Appalachian History Series – Little Shepherd Trail: Inspiration Mountain on the Spine of Pine Mountain
If you ease your car out of the Clover Fork valley and up US 421, there is a point where the pavement breaks over the spine of Pine Mountain and a narrow road slips away along the crest. Locals call it the Little Shepherd Trail. Official descriptions call it Kentucky Highway 1679, a thirty eight mile, mostly one lane road that runs from US 421 east of Harlan to US 119 south of Whitesburg, twisting along the summit through Kingdom Come State Park and Kentenia State Forest.
On a clear day the road offers long views into coalfield valleys, rock outcrops that lean like ribs, and patches of high forest where ravens ride the wind. On a foggy day it can feel like a tunnel in the clouds, with tight curves, broken pavement, and pull offs that appear at the last second. Either way, it is hard to imagine that this skyline drive began as a fire trail, a handful of letters from a Pine Mountain forester, and a set of arguments over how rustic a public road ought to be.
This is the story of how a ridge top truck trail became the Little Shepherd Trail, how John Fox Jr.’s fiction helped name an actual mountain road, and how the crest of Pine Mountain turned into a corridor where forestry, tourism, and local memory meet.
Jack’s Gap and Pine Mountain before the motor road
Long before ground was broken for a formal highway, people were climbing to the top of Pine Mountain for the view. Pine Mountain Settlement School, founded just north of the crest in the early twentieth century, turned the ridge into an outdoor classroom. Staff and students hiked up to Jack’s Gap, a saddle directly above the school, along steep footpaths that were part exercise, part recreation, and part education.
One of the best early glimpses of this pre road era comes from a 1914 letter by staff member Marguerite Butler. Writing to her family, she described an all day hike up to Jack’s Gap, with a long, hot climb, repeated stops to catch their breath, and a view that opened suddenly over the valley when they reached the top. The letter, preserved in the Pine Mountain archives and quoted in modern interpretive essays, shows that by the early nineteen teens the crest above the settlement school was already a destination for weekend walks and school outings rather than an unused wilderness.
Photograph albums kept by Pine Mountain workers reinforce that picture. Early twentieth century images show students and staff posed on the rocks at Jack’s Gap, perched on the edge of cliffs, and strung out along the crest in long lines of hats and long skirts. Those photographs fix Pine Mountain’s ridge as a place of views and fellowship decades before any motorist could reach it by car.
That pattern mattered later. When a forester named William “Bill” Hayes began arguing for a road along the summit, he was not just imagining a line on a map. He was trying to make it easier for ordinary families to reach the same overlooks that students had been climbing to on foot since the settlement school’s early years.
Kentenia State Forest and a mountain of fire lines
The other thread in the trail’s history began not with hikers but with foresters. In 1919 the Kentenia Cantron coal company donated several thousand acres along the south side of Pine Mountain to the state of Kentucky. The land became Kentenia State Forest, the first state owned forest in Kentucky. It eventually grew to seven scattered tracts totaling just over four thousand acres, most of them draped across the crest and upper slopes of Pine Mountain in Harlan County.
The Kentucky Division of Forestry and later conservation agencies treated Kentenia as both a working forest and a fire prone landscape. The ridges above Harlan were subject to frequent burns, and Pine Mountain Settlement School records describe serious fires in the early nineteen twenties that scorched thousands of acres and helped push the state toward a more aggressive forestry program.
During the New Deal era, the Civilian Conservation Corps knit this policy into the landscape. CCC crews built single lane “truck trails,” fire breaks, and access roads along the crest so rangers could reach remote tracts and lookout towers, including the steel fire tower above Putney that locals now call the Beschman or Putney tower.
These early roads were never meant as tourist highways. They were narrow, rough corridors for fire trucks, equipment, and the occasional ranger’s pickup, often no more than twelve feet wide with shallow ditches and simple culverts. Yet they established the basic fact that you could drive along the crest of Pine Mountain instead of only climbing up to it, and they laid the foundation that Bill Hayes would later try to widen into something more ambitious.
Bill Hayes and a letter from Putney
Bill Hayes knew Pine Mountain from both sides. He had been a student and later farm manager at Pine Mountain Settlement School, then left in the early nineteen fifties as small mountain farms began to collapse. He turned to forestry, joined the Kentucky Division of Forestry, and took charge of the Harlan County fire prevention program and Kentenia State Forest from the state’s Putney Ranger Station on the south face of the mountain.
From that vantage point he saw both the practical need for better ridge top access and the scenic possibilities of the CCC truck trails. In December 1958 he sat down and wrote a long letter to Harlan County Judge Cam Smith about a modest, existing trail along the crest. In that two page plea, preserved in the Pine Mountain Settlement School collections, Hayes argued that improving the ridge road could provide fire protection, open up new recreation space, give local people and visitors a Sunday drive with wide views, and create badly needed work for road crews.
He outlined a route that would stretch from US 421 east of Harlan along the spine of Pine Mountain to the vicinity of Camp Blanton, then on toward Gross Knob fire tower and eventually to the high country above Cumberland. He imagined turnouts where people could picnic, parking spots where rangers could leave trucks, and a simple but serviceable road that tied together existing CCC segments with new construction. The key, he insisted, was to move quickly with local equipment and low cost work rather than wait for a perfect highway project that might never arrive.
Hayes could not order such a project himself, but his letter opened a conversation. It circulated among Pine Mountain trustees, forestry supervisors, and state officials. Within a few years those conversations would lead to a ceremonial ground breaking on the ridge.
Groundbreaking at the Putney Ranger Station
By 1961, Pine Mountain Settlement School’s leaders and the Division of Forestry had warmed to Hayes’s idea. The board of trustees, represented by Berea College dean Kenneth Thompson and settlement school director Burton Rogers, joined Hayes and his supervisors in pushing for a scenic road along the crest that would also strengthen Kentenia’s fire protection.
They arranged a ground breaking ceremony at the Putney Ranger Station in June of that year, inviting state officials and local advocates. Governor Bert Combs could not attend, but he sent Lieutenant Governor Wilson Wyatt, a Louisville lawyer with close ties to the Courier Journal. Wyatt’s presence guaranteed that the state paper would pay attention. Journalist Joe Creason came along, and a few days later he published a full color feature in the Courier Journal Magazine titled “Top O’ The Mountain: Work on first sky line motor trail in Kentucky gets off to a fast start.”
Creason’s account began with a hearty breakfast at the Putney Ranger Station, where Bill and Fern Hayes and their families served ham, biscuits, eggs, and a white cake decorated with candied violets to the visiting dignitaries. He went on to describe Wyatt turning the first shovelful of dirt for a rustic “skyline drive” along Pine Mountain and to sketch the idea of a slow paced, scenic road that would stay intentionally narrow and intimate rather than becoming a standard high speed highway.
Under Hayes’s direction, work began almost immediately. Using aging equipment and small crews funded through the Division of Forestry, workers widened existing CCC roads to about twelve feet, cut new ditches, and installed culverts along several miles of crest. The early focus was on the segment west from Shell Gap toward US 421, where the ridge rolled like a series of waves and demanded constant attention to drainage and erosion. For a remarkably low cost, the Putney crew finished roughly seventeen miles of drivable road, about six of which required cutting new roadway rather than simply widening old truck trails.
Creason later noted that the work was done on a financial shoestring, but he and Wyatt shared the belief that if people could drive part of the ridge and glimpse the views, they would build public pressure for more improvements and future funding. Usage, in other words, would justify the next steps.
Federal money, right of way fights, and an Appalachian corridor
The trail did not become a complete, thirty eight mile ridge road overnight. Through the nineteen sixties planners and local advocates tried to extend and improve the road in stages, often in fits and starts.
