Appalachian Figures Series – The Story of C. Bascom Slemp of Lee, Virginia
In September 1923, the mountains of far Southwest Virginia reached the White House by way of a man from Turkey Cove. Calvin Coolidge had only recently become president after the death of Warren G. Harding, and one of his first major appointments was C. Bascom Slemp of Lee County, Virginia. Slemp was no stranger to power by then. He had already represented Virginia’s Ninth District in Congress, managed Republican influence in a mostly Democratic state, and made Big Stone Gap one of the centers of his political and business life.
He was often called C. Bascom Slemp, but his full name was Campbell Bascom Slemp. He was born at Turkey Cove in Lee County on September 4, 1870, the son of Campbell Slemp, a Confederate officer, state legislator, and later congressman. The younger Slemp inherited more than a family name. He inherited a place in the unusual Republican world of Southwest Virginia, where the politics of the mountains did not always follow the politics of Richmond.
From Turkey Cove to Big Stone Gap
Turkey Cove was not Washington, but it gave Slemp the beginning of a public life. He attended public schools, graduated from Virginia Military Institute in 1891, studied law at the University of Virginia, and was admitted to the bar in 1901. Before he entered the law, he taught mathematics and served in military school settings, including work connected to VMI and Marion Military Institute.
When Slemp settled into Big Stone Gap, the town was still young and full of ambition. The railroads, coalfields, and land companies had made Wise County a place where lawyers, investors, railroad men, coal operators, and politicians crossed paths. Big Stone Gap was not only a mountain town. It was a courthouse town, a coalfield town, and a place where Southwest Virginia’s future was being argued in offices, newspapers, banks, and public meetings.
Slemp opened a law office there in 1901. His father was already rising in Republican politics, and Bascom soon became more than a local attorney. He was a political organizer, a businessman, and a man who understood that the mountains could be a base of power if they were carefully organized.
The Fighting Ninth
Virginia’s Ninth Congressional District had a character of its own. Much of Virginia was controlled by Democratic politics in the early twentieth century, but the counties of far Southwest Virginia remained a Republican stronghold. The region’s Civil War loyalties, mountain geography, local networks, and resentment of outside control all helped make the Ninth different from the rest of the state.
That difference gave the district its famous nickname, the Fighting Ninth.
Campbell Slemp, Bascom’s father, represented the district in Congress until his death in 1907. Bascom Slemp then won the special election to succeed him and entered Congress that December. He would remain there until March 1923, representing the district through years when Virginia Republicans had little power elsewhere in the state.
In Congress, Slemp was not remembered mainly as a great lawmaker of sweeping national bills. His strength lay in organization, access, and the steady delivery of attention to his district. He knew the value of appointments, federal offices, local favors, and party loyalty. In an age when patronage was a major part of political life, Slemp knew how to use it.
A Republican Boss in a Democratic State
Slemp became chairman of the Republican State Committee in 1905 and later served on the Republican National Committee. From his Southwest Virginia base, he became one of the most important Republican figures in Virginia during the early twentieth century.
This power had two sides. To supporters, Slemp was the mountain district’s defender in Washington. He helped keep the Ninth District connected to federal government, national campaigns, and Republican administrations. He could speak for Southwest Virginia in rooms where few other Virginians from the mountains had influence.
To critics, Slemp represented machine politics. His control of patronage brought loyalty, but it also drew charges of heavy-handedness. The same system that made him powerful also made him controversial. Federal jobs, appointments, and political favors passed through networks that shaped local and state politics.
Slemp’s career also had moments that cut against the broader politics of Virginia. During the suffrage fight, he was the only member of Virginia’s congressional delegation to vote in favor of the Nineteenth Amendment when Congress sent it to the states. Virginia itself refused to ratify the amendment at the time, but women gained the right to vote when the amendment became part of the United States Constitution in 1920.
The Road to the White House
By the late 1910s and early 1920s, Slemp’s influence had moved beyond the Ninth District. He helped manage Southern Republican support for national candidates and became important in the party’s presidential politics. He had a role in the successful effort to make Frederick Gillett Speaker of the House, and he helped Warren G. Harding’s campaign secure support in the South.
Slemp did not seek reelection to Congress in 1922. The decision ended his time as the Ninth District’s congressman, but it did not end his political career. If anything, his national role was becoming larger.
