Appalachian Figures
If you stand at the mouth of the hollow where Packard once sat, there is no marquee and no sign that an Academy Award winner first opened her eyes there. The coal tipple is gone. The company houses are gone. What remains is a quiet Whitley County hollow above Big Patterson Creek where, for a few decades in the early twentieth century, several hundred people tried to make a life in the shadow of a mine.
Packard is now officially listed as a ghost town seven miles southeast of Williamsburg, founded as a mining camp around 1900 by the Thomas B. Mahan family and tied to the Mahan Jellico and Packard Coal companies. Contemporary accounts and later research suggest the population may once have approached four hundred, with a company store, a post office, and a spur that connected the camp to the Louisville and Nashville Railroad at Nevisdale.
In January 1926, in that coal town on the Tennessee line, a daughter was born to a mine official and a doctor’s child. The birth certificate listed her as Patsy Louise Neal. The world would come to know her as Patricia Neal, star of The Day the Earth Stood Still, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Hud, survivor of a devastating series of strokes, and one of Whitley County’s most famous daughters.
This story traces her path from Packard’s dark hollow to Broadway and Hollywood, then back again in memory, archives, and the scattered pieces of a coal camp that no longer exists on the ground but still lives in paper, celluloid, and local pride.
Packard, Kentucky: Whitley County’s forgotten third town
Most county histories focus on Williamsburg and Corbin and treat everything else as outlying. Local memory, however, sometimes talks about a “third town” that has almost vanished from maps. Packard began as a camp serving the Packard Coal Company, named for local schoolteacher Amelia Packard, with company housing, a post office that opened in 1908, and a small station on the Louisville and Nashville.
Primary sources from the 1910s and 1920s sketch the camp’s conditions. In 1917 a miner from Packard wrote to the United Mine Workers Journal that there was “only one store within two miles of us, and that is the company store,” then went on to describe high prices, isolation, and poor sanitation.
When Kentucky Department of Mines inspectors visited three Packard operations in 1920 they reported conditions around the mines as satisfactory, a sharp contrast with the union letter from only a few years earlier and a reminder that official reports and workers’ letters did not always see the same camp in the same way.
In July 1922 labor tension flared high enough that two Kentucky National Guard gunner squads were dispatched to Packard after a coal tipple was burned. The Great Falls Tribune in distant Montana carried a brief notice that troops had gone to “protect coal mines against aggrieved miners,” evidence that trouble in a Whitley County hollow could ripple far beyond the Jellico line.
By the mid 1940s, as seams around Big Patterson Creek played out, the mines closed and Packard faded. Later ghost town features, local Facebook groups, and travel pieces now describe the site as little more than foundations, mine ruins, and a gravel road, but nearly all of them mention the same detail. The coal camp where Patricia Neal was born does not exist anymore. The actress does.
A miner’s daughter: the Neals and the Petreys
Archival biographies and genealogical records agree on the basic outline of Patricia’s family. She was born on 20 January 1926 in Packard to William Burdette “Coot” Neal and Eura Mildred Petrey Neal.
Find A Grave memorials and family history databases identify her father as a coal company official who later served as a manager for Southern Coal and Coke, and her mother as the daughter of Dr. Paschal G. Petrey, remembered in some accounts as Packard’s town doctor.
Eura herself had deep roots in Whitley County. She was born near Williamsburg in 1899 and lived long enough to see the coal camp of her youth empty out. When she died in 2003 at the age of 103, her obituary noted that she was formerly of Packard and Williamsburg, and cemetery records place her grave in Highland Cemetery in Williamsburg, surrounded by other members of the Petrey family.
For Patricia the coal camp was early and brief. Northwestern University’s biographical note on her papers, drawing on family material, explains that she was born in Packard but grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee, where her father worked as a manager for Southern Coal and Coke.
Even so, that Whitley County origin remained part of her story. Genealogical essays such as James Pylant’s “Patricia Neal’s Deep Roots in the Bluegrass State,” local heritage pieces from outlets like HerKentucky, and regional news columns all emphasize that the glamorous actress who would one day share scenes with Gregory Peck and Paul Newman began life in a coal camp hollow on the Kentucky–Tennessee border.
From Packard to Knoxville stages
Neal’s Knoxville years are better documented than her infancy in Packard, but the two belong to the same coal corridor. Biographical sketches note that after the family relocated from Whitley County to Knoxville, she attended Knoxville High School, where she discovered drama and acted in school productions.
Local newspaper tributes written after her death remember her as part of a remarkable cohort of Knoxville High students who went on to national prominence. That list included not only Neal but also future actors and writers who sharpened their craft in the same auditorium where she first stepped onstage.
From there she moved farther up the ladder of Midwestern education and theatre. At Northwestern University in Evanston she studied drama, joined Pi Beta Phi, and won a campus beauty title as “Syllabus Queen,” a detail that felt important enough to make it into both encyclopedia entries and the Northwestern alumni magazine.
