Appalachian Community Histories – Cornettsville, Perry County: Salt Works, Leatherwood, and a Community on the Map
Cornettsville is one of those eastern Kentucky communities whose history does not survive mainly in one long town chronicle. Instead, it has to be pieced together from roadside markers, postal history, topographic maps, county records, and the scattered traces left by one of Perry County’s earliest industries. What emerges from those sources is a place whose identity formed around the salt works at Leatherwood, was tested by Civil War violence, and then settled into the smaller but lasting community known as Cornettsville. The strongest surviving evidence points again and again to three anchors in the local story: the Brashear salt works, the Battle of Leatherwood, and the community’s place in the county’s postal and mapped landscape.
Salt and the Earliest Importance of the Place
The earliest large historical force tied to Cornettsville was salt. The state historical marker at the site says the Brashears’ well was producing salt there by 1835 and that the works supplied the area for about half a century before floods destroyed them in 1892. That matters because salt was not a minor sideline on the early Kentucky frontier. It was a necessity for preserving meat, sustaining livestock, and supporting daily life, and places with workable brine often became early industrial centers before railroads or coal transformed the mountains. In Perry County, the Leatherwood salt works gave this bend in the river valley an importance that far exceeded the size of the settlement itself.
The older name most closely associated with that industrial period was Brashearville. The Brashear family genealogy published in the early twentieth century noted that a town called Brashearville in Perry County bore the family name, preserving memory of the place before Cornettsville became the settled modern form. Postal-history references tied to Robert Rennick’s Perry County work also point to an early Brasherville post office, reinforcing the connection between the Brashear family, the salt works, and the first durable identity of the settlement. Even where the exact details of every name change require courthouse and postal-site records to pin down completely, the broader pattern is clear. Cornettsville grew out of a place first remembered for salt and for the Brashear name.
Brashear’s Salt Works and a Frontier Economy
In practical terms, Brashear’s Salt Works helped create a working landscape rather than just a named spot on a map. Salt works required wells, furnaces, kettles, fuel, labor, roads, and trade connections. That meant the area drew movement and economic activity long before Perry County’s coal-field identity hardened in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Leatherwood site stood in a narrow but useful position near the North Fork, and later historical writing continued to remember it as one of Perry County’s foundational industries. The fact that the site remained important enough to be memorialized by a state marker shows how central it was to the county’s early economy and to local memory.
That early importance also helps explain why the settlement lingered in records even when it was still small. Communities that hosted post offices, ferry points, industrial sites, or strategic resources often left a richer documentary trail than their population alone would suggest. Cornettsville fits that pattern. Its history is not the history of a large incorporated town. It is the history of a small place made regionally significant because it sat where labor, water, and mineral resources came together.
The Battle of Leatherwood
Cornettsville’s second great historical anchor is war. On October 19, 1862, fighting broke out at the salt works in what later memory fixed as the Battle of Leatherwood. The historical marker near Cornettsville says forces of the Harlan County Battalion clashed there with Confederate troops associated with Caudill’s command, producing multiple casualties. The marker also says Union forces captured Confederate supplies and held the salt works for a short time before abandoning the site. That brief wording captures something important about the fight. This was not a random skirmish in an empty hollow. Men fought there because the salt works still mattered. Control of salt meant control of food preservation and military supply in a region where such resources could be decisive.
The Battle of Leatherwood also reveals how eastern Kentucky communities experienced the Civil War differently from better known battlefields in the Bluegrass or Deep South. Here, warfare often gathered around crossroads, mountain passes, home guards, and supply points rather than large permanent fronts. Cornettsville was swept into that kind of war because the old salt works still gave the place military value. The surviving marker evidence does not tell the whole battle in detail, but it firmly places Cornettsville inside the wartime story of Perry County and shows that local memory continued to treat the engagement as one of the defining events in the community’s past.
From Brashearville to Cornettsville
By the early twentieth century, the name Cornettsville had clearly taken hold in the federal record. Cornettsville appears in the July 1916 United States Official Postal Guide, showing that the community had a recognized place in the national postal system by that date. It also appears on the 1916 Cornettsville topographic quadrangle, evidence that the name was established enough to label a mapped landscape rather than just a crossroads or neighborhood. Together, those records show that Cornettsville had moved from an older salt-works identity into a more settled community identity with a durable place-name of its own.
The name also endured in practical daily life, not just on historical maps. The modern USPS location finder still lists a Cornettsville post office, which shows the community’s postal identity survived long after the salt furnaces disappeared and long after the Civil War markers became memorial rather than living history. That continuity matters in Appalachian local history. Many communities vanished from postal records, railroad maps, or everyday use. Cornettsville did not. Its name stayed alive even as the economic world around it changed.
