tacked handwritten Bible verses to telephone poles, but after the accident he started thinking in terms of a full time “sign ministry.” In later years he worked under his coal company number, 219, reserving that “sermon number” so that any coal cars tagged with it would send his overtime pay into the sign fund. Family oral history remembers him as a man who worked regular shifts underground and then poured that money, plus freelance sign painting income, into concrete, lumber, and paint.
Wood, cardboard, and the problem of weather
In the 1910s and 1920s, before he ever poured a concrete mold, Mayes worked with cheap, fragile materials. Appalachia already knew the rhythm of Burma Shave jingles on the roadside. Mayes wanted something similar but theologically sharper. Appalachian History’s public history sketch notes that he began his roadside mission around 1917, soon after the accident, and paid for it out of coal mining and sign painting.
He painted slogans on wooden boards, cardboard, and oilcloth and wired them to trees and fenceposts along two lane roads. By one later estimate, he had erected more than 1,600 wooden and cardboard signs in twenty five states by the mid 1940s.
Newspaper writers sought him out even then. A long running “Strolling” column in the Knoxville News Sentinel profiled “the man behind the signs” during the mid 1940s and recorded his irritation with weather and vandals. He had come to believe that flimsy materials were no match for Appalachian winters and mountain teenagers. The papers quote him saying that concrete would still be standing after he was “dead and gone.”
That conviction pushed him into the next phase of his project.
Concrete for eternity
Around the mid 1940s, Mayes began casting his now familiar hearts and crosses in concrete, using self built wooden molds and hand mixed cement in the yard behind his house. Atlas Obscura’s detailed technical description explains that the heart markers were roughly two feet by two feet, set on a concrete stem, while the crosses stood about nine feet tall. Roughly one third of each support was buried in the ground. A typical cross weighed about 1,400 pounds.
The letters on these markers are chiseled in a distinctive block script by hand. The most common slogans read “Jesus is coming soon” and “Prepare to meet God,” while many of the hearts simply tell motorists to “Get right with God.” Some markers combined the messages, reading “Get right with God” on one side and “Jesus is coming soon” on the other.
In summer, Mayes hired acquaintances with flatbed trucks to drive him and the fresh markers along U S highways. Because he never learned to drive, he stood in the back directing the work and, when the truck stopped, rolled the markers off and into a hand dug hole. Atlas Obscura notes that once the hole was ready he could set a marker in as little as five minutes.
Permission was another matter. The same source quotes his son Clyde admitting that his father sometimes chose locations creatively, placing crosses along fence lines or even on a golf course without asking anyone. Property owners, highway widenings, wrecks, and plain vandalism removed many of those signs. What survives today are the stubborn remnants of an enormous evangelistic experiment built on the assumption that a hand carved concrete cross could preach to strangers indefinitely.
The House of Many Crosses in Middlesboro
After decades in the Fork Ridge and Mingo Hollow coal world, Mayes moved his family into town. In 1946 he began constructing a home at 409 Chester Avenue in Middlesboro, Kentucky, in the shape of a cross, built from handmade blocks pressed in a portable machine.
Foxfire 9 interviewed him there late in life. In that conversation, preserved in the book and quoted at length on Folk Visions, he explained that the house itself was meant to work like one of his signs. Eight rooms represented the eight people saved in Noah’s ark. The twelve front windows stood for the twelve apostles and ten rear windows for the Ten Commandments. He built the house of concrete, he said, because he never wanted it to leave or be sold. His hope was that it would someday belong to the Salvation Army.
His daughter in law Catherine Mayes, in her self published family history A Coal Miner’s Simple Message, went even further in decoding the symbolism. Folk Visions quotes her description of the house’s heart shaped porches, each labeled “Regeneration,” “Sanctification,” or “Holy Ghost Baptism,” and the anchor shaped walkway with a gate that once read “Anchor your heart to the cross.” Concrete fence posts represented the continents, metal and wooden posts represented the planets, and strands of barbed wire stood for the sayings of Jesus from the cross. The metal roof originally carried “Get right with God,” later repainted in larger letters as “Jesus saves,” visible to pilots overhead.
Even the doors preached. One pair had heart shaped wooden knockers that opened to reveal a short sinner’s prayer before you could reach the doorknob. A two hundred pound concrete heart on the lawn carried instructions to open it only after Mayes’s death, with a hidden message sealed inside. In photographs taken in the 1950s, the small yard is crowded with concrete hearts and crosses waiting for the right year and the right destination. One row carried inscriptions instructing future bearers to ship them to Egypt, China, or even Jupiter in the 1990s.
