Coming up on the season finale of Kentucky Life... we'll visit Jenny Wiley State Resort Park and tell the tragic and captivating story of its namesake.

We'll meet poet Belle Townsend and hear the strong voice of this native western Kentuckian.

And we'll see how University of Kentucky researchers have been able to read 2,000-year-old manuscripts thought destroyed during the eruption of Italy's Mount Vesuvius.

All that's next on Kentucky Life.

█ █ █ █ Hey, everybody, and welcome to Kentucky Life.

I'm your host, Chip Polston.

Today has brought us to Jenny Wiley State Resort Park in Prestonsburg, and would you check out this view, it's just spectacular up here.

This nearly 3,000-acre gem in the Kentucky State Park System is home to Dewey Lake, an 18-hole golf course, and multi-use trails that can handle hikers, horses, and even mountain bikes.

Odds are pretty good you've heard of this place if you've been in Kentucky for a while, but what you may not know is the backstory for the woman for whom the park is named.

The story of Jenny Wiley blends truth with legend.

Now, historical records confirm that Jenny Wiley was indeed captured by Native Americans in 1789, and she survived months in captivity before escaping, but folklore has embellished many details of her ordeal.

Today, the park preserves both the history and the myth, inviting visitors to explore the landscape that shaped her remarkable story.

█ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ This is a story that everyone knows, but no one really knows well.

People know the legend, but the truth of what happened is a little slipperier.

So, who was Jenny Wiley?

Tell us her story.

Jenny Wiley was a young wife and mother on the frontier in Virginia, on Walters Creek.

And in 1789, her cabin was attacked by a group of Shawnee, Cherokee, and other groups.

They apparently had been trying to exact revenge on a guy named Mathias Harman, “Tice” Harman.

He led an exploration over here.

He led some hunting adventures and trapping adventures, and on one particular incident, he ran into a group of Native Americans where he fired a shot from his musket, and he killed one of the chief's sons.

And one of the interesting things about Jenny Wiley's story is that, according to the lore, it was a case of mistaken identity.

The chief would send a group of Natives back to follow them all the way back to Walkers Creek, Virginia.

They would shadow the group.

They would mistakenly pick Jenny Wiley's cabin while her husband Tom Wiley was away on a trading trip, and they would kill three of her children, her brother, and they would kidnap her and her infant son.

They traveled from Virginia and ended up very close to the state park right here.

She escaped.

She got to the river, saw some men building a blockhouse or a cabin on the other side of the river, yelled for help.

They fashioned a canoe and came over and saved her.

When you talk about her rebuilding her life, how did the rest of her days play out?

There are accounts of people who met her later after she had escaped.

She had undergone some trauma.

She was She She was affected by what happened to her, but she persevered.

She endured.

She raised a family.

They told the story.

The neighbors told the story.

People in this region really identify with Jenny Wiley.

Do you think you found out what really happened?

Well, we know that she was a real person.

This horrible thing happened to her.

She lost her children, and she found the courage to escape and to rebuild her life near where all of this awful stuff happened.

Jenny Wiley State Resort Park originally started as Dewey Lake State Park in the early 1950s.

The thought was, “Well, Dewey had nothing to do with Floyd County or Kentucky.” They wanted to be named after somebody more local, somebody that was unique and a real tale of the Eastern Kentucky Appalachian lifestyle.

With the story of Jenny Wiley, the tragedy, the trial, and the triumph, that is the story of Eastern Kentucky.

So, in 1954, we became Jenny Wiley State Park.

This is a good opportunity to honor Jenny's memory and get interest in the region.

You got a story with Jenny Wiley and the Harmans and wanting to settle the Wild West.

No, we're not talking about these big Western states.

Once upon a time, Kentucky and Eastern Kentucky was that Wild West.

█ █ █ █ Kentucky was known as the land of plenty.

There was a number of animals for them to hunt.

and you know When settlers pushed into this area, they killed the elk out, they killed the bison out.

How hard was it just to live back then?

Was it pretty hard scrabble to exist back then?

You know, she was captured on October 1st in Walker's Creek, Virginia.

and They went all the way up towards Portsmouth, Ohio.

So that's through the winter months.

You can only imagine what the weather and the elements was like then.

and you know Food is scarce in the winter.

Right.

The natives would pick up acorns like you have right here.

They would actually put these in the rivers or the creeks in a basket and it would get the tannins out of it.

They would actually grind these up and make flour and things like that.

How about out of the river?

Were they able to catch anything out of that?

Now, I'd say they caught a lot of fish, mussels, and things like that.

