According to David Walls, William Goodell Frost, President of Berea College from 1892 to 1920, was “the first person to give a precise geographic definition to the Southern Appalachians as a cultural region” with the help of his former student, C. Willard Hayes, “then working for the Geological Survey.”
![William Goodell Frost Appalachian America map 1896](https://mapappalachia.wp.prod.es.cloud.vt.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Frost-1896.jpg)
Though Frost’s text indicated that the region was 194 counties, county boundaries have shifted since 1896. Our ArcGIS recreation includes 195 counties as our best approximation of Frost’s hand-drawn map.