Appalachian Figures
On a fall night in Bluefield, Virginia, a Graham High School senior named Bill Dudley lined up for what everyone in the stands understood as a desperate kick. The ball sat on the Princeton forty yard line, too far out for most high school kickers of the late nineteen thirties. Dudley swung his leg, the ball sailed through the uprights, and an underdog team from the coalfields stunned a favored rival.
Later writers would say that this thirty five yard kick gave Dudley the nickname that followed him to the University of Virginia and the National Football League, the Bluefield Bullet. When Dudley looked back on his high school years, he credited a comparatively quiet figure on the sideline, the man who had convinced the skinny junior to come out for football and who taught him how to place kick in the first place, coach Marshall L. Shearer.
That moment on a Bluefield hillside links two different Appalachian stories. One belongs to Dudley, later a Hall of Fame halfback. The other belongs to Shearer, a son of Wayne County, Kentucky, who carried lessons from Shearer Valley and Centre College across the coalfields of Virginia and West Virginia, onto naval beaches in the Second World War, and finally into classrooms in coastal South Carolina.
Shearer Valley and a Wayne County beginning
Modern reference works agree on the basic outline. Marshall Livingston Shearer was born on 30 August 1901 in or near Monticello, the Wayne County seat, and his later records consistently give Wayne County as his place of birth.
By the time he arrived, the Shearer name had been part of the local landscape for generations. County histories and genealogical work trace several Shearer lines back to eighteenth century migrants from what is now Northern Ireland, families who settled along creeks and ridges that gave their name to Shearer Valley in central Wayne County. A New Deal era geological report on Wayne and neighboring McCreary County oil fields quotes the Wayne County Outlook on wells in Shearer Valley, treating the place name as a familiar landmark for readers.
Augusta Phillips Johnson’s local history A Century of Wayne County, Kentucky, 1800–1900 spends pages on this countryside, describing small schools, churches, and valleys named for early settler families. She highlights Shearer Valley and a teacher named Daniel Shearer as part of the county’s nineteenth century educational life and notes that the local newspaper, the Wayne County Outlook, grew into the county’s core chronicler of births, deaths, court disputes, and oil booms.
Later genealogical compilations, particularly Clara Rector Barnes Smart’s The Rectors of Wayne County, Kentucky and related Shearer family charts, place a cluster of Shearers in and around Monticello and Elk Springs Cemetery, the burial ground that anchors much of the county’s family memory. Obituaries for Wayne County Shearers published as late as the twenty first century still mention Elk Springs and Shearer Valley, a reminder that the family did not disappear from the county when one young man headed east.
Those sources do not say much about Marshall’s childhood in particular, but they sketch the world that shaped him. He grew up in a rural Baptist county where kin networks overlapped with church leadership and teaching, where the Outlook recorded everything from oil production in Shearer Valley to the careers of local sons who left for college and the ministry. William Armstrong Cooper, the Baptist preacher whose biography William Armstrong Cooper: Seventy three years a Baptist preacher later drew on Wayne County court records, land grants, and Outlook clippings, came out of the same tangle of Cooper, Rector, and Shearer families. When online indexes for that book list Shearer names alongside Coopers, they hint that the boy who would become Coach Shearer stood inside a web of Wayne County kin and church connections that reached well beyond the county line.
Centre College and the Praying Colonels
Like several ambitious young men from Wayne County, Marshall Shearer headed to Centre College in Danville, Kentucky, a Presbyterian school that loomed large in the state’s educational imagination in the early twentieth century. At Centre he played tackle on the 1923 football squad, known to sportswriters as the Praying Colonels.
Two years earlier, in 1921, that program had shocked the football world by defeating Harvard, a game that put Centre and its coach Charley Moran into national headlines. Shearer arrived after the Harvard upset, but the echoes of that achievement still shaped the small campus. Contemporary accounts of Centre football remember the early twenties teams as hard hitting and outsized for such a small school, with future All Americans like Robert L. Red Roberts anchoring the line. The Wikipedia entry for Shearer, which distills earlier football histories and local biographies, notes that he and Roberts were teammates during his Centre season.
Playing line against larger eastern opponents required technique, conditioning, and a kind of stubbornness that would later show up in Shearer’s own coaching. Centre’s program stressed fundamentals, especially blocking schemes and special teams work, areas that would become crucial in his most famous coaching relationship.
Small college sidelines in the coalfields
After leaving Centre, Shearer followed a pattern familiar to many college players of his era and time, moving directly into coaching. By the mid nineteen twenties he appears as head coach at Bluefield College in Bluefield, Virginia, then a small Baptist institution perched on the state line where Virginia meets West Virginia coal country.
