Appalachian Figures
For most of the twentieth century, people in Barbourville knew Kenneth Herndon Tuggle as a familiar figure on Main Street. He was the hometown lawyer you might meet on the courthouse steps, the banker whose name hung over the corner building, the lay leader at First Methodist, and the local boy who kept sending scholarships back to Union College.
Far beyond Knox County, however, shippers and civil rights activists and railroad executives knew the same man as something else. In Washington he was Commissioner Kenneth H. Tuggle of the Interstate Commerce Commission, a national expert on railroads and trucking who helped referee mergers, passenger train abandonments, and the long fight over discrimination in interstate transportation.
His story runs from a family that reached Barbourville in the early nineteenth century to federal hearing rooms in the capital and then home again to a grave on the hill above town. It is also an Appalachian story about how a small mountain county banker could end up holding a pen over the country’s rail map.
Barbourville roots in a “mother of mountain counties”
Kenneth Herndon Tuggle was born in Barbourville on 12 June 1904, the only child of attorney and judge Jesse D. Tuggle and Sue Gregory Root. His mother came from a banking family in nearby Corbin, and his father built a legal career that kept the Tuggles near the courthouse square.
Local genealogists trace the line back to Thomas Tuggle, born in Virginia in the 1760s and settled in Knox County around 1800, part of the early wave of families who turned the Cumberland foothills into farms and town lots. Later county histories identify Thomas as Kenneth’s great grandfather and place the Tuggles among the long rooted Barbourville families whose names recur in deeds, bank ledgers, and church rolls.
Tuggle’s education remained close to home at first. He attended Barbourville’s public schools and Union College before taking his bachelor’s and law degrees from the University of Kentucky in 1925 and 1926. Within months he gained admission to the Kentucky bar and returned to practice in his home town.
In 1926, while still a young man, he wrote “Knox County, Mother of Mountain Counties,” a history that a Union College class later adopted and the Knox Historical Museum reprinted in The Knox Countian in 2000. The title alone hints at how he saw the place. Knox County was not a backwater; it was a “mother” from which many later eastern Kentucky counties were carved, a starting point for the region’s modern story.
Lawyer, banker, and wartime lieutenant governor
After law school, Tuggle quickly became a fixture in local government. From 1927 to 1931 he served as city attorney for Barbourville while also handling private clients, then continued for years as a special counsel for the town and county. A sesquicentennial history of Kentucky written in the mid twentieth century lists him not only as an attorney but also as a director in the Barbourville Brick Company and a local lumber firm, evidence of how often his legal work and business interests overlapped.
In the depths of the Great Depression, Tuggle and other local businessmen organized the Union National Bank of Barbourville. The bank opened in 1934 on the corner of Liberty and Knox streets and, according to later reference works, he served as its president and chairman of the board for nearly two decades. The bank became a symbol of small town resilience, a local institution that survived until its branches were eventually absorbed into a regional chain during the twenty first century.
Republican politics carried him beyond Knox County. In 1939 he ran unsuccessfully for Kentucky attorney general, but in 1943 he won the lieutenant governorship on the ticket with Simeon Willis. Tuggle’s margin was razor thin, barely a thousand votes statewide, but it made him the state’s thirty ninth lieutenant governor and one of the few Republicans to hold that office between the New Deal and the Reagan era.
During the Second World War he presided over the state senate and took part in Kentucky’s long struggle against tuberculosis and other public health crises. A letter preserved in the Stratton Owen Hammon Papers at the Filson Historical Society shows Lieutenant Governor Tuggle writing to architect and officer Stratton Hammon in February 1945, asking him to resign his military commission and come home to design hospitals for what he called Kentucky’s “war on TB.” The request illustrates his conviction that modern infrastructure and professional expertise were essential to rural Kentuckians’ welfare.
Local historian of Knox County and Barbourville
Even as his responsibilities widened, Tuggle kept writing about the place that had formed him. The Knox Historical Museum’s indices to The Knox Countian show several pieces that grew out of his personal papers and earlier manuscripts.