Today the House of Many Crosses is still a private residence, a short walk from downtown Middlesboro. The yard no longer holds rows of unplaced hearts and crosses, but two of the original poured standing crosses and traces of the fence remain, along with the famous cross shaped footprint of the house itself.
Bicycles, jackets, and a map of the mission
Material culture carries much of Mayes’s story. His first bicycle, which he called his “Jeep,” is now in the Tennessee State Museum in Nashville, complete with a large sign on the frame reading “Get right with God” and another that proclaimed he had been “advertising God since 1918.” His white parade jacket was hand drawn with nearly three hundred tiny crosses, one for each Christian denomination he knew about.
The largest single collection of his work sits in the People’s Building at the Museum of Appalachia in Clinton, Tennessee. Folk Visions and Atlas Obscura both emphasize that when the Mayes home was finally sold, museum founder John Rice Irwin worked with the family to rescue dozens of uninstalled markers, a large wall map of his travel routes, hand painted metal signs, the portable block machine, and many other objects. The SPACES Archives entry on “Harrison Mayes, Signs” confirms the same story and notes that the Museum of Appalachia exhibit includes “a large collection of the signs that were left over when he died.”
Clyde Mayes later built a meticulous scale model of the House of Many Crosses that now stands at the Museum of Appalachia. The model reproduces each symbolic feature, from the windows and porches to the fence posts and barbed wire, and turns a modest Middlesboro house into something like a three dimensional sermon outline.
“God’s Advertiser” on film and tape
If you want to hear Mayes himself, you will not find him on streaming services. His voice is buried in federal collections.
Artist and documentarian Eleanor Creekmore Dickinson spent years in the 1960s and 1970s documenting Pentecostal and Holiness worship in Appalachia. The Library of Congress now holds her field tapes as the “Eleanor Dickinson collection, 1901 2004” in the American Folklife Center. The finding aid lists dozens of audio logs and transcripts and includes a file labeled “1962 Brother Harrison Mayes,” along with contextual interviews such as “Creekie and Bob Weems interview Powell about B. Mayes.”
Folk Visions’ Sounds of Middlesboro page pulls Dickinson’s work together and identifies a series of specific Library of Congress tape numbers. The list includes AFS 15456A, an August 1972 interview with “Brother Harrison Mayes” running two hours, AFS 19139 to 19140 and 19145, three reels totaling six hours of interviews with Harrison and Lillie Mayes in July 1976, along with five further tapes recorded in Middlesboro in 1978 and 1979, and another pair, AFS 23180 to 23181, with later interviews.
Those recordings are not online. Researchers access them on site at the American Folklife Center through listening copies or, in some cases, by requesting reference transfers. For Appalachian religious history they are priceless. They capture Mayes explaining his theology, recounting his mining accident and his vow, commenting on the rising interstate highway system that was bypassing his concrete sermons, and talking with his wife about the strain and joy of a lifetime of sign work.
Dickinson’s video of him forms another strand of this audiovisual archive. The Smithsonian’s Archives Center at the National Museum of American History holds the “Eleanor Dickinson Pentecostal Videotape and Audiotape Collection,” cataloged as NMAH.AC.0199. The scope note mentions videotapes of snake handling services and other Pentecostal ceremonies and, crucially, “a video interview with Brother Harrison Mayes at his home in Middleburg [Middlesboro], Kentucky,” plus an audiotape of revival meetings.
Taken together, the Library of Congress and Smithsonian sets record what it sounded like when a coal miner turned roadside evangelist tried to explain himself from the front porch of a cross shaped house in Bell County.
From highway shoulders to museum walls
During his lifetime, Mayes attracted national press attention. Newspapers from Knoxville, Louisville, Nashville, and Evansville profiled him with titles like “The Man Behind the Signs,” “Highway Evangel,” “A Kentuckian’s World Crusade,” and “Sign painter is awakin’ people up.” LIFE magazine’s 1958 feature on the “Third Force in Christendom” included a photograph of one of his signs as an example of Pentecostal expansion. National Geographic’s November 1971 story on “The People of Cumberland Gap” reproduced a heart shaped “Jesus is coming soon” sign near Totz, Kentucky, and noted how its concrete construction was meant to withstand both years and bullets.
