Appalachian Community Histories – Blackey, Letcher County: Indian Bottom, Stuart Robinson School, and a Town Shaped by Rail and Coal
Blackey, in western Letcher County, sits on the North Fork of the Kentucky River at the mouth of Rockhouse Creek, about eight miles west of Whitesburg. On a map it can look like a small place. In the historical record, though, it carries several different Appalachian stories at once. Blackey grew near one of the earliest settlement zones in what became Letcher County, developed into an independent trade town during the railroad and coal boom, became home to one of eastern Kentucky’s best known Presbyterian settlement schools, and later remained a community landmark through the long life of the C. B. Caudill Store.
That layered history is part of what makes Blackey so valuable for Appalachian local history. Some mountain communities are easiest to tell through one institution, one disaster, or one industry. Blackey has all of those. Its story begins before the town name itself, in the older neighborhood known as Indian Bottom, and then moves forward through postal records, railroad growth, school records, newspaper coverage, oral histories, and the memories gathered around a store porch that became famous far beyond Letcher County.
Before Blackey was Blackey
Long before Blackey emerged as a named town, the surrounding area was already part of early white settlement in the upper Kentucky River valley. The Indian Bottom Church, generally described as the first church established in Letcher County, was organized in 1810 near what is now Blackey. Accounts tied to the church place that organization at Isaac Whitaker’s home near a bottom along the river, about two miles from present day Blackey. Those same accounts describe early settlers such as the Adams, Caudill, Webb, Whitaker, and Dixon families spreading into the surrounding creeks and forks at the opening of the nineteenth century.
That older Indian Bottom identity matters because Blackey did not rise out of empty ground. It emerged in a landscape that already had kin networks, church life, creek names, and remembered settlement patterns. Kentucky Atlas still notes that one of the earliest Anglo-American settlements in the area, known as Indian Bottom, may have stood at or near the site of Blackey. Later postal history reflects that continuity too, since the older Indian Bottom post office was eventually moved to Blackey and took on the Blackey name.
The name, the post office, and the railroad town
The name Blackey is closely tied to the Brown family. Robert M. Rennick’s work on Letcher County post offices and place names traces the name to Joseph Preston Brown, remembered locally as “Joe Blackey.” Rennick’s postal history says the Blackey post office opened in 1908, while Kentucky Atlas notes that this original office closed in 1913 and that the Indian Bottom office later moved to Blackey in 1919 and assumed the town name. Together, those records show that the town’s identity was shaped through both local naming tradition and a somewhat tangled postal history.
Blackey’s rise as a town came with the railroad and the opening of the eastern Kentucky coalfield economy. The Kentucky Atlas entry notes that the community was served by the Louisville and Nashville Railroad and incorporated in 1915. The National Register nomination for the C. B. Caudill Store adds important texture, explaining that Blackey “grew up around the train depot which bore its name” and that by the early 1920s it had become an independent local hub surrounded by coal camps and company towns. That distinction matters. Blackey was tied to coal, but it was not only a company appendage. It was also a place where miners and their families came for independent banking, shopping, entertainment, and conversation outside company control.
Boomtown years in the 1920s
The best concise description of Blackey in its boom years comes from the Caudill Store nomination. It describes Blackey in the 1920s as a “thriving boomtown” that flourished with railroad development and coal expansion. By the early 1920s, the town served miners from surrounding camps who came into Blackey for independent shopping, bank business, and even moviegoing. The nomination also preserves memory of a cluster of Blackey stores from that era, including the Jeff Ison General Store, the Dollar Store, the G. M. Hogg Store, and other merchant spaces that made the town more than a single crossroads.
Local newspaper traces match that picture. The Mountain Eagle is one of the strongest continuing sources for Blackey research because it caught the town in real time, through advertisements, bank notices, disaster coverage, and ordinary local business life. Archive material from the paper shows the Blackey State Bank advertising in the 1920s, while later retrospective pieces in The Mountain Eagle recalled both the bank building and the dense row of businesses that once stood in town.
Stuart Robinson School and a different kind of institution
In 1913, Blackey also became home to the Stuart Robinson School, one of the most important institutions ever located there. Berea College’s Stuart Robinson School Collection describes it as a Presbyterian mission effort begun in 1913 by Rev. E. O. Guerrant. The Berea finding aid also notes that students held labor positions on campus alongside their academic work, and that the school’s surviving publications and photographs document decades of educational and community life in Blackey.
The school did not simply educate local children. It also helped make Blackey a regional point of contact between mountain communities and outside religious and reform networks. Berea’s collection notes notable graduates such as Juanita Kreps and Gurney Norman. Kentucky Atlas records that the school operated in Blackey from 1913 to 1957 and included a farm and various shops. Even setbacks at the school left a paper trail. A 1932 letter preserved at Western Kentucky University reports that a fire destroyed the administration building and appealed for donations to rebuild, a reminder that Blackey’s institutional history can still be followed through specific surviving documents rather than only through later summaries.
Flood, fire, and the end of the boom
Like many mountain towns built close to river, rail, and creek bottoms, Blackey was vulnerable to disaster. In the catastrophic flood of late May 1927, The Mountain Eagle reported widespread destruction across Letcher County, cut train and communication lines, and deaths on tributaries near Blackey, including on Rockhouse Creek. The same coverage noted that reconstruction crews were struggling to restore the railroad and estimated the train would only later reach Blackey again. The paper’s flood reporting makes clear that communities in the Blackey area were directly in the path of the storm’s destruction.
