Appalachian Community Histories – Tejay, Bell County: Toms Creek, the L&N, and a Coal Camp Named for T. J. Asher
Tejay does not enter Bell County history as a courthouse town, a large incorporated place, or a community with a long line of postal records. Its story is quieter than that. It begins along the Cumberland River, near the mouth of Toms Creek, where railroad, timber, coal, and one powerful local developer came together in the early twentieth century.
Robert M. Rennick’s place-name work gives the cleanest explanation of the name. Tejay was an L&N Railroad station and coal camp at the mouth of Toms Creek, seven miles east of Pineville. It was established by Thomas Jefferson Asher, one of the major timber and coal developers of southeastern Kentucky. The name was not borrowed from an older settlement or family creek. It was simply T. J. Asher’s initials spelled out. Rennick also noted that Tejay never had its own post office, which helps explain why the place can be hard to follow in postal lists and county records. Nearby Balkan, Tomscreek, Varilla, and Wasioto often carry the paper trail instead.
Thomas Jefferson Asher and the Road to Tejay
Thomas Jefferson Asher was born in 1848 and became one of Bell County’s best-known industrial figures. Local history placed him first in the timber business. At Wasioto, he operated one of the largest sawmills in the county, drawing timber from the upper Cumberland in Bell County and from the forks of the Cumberland in Harlan County. The lumber period mattered because it helped prepare the same geography for coal. The sawmill, store, river, railroad, and landholdings all belonged to the world that later made Tejay possible.
Around 1909 or 1910, Asher left the large-scale lumber business and moved deeper into coal. A Bell County history account says that after he went out of the lumber business, he built a railroad from Wasioto up the Cumberland River to Tejay and opened mines on his property. The same account says the railroad later continued into Harlan County and that Asher developed about 30,000 acres of coal lands on the upper Cumberland in Bell and Harlan counties.
A biographical account of Asher in a 1928 History of Kentucky connected him directly to the coal and railroad network that surrounded Tejay. It said that since 1900 he had been active in coal mining in Bell and Harlan counties and had constructed a twelve-mile railroad with a two-mile branch along Tom’s Creek. It also listed Asher Coal Mining Company properties at Colmar, Varilla, and Tejay in Bell County, and at Coxton, Wood, and Chevrolet in Harlan County. That same account says plainly that the village of Tejay derived its name from Asher’s initials.
Tejay on the L&N Harlan Branch
Federal survey records show that Tejay was more than a name remembered by local writers. In a U.S. Geological Survey bulletin covering triangulation and primary traverse work from 1916 to 1918, “Tejay, Bell County, Ky.” appears as a named survey station. The description places it on a high knob about two miles southeast of Tejay station on the Louisville & Nashville Railroad’s Harlan Branch. The knob was in plain view from the station and was locally known as Jackson’s Knob.
That source is important because it fixes Tejay in the railroad geography of the time. It was not described as a courthouse district or a post office. It was described from the viewpoint of the railroad. The station was the landmark. The L&N Harlan Branch was the line that tied the place to Pineville, the upper Cumberland, and the coal fields farther east.
By the middle of the twentieth century, the name remained visible on federal mapping. The 1954 USGS Balkan, Kentucky topographic quadrangle shows Tejay in relation to Balkan, Toms Creek, the Cumberland River, local roads, and the railroad landscape of eastern Bell County.
Balkan, Toms Creek, and the Coal Camp Record
Tejay’s history cannot be separated from Balkan. Rennick’s Bell County post-office notes describe Balkan as a coal town with a post office one mile up Toms Creek from Tejay on the Cumberland River. The Balkan post office was established in 1912, while Tejay itself had no post office of its own.
Kentucky Atlas describes Balkan as a Bell County coal town on Tom Fork about nine miles east of Pineville, established around 1912 by the Southern Mining Company to house miners and their families. It also notes that the Balkan post office opened in 1912 and closed in 1982.