“Knox County, Mother of Mountain Counties” offered an overview of county development in 1926, written while his generation still remembered the last decades of the nineteenth century. Later numbers of The Knox Countian reprinted his biographical sketch “Thomas Tuggle, 1766–1835,” which traced the family’s migration from Virginia and placed his ancestor among the early settlers on the Cumberland.
Another article, “The Bank of Barbourville, 1818–1820,” examined one of the town’s earliest financial institutions. In that brief history he followed old charters and court records to reconstruct how a frontier community tried to marshal capital for growth and then saw its first bank disappear. Coming from a man who had organized a later Union National Bank in 1934, the piece reads as both antiquarian and autobiographical.
By the 1990s, when the Knox Historical Museum published a biographical essay “Kenneth Herndon Tuggle, Lieutenant Governor of Kentucky, 1943–47,” his life itself had become part of the local story. For Barbourville historians, he was no longer only a collector of documents but a subject worth documenting.
From mountain courthouse to the Interstate Commerce Commission
If the first half of Tuggle’s life belonged to Knox County, the second unfolded in a web of federal statutes, case files, and hearing rooms. In 1953 President Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed him to the Interstate Commerce Commission, the powerful but sometimes obscure agency that regulated interstate transportation of freight and passengers by rail, truck, bus, pipeline, and inland waterway.
He took the oath of office that September and quickly became one of the commission’s most visible members. German biographical notes on his career emphasize that he was reappointed by presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson, served as chairman of the commission in 1959, and from 1960 onward headed its finance division, the branch that scrutinized railroad mergers and reorganizations.
A mid career profile in a Kentucky reference volume, Kentucky Lives: The Blue Grass State Who’s Who, stressed how he balanced this national role with local commitments. It described a man who remained active in Barbourville businesses, held office in civic clubs and fraternal orders, and continued to serve as a trustee of Union College, where he received an honorary Doctor of Laws in 1947.
Contemporaries outside Kentucky also took note. A 1955 article in The Atlantic titled “Competition in Transportation” cited a speech Tuggle delivered to the Association of Interstate Commerce Practitioners, in which he challenged the claim that federal regulation of carriers had remained unchanged since 1887. The article quoted him insisting that such a notion was false and pointed to more than a hundred statutory amendments that had reshaped the commission’s work.
Washington reporters, writing later in his life, routinely described him as one of the government’s leading experts on the railroad industry, a commissioner whose quiet influence could make or break mergers and routings that affected whole regions.
“Diversification” and the shadow of Penn Central
The 1960s and early 1970s were hard years for railroads. Freight traffic shifted to trucks and pipelines, passengers migrated to highways and airlines, and several northeastern rail systems slid toward bankruptcy. Tuggle’s most substantial published work on these problems appeared in 1973 in the Transportation Law Journal under the title “Diversification as a Means of Financial Support for Surface Transportation Utilities.”
Writing as a sitting commissioner, he opened the article by invoking the collapse of the multibillion dollar Penn Central empire, treating the bankruptcy as a warning about the financial fragility of regulated carriers. From there he considered how railroads and other “surface transportation utilities” might diversify their holdings, seek non transportation revenues, and still remain within the public utility framework that the ICC supervised.
The article also underscored his personal link to eastern Kentucky institutions. The byline identified him as “Commissioner, Interstate Commerce Commission, LL.D., Union College,” quietly reminding readers that his honorary doctorate came from the small mountain college whose board he had served for decades.
Civil rights on the rails
Because the Interstate Commerce Commission regulated interstate transportation, it sat at the center of the long struggle to dismantle segregation in buses and trains. In October 1959, Martin Luther King Jr., writing on behalf of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, sent a letter titled “To Kenneth H. Tuggle” to the ICC chairman in Washington. The King Papers describe King’s purpose as seeking a meeting with Tuggle to discuss continuing discrimination against Black passengers traveling on interstate carriers.
