Appalachian Community Histories – Anthras, Campbell County: The Clear Fork Coal Camp in the Jellico Field
Anthras sits in the record as one of those Campbell County places whose history was shaped by coal, water, railroads, and a company name. It was not a county seat, courthouse town, or large commercial center. It was a mining community along the Clear Fork River, near Tackett Creek, in the northeastern part of Campbell County close to the Claiborne County line.
The place name itself tells much of the story. In a 1939 Campbell County place-name sketch, Della Yoe recorded that Anthras was pronounced “Ann-thruss” and that its name came from “anthracite.” The name was given by L. I. Coleman, president of the Tennessee-Jellico Coal Company. The same account described Anthras as a little mining community established in 1909, with a population of 250 in 1930 and an estimated 500 in 1938.
Anthras belonged to the larger Jellico coal field, a region where the mountains of northern Tennessee and southeastern Kentucky became tied to industrial markets. Coal seams, branch lines, tipples, churches, schools, company stores, and post offices formed the working geography of places like Anthras. The community’s story is not preserved in one single book. It has to be reconstructed from place-name files, post office records, mine reports, federal coal records, railroad history, maps, court cases, and scattered local memories.
Before Anthras
Campbell County was formed in 1806, long before Anthras appears by name in the records. For much of the nineteenth century, settlement in the mountains and valleys of northern Campbell County followed streams, wagon roads, family farms, churches, and small trading points. The later industrial map of the county was not yet complete.
That changed after the Civil War as coal and railroads began reshaping the Cumberland Mountains. Jellico became one of the best-known coal and railroad towns in the region. The National Register nomination for the Jellico Commercial Historic District describes Jellico as a booming mining community whose growth came after railroads were completed and mines opened in Campbell County. Jellico became a hub for the mining district of northern Campbell County, Tennessee, and southern Whitley County, Kentucky.
Anthras grew out of that same coal world. It was not as large or commercially visible as Jellico, but it was part of the same industrial landscape. The coal beneath the ridges mattered because railroads and markets could carry it beyond the valley. A small mountain place could become important when a seam, a company, and a transportation route came together.
The Name and the Company
The best-known explanation for the name Anthras comes from the 1939 Campbell County place-name material. According to that account, L. I. Coleman of the Tennessee-Jellico Coal Company named the community from “anthracite.” The spelling became Anthras rather than Anthracite, but the meaning remained tied directly to coal.
The name is interesting because the Jellico field was famous for bituminous coal, not true Pennsylvania-style anthracite. Still, the name shows how coal shaped identity and promotion. Coal companies often used names that suggested quality, strength, geology, or industrial promise. Anthras sounded like a coal place because it was one.
The Tennessee-Jellico Coal Company appears again in federal records. During the 1940s, Federal Register notices listed the Tennessee Jellico Coal Company with an Anthras mine. One 1946 coal-price and classification record identified the Anthras mine by mine index number. These records show that Anthras was not just a name on a map or a memory from a local sketch. It was part of the federal coal market and mine classification system in the years after World War II.
The Post Office and the Community
The place-name sketch gives 1909 as the establishment date for Anthras, but post office evidence suggests the name was already in use slightly earlier. Tennessee post office indexes based on National Archives postmaster appointment records list an Anthras post office in Campbell County from 1907 to 1946.
That matters because post offices were often among the clearest signs that a rural or mining community had become a recognized place. A post office did more than handle letters. It tied a camp or village to the outside world. It marked the community in state and federal records. It gave residents a postal identity even when the place itself remained unincorporated.
The Anthras post office also appears in a 1908 newspaper report from Jellico concerning violence near the community. The report described Anthras as isolated, five miles from a railroad, and without telephone connection. It also mentioned a Baptist church near the post office. Newspaper accounts like that should be used carefully, especially when repeated through papers far from Campbell County, but they still show that Anthras was already a named community before the commonly repeated 1909 date.
Railroads, Roads, and the Clear Fork Landscape
By 1939, Anthras was described as being served by the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, the Southern Railroad, and State Highway 90. That description places Anthras inside the transportation network that made coal camps possible. A mine in the mountains needed more than coal in the ground. It needed a way to move coal to markets.
The Clear Fork River and Tackett Creek help explain the geography of Anthras. Waterways shaped where roads ran, where people settled, and where local names appeared on maps. Modern United States Geological Survey water-data sites still mark Clear Fork at Highway 90 at Anthras and Tackett Creek at Anthras. Those records are modern, but they preserve the same geographical relationship that mattered to the older settlement.
Historical topographic maps are especially useful for Anthras because they show how the community related to nearby ridges, creeks, churches, roads, and mining features. In coal country, maps can sometimes preserve what written histories overlook. A church symbol, a school, a road bend, a creek crossing, or a railroad spur can help rebuild the lived landscape of a place that rarely made headlines.