The town was hit again that winter. A Mountain Eagle retrospective, drawn from the paper’s own old coverage, reported that more than twenty businesses and dwellings were destroyed in a fast-moving fire that swept Blackey in December 1927. The Caudill Store nomination then identifies the next major blow, the collapse of the Blackey State Bank in November 1928, which took the savings of many residents, including the Caudill family. Read together, those records explain why Blackey’s 1920s momentum broke so sharply. Flood, fire, bank failure, and the Depression did not erase the town, but they changed its future.
The C. B. Caudill Store and the afterlife of the town
If one building now carries Blackey’s twentieth century memory better than any other, it is the C. B. Caudill Store. According to its National Register nomination, the present structure was built in 1933, with additions in 1940, and operated continuously as a general store until 1997. The nomination places the store inside a much older local tradition. It notes that the Caudill family had operated general stores in the area as early as the nineteenth century and that C. B. and Tessie Mae Caudill reopened commercial life after Blackey’s decline by building up the store in the 1930s.
The nomination also explains why the store mattered so much. In a coalfield ringed by company commissaries, an independent store was not just a place to buy flour or hardware. It was an alternative space. The Caudill Store served people from Blackey and nearby camps, while its porch and stove made it a social center where news, arguments, favors, and community memory all circulated. The nomination explicitly calls it an essential social and commercial hub for the Blackey community and the wider rural landscape.
That role continued into the later twentieth century under Gaynell Caudill Begley and her husband Joe Begley. Mountain Eagle coverage states that after C. B. Caudill’s death in 1966, Gaynell and Joe lived in and ran the store for decades. By then the store was known far beyond ordinary commerce. In the Studs Terkel Radio Archive, Joe Begley is introduced from Blackey as a storekeeper and outspoken opponent of strip mining. Other archival and interpretive sources linked to the store show that Blackey, through the Begleys, became a place where journalists, activists, artists, and scholars came to listen as much as to shop.
Why Blackey still matters
Blackey matters because it concentrates so much Appalachian history in one small community. Its roots reach back to the Indian Bottom settlement era. Its name preserves local family memory. Its growth followed the railroad and coal economy, yet it also retained independent institutions that made it more than a company outpost. Stuart Robinson School gave it an educational and religious significance that lasted for decades. The flood of 1927, the fire of 1927, and the bank failure of 1928 explain why the old boom did not last. The C. B. Caudill Store, in turn, shows how a town can shrink in size and still remain large in memory.
For Appalachian historians, Blackey is also unusually well documented. Its story survives in place-name files, postal history, school collections at Berea, mission records at Western Kentucky University, National Register research, oral history indexes, radio interviews, photographs, and the long run of The Mountain Eagle. That surviving record is one reason Blackey can still be reconstructed with unusual clarity. Even now, the town is best understood not as a vanished relic, but as a place where settlement, coal, religion, education, disaster, commerce, and organizing all met in one narrow stretch of river bottom.
Sources & Further Reading
ArchiveGrid. “Letcher County Research Materials, 1818-1943.” Accessed April 4, 2026. https://researchworks.oclc.org/archivegrid/collection/data/868060189
Berea College Special Collections and Archives. “Stuart Robinson School Collection.” Accessed April 4, 2026. https://bereaarchives.libraryhost.com/repositories/2/resources/619
Elbon, David C. “Blackey, Kentucky.” Kentucky Atlas and Gazetteer. Accessed April 4, 2026. https://www.kyatlas.com/ky-blackey.html
Kentucky Genealogical Society. “The Story of Letcher County’s First Church.” Accessed April 4, 2026. https://kygs.org/old-regular-baptist-indian-bottom-church/
Library of Congress. “The Mountain Eagle.” Chronicling America. Accessed April 4, 2026. https://lccn.loc.gov/sn83025555
National Park Service. “National Register of Historic Places Registration Form: C. B. Caudill Store.” Accessed April 4, 2026. https://npgallery.nps.gov/GetAsset/5fc06766-2ceb-4e0c-9941-8ac3fc042a8b
Rennick, Robert M. “Blackey.” Robert M. Rennick Topographical Maps Collection. Accessed April 4, 2026. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_maps_all/62/
Rennick, Robert M. “The Post Offices of Letcher County, Kentucky.” Accessed April 4, 2026. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/context/kentucky_county_histories/article/1392/viewcontent/Letcher_PostOffices.pdf
Western Kentucky University Manuscripts & Folklife Archives. “Cooper, Williamson Lee, Jr., 1889-1972 (SC 2522).” Accessed April 4, 2026. https://digitalcommons.wku.edu/dlsc_mss_fin_aid/2053
WFMT Studs Terkel Radio Archive. “Interview with Mrs. Joe Gaynell Begley.” Accessed April 4, 2026. https://studsterkel.wfmt.com/programs/interview-mrs-joe-gaynell-begley
WFMT Studs Terkel Radio Archive. “Joe Begley Discusses Coal Mining.” Accessed April 4, 2026. https://studsterkel.wfmt.com/programs/joe-begley-discusses-coal-mining
Author Note: Blackey is one of those eastern Kentucky places where nearly every surviving record opens another door into the past. I wanted to follow the town through its early Indian Bottom roots, its railroad and coal years, its school history, and its store-porch memory so the place feels whole on the page.