Kentucky Coal Heritage Trail

10/08/2026

Save the date: the Kentucky Coal Heritage Trail Regional Summit comes to Beattyville on Friday, November 6. Trail communities and partners will meet at Herman's Brew in downtown Beattyville from 1 to 3 p.m. Eastern for lunch and a meeting on strengthening regional tourism and Main Street communities, preserving our stories and creating shared opportunities.

10/06/2026

Peach Orchard sits on the Levisa Fork in Lawrence County, above the reach the barges ever worked. The coal came out by rail from Nats Creek, and the name was on the maps before the railroad was.

10/03/2026

Where Hurricane Creek meets the Middle Fork, four miles above Hyden, Mary Breckinridge raised a log house in 1925. From there the Frontier Nursing Service rode out on horseback into a county that had no railroad and few roads, carrying medicine over ground that coal trucks would later climb.

10/01/2026

Carr Creek's stone high school under construction, about 1937. Works Progress Administration crews built it, and it still stands.

09/29/2026

Before it was Booneville they called it Boones Station, for Daniel Boone, who camped along the South Fork of the Kentucky River. It became the seat of Owsley County, out on the western edge of the eastern coalfield, where the ridges gave up coal from small drift mines a few tons at a time.

09/28/2026

1977, Pikeville: Shriners "Shady" Grady Kinney and Howard "Dirty Ear" Stratton of Hillbilly Clan 1, Outhouse 2 brought a hillbilly parade to town after seeing one in Portsmouth, Ohio. Fifty years on, we'll gladly line Hambley Boulevard for that parade.

Did you know the upcoming Hillbilly Days Festival will be the 50th? 🤔

Well IT IS & we're officially 200 DAYS AWAY! 🎉

For FIVE DECADES, Hillbilly Days has brought generations of families, friends, visitors, vendors, entertainers and volunteers together in the heart of our community. And while we’re looking ahead to what’s next, we can’t help but look back at all the incredible memories that have made this festival what it is today. ❤️

So, we want to hear from YOU! 👇

What’s something from Hillbilly Days past that you’d love to see make a comeback for the 50th festival? Maybe it’s an old tradition, a favorite event, a performance, or something we may have forgotten all about!

Let’s celebrate 50 years of Hillbilly Days by bringing some of the best of the past into the future. We’re ready to make Hillbilly Days 50 the biggest celebration yet! 🎉🤠

Drop your Hillbilly Days memories and throwback ideas in the comments! ⬇️

09/26/2026

Manchester has been the seat of Clay County since 1807. The coal was never in town — it was out on the creeks at Oneida, Burning Springs, Fogertown, Garrard and Bright Shade, and it came down the Cumberland and Manchester Railroad. What was in town was the courthouse, the bank and the lawyers: the place where leases were recorded, payrolls were banked and disputes were settled.

09/24/2026

United States Coal and Coke built Lynch from 1917 to supply coke to U.S. Steel's furnaces. The company put up a stone commissary, a bathhouse, a hospital and a school, and by the 1940s the town held around ten thousand people.

09/22/2026

Most coal is banded. You can see the layers in it.

Cannel coal is not. It is the same the whole way through, and it breaks with a conchoidal fracture — the way flint does, or glass.

In 1904 Kentucky's mineral exhibit at the St. Louis World's Fair included an arch built of it.

Sources: Kentucky Geological Survey; Kentucky at the World's Fair, St. Louis, 1904.