Appalachian Figures
In the middle of the twentieth century, when most Kentuckians still expected the courthouse and the statehouse to be run by men, a woman from the coal country on Pond Creek quietly took charge of the Commonwealth’s checkbook.
Pearl Frances Runyon was born in 1913 at Belfry in Pike County, the youngest of thirteen children of merchant and timber dealer James Epperson Runyon and his wife Ella Murphy. Genealogists who trace the long Runyon line in the Tug Valley note her birth on 8 January 1913 and place her in a branch that runs back through Moses and Adron Runyon to the old landholding Runyons along Harless Creek.
By the time she died in Pikeville in March 1989 at the age of seventy six, newspapers were calling her “former state treasurer” and filing her among the milestones in Kentucky women’s political history.
Between those two points lies a classic Appalachian story. It begins in a creek bottom school and a Pike County courthouse and ends in a Frankfort office where a woman from Belfry signed off on investments that ran into the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Belfry, Harless Creek, and the Runyon political world
The world Pearl was born into was already a political one. Pike County genealogies and the Harless family history tie the Runyons to a network of justices of the peace, merchants, and landowners who straddled the Kentucky–West Virginia line in the late nineteenth century. In his Harless Genealogy, J. L. Pritchard pauses in a discussion of Adrian (or Adron) Runyon, a Pike County justice of the peace, to note that he was “ancestor of Pearl Runyon who is prominent in Democratic politics in Kentucky, having served as Asst. Secy. and as Treasurer of the Commonwealth of Kentucky.”
The Robert Runyon Family Papers at the University of Texas include a genealogical file labeled “Pearl Frances Runyon, dau. of James Esperson Runyon,” confirming the link from those antebellum and Reconstruction era Runyons to the twentieth century state treasurer.
Modern Pike County reference works list Pearl alongside figures like Katherine G. Langley, the first woman elected to Congress from Kentucky, as part of the county’s political legacy.
Pearl grew up in that atmosphere of kin networks and courthouse politics. The Kentucky Treasury’s official bicentennial history and later summaries agree that she was educated in Pike County schools, graduated from Belfry High School at the top of her class in 1931, and then attended a business college in Charleston, West Virginia.
According to the Treasury history and the biographical note distilled in modern encyclopedias, her father introduced her to politics early. As a girl he sent her to babysit the children of voters while adults talked business and elections, turning childcare into on the job training in Pike County retail politics.
Deputy clerk in Pike County
In 1934 the voters of Pike County chose Pearl as deputy county court clerk. She would hold that office for fourteen years.
Those years are not yet fully documented in digitized records, but the traces that survive in court and clerk materials give a sense of the work. Pike County deed books, marriage licenses, and other instruments from the 1930s and 1940s carry her name on attestations and signatures as deputy clerk. Later researchers who have combed those volumes for land disputes or family history find themselves reading past “Pearl F. Runyon, D.C.” in the margins again and again.
Serving as deputy clerk in Appalachia meant more than copying deeds. In a coal county like Pike the courthouse sat at the intersection of company power, independent merchants, and small landholders trying to defend their lots against survey errors or tax sales. Pearl would have watched miners record mortgages on tiny houses, widows come in with questions about estates, and coal companies file complex leases that reached up every branch of Pond Creek. It was a practical education in where money came from and where it went in eastern Kentucky.
From Pikeville to Frankfort: assistant secretary of state
By the late 1940s Kentucky’s Democratic leadership had noticed the capable woman working in the Pike County courthouse. In 1947 Governor Earle C. Clements appointed her assistant secretary of state in Frankfort.
This move fit a broader pattern. Mid century Kentucky governors often used appointive offices to pull promising courthouse politicians into statewide networks. For a woman from Belfry, an assistant secretaryship offered both a path upward and a chance to prove herself in a capital that still treated female officeholders as exceptions.
The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society would later publish a photograph titled “Kentucky Women Hold Top State Positions,” taken around 1950, that shows Treasurer Pearl F. Runyon alongside Secretary of State Susan B. Jackson and other female officers. The image captures a rare moment when women clustered in several of the upper statewide offices at once.
“Treasurer Pearl Frances Runyon, 1949–1956”
In 1948 voters elected Louisville banker Edward F. Seiller as state treasurer. When he died in office the next year, Governor Clements turned again to the Pike County Democrat he already trusted. In 1949 he appointed Pearl Frances Runyon to fill the vacancy. The Kentucky Treasury’s bicentennial history lists her simply as “Treasurer Pearl Frances Runyon, 1949–1956,” following Seiller and preceding Henry H. Carter.
The appointment made her Kentucky’s second woman to serve as state treasurer after Emma Guy Cromwell’s term in the late 1920s.
Three years later, in 1952, she stood before the voters in her own right. Contemporary summaries of Kentucky politics and the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights’ report on women in public life both list “Pearl Frances Runyon (D) – State Treasurer 1952–1955,” underscoring that she was elected rather than simply appointed and placing her within a small cohort of women who cracked statewide executive offices during the mid twentieth century.
The Kentucky Teachers’ Retirement System’s annual reports from the early 1950s offer one of the clearest primary windows into her everyday official role. In the Tenth Annual Report for 1949–1950 and in a string of later volumes, the board roster names “Hon. Pearl F. Runyon, State Treasurer, ex officio member, Frankfort,” alongside the superintendent of public instruction and the attorney general.
Those reports show her as part of the small group responsible for overseeing the pension fund for Kentucky’s teachers. The text around them talks about actuarial obligations, funding ratios, and the steady growth of assets. Her name sits at the hinge between those figures and the actual movement of money into and out of the state treasury.
Watching the state’s money
Contemporary newspapers flesh out what “state treasurer” meant in practice for someone from Pike County.
The Floyd County Times, which covered politics and finance in another coalfield county just west of Pike, printed periodic reports that credited “State Treasurer Pearl Runyon” with summarizing how much money Frankfort held in trust. In a July 1952 issue the paper quoted her report that the largest trust item was more than 131 million dollars in federal unemployment funds held by the United States Treasury for Kentucky, a striking figure for an overwhelmingly rural state.
Another Floyd County Times article from May 1954 noted that “State Treasurer Pearl F Runyon and Commissioner of Finance George T. Stewart” had decided that funds sitting in inactive bank accounts could be reclaimed, an early move in what later generations would call unclaimed property policy.
Across the state line in Tennessee, the Kingsport Times bylined small pieces from Frankfort that treated Pearl as a familiar figure in state finance stories. One article in the early 1950s reported that “State Treasurer Pearl Runyon’s new administrative assistant will be Tom Rhea,” sketching a picture of a woman who ran an office large enough to warrant its own staff coverage. Another described the state planning to invest several million dollars of idle funds in short term federal securities, with Treasurer Runyon explaining that the investment would be in ninety one day United States obligations.
At the national level, a 1953 United States Treasury press release on savings bond policy lists “Miss Pearl Runyon, State Treasurer of Kentucky” among the state officers who had come to Washington for a briefing by Under Secretary Marion B. Folsom.
Taken together, those scattered items show a woman who moved easily from local eastern Kentucky concerns to federal bond markets. In an era when Kentucky’s tax base strained to keep up with road building, school consolidation, and postwar social programs, she sat at the desk where all that money passed.
Barkley’s campaign and a Democratic inner circle
Pearl was not only a bookkeeper. She was also a working Democratic politician.
In 1954 former vice president Alben W. Barkley launched a comeback campaign for the United States Senate. When his campaign announced a long list of committee chairs, the weekly Mountain Eagle in Whitesburg published the names. The text notes that Attorney General J. D. “Jiggs” Buckman would chair the liaison committee “with John W. Green, Sandy Hook, co-chairman, and State Treasurer Pearl F. Runyon, chairwoman.”
That short line from an eastern Kentucky paper reveals several things at once. First, it places a woman from Pike County right in the middle of the organizational chart for one of the most important Democratic campaigns of the decade. Second, it shows that her portfolio extended beyond Pike County or even Frankfort into statewide coalition building. She was trusted to help manage the lines between Barkley, local party organizations, and allied officials.
Other contemporary coverage of state politics, including studies like Divide and Dissent: Kentucky Politics, 1930–1963, situates her within the factional battles of the Democratic Party. One passage notes that pro–Happy Chandler forces rallied behind Thelma Stovall for treasurer in the mid 1950s and that Stovall defeated “Pearl Runyon, of the Combs slate,” signalling that Pearl’s political career was entangled with the reform minded Bert Combs wing that gained strength later in the decade.
By the time she left office in early 1956, local editors like those at the Walton Advertiser could refer to “Pearl Runyon, the retiring state treasurer” without further explanation. Everyone following Kentucky politics knew who she was.
A woman in the top row
For historians of women in government, Pearl’s significance lies partly in where she stood.
The Kentucky Treasury’s bicentennial history devotes a brief biographical sketch to her among its portraits of treasurers. It emphasizes that she was born in Belfry, educated in Pike County, attended business school in Charleston, rose from deputy county clerk to assistant secretary of state, and then served as treasurer from 1949 to 1956.
The Kentucky Commission on Human Rights’ Overview of Women in Kentucky, published in 2010, lists her among the handful of women who held statewide elective executive office before the women’s movement transformed political expectations. Alongside Cromwell, Secretary of State Thelma Stovall, and later treasurers Frances Jones Mills and Drexell R. Davis, the report highlights “Pearl Frances Runyon (D) – State Treasurer 1952–1955” as part of a slow climb toward gender parity.
The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society article on Emma Guy Cromwell and Mary Elliott Flanery reproduces a photograph captioned “Kentucky Women Hold Top State Positions,” noting that in 1950 the top row of the statehouse included Treasurer Pearl F. Runyon and Secretary of State Susan B. Jackson along with other women whose presence would have seemed unimaginable a generation earlier.
In an Appalachian context, her story pairs naturally with that of other women from the mountains who took on public roles. Pike County was already the home of Katherine Langley in Congress and would later send Allison Ball from nearby Prestonsburg to the same treasurer’s office. Pearl sits between those better known names, a reminder that mountain women were working in state government long before second wave feminism gave them new language for what they were doing.
Genealogy, memory, and the question of where she belongs
Because Pearl never married and left no direct descendants, much of what we know about her personal life comes not from family memoirs but from genealogists, archivists, and the brief obituary printed in the Lexington Herald-Leader in March 1989. The obituary summarized her career as a Pike County native who became state treasurer, noted that she died in a nursing facility at Pikeville on 17 March 1989, and recorded her burial in Rose Hill Burial Park at Ashland.
Runyon family researchers have made sure she did not disappear into the footnotes. Online compilations like “Descendants of Isaac Runyon” list “PEARL FRANCES RUNYON, b. January 08, 1913,” with a note that “Pearl served as secretary of state of Kentucky and was later elected state Treasurer. She was unmarried.”
A findagrave entry repeats that she was the youngest of thirteen children of James Epperson Runyon and Ella Murphy, born in Pike County and remembered as Kentucky state treasurer.
These sources are secondary and must be handled with care, yet when read alongside the official Treasury history, KTRS reports, and contemporary newspapers, they reinforce the same arc. A girl from a large Pond Creek family, rooted in Harless Creek kinship networks, used a business education and courthouse experience to climb into the inner circles of Kentucky’s Democratic establishment. She spent roughly two decades in state service, then returned to Pike County in retirement, where her death warranted a short notice but not a long public fuss.
