Appalachian Community Histories – David, Floyd County: From Princess Elkhorn Coal Camp to Community-Owned Town
David sits in Floyd County about seven miles southwest of Prestonsburg, tucked along Lick Fork in the steep country of eastern Kentucky. It should not be confused with the separate David in Letcher County. This David belongs to Floyd County, and its story is one of the clearest Appalachian examples of a coal company town that passed from corporate control into community hands.
Before the town carried the name David, the area was known as Lick Fork. Kentucky Atlas connects the place to a nearby salt spring, later remembered as Young’s Salt Works, and notes a tradition that early hunters and settlers, said to include Daniel Boone, knew the spring by the late eighteenth century. Salt licks mattered in the old Kentucky frontier because they drew animals, hunters, surveyors, and eventually settlement. Long before coal tipples and company houses stood in the hollow, Lick Fork was part of an older mountain landscape where water, salt, timber, and narrow creek valleys shaped human movement.
Floyd County itself belonged to Kentucky’s Eastern Coal Field. Formed in 1800, the county once stretched across far more land than it does today, giving rise to several later eastern Kentucky counties. By the twentieth century, coal and railroads had remade much of the county. David came late compared with older coal camps, but when it arrived, it was built with a clear purpose.
Princess Elkhorn Builds David
The modern town of David was created in 1941 by the Princess Elkhorn Coal Company. Kentucky Atlas says the community was named for David L. Francis, general manager of the company, and that the David post office opened that same year.
David was not simply a scatter of houses beside a mine. It was planned as a company town. The company built a store, school, church, swimming pool, and other facilities. Later descriptions of the town remembered it as a model coal community, with services and amenities that many rural mountain settlements did not have. Photographs from 1952 and 1953 in the Michael H. Ross Collection at Georgia State University show the mining and social world of David in the middle of the coal era. One image records loaded coal cars at the Princess Elkhorn Coal Company’s David Mine. Another shows the company swimming pool and play area, with the mine buildings rising behind the recreation space.
The contrast in those photographs is the story of the company town in miniature. Coal paid for the swimming pool. The mine sat close to the houses, the school, the store, and the lives of families. Work, worship, play, shopping, and schooling were all gathered into a place owned and shaped by the company.
David L. Francis also appears in later federal court records involving Princess Coals and related companies. Princess Coals, Inc. v. United States identifies Francis as president of Powellton and Elkhorn during a 1958 corporate transaction. Such records do not tell the whole local story, but they help place David inside a wider corporate network of Appalachian coal operations.
Life In A Model Company Town
David’s early decades were remembered with a mixture of pride and dependence. The town offered more than a job site. It gave families a school, church, recreation area, company store, and public utilities in a part of Kentucky where such services could be uneven or absent. The swimming pool became one of the most visible symbols of the company town’s unusual amenities.
Mary A. Pineau’s Pioneer People: A Story of David, Kentucky appears to be the most important local history of the community. Published under the auspices of the David Community Development Corporation, the book describes David as a small Appalachian community that moved from birth to maturity, then decay, then renewal. Book records describe it as illustrated with maps, drawings, and historical photographs, which makes it valuable not only as a narrative history but also as a visual record of the town.
The Floyd County Times is another key source for reconstructing David’s life. Digitized issues through the Floyd County Library include mid-century and later references to Princess Elkhorn, David residents, reunions, the David Community Development Corporation, and the David School. These newspaper pages matter because they catch the town in motion. They show David not as a fixed coal camp in memory, but as a place where residents organized, celebrated, worried, repaired, and argued through the changes that came after coal.
The Mine Closes
Kentucky Atlas gives the closing of the mine at around 1968. That date marks the turning point in David’s story.
When a company town loses the company, the loss is never only economic. A mine closure can mean lost wages, empty houses, failing water systems, shuttered stores, and public spaces with no one clearly responsible for maintaining them. In David, the features that once made the town look modern and stable became harder to sustain after the coal economy pulled back.
By the early 1970s, David faced the problem that many coal towns faced. The buildings and infrastructure had been built around a company system, but the people who remained still needed a livable community. Houses, water, sewer, roads, and public facilities could not survive on nostalgia. They needed ownership, repair, money, and organization.
That is where David’s story becomes more than the history of a coal camp. It becomes a story of residents trying to claim the town itself.
