Appalachian Community Histories – Martin, Floyd County: Coal, Hospitals, Railroads, and Floodwater on Beaver Creek
Martin sits in Floyd County where Beaver Creek meets Bucks Branch, a short distance south of Prestonsburg. The town is small in size, but its history opens onto some of the largest themes in Eastern Kentucky: coal, railroads, mountain medicine, flooding, federal redevelopment, and the survival of local memory after the landscape itself has been changed.
It is easy to confuse Martin, Kentucky with Martin County, Kentucky, but they are not the same place. Martin is a city in Floyd County, rooted in the Beaver Creek country that helped tie the upper Big Sandy region to the coalfields of the twentieth century. Its streets, hospitals, rail lines, and flood projects tell the story of an Appalachian town that grew because of industry and then had to remake itself because of water.
For many communities in the mountains, the past is held in courthouses, newspapers, railroad timetables, hospital records, and family memory. Martin is one of those places where a town can be read through all of them.
From Bucks Branch to Martin
Before the town carried the name Martin, the place was known by the creek branch that shaped it. The early post office name was Bucks Branch, opened in 1910. In 1913, the post office was renamed Smalley, after Smalley Crisp, a local landowner. By the middle of the decade, the name Martin had come into use for Martin Van Allen, a local postmaster. The post office officially became Martin in 1926, though the town itself had already been incorporated in 1920.
Those name changes matter because they show how new coalfield communities often came into public record. A creek name might come first. Then a landowner, postmaster, company, or local family might lend a name. Finally, when the town grew into a place with enough business, population, and public life, it entered the official life of Kentucky.
Martin was not an old county-seat town with a courthouse square from the early republic. It was a twentieth-century mountain town, shaped by rail, coal, health care, and the movement of people in and out of the Beaver Creek valley.
Coal and the Railroad
Martin developed in the age when railroads opened the deep hollows of Floyd County to large-scale coal operations. The town stood at an important point on the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway system, with the Long Fork line reaching from Martin toward mining communities in southern Floyd County.
The Long Fork Railway was incorporated in 1912. Construction began in 1916, and by 1918 service had opened from Martin toward Weeksbury and the Wheelwright area. The line connected Martin to mines and company towns that became part of the industrial life of Floyd County. Later railroad histories describe the route as part of the C&O’s Long Fork Subdivision, tied to places such as Weeksbury, Wheelwright, Price, Clear Creek, and Ligon.
For Martin, the railroad meant more than tracks on a map. It meant coal cars, workers, freight, passengers, and the daily machinery of an industrial Appalachian town. Coal moved out. Supplies moved in. Doctors, salesmen, miners, and families moved along the same network. The railroad yard and related operations made Martin a working point in a larger coalfield system.
Passenger service on the Long Fork line eventually ended in 1949, but the industrial importance of the railroad continued for decades. In the 1970s, the Long Fork and Clear Creek subdivisions still served active mining operations, and historic photographs of Martin Yard show coal trains, engines, and railroad structures that once formed a familiar part of the town’s built environment.
The railroad gave Martin a practical reason to grow. The hospitals gave it another.
Beaver Valley Hospital and Mountain Medicine
One of the most important primary sources for Martin’s history is not a town history at all, but a Kentucky Court of Appeals case from 1938. In Johnson v. Stumbo, the court described Beaver Valley Hospital, which had been established at Martin in 1918 by Dr. W. L. Stumbo and his brother, Dr. Ed Stumbo.
That detail places Martin at the center of a regional medical story. Beaver Valley Hospital served miners, industrial workers, families, and county patients. The court record stated that the hospital’s services to mining and other industries in the community had been extensive. It also described contracts with industries and labor unions, along with arrangements for Floyd County patients whose care was paid through fiscal court orders.
This was the world of coalfield medicine, where health care often grew beside industry. Miners and their families needed doctors close enough to reach after accidents, illness, childbirth, or epidemic. Hospitals in mountain towns were not simply medical buildings. They were places where county government, private doctors, mining companies, labor agreements, and desperate families met.
The Beaver Valley Hospital case also records that the hospital property was sold in 1935 to a group of doctors associated with the Pikeville Clinic. The dispute that followed was legal and commercial, but behind it was a larger truth: Martin had become important enough as a medical center that control of a hospital there mattered.
Our Lady of the Way
Martin’s hospital history did not end with Beaver Valley. In 1947, the Sisters of Divine Providence of Kentucky established Our Lady of the Way Hospital at Martin. For generations of Floyd County residents, Our Lady of the Way became one of the best-known institutions in the Beaver Creek region.
Local newspaper records from 1967 reported the opening of a new forty-bed Our Lady of the Way Hospital facility at Martin. By then, the hospital was part of a long tradition of mountain health care in a county where distance, roads, mine work, and poverty all shaped medical need.
