Appalachian History Series – The Godbey Appalachian Center of Cumberland
On the Cumberland campus of Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College, the Godbey Appalachian Center looks out over the valley from a low rise above College Road. Visitors driving in for classes, festivals, or a quick run to the bookstore pass a brick and glass building that could be any campus arts center. Step inside, though, and it becomes clear that this is one of the most important public memory sites in Harlan County.
In one direction, a climate controlled archival vault protects tens of thousands of photographs, letters, oral histories, maps, and coal camp records that document southeastern Kentucky. In another, a black box theater and gallery host community plays, film premieres, art exhibits, and festivals. Lobby walls carry tile mosaics built from local oral histories and murals painted by regional artists. The building itself is named for two Berea educated mountain kids, Edsel and Lois “Sue” Godbey, who turned their own scholarships into a lasting gift for other Appalachian students.
What follows is the story of how this one building on a community college campus became a regional archive, a stage, and a crossroads for imagination in the coalfields.
A Center Built By Mountain Educators
The Cumberland campus of Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College opened in 1960 as the college’s original campus. Today it still anchors the institution, housing academic programs in arts, science, and applied science alongside the Godbey Appalachian Center theater and archives. Each fall, the campus hosts the Kingdom Come Swappin’ Meetin’, a heritage festival that turns the grounds into a gathering of crafters, musicians, church groups, and local cooks.
The couple behind the center’s name came from very different corners of Kentucky, but shared the same route out of poverty. Born in rural Casey County in 1929, Edsel Taylor Godbey grew up in a large farm family that prized education. His height and talent on the basketball court made him a local star, but it was his academic record that carried him to Berea College on a full scholarship, where he served as student body president.
Lois “Sue” Carroll Godbey was the daughter of a coal miner from the hills of eastern Kentucky. Obituaries and alumni notes describe her as a cheerleader, valedictorian, and organizer by the time she finished high school. As a teenager she created a homemade book exchange for mountain children, then left home at seventeen for Berea College on her own scholarship. There she met Edsel. Their marriage lasted more than seventy years, and both Berea and funeral home obituaries credit them with using their good fortune to support education for others.
After college, Edsel served in the United States Army and then completed graduate study in education. By his late twenties he had become the first president of what would become Southeast Kentucky Community College, based in Cumberland. The Berea magazine obituary notes that the couple later funded creation of the Godbey Appalachian Center at Southeast and endowed a scholarship for teachers who planned to work in Appalachian schools.
That gift shaped a building that was never meant to be only classrooms and offices. From the start, the Godbey Center was designed as a home for Appalachian focused archives, a theater, and gallery space, tying the college’s educational mission directly to the culture and history of the surrounding mountains.
The Southeast Appalachian Archives
The archival core of the building is the Southeast Appalachian Archives, the regional archives and special collections for the college and the broader coalfield. The archives began in the 1980s with a focus on oral histories and local history documentation. By 2011, a federal grant announcement from the Institute of Museum and Library Services reported that the Appalachian Archives had grown to more than seventy thousand catalogued items, ranging from photographs and manuscripts to audio recordings and ephemera.
The virtual portal for the Southeast Appalachian Archives lays out the mission clearly. The archives document the people, events, and arts of southeastern Kentucky in the present, preserve the history and heritage of its past, and inform current and future generations about the cultural contributions of the region’s residents. Collection guides list coal company records, community organization files, family papers, labor and company newsletters, local newspapers, and extensive oral history projects.
Institutional news pieces underline how actively the collections have grown. One SKCTC newsroom story details a large donation from journalist and author Margaret Edds, who brought more than three hundred letters written by her mother Sara while living and working in Lynch before the Second World War and later at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The letters, now housed in the Edsel Godbey Appalachian Center, capture daily life in Harlan County’s company town during record coal production and in the wartime federal city that helped produce material for the first atomic bomb.
A 2011 press release from SKCTC announced a federal grant to improve public access to the archives. The project included digitizing thousands of items, building online finding aids, and upgrading storage and cataloging for older collections. A separate article in The Mountain Eagle reported that historical and cultural collections from SKCTC were now available online through the archives website, framing the college archives as a key regional repository rather than a purely campus resource.