Editors of The Papers of Martin Luther King Jr. place the letter within a cluster of documents that show civil rights organizations pressuring federal regulators to enforce existing Supreme Court decisions against segregated seating and facilities. One later introduction notes that the correspondence with Tuggle formed part of the broader campaign against “discriminatory practices against Black interstate travelers.”
According to the King Institute’s summary and contemporary press coverage from the Montgomery Advertiser, Tuggle agreed to meet with King’s delegation and assured reporters that the commission would act when it received formal complaints of discrimination in interstate travel. The ICC would not issue its most sweeping desegregation orders until later in the 1960s, but the episode shows how a Barbourville lawyer ended up in conversation with one of the central figures of the civil rights movement over what happened on buses and trains crossing state lines.
Passenger trains and the problem of discontinuance
By the mid 1960s, the commission faced a different but related public policy problem. Railroads across the country petitioned to discontinue money losing passenger trains, especially on secondary and branch lines that served small towns. Congress responded by calling hearings on “Passenger Train Discontinuances” before the Senate Commerce Committee in the Eighty ninth Congress, summoning ICC officials, including Tuggle, as witnesses.
In those hearings, commission representatives explained how they weighed railroad finances against communities’ dependence on passenger service. Tuggle’s appearance placed him squarely in the middle of that balancing act. He had grown up in a county where the railroad station was a gateway to jobs and schooling beyond the mountains, but as a regulator he had to consider national transportation trends and the legal standards that governed abandonments. The official record shows him testifying about the commission’s procedures for reviewing discontinuance applications and about the broader economic context of declining passenger demand.
Within a decade, Amtrak would take over most intercity passenger service, but the hearings capture a moment when ICC commissioners like Tuggle still held direct power over whether a given train lived or died.
Working past retirement: Executive Order 11791
Under federal retirement law, ICC commissioners ordinarily faced mandatory retirement at age seventy. Tuggle reached that mark in June 1974, in the middle of the Penn Central and northeastern railroad reorganizations that had already preoccupied his published work.
Rather than see him step down immediately, President Richard Nixon issued Executive Order 11791, formally exempting him from the retirement requirement. The order, dated 25 June 1974, stated that “the public interest requires that Commissioner Tuggle be exempted from such mandatory retirement” and extended his service through the end of 1975.
German biographical notes connect that exemption directly to the effort to complete the reorganization of northeastern railroads, including the creation of Conrail. They emphasize that Nixon’s order kept an experienced hand in place while Congress and federal agencies tried to salvage a functioning freight system out of several bankrupt carriers.
In the end, health rather than statute ended his tenure. Tuggle resigned from the commission effective 31 July 1975, citing serious heart problems that had kept him in and out of hospitals. In a letter to President Gerald Ford, quoted in his Washington Post obituary, he wrote, “I regret that my health does not permit me to remain in the commission’s service.”
Remembering Tuggle in Barbourville and beyond
Tuggle died in Louisville on 17 February 1978 at the age of seventy three. His obituary in The Washington Post remembered him as a former chairman of the ICC who had spent twenty two years on the commission and played a major role in supervising railroad mergers. Yet the story also noted that he had organized the Union National Bank of Barbourville, chaired its board until 1953, and remained a trustee of Union College for thirty six years.
Biographical entries in political reference works add a few more details. They list him as a Republican delegate to national conventions in 1948 and 1952, a member of Pi Kappa Alpha and the American Bar Association, and a Methodist layman. Genealogical summaries and cemetery guides agree that he was buried in Barbourville Cemetery in Knox County, the same town whose early history he had once chronicled as a student.
Back in Barbourville, his legacy has been carried in quieter ways. Union College histories and late twentieth century catalogs list him as a longtime trustee and mention the Kenneth H. Tuggle Eastern Kentucky Essay Award, endowed in his memory to encourage students to explore the region’s past. The Knox Historical Museum catalogs his original manuscripts and the later reprintings, ensuring that his essays on Knox County and his ancestors remain available to local readers.