Work in the Jellico Seam
The coal itself appears in federal mine reports. A United States Bureau of Mines report covering mine and car samples collected from 1913 to 1916 included the Anthras mine in Campbell County and identified its coal with the Jellico bed. That places Anthras in one of the best-known coal seams of the region.
The Jellico bed had already given its name and reputation to the broader coal field. Coal from this region moved into industrial markets and helped support the growth of towns, rail connections, and mining camps across northern Campbell County and the Kentucky border country. Anthras was one of the smaller pieces in that larger system.
Mining work in places like Anthras was demanding, dangerous, and tied closely to the rhythms of company production. Men worked underground or around surface facilities, while families lived with the uncertainty that came with coal employment. Schools, churches, post offices, and stores made a camp into a community, but the mine remained the central fact of daily life.
School, Church, and Everyday Life
The 1939 place-name sketch recorded one graded school and one Baptist church at Anthras. Those two institutions say much about the community beyond the mine. A school meant families, children, teachers, and county involvement. A Baptist church meant worship, funerals, revivals, kinship ties, and a gathering place beyond the workday.
For small coal communities, churches and schools often outlasted the fullest years of industrial activity. They held memory when company records disappeared or moved into archives. They also connected a coal camp to older rural traditions in Campbell County. Anthras was not only a place of tipples and coal seams. It was also a place where families worshiped, children attended school, and residents built a local identity around the creek, the road, and the mine.
Death certificates, cemetery records, obituaries, and veterans’ memorial entries can help recover those families. A Tennessee death certificate transcription for George Douglas gives Anthras as a place of death in 1931. The East Tennessee Veterans Memorial Association’s entry for Willard Adkins notes that he had worked for Anthras Coal Company before his military service. Such records are small pieces, but they help move the story from company history into community history.
Anthras in Federal and State Mine Records
Anthras continued to appear in coal records after the first decades of the twentieth century. Federal Register notices from the mid-1940s connected the Tennessee Jellico Coal Company to Anthras. Later coal analyses and tipple sample reports also indexed Anthras, showing that the place remained part of the documented coal economy into the postwar years.
The Tennessee Department of Labor records at the Tennessee State Library and Archives include a file for Anthras Mine in 1945. That file is especially important for future research. State mine records can contain inspection reports, correspondence, labor information, safety details, accident material, and other evidence that does not appear in local histories. For Anthras, such records may be among the strongest sources for understanding the mine as a workplace.
This is one reason Anthras is a good example of how Appalachian community history is often found. The public story may be thin, but the records are not empty. They are scattered across state archives, federal reports, court cases, maps, newspapers, and family documents.
The Later Coal-Hauling Era
Anthras also appears in later coal and labor history through the 1963 federal court case White Oak Coal Company, Inc. v. United Mine Workers of America. The case concerned conflict involving coal operations in Campbell County and the United Mine Workers. It described White Oak Coal Company’s surface mining in the Jellico seam and referred to coal being hauled to a tipple and coal-cleaning plant at Anthras.
That court record shows that Anthras remained part of the coal infrastructure even after the classic company-camp period had changed. By then, coal might be mined in one place, hauled by truck, cleaned or loaded in another, and sold to large customers such as the Tennessee Valley Authority. Anthras was no longer only a small mining village beside a company mine. It was part of a broader coal-handling system in a changing industry.
The case also hints at the tensions of mid-twentieth-century coal country. Labor organization, nonunion operations, trucking routes, markets, violence, and legal claims all shaped the coalfields during this period. Anthras appears in that story not as a courtroom center, but as a working point in the coal network.
Remembering Anthras
Anthras is easy to miss if one only looks for large towns. It was a coal camp, a post office, a school community, a Baptist church community, a mine name, and a place on Clear Fork. Its history is tied to Campbell County, to the Jellico coal field, to the Tennessee-Jellico Coal Company, and to the transportation routes that carried coal out of the mountains.
The records show a place that grew quickly enough to reach several hundred residents by the late 1930s, then slowly faded from wider public attention as coal, transportation, and rural settlement patterns changed. The post office closed in 1946, but the name remained in maps, water records, legal records, family memories, and the landscape itself.
Anthras matters because small coal communities carried much of the weight of Appalachian industrial history. Places like Jellico became the hubs, but places like Anthras supplied the labor, coal, families, churches, schools, and local geography that made the coalfield real. Its story is not only about extraction. It is about how a mountain place became known, worked, mapped, recorded, and remembered through coal.
