Appalachian History Series – Consolidation Coal in Appalachia: Land, Labor, and Life in Jenkins and Van Lear
When the Consolidation Coal Company first incorporated in Maryland during the Civil War era, its managers were thinking about the bituminous seams of the Georges Creek basin and the rail connections that could move that coal to eastern cities. Corporate histories and the company’s own records at the University of Pittsburgh and the Smithsonian show how quickly that horizon widened. By the early twentieth century Consolidation had grown through mergers, bought rail lines, and adopted a simple strategy for new fields: control the land, control the transportation, and if necessary build a town from the ground up to house the work force that made everything else possible.
Eastern Kentucky became one of the most important stages for that strategy. In the 1900s, land speculators and company agents fanned out across the Big Sandy and upper Kentucky River country, buying mineral rights from farm families and small holders who often had little idea how much their coal was worth. When Consolidation Coal decided to plant permanent roots in the Elkhorn and Millers Creek fields, it did so with the full weight of a large, integrated corporation behind it, and with a willingness to treat whole valleys as industrial projects.
Buying a Mountain Kingdom on Elkhorn Creek
The decisive move came in 1911, when Consolidation purchased roughly one hundred thousand acres in Letcher, Pike, and Floyd counties from the Northern Coal and Coke Company. Company plans called for a new town named Jenkins, after director George C. Jenkins, and for an extension of the Lexington and Eastern Railroad over Pine Mountain toward McRoberts.
The land that would become Jenkins sat in a steep, narrow valley along Elkhorn Creek. There were scattered farms, timber, and seams of coal that had been known locally for years. To turn that rugged landscape into a company hub capable of feeding coal into the national market, Consolidation threw money and machinery at the problem. Contemporary accounts describe nine sawmills chewing through local timber, two brickyards turning out building material, a temporary dynamo to power construction, and a narrow gauge railroad snaking over Pine Mountain from Virginia to bring in supplies and equipment.
From the beginning, the town and its outlying camps were laid out with a deliberate hierarchy. Officers’ houses occupied the better sites, workers’ rows filled the hollows, and tracks, tipples, and reservoirs claimed the remaining space. The company’s own engineers plotted streets, water lines, and sewer routes, an unusual level of infrastructural investment for that part of eastern Kentucky before 1910. Later observers in the History of Jenkins, Kentucky would look back on this period under the apt title “They Built a Town.”
A Crown Jewel Company Town
In 1912 Jenkins was incorporated as a sixth class city, but real power still flowed through Consolidation’s offices. The company handled law enforcement through hired marshals, owned nearly every structure in town, and treated civic improvements as another line item in its operational plans.
One of the most visible examples of that investment was the brick Jenkins School on Pane Street. Built in 1912, it became the largest and most impressive school structure produced as part of Consolidation’s town building program in eastern Kentucky. The National Register nomination for the building describes it as a showpiece that helped Jenkins gain a reputation as one of the “crown jewels” of coal camps, a place where Consolidation proudly brought visitors and politicians to see what an up to date company town could look like in the mountains.
Below the school, the company raised a hospital, offices, boarding houses, churches for several denominations, and a recreation building that housed everything from pool tables to a motion picture theater. A 1928 newspaper profile reprinted in local histories listed the Consolidation company store, First National Bank, Jenkins Steam Laundry, and the “mammoth” recreation building among the town’s most prominent institutions, reflecting how completely everyday life revolved around company infrastructure.
Behind that civic face stood basic needs that were just as carefully planned. In 1912 Consolidation impounded natural springs at a place called Goodwater to create a reservoir sized to serve a projected population of ten thousand. Photographs from the Pike County Historical Society show crews at the new dam and the early pipelines snaking toward town, another reminder that the whole valley was being remade with an industrial population in mind.
Camps Along Elkhorn Creek
Jenkins itself was only the centerpiece of a longer chain of camps. CoalCampUSA and local histories describe how company built housing and industrial plants eventually stretched for about six miles along Elkhorn Creek, tying Jenkins to the satellite communities of Burdine, Dunham, and McRoberts. The town was meant to function as a hub for a network of mines with numbers like 201 through 205 that honeycombed the surrounding ridges.
In the teens and twenties, Consolidation’s own photographers documented this new landscape in meticulous detail. The Jenkins Photographic Collection held by the University of Kentucky contains more than two hundred images made for the company between 1911 and 1913, ranging from construction scenes to portraits of church congregations, classrooms, and tidy rows of company houses.
Those carefully composed scenes were only one way of looking at the town. In the 1930s, Farm Security Administration photographer Ben Shahn stood on a nearby hillside and made a now famous image of identical company houses stepping up the slope above the tracks. His photograph, often titled “Coal company town in Jenkins,” showed the same ordered rows that appear in the company albums, but with a sharper sense of regimentation and vulnerability in a landscape already scarred by mining.