They would even build fish traps and catch them out of the river.

That's probably a lot of their food source, especially coming into the spring.

█ █ █ █ Prior to 1850, elk flourished and were native to Kentucky.

During that time of Jenny Wiley days, we had an abundance of game and that was the draw to Kentucky.

Her family would have seen these elk.

These eastern elk, which are extinct today, she would have seen these elk all over the hills of Eastern Kentucky.

█ █ █ █ The elk are clearly a big draw for people to come see.

How did that get restored and how did all that start?

The Kentucky elk restoration, what a great story that is.

Behind the bald eagle, it is modern day.

The modern-day restoration story of all time.

█ █ █ █ So, it started with seven.

Where are we today?

Today, we are at 10,600 elk.

Wow.

That's remarkable.

Yeah, it is.

It is a phenomenal story that has a lot of side stories to it and if you've not been here to see them, you're missing out.

█ █ █ █ To conclude our Poets of Kentucky series here on Kentucky Life, we're going to focus on an up-and-coming poet from western Kentucky.

Belle Townsend is a writer, organizer, and journalist, who founded Backwoods Literary Press, a nonprofit press project that aims to platform and document diverse rural voices.

Now based out of Louisville, Belle has proven to be a strong voice in helping the community and promoting the rich artistic culture of Kentucky.

I owe everything to the good country women before me who worked on the farm in hosiery manufacturing, in salons, in classrooms, in the home.

The men I knew in my family were nuanced, loving and hard working with hard calloused hands.

The women in my family not only survived the conditions of rural life but also through men leaving or men staying.

This is for Maggie Jane, Blanche Juanita, Linda Sue and Michelle Deneen, who all did what they could to create through surviving so that I could create through living.

Last names denote ownership of property but they are also what gets passed down, what gets remembered, what gets documented.

Let this poem hold space for those who have made space for me.

Let this poem remember and document so that my people will not be forgotten.

One of the up-and-coming Kentucky writers that I've been hearing about is Belle Townsend.

I know Belle's writing mostly through journalism.

I love the way that they're pursuing writing and especially the way Belle is expanding notions of what a Kentucky writer is and must be, pushing the boundaries on all those things.

I think you know artists should always be pushing boundaries in every way they can.

My name is Belle Townsend.

I'm from Robards, Kentucky, in Henderson County.

I went to Henderson County High School.

I left Kentucky to go to Boston University to study political science.

As soon as I graduated, I brought my butt right back to Kentucky and I've written three poetry books since then.

I started writing just classically in school as it was expected of me in different assignments or whatever and at a certain age, I think I was about 14, I started writing poetry.

I do try to write about things from my perspective in a vulnerable way because I'm the subject matter that I know best but I also try to write about the family life and the culture that I grew up in because rural life is so often rewritten or just completely discarded.

I will say that I thought that I had to leave Kentucky in order to be myself as a queer person and after I left I realized that I could not be myself without Kentucky.

The way that we talk to each other and the way that we care for each other as community members in rural Kentucky, across Kentucky, it's so special and I kind of recognized it while I was here but I sure didn't recognize it enough.

And so, it was after leaving that I really realized how much Kentucky and the culture of Kentucky's people really impacted me.

As a writer, we have to be very introspective, and we have to know what we're saying and why we're saying it.

So, I had to deconstruct a lot of perspectives that I had, that I had learned from my family, and I also had to learn to lean into the good things that I learned from my family.

And so, it was through being able to learn what I really and truly believe, and not just what I was taught, that I was able to find my voice in writing.

But in that, also, I have such a gratitude for the people that came before me, because I would not be able to be doing what I do if it were not for them and for their sacrifices.

Canary in the Coal Mine.

My daddy built our house with his hands and his mind and years after our house was built he nonchalantly told me about the huge hole in the floor of the house he grew up in.

He told me about how him and his siblings would play games to see who could dance around it and not fall through the cracks.

My daddy worked in the coal mines in the summer to put himself through architecture school.

My daddy told me about how the money was good enough, how cartridge was too hard and how all he wanted to do was stay in the mines.

The men he worked with caught wind of this, took his clothes and jumped him.

They told him get out while you still can.

The men in my daddy's lineage were taken by the rich man's wars, by the rich man's opioid epidemic and by the rich man's mines.

My daddy listened to his father and the miners he worked with and he had more of himself to give me because of it.

What I did not tell you is that my daddy is a talented artist.

He constantly told me that I could be anything I wanted to be.

I knew that he wanted to be an artist and I know though that he wanted me to be an artist.

Here I am daddy.

Here we are daddy.

