Born in the foothills of Central Appalachia, photographer William R. Mullins (1886-1969) hitch-hiked and bicycled along winding roads of the Kentucky-Virginia border to make photo images of local families, farms, and businesses. Mullins—known as “The Pictureman”—created views of lively communities built around the bituminous coal industry that offer a critical corrective to widely circulated New Deal-era photographs from the 1930s, which depicted life in the coal fields as one of mere neglect and poverty. In other words, Mullins photographed people living in coal towns, not “coal people.” For more than 30 years, Appalshop, a regional media institute founded in 1969 and located in Whitesburg, Kentucky, has cared for more than 3,000 of Mullins’s negatives. In 2022 a “thousand-year flood” breached the archive vault, covering the negatives with flood mud. During summer 2024, I assisted the Appalshop staff with ongoing efforts to preserve and research Mullins’ work. Though most of the negative collection is undergoing conservation treatment, a small group of undamaged “copy negatives,” like the one pictured here, give insight into Mullins’s own preservation practice as clients would give him aged photographs to copy with his camera and re-print, thereby extending the lives of their cherished images.