A 1965 article in the Harlan Daily Enterprise carried the headline “Little Shepherd Trail Has Vast Recreation Potential,” a sign that locals were already using the name drawn from John Fox Jr.’s novel and that they viewed the road as an economic opportunity as well as a forestry tool.
Two years later, a tourism and heritage magazine called Our Heritage ran a piece titled “Your Passport to Wild Beauty” that included a map of the trail and reported on Appalachian Regional Commission interest in extending the route from Harlan west to Pineville and from Whitesburg northeast to Breaks Interstate Park. In that vision, Little Shepherd Trail would become the middle link in a one hundred and three mile scenic corridor along Pine Mountain, tying together coal camps, parks, and overlooks.
Securing money for such a corridor proved complicated. Harlan Daily Enterprise articles from 1968 and 1970 trace the twists and turns. Headlines like “Federal, State Funds For Building Trail Are Assured. If Property Owners Willing To Donate Needed Right of Way,” “Little Shepherd Trail Group Urged ‘Start Today,’” and “Right of Way Not Obtained. Pine Mountain Trail Funds In Danger of Being Lost” give a sense of the stakes. County leaders were promised significant Appalachian Regional Commission funds if they could convince landowners to grant right of way and if the Bureau of Public Roads approved the design standards. If not, as one article warned, more than a million dollars in potential funding could vanish.
At the same time, smaller stories in papers like the Tri City News show the road taking on its modern recreational role. A 1970 article reported on new campsites and picnic areas planned along the trail, while an April 1971 piece described members of a University of Kentucky fraternity helping the Division of Forestry clean up overlooks and picnic spots, only to find that many of the original overlook signs had been stolen and trash cans riddled with bullet holes. That same article noted that the first seventeen miles of the trail had been built in the nineteen thirties by the Civilian Conservation Corps and that the Division of Forestry extended the road by another twenty one miles in 1961 and 1962.
By the early nineteen seventies, state recreation plans treated Little Shepherd Trail as a defined thirty eight mile road between US 421 and US 119, a mix of paved and gravel segments that functioned as the primary access to Kentenia State Forest and as a scenic drive through Kingdom Come State Park. Later descriptions in state outdoor recreation plans and tourism materials have repeated that basic outline ever since.
From fiction to markers: John Fox Jr. and “Inspiration Mountain”
The name of the trail was not an accident. Long before the road existed, readers around the country knew the phrase “Kingdom Come” as the setting for a best selling novel by Kentucky author John Fox Jr. His 1903 book The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come followed an orphan named Chad Buford through a coming of age story in a mountain valley during the Civil War. It was serialized in Scribner’s Magazine and then published as a novel that went on to sell more than a million copies, one of the first American novels to reach that mark.
Kingdom Come State Park, created in 1961 on the crest of Pine Mountain near Cumberland, took its name from Fox’s novel. From the beginning, its trails, rock formations, and overlooks were marketed as part of the landscape that had inspired his stories, even though the park itself was the product of mid twentieth century conservation and recreation policy.
When the mountain road that Hayes had imagined finally began to cohere as a continuous route, local advocates and state agencies leaned into that literary connection. They called it the Little Shepherd Trail, explicitly tying the ridge top drive to Fox’s novel and inviting visitors to see Pine Mountain as the “Inspiration Mountain” behind his work.
The Kentucky Historical Society made that link literal in the form of two roadside markers, numbers 775 and 776, both titled “Inspiration Mountain.” One stands north of Harlan on US 421, the other north of Cumberland on US 119. Each marker tells travelers that Little Shepherd Trail is part of the setting for The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come, Hell fer Sartain, and The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, then briefly sketches Fox’s life from Paris, Kentucky, to Big Stone Gap, Virginia.
Later, heritage tourism projects like the First Frontier Adventure Driving Tour built audio segments around the same idea. In guidebooks and recorded narration, the “Inspiration Mountain: Little Shepherd Trail” track invites drivers to imagine Fox drafting scenes as he looked across Pine Mountain’s ridges and hollows, even as it points out coal tipples, company towns, and New Deal projects below the road.