When Harding died in August 1923 and Calvin Coolidge became president, Slemp’s knowledge of Congress and Republican politics made him useful. Coolidge appointed him secretary to the president on September 4, 1923, Slemp’s fifty-third birthday.
The title “secretary to the president” did not mean what it might suggest today. In the years before the modern White House staff, the secretary handled duties that touched correspondence, appointments, visitors, messages, political advice, and relations with Congress. Slemp entered the White House as a man who knew how political machinery worked.
At the Desk of Coolidge
Photographs from the period show Slemp in the world of Washington offices, papers, and formal suits. One Harris & Ewing image from 1924 shows him seated at a desk, the kind of photograph that seems quiet until one remembers how much power passed through a desk like that.
The Coolidge White House was a place of letters, telegrams, appointment books, guest lists, and carbon copies. Slemp’s job placed him near the center of that paper world. He helped Coolidge with party politics, especially in the South, and he worked during the 1924 campaign when Coolidge sought election in his own right.
For a time, Slemp was described as one of Coolidge’s most important aides. His knowledge of Congress and Republican organization made him valuable. Yet his influence did not last unchanged. Other advisers gained ground, and Slemp’s power inside the administration weakened. He offered to resign in 1924, but Coolidge did not accept it then. In January 1925, Slemp resigned again, and this time the resignation was accepted. He left office on March 4, 1925.
Power, Patronage, and Criticism
Slemp’s White House years cannot be separated from the larger story of Republican politics in the South. He was skilled at organizing white Southern Republicans and securing delegates, but his political methods also drew criticism. Democrats criticized his patronage power, and the NAACP criticized his efforts to exclude Black participation in Republican politics in Virginia and the South.
That part of the story matters. Slemp’s career shows how power could work in the early twentieth-century South, even outside the Democratic Party. Republican politics in Southwest Virginia gave mountain counties a voice against the Democratic machines that dominated much of the state, but Slemp’s own organization also reflected the racial exclusions and patronage struggles of the period.
A careful history of Slemp must hold both truths together. He was one of the most powerful Southern Republicans of his time, and he was a son of the Southwest Virginia mountains who brought his district national influence. He was also a political boss whose methods raised serious criticism.
The Sage of Turkey Cove
After leaving the White House, Slemp remained active in law, business, and Republican politics, but the height of his political power had passed. He returned often to Big Stone Gap and remained tied to the region that had shaped him.
Slemp had also built wealth through business ventures connected to land and coal. His interests reached into the Kentucky coalfields, where land companies and coal corporations helped shape the economy of the mountains. Like many powerful men of his era, his life was tied to both public office and private enterprise.
By the 1930s, newspapers sometimes called him the Sage of Turkey Cove. The nickname suited the public image of an older political figure who had seen the inside of Congress, the White House, party conventions, and mountain courthouse politics. Yet Slemp’s later years were not only about politics. He increasingly turned toward history, collecting, and preservation.
A Museum in the Mountains
One of Slemp’s lasting legacies stands in Big Stone Gap. In 1929, he purchased the Ayers House, a large Queen Anne-style home that later became the Southwest Virginia Museum Historical State Park. Slemp and his sister, Susan Jane “Janie” Slemp Newman, collected documents, artifacts, and historical materials connected to Southwest Virginia.
Their collecting was more than a hobby. It came from a belief that the region’s history deserved preservation. Southwest Virginia had produced soldiers, settlers, politicians, coal miners, railroad builders, teachers, lawyers, and families whose stories were often scattered in private hands. Slemp’s collection helped give some of that history a permanent home.
Slemp died before the museum opened. He suffered a heart attack and died on August 7, 1943, in Knoxville, Tennessee. After his death, the Slemp Foundation helped arrange the sale of the Ayers House to the Commonwealth of Virginia. The museum opened to the public on May 30, 1948.
Today, the Southwest Virginia Museum remains one of the clearest physical reminders of Slemp’s later life. It connects his political career to his regional identity. The same man who worked in Washington also wanted the mountain past preserved in Big Stone Gap.