Did you know that miners used to carry canaries down into the coal mine tunnels as they navigated?

The dangerous gases would kill the canaries, alerting the miners that it was time to go.

This is how miners protected themselves and knew when to leave.

Kurt Vonnegut said something about artists being the canaries and the coal mines, about artists gauging and feeling for the greater good for those to come.

My daddy wanted to be an artist and even if he spends his long days in an office instead of in a studio, I want him to know that I can navigate, feel, engage my way through this life because he breathed this world in before I did.

I am who I am because my daddy told me over and over again, “I just want you to be yourself and share it with the world.

I'll love you no matter who you are.” I am who I am because my daddy hand laid every tile and board to make sure that I would not fall through the cracks.

█ █ █ █ They're known as the Herculaneum Scrolls, an ancient collection of manuscripts that were carbonized and buried during the eruption of Italy's Mount Vesuvius almost 2,000 years ago.

Discovered in 1752, the scrolls were deemed unreadable and remained so until recently when a University of Kentucky computer science professor led an effort to develop software that could virtually unwrap the scrolls.

We're unlocking the secrets of the distant past with a little help from technology from the future.

█ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ The scrolls from Herculaneum have an incredibly interesting history.

They were formed at the explosion of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79, and this cataclysm is well known mainly because of Pompeii, which is the birth of modern archaeology.

We know about the Pompeii archaeological site, but the scrolls were at an adjacent town in a library, and the explosion of the volcano actually preserved that library.

How did the papyrus survive something like that?

Well, normally papyrus would decompose over a fairly short period of time, but because the scrolls in the library were covered up with the ash and the gases and the dirt and the mud from the explosion, they were ironically preserved by that very process that destroyed everything else.

When the dust finally settled, Herculaneum and its libraries had been completely buried, a time capsule that would remain hidden for nearly 1,700 years.

They were discovered archaeologically 250 years ago when some people were trying to dig a well, and they basically hit not only the library but floors of mosaics that were from the Roman period, and they discovered that there was an entire town underneath the area.

The area pretty much was a very wealthy area, so wealthy Romans sponsoring philosophical groups, discussions.

So, in terms of its significance, it's just a center that's copying books.

They're preserving books.

So, as a library, it's preserving copies of very, very, very ancient literature.

So, when you think about the eruption of Vesuvius, every work that we have predates the eruption.

So, it's anything written before 79 going as far back as you can imagine.

A treasure trove of knowledge spared from destruction.

Could they be deciphered?

It's a tantalizing puzzle that Seales says was impossible to resist, but getting access was not easy.

The scrolls have always been at the center of a kind of currency, sort of the coin of the realm, if you will, for cultural artifacts that are highly regarded, venerated really by the royalty of Italy.

So, it's not like you can just go to the library and say, “I would like to do this experiment with your treasures, right?” So, there's sort of a political and a cultural question there about how to make that happen.

How did you navigate that?

I didn't navigate it very well at the beginning.

I made approaches to the people who held the collection and we were declined.

So, I had to build up the credibility over a long period of time with other work that we did.

And I had to show those things succeeding in order to be able to eventually work on this material.

We'd done enough work that we were gonna get an answer that was gonna be yes.

And I mean, that was incredibly important to be able to walk through the doors of the library and have the conservator hand me a scroll and say, “We would like you to work on this.” What was that moment like?

I mean, it was incredible because this material is really challenging and it's fragile and it's inaccessible.

It is not easy to be able to even be in the same room.

And then think about how that feels.

It's 2,000 years old.

This scroll existed maybe before Jesus walked the earth, right?

And you're in the same room with a document that actually has writing from a human, right?

That no one has read.

Early when they were discovered, and this is back in the 1750s, 1800s, scholars in that moment hoped that they would discover something new about the first century and about the classical period.

So, there was already a huge context when I came to this problem as a computer scientist.

What I discovered is that there were still scrolls that were not unwrapped.

They're completely intact, like a book on a shelf that had never been opened.

And so, what attracted me was the technical challenge of being able to read that book without opening it.

And so, what we did is we engineered a method to see inside and read what's inside without opening them.

And we do that with X-ray, but in a more sophisticated way than had been applied before.

We had to sort of engineer a new algorithm to use X-ray to be able to do what we call virtual unwrapping.

Seales and his team developed software that would examine these scroll fragments and use artificial intelligence to decipher the markings embedded within.

In this particular case with Herculaneum, AI has really been crucial in virtual unwrapping.

I mean, we have two really open problems that we've solved using AI.

One of them is to follow the layers of the papyrus because they're all tangled up and they're crushed.