For Appalachian historians, the question is not whether she belongs in the story. It is why her name has been so easy to overlook. When popular accounts list Kentucky’s pioneering women in politics, they often mention Cromwell, Flanery, and Stovall, but leave out the treasurer from Belfry who kept the Commonwealth solvent through the early 1950s.
Why Pearl Runyon’s story matters for Appalachian history
Pearl Frances Runyon’s career complicates a simple picture of Appalachian women as confined to home or church until very recent decades.
Her path from Belfry High School to the Pike County clerk’s office, from there to the secretary of state’s suite, and finally to the treasurer’s desk in Frankfort shows how courthouse skills and family networks in an eastern Kentucky coal county could translate into statewide power. It also reveals how women in the mountains entered politics: not always as candidates for dramatic reform, but as careful administrators and coalition builders trusted to manage money and relationships.
She never ran on a platform of women’s liberation, yet the sight of “Treasurer Pearl F. Runyon” in board minutes and newspaper articles in the early 1950s helped normalize the idea that a woman from the Tug Valley could sign off on state investments and sit in on national bond policy briefings.
For Pike County and the wider Central Appalachian region, remembering Pearl means remembering that the story of women in public life did not start in the 1970s. It runs back through court clerks, school board members, county treasurers, and state officers whose names are scattered through archival finding aids and pension reports.
On paper her legacy is a signature on bond documents and KTRS minutes. In Appalachian memory, it can be something more: a reminder that the coalfields and creek valleys of eastern Kentucky have long sent daughters, as well as sons, into the hard work of governing a poor state.
Sources & Further Reading
Kentucky Treasury, Kentucky Treasury Bicentennial History, 1792–1992, biographical entry “Treasurer Pearl Frances Runyon, 1949–1956.” treasury.ky.gov
Kentucky Teachers’ Retirement System, Tenth, Twelfth, Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Annual Reports (1950–1955), Board of Trustees lists naming “Honorable Pearl F. Runyon, State Treasurer, ex officio member.” trs.ky.gov+4trs.ky.gov+4trs.ky.gov+4
“Committee Chairmen Appointed for Barkley Campaign,” The Mountain Eagle (Whitesburg, Kentucky), 16 September 1954, listing “State Treasurer Pearl F. Runyon, chairwoman” of the liaison committee in Alben Barkley’s Senate campaign. Internet Archive+1
Floyd County Times (Prestonsburg, Kentucky), issues of 31 July 1952 and 13 May 1954, reports citing “State Treasurer Pearl Runyon” on trust funds and unclaimed bank accounts. fclib.org+1
United States Department of the Treasury, press release in Press Releases of the United States Department of the Treasury, Vol. 97, listing “Miss Pearl Runyon, State Treasurer of Kentucky” among state officials attending a Washington briefing on savings bonds. FRASER
J. L. Pritchard, Harless Genealogy: John Philip and Anna Margaretha (Preiss) Harless, 2nd ed. (1962), page 27, noting Adrian Runyon as “ancestor of Pearl Runyon” and mentioning her roles as assistant secretary of state and treasurer. Internet Archive
“Descendants of Isaac Runyon,” Runyon family genealogy site, entries for Pearl Frances Runyon, born 8 January 1913, and notes on her service as secretary of state and state treasurer. runyan2.tripod.com+1
Robert Runyon Family Papers, Texas Archival Resources Online, finding aid listing genealogical file “Pearl Frances Runyon, dau. of James Esperson Runyon.” txarchives.org
Kentucky Commission on Human Rights, Overview of Women in Kentucky (2010), section on “Statewide Elective Executives,” listing Pearl Frances Runyon among women who held statewide offices.
“Pearl Frances Runyon,” Pike County, Kentucky and Kentucky State Treasurer entries, and dedicated biographical page on Wikipedia, summarizing her life, education, career, and death with citations to the Lexington Herald-Leader obituary and Kentucky Treasury history. Wikipedia+1