The Federal Building and the Papers Left Behind
Slemp’s name also remains on the C. Bascom Slemp Federal Building in Big Stone Gap. The building was completed in the early twentieth century as a post office and courthouse, and it still stands in the downtown district. Its stone walls and formal design speak to the era when Big Stone Gap expected to be a major federal and commercial center in the mountains.
The deeper record of Slemp’s life, however, is found in archives. His papers at the University of Virginia contain correspondence, legal and financial records, political files, patronage materials, genealogy, local history, and materials related to the founding of the Southwest Virginia Museum. The Calvin Coolidge Papers at the Library of Congress preserve the larger White House paper trail from the years when Slemp served as secretary to the president.
Those collections matter because Slemp’s career cannot be understood from memory alone. He moved through too many worlds for that. Lee County, Wise County, Congress, the Republican National Committee, the Harding campaign, the Coolidge White House, Kentucky coal lands, and the Southwest Virginia Museum all form part of the same life.
Remembering C. Bascom Slemp
C. Bascom Slemp died far from Turkey Cove, but he was buried in the family cemetery there. That ending fits the pattern of his life. He went to Richmond, Lexington, Charlottesville, Big Stone Gap, Washington, and the White House, but the place that marked him first remained Lee County.
His legacy is complicated, as political legacies often are. He gave Southwest Virginia a rare level of national influence. He helped keep the Fighting Ninth visible in Washington at a time when much of Virginia politics was controlled elsewhere. He supported woman suffrage when the rest of Virginia’s congressional delegation did not. He helped preserve regional history through the collections that became part of the Southwest Virginia Museum.
At the same time, Slemp’s career was built on patronage and political control. His methods brought criticism, and his role in racially exclusionary Republican politics cannot be ignored.
To understand Slemp is to understand a certain kind of Appalachian power. It was local and national at the same time. It began in Turkey Cove, worked through Big Stone Gap, fought its battles in the Ninth District, and reached all the way to the desk beside Calvin Coolidge. In the story of Southwest Virginia, C. Bascom Slemp remains one of the clearest examples of how a mountain politician could carry a small place into the center of American power.
Sources & Further Reading
U.S. House of Representatives, History, Art & Archives. “Slemp, Campbell Bascom.” Accessed June 11, 2026. https://history.house.gov/People/Detail/21745
Biographical Directory of the United States Congress. “Slemp, Campbell Bascom, 1870–1943.” Accessed June 11, 2026. https://bioguide.congress.gov/search/bio/S000486
University of Virginia Library, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library. “Papers of C. Bascom Slemp, 1866–1944.” Archival collection listed by U.S. House History, Art & Archives. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://history.house.gov/People/Detail/21745
Library of Congress. “About This Collection: Calvin Coolidge Papers.” Accessed June 11, 2026. https://www.loc.gov/collections/calvin-coolidge-papers/about-this-collection/
Library of Congress, Manuscript Division. “Calvin Coolidge Papers: A Finding Aid to the Collection in the Library of Congress.” Accessed June 11, 2026. https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mss/eadmss.ms009246
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. “[C. Bascom Slemp at Desk].” Harris & Ewing, photographer. 1924. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2016887549/
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. “[C. Bascom Slemp].” Harris & Ewing, photographer. 1923. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2016892550/
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. “[Calvin Coolidge and C. Bascom Slemp. White House, Washington, D.C.].” Harris & Ewing, photographer. 1923. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2016892883/
Theodore Roosevelt Center. “Letter from C. Bascom Slemp to Theodore Roosevelt.” April 23, 1910. Library of Congress Manuscript Division. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org/digital-library/o61285/
Theodore Roosevelt Center. “Letter from Theodore Roosevelt to C. Bascom Slemp.” September 14, 1917. Library of Congress Manuscript Division. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org/digital-library/o246705/
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Documenting the American South. “Letter from C. Bascom Slemp to Charles Hillyer Brand.” Thomas E. Watson Papers Digital Collection. February 2, 1924. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://www.docsouth.unc.edu/watson/index.php/item/755_177_015_01?p=044
