Appalachian Community Histories – Auxier, Floyd County: Railroad, Coal, and Company-Town Memory Beside the Levisa Fork
Around the beginning of the twentieth century, before Auxier became a remembered coal town, a camera caught one of the clearest images of what drew outside attention to this part of Floyd County. In the Roy Lee Stump Photograph Collection at Marshall University, there is a cyanotype of Mrs. John Mayo with a guide and guard showing an outcrop of coal near Auxier. The picture is quiet, but the meaning behind it is not. It shows the old story of eastern Kentucky at the moment when mountain land, mineral wealth, outside capital, railroads, and local families were beginning to reshape the Big Sandy Valley.
Auxier sits just north of Prestonsburg, near the Levisa Fork and the Johnson County line. Its place in history came from that location. The mountains held coal, the river valley gave a path through the country, and the railroad made the coal marketable. What had once been a rural place tied to family names and local travel became, in a few short years, a coal community with a company store, miners’ houses, churches, schools, and a public memory that still survives in records and oral histories.
The Railroad Comes
The history of Auxier as a town begins with the railroad. Kentucky Atlas records that Auxier Station on the Big Sandy Railroad opened in 1903, and that a town was established there in 1909. The Floyd County Auxier post office opened in 1911, although earlier Auxier post offices had been in Johnson County near Van Lear.
Those dates matter. In Appalachian history, a post office and a railroad station often mark the point where a place became visible to the outside world. The railroad turned Auxier into more than a settlement along the river. It made the community part of the larger coal economy of eastern Kentucky.
By the early twentieth century, railroads were pushing into the mountain coalfields and turning places like Auxier into shipping points. A town could grow quickly when a seam of coal met a rail line. Stores, houses, schools, churches, and mining operations followed the track. Auxier’s history was shaped by that process.
North-East Coal Company
The company most closely tied to Auxier’s early coal-town history was the North-East Coal Company. A 1912 Kentucky Court of Appeals case, Blankenship v. Commonwealth, gives one of the clearest early documentary glimpses of the company’s operation at Auxier Station. The case was not written as a history of the town. It concerned a theft from a railroad boxcar, but the details it preserves are valuable.
The court described North East Coal Company as a corporation mining and selling coal at Auxier Station in Floyd County. It also noted that the company owned a general store for the people in its employ. The stolen property in the case was twenty pairs of shoes that had been ordered for the store and had not yet been removed from the railcar. One of the men involved lived at Auxier and worked for the company.
That small legal record tells a great deal. By 1910, Auxier had a mine, a company store, workers living nearby, railroad sidings, and supplies arriving by rail. The company town was not just a row of houses. It was a system. Men worked the mines, families bought necessities from the store, and the railroad carried both coal and goods in and out.
North-East Coal Company also operated in Johnson County at Thealka. A historical account of the company describes A. D. W. Smith as president and Henry LaViers as manager of the company’s operations at Thealka and Auxier. In that period, coal companies often presented their towns as orderly and progressive places with houses, churches, schools, stores, and steady work. Those descriptions should be read carefully, because company accounts often emphasized harmony and welfare while leaving out hardship, danger, debt, and conflict. Still, they show how coal operators wanted their towns to be seen.
Life in the Company Town
The best sources for Auxier’s daily life are not just court cases or company descriptions. They are the oral histories preserved by the Nunn Center at the University of Kentucky. The Family and Gender in the Coal Community Oral History Project focused on eastern Kentucky coal communities, especially Auxier and Van Lear. These interviews help recover the life that does not always appear in official records.
In those memories, Auxier was not only a place of coal production. It was a place where children grew up in company housing, where women managed households under the conditions of coal-camp life, where gardens mattered, where churches and schools shaped the week, and where work at the mine reached into every part of family life.
Clifford Childers, who was born in Auxier, remembered growing up in a company town run by North-East Coal Company. Grace Litteral described moving to Auxier when her husband worked in the mines and living in company housing. Other interviews connected Auxier with childhood, marriage, wages, union activity, immigration, race, religion, and the ordinary routines of a coal community.
That kind of history is important because Auxier was not only built by coal operators. It was also built by families. The town was made by miners walking to work, women keeping homes together, children attending school, neighbors gathering for church, and families burying their dead in local cemeteries. Company towns could feel both close and controlled. A family might have neighbors, kin, and church community nearby, but the company could still shape housing, wages, work, and the store.
