John Fox Jr. House , Big Stone Gap
Virginia
In the Wise County town of Big Stone Gap, Virginia, a shingle-style house built in eighteen ninety became the home of the writer who first made Appalachia visible to mainstream America. John Fox Junior moved here from Kentucky's bluegrass region to join brothers involved in land speculation at the edge of the coalfields. He stayed for nearly thirty years and wrote from this house until his death in nineteen nineteen.
His novel The Trail of the Lonesome Pine examined the collision between mountain culture and the arriving coal economy. It sold two million copies, carried an advance sale of a hundred thousand, and became one of the best-selling American novels of the early twentieth century. Fox wrote fifteen full-length novels and more than five hundred short stories from the rooms of this house. The family home has been a museum since nineteen seventy.
