Van Lear
You have reached the final page of our Virtual Van Lear Coal Miners' Museum website.
Please be patient while your PC loads our photo files.

After the files load, click here or start scrolling down the pages.
Click here for answers to our Eighth-grade Graduation Exam.
Click here for photos of miners who lost their lives in the Van Lear coal mines.
Click here for a photo of a 1920s Van Lear baseball team, one of the town's best.
Click here to see a photo of our 1940-41 Van Lear Bankmules High School basketball team.
Click here for photo of Consol office building, now the VLHS museum and historical society headquarters.
Click here for a photo of Crystal Gayle on the occasion of her visit in 2003 to the VLHS Miners' Museum.
Click here for links to additional old photographs of Van Lear buildings and people from days long ago and far away.
Click here for information regarding James Vaughan's new book, Bankmules: The story of Van Lear, a Kentucky Coal Town.

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Welcome to our second and final Van Lear Webpage!





For additional information you may click on one of the hypertext links below, telephone (606) 789-9725, or write to:


VAN LEAR HISTORICAL SOCIETY, P. O. Box 369, 78 Miller's Creek,
Van Lear, Kentucky 41265

Thanks for visiting Van Lear in Cyberspace! We enjoy re-living some of this town's ancient and more recent history on these Internet pages. As we pointed out on our first page, there are a couple of other Van Lear websites kept by individual volunteers. Why not tell us something about yourself and your interest in our Website. By visiting these Van Lear pages, you too would seem to share our interest in preserving, and perhaps recapturing something of the past. If you would like to suggest other photos, or request or provide material of historical or genealogical interest, you may write directly to the postal address (preceding), or the e-mail address (following). We have discontinued our guestbook because of improper use by irresponsible scammers. Please send your comments via e-mail, either at (1) or (2) below.

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(1)Use this automated hypertext link to E-mail James Vaughan.
(2)Use this automated hypertext link to E-mail VLHS.

Click here to read about our webmaster's books:


The Books

{Bankmules)

Our webmaster, James Vaughan, grew up in Van Lear, a company-built coal town in eastern Kentucky. In his eyes, Van Lear was unique, a great place to "grow up in," despite The Great Depression and occasional human tragedy. Van Lear's athletic teams were nicknamed BANKMULES, the title of one of Vaughan's books, which KENTUCKY MONTHLY described as "a gem of a memoir." One Kentucky reader characterized it as a "beautiful book of unusual perfection." The Hardin County Kentucky News-Enterprise referred to it as "an uplifting book." If you wish to learn more about BANKMULES from the publisher (The Jesse Stuart Foundation), click here. and then return to this site via you browser's back < button to continue.




{logo}

The Alchymist and The Silurist is a new historical novel based on the sometimes tortured life of Thomas Vaughan, a 17th-century Welsh Anglican pastor, who became obsessed with alchemy, and his twin brother Henry, the mystical poet known as the Silurist, distant kinsmen of author James E. Vaughan. Stories of the controversial alchymist were revived some two hundred years after his death by a roguish French writer named Gabrielle Jogand-Pages, who created elaborate hoaxes, pitting Freemasons against Catholics. Writing under various pseudonyms, he published a series of salacious stories about a young American girl named Diana Vaughan, who had journeyed to Paris hoping to prove her kinship to the 17th-century Welsh scientist. The sequel Diana and Leo. will soon follow. Click here.

{Vaughan Family)

The Vaughan Family in Wales and America is a 2008 update of a family history first published in 1990 by Higginson Book Company of Salem, Massachusetts. Originally conceived as a "search for the Welsh ancestors of William Vaughan (1750-1840)," this book became a global search for Vaughans of all seasons. Revised in 1992, this edition has been further revised by the author, 83 year-old James E. Vaughan, for publication and distribution by Trafford Publishing of 2657 Wilfert Road, Victoria BC CANADA V9B 5Z3, the publisher of his historical novels The Alchymist and The Silurist, and Diana and Leo. To learn more about this book and its availability, click here, and then return to this site via your browser's back < button to continue.





About the Author of these books (and his web site):

James E. Vaughan was born and reared in eastern Kentucky. He attended Michigan State College and served in the U. S. Navy during World War II, achieving the rank of lieutenant (jg). He received his BA in mathematics and physics from Oklahoma University in 1947, and his MSE degree in 1962. He managed a commercial broadcast station in Miami, Florida for a time before moving with his wife Wanda Lee to an Arkansas farm in 1955, where he lived for 50 years, teaching and writing. He was member of the Arkansas Educational Telecommunications Commission from 1980 to 1988, and played a major role in establishing a statewide academic competition known as Quiz Bowl, which endures to this day. "A Study of Vocabulary Improvement Techniques" was published in the NSPI Journal No. 6 in 1968. Over a period of some twenty years he authored more than 60 instructional books, including Mr. Ready and Mr. Phun Phonics (AudioActive, 1975). Ceres: A Space Odyssey, a software program for Apple II computers, was included in NASA's Second Edition of Software for Aerospace Education in 1990 (p.24, Section 1). His first work of fiction, a political story titled The Polemicists, won the 1993 Heartland Writers' Guild award for Contemporary Fiction. In 1996 his mystery story, The Case of La Grande Dame, was selected from more than 300 submissions to The New Yorker magazine for publication in an anthology. His Bankmules: The Story of Van Lear, a Kentucky Coal Town was published in 2003 by Jesse Stuart Foundation. The Alchymist and The Silurist is his first published novel.

Danny Blevins has assembled a new collection of photos of "Old Van Lear." The book is available from Jesse Stuart Foundation. Click here.

To visit jevaughn.com, James Vaughn's personal Vaughn-Vaughan family web site, click here.
For a fast-loading, general-purpose alphabetized index/directory to the Internet, click here.


We support the KENTUCKY WILDCATS, the Johnson Central Eagles and the old Van Lear BANKMULES of yesteryear. Go Big Blue, Black and Gold, and Navy Blue and Grey!

If your PC is not presently equipped to play our music, click here to download Crescendo.

Return to our main Van Lear page.

If you are searching for a fast-loading, general-purpose alphabetized index/directory to the Internet, try e-lynks:

e-lynks
the A-to-Z index to the Internet.

Yahoo! is a registered trademark of Yahoo! Inc. This web site was last updated January 19, 2009, and is hosted by Yahoo-Geocities! © Copyright 1999-2009 Delapress, Inc. All Rights Reserved. GOOGLE is a registered trademark of GOOGLE, Inc. LYCOS. Is a registered trademark of Carnegie Mellon University. INDXR.COM is a registered trademark of Delapress, Inc. E-lynks, INDXR, aGoogling, VanLearKy, and JEVaughn are trademarks and productions of Delapress, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.




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