Sources & Further Reading
Bogan, Dallas. “Anthras Got Its Name from Anthracite Coal; Block’s Name Came from Thick Coal Vein.” Campbell County, Tennessee and Beyond. TNGenWeb. https://www.tngenweb.org/campbell/hist-bogan/placenames.html
Bogan, Dallas. “A Short History of Area Railroads.” Campbell County, Tennessee and Beyond. TNGenWeb. https://www.tngenweb.org/campbell/hist-bogan/RRhistory.html
Bogan, Dallas. “Discovery of Coal in Jellico Mountains Changed Small Village of Smithburg from 1833 to 1878.” Campbell County, Tennessee and Beyond. TNGenWeb. https://www.tngenweb.org/campbell/hist-bogan/discovery.html
Tennessee State Library and Archives. “Tennessee Place Names and Post Offices: Introduction and Index.” https://sharetngov.tnsosfiles.com/tsla/history/places/postoff1.htm
Tennessee State Library and Archives. “Genealogical ‘Fact Sheets’ About Campbell County.” https://sos.tn.gov/tsla/pages/genealogical-fact-sheets-about-campbell-county
Tennessee State Library and Archives. Tennessee Department of Labor Records, 1878 to 1974. Finding aid. https://sos-tn-gov-files.tnsosfiles.com/forms/DEPARTMENT_OF_LABOR_RECORDS_1878-1974.pdf
United States Bureau of Mines. Analyses of Mine and Car Samples of Coal Collected in the Fiscal Years 1913 to 1916. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1918. https://dggs.alaska.gov/webpubs/usbm/b/text/b123.pdf
Campbell, Marius R. “Analyses of Coal Samples from Various Parts of the United States.” United States Geological Survey Bulletin 621-P. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1916. https://pubs.usgs.gov/bul/0621p/report.pdf
Snyder, N. H., and S. J. Aresco. Analyses of Tipple and Delivered Samples of Coal: Collected During the Fiscal Years 1948 to 1950 Inclusive. Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of Mines, 1953. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc12676/
Federal Register. “Tennessee Jellico Coal Co., Anthras, Anthras, Tenn.” June 16, 1945. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-1945-06-16/pdf/FR-1945-06-16.pdf
Federal Register. “Tennessee Jellico Coal Co., Anthras Mine, Mine Index No. 22.” November 5, 1946. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-1946-11-05/pdf/FR-1946-11-05.pdf
White Oak Coal Company, Inc. v. United Mine Workers of America, 318 F.2d 591. United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, 1963. https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/318/591/56277/
National Register of Historic Places. “Jellico Commercial Historic District.” National Park Service, 1999. https://npgallery.nps.gov/GetAsset/aeeab044-30b4-421f-b126-e5d217154076
Clark, F. R. The Northern Tennessee Coal Field: Included in Anderson, Campbell, Claiborne, Fentress, Morgan, Overton, Pickett, Roane, and Scott Counties. Tennessee Division of Geology Bulletin 33-B. Nashville: Tennessee Division of Geology. https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Northern_Tennessee_Coal_Field.html?id=BTAQAAAAIAAJ
Englund, K. J. Geology and Coal Resources of the Elk Valley Area, Tennessee and Kentucky. United States Geological Survey Professional Paper 572. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1968. https://pubs.usgs.gov/pp/0572/report.pdf
Coal Mining Catalogs, Including Directory of Manufacturers and Supply Dealers. New York: Coal Age, 1922. https://archive.org/stream/coalminingcatalo1922newy/coalminingcatalo1922newy_djvu.txt
University of Tennessee Libraries. “Jellico Coal Mining Company Journal, 1909 to 1916.” Betsey B. Creekmore Special Collections and University Archives. https://scout.lib.utk.edu/repositories/2/resources/3013
East Tennessee Veterans Memorial Association. “Willard Adkins.” https://www.etvma.org/veterans/willard-adkins-12377/
TNGenWeb. “George Douglas Death Certificate.” Campbell County, Tennessee Death Certificates. https://www.tngenweb.org/campbell/dcerts/dcerts/douglas-g.html
United States Geological Survey. “Monitoring Location Clear Fork at Hwy 90, at Anthras, TN, USGS-03403697.” https://staging.waterdata.usgs.gov/monitoring-location/USGS-03403697
United States Geological Survey. “Monitoring Location Clear Fork at Anthras, TN, USGS-03403700.” https://staging.waterdata.usgs.gov/monitoring-location/USGS-03403700
United States Geological Survey. “Monitoring Location Tackett Creek at Anthras, TN, USGS-03403710.” https://waterdata.usgs.gov/monitoring-location/03403710/
United States Geological Survey. topoView: Historical Topographic Map Collection. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/topoview/
Tennessee Geological Survey. “Quadrangle Map Index.” Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation. https://www.tn.gov/environment/program-areas/geology/maps-publications/quad-map-index.html
FamilySearch. “Campbell County, Tennessee Genealogy.” FamilySearch Wiki. https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Campbell_County%2C_Tennessee_Genealogy
Appalachian Regional Commission. “Campbell County, Tennessee.” https://www.arc.gov/states_counties/campbell/
Author Note: Anthras is one of those Campbell County places that has to be rebuilt from records more than from a single published history. I wanted to preserve it here because coal camps, post offices, churches, and creek communities carried much of Appalachia’s story even when they did not become large towns.