Appalachian Figures
By the late 1970s a woman in her sixties from rural Laurel County began turning the stories she had carried all her life into a public record. She had spent decades on a farm along Muddy Gut Creek, raised children, worked tobacco auctions in London, and buried a husband. Then a Corbin newspaper editor asked her to write about a church trip to the Holy Land, and the door opened.
That writer signed her columns “Mabel W. Martin” or “Mabel Wyrick.” Readers across southeastern Kentucky came to know her through titles like “If Quilts Could Talk… I’d Listen,” “Land Beneath the Lake,” “Factual Folklore,” and “Mabel’s Fables.” Over the next two decades she published six books and countless short pieces that turned everyday memories into what she called “factual folklore” – tales rooted in real people, real places, and histories that had never made it into courthouse ledgers or county chronicles.
Today her papers sit in a single manuscript box at Berea College’s Southern Appalachian Archives. Inside are family letters, association minutes, a Civil War era Union songbook, and drafts of the short narratives that appeared in small town papers and in books like If Quilts Could Talk, I’d Listen and Factual Folklore. Together they show how a farm wife from Laurel County became one of the most important community historians for Laurel, Knox, and Whitley County in the later twentieth century.
From Muddy Gut Creek to Corbin
Archival and genealogical records trace Wyrick’s life across the same three counties her stories would later map. She was born Mabel Williams on 9 March 1913 and would live until October 2003, a lifespan that ran from the tail end of the log camp era through the age of interstates and strip malls. In November 1929 she married Lohren F. Martin Sr. and moved to his family’s farm on Muddy Gut Creek in Laurel County.
For nearly half a century that farm and its surrounding community shaped her world. The Wikipedia summary, drawn from family recollection and local newspapers, notes that the Martins raised five children, one of whom died as a toddler. During these decades she ran the household, worked the fields, and picked up seasonal work at the Dean Planters Tobacco Warehouse in London where she graded tobacco and helped neighbors navigate the warehouse auctions.
Indexes at FamilySearch and related memorials at Find A Grave tie the married name “Mabel Williams Martin” to Williams family burials and to a child, Kenneth Williams, who died in 1935. These records do not tell stories in her style. Instead they supply the bare scaffolding of dates, names, and burial grounds that her later writing would flesh out with remembered voices and scenes from farm and church life in southeastern Kentucky.
When Lohren Martin died in 1976, Mabel left the Muddy Gut Creek farm and moved north to Corbin, a railroad and highway town that straddles Laurel, Knox, and Whitley Counties. Corbin’s role as a regional crossroads mattered. It sat on Interstate 75 and US 25W, with Laurel River Lake just to the west and London only fourteen miles away, so the town drew in residents from all three counties that she claimed in her work.
In Corbin she poured the same energy she had once used on the farm into community projects. According to both the Berea finding aid and the Wikipedia summary, she helped start a lending library at the Senior Citizen’s Center by personally gathering books and soliciting donations from local merchants, then volunteered with an adult literacy program. Long before most people thought of her as an “author,” she cast herself as a neighbor who loved books and believed that ordinary people deserved access to them.
Columns from the kitchen table
Wyrick’s public writing career began in 1978 when the editor of the Corbin Times Tribune asked her to write a travel series about visiting the Holy Land. Those columns led to others in which she wrote not about distant Bible lands but about the places she knew best: farm kitchens, churchyards, tobacco barns, and river valleys in Laurel, Knox, and Whitley County.
In a biographical abstract attached to her papers, Berea archivists list a cascade of column titles: “If Quilts Could Talk… I’d Listen,” “Land Beneath the Lake,” “Factual Folklore,” and “Mabel’s Fables.” They note that these pieces appeared not only in the Corbin Times Tribune but also in the London Sentinel Echo, the Berea Citizen, Appalachian Heritage, and the regional magazine Back Home in Kentucky.
These columns were short, often only a page or two in the newspaper, but they stitched together memory and local detail in a way that readers recognized. The finding aid remarks that her writings “told the stories of early life in the hills of Southeastern Kentucky” and that she quickly expanded beyond travel pieces to stories passed down through family and friends.
She herself supplied the most concise account of what she was trying to do. In a 1999 interview with the Lexington Herald, quoted in both the Berea finding aid and the Wikipedia article, Wyrick described her project in a single phrase: “Factual folklore is my link between folklore and history. It is the history that was not written down, but should have been.”
That definition is worth pausing over. She insisted on fact, on memory that could be tied to particular people and places. Yet she refused to abandon folklore, with its delight in anecdotes, set phrases, humor, and the occasional tall tale. Instead she argued that for a region where much of the past had never been formally archived, cleaned up, or celebrated, these stories were sometimes the only surviving record.
Books that quilt a region together
The columns were fast moving work. The books slowed things down. Through them Wyrick shaped her stories for readers who would never unfold a copy of the Times Tribune in a Corbin diner.