The hospital’s religious roots also matter. Catholic sisters and mission hospitals played a major role in health care across parts of Appalachia, especially in rural places where private medical markets alone could not meet local needs. Our Lady of the Way served Floyd County through emergency care, inpatient care, outpatient services, and community clinics. In the twenty-first century, it became part of Appalachian Regional Healthcare, continuing Martin’s role as a medical center for the surrounding area.
In many towns, the main public story is the courthouse, the depot, or the mine portal. In Martin, the hospital is just as important. It is part of the town’s identity, part of its economy, and part of the memory of births, deaths, injuries, recoveries, and long family vigils.
A Town Repeatedly Hit by Floodwater
If coal and medicine helped build Martin, floodwater repeatedly threatened it.
The town’s location along Beaver Creek made it vulnerable. Flooding was not a single disaster in Martin’s history. It was a recurring force. Official records from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers identify major floods affecting Martin and vicinity in 1957, 1963, 1977, 1984, 1998, 2001, 2003, 2009, and 2015. Among these, the April 1977 flood became the flood of record.
The 1977 flood was one of the defining disasters in modern Eastern Kentucky history. Torrential rain struck the Big Sandy basin and the upper Cumberland region. In Martin, floodwater reached nine feet on Main Street. Countywide, Floyd County suffered a death, severe damage to businesses, and losses to nearly a thousand families.
For a small mountain town, nine feet of water on Main Street was not just a bad flood. It was a statement about the limits of rebuilding in the same place again and again. Stores, homes, roads, public buildings, and daily routines sat in a floodplain that could not be wished away.
Older residents of Martin knew that water shaped the town as surely as the railroad did. Floods marked family memory. They determined where people built, where businesses survived, what photographs were saved, and what records were lost. They also set the stage for one of the most ambitious redevelopment efforts in the town’s history.
Moving Martin to Higher Ground
After decades of flooding, Martin became part of a major federal flood-damage reduction effort. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers project grew out of Section 202 of the Energy and Water Development Appropriations Act of 1981, a program intended to address flood damage in parts of the upper Big Sandy region.
The Martin project did not simply build a wall and leave the old town alone. It used relocation, floodproofing, acquisition, demolition, redevelopment sites, road work, utility relocation, and new public facilities. The goal was to move vulnerable parts of the community out of danger while preserving as much of the town’s cohesion as possible.
The project included a redevelopment site at Mayo Hollow. Public facilities such as City Hall, the police station, the fire station, school facilities, and senior housing were moved or rebuilt above the flood-prone area. Later phases included raising Highway 1428, creating permanent green space, relocating utilities, acquiring tracts, removing structures, and offering floodproofing or acquisition for eligible properties.
The Kentucky Geological Survey summarized the logic in plain terms. After decades of trying to control flooding sources across the region, the most cost-effective way to reduce damages was to move properties out of the floodplain.
That sentence captures a hard truth. In many Appalachian towns, history is attached to place with unusual strength. A storefront, church, depot, hospital, or family house is not just a structure. It is a point of belonging. Moving a town to higher ground is never only an engineering decision. It is also a cultural and emotional one.
Martin’s redevelopment represents one of the clearest examples in Eastern Kentucky of a community being physically reshaped by flood policy. It is not the same as abandonment, but it does involve loss. Streets change. Old buildings come down. Familiar views disappear. A town survives, but it does not survive unchanged.
The Town on Beaver Creek
Michelle Slatalla’s book The Town on Beaver Creek helped preserve Martin in a different way. Published in 2006, the book used court reports, diaries, letters, interviews, and newspaper archives to reconstruct life in Martin during the twentieth century. It treated the town not as a statistic or a flood project, but as a community of families, memory, work, humor, hardship, and attachment.
That kind of work matters because official records often preserve the outline of a place while leaving out the feeling of it. A court case can tell us when Beaver Valley Hospital was founded and who owned it. A railroad history can tell us when the Long Fork line opened. A Corps document can tell us why buildings were moved. But local memory tells us what those changes felt like to the people who lived through them.
Martin’s history needs both kinds of sources. It needs the court record, the government report, the newspaper issue, the map, and the photograph. It also needs the remembered sound of trains, the fear of floodwater, the hospital hallway, the ballgame, the church gathering, the Main Street business, and the family who still calls the place home even after the ground itself has been raised.
What Remains
Today Martin is a small city, but its history is larger than its population. It carries the layered story of a coal-era town, a railroad junction, a hospital center, and a community forced to confront one of Appalachia’s oldest environmental realities: narrow valleys make settlement possible, but they also make flooding devastating.