The strongest mining evidence comes from the Kentucky State Department of Mines. In its 1920 report, the Southern Mining Company’s Balkan Mine was listed at Balkan, one mile from Tejay, in Bell County, on the L&N Railroad. The report described it as a drift mine developing the Creech seam of coal. It gave details about the seam, machinery, ventilation, motors, gravity plane, tipple, and a capacity of 1,500 tons per day.
Coal Age gave another near-contemporary view in 1926. A captioned item described the Southern Mining Company mine at Balkan as working the Tejay seam and producing 1,400 to 1,500 tons per day. It placed Balkan in Bell County close to the Harlan County line. That short trade-journal notice shows how Tejay’s name lived not only as a station or camp, but also as a coal-seam name used in the mining industry.
Why Tejay Can Be Hard to Find
Some Appalachian communities are easy to trace because the post office, school, church, mine, and railroad station all carried the same name. Tejay is different. Its history is scattered across neighboring names. A researcher looking only for a Tejay post office will come up short because there was no Tejay post office. A researcher looking for mines may find Balkan, Southern Mining Company, Toms Creek, the Tejay seam, Varilla, or the L&N Harlan Branch before finding Tejay itself.
That does not make Tejay unimportant. It makes it typical of many coalfield places whose lives were shaped by the railroad timetable, the company mine, the creek mouth, and the nearest post office. Tejay’s name remained attached to the ground through the railroad station, federal maps, mining reports, and later census geography.
The official Geographic Names Information System remains the baseline federal source for the place-name form. GNIS is the federal and national standard for geographic nomenclature, holding recognized names, feature classes, locations, map references, and coordinates for named features in the United States.
The Landscape After Coal
Modern records still carry the Tejay name. Census Reporter identifies Tejay CCD in Bell County as a census county division, showing that the name continues as a geographic label beyond the older coal-camp era.
Recent federal energy records also place Tejay within a new chapter of land use in eastern Bell County. Federal Register notices for the Lewis Ridge Pumped Storage Project describe the project as being near Blackmont, Tejay, Balkan, and Callaway in Bell County. Those modern records are not early Tejay history, but they show how the same coalfield landscape remains tied to energy, infrastructure, and questions about what former mining land can become.
Remembering Tejay
Tejay was small, but its story opens a larger window into Bell County history. It was a named place because Thomas Jefferson Asher’s railroad and coal work made it one. It stood near the mouth of Toms Creek, close to Balkan, along the Cumberland River, on the line that pushed from Pineville toward the Harlan County coal fields.
The place never had the kind of post office record that makes a community easy to follow. Instead, it appears in railroad references, geologic maps, mine inspection reports, trade journals, and place-name studies. That is where Tejay’s history survives.
In that sense, Tejay tells a common Appalachian story. A name could begin with one man’s initials, but the place itself belonged to a wider world of track crews, miners, storekeepers, families, surveyors, and mapmakers. It was a coal camp and station, but it was also a marker of how the Cumberland River corridor changed when timber gave way to coal and the railroad became the spine of industrial Bell County.
