Appalachian Community Histories – Blackmont, Bell County: Puckett Creek, Hulen, and a Coalfield Community Beside the Rails
Blackmont sits in the eastern part of Bell County, close to the Cumberland River and the road that now carries travelers toward Harlan County. On modern transportation records, KY 72 begins at its junction with US 119 and runs “via Blackmont Hulen and Tuggleville” to the Harlan County line. That official road description preserves the way Blackmont still belongs to a chain of places along the Puckett Creek corridor, where the river, the railroad, the highway, and the old coal roads all meet in a narrow mountain landscape.
The U.S. Geological Survey places Blackmont on the Balkan quadrangle, with coordinates near 36.7917528 north and 83.524914 west, at about 1,112 feet above sea level. That placement matters because Blackmont’s story is not only a story of a named community. It is also a story of geography. The community stood at the lower end of a coal and rail corridor, where Puckett Creek came out of the mountains and where traffic from Black Star, Black Snake, Tuggleville, Hulen, and the Cumberland River settlements could connect to the wider world.
The Creek, the River, and the Shape of the Place
Long before Blackmont appeared as a coalfield name, the land was part of the upper Cumberland River country. Henry Harvey Fuson, in his history of Bell County, described Puckett’s Creek as rising in the Martin’s Fork Range of Cumberland Mountain in Harlan County, entering Bell County below the mouth of Rocky Branch, and flowing west into the Cumberland River near Hulen. In the same section, he emphasized how little level land Bell County possessed, with usable bottoms lying mainly along streams such as the Cumberland River, Puckett’s Creek, and the other narrow valleys that cut through the mountains.
That geography shaped everything that followed. Roads could not spread easily across the slopes. Rail lines had to follow the watercourses. Houses, schools, churches, stores, and mine openings had to find room in creek bottoms that were already crowded by tracks and roads. In that kind of country, a place like Blackmont became important because it sat near the mouth of a working valley. It was not simply a dot on a map. It was a passage point.
The older local history also reminds us that Puckett Creek had a farm life before the industrial era fully arrived. Fuson listed several farmers on Puckett’s Creek among the active farm families of Bell County’s older period, including Howard, Creech, and Lee names that fit the wider settlement pattern of the county. Coal did not erase that earlier world all at once. Instead, mining and railroading layered a new industrial system over older creek communities, family lands, footpaths, and local roads.
Hulen and Blackmont
The name history of Blackmont is tied closely to Hulen. Robert M. Rennick’s study of Bell County post offices connects Hulen with Blackmont and places the Hulen post office in the early twentieth century record. Searchable versions of Rennick’s work show the Hulen post office established on July 17, 1913, and connect the office with the Blackmont area.
That kind of postal history is important for communities like Blackmont because many small places entered official records through post offices, railroad stations, schools, and mines rather than through incorporation papers. Blackmont was not a town in the municipal sense. It was a community known through daily use. People named it when they mailed letters, boarded trains, walked to school, attended church, worked the mines, or gave directions along the creek.
The continued pairing of “Blackmont Hulen” in state road records shows that the older name did not disappear completely. Hulen remained in addresses and local usage, while Blackmont survived as a community name, map name, school name, and railroad point. That overlapping identity is common in Appalachian places where post office names, coal company names, railroad names, and creek names often sat on top of one another.
The Railroad Comes Up Puckett Creek
Bell County’s industrial era followed the railroad. Fuson wrote that the Louisville and Nashville Railroad reached Pineville in 1888, beginning what he called the county’s new industrial era. He later described the extension of L&N routes and branch lines into the county’s coal fields, including a line up Puckett’s Creek.
For Blackmont, that rail connection was the turning point. The creek valley became a coal corridor. The railroad did not merely pass through the area. It tied Blackmont to Black Star, Black Snake, Tuggleville, and the coal camps along Puckett Creek. The track gave coal companies a way to move coal out of the valley, but it also became part of daily life for people who lived there.
One of the clearest primary sources for this world is the 1927 Kentucky Court of Appeals case Louisville & Nashville Railroad Co. v. Slusher’s Administrator. The case grew out of the death of I. D. Slusher, who was killed in November 1924 by a motor car operated by the Black Star Coal Company on a railroad running from Blackmont to Black Star. The court described the railroad as running about seven miles from Blackmont to Black Star and noted that the accident occurred near a crossing about half a mile from Blackmont.
The case gives a rare close view of the Puckett Creek corridor in the 1920s. It described Puckett Creek as a narrow valley between two mountains, with coal camps along the railroad and a large population living between Black Star and Blackmont. It also noted that local people used the railroad track for travel up and down the creek, a detail that shows how industrial infrastructure became part of ordinary movement in a place where road space was limited.
Black Star, Coal, and the Camp World
Blackmont’s history cannot be separated from Black Star. Morehead State University’s Arthur Kilgore Mine Scrip Collection identifies Black Star Coal Company as a company founded at Alva in 1923 and operating until 1958. The collection includes a 1930 piece of Black Star Coal Company scrip, a small artifact from the company economy that shaped life in the surrounding coal camp region.