Danger in the Mines
The newspapers of the Big Sandy region preserve the cost of coal in another way. They record deaths, injuries, funerals, and names that would otherwise be easy to lose.
In 1923, the Big Sandy News reported the death of Thomas J. Music, who was killed at the Auxier plant of North East Coal Company. He had been working with moving cars when he fell and was run over. The notice said he had worked for the company for several years and was buried in Auxier Cemetery.
In 1926, the Paintsville Herald reported that Mack Blair was killed in the North East Coal Company mines at Auxier. He was a coal loader and cutter, and the report said a fall of slate killed him while he was working. Blair left behind a wife and nine children.
These accounts are brief, but they keep the human scale of coal history in view. Auxier was part of a regional coal economy, but that economy was paid for by individual workers and families. A mining death was not only an industrial accident. It changed a household, a church pew, a schoolroom, and a cemetery.
School, Church, Store, and Cemetery
Like many eastern Kentucky coal towns, Auxier’s history can be followed through institutions as much as through mines. The school, church, company store, and cemetery all appear in the surviving record.
The company store was central enough to appear in a state court case. Newspapers later mention Auxier school matters, Auxier Methodist Church, water service, and local concerns. Cemetery records preserve family names and show the continuity of the community after the busiest company years had passed.
The cemetery is especially important in a place like Auxier. Coal companies could change ownership, stores could close, and rail lines could be renamed or reorganized, but the dead remained. Auxier Cemetery and related burial records connect the industrial town to families who lived there, worked there, worshiped there, and stayed tied to the place long after the first coal boom.
Memory After the Boom
Auxier did not vanish when the early coal-town period passed. Like many communities in Floyd County, it changed. The town’s later history includes questions of school identity, public utilities, health concerns, and the continuing memory of mining life. A 1977 Floyd County Times article recorded Auxier residents speaking about fears of “white lung,” showing that the health legacy of work and industry remained part of local life long after the earliest North-East Coal Company years.
Later newspaper references to Auxier school and water service show a community still negotiating its place in Floyd County. The story did not end when the company-town model weakened. Auxier remained a place where people lived, remembered, argued for services, kept local identity, and carried forward the memory of coal-camp life.
Why Auxier Matters
Auxier’s history is not as widely known as some larger coal towns, but it is a useful example of how eastern Kentucky changed in the early twentieth century. It shows how a railroad station could become a town. It shows how a coal company could shape daily life through work, housing, and the store. It shows how newspapers recorded danger in the mines, while oral histories preserved the family life that official documents often missed.
The town’s story also shows why local history depends on many kinds of sources. A photograph shows the coal seam. A court case shows the store and the railroad siding. A newspaper records the death of a miner. A cemetery preserves family names. An oral history remembers what it felt like to grow up there.
Auxier was never only a coal operation. It was a community beside the railroad, built in the narrow space between the river, the hillside, and the mine. Its history belongs to Floyd County, but it also belongs to the larger Appalachian story of coal, family, work, loss, and survival.
