Letcher County

The Bureau of Prisons has filed a new notice of intent to prepare an environmental impact statement for a new federal prison in Letcher County, Ky.

It’s a cloudy summer morning in the mountains, and Lois Thompson has just started heading home from the Letcher County Farmers Market in Whitesburg.

School is on hold in eastern Ky. as educators, students and families pick up the pieces of their lives.

The Mountain Eagle publisher and editor Ben Gish says it's been “exhausting and emotional” reporting on the devastating eastern Ky. floods.

As eastern Kentucky remains under a flood watch, residents are slowly picking up the pieces after historic flash flooding.

Districts reported multiple school buildings flooded, some beyond repair. They’re also mourning the deaths of staff and at least one student.

As the water receded, it left a mix of stinking mud and tossed-up furniture, and a slowly rising grief.

Though the former coal camp town still has an active community, politically, it was defunct. No one had been running the town for years. With no one to oversee the dispensation of municipal road funds and coal severance, the city’s services fell into disrepair.

Elaine Tanner lives with her life partner, Jimmy Hall, at the head of Mill Creek in Letcher County, Kentucky. Jimmy is a sixth-generation Letcher…

A line of blue and yellow pop-up tents stand along the North Fork of the Kentucky River during a sunny September weekend in downtown Whitesburg, Kentucky,…