A Bell County coal mine index lists Black Star Coal Company, Inc. at Blackmont for the 1931 to 1940 period, with an employment figure of 880. That index should be treated as a strong lead and checked against annual Kentucky mine reports and company records, but it fits the larger documentary picture of Blackmont as a rail and coal point connected to Black Star operations.
The larger coal record helps explain why so much development crowded into these valleys. A Kentucky Geological Survey land-use map for Bell County reported that the county produced 302 million tons of coal from 1879 to 2004. The same map uses the Balkan quadrangle as part of its geological base, placing the Blackmont area inside the county’s broader coal and mountain landscape.
Coal camp memory sources also preserve Blackmont’s role as a gateway into Black Star. Local recollections on Black Star coal camp websites describe leaving the train at Blackmont and continuing into Black Star by electric car or other local transport. Other recollections say mail reached Black Star through Blackmont. These memories are not the same as official railroad or postal records, but they are valuable when read alongside maps, court cases, timetables, and census schedules.
Roads, Schools, and Churches
As the coal era matured, the road system gradually followed the older rail and creek corridors. Today, the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet’s road listing places KY 72 from US 119 through Blackmont Hulen and Tuggleville to the Harlan County line. This modern description still follows the same basic route logic that shaped the valley in the coal years. The road begins where the valley opens toward the Cumberland River and then moves up the creek toward the old coal communities.
Schools and churches anchored Blackmont in a different way. KYGenWeb’s Bell County school material lists Blackmont Elementary among the county’s grade schools, and later local photography documented the old Blackmont Elementary building in an abandoned state. That photography source is not an official school record, but it helps preserve the building’s later condition and records community comments from people who remembered attending there. A full school history would need Bell County Board of Education minutes, yearbooks, state school directories, and local newspaper notices.
Church records and directories also keep Blackmont visible. KYGenWeb’s Bell County church page lists Blackmont First Baptist Church, while the Kentucky Baptist Convention directory places First Blackmont Baptist Church at 14 Old Blackmont Church Road in Hulen. Together, these records show how the Blackmont and Hulen names continued to overlap in religious and community life.
In communities like Blackmont, church and school records often become the best way to recover daily life. Mine reports can tell who owned a mine and how many men worked there. Railroad cases can describe tracks and crossings. Maps can show roads, streams, and stations. But churches, schools, cemeteries, obituaries, and family records are where a community begins to regain its people.
Blackmont in Family Records
The National Archives 1950 census portal gives researchers access to population schedules, enumeration district maps, and enumeration district descriptions. For Blackmont and Hulen, those records are especially useful because they can identify households, occupations, school-age children, miners, railroad workers, widows, boarders, and families who had moved into Bell County from other parts of Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, or farther away.
FamilySearch’s Bell County genealogy guide points researchers toward county court, land, probate, vital, church, cemetery, census, and military records. Those records are essential for reconstructing Blackmont beyond the company and railroad story. A coal camp was never only a company project. It was also a place of marriages, births, funerals, land transfers, church memberships, school attendance, and family migrations.
The Bell County Historical Society is another important path into this story. Its onsite research collection includes local history, family history, biographies, yearbooks, phone books, regional history, and the Gateway Index. For a place like Blackmont, where many records may never have been digitized, those local holdings may contain photographs, school references, obituary files, family folders, and community notes that do not appear in ordinary online searches.
Remembering Blackmont
Blackmont’s importance comes from its position at the meeting point of several histories. It was part of the older Cumberland River settlement world. It belonged to the Hulen post office record. It stood at the lower end of Puckett Creek, where the road and railroad entered a coal valley. It connected Bell County to Black Star and the Harlan County coal camp system. It had a school, a church, a station, and families whose lives were written into census schedules, court cases, cemeteries, and local memory.
The surviving sources do not give Blackmont a single neat story. Instead, they give fragments. A topographic map fixes the place. A road listing keeps the Blackmont Hulen pairing alive. A post office study explains the name trail. A railroad death case shows the crowded coal corridor of the 1920s. A piece of company scrip points to Black Star’s company economy. School and church references show the community beyond the mine.
That is often how Appalachian community history survives. Not as one complete archive, but as a set of records scattered across maps, court books, mine reports, family files, church lists, school memories, and the stories people keep telling after the company towns have faded.
Blackmont still matters because it helps explain how a small Bell County place could stand at the center of a much larger world. Coal came down the creek. Trains and motor cars moved between camps. Children went to school under a name that stayed on the map. Families buried their dead in nearby cemeteries, worshiped in local churches, and used both Blackmont and Hulen to describe home. The old corridor from the Cumberland River toward Black Star is quieter now, but the records still show why Blackmont belonged to the working heart of the southeastern Kentucky coalfield.