Sources & Further Reading
Kentucky Atlas and Gazetteer. “Auxier, Kentucky.” Accessed June 13, 2026. https://www.kyatlas.com/ky-auxier.html
Kentucky Court of Appeals. Blankenship v. Commonwealth, 145 S.W. 752. 1912. https://app.midpage.ai/document/blankenship-v-commonwealth-7139593
University of Kentucky Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History. “Family and Gender in the Coal Community Oral History Project.” Accessed June 13, 2026. https://kentuckyoralhistory.org/ark%3A/16417/xt773n20g49j
University of Kentucky Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History. “Interview with Blaine Fraley, September 9, 1988.” Accessed June 13, 2026. https://nunncenter.net/ohms-spokedb/render.php?cachefile=1988oh154_app155_ohm.xml
University of Kentucky Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History. “Interview with Clifford Childers, July 20, 1988.” Accessed June 13, 2026. https://kentuckyoralhistory.org/ark%3A/16417/xt7pk06x0m38
University of Kentucky Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History. “Interview with Grace Litteral, June 14, 1988.” Accessed June 13, 2026. https://kentuckyoralhistory.org/ark%3A/16417/xt7j0z70zm78
University of Kentucky Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History. “Interview with Opal Goble, July 19, 1988.” Accessed June 13, 2026. https://kentuckyoralhistory.org/ark%3A/16417/xt7bcc0tt74w
University of Kentucky Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History. “Interview with Ernestine Wells, July 20, 1988.” Accessed June 13, 2026. https://kentuckyoralhistory.org/ark%3A/16417/xt7jsx647c07
University of Kentucky Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History. “Interview with Ora Reynolds, October 14, 1988.” Accessed June 13, 2026. https://kentuckyoralhistory.org/ark%3A/16417/xt7pg44hqd0w
University of Kentucky Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History. “Interview with Malta R. Miller, July 19, 1988.” Accessed June 13, 2026. https://kentuckyoralhistory.org/ark%3A/16417/xt7tb27prv9n
Marshall University Special Collections. “Roy Lee Stump Photograph Collection, 1900–1904.” Marshall Digital Scholar. Accessed June 13, 2026. https://mds.marshall.edu/stump_photograph_collection/
Pike County Historical Society. “North-East Coal Company / Thealka.” Accessed June 13, 2026. https://pikecountykyhistoricalsociety.com/north-east-coal-company-thealka/
Kentucky Department of Mines. Annual Report of the Department of Mines for the Year Ending December 31, 1925. Frankfort, KY: State Department of Mines, 1926. https://kgs.uky.edu/kgsweb/olops/pub/general/jonesminereport1925.pdf
Rice, Charles L. Geologic Map of the Prestonsburg Quadrangle, Floyd and Johnson Counties, Kentucky. U.S. Geological Survey Geologic Quadrangle Map GQ-641. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1967. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/gq641
Price, W. E. Geology and Ground-Water Resources of the Prestonsburg Quadrangle, Kentucky. U.S. Geological Survey Water-Supply Paper 1359. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1956. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/wsp1359
U.S. Census Bureau. “2020 Gazetteer Files: Kentucky Places.” Accessed June 13, 2026. https://www2.census.gov/geo/docs/maps-data/data/gazetteer/2020_Gazetteer/2020_gaz_place_21.txt
U.S. Geological Survey. “Geographic Names Information System.” Accessed June 13, 2026. https://www.usgs.gov/tools/geographic-names-information-system-gnis
Rennick, Robert M. Kentucky Place Names. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984. https://www.kentuckypress.com/9780813101798/kentucky-place-names/
Morehead State University. “Robert M. Rennick Manuscript Collection.” ScholarWorks at Morehead State University. Accessed June 13, 2026. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_ms_collection/
KYGenWeb. “Floyd County Post Offices.” Accessed June 13, 2026. https://kygenweb.net/floyd/county/list-floyd-co-post-offices.html
KYGenWeb. “Auxier Community Cemetery, Floyd County.” Accessed June 13, 2026. https://kygenweb.net/floyd/records/cemeteries/floyd-co/auxiercommunity.html
KYGenWeb. “Auxier Relocation Cemetery, Floyd County.” Accessed June 13, 2026. https://kygenweb.net/floyd/records/cemeteries/floyd-co/auxierelocation.html
The Floyd County Times. “Auxier Group Tells Fear of ‘White Lung.’” May 18, 1977. https://fclib.org/Floyd%20County%20Times/The_Floyd_County_Times_1977/05-18-1977.pdf
Kentucky Public Service Commission. “Case No. 8768, Adjustment of Rates of Auxier Road Gas Company, Inc.” 1983. https://psc.ky.gov/case/viewcasefilings/19008768
Saadati, Nasrin. The Evolution of Coal Company Towns in Kentucky. Master’s thesis, University of Padua, 2024. https://thesis.unipd.it/retrieve/7fc8061b-420d-4209-bc57-fafdb5bd5304/Thesis_NasrinSaadati.pdf
Appalachian Regional Commission. “Floyd, Kentucky.” Accessed June 13, 2026. https://www.arc.gov/states_counties/floyd-kentucky/
Author Note: Auxier’s story is one of those Appalachian histories that survives in small but powerful records, including court cases, oral histories, cemetery lists, maps, and old newspapers. I wrote this piece to help preserve the memory of a Floyd County coal town where railroad tracks, mine work, family life, and community identity all met beside the Levisa Fork.