Van Lear and the Millers Creek Division
While Jenkins rose along Elkhorn Creek, another branch of Consolidation’s Appalachian experiment took shape on the other side of the Big Sandy watershed. In Johnson County, local promoter John C. C. Mayo spent the early twentieth century assembling mineral rights along Millers Creek. He sold those holdings to Northern Coal and Coke, which were in turn absorbed by Consolidation.
Around 1909 and 1910, the company began building a new camp at Van Lear, named for Maryland financier and director Van Lear Black. A spur of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad snaked up the hollow. Company sources and local histories agree that five deep mines operated around the town, and that Consolidation kept the Millers Creek Division running until 1946.
Like Jenkins, Van Lear was a planned environment. Kentucky Coal Heritage and the Van Lear Historical Society describe a brick company store, offices, a hotel, rows of standardized houses, and mine structures clustered around the tipples. Communities of Irish, Italian, and Slavic immigrants lived alongside native born Appalachians, all linked by the same payroll and the same company tracks.
Today the former Consolidation office in Van Lear houses a local museum where visitors can walk past mine maps, equipment, and scrip once used in the Millers Creek Division. Old postcards of Tipple Number 4 and photographs of mine portals, some now sealed and marked simply “Consol Mine,” underline how completely the company’s name once dominated the valley.
Work Underground and Life on the Surface
The archival record that survives for Jenkins and Van Lear makes it possible to get unusually close to the daily routines of work and home in a Kentucky coal camp. Underground scenes in the Consolidation Coal Company Collection at the Smithsonian include a 1924 photograph titled “Proper Method for Shooting Coal, Jenkins, Kentucky,” which shows miners gathered with tools and explosives at the face, frozen in the moment before a shot loosens the seam.
Engineering reports such as United States Geological Survey bulletins and Kentucky geological surveys map the seams that fed those mines and give technical descriptions of the Elkhorn and Van Lear beds. One 1930s study notes that much of the information for certain divisions came from thorough prospect surveys by Consolidation’s own engineers at Jenkins, a reminder that the company’s search for coal left its mark in scientific literature as well as in payroll ledgers.
On the surface, artifacts like company scrip help explain how miners and their families moved through the company’s economic web. Tokens issued for Jenkins and Van Lear, preserved in collections such as the Kilgore Scrip Collection and in private holdings, bear inscriptions like “The Consolidation Coal Company Inc. Van Lear” around punched heart shaped holes. They stood in for wages at the company store and affiliated businesses, reinforcing a world where the same corporate name appeared on pay envelopes, rent receipts, and grocery counters.
Consolidation’s own photographers and later local camera enthusiasts recorded the other side of that economy. Images from the Jenkins Photographic Collection show children playing on wooden porches, kindergarten classes at recess, Emancipation Day and Fourth of July parades, and workers gathered on mine tipples.
Those visual sources dovetail with oral histories from projects such as the Jenkins Coal Town Archaeology Oral History Project and interviews at the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, where former employees like division manager David Zegeer and rank and file miners recall both the security and the restrictions of company town life. They talk about paying rent to Consolidation, attending churches and schools the company had financed, and navigating rules about drinking, disorder, and union organizing that could cost a family its house as well as its job.
Company Power and Community Power
Historians like Geoffrey Buckley, Harry Caudill, and Dwight Billings and Kathleen Blee have all used Consolidation’s Kentucky towns to think about the larger story of corporate power in Appalachia. Buckley’s Extracting Appalachia mines the very photo collections discussed above to show how the company wanted its landscapes to be seen as orderly, hygienic, and progressive, even when those same landscapes contained mine accidents, environmental damage, and deep social hierarchies.
Caudill’s Night Comes to the Cumberlands, written a generation after Consolidation’s peak, treated Letcher and neighboring counties as examples of how outside capital could strip wealth from a region while leaving behind poverty and damaged land. Billings and Blee’s work on religion and labor in the Kentucky coalfields adds another layer, emphasizing how churches and working class faith communities in places like Jenkins became spaces where miners and their families interpreted and sometimes resisted corporate authority.
Local sources from Jenkins echo those broader arguments in very concrete terms. The “They Built a Town” chapter notes that city government in Jenkins only emerged when Consolidation began selling its businesses and property, and that before then law enforcement rested with company hired marshals. Later sections of the same history recall that church buildings originally constructed by the company were eventually deeded to their congregations for a token price of one dollar, a symbolic transfer that turned corporate welfare projects into locally controlled institutions.
In Van Lear, residents who lived through the decline of the Millers Creek Division remember similar shifts. When Consolidation sold its properties in 1946, families who had always rented from the company suddenly had the opportunity, and sometimes the burden, of buying houses and maintaining aging infrastructures that had never been designed for long term, resident controlled use.
