On the banks of the Big South Fork, the name Lonesome once belonged to the coal community of Yamacraw. In 1907, the Kentucky & Tennessee Railway crossed this isolated river country on an enormous five-arch concrete bridge, considered the largest structure of its kind when it was built.

Nearly a century earlier, Martin Beaty was drilling for salt water near Bear Creek when his crew struck a black, foul-smelling liquid that burned. Convinced they had drilled into Hell itself, the men called the strange substance “Devil’s Tar.”

The surrounding woods carry stranger stories. In 1875 and 1876, Buckner Payne recorded a tale he said Daniel Boone once told about killing an enormous, hairy giant in the Kentucky wilderness. Later writers transformed the creature into a “Yahoo,” borrowing the name from the savage, humanlike beings in Gulliver’s Travels, and the story became entangled with the folklore surrounding nearby Yahoo Falls.

Eventually, the mines closed and the trains disappeared. Lonesome faded back into the woods beside the river. The town vanished, but the name was too good to die.

The artwork features a delicate hand grasping four stylized red flowers with golden centers, rendered in the bold, flattened style of medieval manuscript illumination. The image was carefully restored from an original antique print.

• 100% combed cotton
• Marles color is 85% cotton and 15% viscose
• Fabric weight: 5.3 oz./yd.² (150.25 g/m²)
• Yarn diameter: 28 singles
• Pre-shrunk
• Regular fit
• Crew neck
• Side-seamed construction
• Double-needle topstitch on the sleeves and hem
• Ribbed collar
• Shoulder-to-shoulder taping