The result is a layered landscape. Fictional Kingdom Come and real Pine Mountain intertwine, with highway signs and interpretive panels prompting visitors to look at the same cliffs, ravines, and forests through both a literary and a historical lens.
Fire towers, ranger stations, and ghost stories along the road
If you drive Little Shepherd Trail today, you pass more than just overlooks. You move through a network of sites that embody the older fire control mission that first motivated Hayes and the Division of Forestry.
One of the most striking is the rusted steel frame of the Beschman, or Putney, fire tower. It stands on a knob above the road in Kentenia State Forest near Goss Park, a short, steep walk from a small pull off. Built in the late nineteen twenties as a one hundred foot lookout tower, it once tied into a statewide web of watchmen and telephone lines. Now its cab and most of its stairs are gone, but the skeletal frame still rises above the trees and still gives a sense of how rangers scanned Pine Mountain’s slopes for smoke.
At the foot of the mountain, beside US 119 near Putney, the old ranger station anchors the other end of that network. Tourism materials describe the Putney Ranger Station as Kentucky’s oldest ranger station, built in the late nineteen thirties with local logs and stone, half serving as office and half as a ranger’s home. Modern news reports and county minutes show that local officials have tried in recent years to secure funding to restore the building rather than let it decay, arguing that it is “too important to lose” as a symbol of Kentenia’s history.
The ranger station, like many places along Pine Mountain, has also slipped into the realm of ghost stories. Harlan County’s “Haunted Harlan” tour includes it as a stop, with accounts of unexplained noises, objects moving on their own, and the sense that long dead rangers are still on duty. The same promotional materials point out that the station lies on the south side of Pine Mountain while Pine Mountain Settlement School sits on the north, and that both stand close to infamous crime scenes on or near Little Shepherd Trail, including the case of the long unidentified “Unidentified Girl” whose body was found near the ridge road decades before forensic work finally gave her a name as Mountain Jane Doe.
In that sense, fire towers, ranger stations, homicide investigations, and folklore are all part of the trail’s landscape. They complicate any simple picture of the road as either a pure recreation route or a purely utilitarian fire line.
Views of coal scars and wildlands
When early champions called for a ridge top road, they spoke of “unspoiled” views from Pine Mountain. By the time most of the modern trail was in place, those views included coal scars.
In the nineteen sixties and seventies, surface mining expanded along parts of Pine Mountain and neighboring ridges. From Little Shepherd Trail, drivers could see broad benches carved into hillsides, highwalls, and reclaimed slopes. The same vistas that carried tourists above the valley haze and heat also gave them a seat in the balcony for watching industrial change. Pine Mountain Settlement School’s interpretive essay on the trail notes that this juxtaposition of beauty and damage became part of what the road symbolized: a vantage point where people could see both the resilience of high forest and the costs of extracting what lay beneath it.
At the same time, conservation work on Pine Mountain deepened. Kentenia State Forest remains a largely dry, mixed hardwood forest on the top and south face of the ridge, with hemlock ravines and rich rockhouse communities sheltering rare plants like yellow wild indigo and small yellow lady slipper. It is open to hiking, nature study, hunting, fishing, horseback riding, and primitive camping, but off road vehicles are prohibited and parking is limited to small pull offs along Little Shepherd Trail.
On the Harlan County side, Blanton Forest State Nature Preserve protects one of the largest remaining tracts of old growth in Kentucky. On the Letcher and Harlan county line, Kingdom Come State Park and the dedicated nature preserve within it protect a landscape of high cliffs, arches, and a recovering black bear population. Modern guidebooks and wildlife reports describe Pine Mountain and nearby Putney tower as important sites for hawk and eagle migration counts.
These conservation measures mean that a driver on the trail today may see both the legacy of strip mines in the middle distance and intact, mature forest in the foreground. Little Shepherd Trail becomes not just a road along a ridge but a balcony over a century of shifting land use.