Those articles are primary sources in their own right. They show how editors framed a working class Appalachian Holiness evangelist for a mainstream audience and how Mayes used them as yet another platform. In some, he patiently explained that he was no crank but a coal miner paying his vow. In others he leaned into the role of “God’s ad man,” as a 1983 Courier Journal headline put it, posing with rows of freshly cast concrete hearts and crosses in his backyard.
Museums gradually followed. The National Museum of American History in Washington D C holds a corrugated metal sign that bluntly reads “Get right with God.” The catalog entry identifies the maker as “Mayes, Harrison,” dates it circa 1969, and lists the donor as Eleanor Dickinson, linking it directly to the fieldwork that produced the tapes and videos.
In 2016, that sign appeared in the exhibition Southern Accent: Seeking the American South in Contemporary Art at Duke University’s Nasher Museum of Art. The exhibition catalog describes Mayes’s work as a paradigmatic example of Southern religious vernacular art. One essay notes that the “Get right with God” sign is “unambiguous in its directive” and stresses that Mayes’s thousands of handmade signs, set without permission along highways and on barns, functioned much like a preacher’s shouted altar call, only aimed at motorists instead of congregations.
Curators and folklorists in Tennessee and beyond now treat his signs as part of the region’s folk art landscape. The SPACES Archives, a project devoted to art environments, maintains an entry for “Harrison Mayes, Signs” that situates his life’s work in Middlesboro and notes that the Museum of Appalachia exhibit preserves a large number of relocated markers. The Tennessee Arts Commission’s folklife bibliography lists Catherine Mayes’s A Coal Miner’s Simple Message as a key source on his life and work.
Tracing the signs today
For contemporary fieldworkers, one of the best starting points is the independent research site Folk Visions. Built by Marcus Obst, it functions as a de facto digital archive on Mayes. The main “Prepare to meet Henry Harrison Mayes” narrative essay pulls together newspaper references, Foxfire interviews, and family accounts. The “Map of All Known Markers” geocodes concrete crosses, hearts, barn signs, and corrugated metal pieces across Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Arkansas, Ohio, West Virginia, and beyond, noting which markers are extant, relocated, or lost.
Closer to Bell County, that map highlights a cluster of sites around Middlesboro. These include the House of Many Crosses on Chester Avenue, a yellow painted concrete “cross bench” now resting in Ford’s Woods Park downtown, the hillside lighted cross above Cumberland Avenue, and several nearby roadside hearts and crosses, including Mayes family grave markers at Fork Ridge Cemetery.
Beyond Kentucky, local tourism sites have begun to promote remaining markers. The Southeast Tennessee Tourism Association’s travel blog, for example, points travelers to surviving crosses near Benton and Decatur and reminds visitors that Mayes’s mission once stretched into forty four states.
Roadside America and numerous local history blogs document individual signs, from the “Prepare to meet God” crosses in Arkansas and North Carolina to “Get right with God” metal signs in rural Georgia and Ohio, some of which have been moved to historical societies or small museums after community campaigns to keep them local.
Seen together, these scattered relics work like a material census of mid century Southern and Appalachian religious culture. They show where traffic flowed before the interstates, where small churches cared enough to adopt and relocate a fading cross, and where communities still see an old concrete sermon as worth painting and preserving.
Faith, work, and dust
Scholars of religion and labor in the Southern mountains have begun reading Mayes against a wider backdrop. R J Callahan’s Work and Faith in the Kentucky Coal Fields treats his mine accident and conversion as one example of how coal field experience reshaped evangelical practice in the twentieth century. Martha Carver’s chapter “Harrison Mayes’s roadside advertising campaign for the Lord,” originally in the SCA Journal and later in Looking Beyond the Highway: Dixie Roads and Culture, treats his signs as a carefully planned, long term media strategy that took advantage of two lane highways and the slower pace of pre interstate travel. Joe York’s photographic book With Signs Following and Deborah Vansau McCauley and Laura E Porter’s Mountain Holiness include his crosses within a larger landscape of Southern Holiness and Pentecostal imagery.
More recently, curators at the Reece Museum in Johnson City have used Mayes’s corroded “Get right with God” signs as a starting point for thinking about grief, praise, and memory in Southern folk art, as in the Appalachian Places essay “Grief and Praise: Southern folk art as sacred memory.”
Those studies underscore a simple but important point. Mayes’s crosses are not just odd roadside relics. They are coal field objects, built with wages from overtime shifts and cast in mixtures of concrete, gravel, and bits of coal scraped from track beds. They grow out of a Holiness and Pentecostal soundscape captured on Alan Lomax’s 1930s Bell County recordings, where local preachers and congregations shout, sing, and testify their way through economic trauma and industrial change.