Buying Back The Town
In 1975, the residents of David purchased the town through the David Community Development Corporation. Kentucky Atlas summarizes the moment plainly, but its importance is large. A former company town became a community development project controlled by local residents and their nonprofit corporation.
This was part of a wider Appalachian moment in the 1970s when community organizers, church workers, housing advocates, and local families tried to answer the damage left by coal’s boom and decline. David was not only asking how to preserve memory. It was asking how people could keep living there.
A federal HUD publication, Neighborhoods: A Self-Help Sampler, treated David as one of the examples of local self-help community development. The record describes David as a small rural hamlet and places its revival in the language of local action, housing, and community rebuilding. The White House biography of Shekar Narasimhan later noted that he served as executive director of the David Community Development Corporation from 1975 to 1977, showing that the organization was connected to a broader network of community development and housing work.
The David Community Development Corporation also remained important after the purchase. A 2001 Kentucky Public Service Commission order records the corporation’s application to transfer its wastewater collection system to the City of Prestonsburg. The order states that the system had been in operation since March 1979 and confirms that the corporation still held public infrastructure responsibilities decades after the town’s purchase.
That detail is easy to overlook, but it matters. The resident purchase was not a symbolic act alone. It involved the unglamorous work of sewer systems, utilities, property, grants, repairs, and public accountability. David survived because people organized around those practical needs.
The David School
If the David Community Development Corporation became one answer to the collapse of the company town, the David School became another.
The David School opened in 1974. It began in the same period when the community was trying to rebuild itself after the loss of Princess Elkhorn. The school became one of the best-known institutions in David and one of the most recognizable alternative schools in Appalachia.
The Appalachian Regional Commission’s case study of the David School described it as a private, nondenominational, nonprofit education provider founded in 1974. It served students who had dropped out or were at risk of dropping out, with an emphasis on vocational skills, hands-on learning, and individualized attention. The ARC report also noted that the school originally occupied abandoned coal company buildings, including the company store, office, and movie theater. In that sense, the school literally reused the physical remains of the coal town for a new purpose.
The school’s Success Bound program began in the 1990s with ARC support. It pushed students to think beyond simply earning a diploma or GED and toward a specific future, whether college, vocational school, military service, or employment. Success Bound became part of the school’s identity, even giving its name to Success Bound Road.
PBS Frontline brought David and the school to national attention in 2006 with Country Boys, David Sutherland’s six-hour documentary following Cody Perkins and Chris Johnson, two students at the David School, over several years. The film did not tell the whole history of David, but it showed a wider audience the challenges faced by young people in the coalfields and the role the school played as a place of second chances.
The David School still describes itself as a private, nonprofit school offering a second chance and a supportive environment for students who need it most. Its current address, 352 Success Bound Road, carries the language of the school’s mission into the map of the town.
From Coal Rails To Prestonsburg Passage
The old coal landscape around David has continued to change. One of the most visible modern examples is the Prestonsburg Passage Rail Trail. Built along a former coal-hauling rail corridor, the trail connects Prestonsburg with David. Prestonsburg Tourism describes it as an 8.6 mile paved trail, 17.2 miles round trip, running from the county seat to the former coal town.
The trail opened in 2020 after planning and an Abandoned Mine Lands Pilot Grant. Its route turns former coal infrastructure into recreation, tourism, and public memory. For David, the trail is more than a path. It is a reminder that industrial corridors can carry new meaning after the trains stop running.
A visitor traveling the trail from Prestonsburg to David moves through a landscape shaped by coal, creeks, ridges, and recovery. The same corridor that once moved coal out of the mountains now brings walkers, cyclists, and local families into contact with the history of a company town that refused to disappear.
Why David Matters
David matters because it tells more than one Appalachian story at once.
It is a coal story, beginning with Princess Elkhorn and the mine that gave the town its purpose. It is a company-town story, with houses, a store, school, church, swimming pool, and public life shaped by corporate ownership. It is a decline story, marked by the mine closing around 1968 and the difficulty of maintaining a place after the company moved on.
But David is also a survival story.
In 1975, residents bought the town through the David Community Development Corporation. They did not simply mourn what Princess Elkhorn had left behind. They organized around housing, water, sewer, education, and community life. The David School turned former coal company spaces into classrooms and workshops. The Prestonsburg Passage later turned a former coal-hauling route into a public trail.
Many Appalachian coal towns were built to serve one industry. David’s deeper legacy is that its people found ways to make the town serve the community after that industry retreated.
