Appalachian Community Histories – Olive Hill, Carter County: Fire Clay, Railroads, Industry, and the Rise of an Appalachian Town
In the early 1880s, Olive Hill was still a small Carter County village rather than the industrial town it would soon become. The Kentucky State Gazetteer and Business Directory for 1881 and 1882 placed the community fifteen miles west of Grayson and counted only about sixty-five residents. Tygarts Creek supplied waterpower, local farmers shipped wheat, dried fruit, and other produce, and the village supported a handful of stores, blacksmiths, physicians, hotels, a saw and flour mill, and other small businesses. What mattered most for Olive Hill’s future, however, was something that had not quite arrived. The Elizabethtown, Lexington and Big Sandy Railroad was still described as being “in course of construction” and expected to pass directly through the community.
That description captures Olive Hill at the edge of a transformation. The community already possessed the natural resources that would eventually make its name known far beyond Carter County, but without reliable transportation those resources remained difficult to move in commercial quantities. Once rail transportation connected the upper Tygarts Creek country with larger markets, clay that had rested beneath the surrounding hills could be shipped to furnaces, factories, and steelmaking regions hundreds of miles away.
The railroad did not merely pass through Olive Hill. It changed the scale on which the town could operate.
The Railroad Arrives, and Olive Hill Incorporates
Railroad construction through northeastern Kentucky during the early 1880s linked communities such as Olive Hill with Lexington to the west and Ashland and the Ohio River to the east. Later, the Chesapeake and Ohio system leased and purchased the Elizabethtown, Lexington and Big Sandy line, making the route part of a much larger transportation network. The National Register documentation for Olive Hill’s surviving depot notes that the C&O acquired the route between 1886 and 1892, connecting Lexington through Clark, Montgomery, Bath, Rowan, and Carter counties with Ashland.
The timing was crucial because the railroad arrived just as investors were beginning to understand the commercial possibilities of Carter County’s fire clay. A later federal geological study, drawing upon the early Kentucky Geological Survey work, stated that clay was being shipped from Olive Hill by 1883.
In 1884, the Kentucky General Assembly formally incorporated the town of Olive Hill. The incorporation act provides a useful dividing line between the small settlement described in the 1881 directory and the increasingly ambitious railroad and industrial community that followed.
Growth was not immediate, but once it began, it was dramatic. Federal census figures recorded 291 people in Olive Hill in 1900. By 1910, the population had climbed to 1,138, almost four times the total recorded only a decade earlier.
Behind that increase stood one industry above all others.
Fire Clay Beneath the Hills
The hills around Olive Hill contained unusually valuable deposits of refractory clay, material capable of surviving the tremendous temperatures required in furnaces, steel mills, boilers, kilns, locomotives, and other heavy industrial equipment.
The development of the district began before the brick plants themselves appeared. Contemporary and later geological histories traced commercial clay shipments from Olive Hill to 1883, when Sebastian Eifort began sending clay to places such as Portsmouth and Ironton in Ohio, Ashland in Kentucky, and Pittsburgh. The material was used there for manufacturing fire brick.
The crucial change came in 1895, when the Olive Hill Fire Brick Company erected a plant in the community. A 1932 industrial history published through the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway described a famous deposit known as the Burnt-House mine, where the fire clay bed reportedly reached twenty-seven feet in thickness in places. The same account emphasized four advantages that made the Olive Hill district especially attractive: the quality of the clay, the amount available, railroad transportation, and the district’s relative proximity to the coal, iron, and steel industries.
The business became much larger than a local brickyard. Fire brick from Carter County went into industrial installations far from Kentucky. A history of the American clay-working industry reported that the Olive Hill company completed a blast-furnace lining for the Illinois Steel Company at Joliet in 1897 and that the lining remained in use for more than six years. By the early twentieth century, the plant had a daily capacity measured in tens of thousands of bricks.
That meant jobs underground in clay mines, jobs transporting the raw material, jobs tending kilns and presses, jobs loading railcars, and work in the businesses that served the growing population. Olive Hill’s industrial story spread into surrounding Carter County communities because the clay district was larger than the town itself. Mines, plants, sidings, and related settlements stretched along the railroad corridor.