If Quilts Could Talk, I’d Listen, published by Kaikairocker’s Press in 1988 and running 252 pages, is the simplest gateway into her world. Catalogs describe it as a collection of short stories, but the volume functions almost like a patchwork quilt. Each piece stands on its own, yet the pattern that emerges is a thickly peopled landscape of small farms, creek hollows, and crossroads churches. Read as primary source, the book offers compact scenes of gendered work on tobacco farms, kin networks that run across county lines, and the shifting balance between cash wages and subsistence labor in mid twentieth century Laurel County.
Her later book Factual Folklore, issued by Janze Publications in London, Kentucky around 1998, makes her method explicit. The FamilySearch library catalog notes that the book runs 218 pages plus a final unnumbered page and includes maps. The presence of maps hints at one of her key concerns: pinning stories to specific ridges, creeks, and communities before those place names vanished from everyday speech. For historians, Factual Folklore is valuable not only for individual anecdotes but for the way it captures how an Appalachian woman in the 1980s and 1990s thought historical work could happen outside formal archives.
Land Beneath the Lake, also brought out by Janze Publications and listed in book dealer and Goodreads entries as roughly two hundred pages long, extends that approach into the age of federal dams and recreational tourism. The title refers to Laurel River Lake, the reservoir west of Corbin that the US Army Corps of Engineers created in the 1970s. When the lake filled, it covered bottomland farms, churches, and homesteads whose histories rarely reached beyond family circles. By gathering stories about those places, Wyrick documented a local version of a broader Appalachian pattern in which reservoirs, strip mines, and highway projects erased communities at the same time that they promised economic development.
She also ranged into fiction. How to Bury a Drifter and The Ultimate Irony, both published by small Kentucky presses in the 1990s, are novels set in a recognizable southeastern Kentucky landscape. Catalog entries show The Ultimate Irony running about 233 pages and being issued by Janze Publications in London. These books do not translate directly into documentary evidence. Yet because they are based on the same communities she wrote about in her factual folklore, they double as sources for how an older Laurel County woman imagined class, religion, gender, and change in the closing decades of the twentieth century.
Finally there is Tales of the Rails, usually cataloged under her second husband, railroad worker Wilson L. Wyrick, but associated with Mabel in several bibliographies. The book gathers railroad stories that tie Corbin’s L and N and later CSX culture to everyday life, and it shows Wyrick working as an editor and shaper of her husband’s oral narratives rather than as sole storyteller. Taken together, these books form a small but rich corpus of primary sources about how one family and its neighbors understood the past of Whitley, Knox, and Laurel County.
A box of papers in Berea
If the books and columns are the finished quilts, the box at Berea is the scrap basket. The Mabel Martin Wyrick Local History Collection at Berea College’s Hutchins Library carries the identifier BCA 0039 / SAA 037 and occupies a single manuscript box.
The finding aid lays out five series. Series 1 holds correspondence and records, while Series 2 gathers family records and correspondence. Series 3 consists of minutes from the Laurel River Association of United Baptists, a nineteenth century church association that covered parts of the same three counties. Series 4 holds a photograph of the Even Jones House, and Series 5 contains a Union Songster, a Civil War era songbook with lyrics and tunes from the Union side.
There is a quiet significance to those contents. Wyrick is not simply remembering an isolated log cabin childhood. She is actively collecting and preserving documents that stretch back more than a century before her own birth. The Baptist association minutes and Union songbook reflect an interest in how religion, war, and politics shaped the Laurel River valley in the mid nineteenth century. The family correspondence preserves voices from the Martin, Anderson, and Jones families whose lives threaded through Knox, Laurel, and Whitley Counties.
For researchers, the collection functions on two levels. First, the documents themselves provide glimpses into antebellum and Civil War period church life and wartime loyalties in this part of Kentucky. Second, the act of collecting them, then using them as source material for columns and books, shows how a late twentieth century community historian built her own archive so that the next generation would not have to start from scratch.
Corbin’s community historian
Outside archival circles, Wyrick’s name most often appears in lists of notable people from Corbin. Children’s encyclopedia sites that summarize the town’s history mention her simply as “a writer,” alongside football players, food writers, and Harland Sanders. That brief label understates the scope of her work.
The ArchiveGrid description of her collection identifies her as “a writer and community historian from Corbin, Kentucky, writing on Whitley, Knox, and Laurel Counties.” The subject headings attached to the Berea collection underline that regional focus: “Knox County (Ky.) – History,” “Laurel County (Ky.) – History,” and “Whitley County (Ky.) – History.”
In practice this meant that she followed stories wherever kinship, church membership, and roads led. A baptism in a Knox County creek might tie to a funeral on a Laurel County hill. A tobacco warehouse in London might bring together farmers from all three counties on sale day. When Laurel River Lake went in, the valley it covered had never paid much attention to county lines. Her books and columns respect that lived geography more than courthouse divisions, which is one reason they are so useful for reconstructing the social history of the region.