From narrow road to long distance trail
Although Hayes and his contemporaries imagined Little Shepherd primarily as a road, twenty first century hikers have begun to reclaim the crest as a footpath as well.
In recent years, segments of the Pine Mountain State Scenic Trail, a long distance hiking trail planned to stretch roughly one hundred and twenty miles from Breaks Interstate Park to Cumberland Gap, have been built parallel to or overlapping the Little Shepherd road. A new section between Kingdom Come State Park and US 119, with sixteen named overlooks and fresh single track, is marketed as the Little Shepherd Trail Section of the Pine Mountain State Scenic Trail and as part of the larger Great Eastern Trail that will eventually run from Florida to New York.
The Kentucky Office of Nature Preserves notes that a portion of Little Shepherd Trail within Kentenia State Forest now doubles as part of the Pine Mountain Scenic Trail, underscoring how a once strictly motorized route has become a multi use corridor for backpackers as well as drivers.
Hiking sites emphasize that while you can still drive the full thirty eight miles in a day if conditions allow, many visitors now park at overlooks like Creech or Leopold Gap, walk stretches of the parallel footpath, and treat the road more as a shuttle route than as the main event.
Local tourism groups have adapted too. Harlan County Trails and Letcher County tourism pages pitch Little Shepherd Trail as a challenge for cyclists and adventure drivers, a leaf peeping route in autumn, and a backbone that connects side trips to places like the Putney fire tower, Bad Branch Falls, and the coal camp towns of the Tri Cities.
In short, the trail has become what Hayes hoped in one sense and more than he likely imagined in another: a ridge top line that carries both wheels and boots, serving forestry, recreation, and interpretation all at once.
Why Little Shepherd Trail matters
From a historian’s perspective, Little Shepherd Trail matters for several reasons.
It ties local Appalachian experience directly to national currents in conservation and development. The road would not exist without Kentenia State Forest, New Deal era CCC work, and mid century fire control policy, nor without the Appalachian Regional Commission’s brief, intense push to fund scenic routes that might help diversify mountain economies.
It exemplifies how literature and landscape can loop into one another. John Fox Jr.’s novel lent its title and aura to the road, while the road in turn helped solidify “Kingdom Come” and “Inspiration Mountain” in public memory as real, drivable places rather than only fictional settings.
It shows how infrastructure accumulates stories. Along its length you find the remains of a fire tower, an aging ranger station, homicide sites, ghost stories, picnic areas, hunting pull offs, and now long distance hiking trailheads. Each layer sits next to the others, visible from the same narrow lane.
Finally, it offers a rare kind of continuity. When you stand at an overlook along Little Shepherd Trail on a cool autumn day and watch clouds move over the valleys, you are watching from roughly the same vantage point that Marguerite Butler and her companions climbed to in 1914, that CCC crews graded in the nineteen thirties, that Bill Hayes and his colleagues widened in the nineteen sixties, and that modern hikers mark with GPS, trail apps, and social media posts.
The ridge has changed. The forest has grown and burned and regrown. Strip mines have scarred some slopes and been partly reclaimed. Bears and ravens have returned in greater numbers. Yet the feeling of standing at the very top of the mountain, with layers of ridges falling away on either side, remains.
Little Shepherd Trail holds that feeling within the frame of a narrow road along the sky.