The story of David is not only about what coal built. It is about what residents chose to keep, repair, and remake after coal no longer held the town together.
Sources & Further Reading
Kentucky Atlas and Gazetteer. “David, Kentucky.” Accessed June 14, 2026. https://www.kyatlas.com/ky-david.html
Kentucky Atlas and Gazetteer. “David, Kentucky,” Letcher County entry. Accessed June 14, 2026. https://www.kyatlas.com/ky-david-2.html
Kentucky Atlas and Gazetteer. “Floyd County, Kentucky.” Accessed June 14, 2026. https://www.kyatlas.com/21071d.html
Pineau, Mary A. Pioneer People: A Story of David, Kentucky. Pikeville, KY: Executive Printing, 1987. https://www.abebooks.com/Pioneer-People-Story-David-Kentucky-Pineau/32214933653/bd
Floyd County Public Library. “Floyd County History Collection.” Accessed June 14, 2026. https://www.fclib.org/floyd-county-history-collection/
The Floyd County Times. “Lake Sedimentation Near 3 Times Expected Rate.” February 16, 1977. https://fclib.org/Floyd%20County%20Times/The_Floyd_County_Times_1977/02-16-1977.pdf
Floyd County Public Library. “Newspaper Indexes: Floyd County Times.” Big Sandy Community and Technical College Library Guides. June 12, 2025. https://bigsandy.libguides.com/localnewspaperindex
U.S. Geological Survey. “Geologic Map of the David Quadrangle, Eastern Kentucky.” By William F. Outerbridge. Geologic Quadrangle 720. 1968. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/gq720
Outerbridge, William F. Geologic Map of the David Quadrangle, Eastern Kentucky. U.S. Geological Survey Geologic Quadrangle Map GQ-720. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1968. https://doi.org/10.3133/gq720
U.S. Geological Survey. “Historical Topographic Maps: Preserving the Past.” Accessed June 14, 2026. https://www.usgs.gov/programs/national-geospatial-program/historical-topographic-maps-preserving-past
U.S. Geological Survey. “TopoView.” Accessed June 14, 2026. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/topoview/
U.S. Geological Survey. “US Topo 7.5-Minute Map for David, KY.” 2013. https://prd-tnm.s3.amazonaws.com/StagedProducts/Maps/USTopo/PDF/KY/KY_David_20130319_TM_geo.pdf
Kentucky Geological Survey. Floyd County, Kentucky. Accessed June 14, 2026. https://kgs.uky.edu/kgsweb/olops/pub/kgs/mc178_12.pdf
Kentucky Public Service Commission. “Case Filings for Case No. 2001-00208.” Accessed June 14, 2026. https://psc.ky.gov/case/viewcasefilings/2001-00208
Kentucky Public Service Commission. “Order, Case No. 2001-208: Application of David Community Development Corporation, Inc., Floyd County, Kentucky.” October 1, 2001. https://psc.ky.gov/order_vault/orders_2001/200100208_100101.pdf
Princess Coals, Incorporated v. United States, 239 F. Supp. 401. Justia. Accessed June 14, 2026. https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/239/401/2379003/
Georgia State University Library. “M. H. Ross Papers.” Digital Collections. Accessed June 14, 2026. https://digitalcollections.library.gsu.edu/digital/collection/mhross
Georgia State University Library. “Loaded Cars of Coal from Princess Elkhorn Coal Company’s David Mine in Kentucky, 1952-03.” M. H. Ross Papers. Accessed June 14, 2026. https://digitalcollections.library.gsu.edu/digital/custom/mirador?manifest=https%3A%2F%2Fdigitalcollections.library.gsu.edu%2F%2Fiiif%2Finfo%2Fmhross%2F101209%2Fmanifest.json
Georgia State University Library. “Employees of the Princess Elkhorn Coal Company Using Company-Built Swimming Pool and Play Area, 1953-06.” M. H. Ross Papers. Accessed June 14, 2026. https://digitalcollections.library.gsu.edu/cdm/ref/collection/mhross/id/102322
Berea College Special Collections and Archives. “SA-0169-02-00028-S, 1978.” Warren Brunner Photography Collection. Accessed June 14, 2026. https://bereaarchives.libraryhost.com/repositories/2/archival_objects/102581
Granger. “Kentucky Mining Town, 1952.” Accessed June 14, 2026. https://grangerartondemand.com/featured/kentucky-mining-town-1952-granger.html
Granger. “Kentucky: Coal Miners, 1952.” Accessed June 14, 2026. https://www.granger.com/0640086-kentucky-coal-miners-1952-coal-miner-walter-ward-and-other–image.html
