Appalachian Community Histories – McRoberts, Letcher County: Mines 213, 214, and 215 in a Coal Camp Built in 1912
McRoberts entered the historical record at the height of the eastern Kentucky coal boom. In the fall of 1911, Consolidation Coal acquired a vast block of coal land in Pike, Letcher, and Floyd counties and planned new towns along the line being pushed toward the upper Kentucky River. One of those new places was McRoberts, named for Samuel McRoberts, a financier tied to the company. Robert Rennick’s Letcher County postal research dates the McRoberts post office to March 30, 1912, and the Kentucky Atlas likewise identifies the community as a 1912 Consolidation Coal town.
What makes McRoberts especially visible in the record is not one single document but the unusual breadth of surviving evidence. The Smithsonian’s Pittsburgh Consolidation Coal Company collection preserves McRoberts in remarkable detail across the years when the town was still new. The finding aid shows views of the dam foundation, school building and vicinity, houses on lower Main Street, the hospital site, the Lexington and Eastern Railroad depot, the McRoberts store and meat market, No. 214 tipple and substation, No. 215 tipple, the No. 213 mine portal, the recreation building, bowling alleys, pool room, playground, office building, and even McRoberts Street before paving in 1926. The Kentucky Historical Society’s Consolidation Coal Company collection adds another strong image trail, including a circa 1916 photograph of the Club House at McRoberts.
A Town Built Almost All at Once
A 1973 local history of Jenkins and its satellite camps remembered McRoberts as a town built for one purpose, housing the men brought in to mine the newly purchased coal field. According to that account, early 1912 saw circular sawmills and a band saw operating in McRoberts, along with a brick plant supplying construction. That same source recalled how quickly the place expanded. By 1914 there were said to be 1,600 men working at McRoberts, and by 1916 about 2,500. It also remembered a long waiting list for houses and estimated that by 1925 roughly 600 houses had been built.
The surviving photographs back up that sense of speed and scale. By March and December 1913, the company was already recording sweeping views of McRoberts, a completed schoolhouse, a store and meat market, the railroad depot, the hospital, hotel and YMCA spaces, and the industrial structures needed to keep a camp of this size moving. By 1917 the image record had widened to include the recreation building’s auditorium, lobby, bowling alleys, and pool room, showing that McRoberts was never only a cluster of miners’ houses. It was a carefully built company settlement with work sites, consumer spaces, leisure spaces, and public-facing institutions all laid out within a few years.
Coal, Rail, and Industrial Geography
The industrial side of McRoberts also appears clearly in federal and state records. In 1914 the U.S. Geological Survey described coal exposures on the new road to McRoberts, including seams above No. 207 and No. 214, and noted that coal was being mined extensively at Jenkins and McRoberts by Consolidation Coal. The same report said much of that output was being shipped to Michigan for by-product coke ovens, a reminder that a place like McRoberts was tied from the beginning to markets far beyond Letcher County.
Kentucky mine reports show the same place from another angle. The 1924 annual report lists J. B. Thompson as inspector at McRoberts, and the 1925 report specifically names Mine No. 213, Mine No. 214, and Mine No. 215 at McRoberts. The 1927 report continues that pattern, again listing those McRoberts mines in the official state record. Together, those reports show that the town’s identity was not general or symbolic. It was grounded in numbered mines, inspection districts, fans, tipples, slate disposal systems, and the day to day machinery of underground extraction.
The railroad mattered just as much as the mines. The 1913 depot image in the Smithsonian collection shows McRoberts already functioning as a rail point in the wider Consolidation system. The broader Jenkins history explains that McRoberts was selected as part of the Lexington and Eastern Railroad extension into the coal lands that Consolidation had just secured. In other words, the town was not simply built beside coal. It was plotted into a transportation corridor designed to turn mountain land into an industrial landscape.
Houses, Stores, and Daily Life
For residents, McRoberts was more than tipples and payrolls. The local history of Jenkins recalled a place where people could get most of what they wanted or needed through Consol. Water and electricity were installed in most houses, a doctor’s office was supplied by the company, and the hospital in Jenkins served the surrounding camps. The same account names the internal geography of the town in a way official reports usually do not: Chopping Branch, Cannel City Row, Cheys Fork, Tom Biggs, Band Mill Bottom, Band Mill Hill, Church Row, 13 Row, Doctor’s Hill, Johnson Hollow, 15 Hollow, and Ball Park Row. Those names matter because they show how residents understood McRoberts not just as one town, but as a cluster of lived neighborhoods inside a larger company map.