By the twentieth century, the name “Olive Hill district” had become a geological and industrial designation, not merely the name of a municipality.
The Town That Almost Became a County Seat
Olive Hill’s rapid growth produced political ambitions as well as industrial ones.
In February 1904, the Kentucky General Assembly approved the creation of Beckham County from territory taken from Carter, Elliott, and Lewis counties. The new county was named for Governor J. C. W. Beckham, and Olive Hill was designated as its county seat. For a brief period, the town appeared ready to become the governmental center of Kentucky’s newest county.
Then the courts intervened.
In Zimmerman v. Brooks, the legality of the new county was challenged on constitutional grounds. The Kentucky Court of Appeals found serious problems with the territory removed from the existing counties, including the amount of land left to Carter and Elliott counties and the proximity of the proposed boundary to an existing county seat. The court invalidated the act, ending Beckham County almost as quickly as it had appeared.
A Kentucky historical marker in Olive Hill remembers the episode and records that the act creating Beckham County was signed on February 9, 1904, and that the Court of Appeals ordered its dissolution on April 29.
For a matter of weeks, however, Olive Hill occupied one of the strangest positions in Kentucky political history. It had been selected as the seat of a county that effectively vanished under constitutional review.
Reading the Boom Years in Olive Hill’s Newspapers
Olive Hill’s growth can also be followed through the newspapers printed within the town itself.
Morehead State University preserves two surviving issues of the Olive Hill Dispatch, published in 1902 and 1903, along with an extensive run of the Olive Hill Times. The Times, edited and published by J. L. Maddix, appeared from 1904 to 1910, with surviving issues extending from January 1905 through January 1909.
These newspapers provide something that census tables and geological reports cannot. Their advertisements, marriage notices, business announcements, political arguments, social columns, school reports, crimes, deaths, railroad notices, and church news capture Olive Hill while it was becoming an industrial community.
The surviving issues cover precisely the years in which the town’s population and commercial activity accelerated. They allow the historian to watch industrialization from street level rather than simply from the company office or state geological survey.
A Depot Worthy of a Growing Town
By 1910, Olive Hill had grown enough that its railroad station became a statement about the town’s importance.
The surviving Chesapeake and Ohio passenger depot was constructed that year in the Prairie style. The National Register nomination describes a low-profile brick building with broad roof overhangs, terra-cotta tile, sandstone accents, separate interior spaces for waiting rooms, ticketing, baggage, and other passenger functions.
The National Park Service later described the station as the entry point to Olive Hill during the period when the railroad remained the principal means by which many travelers reached the community. It also identified the building as the only surviving structure in Olive Hill directly associated with the railroad.
Its construction coincided almost perfectly with Olive Hill’s explosive census growth. The village of sixty-five people described before the railroad arrived had become a town of more than a thousand, tied by steel rails to regional and national markets.
The Fire Brick Works at Industrial Scale
If the depot represented Olive Hill’s connection to the outside world, the smokestacks and kilns represented what the town sent back out along those rails.
The Olive Hill Fire Brick Company eventually became part of the General Refractories Company. Court records from the 1920s preserve details about company property, clay lands, railroad boundaries, and industrial operations, demonstrating how deeply the brick industry had become embedded in the local landscape.
A remarkable 1920 photograph by Kentucky geologist Willard Rouse Jillson shows the General Refractories works at Olive Hill. The original notation attached to the photograph gives the plant a capacity of 100,000 bricks per day.
That number gives some sense of the scale hidden behind the word “brickyard.” These were large industrial works feeding national markets.
By 1932, the C&O Railway’s industrial commissioner was promoting the Olive Hill district to readers across the railroad system. His account stated that the General Refractories operations at Olive Hill and nearby Hitchins had a combined capacity of roughly 180,000 bricks a day and shipped refractory products throughout the United States, Canada, and foreign markets. Harbison-Walker also maintained major operations in Olive Hill.