From there his career shifted through the small college world of the central Appalachian coalfields. Records compiled in modern media guides for what is now Concord University show him as head football coach at Concord State Normal School in Athens, West Virginia, in the 1930 and 1931 seasons. A few years later, he took over at New River State College in Montgomery, West Virginia, a school that would eventually become West Virginia University Institute of Technology. He led New River’s football team for the 1933 and 1934 seasons, part of a coaching succession that moved from Ken Shroyer in the late nineteen twenties to Steve Harrick after Shearer’s tenure.
The raw numbers from his college years, an overall record of six wins, twenty two losses, and three ties, look harsh in isolation. Context matters. These were small, resource strapped programs recruiting in the shadow of larger state schools, and they played schedules loaded with regional rivals eager to test themselves against any new coach. For a young man from Wayne County, the jobs also meant work that kept him within a day’s rail journey of home, in towns that drew students and players from the same sort of upland families he had grown up among.
A coach in Bluefield and a family tragedy
By the mid nineteen thirties, Shearer had moved into high school coaching at Graham High School in Bluefield, Virginia. Local newspapers in the region provide some of the clearest primary glimpses of his life in those years.
On 13 August 1937, the Clinch Valley News, published in Tazewell County, Virginia, carried a short but devastating notice on its front page. The item reported the accidental death of five month old William Lee Shearer, son of Mr and Mrs Marshall Shearer of Bluefield, whom the paper identified as coach of Graham High School. The child, the paper said, had choked to death in bed.
In a single paragraph the notice ties together several strands. It confirms that by 1937 Shearer was living in Bluefield with a young family. It names him explicitly as Graham’s coach, not an assistant or visiting college man. And it hints at the emotional weight that often lies behind the tidy lines of coaching records.
Those records survive in a different format. A carefully compiled table of Graham High’s yearly football results, produced in the early twenty first century by a southwest Virginia sports historian, lists Shearer as head coach from the 1936 through the 1939 seasons. The entry credits his teams with marks of four wins, two losses, and one tie in 1936, five wins, one loss, and two ties in 1937, five wins and two losses in 1938, and a strong seven wins and two losses in 1939, when another coach took over mid season. Although this compilation is a secondary source, it rests on box scores and game stories in local papers and gives a sense of how consistently competitive his Graham teams became.
Teaching a skinny halfback to kick
It was at Graham that Shearer encountered the player who would anchor his legacy in national football history. William McGarvey Dudley, a small framed boy from the Bluefield area, did not even make the football team until his junior year. A widely quoted biographical sketch on the University of Virginia affiliated site TheSabre.com describes Dudley as five feet nine and only about one hundred ten pounds, small enough that many people assumed he was not built for the game.
Under Shearer’s coaching, Dudley not only earned a spot but began to shine as a running back, defensive back, and kicker. Both the Pro Football Researchers Association’s Coffin Corner article on Dudley and a later detailed PFRA biography note that Graham hired a new coach for Dudley’s senior year and that this coach, Marshall Shearer, took particular care with his kicking. One of those pieces quotes Dudley’s recollection that, as a senior under Shearer, he learned to place kick and that this newly honed skill helped make him famous as the Bluefield Bullet.
Grokipedia’s summary of Dudley’s life, which condenses material from the PFRA work and other sports histories, describes the same 1938 season in similar terms. Dudley, it notes, led his team to a winning record and sealed a ten to seven victory over favored Princeton High School with that now legendary thirty five yard field goal. TheSabre piece frames this moment as the turning point when college scouts, already interested in Dudley’s running, recognized that this skinny kid from Graham had the versatility and grit to thrive at the next level.
In this layered cluster of sources, Shearer appears as more than a name in a coaching table. He is the adult who tells an undersized junior that he can, in fact, play. He is the mentor who insists that place kicking is worth practicing until a coalfields crowd watches the ball clear the crossbar at Princeton. Dudley’s pro success would owe much to his own talent and work ethic, but in his own recollections he made clear that a coach from Wayne County gave him the first real chance.
A commander on naval beaches
Like many coaches of his generation, Shearer left the sidelines for military service during the Second World War. A wartime sports brief in The Times of Streator, Illinois, a central Illinois paper that often ran wire notes on college and professional sports figures in uniform, offers one of the clearest wartime glimpses. The item describes Commander Marshall L. Shearer, identified as a former Centre College teammate of famed quarterback Bo McMillin and later Bluefield coach, as serving as a beach battalion commander in the United States Navy.
Beach battalions were small naval units that went ashore early in amphibious landings, where they directed landing craft, organized supply movement, and tried to make sense of chaos at the water’s edge. Marine and Army histories often get more attention, but those navy beach units had to operate under fire with a mixture of courage and logistics that might appeal to an old line coach used to keeping track of blocking schemes and substitution patterns.
Shearer’s name turns up in indexing for the United States Navy cruise book collection on Ancestry, suggesting that at least one of his ships or battalions produced a printed yearbook style record of its service that included him. The details of those deployments remain locked behind archival and subscription walls, but the combination of the Times notice and naval indexing confirms that he wore a commander’s stripes and that his responsibilities included coordinating landings at some unnamed beachhead.