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Neighborhoods: A Self-Help Sampler. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 1979. https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/Neighborhoods-A-Self-Help-Sampler.pdf
The White House. “President Obama Announces His Intent to Appoint Fourteen Individuals to Presidential Advisory Commission on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.” April 24, 2014. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2014/04/24/president-obama-announces-his-intent-appoint-fourteen-individuals-presid
Appalachian Regional Commission. Collected Case Study Evaluations of the Appalachian Regional Commission’s Educational Projects, Volume 2. Washington, DC: Appalachian Regional Commission, 2001. https://www.arc.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/CaseStudyEvaluationsARCsEducationalProjectsVol2.pdf
Appalachian Regional Commission. Evaluation of the Appalachian Regional Commission’s Educational Projects. Washington, DC: Appalachian Regional Commission, March 2001. https://www.arc.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/EducationEval-March2001.pdf
PBS Frontline. “The David School.” Country Boys. January 9, 2006. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/countryboys/readings/greene.html
PBS Frontline. “The Story Behind Country Boys.” January 9, 2006. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/countryboys/etc/story.html
PBS Frontline. “Country Boys, Part I.” 2006. https://www.pbs.org/video/frontline-country-boys-part-i/
The David School. “Home.” Accessed June 14, 2026. https://mydavidschool.org/
Estep, Bill. “KY School Helps Kids Who Struggle in Traditional Classes.” Lexington Herald-Leader, February 12, 2024. https://www.kentucky.com/news/state/kentucky/article285088327.html
Forbes, Buddy. “The David School Will ‘Keep on Keeping On’: Donor Sends $39K Donation to Floyd County School.” WYMT, January 22, 2021. https://www.wymt.com/2021/01/23/the-david-school-will-keep-on-keeping-on-donor-sends-39k-donation-to-floyd-county-school/
Prestonsburg Tourism. “How a Mountain Community Reimagined Coal’s Pathway.” Accessed June 14, 2026. https://prestonsburgky.org/how-a-mountain-community-reimagined-coals-pathway/
Prestonsburg Tourism. “Hiking and Biking in Prestonsburg, Kentucky.” Accessed June 14, 2026. https://prestonsburgky.org/adventures/hiking-biking/
Kentucky Tourism. “Prestonsburg Passage.” Accessed June 14, 2026. https://www.kentuckytourism.com/explore/prestonsburg-passage-10360
Abandoned Online. “Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad Middle Creek Subdivision.” Last updated February 20, 2024. https://abandonedonline.net/location/chesapeake-ohio-railroad-middle-creek-subdivision/
National Park Service. Kentucky Wildlands National Heritage Area Feasibility Study. 2023. https://npshistory.com/publications/nha/kentucky-wildlands-nha-fs-2023.pdf
National Park Service. “National Park Service Completes Kentucky Wildlands National Heritage Area Feasibility Study.” August 13, 2024. https://www.nps.gov/orgs/1207/national-park-service-completes-kentucky-wildlands-national-heritage-area-feasibility-study.htm
ExploreKYHistory. “Explore Floyd County, Kentucky.” Kentucky Historical Society. Accessed June 14, 2026. https://explorekyhistory.ky.gov/tours/show/33
ExploreKYHistory. “County Named, 1799.” Kentucky Historical Society. Accessed June 14, 2026. https://explorekyhistory.ky.gov/items/show/477
Auxier, James. Floyd County. Morehead State University Kentucky County Histories. Accessed June 14, 2026. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1192&context=kentucky_county_histories
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
United States Postal Service. “David Post Office.” Accessed June 14, 2026. https://tools.usps.com/locations/details/1360342
Mountain Association. “Faith in Action: 57 Years of Service at St. Vincent Mission.” May 1, 2025. https://mtassociation.org/business-support/faith-in-action-57-years-st-vincent-mission/
Author Note: David is one of those Floyd County places where coal history, community survival, and Appalachian reinvention all meet in the same hollow. I wanted to tell its story as more than a company town, because the resident purchase, David School, and rail trail show what people built after the mine no longer held the town together.