Forgotten Appalachia Series – Allais School of Perry County
Allais School belonged to one of those Eastern Kentucky places that can be hard to hold still on a map. Allais appears as a Perry County community in modern county listings, and the Geographic Names Information System identifies Allais as a populated place in Perry County. Topographic references place it on the Hazard North quadrangle, near Hazard and Walkertown. That geography matters because the school’s story is not only the story of a classroom. It is also the story of a coal camp community that grew close enough to Hazard to be tied to its school system, but distinct enough to keep its own name in newspapers, maps, school records, and memory.
Allais School appears most clearly in the surviving record by the middle of the twentieth century, but the community that produced it began earlier in the coal economy of Perry County. Like many Appalachian schools, it stood at the meeting point of several worlds: the company town, the public school system, the parent teacher association, the coal road, and the lives of children whose families worked and lived near the mines.
The Coal Camp Behind the Classroom
To understand why Allais School mattered, the place must first be understood as more than a neighborhood name. It was tied closely to Columbus Mining Company, one of the coal operators that helped shape the Hazard area in the first half of the twentieth century. Gurney Norman, who grew up with deep family ties to Allais, remembered it as a coal mining camp a couple of miles from Hazard. In remarks given at the wall raising for Gurney’s Bend, he described Allais as one of the many coal company towns that operated in Kentucky’s mountain counties and stated that Columbus Mining Company had numerous mines in Perry County. He remembered his grandfather coming to Allais in 1918 to manage the company commissary, and he recalled living as a child in Walkertown and Allais during the coalfield years of the 1930s and 1940s.
Norman’s later interview with New Limestone Review gives a fuller picture of the social landscape around the school. He described Columbus Mining Company as a corporate operator with several underground mines in Perry County and remembered Allais as a compact coal camp with small company houses near the mine opening. Those memories do not replace public records, but they help explain what the records alone cannot show: Allais was a lived community of miners, children, houses, commissary life, danger, and local identity.
The legal record also places Allais in the mining world near Hazard. In Columbus Mining Co. v. Napier’s Administrator, decided by the Kentucky Court of Appeals in 1931, the court described a driftmouth on Columbus Mining Company property near the city limits of Hazard and about 3,000 feet from active mining operations. The case involved the death of Otis Napier, a fifteen year old boy found in the driftmouth in 1929. Although the case was about liability, its testimony preserves glimpses of everyday coal camp geography, including children playing near a mine opening, parents warning them away, and named Allais family members connected to Columbus Mining Company management.
The School in Hazard’s City System
The clearest school record found so far is the 1956 and 1957 Hazard City School roster, transcribed from the Perry County Genealogical and Historical Society Newsletter. That roster lists Allais separately from other Hazard school units and gives a full Allais staff across grades one through eight. The Allais list includes teachers for the primary grades, intermediate grades, and upper grades, with Mr. William Browning listed as principal and grade eight teacher. Just as important, the same roster lists Walker’s Branch as a separate school unit. That distinction shows that Allais School was not simply a loose reference to schooling somewhere near Walkertown. In the mid 1950s, it was recorded as its own school within the Hazard city school structure.
That same William Browning appears in a 1952 Associated Press item from Hazard, printed in The Evening Star of Washington, D.C. The article was not about school history, but it identified W. M. Browning as principal of a school at Allais, Kentucky. Small references like that are useful because they confirm how the school appeared in ordinary public notice. The school was not only remembered locally. It was named plainly enough in a wire service report for readers far beyond Perry County.
Other newspaper traces point to the physical and civic life of the school building. A Newspapers.com index for The Hazard Herald reports that a contract for installing a steam heating system in the Allais school was let to Hazard Plumbing and Supply Company. Another indexed Hazard Herald item identifies an “Allais P.T.A. Holds Meeting” notice connected to the P.T.A. of Allais School. Those items need full page review before exact quotations and page numbers are used, but even as leads they show a school with infrastructure needs, organized parents, and enough community presence to appear in the local paper.
The Allais PTA and the Pack Horse Library Trail
One of the strongest signs of organized school life at Allais is the trail left by the Allais PTA. The school’s parent teacher association was not only holding meetings. It also appears in the broader history of Eastern Kentucky’s Pack Horse Library movement. J. C. Schmitzer’s Register of the Kentucky Historical Society article on the Pack Horse Library of Eastern Kentucky identifies A. J. Tucker of the Allais, Kentucky, PTA among those connected to the movement.