Humor, faith, and “factual folklore” in Appalachian writing
Wyrick’s work did not emerge in a vacuum. The one formal scholarly citation attached to the Wikipedia article points to Loyal Jones and Billy Edd Wheeler’s Curing the Cross Eyed Mule: Appalachian Mountain Humor, a 1989 collection that surveys jokes, comic tales, and humorous sketches from across the mountain region. The inclusion of Wyrick in that reference list suggests that scholars of Appalachian humor see her as part of a broader tradition in which storytelling, exaggeration, and carefully timed understatement work alongside prayer and hard experience.
Pieces like “Kentucky Ham,” her 1987 contribution to Appalachian Heritage, make that blend visible. The Project MUSE listing highlights the essay as a stand alone text, and its presence in a literary magazine signals that editors recognized her voice as more than local color. In such work, food becomes a way of talking about kinship, labor, and memory in the hills between the Laurel and Cumberland rivers.
What sets Wyrick apart is her insistence that these stories are not only art but also evidence. By coining the phrase “factual folklore” and repeating it in interviews and book titles, she built an argument about Appalachian sources. Oral history, family tales, and humorous sketches, she insisted, are not a lesser grade of history. They are what communities have when no one bothered to write them into official records.
Reading Wyrick as a source today
For family historians and local researchers in Laurel, Knox, and Whitley Counties, Wyrick’s work offers at least three paths.
First, her columns and books can be read as direct testimony about twentieth century farm and town life in southeastern Kentucky. When she describes tobacco sales, quilting circles, church dinners, or trips to the Holy Land organized through local congregations, she is documenting the routines and aspirations of her neighbors as she saw them in her sixties and seventies.
Second, the people she writes about often align with names and families that appear in census schedules, marriage records, and cemetery listings. The FamilySearch person page that identifies her as “Mabel Williams” and links to Martin and Williams kin, and the Find A Grave memorials that list her alongside siblings and children, are starting points. Wyrick’s stories can help genealogists see those names as more than dates on a stone.
Third, the archival collection at Berea and the published volumes preserved in library catalogs give future researchers a way to check her memory against older documents. The Laurel River Association minutes and the Union Songster in her papers show which sources she found compelling when she reconstructed local history.
Taken together, these materials make it possible to follow one Appalachian community historian from the kitchen table to the archive. They show how a farm wife who loved reading turned herself into a writer whose books and columns help preserve the intertwined histories of three Kentucky counties.
When Wyrick told the Lexington Herald that factual folklore was “the history that was not written down, but should have been,” she was not only defending her own method. She was offering an invitation. Anyone willing to listen carefully to stories and then set them down with names, places, and dates could join the work. For those who care about the land beneath Laurel River Lake, the farms along Muddy Gut Creek, or the streets of Corbin, that invitation still stands.
Sources and further reading
Mabel Martin Wyrick Local History Collection, BCA 0039 / SAA 037, Berea College Special Collections and Archives, Hutchins Library, Berea College, Berea, Kentucky. Finding aid and abstract, including series description and biographical note. Berea College Special Collections+1
ArchiveGrid, “Mabel Martin Wyrick Local History Collection 1854-1893,” summary description and citation format for the collection, with note that Wyrick was a writer and community historian from Corbin whose columns “Factual Folklore” and “Mabel’s Fables” appeared in the Corbin Times Tribune and London Sentinel Echo. OCLC
Mabel Wyrick Martin, If Quilts Could Talk, I’d Listen (Kaikairocker’s Press, 1988), 252 pages; Google Books bibliographic entry. Google Books
Mabel W. Martin, Factual Folklore (London, Kentucky: Janze Publications, c. 1998), 218 pages with maps; FamilySearch library catalog entry. FamilySearch+1
Mabel W. Martin, Land Beneath the Lake: More Factual Folklore (London, Kentucky: Janze Publications, 1990s), about 199 pages; AbeBooks and related listings. Goodreads+1
Mabel W. Martin, The Ultimate Irony (London, Kentucky: Janze Publications, 1997), first edition, about 233 pages; WorldCat catalog entry. WorldCat
Mabel Martin, How to Bury a Drifter (small Kentucky press, late twentieth century); bookseller listings and bibliographic records. Amazon+1
Wilson L. Wyrick and Mabel Wyrick Martin, Tales of the Rails (Kaikairocker’s Press, late 1980s), railroad narratives; publisher and bookseller listings. Amazon+1
Mabel Martin Wyrick, “Kentucky Ham,” Appalachian Heritage (1987); Project MUSE entry. Wikipedia+1
“Corbin, Kentucky” and “Corbin, Kentucky Facts for Kids,” entries describing the town’s geography, culture, and notable residents, including Mabel Martin Wyrick; Wikipedia and Kiddle. Wikipedia+1
“Mabel Martin Wyrick,” Wikipedia entry summarizing her life, works, marriages, and self description of “factual folklore,” drawing on newspaper obituaries and Loyal Jones and Billy Edd Wheeler’s Curing the Cross Eyed Mule: Appalachian Mountain Humor (August House, 1989). Wikipedia+1
FamilySearch, person index for “Mabel Williams (1913-2003)” and related records; Find A Grave memorials for Williams and Martin family members including Kenneth Williams (1927-1935), which list “Mabel Williams Martin” among relatives. FamilySearch+1