25 split into 25W and 25E between Corbin, Kentucky, in the north and Newport, Tennessee, in the south. 25, which in those days ran from Port Huron, Michigan, to Statesboro, Georgia. Today, Jellico is reached via Interstate 75 that runs atop majestic Pine Mountain. Kentucky state troopers rarely ventured that far south of Williamsburg. The unincorporated area across the state line was off-limits to Jellico police, and too far away from the county seat in Williamsburg for the Whitley County sheriff to pay much attention to it. The Kentucky side, where morality apparently reigned in Fox’s time, had become the source of just about anything illegal, from booze to sex. A city ordinance prohibited beer sales within a mile of the city limits. The saloons and other dins of iniquity were closed down by Prohibition, and never reopened after it was repealed. The Jellico of my youth was a far cry from the one described by John Fox. Several rough, brawny fellows were already staggering from Tennessee into Kentucky …. It was “payday” for the miners and the worst element of all the mines was drifting in to spend the following Sabbath in unchecked vice. Just across the way in Tennessee was a row of saloons. On the Kentucky side an extraordinary spasm of morality had quieted into local option. The state line bisects the straggling streets of framed-houses. Jellico had never seemed so small so coarse, so wretched as when he stepped from the dusty train and saw it lying dwarfed and shapeless in the afternoon twilight. In his absence everything seemed to have suffered a change. The journey to the mountains was made with a heavy heart. Describing the town as it appeared around 1895, Fox wrote: In the novel, New Yorker Clayton is returning to the mountains after a trip home. The Jellico area was the setting for Fox’s novel A Mountain Europa. He is perhaps best known for The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come, a Civil War novel whose protagonist is torn between his mountain up-bringing and his bluegrass roots, and The Trail of the Lonesome Pine. (1862-1919) spent some time in Jellico early in his career before settling in Southwest Virginia. Many others achieved prominence in a variety of fields, from politics to academics. Patricial Neal, the Oscar-winning actress, came from nearby Packard, Kentucky., and grew up in Knoxville. Two-time Putlizer Prize winner Don Whitehead grew up in a nearby Kentucky mining camp, but always considered Jellico his childhood home base. Jellico native Tom Siler became a nationally known sportswriter with The Associated Press and later settled back in East Tennessee as sports editor of The Knoxville News-Sentinel. It produced Grace Moore, the internationally famous opera singer of the 1930s and 1940s, and Homer Rodeheaver, evangelist Billy Sunday’s song leader. It was a mixture of hard-bitten coal miners and loggers, polished merchants and professional people.
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