Appalachian Figures
In the official records, Verlin Talmadge Adams begins life in a place that barely shows up on most maps. The 1940 United States census and a linked World War II era index list him as born on 14 July 1918 in Burnwell, a Pike County coal camp on the Kentucky side of the Tug Fork.
Family history entries for his father, Iva Elton Adams, and his sister Agnes Odenia Adams tie the family to both Kentucky and neighboring Mingo County, West Virginia. These genealogies, drawn from census pages, draft cards, and Social Security records, list Verlin Talmadge as one of Iva and Sarah Jane Maynard Adams’s children and place the family in the coalfields by the time he was a young man.
Even his birthplace reflects how Appalachian identity slips across state lines. Pro-football databases and genealogical indexes usually give Burnwell, Kentucky, as his birth location. The West Virginia Sports Hall of Fame plaque that would later bear his name, however, calls him “born in Williamson on July 14, 1918,” claiming the busy Mingo County rail and coal town just across the Tug Fork as his origin.
Taken together, the records suggest a familiar borderland story. A child born in a Kentucky coal camp grows up in and around Williamson, a town whose daily life ignores the state line even as state politics and sports writers draw it in bold ink. By the time he reaches high school, the local papers and scorebooks know him simply as Verlin “Sparky” Adams of Williamson.
Williamson High’s three-sport standout
Williamson High School was already a proud sports school when Adams came of age. Over the decades its teams would win state titles in football, basketball, and baseball, and its alumni list eventually included “Verlin Adams, former NFL player, West Virginia Sports Hall of Fame.”
The West Virginia Sports Writers Association’s Hall of Fame description remembers Adams as a three-sport standout at Williamson High. According to that plaque text, he starred in football, basketball, and baseball before heading to college in Charleston. Box scores from those late 1930s seasons are scattered, but the hall-of-fame summary is clear enough to show what local fans were seeing. In an era when mountain schools often depended on one or two gifted athletes to carry entire programs, Adams was the rare player who excelled across the calendar, moving from gridiron to hardwood to diamond with ease.
For families in Pike and Mingo counties the sight of a coal miner’s son in a Williamson Wolfpack uniform was already a point of pride. What no one yet knew was how far that uniform would carry him.
Morris Harvey College and a three-sport career in Charleston
In 1939 Adams enrolled at Morris Harvey College, the small church-related school in Charleston that later became the University of Charleston. There he duplicated his Williamson pattern at a higher level. The Hall of Fame plaque describes him as “one of the all time great athletes at Morris Harvey,” again in three sports: football, basketball, and baseball, between 1939 and 1943.
Morris Harvey yearbooks and athletic record books fill in some of the texture. A 1950 Harveyan yearbook photo shows a young coaching staff looking over a football practice, identifying “Head Coach Eddie King and assistants, Verlin (Sparky) Adams and Frank Kovach.” Later summaries of Golden Eagles basketball history note that “Sparky Adams” was high point man for a West Virginia Intercollegiate Athletic Conference tournament with 58 points, evidence that his scoring touch on the court matched his reputation on the football field.
Those records were compiled after his playing days, but they draw from contemporary student newspapers and game accounts. Coupled with the Sports Writers Association’s description of him “starring” in all three sports, they point to a college career in which Adams became one of the faces of Morris Harvey athletics on campus and across the WVIAC.
Drafted from a mountain college to the New York Giants
In April 1943 the National Football League held its draft at Chicago’s Palmer House Hotel. The Giants spent their thirty-first round pick, number 291 overall, on a guard from Morris Harvey named Verlin Adams. Draft logs and position tables list him as a guard out of Morris Harvey or “Charleston,” reflecting the way the college and its city were already intertwined.
Modern databases built from league records and box scores show how that gamble turned out. Pro-Football-Reference and NFL.com list Adams as a six foot, 205 pound lineman capable of playing defensive end, tackle, guard, end, and linebacker. He wore number 28 for the Giants and appeared in a total of twelve regular season games between 1943 and 1945, credited with one interception and other defensive statistics in an NFL whose rosters were stretched thin by wartime service.
A 1943 Giants roster sheet preserves a snapshot of that first professional season. It lists “28, Verlin Adams, DE-T-G-E-LB, July 14 1918, 6’0, 205, Charleston (WV), Burnwell, KY,” collapsing his college and birthplace into a single line and underlining how a coal camp birth could lead to the biggest stage then available in professional football.
For New York fans, Adams was one more hard hitting lineman in a league clawing its way through the war years. For people back in the Tug Fork and Kanawha valleys, he was something different. In a time when few players from Appalachian Kentucky or the southern West Virginia coalfields reached the NFL at all, Adams’s presence on the Giants roster confirmed that someone from places like Burnwell and Williamson could hold their own against the best in the game. Contemporary statistical compilers now rank him among the “Top Ranked Football Players from Kentucky,” listing him as an end from Burnwell and placing his name alongside more widely known stars.