A later United States Geological Survey study still regarded the Olive Hill district as one of the country’s major refractory-brick producing areas, with finished products moving to American steel centers and foreign markets.
For much of the twentieth century, Olive Hill’s industrial identity was built in clay, fire, smoke, and railcars.
A Town Mapped by Industry
The Library of Congress preserves another extraordinary snapshot of Olive Hill during these years in the four-sheet Sanborn fire insurance map published in December 1920. The maps record streets, houses, businesses, railroad facilities, industrial structures, construction materials, water sources, kilns, tanks, and other details that turn the town into something that can almost be walked again on paper.
The Sanborn sheets are particularly valuable because Olive Hill was no longer just a cluster of businesses beside the railroad. By 1920, its built environment reflected decades of industrial growth.
The maps also remind us how closely industry and residential life stood together. Railroads, factories, homes, churches, shops, and streets occupied the same narrow valley. The people who worked in the plants did not live in some distant industrial zone. The brickyards were part of everyday Olive Hill.
Matthew Sellers and Early Flight in Carter County
Industry was not the only place where the Olive Hill area entered technological history.
South of town, Matthew B. Sellers conducted aeronautical experiments at his Carter County property during the years when powered aviation was still in its infancy. The Kentucky Historical Society credits Sellers with experimenting with gliders and powered flight from 1897 to 1911 and with constructing an advanced wind tunnel in 1903 to investigate lift and drag.
His work progressed from kites and gliders to powered aircraft. Archival aviation research preserved by the Smithsonian records Sellers making successful powered hops on December 28, 1908, followed by additional experimental flights and improvements to the aircraft.
Sellers also experimented with retractable landing wheels, years before retractable landing gear became standard on advanced aircraft. His diaries and photographs survive at Morehead State University, giving Carter County an unusually rich documentary record of a pioneer working at the boundary between experimentation and practical powered flight. The attached research base identifies those diaries and photograph collections as major primary sources for the Olive Hill area.
It is a striking contrast. During the same general period that trains hauled clay and fire brick through Olive Hill, an inventor only a few miles away was trying to solve the problem of leaving the ground entirely.
Erie Industrial School and Education in the Mountains
Olive Hill also became home to educational and missionary institutions intended to serve children from the surrounding mountain region.
The Erie Industrial School grew from Methodist missionary work that began in Olive Hill in 1913. A 1929 to 1930 annual report of the Woman’s Home Missionary Society described an accredited school offering education from kindergarten through a four-year high school program. The institution also taught practical and traditional skills, including weaving, and sought to preserve patterns and techniques associated with mountain households.
The school belonged to a broader Progressive Era movement in Appalachia in which churches, settlement schools, reformers, and educators created institutions combining academics, vocational training, religious instruction, and community outreach.
Whatever judgments later generations make about the paternalism sometimes embedded in such efforts, the surviving reports provide valuable evidence about education, gender, craft traditions, and opportunity in the Olive Hill region during the early twentieth century.
“Honest Bill from Olive Hill”
As Olive Hill grew industrially, one of its residents rose into state and national politics.
William Jason Fields was born at Willard in Carter County in 1874 but built his business and political life around Olive Hill. The 1914 Official Congressional Directory identified him specifically as “William Jason Fields, Democrat, of Olive Hill, Carter County, Ky.” and described him as a farmer, real estate dealer, and former traveling salesman.
Fields served in the United States House of Representatives from 1911 until December 1923, when he resigned after being elected governor of Kentucky. After completing his gubernatorial term in 1927, he returned to Olive Hill.
His association with the town was strong enough that he became known as “Honest Bill from Olive Hill.” The Kentucky Historical Society marker at his former home notes his support for road construction, school consolidation, and the establishment of teacher-training colleges at Murray and Morehead. He died in 1954 and was buried in Olive Hill Cemetery.
For a community that had counted only a few dozen people before the railroad era, sending one of its residents to Congress and then the governor’s mansion was another measure of how far Olive Hill had traveled.
Fire, Flood, and Rebuilding
Industrial prosperity did not protect Olive Hill from disaster.