Beyond internal reporting, outside media and partner institutions show how deeply researchers depend on the Godbey Center’s holdings. In 2015, the public radio story “Gone Home: The Stories of Black Coal Miners in Appalachia” credited photographs to Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College and the Appalachian Archives, drawing specifically on coal company collections preserved in the vault in Cumberland. Scholars and curators working on Black mining communities, International Harvester’s coal operations, and Lynch as a company town continue to use those images and documents.
Even genealogists looking for local leads are directed toward the archives. A Harlan County research guide on Linkpendium lists the Edsel T. Godbey Appalachian Center among the county’s historical and genealogical resources, placing it alongside courthouses, local libraries, and funeral home records as a first stop for family historians.
Galleries, Murals, And Tile Stories
The building’s most visible stories are not in boxes or bound in folders. They are painted and fired into the walls. Tourism guides and arts directories consistently describe the Godbey Appalachian Center as a cultural and fine arts center with an expansive art gallery collection, an open crafts studio, a woodworking shop, and a performing black box theater.
One of the most striking works in the lobby is the tile mosaic If These Hills Could Talk, part of a series of public art projects connected to the Higher Ground community arts initiative. The project’s own documentation explains that the mural shows a grandmother telling her grandson stories on a front porch, with those stories spelled out in clay text stretching across the tile mountains. Its creators emphasize that the words come directly from local oral histories, linking the image in the lobby to the recordings and transcripts preserved only a few steps away in the archives.
Other murals and exhibits in the gallery space have highlighted regional painters and photographers. Tourism and higher education profiles note that the Godbey Center houses rotating exhibits of Appalachian art and has served as a venue for photography shows, including work tied to the Higher Ground plays and to projects like Shewbuddy Radio that adapted theater scenes for radio broadcast.
For students on campus, the effect is that the hallway outside a classroom might double as an art show, and the route to the archives passes directly through a gallery of images drawn from the same communities whose records sit in the archival vault.
Higher Ground And Community Performance
Perhaps the best known work to emerge from the Godbey Appalachian Center is the Higher Ground series of community plays and arts projects. Higher Ground began in the early 2000s, when SKCTC’s Appalachian Program secured a Rockefeller Foundation grant to support an arts based community organizing project focused on the opioid crisis. Over the next several years, faculty, staff, and visiting artists worked with hundreds of Harlan Countians to collect oral histories, shoot photographs, design public art, and write scripts.
The Higher Ground website describes the project as a community arts organization in Harlan County that creates photography exhibits, tile mosaics, and plays, each one relying heavily on oral histories gathered by and about local people. It identifies Higher Ground as a project of the Appalachian Program at Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College, headquartered in the Godbey Center.
A 2009 Kentucky Educational Television documentary, Finding Higher Ground, followed some of the early performances and rehearsals. The film includes interviews with community members, faculty, and students, along with footage shot inside the Godbey Appalachian Center’s theater and hallways. It documents stories drawn from layoffs, floods, prescription drug abuse, and the everyday challenges of life in the coalfields, performed by local residents on a college stage that is also their own stage.
SKCTC news releases track the project’s growth. Articles announce new Higher Ground plays such as Foglights and Shift Change, describe grants from ArtPlace and other funders to expand the series, and note that performances have toured not only in Harlan County but also to regional venues like Eastern Kentucky University. In 2020 SKCTC celebrated new hires for the project, underscoring that Higher Ground had become a long term part of the college’s Appalachian Program rather than a short lived grant project.
In this sense, the Godbey Center is more than a museum of Appalachian culture. It is an active rehearsal hall and performance venue where residents take the stories preserved in the archives and transform them into plays, film, music, and public art.
A Campus Hub For Festivals, Workforce, And Digital Futures
The Godbey Appalachian Center is also embedded in a wider network of regional cultural and educational initiatives. Tourism sites like Harlan County Trails and Visit Appalachia Kentucky list the center as a historical and cultural attraction, noting its archives, murals, gallery, and theater, and describing it as home to the Higher Ground community arts organization. Regional arts mapping projects such as Our Creative Promise identify the Cumberland campus as SKCTC’s original campus and emphasize that it houses the Godbey Appalachian Center with the Appalachian Program and archives, as well as visual arts, music, theater, and festival programs like the Kingdom Come Swappin’ Meetin’, youth led Crawdad Festival, and It’s Good To Be Young In The Mountains.