In that sense, the House of Many Crosses and the markers that radiated out from it are part of a much broader Appalachian story. They speak to the ways working people in the coal fields have used whatever they had on hand concrete, scrap metal, block presses, and homemade molds to proclaim that their lives and their roadsides mattered before God.
For anyone who grew up glancing at a weathered “Prepare to meet God” cross on the way to town, those signs were simply part of the scenery. For historians and folklorists today, they are signposts back into a world where a miner from Fork Ridge believed that a life saved in a mine ought to be spent trying to save strangers one hand poured cross at a time.
Sources and further reading
Library of Congress, American Folklife Center. “Eleanor Dickinson collection, 1901 2004,” AFC 1970/001, including audio logs and transcripts such as “1962 Brother Harrison Mayes” and related interviews about him. findingaids.loc.gov
Folk Visions. “Sounds of Middlesboro,” “The House of Many Crosses,” “Map of All Known Markers,” “Publications and Press,” and main narrative essay “Prepare to meet Henry Harrison Mayes.” These pages compile Dickinson’s tape numbers, transcribe Foxfire and Catherine Mayes passages, and geocode surviving markers. Folk Visions+2Folk Visions+2
Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History Archives Center. “Eleanor Dickinson Pentecostal Videotape and Audiotape Collection,” NMAH.AC.0199, including a video interview with Brother Harrison Mayes at his home in Middlesboro and an audiotape of revival meetings. SOVA
Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History. Corrugated metal sign “Get right with God,” maker listed as “Mayes, Harrison,” ca. 1969, gift of Eleanor Dickinson, object referenced in the exhibition Southern Accent: Seeking the American South in Contemporary Art. National Museum of American History+1
Museum of Appalachia, Clinton, Tennessee. People’s Building exhibit on Henry Harrison Mayes, containing uninstalled concrete hearts and crosses, tools, model of the House of Many Crosses, and related artifacts, documented in Atlas Obscura’s “Roadside Signs of Harrison Mayes” and the SPACES Archives entry “Harrison Mayes, Signs.” Atlas Obscura+1
Catherine Mayes. A Coal Miner’s Simple Message. Middlesboro, Kentucky, privately published, 1999. Family oral history and interpretation of the House of Many Crosses and the sign ministry, heavily cited by Folk Visions and Tennessee Arts Commission folklife bibliographies. Folk Visions+1
Foxfire 9. Especially the interview chapter in which Mayes describes building his cross shaped house, his mining accident, and his sign ministry in his own words. Folk Visions+1
“America’s Roadside Evangelist,” AppalachianHistory.net, August 24, 2017, and “Henry Harrison Mayes: Appalachia’s Roadside Evangelist,” Southeast Tennessee Tourism Association blog, December 29, 2020. Both provide concise public history narratives aimed at general readers. Chattanooga Region Travel Adventures
Anna Minster, “Roadside Signs of Harrison Mayes,” Atlas Obscura, August 6, 2024. Rich overview of his biography, sign construction, and the Museum of Appalachia collection, with technical detail about marker size and installation methods. Atlas Obscura
R J Callahan, Work and Faith in the Kentucky Coal Fields: Subject to Dust. Indiana University Press, 2008. Uses Mayes’s mining accident and conversion as part of a broader study of religion and labor in the coal fields.
Martha Carver, “Harrison Mayes’s Roadside Advertising Campaign for the Lord,” SCA Journal 18 (Fall 2000), reprinted in Martha Carver et al., Looking Beyond the Highway: Dixie Roads and Culture. University of Tennessee Press, 2006. Focused study of his sign campaign in the context of Southern highway culture. Folk Visions
Deborah Vansau McCauley and Laura E Porter, Mountain Holiness: A Photographic Narrative. 2003. Includes photographs and commentary on Mayes markers in Kentucky, Virginia, and Tennessee. National Museum of American History
Edited by Miranda Lash and Trevor Schoonmaker, Southern Accent: Seeking the American South in Contemporary Art. Duke University Press, 2016. Exhibition catalog with a short portrait of Mayes and interpretive essay on his “Get right with God” sign. Sonya Clark+1
“Grief and Praise: Southern folk art as sacred memory,” Appalachian Places, November 5, 2025. Essay that uses memories of Mayes’s roadside signs as a lens on Southern folk art, remembrance, and regional identity. Appalachian Places