Its location beside Tygarts Creek repeatedly exposed the community to flooding, while tightly packed wooden buildings and industrial works created serious fire risks. Photographic collections preserve images associated with major floods in 1913, 1937, 1939, and 1950, along with scenes identified with the 1917 fire.
The National Register study of the C&O depot notes that much of the surviving brick commercial district dates from the 1920s after a fire destroyed most of the earlier commercial district.
The result was a town repeatedly rebuilt around the same narrow physical geography that had made its industrial development possible. Tygarts Creek supplied water and defined the valley. The railroad made large-scale commerce possible. The surrounding hills held the clay. Those same hills and waterways also confined development and intensified the effects of flooding.
Olive Hill’s landscape was both its economic advantage and one of its greatest vulnerabilities.
Harry Truman Comes to Olive Hill
On October 1, 1948, national politics arrived by train.
President Harry S. Truman stopped at Olive Hill during the famous whistle-stop campaign that helped produce one of the greatest political upsets in American presidential history. The Truman Presidential Library preserves both the recording and transcript of his rear-platform remarks.
The Olive Hill stop took place at approximately 1:21 in the afternoon. Truman thanked the crowd for its welcome and used the brief appearance to continue his argument for a Democratic Congress and presidency.
The surviving sound recording runs a little more than six minutes.
For Olive Hill residents standing beside the tracks that day, the railroad that had created so much of the town’s industrial prosperity became a stage for a sitting president campaigning directly to small-town America.
Few episodes better illustrate the central place the railroad once occupied in community life.
From Fire Brick to the Storyteller
Olive Hill’s best-known cultural figure emerged from a different kind of storytelling.
Tom T. Hall was born in Olive Hill on May 25, 1936. Long before Nashville knew him as “The Storyteller,” Hall was absorbing the people, language, humor, tragedy, and everyday experiences of northeastern Kentucky. The Country Music Hall of Fame notes that he wrote his first song at the age of nine and later performed as a teenager with the Kentucky Travelers.
Hall would eventually become one of country music’s most respected songwriters, using tightly drawn characters and ordinary lives to expand what a country song could say. He was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2008.
There is something fitting about one of America’s great musical storytellers coming from Olive Hill. By the time Hall was a child, the town had already accumulated stories of railroad workers, miners, brickmakers, merchants, missionaries, politicians, inventors, floods, fires, and families who had watched the community grow around them.
Hall carried the observational tradition of the place into a different medium.
The End of an Industrial Era
The industries that had sustained Olive Hill could not remain unchanged forever.
Changes in steelmaking and furnace technology reduced demand for traditional refractory brick. Plants that had once operated at enormous capacity began closing or consolidating. The General Refractories plant at Olive Hill ultimately ceased production in the early 1970s, ending a major chapter in the community’s industrial history.
Passenger rail service declined as automobiles and highways replaced trains for most local travel. The National Register study notes the wider disappearance of C&O depots across eastern Kentucky as passenger service gave way to automobiles and freight priorities.
Yet Olive Hill retained its depot.
Restored rather than demolished, the 1910 station now survives as one of the clearest physical links to the transportation system that made the town’s industrial rise possible. The building entered the National Register of Historic Places in 1992.
Why Olive Hill Matters
Olive Hill’s history is larger than its population might suggest.
In the space of a few generations, a village of about sixty-five people became the center of one of America’s important refractory-clay districts. Railroads connected its mines and factories to steelmaking and industrial markets. Fire brick manufactured there entered furnaces far beyond Kentucky. For a few weeks in 1904, the town was even designated the seat of a newly created county. Nearby, Matthew Sellers experimented with powered flight. William Jason Fields carried the Olive Hill name into Congress and the Kentucky governor’s office. Harry Truman spoke from the back of a campaign train. Tom T. Hall later carried the voices and observations of eastern Kentucky into American music.
Olive Hill is therefore not simply a small town that happened to contain a few notable people or industries. Its history demonstrates how transportation, geology, industrialization, education, politics, invention, and culture could intersect in one Appalachian valley.