You might think, “Well, it's a scroll.

I know what the cross-section is gonna look like.

It's gonna be like a jelly roll.

It'll be a cylinder that spirals into the middle.” That's actually not what it looks like.

The papyrus is damaged.

It's crushed.

Places are broken.

And we needed AI-inspired approaches to be able to follow those layers and pull them out.

So that really got you over the hub, if you will?

That helped us with the geometry of taking a scroll and virtually unwrapping it into something that was flat.

Right.

Ok. AI helps us do that.

But the other piece of the AI is that the ink is not very visible in the way that we have to scan using X-ray.

Right.

The evidence is there, but not to the naked eye.

Normal people looking at these images are not gonna see the evidence of the ink from Herculaneum.

But the AI can be trained to see it and then make it more visible.

And that's what we did.

At the end of the day, it really just needed more access to more data and more data and more data, more actual Herculaneum fragments.

All it's doing is it's just going over.

It learned the pattern of what's papyrus and what's ink.

And so, it just identifies ink, ink, ink patterns, ink patterns.

And then it just basically amplifies them.

But it needed that learning to progress in order to get to kind of where it is.

The method was very simple, but it needed a massive amount of training data.

You need actual carbonized fragments for it to train and learn on and getting things to work at scale, not just in a little microcosm of just a few bits and examples.

Enter the Vesuvius Challenge, a crowdsourced approach to process these fragments at scale in a worldwide contest with $1 million in prizes awarded to those who could be among the first to decode the Greek text hidden within the layers of carbonized scrolls.

When you look at the scale of the problem, it's really difficult to read a 100 scrolls with a few people working in the lab.

And so, at the right moment, we realized an opportunity for scaling up could be found through building a contest.

And so, with partnership in Silicon Valley, we built a contest framework where we could entertain contestants from all over the world who would help us do the work of virtually unwrapping a scroll.

That contest led to a few prizes that we were able to award, and one of them we called the First Letters Prize.

An incredibly high moment happened last year right here at the University of Kentucky, where one of the contestants found the first word ever read from the inside of a particular scroll that we were working on.

And that word, clearly visible, was purple.

As a first word, it's really pretty unique.

In the ancient world, the color purple was meant for royalty, it meant riches.

We thought immediately this might be a work that talks about wealth, talks about comfort, maybe a little bit of pleasure, pain, not sure.

But as a first word, it was a very sort of rich piece of vocabulary.

That word was just the uncorking of many, many words that came out of that scroll.

Ultimately, the grand prize was awarded for 16 columns of text, 500 or 600 words, that gave us a pretty good indication that the text is about Epicureanism and the philosophy around pleasure, pain, and scarcity.

It was a very human discussion about what does it mean to live a life that is responsible and that is full?

What does it mean to seek pleasure?

Is that what we should be doing as humans?

What brings us pleasure?

Does food bring us pleasure?

Music?

If things are scarce, are they more pleasurable?

These are all questions that are being asked in this text that we exposed using virtual unwrapping.

█ █ █ █ So, that does it for the 30th season of Kentucky Life.

We've shot nearly every show this season in a Kentucky state park to celebrate 100 years of these amazing facilities.

But as we mark our final shooting for our season today, I wanna take you back to our first day of shooting for this season.

We were really excited.

That day alway kind of feels like the first day of school.

So, we pack up the vans and we head to Pine Mountain State Resort Park in Pineville.

We got to our first shooting location a little later than we wanted to arrive, so we were hustling to get our gear out and get the shot.

We ran up to the overlook there, yet everybody stopped dead in their tracks when this view unfolded in front of us.

It literally took our breath away, and all of us paused for a moment to appreciate what we saw.

Scenes like this just drive home how important and precious our state park system has been to our state, and we've had so much fun celebrating their 100th anniversary this year.

Now at the end of tonight's show, you're going to see a list of people.

They are just some of the folks who have worked so hard this season on the other side of the camera through heat, incredibly rugged conditions, torrential rains, and other weather events to bring you the stories we hope you've enjoyed.

They are literally the best crew around, and I am so thankful for every day that I get to work with them.

And we're already hard at work on season 31 of our show with lots more great adventures ahead.

Now if you've enjoyed our show, be sure to like the Kentucky Life Facebook page or subscribe to the KET YouTube channel for more of what we like to call Kentucky Life Extras, where you'll have access to lots of other great videos.

Until next time, I'll leave you with this moment, along with thanks for your support of 30 seasons of our show.

I'm Chip Polston, cherishing this Kentucky life.

█ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █