Pike County is a county in the U.S. state of Kentucky. As of the 2020 Census, the population was 58,669. Its county seat is Pikeville. The county was founded in 1821. With regard to the sale of alcohol, it is classified as a moist county–– a county in which alcohol sales are prohibited, but containing a "wet" city. There are three cities in the county, Pikeville, Elkhorn City, and Coal Run Village, where package alcohol sales are legal.
Appalachia is a socio-economic region located in the central and southern sections of the Appalachian Mountains of the eastern United States. It stretches from the western Catskill Mountains of New York state into Pennsylvania, continuing on through the Blue Ridge Mountains and Great Smoky Mountains into northern Georgia and Alabama. In 2020, the region was home to an estimated 26.1 million people, of whom roughly 80% were white.
The West Kentucky Coal Field comprises an area in the west-central and northwestern part of the state, bounded by the Dripping Springs Escarpment and the Pennyroyal Plateau and the Ohio River, but is part of the Illinois Basin that extends into Indiana and Illinois. It is characterized by Pennsylvanian age sandstones, shales and coal. Nearly all of the counties in the area are part of the television market known as the Kentucky–Illinois–Indiana tri-state area.
Thomas Walker was a physician, planter and explorer in colonial Virginia who served multiple terms in the Virginia General Assembly, and whose descendants also had political careers. Walker explored the Western Colony of Virginia in 1750, 19 years before the arrival of Daniel Boone.
The Coal Region is a region of Northeastern Pennsylvania. It is known for being home to the largest known deposits of anthracite coal in the world with an estimated reserve of seven billion short tons.
In the Lattimer massacre, at least 19 unarmed striking immigrant anthracite miners were killed violently at the Lattimer mine near Hazleton, Pennsylvania, United States, on September 10, 1897. The miners, mostly of Polish, Slovak, Lithuanian and German ethnicity, were shot and killed by a Luzerne County sheriff's posse. Scores more workers were wounded. The massacre was a turning point in the history of the United Mine Workers (UMW).
Leyden, Colorado, elevation 5,656 feet (1,724 m) is a small unincorporated community in Jefferson County, Colorado west of Arvada at the junction of West 82nd Avenue and Quaker Street. It is a historic company town established by the Leyden Coal Company in 1902 to house the miners of the Leyden Coal Mine nearby to the west.
Pocahontas Coalfield, which is also known as the Flat Top-Pocahontas Coalfield, is located in Mercer County/McDowell County, West Virginia and Tazewell County, Virginia. The earliest mining of coal in the coalfield was in Pocahontas, Virginia in 1883 at Pocahontas Mine No. 1, now on the National Register of Historic Places.
Gurney Norman is an American writer documentarian, and professor.
The Martin County coal slurry spill was a mining accident that occurred after midnight on October 11, 2000, when the bottom of a coal slurry impoundment owned by Massey Energy in Martin County, Kentucky, broke into an abandoned underground mine below. The slurry came out of the mine openings, sending an estimated 306 million US gallons of slurry down two tributaries of the Tug Fork River. By morning, Wolf Creek was oozing with the black waste; on Coldwater Fork, a 10-foot-wide (3.0 m) stream became a 100-yard (91 m) expanse of thick slurry.
Van Lear is an unincorporated community and coal town in Johnson County, Kentucky, United States.
In the United States, the Hillbilly Highway is the out-migration of Appalachians from the Appalachian Highlands region to industrial cities in northern, midwestern, and western states, primarily in the years following World War II in search of better-paying industrial jobs and higher standards of living. Many of these migrants were formerly employed in the coal mining industry, which started to decline in 1940s. The word hillbilly refers to a negative stereotype of people from Appalachia. The term hillbilly is considered to be a modern term because it showed up in the early 1900s. Though the word is Scottish in origin, but doesn't derive from dialect. In Scotland, the term "hill-folk" referred to people who preferred isolation from the greater society and the term "billy" referred to someone being a "companion" or "comrade". The Hillbilly Highway was a parallel to the better-known Great Migration of African-Americans from the south.
Coal was discovered in Kentucky in 1750. Since the first commercial coal mine opened in 1820 coal has gained both economic importance and controversy regarding its environmental consequences. As of 2010 there were 442 operating coal mines in the state, and as of 2017 there were fewer than 4,000 underground coalminers.
Brenizer, also known as Breinizer, is an unincorporated community and coal town in Derry Township, Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, United States.
Closplint is an unincorporated community in Harlan County, Kentucky, United States. The settlement was named Cloversplint after the mining company that built the mine to exploit the coal and the settlement as a coal town in 1926. The arrangement of the company houses is considered to have shown the influence of reform thinking about such towns. The company operated here between 1928 and 1946. When the United States Postal Service established a post office, it shortened the name to Closplint.
Ajax is an unincorporated community located in Mingo County, West Virginia, United States. It was previously known as Himler because it was founded as a company town by the Himler Coal Company.
The Himler Coal Company was a cooperative mining company established in 1918 by Hungarian-American immigrant Martin Himler. The company was responsible for the establishment of two company towns, Himler, West Virginia and Himlerville, Kentucky. Its finances exhausted, the company was wiped out by flooding in 1928.
The Frasure Creek lawsuit was a legal action by environmental organizations Waterkeeper Alliance and Appalachian Voices against Frasure Creek Mining and International Coal Group (ICG) on grounds of falsifying pollution discharge in their reports. This violated many key components of the Clean Water Act (CWA), which controls and regulates many types of pollution entering into waterway. Individual citizens joined the environmental organizations to sue the coal mining companies under the CWA. The Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet attempted to settle in Franklin Circuit Court in December, 2010 but was denied. The case moved forward to the Kentucky Supreme Court in April, 2012 who agreed with lower court rulings that Appalachian Voices and others were legally supported by the CWA to intervene in the lawsuit against Frasure Creek Mining and ICG.
The Martin Himler House in Beauty in Martin County, Kentucky was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1991.
Kyrock is a ghost town in Edmonson County in south central Kentucky, United States. The ghost town is located about 2.4 miles (3.9 km) east of Sweeden, or about 5 miles (8.0 km) north-northeast of the county seat of Brownsville. It was once a referred to as a “company town” along the Nolin River during much of the first half of the 20th century, but the industrial town was disincorporated in 1966, about nine years after the closure of the company that created the town.