Sources & Further Reading
Rennick, Robert M. “Bell County Place Names.” Robert M. Rennick Manuscript Collection, Morehead State University, 2016. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_ms_collection/34/
Rennick, Robert M. “The Post Offices of Bell County, Kentucky.” Robert M. Rennick Manuscript Collection, Morehead State University, 2000. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1382&context=kentucky_county_histories
Rennick, Robert M. Kentucky Place Names. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984. https://books.google.com/books/about/Kentucky_Place_Names.html?id=ivUTAAAAYAAJ
United States Geological Survey. “Geographic Names Information System: Tejay, Bell County, Kentucky, GNIS Feature ID 509194.” The National Map. https://edits.nationalmap.gov/apps/gaz-domestic/public/search/names
United States Geological Survey. Results of Triangulation and Primary Traverse for the Years 1916 to 1918. Bulletin 709-H. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1920. https://pubs.usgs.gov/bul/0709h/report.pdf
United States Geological Survey. Balkan Quadrangle, Kentucky, 7.5 Minute Series. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Geological Survey, 1954. https://prd-tnm.s3.amazonaws.com/StagedProducts/Maps/HistoricalTopo/PDF/KY/24000/KY_Balkan_708112_1954_24000_geo.pdf
Froelich, A. J., and James Tazelaar. Geologic Map of the Balkan Quadrangle, Bell and Harlan Counties, Kentucky. U.S. Geological Survey Geologic Quadrangle 1127. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Geological Survey, 1973. https://doi.org/10.3133/gq1127
Carey, Daniel I. Generalized Geologic Map for Land-Use Planning: Bell County, Kentucky. Kentucky Geological Survey, University of Kentucky. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/kgs_mc/181/
Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. Bell County, Kentucky: State Primary Road System. Frankfort: Kentucky Transportation Cabinet, November 2024. https://transportation.ky.gov/Planning/SPRS%20Maps/Bell.pdf
Kentucky State Department of Mines. Annual Report of the Kentucky State Department of Mines. Frankfort: State Department of Mines, 1920. https://archive.org/stream/annualreport41deptgoog/annualreport41deptgoog_djvu.txt
Kentucky Department of Mines and Minerals. Annual Report. HathiTrust Digital Library. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006206733
Jones, Daniel. Annual Report of the Kentucky State Department of Mines, 1925. Frankfort: Kentucky State Department of Mines, 1925. https://kgs.uky.edu/kgsweb/olops/pub/general/jonesminereport1925.pdf
“Southern Mining Company, Balkan, Bell County.” Coal Age 29, no. 11, March 1926. https://delibra.bg.polsl.pl/Content/8952/P-375_Vol_29_1926_Nr11.pdf
Fuson, Henry Harvey. History of Bell County, Kentucky, Volume II. KYGenWeb. https://kygenweb.net/bell/area/bell_history2.htm
Fuson, Henry Harvey. “The New Industrial Period.” In History of Bell County, Kentucky. KYGenWeb. https://sites.rootsweb.com/~kybegw/books/History_Bell_1/Chapter_XII.htm
Ashley, George H. Geology and Mineral Resources of Part of the Cumberland Gap Coal Field, Kentucky. U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper 49. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1906. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/pp49
“Balkan, Kentucky.” Kentucky Atlas and Gazetteer. https://www.kyatlas.com/ky-balkan.html
“Coal Mines in Bell County, Kentucky.” Kentucky Coal Mine Records, RootsWeb. https://sites.rootsweb.com/~kycoalmi/bellcomines.html
Speaker, Bettie. “Tracing Your Kentucky Coal Mining Ancestors.” Kentucky Genealogical Society, 2022. https://kygs.org/eastern-ky-coal-mining-records/
United States Census Bureau. “Tejay CCD, Bell County, Kentucky.” Census Reporter. https://censusreporter.org/profiles/06000US2101393456-tejay-ccd-bell-county-ky/
Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. “Lewis Ridge Pumped Storage, LLC; Notice of Application Ready for Environmental Analysis and Soliciting Comments, Recommendations, Terms and Conditions, and Prescriptions.” Federal Register, February 6, 2026. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/02/06/2026-02358/lewis-ridge-pumped-storage-llc-notice-of-application-ready-for-environmental-analysis-and-soliciting
Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. “Lewis Ridge Pumped Storage, LLC; Notice of Intent To Prepare an Environmental Impact Statement.” Federal Register, May 12, 2026. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2026-05-12/html/2026-09425.htm
Kentucky Cabinet for Economic Development. “Gov. Beshear: $81 Million Federal Grant To Help Build $1.3 Billion Lewis Ridge Pumped Storage Hydropower Facility in Bell County.” March 21, 2024. https://ced.ky.gov/Newsroom/NewsPage/20240321_LewisRidge
Author Note: Tejay is one of those Bell County places where the history survives in fragments, through railroad records, mine reports, maps, and nearby communities like Balkan and Toms Creek. I like stories like this because they show how even a small place-name can open a larger window into coal, timber, railroads, and the families who lived along the Cumberland.