Cornettsville in the Twentieth Century
Twentieth-century sources show Cornettsville as a small but persistent place. The 1936 WPA era Perry County historical survey listed Cornettsville with a population of 75, which suggests a modest community rather than a booming town. Yet small size did not mean historical insignificance. The same documentary world that recorded a small population also preserved Cornettsville in county histories, newspapers, maps, and place-name collections. The Hazard Herald’s repeated Cornettsville coverage in the twentieth century, together with the place’s appearance in annotated map collections like Robert Rennick’s, points to a community that remained woven into Perry County’s daily life long after its earliest industry had faded.
Geology and coal mapping added another layer to that story. In 1955 the U.S. Geological Survey issued a preliminary coal map for the Cornettsville quadrangle, covering parts of Perry and neighboring counties. That tells us Cornettsville had become part of the mapped coal-field world that defined much of eastern Kentucky in the twentieth century. By then the place was no longer primarily known for salt, but it still named a meaningful section of mountain landscape important enough for federal geological study. In that sense, Cornettsville’s history reflects a larger Appalachian transition from early frontier industry to the era of coal, mapped resources, and changing transportation networks.
Why Cornettsville Still Matters
What makes Cornettsville historically important is not size. It is continuity. The place connects several major layers of Perry County history in one small landscape. It ties early industry to salt production, local naming to family settlement and postal identity, and Civil War memory to one of the county’s best remembered wartime sites. The two Cornettsville markers, one for Salt Works and one for Battle of Leatherwood, effectively summarize why the community deserves attention. One points backward to the long industrial life of the place. The other points to the violence that grew out of that industry in wartime. Together they show why Cornettsville is more than just a dot on a map. It is one of the places where Perry County’s early economic, military, and community history can still be read in the landscape.
Sources & Further Reading
Rennick, Robert M. “Perry County – Post Offices.” County Histories of Kentucky. Morehead, KY: Morehead State University, 2000. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/273
Works Progress Administration and Historical Records Survey. “Perry County – General History.” County Histories of Kentucky 59. Morehead, KY: Morehead State University, 1936. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/59
Kentucky Historical Society. “Salt Works.” Kentucky Historical Marker 1346. Frankfort, KY. https://history.ky.gov/markers/salt-works
Historical Marker Database. “Battle of Leatherwood.” https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=97061
United States Geological Survey. Cornettsville, KY Historical Map GeoPDF. 1916. https://store.usgs.gov/product/864854
Johnston, John Edward, Philip T. Stafford, and Stewart W. Welch. Preliminary Coal Map of the Cornettsville Quadrangle, Perry, Knott, Letcher, Harlan, and Leslie Counties, Kentucky. Coal Map 22. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1955. https://doi.org/10.3133/coal22
United States Post Office Department. United States Official Postal Guide. July 1916. Washington, DC: Post Office Department, 1916. https://archive.org/details/unitedstatesoffi1916unit
Rennick, Robert M., and United States Geological Survey. “Cornettsville.” Robert M. Rennick Topographical Maps Collection. Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_maps_j-l/index.3.html
FamilySearch. “Tax books, 1821-1875.” Perry County, Kentucky. https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/156835
FamilySearch. “Land records, 1821-1964.” Perry County, Kentucky. https://www.familysearch.org/en/search/catalog/190103
FamilySearch. “Marriage records, 1821-1963.” Perry County, Kentucky. https://www.familysearch.org/en/search/catalog/189956
FamilySearch. “Births, marriages, deaths, 1852-1910.” Perry County, Kentucky. https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/222310
FamilySearch. “Will books, v. 1-2, 1901-1964.” Perry County, Kentucky. https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/190009
FamilySearch. “General index 1840 Perry County, Kentucky, census.” https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/3244356
Johnson, Eunice Tolbert, comp. History of Perry County, Kentucky. Hazard, KY: Hazard Chapter, Daughters of the American Revolution, 1953. https://search.worldcat.org/title/History-of-Perry-County-Kentucky/oclc/25680657
Brashear, Henry Sinclair. The Brashear-Brashears Family, 1449-1919. 1929. https://archive.org/details/brashearbrashear00bras
Library of Congress, American Folklife Center. John Cohen Collection, circa 1939-2019. https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.afc/eadafc.af020003.3
FamilySearch. “Perry County, Kentucky Genealogy.” https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Perry_County%2C_Kentucky_Genealogy
Author Note: I am always drawn to places like Cornettsville because small mountain communities often hold big histories in scattered records. This one stayed with me because salt making, Civil War memory, and place-name history all meet in one Perry County landscape.