Even the old Union National Bank building, whose roof recently collapsed after more than a century on the corner of Liberty and Knox, has become part of his story. News coverage and local social media posts about the structure’s partial demolition often mention that it once housed the bank he organized, tying a crumbling downtown landmark back to a man who once tried to modernize both his hometown and the nation’s transportation system.
For Appalachian history, Kenneth H. Tuggle’s life offers more than a list of offices. It shows how a person formed in a small mountain county, attentive to local archives and family stories, could end up shaping national debates over railroads, trucking, and civil rights while still seeing Knox County as the “mother of mountain counties” to which he ultimately returned.
Sources & further reading
Kenneth H. Tuggle, “Diversification as a Means of Financial Support for Surface Transportation Utilities,” Transportation Law Journal 5, no. 1 (1973), published via the University of Denver’s Digital Commons. Digital Commons
Executive Order 11791: Exemption of Kenneth H. Tuggle From Mandatory Retirement, 25 June 1974, in the American Presidency Project archive. The American Presidency Project
“Passenger Train Discontinuances,” hearings before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Eighty ninth Congress, in which Commissioner Kenneth H. Tuggle appeared as a witness on behalf of the Interstate Commerce Commission. GovInfo+1
Martin Luther King Jr. to Kenneth H. Tuggle, 19 October 1959, in The Papers of Martin Luther King Jr., Volume V: Threshold of a New Decade, and at the King Institute’s online edition. MLK Research Institute+2MLK Research Institute+2
Kenneth H. Tuggle, “Knox County, Mother of Mountain Counties: A 1926 History of Knox County, Kentucky,” “Thomas Tuggle, 1766–1835,” and “The Bank of Barbourville, 1818–1820,” all reprinted in The Knox Countian and indexed by the Knox Historical Museum. knoxhistoricalmuseum.org+2knoxhistoricalmuseum.org+2
Stratton Owen Hammon Papers, Filson Historical Society, Louisville, folder containing a 10 February 1945 letter from Lieutenant Governor Kenneth H. Tuggle requesting Hammon’s return to design hospitals for Kentucky’s tuberculosis program. The Filson Historical Society+1
Congressional documents on Tuggle’s nominations and service, including Senate Executive Calendar entries and Congressional Record remarks on his retirement. Congress.gov+1
“Kenneth H. Tuggle,” English language Wikipedia entry, and “Kenneth H. Tuggle,” German language Wikipedia entry, for overviews of his life, offices, and ICC tenure. Wikipedia+1
Hambleton Tapp, ed., Kentucky Lives: The Blue Grass State Who’s Who (Historical Record Association, 1966), biographical sketch of Kenneth Herndon Tuggle. Internet Archive+1
William H. Jones, “K. H. Tuggle, Former Head of ICC, Dies,” obituary in The Washington Post, 22 February 1978, summarizing his twenty two years on the commission and his Barbourville background. The Washington Post
Political Graveyard entries for Kenneth Herndon Tuggle, detailing his roles as Barbourville lawyer, Union National Bank president, Republican candidate and officeholder, and ICC commissioner. Political Graveyard+2Political Graveyard+2
The Knox Historical Museum’s compiled contents for The Knox Countian, including entries on Tuggle’s historical essays and later biographical sketches. knoxhistoricalmuseum.org+1
Neil J. Curry, “Competition in Transportation,” The Atlantic, December 1955, which cites and quotes Commissioner Tuggle’s 1955 speech on the evolution of federal transportation regulation. The Atlantic
Union College histories and catalogs referencing Tuggle’s trusteeship, his honorary LL.D., and the Kenneth H. Tuggle Eastern Kentucky Essay Award. kdl.kyvl.org+2IRP CDN+2