Oral history helps restore that lived texture. Mae Amburgey, interviewed in 2015, remembered McRoberts and Jenkins as places of shopping, recreation, family visits, movies, and hospital trips, while also emphasizing how interconnected communities across Letcher County felt to one another. Kedrick Sanders’s interview centers especially on life in #15 Hollow, and James E. Scott’s interview is framed around personal experience in McRoberts itself. Those memories remind us that however much the company planned the place, residents made its meaning through errands, kinship, churchgoing, play, and the routines of moving between hollows and neighboring camps.
The photographs show that social world taking shape in material form. There are flower beds at the McRoberts post office in 1920, miners’ picnic scenes from 1926, a garden display, the community Christmas tree, the women’s club house, and the playground. These images belong to the era often described as welfare capitalism, when coal companies tried to stabilize labor and shape behavior through housing, beautification, recreation, and managed community life. In McRoberts, the visual record makes that strategy unusually easy to see.
Schools and the Segregated Community
Schools appeared early. The Jenkins history says a McRoberts school system was organized in August 1912, at the same time as the Jenkins system, and that McRoberts became part of the Jenkins Independent School System on April 26, 1915. That same source remembered 490 pupils in the McRoberts schools at the time of organization, a striking figure for such a new camp and another sign of how fast the population had rushed in behind construction and mining. The 1920 federal census also recorded McRoberts as a town, showing how quickly the company settlement had become legible in official state and national records.
Black life in McRoberts is part of this history too, and it should be stated plainly. The Notable Kentucky African Americans Database identifies Tom Biggs Colored School in McRoberts, while Kentucky’s Dunham High School marker notes that Dunham later educated students from Jenkins, McRoberts, Fleming, and Haymond. Recent scholarship on education and civil rights in the Appalachian coalfields also identifies the Tom Biggs section of McRoberts as an entirely Black section of town. Taken together, those sources show that McRoberts fit the broader coalfield pattern in which company towns offered schools and services, but did so through segregation and unequal educational structures.
Roads, Water, and the Long Reach of the Company Town
By the middle 1920s the image trail shows a camp still being improved and reshaped. In August 1926 company photographs recorded a new road at McRoberts and McRoberts Street before paving. Around the same time the collection captured the office building, store displays, community events, and other signs of a settlement moving beyond its first rough construction years into a more settled company-town form. Even then, though, everything still pointed back to the company’s infrastructure.
A 1956 U.S. Geological Survey circular on water supplies in the eastern coal field shows how durable that infrastructure remained. It describes water drawn from abandoned mines and Elkhorn Lake, treatment at the No. 214 plant in Tom Biggs Hollow and other Consolidation facilities, and storage tanks spread across the Jenkins and McRoberts district. This is a later source, but it helps reveal the lasting physical system created in the boom years. McRoberts had begun as a coal camp, yet its roads, water plants, post office, schoolhouses, stores, and recreation spaces gave it the shape of a full community, even if that community rested on company ownership and the unstable fortunes of coal.
Remembering McRoberts
What survives today in the historical record is enough to see McRoberts with unusual clarity. It was a planned Consolidation Coal town established in 1912, named for Samuel McRoberts, tied early to rail expansion, and anchored by mines such as Nos. 213, 214, and 215. But it was also a place of houses and hollows, schoolchildren and store counters, picnics and hospital runs, class distinctions and racial boundaries. The most revealing sources are often the ones that place those worlds side by side. A mine report lists the numbered openings. A photograph shows the schoolhouse. An oral history remembers shopping or a row of houses in a hollow. Put together, they show McRoberts not as an abstract coal camp, but as one of the best-documented company towns in the eastern Kentucky coalfields.