Selling the Towns and Shifting Ground
Corporate decisions that reshaped Jenkins and Van Lear rarely originated in the mountains themselves. Company histories and local narratives agree that Consolidation went into receivership during the Depression and that the Pittsburgh Coal Company ultimately took control of the firm in the mid 1940s, creating the Pittsburgh Consolidation Coal Company.
In Jenkins, one of the most important turning points came in 1956, when Consolidation sold its remaining interests in the area to Bethlehem Steel. The new Beth Elkhorn Corporation continued mining in the region, but the era of a single, Maryland based company owning nearly every building and utility in town had effectively ended.
As the coal economy shifted and deep mines closed, both Jenkins and Van Lear began to lose population. Houses that had once been kept in tight rows and painted in company colors fell into private hands and gradually weathered. Some structures, like the Jenkins School, survived through new uses; others simply disappeared. The archival sources that once narrated corporate progress now help local historians chart abandonment, demolition, and the uneven efforts to preserve what remains.
Archives, Photographs, and Living Memory
One of the reasons Jenkins and Van Lear loom so large in Appalachian historiography is the sheer volume of documentation they produced. The Consolidation Coal Company records in Pittsburgh fill hundreds of linear feet and include minute books for the Kentucky divisions, maps of Elkhorn and Millers Creek properties, and correspondence about everything from mine safety to school construction.
At the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, the Consolidation Coal Company photograph collection preserves nearly four thousand images of mines and towns across Appalachia, many of them from Kentucky. Buckley’s analysis emphasizes that these photographs rarely show accidents, strikes, or black lung, but they still capture telling details of everyday life, from garden plots beside company houses to the narrow walkways on tipples where a misplaced step could be fatal.
Closer to the camps themselves, the Jenkins and Van Lear collections, the University of Kentucky’s Appalachian Center Coal Camp Documentary Project, and online repositories like Kentucky Coal Heritage all make portions of this record visible to the public. Community made videos such as “The People of Jenkins, Kentucky, 1910–1930” or short documentaries on the history of McRoberts turn static photographs into moving montages, adding local narration and music that root company town history in family memory.
Why the Consolidation Coal Towns Matter
More than a century after Consolidation Coal began buying land on Elkhorn Creek and Millers Creek, the company’s physical presence in those valleys has largely vanished. Tipples have been dismantled, tracks torn up, and many rows of company houses either modernized beyond recognition or lost to time. Yet the story of Jenkins, Van Lear, McRoberts, and Dunham still matters for understanding both Appalachian history and the broader history of industrial America.
These towns show what it meant for a large corporation to build a community as part of its business model, and what it meant for families to build their own lives inside that framework. They illuminate how corporate investment could bring schools, hospitals, and running water to places that had been bypassed by earlier development, while also concentrating power over land, labor, and politics in a few distant hands. They remind us that photographs, plant ledgers, oral histories, and aging buildings are not just relics of a vanished coal economy, but tools that Appalachian communities continue to use as they argue over environmental cleanup, economic diversification, and the meaning of home in former company towns.
Standing today on a hillside above Jenkins or in front of the old company office at Van Lear, it is hard to see only a story of rise and fall. The archival record left by Consolidation Coal reveals a more complicated picture, one in which corporate ambition, industrial discipline, community creativity, and long term environmental costs are all layered together in the same mountain hollows.
Sources & Further Reading
Consolidation Coal Company. Consolidation Coal Company Records, 1854–1933. Archives & Special Collections, University of Pittsburgh Library System. https://digital.library.pitt.edu/islandora/object/pitt%3AUS-PPiU-ais201103
CONSOL Energy Inc. CONSOL Energy Inc. Mine Maps and Records, 1928–1996. Archives & Special Collections, University of Pittsburgh Library System. https://digital.library.pitt.edu/islandora/object/pitt%3AUS-PPiU-ais201102
Pittsburgh Consolidation Coal Company. Pittsburgh Consolidation Coal Company Photographs and Other Materials, 1912–1945. Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. https://sova.si.edu/record/nmah.ac.1007
Jenkins, Kentucky Photographic Collection, 1911–1930. Special Collections Research Center, University of Kentucky Libraries. http://exploreuk.uky.edu/catalog/xt7ns17snp9k/guide