Sources & Further Reading
Pine Mountain Settlement School. “Little Shepherd Trail.” Pine Mountain Settlement School Collections, June 6, 2016. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/land-use/land-use-guide/little-shepherd-trail/
Butler, Marguerite. Letter to her mother, August 14, 1914. Pine Mountain Settlement School Institutional Papers, Series 09: Staff/Personnel. Quoted and digitized in “Little Shepherd Trail,” Pine Mountain Settlement School. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/land-use/land-use-guide/little-shepherd-trail/
Hayes, William (Bill). Letter to Judge Cam Smith, December 23, 1958. Pine Mountain Settlement School Institutional Papers, Series 12: Land Use. Quoted and digitized in “Little Shepherd Trail,” Pine Mountain Settlement School. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/land-use/land-use-guide/little-shepherd-trail/
Pine Mountain Settlement School. Photographic albums of Jack’s Gap and Pine Mountain ridge hikes (Katherine True Album, Roettinger Album, Arthur W. Dodd Album, Nace Album, Hook Album, and others), ca. 1914–1947. Pine Mountain Settlement School Collections. Accessed via “Little Shepherd Trail.” https://pinemountainsettlement.net/land-use/land-use-guide/little-shepherd-trail/
Creason, Joe. “Top O’ the Mountain: Work on First Sky Line Motor Trail in Kentucky Gets Off to a Fast Start.” Louisville Courier-Journal Magazine, June 25, 1961. Quoted in Pine Mountain Settlement School, “Little Shepherd Trail.” https://pinemountainsettlement.net/land-use/land-use-guide/little-shepherd-trail/
Harlan Daily Enterprise. “Little Shepherd Trail Has Vast Recreation Potential,” September 15, 1965; “Federal, State Funds for Building Trail Are Assured. If Property Owners Willing To Donate Needed Right of Way,” May 1, 1968; “Little Shepherd Trail Group Urged ‘Start Today,’” May 2, 1968; “Right of Way Not Obtained. Pine Mountain Trail Funds in Danger of Being Lost,” October 29, 1970; Lisa Fee, “Association Regrouping to Promote Tourism Along Little Shepherd Trail,” November 26, 1988. Quoted in Pine Mountain Settlement School, “Little Shepherd Trail.” https://pinemountainsettlement.net/land-use/land-use-guide/little-shepherd-trail/
Tri-City News. “New Camp Sites Are Planned for Little Shepherd Trail,” February 12, 1970; “UK Fraternity Helps Clean Mountain,” April 8, 1971. Quoted in Pine Mountain Settlement School, “Little Shepherd Trail.” https://pinemountainsettlement.net/land-use/land-use-guide/little-shepherd-trail/
“Your Passport to Wild Beauty.” Our Heritage, June 1967. Quoted in Pine Mountain Settlement School, “Little Shepherd Trail.” https://pinemountainsettlement.net/land-use/land-use-guide/little-shepherd-trail/
Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet, Division of Forestry. “Kentenia State Forest.” Kentucky State Forests. https://eec.ky.gov/Natural-Resources/Forestry/ky-state-forests/Pages/Kentenia-State-Forest.aspx
Gracey, Eric. “Kentucky’s State Forests.” Kentucky Woodlands Magazine, University of Kentucky Department of Forestry, n.d. https://kywoodlandsmagazine.mgcafe.uky.edu/sites/kywoodlandsmagazine.ca.uky.edu/files/page18-19parks.pdf
Kentucky Department for Local Government. Kentucky: Statewide Comprehensive Outdoor Recreation Plan (SCORP), 2014–2019. Frankfort: Commonwealth of Kentucky, 2014. https://kydlgweb.ky.gov/Documents/LWCF/FINAL%202014%20SCORP.pdf
Kentucky Department of Parks. “Pine Mountain State Scenic Trail.” Kentucky State Parks. https://parks.ky.gov/explore/pine-mountain-state-scenic-trail-7826
Kentucky Department of Parks. “Kingdom Come State Park.” Kentucky State Parks. https://parks.ky.gov/explore/kingdom-come-state-park-7817
Letcher County Tourism. “Trails.” Discover Letcher. https://www.discoverletcher.com/trails
Harlan County Trails. “Little Shepherd Trail and Kentenia State Forest.” HarlanCountyTrails.com. http://www.harlancountytrails.com/littleshepherdtrail.php
Chesnut, Don. “Little Shepherd Trail on Pine Mountain, Kentucky.” DonChesnut.com, n.d. http://www.donchesnut.com/motorcycle/londonwhitesburgloop/littleshepherdtrail.html