That sense of the center as a hub only grew in the last decade. In 2017, SKCTC partnered with regional workforce and economic development organizations to open the Digital Careers NOW Hub on the Cumberland campus, holding its ribbon cutting in the Godbey Center gallery. The event drew state legislators and representatives from Shaping Our Appalachian Region, General Dynamics, and the Eastern Kentucky Concentrated Employment Program.
In 2024, the college marked the grand reopening of the Southeast HUB in the lower level of the Godbey Appalachian Center. A SKCTC newsroom story describes the renovated space as a digital literacy hub, with a large conference room, coworking area with modern cubicles, and flexible meeting and training rooms. Funded by an Appalachian Regional Commission INSPIRE grant, the HUB is meant to support workforce development and remote work opportunities in the region.
These additions mean that on any given weekday, the building may host an archival research appointment, a workforce training session, a student theater rehearsal, and a community planning meeting under the same roof. The Godbey Center has become a place where preserving the past and building a different economic future share the same hallways.
Visiting And Using The Godbey Appalachian Center
For visitors, the Godbey Appalachian Center is easy to find. The SKCTC campus overview lists the Cumberland campus address as 700 College Road, Cumberland, Kentucky 40823, and notes that this original campus houses the Godbey Appalachian Center theater and archives. Harlan County tourism sites group the center with attractions like Pine Mountain Settlement School, Hensley Settlement, Portal 31, and the Kentucky Coal Museum, inviting travelers who come for trails or mine tours to also step inside a college archives and arts center.
Researchers and genealogists typically begin with the Southeast Appalachian Archives virtual portal. There they can browse collection descriptions, search digitized materials, and find contact information for archivists. The portal emphasizes that researchers should request appointments in advance, both to allow staff to pull materials and to honor the preservation needs of fragile items.
For local residents, the Godbey Center often appears less as a separate destination and more as part of daily life. The art gallery and lobby mosaics are open to anyone walking through the building. Community members attend Higher Ground plays, film screenings like the locally produced Stand Like A Mountain, and festivals held on the grounds. Students in SKCTC’s programs may spend the morning in a general education class and the afternoon learning to hang lights in the theater or process a new archival collection.
Profiles on college information sites point to these same features for prospective students. Appily’s overview of SKCTC notes that the Godbey Appalachian Center theater stages numerous productions and features an art gallery, while highlighting cultural events like the Kingdom Come Swappin’ Meetin’ and Goin’ Back To Harlan Bluegrass Festival on other campuses. Together, these pieces of institutional and tourism writing paint a picture of a campus where the arts and regional history are not extras, but central attractions.
Why The Godbey Appalachian Center Matters
In the larger map of Appalachian cultural institutions the Godbey Appalachian Center is one node among many. Harlan County tourism materials place it alongside the Historic Harlan Museum, Portal 31, Pine Mountain Settlement School, Hensley Settlement, and the Kentucky Coal Museum. What makes the Godbey Center distinctive is the way it combines a community college mission, a regional archives, and a community arts program under one roof funded in part by a pair of former scholarship students who never forgot their own mountain beginnings.
Through the Southeast Appalachian Archives, the center preserves coal camp letters, miners’ photographs, company records, union flyers, and oral histories that might otherwise have disappeared into attics, dumpsters, or private collections. Through Higher Ground and the visual arts program, it turns many of those same stories into plays, mosaics, and murals that circulate back into the community. Through the Southeast HUB and Digital Careers NOW Hub, it helps residents imagine new forms of work and digital connectivity without abandoning local identity.
For historians, folklorists, and family researchers, the Godbey Appalachian Center offers both primary sources and a living laboratory for how communities use those sources. For local residents, it is a place to see their own lives reflected on walls, on stage, and in carefully labeled archival boxes. For the wider region, it stands as a demonstration that a small community college in the coalfields can be a guardian of memory, a creator of art, and a builder of future possibilities at the same time.
Sources & Further Reading
Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College. “Federal Grant for Southeast Will Improve Access to Thousands of Historical Items.” SKCTC News Archive, 2011. https://southeast.kctcs.edu/news/news-archive/federal-grant-for-southeast-will-improve-access-to-thousands-of-historical-items.aspx.
Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College. “Grand Reopening of the Southeast HUB at SKCTC Cumberland Campus.” SKCTC Newsroom, July 26, 2024. https://southeast.kctcs.edu/newsroom/news/2024/grand-reopening-skctc-hub.aspx.
Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College. “Campuses.” SKCTC (Cumberland section). Accessed December 27, 2025. https://southeast.kctcs.edu/about/campuses/index.aspx.
Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College. Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College Home Page. Accessed December 27, 2025. https://southeast.kctcs.edu/.
Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College Appalachian Archive. “Virtual Exhibit Home Page.” Southeast Appalachian Archives / Appalachian Archive Online Exhibit. Last modified December 8, 2022. https://appalachianarchive.com/.
Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College Appalachian Archive. “Search All Exhibits.” Southeast Appalachian Archives / Appalachian Archive Online Exhibit. Accessed December 27, 2025. https://appalachianarchive.com/search.htm.
Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College. “History Alive Podcast.” Kentucky Coal Museum at Benham. Accessed December 27, 2025. https://kycoalmuseum.southeast.kctcs.edu/news_and_events/history_alive.aspx.
Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College. “Shop.” Kentucky Coal Museum at Benham. Accessed December 27, 2025. https://kycoalmuseum.southeast.kctcs.edu/shop/.
Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College. “SKCTC Historical, Cultural Collections Featured Online.” The Mountain Eagle, February 26, 2014. https://www.themountaineagle.com/articles/skctc-historical-cultural-collections-featured-online/.
Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College. “Federal Grant for Southeast Will Improve Access to Thousands of Historical Items.” SKCTC News Archive (press release text reused in regional coverage). https://southeast.kctcs.edu/news/news-archive/federal-grant-for-southeast-will-improve-access-to-thousands-of-historical-items.aspx.
Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College. “Campuses | SKCTC: Contact Information.” In KCTCS Academic Catalog. Accessed December 27, 2025. https://catalog.kctcs.edu/colleges/southeast-kentucky-community-technical-college/.
Appalachian Archive, Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College. “Virtual Exhibit Home Page.” Southeast Appalachian Archives. https://appalachianarchive.com/.
Appalachian Program at SKCTC. Appalachian Program at SKCTC (official Facebook page). Accessed December 27, 2025. https://www.facebook.com/AppalachianProgramatSKCTC/.
Southeast Television (SETV). Southeast TV (official Facebook page, posts featuring Appalachian Archives and Godbey Appalachian Center). Accessed December 27, 2025. https://www.facebook.com/SoutheastTelevision/.
Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College. “The SKCTC Appalachian Archive Has Added a Significant Collection from the Estate of James B. Goode.” SKCTC (Facebook photo post). Accessed December 27, 2025. https://www.facebook.com/Southeast.Kentucky/photos/the-skctc-appalachian-archive-has-added-a-significant-collection-from-the-estate/1416584783801305/.
Gipe, Robert. “Robert Gipe Tour of the Appalachian Archives at SECC.” SETV Archive video, YouTube, ca. 2010s. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4C0_ttTwBIU.
Western Kentucky University, Department of Folk Studies and Anthropology. “Kentucky Folklife Network, Cumberland Gathering Information.” WKU Folk Studies and Anthropology News, March 28, 2019. https://www.wku.edu/fsa/news/index.php?articleid=7491&view=article.
Western Kentucky University, Department of Folk Studies and Anthropology. FSA Newsletter, 2018–2019. Bowling Green, KY, 2019. https://www.wku.edu/fsa/documents/wku_fsa_2018-2019_newsletter.pdf.
Appalachian Archive (Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College). “The Appalachian Archive (SKCTC).” AAPCAppE Interviews, Appalachian English Corpus project. Accessed December 27, 2025. https://aapcappe.commons.gc.cuny.edu/aapcappe-interviews/.
Blue Ridge Public Radio. “Gone Home: The Stories of Black Coal Miners in Appalachia.” BPR News, August 4, 2015. https://www.bpr.org/2015-08-04/gone-home-the-stories-of-black-coal-miners-in-appalachia.