The Pack Horse Library Project has often been remembered through images of women carrying books by horse and mule into remote mountain communities, but the Allais connection shows how local school communities helped create demand for that service. A later discussion of the Pack Horse Library movement notes that PTA members wrote asking how they might begin a library of their own and specifically mentions Allais in Perry County as a place where the school lacked a complete library. In that context, the Allais PTA was not just a social organization. It was part of a larger effort to bring reading material into mountain schools and homes during the Depression era.
That detail changes how Allais School should be remembered. It was not merely a coal camp school serving the children of miners. It was also a site where parents and teachers looked outward, asked for resources, and tried to widen the educational world available to local children. In a place shaped by company property and mine work, the PTA’s interest in library service gives the school a second identity: a community institution trying to pull books, learning, and outside connection into the hollow.
Roads, Children, and the Edges of Hazard
Allais was never isolated from Hazard, but it was not swallowed by Hazard all at once either. A 1927 Hazard Herald page gives a glimpse of local development in the area, mentioning a carload of cement loaned to the Allais road contractor and describing how completion of the concrete road to Allais would allow Hazard residents to travel toward Duane and beyond. The same page refers to Allais residents and an employee of Columbus Mining Company, showing the community as both a road destination and a mining place in the same local landscape.
The school belonged to this in between geography. Children in Allais lived close to Hazard’s civic world, close to the company’s industrial world, and close to the mountain road network that tied coal camps and county seats together. The 1931 Napier case is a tragic source, but it also shows that children’s lives unfolded around old entries, branches, roads, and mine property. The 1956 and 1957 school roster shows the more orderly public side of that same world, with teachers, grades, telephone numbers, and addresses. Taken together, these records show the two sides of coal camp childhood: danger near the mine and structure inside the schoolhouse.
From Allais School to a Changing Hazard
By the 1960s, the school map around Hazard was changing. A 1964 Hazard Herald article on the Hazard City School System discussed enrollment at Hazard High, R. G. Eversole, Walkertown, and Lothair, with Walkertown enrollment rising while Lothair declined. Allais School does not appear in that later enrollment discussion in the same way it appears in the 1956 and 1957 roster, which suggests that the city school landscape had shifted by then. The change fits the broader pattern of coal camp schools across Appalachia, where smaller named schools were often consolidated, renamed, absorbed, or replaced as roads improved, populations moved, and city or county systems reorganized.
The place name survived even as the old coal camp world changed. The University of Kentucky’s biographical note for Gurney Norman states that he grew up primarily in Allais, near Hazard, in Perry County. Modern redevelopment sources also preserve the name. The Housing Development Alliance described the Allais Redevelopment Project as the final phase of a partnership with the City of Hazard, leading to the construction of Gurney’s Bend, a fifteen home affordable housing subdivision named for Norman.
State materials later described the subdivision as named for former Kentucky Poet Laureate Gurney Norman, who lived in Allais as a child. They also quoted local leaders describing the redevelopment of the old site into new homes. That modern chapter does not directly continue the story of Allais School, but it does show that Allais remains a meaningful place name in Hazard’s civic memory.
Why Allais School Matters
Allais School matters because it gives shape to a community that can otherwise disappear into larger names. Without the school records, Allais can be reduced to a mine, a road, a post office, or a section of Hazard. With the school restored to the story, it becomes easier to see Allais as a place where families lived across generations, where children moved from first grade to eighth grade, where parents organized through a PTA, where teachers served a defined community, and where the needs of a coal camp were translated into the language of public education.
The surviving record is still incomplete. The best next step would be a full review of Hazard Herald microfilm for the Allais PTA notices, school building notices, heating contract, enrollment references, and any closing or consolidation records. School board minutes, if preserved, may show when Allais School was built, expanded, heated, repaired, consolidated, or closed. But even the scattered sources now available tell a strong story. Allais School stood at the heart of a coal camp community that was close to Hazard but still its own place, shaped by Columbus Mining Company, strengthened by local parents and teachers, and remembered through the people who carried Allais with them long after the old camp changed.