The town’s story also complicates the idea of loss. Martin was not simply erased. It was moved, rebuilt, documented, photographed, remembered, and argued over. Its older downtown and public buildings became part of a flood-control story, while its name and community continued.
That makes Martin one of Floyd County’s most important local histories. It stands between the industrial past of the coalfields and the uncertain future of Appalachian redevelopment. It reminds readers that the story of a place is not only found in its founding date or population count. Sometimes it is found in the way a town keeps answering the same question across generations.
How do you stay where the water keeps coming?
For Martin, the answer has been work, medicine, memory, and movement to higher ground.
Sources & Further Reading
KY Atlas and Gazetteer. “Martin, Kentucky.” Accessed June 14, 2026. https://www.kyatlas.com/ky-martin.html
Johnson v. Stumbo, 121 S.W.2d 159. Kentucky Court of Appeals. 1938. https://case-law.vlex.com/vid/johnson-v-stumbo-902292452
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Huntington District. “Town of Martin Rises Above Flood.” February 21, 2025. https://www.lrd.usace.army.mil/News/Display/Article/4072890/town-of-martin-rises-above-flood/
Kentucky Geological Survey. “Relocation Out of Floodplains.” Accessed June 14, 2026. https://kgs.uky.edu/kgsweb/download/terrain/ekypdfs/EasternCoalField%2035.pdf
National Weather Service, Jackson, Kentucky. “The East Kentucky Flood of April 1977.” Accessed June 14, 2026. https://www.weather.gov/jkl/1977flood
Kentucky Department for Environmental Protection, Division of Water. “A Report on the April 1977 Flood in Southeastern Kentucky.” Accessed June 14, 2026. https://eec.ky.gov/Environmental-Protection/Water/Reports/Reports/1977-AprilFloods.pdf
Appalachian Regional Healthcare. “ARH Our Lady of the Way Hospital.” Accessed June 14, 2026. https://providers.arh.org/location/arh-our-lady-of-the-way-hospital/loc0000132837
Floyd County Public Library. “The Floyd County Times, July 20, 1967.” Accessed June 14, 2026. https://fclib.org/Floyd%20County%20Times%20%28renamed%29/The_Floyd_County_Times_1967/July%2020%2C%201967.pdf
Floyd County Public Library. “The Floyd County Times, August 29, 1940.” Accessed June 14, 2026. https://fclib.org/Floyd%20County%20Times/The_Floyd_County_Times_1940/08-29-1940.pdf
CSX Transportation Historical Society. “C&O Decades of Change, E&BV SD, Martin Yard.” Accessed June 14, 2026. https://www.csxthsociety.org/railfanning/codecadesofchange-ebvsdmartinyard.html
Abandoned. “Chesapeake and Ohio Railway Long Fork Subdivision.” January 29, 2024. https://abandonedonline.net/location/chesapeake-and-ohio-railway-long-fork-subdivision/
Abandoned. “Exploring Along the Long Fork Subdivision.” January 29, 2024. https://abandonedonline.net/exploring-along-the-long-fork-subdivision/
Rice, Charles L. Geologic Map of the Martin Quadrangle, Floyd County, Kentucky. U.S. Geological Survey Geologic Quadrangle 563. 1966. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/gq563
U.S. Geological Survey. “Geographic Names Information System: Martin.” Accessed June 14, 2026. https://edits.nationalmap.gov/apps/gaz-domestic/public/summary/497596
U.S. Census Bureau. “Gazetteer Files.” Accessed June 14, 2026. https://www.census.gov/geographies/reference-files/time-series/geo/gazetteer-files.html
U.S. Census Bureau. “QuickFacts: Floyd County, Kentucky.” Accessed June 14, 2026. https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/floydcountykentucky/PST045225
KYGenWeb. “Places in Floyd County, Kentucky.” Accessed June 14, 2026. https://kygenweb.net/floyd/photos/places/index.html
KYGenWeb. “Floyd County, Kentucky.” Accessed June 14, 2026. https://kygenweb.net/floyd/
Slatalla, Michelle. The Town on Beaver Creek: The Story of a Lost Kentucky Community. New York: Random House, 2006. https://books.google.com/books?id=FgJ3AAAAMAAJ
Pike County Historical Society. “Pikeville, Pike County Flood of 1977.” April 14, 2024. https://pikecountykyhistoricalsociety.com/pikeville-pike-county-flood-of-1977/
WYMT. “Decades-Long Project Aiming to Lift Up Floyd County Town.” June 8, 2022. https://www.wymt.com/2022/06/09/decades-long-project-aiming-lift-up-floyd-county-town/
Author Note: Martin’s story is one of those local histories where the records, the landscape, and community memory all have to be read together. This article is meant to preserve the town as more than a flood project or coalfield footnote, showing how Beaver Creek shaped its work, medicine, movement, and survival.