Kentucky Heritage Council. “Shop Hollow Dump Site, Jenkins.” Kentucky Heritage Council, 2022. https://archaeology.ky.gov/Find-a-Site/Pages/Shop-Hollow-Dump-Site%2C-Jenkins.aspx
Jenkins Area Jaycees. History of Jenkins, Kentucky. Jenkins, KY: Jenkins Area Jaycees, 1973. Digitized edition, University of Chicago Library. https://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/dig/jenkins
Pike County Historical Society. “Jenkins, Kentucky: Crown Jewel of the Elkhorn Coalfield.” Pike County Historical Society. https://www.pikecountyhistoricalsociety.com/jenkins.html
Kentucky Historical Society. “Jenkins.” ExploreKYHistory. https://explorekyhistory.ky.gov/items/show/702
Kentucky Heritage Council. “Jenkins School: Historic Preservation Projects and Case Studies.” Kentucky Heritage Council. https://heritage.ky.gov/HistoricPreservation/Pages/Jenkins-School.aspx
“Jenkins Coal Town Archaeology Oral History Project.” Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, University of Kentucky Libraries. https://kentuckyoralhistory.org/ark:/16417/xt7s7h1dnj8w
Amburgey, Mae. Interview by Zada Komara. Jenkins Coal Town Archaeology Oral History Project, May 16, 2015. Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, University of Kentucky Libraries. https://kentuckyoralhistory.org/ark:/16417/xt7sf766702n
“Van Lear, Kentucky.” Wikipedia. Last modified 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Lear,_Kentucky
Kentucky Atlas & Gazetteer. “Van Lear, Kentucky.” Kentucky Atlas & Gazetteer. http://www.kyatlas.com/ky-van-lear.html
Van Lear Historical Society. “Van Lear Historical Society and Coal Miners’ Museum.” Van Lear Historical Society. https://vanlearkentucky.com/museum
Kentucky Historical Society. “Consolidation Coal Company (Jenkins, Ky.) Papers.” Kentucky Historical Society Digital Collections. https://digitalcollections.kyhistory.com/catalog/xt7mpg1hmn7d
“Jenkins, KY.” CoalCampUSA. https://www.coalcampusa.com/nowv/wva/jenkins-ky/jenkins-ky.htm
University of Kentucky Appalachian Center. “Coal Camp Documentary Project – Coal Camps (including Jenkins).” Coal Camp Documentary Project. https://appalachianprojects.as.uky.edu/coal-camps
Buckley, Geoffrey L. Extracting Appalachia: Images of the Consolidation Coal Company, 1910–1945. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004. https://www.ohioswallow.com/book/Extracting+Appalachia
Caudill, Harry M. Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area. Boston: Little, Brown, 1963. https://archive.org/details/nightcomestocumb00caud
Callahan, Richard J. Jr. Work and Faith in the Kentucky Coal Fields: Subject to Dust. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. https://muse.jhu.edu/book/2558
Billings, Dwight B., and Kathleen M. Blee. The Road to Poverty: The Making of Wealth and Hardship in Appalachia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. https://www.cambridge.org/9780521655460
Komara, Zada. “Materializing Appalachian Kentucky Coal Towns: Public Archaeology as Applied Anthropology in the Coal Camp Documentary Project.” Practicing Anthropology 36, no. 4 (2014): 25–30. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24782448
Komara, Zada. “Burying Stereotypes: Archaeology, Representations, and Cosmopolitan Coal Camps.” Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 8, no. 2 (2021): 181–201. https://doi.org/10.1080/20518196.2019.1676985
Hunt, C. B. “Coal Deposits of Pike County, Kentucky.” U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 876, 1937. https://pubs.usgs.gov/bul/0876/report.pdf
Hudnall, James S. “The Elkhorn Coal Field.” Kentucky Geological Survey, Series 6, vol. 27 (1925): 131–133. Reprinted in Index and Contents of Publications, Kentucky Geological Survey. https://www.uky.edu/KGS/pdf/ic11_02.pdf
Baker, John A. “Geology and Ground-Water Resources of the Paintsville Area, Kentucky.” U.S. Geological Survey Water-Supply Paper 1257, 1955. https://pubs.usgs.gov/wsp/1257/report.pdf
Baker, J. A., and R. E. Houser. “Structure Map with Contours on the Van Lear Coal, Paintsville Quadrangle, Kentucky.” U.S. Geological Survey Open-File Report 51–93, 1951. https://www.usgs.gov/publications/structure-map-contours-van-lear-coal-paintsville-quadrangle-kentucky
Hayes, P. T. Coal Geology of Adams, Blaine, Richardson, and Sitka Quadrangles, Eastern Kentucky. U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 1526, 1982. https://pubs.usgs.gov/bul/1526/report.pdf
United States Geological Survey. “USGS 1:250000-Scale Quadrangle for Jenkins, KY (1957).” Historical Topographic Maps Collection. https://prd tnm.s3.amazonaws.com/StagedProducts/Maps/HistoricalTopo/PDF/KY/250000/KY_Jenkins_707417_1957_250000_geo.pdf
Author Note: I am especially interested in company towns because they show how corporations tried to script both work and home life in the same narrow valleys. My hope is that this piece helps you see Jenkins and Van Lear not just as old coal camps, but as places where families negotiated, resisted, and reworked a landscape first built to serve Consolidation Coal.