Sources & Further Reading
U.S. Geological Survey. “Geographic Names Information System.” U.S. Geological Survey. https://www.usgs.gov/tools/geographic-names-information-system-gnis
U.S. Geological Survey. “Download GNIS Data.” U.S. Board on Geographic Names. https://www.usgs.gov/us-board-on-geographic-names/download-gnis-data
U.S. Geological Survey. Balkan Quadrangle, Kentucky, 7.5-Minute Series. Reston, VA: U.S. Geological Survey, 2016. https://prd-tnm.s3.amazonaws.com/StagedProducts/Maps/USTopo/PDF/KY/KY_Balkan_20160324_TM_geo.pdf
University of Texas Libraries. “Kentucky Historical Topographic Maps.” Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection. https://maps.lib.utexas.edu/maps/topo/kentucky/
Kentucky Geological Survey. “Georeferenced Map Imagery, Maps and GIS Products.” University of Kentucky. https://www.uky.edu/KGS/gis/mapimages.htm
Carey, Daniel I. Generalized Geologic Map for Land-Use Planning: Bell County, Kentucky. Kentucky Geological Survey, Map and Chart 181, Series XII, 2007. https://kgs.uky.edu/kgsweb/olops/pub/kgs/mc181_12.pdf
Rice, Charles L., and Russell G. Ping. Geologic Map of the Middlesboro North Quadrangle, Bell County, Kentucky. U.S. Geological Survey Open-File Report 87-413. Reston, VA: U.S. Geological Survey, 1987. https://www.usgs.gov/publications/geologic-map-middlesboro-north-quadrangle-bell-county-kentucky-0
Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. State Primary Road System: Bell County. Frankfort: Kentucky Transportation Cabinet, January 3, 2023. https://transportation.ky.gov/Planning/State%20Primary%20Road%20System%20Lists/Bell.pdf
National Archives and Records Administration. “1950 Census.” https://1950census.archives.gov/
National Archives and Records Administration. “Enumeration District Maps.” 1950 Census. https://1950census.archives.gov/howto/ed-maps.html
FamilySearch. “Bell County, Kentucky Genealogy.” FamilySearch Research Wiki. https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Bell_County%2C_Kentucky_Genealogy
Rennick, Robert M. “The Post Offices of Bell County, Kentucky.” Morehead State University ScholarWorks, 2000. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1382&context=kentucky_county_histories
Fuson, Henry Harvey. History of Bell County, Kentucky, Volume I. Digitized by KYGenWeb. https://kygenweb.net/bell/area/bell_history1.htm
Fuson, Henry Harvey. History of Bell County, Kentucky, Volume II. Digitized by KYGenWeb. https://kygenweb.net/bell/area/bell_history2.htm
Kentucky Court of Appeals. Louisville & Nashville Railroad Co. v. Slusher’s Administrator. January 25, 1927. https://www.casemine.com/judgement/us/5914cdc8add7b0493481533f
Morehead State University. “Black Star Coal Company.” Arthur Kilgore Mine Scrip Collection. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kilgore_scrip_collection/10/
Kentucky Coal Mine Index. “Bell County Coal Mines.” RootsWeb. https://sites.rootsweb.com/~kycoalmi/bellcomines.html
KYGenWeb. “Bell County Schools: Grade Schools.” https://kygenweb.net/bell/Schools/grade_school.htm
KYGenWeb. “Bell County Churches.” https://kygenweb.net/bell/churches/churches.htm
Kentucky Baptist Convention. “First Blackmont Baptist Church.” https://www.kybaptist.org/churches/first-blackmont-baptist-church/
Bell County Historical Society. “Onsite Resources.” https://www.bellcountyhistorical.org/onsite
Bell County Historical Society. “Online Resources.” https://www.bellcountyhistorical.org/online
Bell County Historical Society. “Bookstore.” https://www.bellcountyhistorical.org/bookstore
University of Kentucky Appalachian Center. “Coal Camp Documentary Project.” https://appalachianprojects.as.uky.edu/coal-camps
Black Star Coal Camp. “Memories of the Early Black Star Mining Community.” https://www.blackstarcoalcamp.com/web%20pages/Memories%20of%20the%20Early%20Black%20Star%20Mining%20Community.htm
TopoZone. “Blackmont Topo Map, Bell County, Kentucky.” https://www.topozone.com/kentucky/bell-ky/city/blackmont/
Find a Grave. “Cemeteries in Blackmont, Kentucky.” https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery-browse/USA/Kentucky/Bell-County/Blackmont?id=city_54231
The Portal to Texas History. “Louisville & Nashville Railroad Timetables.” University of North Texas Libraries. https://texashistory.unt.edu/
Library of Congress. “Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers.” https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/
Newspapers.com. “The Pineville Sun Archives.” https://www.newspapers.com/
Author Note: Blackmont is one of those Bell County places where the strongest story comes from reading maps, court records, railroad traces, church lists, and family records together. I wrote this piece to preserve the community as more than a coal-camp name, because places like Blackmont helped shape the working landscape between the Cumberland River and the Harlan County line.