Kentucky Coal Heritage Trail

09/05/2026

Pikeville grew up inside a horseshoe bend of the Big Sandy River, on a narrow strip of bottom land with the water on three sides and Peach Orchard Mountain on the fourth. Steamboats came up from Ashland when the river allowed, and log rafts went down to the Ohio. The railroad arrived in 1907, and the tracks and the coal tipples ran through the middle of town, between the commercial district and the mountain. This is the town as it stood inside that bend — the river in its old channel, the rail through the middle of it, the mountain closing the far side.

09/04/2026

There's a new way to explore the Kentucky Coal Heritage Trail, and it's at the Wayland Community Center. A touchscreen kiosk now sits in the Mountain Sports Hall of Fame, where you can tap any town on the trail and read its story — narratives, photographs and oral histories, being added town by town. Wayland, Barbourville, Beattyville, Stearns and more are up now. Thanks to the Wayland Historical Society for making room for it.

09/03/2026

Justus Stearns bought 30,000 acres of Kentucky timber in 1902, found coal on it, and built a town to run the whole operation from. The Stearns Coal and Lumber Company laid its own railroad, put up the first all-electric sawmill in the country, and worked eighteen camps across 200 square miles.

09/01/2026

A loaded car at the Clover Gap tipple, Lejunior, in September 1946. The coal came down through the screens overhead, sized and dropped into the hopper below, and the L&N took it out of Harlan County. A federal survey team was in the coalfields that autumn, sent to look at housing and health in the mining towns, and the photographer they brought with them stopped to photograph the car.

08/31/2026

Twenty-five Kentucky Coal Heritage Trail App users found their way to Wayland on Saturday, some from Prestonsburg and Pikeville, one group all the way from Morgantown, West Virginia. They came to see the Mountain Sports Hall of Fame in the old Wayland Gym. Mayor Jerry Fultz met them there and walked everyone over to the 1950's Room at the town hall for pizza, and Hall of Fame board chairman Rusty Justice brought them up to date on what Wayland has going on.

08/29/2026

Every stop on the Kentucky Coal Heritage Trail started with somebody pointing at a building and saying "that one matters."

If you are with a tourism office, a historical society or a local government, or if there is a place in your county that belongs on the trail, tell us — the form only takes a minute.

kycoalheritagetrail.com/join

08/29/2026

Manchester Music Fest runs September 3–5 — Thursday evening, then Friday and Saturday from two o'clock. If you are driving the Kentucky Coal Heritage Trail, it is worth timing the trip.

08/28/2026

Leslie County was made in 1878, and Hyden was laid out that same year at the mouth of Rockhouse Creek. The coal was there. The railroad was not. Trade papers listed Hyden among the county seats having no railroads, and a thirteen-mile line surveyed up from Quicksand never came. The county turned to roads instead. In 1940 the slopes above town were still corn and cleared pasture, worked from cabins on the benches.

08/27/2026

They called it the town that Jack built. Elk Horn Coal opened Wheelwright in 1916 at the head of the Right Fork of Otter Creek, and when Inland Steel bought it in 1930 it put E.R. Price in charge of building a model town. Paved streets, gas and telephone lines, a filtration plant, a hospital, a theatre, a golf course. Residents remembered infant deaths falling once the sewers went in.

08/26/2026