Northwestern’s archivists have since made that phase of her life unusually visible. When the Neal family donated her papers, the University Library mounted an exhibit titled “On Her Own Terms: Patricia Neal’s Life and Legacy,” built around the 80 box collection that spans her childhood, school years, career, family life, and later philanthropy. Curators highlighted items like her baby book with a lock of her hair, early Northwestern programs, and letters that follow the coal miner’s daughter as she transforms into a working actress.
Talent scouts persuaded her to leave Northwestern before graduation and head for New York. There she began the grind of early postwar theatre work, joined the Actors Studio, and in 1947 won the first Tony Award given to a woman for featured performance, for her role in Lillian Hellman’s Another Part of the Forest.
Hud, Hollywood, and a life of joy and woe
From the late 1940s through the 1960s, Patricia Neal became one of the most recognizable American actresses of her generation. Her filmography is well known to classic movie fans. She played the quietly determined widow Helen Benson opposite Michael Rennie’s Klaatu in The Day the Earth Stood Still, the sharp radio journalist Marcia Jeffries in A Face in the Crowd, and the brittle socialite Emily Eustace “2E” Failenson in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
In 1963 she won the Academy Award for Best Actress for Hud, playing Alma Brown, a worn out housekeeper caught between an aging rancher and his ruthlessly charming son. She also picked up British Academy awards and a Golden Globe and returned regularly to the stage and to television work.
Her personal life was as dramatic as any script. She had a widely discussed affair with older co star Gary Cooper, later married British writer Roald Dahl, and raised a family between England and the United States. Obituaries in the Washington Post, New York Times, and other major outlets in 2010 all stressed the contrast between her glamorous public image and the private griefs she endured, including the death of a daughter in a car accident and a son’s traumatic brain injury after a New York taxi struck his baby carriage.
The most famous crisis came in 1965, when Neal suffered a series of massive strokes while pregnant. She was thirty nine, at the height of her career, and many assumed she would never act again. With intensive rehabilitation she relearned how to walk and speak and returned to the screen, eventually earning another Oscar nomination for her performance in The Subject Was Roses. Her autobiography As I Am and many later profiles refer to this period as the axis on which her life turned.
The Patricia Neal Rehabilitation Center and a late life public history
Neal’s survival turned her into an advocate for patients with brain and spinal cord injuries. In 1978 Fort Sanders Regional Medical Center in Knoxville dedicated the Patricia Neal Rehabilitation Center in her honor. The center specializes in intensive treatment for stroke and trauma survivors and for decades has used her story, and sometimes her in person visits, as part of its message about resilience and recovery.
Photographs from the 1970s show her appearing at colleges, fundraisers, and public events, often speaking about disability, faith, and the long work of healing. One striking example comes from the State Archives of Florida’s Florida Memory project, which preserves a black and white print of “Actress Patricia Neal (right) at the Miami Dade Junior College,” taken around 1973 and cataloged with detailed metadata for researchers.
In August 2010 she died at her home in Edgartown on Martha’s Vineyard at the age of 84 from lung cancer. She had entered the Catholic Church only months earlier and was buried at the Abbey of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, Connecticut, where her friend and fellow actress Dolores Hart had become a nun.
Packard in the archives: how we know what we know
For a place that has almost vanished physically, Packard and its most famous resident are documented in remarkable depth, especially when you look beyond the usual filmographies.
At Northwestern University in Evanston, the Patricia Neal Papers fill 80 boxes and span the years from 1926 to 2011. The finding aid notes that the collection includes clippings, correspondence, speeches, theatre and movie ephemera, photographs, awards, and personal artifacts. Among the items on display in the “On Her Own Terms” exhibit were a baby book from her earliest years, fan mail, letters from family, and mementos that connect her public life to family roots she rarely discussed in interviews.
The University of Tennessee’s Betsey B. Creekmore Special Collections holds a complementary set of Patricia Neal materials. Their description mentions pressbooks, film stills, lobby cards, and makeup design charts, especially for The Fountainhead, along with biographical notes that emphasize her birth in Packard and upbringing in Knoxville.
The trail does not stop on paper. At the University of Wisconsin, an Actors Studio Audio collection includes recordings cataloged under her name, capturing her voice in workshop scenes and interviews. The Wisconsin finding aid, linked through various language editions of her Wikipedia entry, lists her alongside other midcentury stage and screen actors whose work with the Actors Studio shaped American performance on both Broadway and in Hollywood.
Closer to Whitley County, a very different kind of primary source preserves her family context. The Kentucky Department of Mines annual reports for the 1920s list Packard’s mines and provide snapshots of production, ownership, and official assessments. Read alongside the 1917 United Mine Workers Journal letter from Packard and the 1922 National Guard report on sending troops after the tipple burning, they help reconstruct the world of company stores, dangerous work, and labor conflict that framed Neal’s first months of life, even if she did not grow up in that hollow.