Jenny, family, and a return to Charleston
Adams’s life never strayed far from Morris Harvey. During his college years he met Genevieve “Jenny” Taylor, a fellow student who graduated with the class of 1944. In a 2022 University of Charleston alumni newsletter celebrating Jenny’s one hundredth birthday, the college remembered her late husband as “Verlin T. ‘Sparky’ Adams,” a former New York Giants player who coached at Morris Harvey College from 1946 to 1957. The same piece notes that both Jenny and Sparky are members of the UC Athletic Hall of Fame and that Jenny was named the university’s Alumnus of the Year in 2002.
In later University of Charleston annual reports, the Adams name appears again. A 2011–2012 report mentions that Verlin “Sparky” Adams coached the Golden Eagles to at least a share of a baseball championship and lists “Mrs. Genevieve T. Adams” and “Mr. and Mrs. Verlin T. Adams II” in donor rolls, a reminder that the family remained connected to the institution through both coaching and philanthropy.
Family obituaries and genealogical indexes confirm that the Adams siblings remained close and that Verlin himself had died decades earlier. An obituary for his brother Council Adams, for example, lists “Verlin T. Adams” among the siblings who had preceded him in death, and compiled death indexes distinguish “Verlin Adams” of Kentucky and West Virginia from at least two other men of the same name born in Missouri and elsewhere.
Together, those fragments sketch a picture of a family that straddled county and state lines but kept its roots in the coalfields and in the college that had given Sparky his first big stage.
Sissonville, Morris Harvey, and six baseball titles
After his Giants career ended, Adams came home to West Virginia and moved to the opposite sideline. The West Virginia Sports Hall of Fame plaque for his 1985 induction states that after playing three years with the Giants, he returned to the Mountain State as a coach, first at Sissonville High School and later back at Morris Harvey.
Yearbooks and historical pamphlets from the University of Charleston athletics office flesh out those coaching years. A Morris Harvey football history compiled from mid twentieth century yearbooks lists Verlin T. “Sparky” Adams as an assistant football coach under Eddie King, while a 1957 Harveyan yearbook caption again names “Verlin T. ‘Sparky’ Adams” among the coaches shown with the team.
The same Sports Writers Association text that summarizes his playing career adds an important line about his work on the diamond. Adams’s Golden Eagle baseball teams, it notes, won six league titles, a record that places him among the most successful college baseball coaches in West Virginia during the postwar era.
For students who passed through Morris Harvey in those years, Sparky Adams was less a former New York Giant than the coach who ran practices, filled out lineups, and represented their small college against regional powers. His dual role as assistant football coach and head baseball coach made him a constant presence in the athletics department long after he hung up his own cleats.
Whistles and striped shirts: Sparky Adams the official
Adams’s influence did not end with the teams he coached. The West Virginia Sports Hall of Fame notes that he was also a “dedicated coach and official,” wording that hints at a second career in stripes.
Later conference histories and university magazines explain why his name remained familiar long after his Giants statistics faded from memory. The West Virginia Intercollegiate Athletic Conference created a “Sparky Adams Heart and Hustle Award,” presented at its basketball tournament and described in one Shepherd University magazine as named in honor of “the late Sparky Adams, a long time official in the WVIAC.”
When that award shows up in press releases and hall of fame bios for twenty first century players, it quietly carries Adams’s legacy forward. Conference officials who voted on the honor remembered him not only as an athlete and coach but as a standard for fairness and effort in officiating, the person whose name you attached to an award meant to recognize grit and integrity.
A passing in Charleston and a place in the Hall of Fame
On 30 April 1985 Adams died at his home in Charleston at age sixty six. League derived biographical summaries give that date and location, matching the death information in genealogical indexes built from state records. A United Press International death notice reported that he died following a long illness and that his funeral would be held at St. Mark’s United Methodist Church in Charleston later that week, a quiet end for a man whose football career had once taken him to the polo grounds of New York.
By then his peers had already recognized his contributions to West Virginia sports. The Sports Writers Association elected him to the West Virginia Sports Hall of Fame as part of its 1985 class, describing him as one of Morris Harvey’s all time great athletes and noting his roles as coach and official. Not long afterward, the University of Charleston inducted him into its own Golden Eagles Hall of Fame, listing him for football, men’s basketball, baseball, assistant football coaching, and head baseball coaching.
In the years that followed, university annual reports and hall of fame indices kept his name in circulation for new generations of students. For fans of the program, “Sparky Adams” became part of a roll call that linked modern Golden Eagles to Morris Harvey teams that played long before the Kanawha River campus acquired its current name.
Reading the record: untangling three men named Sparky
Researching Adams’s story means sorting him from at least two other sports figures who shared his nickname. Baseball Reference and the Society for American Baseball Research host detailed biographies of a much earlier Major League infielder nicknamed Sparky Adams, while an American football coaching biography describes Richard “Sparky” Adams, a Wisconsin based coach and Dallas Cowboys scout who died in 2010.
