Appalachian Figures
A coal camp beginning
Clara Juanita Morris was born in Lynch, Kentucky, a model company town built by the U.S. Coal & Coke Company, a U.S. Steel subsidiary. Lynch rose quickly after 1917 with stone public buildings, graded streets, schools, a hospital, and a massive coal tipple. Contemporary engineering accounts and later architectural histories described it as the largest coal camp of its day and a carefully planned industrial community set along narrow Looney Creek at the foot of Black Mountain.
The fabric of that town still speaks through primary sources. Construction photographs from 1918 to 1920 document the commissary, power plant, and housing types as the camp took shape. Local archives and a photograph album preserved at the Filson Historical Society show the build-out of Lynch’s industrial core and neighborhoods. Oral histories with longtime residents add voices to the images, capturing the daily life of a diverse workforce recruited from across the South and from abroad.
Scholar, Berea alumna, Duke economist
Kreps left Harlan County for Berea College and then Duke University, where she earned her Ph.D. and rose through the faculty and administration. Duke later named her a James B. Duke Professor of Economics and a university vice president. She became a bridge between academy and public life, a path recorded in her papers at Duke’s Rubenstein Library.
Her scholarship often met public policy directly. In a 1976 Social Security Bulletin essay, she identified the pressures that a maturing system would face, including the ratio of workers to beneficiaries and the policy choices around retirement age and replacement rates. The article reads today like a map of debates that followed.
To Washington with the Carter administration
President Jimmy Carter tapped Kreps to serve as Secretary of Commerce in 1977. The Senate considered her nomination in a joint hearing for the Commerce and Transportation posts, then confirmed her. The Congressional Record notes the confirmation in January 1977, and Carter’s general swearing-in ceremony for cabinet members followed on January 23.
Once in office, Kreps represented the administration to mayors and city leaders. A cataloged copy of her remarks prepared for the U.S. Conference of Mayors in Tucson on June 14, 1977 survives, and Carter’s own remarks to that conference the day before flagged her appearance. The presidential transcript helps place her early agenda in the context of the administration’s urban and energy priorities.
What the paper trail shows inside Commerce
Primary documents from 1977 to 1979 show a secretary taking in oversight findings and pushing for improvements. The Government Accountability Office addressed several letters and reports to “Dear Madam Secretary” regarding Commerce’s internal audit function and Economic Development Administration implementation. One 1977 GAO report urged changes in reporting, staffing, and independence for the department’s auditors. A 1979 GAO letter reviewed how EDA was tracking results under Title IX programs and called for clearer performance reporting to Congress. A separate GAO transmittal in November 1977 sent Kreps a decision about an EDA-related procurement complaint.
The National Archives’ Record Group 40 for the Department of Commerce includes a large body of sound recordings and other material from Commerce secretaries of the period. That finding aid helps researchers place Kreps within a wider documentary record of speeches and administrative communications.
Later appearances and reflections
Kreps continued to speak and write after leaving office. Program material from the Carter Center’s 1988 “Women and the Constitution” conference lists her among the speakers, a reminder that her portfolio was never only about trade figures and industrial output. Biography entries and obituaries agree on the same core facts about her trailblazing role as the first woman to lead Commerce and her start in a Harlan County coal town.
Lynch after the boom
The company town that framed Kreps’s earliest years has spent a century redefining itself. The Portal 31 Exhibition Mine opened as a museum project in 2009 and continues to interpret Lynch’s industrial landscape with underground tours, site signage, and a rehabilitated depot area. State and local histories point out that U.S. Coal & Coke’s public buildings and many dwellings endured long after U.S. Steel divested its holdings and the city incorporated. Primary and curated sources offer a layered view: photographs, Sanborn-style site documentation, and architectural entries that summarize the engineering literature of the era.
Why it matters
Appalachia has sent miners, musicians, teachers, and public servants into the wider world. Kreps carried the sensibilities of a coal camp childhood into classrooms and cabinet rooms. Read together, the oral histories, the hearing transcripts, the GAO letters, and the surviving photographs let us see an Appalachian life that moved from Looney Creek to Pennsylvania Avenue without losing sight of the people who kept the power plants lit and the tipples moving.
Sources and Further Reading
Papers of Juanita M. Kreps, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University. Finding aid and collection overview. explorekyhistory.ky.gov
Oral History Interview with Juanita M. Kreps, Southern Oral History Program, University of North Carolina. Audio and transcript. dcr.lib.unc.edu
Juanita M. Kreps, “Social Security in the Coming Decade: Questions for a Mature System,” Social Security Bulletin, vol. 39, no. 3, 1976. Social Security+1
U.S. Senate, Nominations—Secretaries, Departments of Transportation and Commerce, hearing, January 1977. Berea College Library Guides
Congressional Record, January 1977 entries noting Kreps’s confirmation. U.S. Government Accountability Office
Swearing-In Ceremony for Cabinet Members, transcript, January 23, 1977, American Presidency Project. Google Books
GAO to the Secretary of Commerce: Reporting, Staffing, and Other Changes Would Enhance the Internal Audit Function (CED-77-58, 1977); Survey of EDA’s Implementation of the Title IX Program (CED-79-104, 1979); transmittal letter on an EDA procurement complaint (B-187423, Nov. 21, 1977). U.S. Government Accountability Office+2U.S. Government Accountability Office+2
Remarks prepared for delivery at the U.S. Conference of Mayors, Tucson, AZ, June 14, 1977, catalog record. sshelco-primo.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com
National Archives, Record Group 40 (Department of Commerce), overview and sound recordings. National Archives
Carter Center program, Women and the Constitution (1988), proceedings listing Kreps. The Carter Center
U.S. Coal & Coke Co. Mining Photograph Album, 1919–1920, Filson Historical Society. The Filson Historical Society
Appalachian Archive (Southeast Kentucky Community & Technical College), U.S. Coal & Coke Co. photo records for Lynch and Looney Creek. appalachianarchive.com
Russell Lee, “Post office and office building, U.S. Coal & Coke Co., Lynch, KY,” Sept. 19, 1946, NARA item 541406. National Park Service
SAH Archipedia, “Lynch,” with references to 1921–1923 engineering literature and the NRHP nomination. SAH ARCHIPEDIA
ExploreKYHistory, “Lynch” (Historical Marker 1803) and related entries on the Lynch Colored School. explorekyhistory.ky.gov
Mining History Journal, J. Steven Gardner, “Kentucky’s Portal 31 Exhibition Mine,” 2012. mininghistoryassociation.org
Encyclopædia Britannica, concise biography of Juanita M. Kreps. Miller Center
UVA Miller Center, cabinet biographies for the Carter administration. Los Angeles Times
New York Times obituary for Juanita M. Kreps, 2010. Berea College Library Guides
Duke Endowment centennial profile of Kreps. Miller Center