The old depot, surviving photographs, newspapers, geological reports, court cases, maps, diaries, and industrial records make it possible to reconstruct that transformation unusually well. They allow us to see Olive Hill not as a footnote between larger cities, but as a community whose clay fed American industry, whose railroad connected the mountains to distant markets, and whose people repeatedly found ways to reach far beyond Carter County.
Sources & Further Reading
Kentucky General Assembly. Acts Passed at the Session of the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Kentucky. Frankfort, KY, 1884. See “An Act to Incorporate the Town of Olive Hill in Carter County,” 798. https://books.google.com/books/about/Acts_Passed_at_the_Session_of_the_Genera.html?id=fUBMAQAAIAAJ
Polk, R. L., and A. C. Danser. Kentucky State Gazetteer and Business Directory, 1881–1882. Vol. 3, pt. 2. Detroit: R. L. Polk & Co., 1881. Olive Hill entry. https://ldsgenealogy.com/KY/books/Kentucky-state-gazetteer-and-business-directory-1881-1882-Vol-III-pt-2-part-4.htm
United States Census Office. Report on Population of the United States at the Eleventh Census: 1890. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1895. https://www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/1890a_v1-09.pdf
United States Census Office. Population of Kentucky by Counties and Minor Civil Divisions. Census Bulletin No. 25. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1900. https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1900/bulletins/demographic/25-population-ky.pdf
United States Bureau of the Census. Thirteenth Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1910: Abstract of the Census, Supplement for Kentucky. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1913. https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1910/abstract/supplement-kentucky.pdf
Olive Hill Dispatch. Olive Hill, KY, 1902–1903. Morehead State University Newspaper Archive. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/olive_hill_dispatch/
Olive Hill Times. Olive Hill, KY, 1904–1910. Morehead State University Newspaper Archive. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/olive_hill_times/
Morehead State University. “Newspaper Archive.” Camden-Carroll Library, Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/newspaper_archive/
Sanborn Map Company. Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Olive Hill, Carter County, Kentucky. New York: Sanborn Map Company, December 1920. Library of Congress Geography and Map Division. https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3954om.g032211920/?st=gallery
Crider, Albert F. “The Fire-Clays and Fire-Clay Industries of the Olive Hill and Ashland Districts of Eastern Kentucky.” Kentucky Geological Survey, 4th ser., vol. 1, pt. 2, 592–711. Frankfort: Kentucky Geological Survey, 1913.
Patterson, Sam H., John W. Hosterman, and John Warfield Huddle. Geology and Refractory Clay Deposits of the Haldeman and Wrigley Quadrangles, Kentucky, with a Section on Coal Resources. U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 1122-F. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1962. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/b1122F
Huddle, John W., and Sam H. Patterson. “Origin of Pennsylvanian Underclay and Related Seat Rocks.” Geological Society of America Bulletin 72, no. 11 (1961): 1643–1660. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/70206836
Hosterman, John W. Structure-Contour Map of the Olive Hill Clay Bed in Northeastern Kentucky. Miscellaneous Field Studies Map MF-261. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1963. https://pubs.usgs.gov/search?page=417&q=states+on+the+east
Englund, Kenneth J., and John F. Windolph Jr. Geologic Map of the Olive Hill Quadrangle, Northeastern Kentucky. Geologic Quadrangle Map GQ-1270. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1975. https://pubs.usgs.gov/pp/1708/ii/downloads/coal/fire_clay_coal_zone/fcoc.shp.htm
Jillson, Willard Rouse. “General Refractory Co., Olive Hill, Ky.” Photograph, 1920. Kentucky Geological Survey Photograph Collection. Kentucky Historical Society. https://www.kyhistory.com/digital/collection/PH/id/8059/
Boy, D. C. “Products of Kentucky’s Famous Olive Hill District Move Via C&O and P.M.” Chesapeake and Ohio Railway Magazine, February 1932. Reprinted in the Carter County Herald, February 11, 1932. https://kygenweb.net/carter/news/cch211321.html