Sources & Further Reading
Genealogy Trails. “Hazard City School 1956-1957.” Transcribed from Perry County Genealogical and Historical Society Newsletter 18, no. 3, December 1996. https://genealogytrails.com/ken/perry/city_school_56.html
The Evening Star. “School Principal Arrested.” Washington, DC, September 3, 1952. Library of Congress. https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ndnp/dlc/batch_dlc_borisgodunov_ver01/data/sn83045462/0028060608A/1952090301/0450.pdf
The Hazard Herald. “Allais P.T.A. Holds Meeting.” Hazard, KY. Newspapers.com indexed page. https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/1118182545/
The Hazard Herald. “For Steam Heating System in the Allais School; Music Supervisor Chosen.” Hazard, KY. Newspapers.com indexed page. https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/1118650647/
The Hazard Herald. January 27, 1921. Library of Congress, Chronicling America. https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn85052003/1921-01-27/ed-1/
The Hazard Herald. September 27, 1927. Library of Congress, Chronicling America. https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ndnp/kyu/batch_kyu_labrador_ver01/data/sn85052003/00516997369/1927092701/0909.pdf
The Hazard Herald. July 16, 1964. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/download/kd9gq6qz2b2r/kd9gq6qz2b2r_text.pdf
Schmitzer, J. C. “Reaching Out to the Mountains: The Pack Horse Library of Eastern Kentucky.” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 95, no. 1, 1997. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23383806
Omer, J. “The Pack Horse Library Initiative and Kentucky’s Librarians.” SLIS Connecting, 2023. https://aquila.usm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1259&context=slisconnecting
Columbus Mining Co. v. Napier’s Adm’r, 239 Ky. 642, 40 S.W.2d 285, Kentucky Court of Appeals, 1931. https://www.casemine.com/judgement/us/59147a15add7b04934403bb1
CTC Inv. Co. v. Daniel Boone Coal Corporation, 58 F.2d 305, Eastern District of Kentucky, 1931. https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/F2/58/305/1504241/
Kentucky State Department of Mines. Annual Report, 1924. Kentucky Geological Survey. https://kgs.uky.edu/kgsweb/olops/pub/general/jonesminereport1924.pdf
Kentucky State Department of Mines. Annual Report, 1925. Kentucky Geological Survey. https://kgs.uky.edu/kgsweb/olops/pub/general/jonesminereport1925.pdf
Schopf, James M., and Orrin G. Oftedahl. The Reinhardt Thiessen Coal Thin-Section Slide Collection of the U.S. Geological Survey: Catalog and Notes. U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 1432. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1976. https://pubs.usgs.gov/bul/1432/report.pdf
Seiders, Victor M. Geology of the Hazard North Quadrangle, Kentucky. U.S. Geological Survey Geologic Quadrangle Map GQ-344. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1964. https://doi.org/10.3133/gq344
United States Geological Survey. “Allais Topo Map, Perry County KY, Hazard North Area.” TopoZone. https://www.topozone.com/kentucky/perry-ky/city/allais/
Perry County Fiscal Court. “Communities.” Perry County, Kentucky. https://perrycounty.ky.gov/things-to-do/Pages/Communities.aspx
Rennick, Robert M. “Perry County: Post Offices.” County Histories of Kentucky, no. 273. Morehead State University, 2000. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/273/
Rennick, Robert M. “The Post Offices of Perry County, Kentucky.” La Posta 34, no. 2, 2003. https://www.lapostapub.com/Backissues/LP34-2.pdf
Rennick, Robert M. “The Post Offices of Perry County, Kentucky. Part II.” La Posta 34, no. 3, 2003. https://www.lapostapub.com/Backissues/LP34-3.pdf
Norman, Gurney. “Remarks for Wall Raising at Gurney’s Bend.” University of Kentucky College of Arts and Sciences, May 11, 2021. https://www.as.uky.edu/remarks-wall-raising-gurney%E2%80%99s-bend-gurney-norman-may-11-2021
Smith, Hagan. “Gurney Norman on Allegiance, Appalachia and His Literary Legacy.” New Limestone Review, University of Kentucky, May 15, 2019. https://newlimestonereview.as.uky.edu/2019/05/15/gurney-norman-on-allegiance-appalachia-and-his-literary-legacy/
University of Kentucky College of Arts and Sciences. “Gurney Norman.” https://www.as.uky.edu/users/gnorman
Housing Development Alliance. “HDA Purchases Gurney’s Bend.” https://hdahome.org/news-blog/hda-purchases-gurneys-bend/
Commonwealth of Kentucky. “Gov. Beshear Joins Community Leaders in Hazard to Celebrate Completion of Gurney’s Bend.” Kentucky.gov, April 2023. https://kentucky.gov/Pages/Activity-stream.aspx?n=GovernorBeshear&prId=1738
Author Note: Allais School survives in scattered school rosters, newspaper notices, legal records, and local memory rather than in one complete institutional history. I wanted to piece those fragments together because a coal camp school can tell us as much about community life as a mine, commissary, or railroad line.