Explore The Kentucky Wildlands. “Little Shepherd Trail.” ExploreKYWildlands.com. https://www.explorekywildlands.com/listing/little-shepherd-trail/199/
Explore The Kentucky Wildlands. “Kentenia State Forest.” ExploreKYWildlands.com. https://www.explorekywildlands.com/listing/kentenia-state-forest/902/
National Park Service. Kentucky Wildlands National Heritage Area Feasibility Study. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of the Interior, 2023. https://npshistory.com/publications/nha/kentucky-wildlands-nha-fs-2023.pdf
Kentucky Heritage Council. The New Deal Builds: A Historic Context of the New Deal in East Kentucky, 1933–1943. Frankfort: Kentucky Heritage Council, 2005. https://heritage.ky.gov/Documents/NewDealBuilds.pdf
Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet. “Kentenia State Forest Is a Hidden Recreational Gem.” Land, Air & Water (Spring 2015). https://eec.ky.gov/Land%20Air%20Water/Spring%202015.pdf
Kentucky Division of Forestry. “Forest Facts.” Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet. https://eec.ky.gov/Natural-Resources/Forestry/Pages/Forest-Facts.aspx
Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources. “Kentenia State Forest Information (Public Hunting Area Location).” Area map and description, April 6, 2020. https://fw.ky.gov/More/Documents/KenteniaStateForest_ALL.pdf
Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources. “Kentenia State Forest.” Public Lands Search. https://app.fw.ky.gov/Public_Lands_Search/detail.aspx?Kdfwr_id=9080
Kentucky Natural Lands Trust. “Pine Mountain Wildlands Corridor.” KNLT.org. https://knlt.org/pmwc/
Kentucky Natural Lands Trust. “The Wildlands of Pine Mountain.” KNLT.org, March 28, 2016. https://knlt.org/the-wildlands-of-pine-mountain/
Fox, John Jr. The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1903. Project Gutenberg eBook #2059. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2059
Fox, John Jr. The Trail of the Lonesome Pine. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1908. Project Gutenberg eBook #5122. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5122
Fox, John Jr. Hell Fer Sartain and Other Stories. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1897. Project Gutenberg eBook #410. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/410
Kentucky Historical Society. “Inspiration Mountain (Markers #775 and #776).” Historical Markers Database, Kentucky Historical Society. https://history.ky.gov/historical-markers/inspiration-mountain
First Frontier Heritage Tourism. First Frontier Adventure Driving Tour (audio CD and guidebook), track “Inspiration Mountain: Little Shepherd Trail.” First Frontier, n.d. https://www.firstfrontier.org
Asher, Joe. “Funding Sought to Restore Putney Ranger Station.” Harlan Daily Enterprise, April 26, 2019. https://harlanenterprise.net/2019/04/26/funding-sought-to-restore-putney-fire-station/
James, Connor. “‘Too Important to Lose’: Locals Work to Restore Former Putney Ranger Station.” WYMT Mountain News, April 30, 2019. https://www.wymt.com/content/news/Too-important-to-lose-locals-work-to-restore-former-Putney-Ranger-Station–509281011.html
American Byways. “Little Shepherd Trail.” AmericanByways.com. https://americanbyways.com/destination/little-shepherd-trail/
American Byways. “Autumn Along the Cumberland Mountains.” AmericanByways.com. https://americanbyways.com/autumn-along-the-cumberland-mountains/
Harr, Michael. “Little Shepherd Trail KY-2010 Overlook.” Kentucky Hiker, September 10, 2020. https://www.kentuckyhiker.com/latest/2020/9/10/little-shepherd-trail-ky-2010-overlook
Wikipedia. “Kentenia State Forest.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kentenia_State_Forest
Author Note: As a Harlan County historian, I have learned Pine Mountain as both fire line and overlook, a ridge that always pulls your eyes upward from the valleys below. Writing about the Little Shepherd Trail lets me trace how one narrow mountain road ties together forestry, coal camps, literature, and the stories people still tell on its curves.