Kentucky Tourism. “Explore | Godbey Appalachian Cultural & Fine Arts Center.” KentuckyTourism.com. Accessed December 27, 2025. https://www.kentuckytourism.com/explore/godbey-appalachian-cultural-fine-arts-center-2865.
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The Kentucky Wildlands. “Art Galleries in Kentucky.” The Kentucky Wildlands (arts and entertainment listing). Accessed December 27, 2025. https://www.explorekywildlands.com/things-to-do/arts-and-entertainment/art-galleries/.
Harlan County Tourism Commission. “Historical and Cultural.” Harlan County Trails. Accessed December 27, 2025. https://www.harlancountytrails.com/attractions/historical-and-cultural/.
Tri-Cities Main Street. “Things to Do & Explore.” Tri-Cities KY Main Street. Accessed December 27, 2025. https://www.tricitieskymainstreet.com/explore.
Our Creative Promise. “Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College – Cumberland Campus.” Our Creative Promise: Arts and Cultural Assets of the Kentucky Promise Zone and Promise Neighborhoods, July 20, 2018. https://ourcreativepromise.com/featured-listings/education/page/17/.
Linkpendium. “Harlan County, Kentucky: Genealogy, Census, Vital Records.” Linkpendium, section “Libraries, Museums, Archives.” Accessed December 27, 2025. https://linkpendium.com/harlan-ky-genealogy/.
Higher Ground in Harlan County. “Tile Mosaics – If These Hills Could Talk.” Higher Ground in Harlan County. Accessed December 27, 2025. https://www.highergroundinharlan.com/tile-mosaics.html.
Higher Ground in Harlan County. Higher Ground in Harlan County (project home page: community theater, mosaics, murals, and related projects). Accessed December 27, 2025. https://www.highergroundinharlan.com/.
Simon, Rachel Ellen (AV’s Intern Team). “Higher Ground: Staging Solutions in Harlan County.” The Appalachian Voice (Appalachian Voices), December 10, 2013. https://appvoices.org/2013/12/10/higher-ground-staging-solutions-in-harlan-county/.
Kentucky Educational Television. “Finding Higher Ground.” Kentucky Muse, Season 2, Episode 2, first aired January 8, 2009. https://www.pbs.org/video/finding-higher-ground-bp8zmr/.
Kentucky Educational Television. “Finding Higher Ground.” Kentucky Muse episode synopsis. Accessed December 27, 2025. https://ket.org/program/kentucky-muse/finding-higher-ground-169857/.
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Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College. “60th Annual Kingdom Come Swappin’ Meetin’ Celebrates Heritage and Flood Relief.” SKCTC Newsroom, October 2, 2024. https://southeast.kctcs.edu/newsroom/news/2024/swappin-meetin-flood-relief.aspx.
Digital Careers NOW and Shaping Our Appalachian Region. “Digital Careers NOW Hub to Hold Ribbon Cutting on SKCTC Cumberland Campus.” SOAR-KY News, October 2018. https://soar-ky.org/digital-careers-now-hub-to-hold-ribbon-cutting-on-skctc-cumberland-campus/.
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Edo Miller & Sons Funeral Home. “Edsel Taylor Godbey.” Dignity Memorial (online obituary), June 15, 2022. https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/brunswick-ga/edsel-godbey-10793914.
Berea College. “Passages: Winter 2023 – Dr. Edsel T. Godbey ’52.” Berea College Magazine, February 10, 2023. https://magazine.berea.edu/alumni-connections/passages-winter-2023/.
Edo Miller & Sons Funeral Home. “Lois Sue Godbey.” Dignity Memorial (online obituary), January 24, 2022. https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/brunswick-ga/lois-godbey-10548889.
Berea College. “Passages: Summer 2022 – Lois ‘Sue’ Carroll Godbey.” Berea College Magazine, August 15, 2022. https://magazine.berea.edu/alumni-connections/passages-summer-2022/.
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Author Note: I still remember walking through the Godbey Appalachian Center almost every day when I went to Southeast for classes as a college freshman and sophomore, cutting across the lobby on my way to English, history, or math. At the time I noticed the murals, the theater doors, and the quiet archives without fully understanding how much history and community work was happening behind those walls. Writing this piece years later feels a bit like circling back through that same hallway, this time with the lights on and the doors open.