Zimmerman v. Brooks, 118 Ky. 85, 80 S.W. 443 (Ky. Ct. App. 1904). https://case-law.vlex.com/vid/zimmerman-v-brooks-902344092
General Refractories Co. v. Morrison, 212 Ky. 411, 279 S.W. 651 (Ky. Ct. App. 1926). https://www.casemine.com/judgement/us/5914cdedadd7b04934816453
Harbison-Walker Refractories Co. v. Brown. Kentucky Court of Appeals, 1944. https://www.casemine.com/judgement/us/5914cb6aadd7b04934802417
Harbison-Walker Refractories Co. v. United Brick & Clay Workers of America. 339 S.W.2d 933 (Ky. 1960). https://law.justia.com/cases/kentucky/court-of-appeals/1960/339-s-w-2d-933-0.html
Morehead State University. Matthew B. Sellers Diaries, 1889–1909. Special Collections and Archives, Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/sellers_diaries/
Morehead State University. Matthew B. Sellers Photograph Collection. Special Collections and Archives, Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/sellers_photographs/
Kentucky Historical Society. “Aviation Pioneer.” Kentucky Historical Marker No. 1222, Carter County. https://history.ky.gov/markers/aviation-pioneer
Woman’s Home Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Forty-Ninth Annual Report of the Woman’s Home Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1929–1930. Cincinnati: Woman’s Home Missionary Society, 1930. See material on Erie Industrial School, Olive Hill, Kentucky. https://divinityarchive.com/bitstream/handle/11258/3856/womanshomemissio1930woma.pdf?isAllowed=y&sequence=1
United States Congress. Official Congressional Directory. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1914. William Jason Fields entry. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CDIR-1914-12-01/pdf/CDIR-1914-12-01.pdf
United States House of Representatives, Office of the Historian. “Fields, William Jason.” History, Art & Archives. https://history.house.gov/People/Detail/13116
Kentucky Historical Society. “Home of Gov. Fields.” Kentucky Historical Marker No. 640, Carter County. https://history.ky.gov/markers/home-of-gov-fields
Kentucky Historical Society. “Beckham County.” Kentucky Historical Marker No. 1177, Carter County. https://history.ky.gov/markers/beckham-county
Truman, Harry S. “Rear Platform and Other Informal Remarks in Kentucky and West Virginia.” October 1, 1948. Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum. https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/public-papers/222/rear-platform-and-other-informal-remarks-kentucky-and-west-virginia
Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum. “President Truman’s Rear Platform Remarks, Olive Hill, KY.” Sound recording, October 1, 1948. https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/sound-recordings-collection-4
National Park Service. “Olive Hill C & O Depot.” National Register of Historic Places Registration Form. National Register Information System No. 92001487. 1992. https://npgallery.nps.gov/AssetDetail/NRIS/92001487
Kentucky Historical Society. Ronald Morgan Kentucky Postcard Collection. Frankfort: Kentucky Historical Society. Includes Olive Hill, Erie School, General Refractories, Aiken Hall, and related views. https://www.kyhistory.com/digital/api/collection/LIB/id/2026/download
Carter County Clerk. “Land Records and Public Records.” Carter County, Kentucky. https://carter.countyclerk.us/
Morehead State University and Carter County Public Library. Carter County Genealogy Collection. Morehead State University ScholarWorks. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/ccpl_genealogy/
Pettit, Sheri. Carter County Newspaper Extractions, 1893–1930. Carter County Genealogy Collection. Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/ccpl_genealogy/88/
City of Olive Hill. Long-Term Recovery Plan. Olive Hill, KY: City of Olive Hill. https://olivehill.ky.gov/Documents/OliveHillLongTermRecoveryPlan.pdf
Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. “Tom T. Hall.” Nashville: Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. https://www.countrymusichalloffame.org/hall-of-fame/tom-t-hall
Songwriters Hall of Fame. “Tom T. Hall.” New York: Songwriters Hall of Fame. https://www.songhall.org/profiles/tom-t-hall
Author Note: Olive Hill’s history is one of the clearest examples of how railroads and natural resources transformed a small Appalachian community into an industrial center. I hope this article also helps preserve the stories of the workers, inventors, educators, politicians, and musicians who gave this Carter County town its wider legacy.