Sources & Further Reading
Pittsburgh Consolidation Coal Company. Guide to the Pittsburgh Consolidation Coal Company Photographs and Other Materials. Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. https://sova.si.edu/record/nmah.ac.1007
Pittsburgh Consolidation Coal Company. “House, McRoberts, Kentucky, 1916.” Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. https://sova.si.edu/record/nmah.ac.1007/ref2550
Pittsburgh Consolidation Coal Company. “McRoberts Street before paving, 1926-08-28.” Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. https://sova.si.edu/record/nmah.ac.1007/ref3381
Kentucky Historical Society. “Club House, McRoberts, Kentucky.” Consolidation Coal Company Collection (Jenkins, Ky.). https://www.kyhistory.com/digital/collection/PH/id/8121/
Kentucky Historical Society. Consolidation Coal Company Collection (Jenkins, Ky.), Graphic 22. https://www.kyhistory.com/digital/api/collection/LIB/id/2126/download
The Big Sandy News (Louisa, Kentucky), June 27, 1913. Library of Congress, Chronicling America. https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83004226/1913-06-27/ed-1/?st=text
Jones, W. H. Annual Report of the State Department of Mines for the Calendar Year 1924. Lexington: Kentucky Geological Survey. https://kgs.uky.edu/kgsweb/olops/pub/general/jonesminereport1924.pdf
Jones, W. H. Annual Report of the State Department of Mines for the Calendar Year 1925. Lexington: Kentucky Geological Survey. https://kgs.uky.edu/kgsweb/olops/pub/general/jonesminereport1925.pdf
Jones, W. H. Annual Report of the State Department of Mines for the Calendar Year 1927. Lexington: Kentucky Geological Survey. https://kgs.uky.edu/kgsweb/olops/pub/general/jonesminereport1927.pdf
Daniel, E. C. Annual Report, State Department of Mines, 1928. Lexington: Kentucky Geological Survey. https://kgs.uky.edu/kgsweb/olops/pub/general/DanielReportMines1928.pdf
Ashley, George Hall. “Coal and Lignite.” In Contributions to Economic Geology, 1912, Part II: Mineral Fuels. U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 541. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1914. https://pubs.usgs.gov/bul/0541f/report.pdf
Marshall, R. B. Results of Spirit Leveling in Kentucky, 1898 to 1913, Inclusive. U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 554. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1914. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/b554
Baker, John A. Public and Industrial Water Supplies of the Eastern Coal-Field Region, Kentucky. U.S. Geological Survey Circular 369. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1956. https://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/1956/0369/report.pdf
United States Census Bureau. Population: Kentucky. Number of Inhabitants, by Counties and Minor Civil Divisions. Fourteenth Census of the United States, 1920. https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1920/bulletins/demographics/population-ky-number-of-inhabitants.pdf
Amburgey, Mae, and Greg Amburgey. Interview by Zada Komara. May 16, 2015. Jenkins Coal Town Archaeology Oral History Project. Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, University of Kentucky Libraries. https://kentuckyoralhistory.org/ark:/16417/xt7sf766702n
Scott, James E. Interview by Ted McDaniel. September 18, 2006. Personal Responsibility in a Desirable Environment Oral History Project. Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, University of Kentucky Libraries. https://kentuckyoralhistory.org/ark:/16417/xt7gf18sf60d
Sanders, Kedrick, and Eileen Sanders. Interview by Zada Komara. October 22, 2015. Jenkins Coal Town Archaeology Oral History Project. Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, University of Kentucky Libraries. https://kentuckyoralhistory.org/ark:/16417/xt7f7m041n01
Johnston, Gussie F. Interview by Glenna Graves. October 24, 1988. Family and Gender in the Coal Community Oral History Project. Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, University of Kentucky Libraries. https://kentuckyoralhistory.org/ark:/16417/xt7cz892bq25
Rennick, Robert M. The Post Offices of Letcher County, Kentucky. Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/context/kentucky_county_histories/article/1392/viewcontent/Letcher_PostOffices.pdf
The History of Jenkins, Kentucky. Jenkins Area Jaycees, 1973. https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Gazetteer/Places/America/United_States/Kentucky/Letcher/Jenkins/_Texts/HJK/home.html
Kentucky Atlas and Gazetteer. “McRoberts, Kentucky.” https://www.kyatlas.com/ky-mcroberts.html
Notable Kentucky African Americans Database. “African American Schools in Letcher County, KY.” https://nkaa.uky.edu/nkaa/items/show/2642
Kentucky Historical Marker Database. “Dunham High School.” https://history.ky.gov/markers/dunham-high-school
McCullum, Kristan L. “‘They Will Liberate Themselves’: Education, Citizenship, and Civil Rights in the Appalachian Coalfields.” History of Education Quarterly 61, no. 4 (2021): 449–477. https://doi.org/10.1017/heq.2021.46
Komara, Zada, and Shane Barton. “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://doi.org/10.17730/praa.36.4.q752r131w627ln86
Kentucky Heritage Council and Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. The New Deal Builds: A Historic Context of the New Deal in East Kentucky, 1933–1943. Frankfort, KY, 2005. https://heritage.ky.gov/Documents/NewDealBuilds.pdf
Author Note: I have always been drawn to coal camp history because it shows how quickly industry could reshape a mountain hollow into a full community. McRoberts is one of those places where photographs, mine records, and memory all survive strongly enough to let us see both the company town and the people who made a life there.