Genealogical compilations on FamilySearch, WikiTree, Geneanet, and similar sites pull together digitized census entries, Kentucky marriage records, and cemetery transcriptions. These confirm that William Burdette and Eura Mildred married in Lexington in 1918, that their daughter Patsy Louise was born in Packard in 1926, and that the family later appears in Tennessee records around Knoxville. Eura’s burial at Highland Cemetery in Williamsburg, recorded in cemetery databases and local family history projects, anchors the story back in Whitley County soil.
Finally, there are the coal camp images themselves. Nova Numismatics’ article “The Elusive Story of Packard, Kentucky and Its Tokens” reproduces two rare photographs of Packard, showing neat rows of company houses and the looming tipple, along with images of tokens from the company store. A Kentucky history blog that reuses one of those photographs identifies it as “Packard Kentucky Coal Camp Mining Town” and ties it directly to the story of Patricia Neal’s birthplace.
Packard in local memory
While university archives and online genealogies preserve the broad outlines of Neal’s life, Whitley County residents and local writers have kept the Packard connection alive in a different register.
A 2023 column from the Corbin based News Journal titled “The Story of Packard and Pat Neal” frames the camp as one of Whitley County’s most important ghost towns and emphasizes that the woman who won an Oscar for Hud was born in what some folks still call “the forgotten third city” of the county.
HerKentucky, a women’s history and culture site, published a Women’s History Month spotlight that begins with surprise at discovering that the worldly actress was born not in New York or London but in “a tiny Whitley County coal camp town.” Social media posts by Kentucky backroads and ghost town pages regularly list Packard among the state’s lost places and repeat the detail that Patricia “O’Neal” or Neal was born there, sometimes spelling her name wrong but placing her correctly in the hollow.
Public history producers have picked up the thread. A 2022 segment for Kentucky Educational Television’s Kentucky Life, rebroadcast in the Kentucky Edition news magazine, introduces Packard as “a small coal mining community located in Whitley County near the Tennessee border” and explicitly notes that Patricia Neal was born there in 1926, even though “the town does not exist anymore.”
A note on names: avoiding the wrong Patricia Neal
Researchers working from search engines alone have to navigate an odd complication. There is at least one other prominent “Patricia Neal” in the historical record, and she is not the actress from Packard.
The Southern Oral History Program at the University of North Carolina hosts a 1989 interview with a Durham civic leader named Patricia Neal, who served on the Durham County Board of Education and was deeply involved in school integration and local politics. The interview is a rich primary source for civil rights history but has nothing to do with the Whitley County born actress.
To make matters more confusing, the writer and actress Fannie Flagg was born Patricia Neal in Alabama and later adopted her stage name after actors’ union rules made it awkward to share a name with the already famous star from Packard. Some biographical notes and listicles mention this fact without fully distinguishing between the two, which can lead to muddled citations if you are not careful.
For Whitley County purposes, the key is simple. If the source is talking about a civil rights leader in Durham or about the novelist behind Fried Green Tomatoes, it is not talking about the coal miner’s daughter born in Packard in 1926 who went on to Hud and The Day the Earth Stood Still.
Threads left in Whitley County
Although Packard itself has vanished, several lines of inquiry remain for local historians and family researchers who want to push the story further from a Whitley County angle.
Vertical files at the Whitley County Historical and Genealogical Society or in a Williamsburg local history room may hold clippings from the 1960s, when newspapers reported that “Whitley County native Patricia Neal” had won an Oscar, or from later years when she returned to Kentucky events. Property records and corporate filings related to the Mahan Jellico and Packard coal companies in the state archives could help flesh out the economic context of the camp where she was born.
Highland Cemetery in Williamsburg offers a more personal connection. Visiting Eura Petrey Neal’s grave and those of her Petrey kin ties the big arc of Hollywood fame back to a single county cemetery and to the family networks that shaped Packard’s professional and medical life as a coal camp.
For those interested in material culture, the scrip tokens issued by Packard’s company store, documented in numismatic articles and sometimes appearing in online auctions, provide a tangible link to the cash poor, company credit economies that made coal camps so precarious. Holding one of those small metal pieces while looking at a photograph of Patricia Neal at nineteen, eyes bright on a New York stage, drives home the distance between the coal town where she was born and the worlds she went on to inhabit.
Packard’s daughter in Appalachian history
Patricia Neal’s life can be read in many ways. Film historians treat her as a midcentury star who bridged noir, Cold War science fiction, and the gritty turn of 1960s cinema. Biographers follow the drama of her relationships, strokes, and late life faith. Genealogists trace her back through Petreys and Neals to tobacco farms in Virginia and medical practices in small Kentucky towns.