Classrooms and fields in North Charleston
After the war, Marshall Shearer did what many veterans and teachers did. He went back to the classroom. This time, instead of returning to the Virginia mountains, he settled near the South Carolina coast.
The 1956 Eagle yearbook for Chicora High School in North Charleston lists Marshall L. Shearer among the faculty. The faculty page places his name under the commerce department and notes his degree from Centre, succinctly confirming both his academic credentials and his new role teaching business related courses to postwar teenagers. Local memories and short school histories suggest that he also worked with athletics at Chicora, a natural fit for a man whose adult life had revolved around football fields.
Aside from that yearbook snapshot, Shearer’s postwar years in South Carolina appear mostly through the lens of family and memory. An index entry for his Find A Grave memorial in the ancestry version of that database gives his full name, life dates, and burial at Hollybrook Cemetery in Charleston County. A recent obituary for his daughter, Sallie Elizabeth Taylor, lists her as the daughter of the late Marshall L. Shearer Sr. of North Charleston and the late Jane M. Carpenter Shearer, a valuable confirmation that the football coach from Wayne County built a second family life on the South Carolina coast.
The full text of his own 1964 obituary in the Charleston papers has proven more elusive in digital form, though the Find A Grave summary appears to draw on such a notice. Once located on microfilm, that obituary will likely provide a concise narrative of his career, the sort of capsule life story that small town and regional papers specialize in writing when a man who has taught and coached generations of students dies.
A Wayne County story in three regions
Taken together, these scattered primary sources and carefully compiled secondary histories sketch a career that moves through three different Appalachian and Southern regions while remaining rooted in Wayne County.
In Monticello and Shearer Valley, Marshall grew up within the world of small schools, family cemeteries, and Baptist churches described in A Century of Wayne County and in the genealogical work on Shearer and Rector families.
In the coalfields around Bluefield and Montgomery, he coached small college teams that struggled on the scoreboard but gave working class Appalachian students a chance to play college ball. He then molded Graham High School into a consistent winner and, in the process, launched one of the greatest sixty minute men in football history.
On naval beaches and in North Charleston classrooms, he turned the same skill set toward amphibious operations and postwar education. A Wayne County boy who had once learned the game at Centre College ended his career as a respected teacher and coach in a South Carolina port city, his grave a few hundred miles of coastline away from the mountains where he was born.
For Appalachian historians, Shearer’s life offers a reminder that the region’s stories often run along less obvious routes. Not every son of Monticello became a farmer, lawyer, or preacher. Some learned new professions on college grids in Danville and coal town fields in Bluefield, carried those skills into war, and spent their later years teaching in places where palmettos replaced hemlocks.
Along the way, one of them taught a skinny halfback to kick a football farther than anyone expected, and in that moment on a Bluefield field he left a mark on American sports history that still bears the faint imprint of Shearer Valley.
Sources and further reading
Key primary sources for Marshall L. Shearer include the 13 August 1937 issue of the Clinch Valley News reporting the death of his infant son and identifying him as Graham High School’s coach; year by year record tables for Graham football compiled from contemporary box scores; the Coffin Corner and later PFRA articles on Bill Dudley that quote Dudley’s own recollections of playing under Shearer; and a wartime sports brief in The Times of Streator describing Commander Marshall L. Shearer as a beach battalion commander in the United States Navy. Newspapers+5Virginia Chronicle+5Newspapers+5
Additional near primary material comes from the 1956 Eagle yearbook of Chicora High School in North Charleston, which lists Marshall L. Shearer as a commerce teacher with a Centre College degree, and from the Find A Grave index entry placing his grave in Hollybrook Cemetery, Charleston County, South Carolina, supplemented by the 2025 obituary of his daughter Sallie Elizabeth Taylor, which names him as her father and confirms the North Charleston residence. echovita.com+3e-yearbook.com+3Ancestry+3
For Wayne County context and Shearer family background, see Augusta Phillips Johnson, A Century of Wayne County, Kentucky, 1800–1900, particularly the sections on Shearer Valley, local schools, and the Wayne County Outlook; genealogical work on Shearer and Rector families such as Clara Rector Barnes Smart’s The Rectors of Wayne County, Kentucky; and recent blog essays that draw on those books to trace Shearer lineages and Elk Springs burials. RootsWeb+5Genealogy Trails+5Genealogy Trails+5
Concise modern biographies of Shearer appear in his Wikipedia entry and in short reference notes on sports biography sites, which in turn cite Asher Leon Young’s William Armstrong Cooper: Seventy three years a Baptist preacher and Steve Stinson’s Bullet Bill Dudley: The Greatest Sixty Minute Man in Football for additional narrative detail on his coaching and influence on Dudley. Wikipedia+2Wikipedia+2