An eastern Kentucky town that avoided the recent flooding of the region has a mixed past to look back on, and is powerfully meeting the challenge of moving forward positively.
Joan Vannorsdall
One of the few places in the world where you can see a lunar rainbow on full-moon nights, Cumberland Falls draws thousands of visitors annually to the Corbin area.
It’s four days after torrential rains fell in southeastern Kentucky, and Cumberland Falls is living up to its name, “the Niagara of the South.” The river rushes brown, and the force of the 60-foot drop pushes spray high above the base of the falls. In midmorning sun, a broad rainbow arcs across the water.
If it were a full-moon, clear-sky night, you’d call that rainbow a moonbow. Lunar rainbows are rare, very rare, and Cumberland Falls State Resort Park claims to be the only place in the western hemisphere where you can see one. Located in the Daniel Boone National Forest, the park is one of the most biodiverse in America, with 20 miles of trails.
Cumberland Falls is just one of the superlatives of which Corbin, Kentucky, speaks loud and clear. The city of 7,900 is working hard to show and tell its story.
Though not a native of Corbin, Tourism Director Maggy Monhollen is clearly in love with her place. Building on an effective Main Street program in downtown Corbin, Monhollen is working to bring visitors there for food, lodging, and fun.
“This area is an outdoor adventure mecca,” she says. “Corbin is fast becoming a vacation destination.”
In addition to Cumberland Falls, Corbin draws visitors from nearby 5,600-acre Laurel River Lake, also in the Daniel Boone National Forest. It’s one of the deepest and cleanest lakes in Kentucky, where boating, fishing, hiking, camping and scuba diving draw thousands each year, many of whom are looking for a place nearby to eat, play and shop.
That would be Corbin.
“Ten years ago, nearly 60% of the downtown storefronts were dark. Now, we have nearly 100% occupancy,” Monhollen says.
The story of downtown Corbin is entwined with the L&N Railroad, which brought coal and passenger trains to town starting in the 1880s. At one point, Corbin had a 28-stall roundhouse and the largest coal-washing facility in America.
Corbin was a boom town in the early 1900s, with the elegant Wilbur Hotel, a YMCA, a Hippodrome theatre with an orchestr
Joan Vannorsdall
The only existing chainsawed statue of Col. Harland Sanders welcomes visitors to the Corbin Tourism and Convention Building.
a pit, a Carnegie library.
“You could find anything you wanted or needed downtown when the railroad was up and running,” says Corbin native and retired teacher Diane Mitchell. “What hurt us was the trend toward shopping centers, rather than Main Street, being the place to shop. Everyone wanted new, new, new.”
But now, new is happening on Main Street. Restaurants with locally sourced food. (One of them—Wrigley Taproom and Eatery—was written up a few years ago in Time magazine by Kentucky novelist Silas House as a place where diversity is welcome and the food and drinks are memorable.) There’s a pinball museum. An ice cream shop with more flavors of homemade ice cream that you knew existed. A saloon and a tavern, coffee shops and gift shops.
And Sanders Park, with a larger-than-life bronze statue of Colonel Harland Sanders, biographical plaques and an herb garden in which the 11 Kentucky Fried Chicken “secret herbs and spices” grow. Just a mile down the street is the Harland Sanders Café and Museum, home of the world’s first KFC restaurant. A recent $3 million renovation makes this the place to learn about Sanders’ impressive rise from gas station owner to emperor of chicken.
Just off Main Street is the many-windowed Corbin Library, a place notably comfortable for readers and dreamers, with its arched windows and tabled veranda on Roy Kidd Avenue. By the circulation desk, thousands of books are stacked, waiting to be trucked to the towns hardest hit by the recent flooding. Enough said.
Just down the street is the historic 1916 Carnegie Library, for which funds are being raised for restoration and reopening as the Carnegie Center of Corbin. As a member of the newly formed Corbin Historic Preservation Board, Diane Mitchell is passionate about the building’s importance to Corbin’s renaissance. It’s a place where classes, recitals, tutoring, meetings and private events can happen—and the architectural history of Corbin can be preserved. Many of the historic buildings—including the grand Hippodrome Theatre—were torn down as the city center moved south of downtown. So the Carnegie is a vital save for Corbin.
When I ask Mitchell to talk about her English teaching career in Corbin, her face lights up, and I’m treated to stories about working with Foxfire founder and master teacher Eliot Wigginton from Rabun County, Georgia. In 1986 she received a grant to work with Wigginton at Berea College. “Foxfire changed my way of teaching,” she says. “He taught us to sit down with our curriculum guide and tell students what they needed to learn to survive. Where do you see this in the real world?”
Indeed.
You can’t look at Corbin without thinking about the 1919 Corbin Expulsion, when 200 Black railroad workers were forced onto a boxcar and taken to Knoxville, Tennessee. The reasons for the removal vary according to who’s doing the telling—the attack and robbery of a white man by Blacks, ongoing breakdown of law and order in the rough railroad town, railroad jobs being given to Blacks at white citizens’ expense.
Joan Vannorsdall
The restored, 100-year-old L&N 2132 is the last remaining handcrafted steam engine in Kentucky.
Whatever the cause of the expulsion of Blacks from Corbin, the town became known as a “sundown town”—if you were Black, you didn’t want to be out and about at night.
Both Monhollen and Mitchell refer to the 1991 documentary made about the 1919 event. You can find “The Trouble Behind” on YouTube—it’s worth watching if for no other reason than to wonder at the choice of interviewees and scenes. There are more questions than answers in the documentary, which may well be the bottom-line truth of the stunning event.
“We’re working hard to create a new narrative,” Monhollen says. “What happened in October 1919 is our history—we can’t change it. But we can learn from the past, and move forward.”
Which is what The Sunup Initiative has set out to do. The citizens’ group is working to strengthen diversity and inclusion in Corbin. Visit sunupcorbin.com for more information.
What I saw and learned in Corbin is summed up nicely by Maggy Monhollen’s musings about Appalachia on the rise. “What you’ve started to see is people working in Appalachia to create pride. Young people are now starting to make investments and start businesses. That says a lot about change in our region now.”
And it says a lot about Corbin, Kentucky.
The story above first appeared in our November / December 2022 issue. For more like it subscribe today or log in with your active BRC+ Membership. Thank you for your support!