National Archives and Records Administration, Center for Legislative Archives. “Letter from C. Bascom Slemp of Virginia to Joseph Cannon.” March 8, 1909. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Letter_from_C._Bascom_Slemp_of_Virginia_to_Joseph_Cannon_-_DPLA_-_78d573c0a3b1336843a4cbce76fa85f4_(page_1).jpg
U.S. Government Publishing Office. “Congressional Directory.” Accessed June 11, 2026. https://www.govinfo.gov/app/collection/cdir
U.S. Government Publishing Office. “Congressional Record.” Accessed June 11, 2026. https://www.govinfo.gov/app/collection/crec/
U.S. Government Publishing Office. Congressional Directory for the 67th Congress, 2nd Session. July 1, 1922. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CDIR-1922-07-01/text/CDIR-1922-07-01.txt
Library of Congress. “The Big Stone Gap Post.” Chronicling America. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/
Virginia Chronicle. “Marion News.” Library of Virginia. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://virginiachronicle.com/
Virginia Department of Historic Resources. “Southwest Virginia Museum Historical State Park.” National Register of Historic Places Registration Form. 2002. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/101-0002_SW_VA_Museum_Historical_State_Park_2002_NRHP_nomination.pdf
Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation. “Southwest Virginia Museum Historical State Park.” Accessed June 11, 2026. https://www.dcr.virginia.gov/state-parks/southwest-virginia-museum
General Services Administration. “C. Bascom Slemp Federal Building, Big Stone Gap, VA.” Accessed June 11, 2026. https://www.gsa.gov/real-estate/explore-historic-buildings/find-a-historic-federal-building/c-bascom-slemp-federal-building-big-stone-gap-va
Federal Judicial Center. “Big Stone Gap, Virginia, 1913.” Historic Federal Courthouses. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://www.fjc.gov/history/courthouse/big-stone-gap-virginia-1913
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. “C. Bascom Slemp Federal Building, Big Stone Gap, Virginia.” Carol M. Highsmith, photographer. October 3, 2014. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/highsm/item/2014649917/
Slemp, C. Bascom, ed. The Mind of the President, as Revealed by Himself in His Own Words. New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1926. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/
Slemp, C. Bascom. Selected Addresses of C. Bascom Slemp. Compiled and edited by J. Frederick Essary, with a sketch by William Tyler Page. 1938. https://history.house.gov/People/Detail/21745
Slemp, C. Bascom, comp. Addresses of Famous Southwest Virginians. Bristol, TN: King Printing Company, 1939. https://history.house.gov/People/Detail/21745
Hathorn, Guy B. “C. Bascom Slemp: Virginia Republican Boss, 1907–1932.” Journal of Politics 17, no. 2, May 1955: 248–264. https://history.house.gov/People/Detail/21745
Hathorn, Guy B. “Congressional Campaign in the Fighting Ninth: The Contest Between C. Bascom Slemp and Henry C. Stuart.” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 66, no. 3, July 1958: 337–344. https://www.jstor.org/stable/i392982
Hathorn, Guy B. “The Political Career of C. Bascom Slemp.” PhD diss., Duke University, 1950. https://history.house.gov/People/Detail/21745
Encyclopedia Virginia. “Republican Party of Virginia.” Accessed June 11, 2026. https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/republican-party-of-virginia/
Encyclopedia Virginia. “George C. Peery.” Accessed June 11, 2026. https://encyclopediavirginia.org/
Encyclopedia Virginia. “Henry Carter Stuart, 1855–1933.” Accessed June 11, 2026. https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/stuart-henry-carter-1855-1933/
Library of Virginia. “Secure the Suffrage for Women on Equal Terms with Men: The Equal Suffrage League of Virginia.” UncommonWealth. April 15, 2020. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://uncommonwealth.lva.virginia.gov/blog/2020/04/15/secure-the-suffrage-for-women-on-equal-terms-with-men-the-equal-suffrage-league-of-virginia/
University of Virginia School of Law. “Featured Alumni: C. Bascom Slemp.” Accessed June 11, 2026. https://www.law.virginia.edu/
The Slemp Foundation. “Campbell Bascom Slemp.” Accessed June 11, 2026. https://slempfoundation-org.mcallenphp.net/?page_id=121
Time. “C. Bascom Slemp.” Accessed June 11, 2026. https://time.com/archive/6649670/c-bascom-slemp/
Author Note: C. Bascom Slemp’s story is not only a Washington political story, but a Lee County and Southwest Virginia story. His life shows how mountain politics, family networks, federal power, and local memory could meet in one complicated Appalachian figure.