Genealogy sites add another layer of confusion by listing several different men named Verlin or Vurlin Adams, some from Missouri or other states. Without careful attention to birth dates, birthplaces, and family members, it would be easy to mix their stories. What pins “our” Verlin Adams in place are the coalfield origins in Pike and Mingo counties, the Morris Harvey connection, and the 1943 Giants draft slot, all of which line up in the census, family tree entries, NFL draft logs, and West Virginia Sports Hall of Fame text.
Why Sparky Adams matters to Appalachian sports history
Verlin “Sparky” Adams was not a household name on the scale of a Hall of Fame quarterback or a Super Bowl coach. His NFL career lasted only three seasons and shows up today as a tidy row in online stat tables: twelve games, one interception, and a list of positions that amounts to “wherever the team needed him.”
For Appalachian history, though, his story matters for several reasons.
It reminds us that professional sports rosters were never the exclusive territory of big city prep schools and powerhouse universities. A kid born in a Kentucky coal camp and raised in a West Virginia rail town could, through a three sport career at a small mountain college, step into the National Football League at a time when very few players from the region did so.
It complicates simple state based narratives. Kentucky reference sites list him among that state’s top players and give Burnwell as his hometown. West Virginia hall of fame material claims him as “born in Williamson” and celebrates his achievements for a Charleston college. Both are partly right. Like many Appalachian families, the Adams clan lived a life in which the river between Kentucky and West Virginia was a crossing point, not a hard boundary.
It also highlights how much of a player’s influence happens after the cheering stops. Adams’s most enduring impact on West Virginia sports probably came not from his Giants games but from his decades as a coach and official. Six conference baseball titles, years of mentoring athletes at Sissonville and Morris Harvey, and a conference “Heart and Hustle” award named in his honor all speak to a life spent building and policing the games he loved.
Finally, his story illustrates how genealogical records, local newspapers, league archives, and institutional memory work together. Without the census entry that pins his birth to Burnwell, the draft logs that connect him to the 1943 Giants, the yearbook photos that show him on the sidelines, and the hall of fame plaques that try to summarize it all, Verlin T. “Sparky” Adams would be easy to miss. With them, he becomes what he was in life: an Appalachian athlete whose path from coal camp to Giants helmet and back to a Kanawha River campus tells us something about opportunity, community, and the long reach of small colleges in the mountains.
Sources and further reading
United States census and vital records: 1940 U.S. census entries and genealogical summaries for Verlin Talmadge Adams and the family of Iva Elton and Sarah Jane Maynard Adams, accessed through Ancestry and FamilySearch, provide birth, residence, and family relationship data tying Verlin to Burnwell, Pike County, Kentucky, and later to Mingo County, West Virginia. Sorted by Name+3Ancestry+3FamilySearch+3
Professional football records and draft logs: Pro-Football-Reference, StatMuse, NFL.com, and Pro Football Archives preserve Adams’s height, weight, positions, games played, interception total, and draft position as the New York Giants’ thirty first round selection, 291st overall, in the 1943 NFL draft. Pro Football Archives+6Pro Football Reference+6Pro Football Reference+6
West Virginia and Morris Harvey sources: The West Virginia Sports Writers Association’s Hall of Fame web page and plaques PDF offer a concise biographical summary of Adams’s three sport college career, his Giants tenure, his coaching at Sissonville and Morris Harvey, and his six league baseball titles. WVSWA+1 Morris Harvey and University of Charleston athletic history documents, including the “Morris Harvey Football” booklet, the 1950 and 1957 Harveyan yearbooks, men’s basketball records, and Golden Eagles Hall of Fame listings, give additional context on his roles as assistant football coach, head baseball coach, and multi sport athlete. University of Charleston Athletics+6Amazon S3+6Internet Archive+6
University of Charleston alumni and development materials: A 2022 UC alumni newsletter celebrating Genevieve “Jenny” Adams’s hundredth birthday describes her late husband as a former New York Giants player who coached at Morris Harvey from 1946 to 1957 and notes that both are members of the UC Athletic Hall of Fame. University of Charleston+1 The university’s 2011–2012 annual report acknowledges Verlin “Sparky” Adams’s role in Golden Eagle baseball championships and lists Jenny Adams and Verlin T. Adams II among the institution’s supporters. YUMPU
Obituaries and honors: United Press International’s 1 May 1985 death notice for Verlin Talmadge “Sparky” Adams and later West Virginia Sports Hall of Fame and conference materials document his death in Charleston at age sixty six, his funeral at St. Mark’s United Methodist Church, and his subsequent recognition by both the West Virginia Sports Hall of Fame and the West Virginia Intercollegiate Athletic Conference, including the creation of the Sparky Adams Heart and Hustle Award for basketball. Shepherd U+4UPI+4WVSWA+4
Secondary compilations and rankings: The Wikipedia entry on Verlin Adams, the American Football Database profile, and state level rankings such as AinsworthSports’s list of “Top Ranked Football Players from Kentucky” synthesize data from league archives and highlight Adams’s significance as an Appalachian born NFL player from Burnwell who made his way to the New York Giants by way of Morris Harvey College. Ainsworth Sports+3Wikipedia+3Wikipedia+3