For Appalachian history, what matters most is that a coal camp hollow near the Tennessee line produced a woman who would one day stand under Hollywood lights and take home an Oscar, and that the paper trail of her life now runs back through dozens of archival boxes, government reports, photographs, and local memories that still point to Packard, Kentucky, even though the town itself has gone.
In that sense, she is an emblem of a broader pattern. Across the coalfields, children born in company towns that no longer appear on modern road maps carried their roots into factories, universities, churches, and studios far from home. When we recover those origins and place them back on the Appalachian landscape, we see both the costs of the coal economy and the unexpected routes by which its sons and daughters made their way into the wider world.
Sources and further reading
Northwestern University Archives, Patricia Neal (1926–2010) Papers, Collection 31/6/108, including finding aid and biographical note that identifies her birth in Packard, Kentucky, and her parents William Burdette “Coot” Neal and Eura Petrey Neal. Finding Aids+1
Northwestern University Library exhibit materials for “On Her Own Terms: Patricia Neal’s Life and Legacy” and Elizabeth Canning Blackwell’s feature “Reel Life,” which draw on the Neal papers to tell the story of her childhood, Northwestern years, and career. Northwestern University+2Northwestern Library+2
University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Betsey B. Creekmore Special Collections, Patricia Neal pressbooks and film materials, with a biographical sketch emphasizing her birth in Packard and upbringing in Knoxville. SCOUT+2SCOUT+2
University of Wisconsin Actors Studio Audio collection, Patricia Neal recordings, accessible through the Wisconsin Historical Society’s online finding aids and linked from multiple language editions of her Wikipedia entry. Wikipedia+1
Kentucky Department of Mines and Minerals, Annual Reports for the 1920s, listing Packard mines and inspectors’ comments on conditions, used in conjunction with Packard’s entry in the Kentucky Geological Survey’s mine data. Wikipedia+2Kentucky Geological Survey+2
United Mine Workers Journal correspondence from 1917 describing living conditions at Packard, including the complaint about being limited to the company store, reproduced and cited in later histories of the camp. Wikipedia+1
Great Falls Tribune, “Kentucky Guards Out to Protect Coal Mines,” July 13, 1922, and related National Guard correspondence on troop deployments to Packard following the burning of a coal tipple. Wikipedia+1
State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory collection, “Actress Patricia Neal (right) at the Miami Dade Junior College,” PR23537, circa 1973, with full catalog metadata and ordering information. Florida Memory
Patricia Neal, As I Am: An Autobiography (Simon and Schuster, 1988), for her own account of childhood, career, strokes, and recovery.
Stephen Michael Shearer, Patricia Neal: An Unquiet Life (University Press of Kentucky), a deeply researched biography that places her Packard origins in the context of Kentucky coal history and Hollywood. Facebook+1
Adam Bernstein, “Patricia Neal dies: Oscar winning star of ‘Hud’ was 84,” Washington Post, August 10, 2010, and obituaries in the New York Times, Guardian, and other outlets, for contemporary summaries of her life, career, and death. The Washington Post+2The Guardian+2
“Patricia Neal,” Encyclopedia.com and related reference entries that detail her family background in Packard and Knoxville and her later work with rehabilitation and Catholic institutions. Encyclopedia.com+1
“Packard, Kentucky,” Wikipedia, along with Pantheon and House of Highways entries, for a synthesis of Packard’s history based on labor journals, mine reports, and Shearer’s biography. Wikipedia+2House of Highways+2
Aaron Packard, “The Elusive Story of Packard, Kentucky and Its Tokens,” NovaNumismatics.com, which reproduces rare photographs of the camp, images of company store tokens, and a detailed narrative of Packard’s mines and families. Nova Numismatics+1
“Packard, Kentucky: Another Abandoned Coal Town,” FRRandP.com, and various ghost town travel features and social media posts that describe the present day site and link it to Patricia Neal’s birthplace. frrandp.com+2Freaky Foot Tours+2
“The story of Packard and Pat Neal,” The News Journal (Corbin, Kentucky), July 17, 2023, a local column connecting Neal’s career to Whitley County history and the fading physical traces of Packard. The News Journal
HerKentucky, “Women’s History Month Spotlight: Patricia Neal,” which introduces her as a Whitley County coal camp native and explores the tension between that origin and her later cosmopolitan image. Her Kentucky
KET and PBS, Kentucky Life segment on Packard and Patricia Neal, rebroadcast in Kentucky Edition on July 21, 2022, which places the ghost town and the actress’s life in the larger context of Kentucky’s lost coal camps. PBS+1
Southern Oral History Program, Oral History Interview with Patricia Neal, June 6, 1989, Interview C 0068, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, as a reminder that this is a different Patricia Neal, a Durham civil rights activist, whose records should not be confused with those of the actress from Packard. docsouth.unc.edu+1