Appalachian Community Histories – Weeksbury, Floyd County: The Coal Town on Long Fork
At Weeksbury, the history of Floyd County narrows into a coal valley. The road bends along the Left Fork of Beaver Creek, Caleb Fork comes down out of the hills, and the old town site sits where rail, coal, water, and company power once met. Today Weeksbury is an unincorporated community, but its records tell the story of a place that was once organized, counted, photographed, inspected, and served like one of the major coal towns of southern Floyd County.
Weeksbury was not a county seat, a courthouse town, or a market village that slowly grew from farms. It was a coal town, built around the needs of a mine and the railroad that made the mine possible. Its story belongs with Wheelwright, Price, Wayland, Lackey, Martin, and the other communities tied to the Long Fork line. Yet Weeksbury had its own identity, its own post office, its own theater, its own population count, and its own municipal life for a time.
The records also preserve an older spelling, Weeksburg, but Weeksbury became the name that stayed. Kentucky Atlas places the community about thirty five miles south of Prestonsburg, near the mouth of Caleb Fork of the Left Fork of Beaver Creek. The same reference says the name came from two Elk Horn Coal Corporation officers, Weeks and Woodbury. That explanation fits the world in which the place was born. Weeksbury was named in the language of coal development, corporate officers, railroad surveys, and company town planning.
A Town Made by Coal and Rail
Weeksbury’s rise cannot be separated from the Long Fork railroad. Coal in the hills had little value to outside markets until rails could reach it. The Long Fork Railway, tied to the Baltimore & Ohio system, was planned to reach the coal fields of southern Floyd County. Construction began in the 1910s, and the line opened into Weeksbury during the period when the coal town was taking shape.
The railroad made Weeksbury possible in a practical sense. It carried machinery, store goods, building material, and families into the valley, then carried coal out. It linked the town to Martin and beyond, while branches and nearby connections tied Weeksbury into Wheelwright, Price, Clear Creek, and other mining places. In the coal fields, a railroad did not simply pass through a town. It gave the town its reason for being.
By 1920, state mine inspectors were recording Weeksbury as an active mining center. The Kentucky State Department of Mines listed Elkhorn-Piney Coal Mining Company at Weeksbury, with its main office in Huntington, West Virginia. Mine No. 1 was located on the Long Fork Division of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad and worked the No. 1 Elkhorn seam. The seam was recorded as forty six inches thick, and the mine used modern electric appliances for mining and hauling coal.
That one inspection report gives a clear view of Weeksbury at work. Mine No. 1 was the company’s largest operation at the place, with 126 miners and day men working inside. The report noted that the company used a checking in and out system for men underground, a detail that reminds us how dangerous and organized mine labor had to be. An inspector visited on November 17, 1920, and found conditions satisfactory.
The same 1920 report listed Mines No. 3 and No. 4 at Weeksbury, working the same seam, though at forty two inches thick. Coal there was mined by electric machines and hauled by electric motors. Mine No. 7 was a drift mine with about thirty six men, ventilated by fan. The inspector found that the brattices needed repair and that ventilation was not very good, though other conditions were called satisfactory. Those few sentences show both the power and risk of the coal town. The mines were modern, electrical, and productive, but every wall, air course, fan, and brattice mattered.
Elkhorn-Piney, Koppers, and Eastern Gas
Weeksbury’s company history was not frozen under one name. Elkhorn-Piney stands at the beginning of the best early mine records, but later sources connect the Weeksbury mine to Koppers Coal Company and Eastern Gas & Fuel Associates. The shift in names reflects the larger world of coal ownership, mergers, leases, and industrial control across central Appalachia.
A 1943 United Mine Workers of America District 30 housing record preserved by Penn State connects a miner named Bill Newsome to Weeksbury. Newsome lived in Weeksbury with a family of four, worked for Koppers Coal Company, and was employed at the Weeksbury Mine. The record describes the mine as having 570 employees and a daily capacity of 2,100 tons. By then Weeksbury was no small opening on a hillside. It was a major coal operation with hundreds of workers tied to one industrial community.
Coal Age, a trade journal for the coal industry, also kept Weeksbury in its pages. A 1947 notice recorded a superintendent change at Eastern Gas & Fuel Associates’ Weeksbury mine. Such trade notices are brief, but they are useful because they place Weeksbury inside a professional coal network that stretched far beyond Floyd County. Men in company offices, engineers, superintendents, foremen, and suppliers all knew Weeksbury as an operating mine, not simply as a dot on a map.
The Russell Lee coal camp photographs add another kind of evidence. One image titled “General Scene, Upper Station, Weeksbury Mining Camp (Eastern Gas), Weeksbury, Kentucky” shows Weeksbury as a lived landscape. It is not only a mine name or a census figure. It is houses, slopes, tracks, yards, and the daily arrangement of a camp built in narrow Appalachian ground.
Life in a Company Town
Weeksbury was organized around work, but work was not the whole of life. Families lived there. Children were born there. People shopped, worshiped, walked to school, visited neighbors, and watched the hills change with each shift at the mine.
Company towns often blurred the line between public life and company control. Weeksbury’s theater gives one glimpse of that world. A 1928 issue of Motion Picture News reported that the Weeksbury Theatre would be taken over by the Elkhorn-Piney Coal Mining Company, effective May 1. That brief notice says a great deal. Entertainment in a coal town was not always separate from the company. The same industrial power that owned or controlled mine property could reach into recreation, housing, stores, and public gathering places.
The company town system could give residents access to services that might not have existed in a remote valley otherwise, but it also concentrated authority. A miner’s house, a store account, a job, a theater, and sometimes even the rhythm of community events could all be touched by the company. That does not mean Weeksbury was only a place of control. It was also a place of attachment. Former coal camp residents often remembered the closeness of neighbors, the sound of trains, the crowded company houses, and the shared struggle of families whose lives were tied to the same seam of coal.
Population, Incorporation, and Local Government
Weeksbury was large enough to be counted as a town. The Census Bureau’s 1950 preliminary population report listed Weeksbury town with 1,340 people in 1950, down from 1,578 in 1940. The decline was already visible by midcentury, but even after that loss Weeksbury remained one of the better known communities of the Floyd County coal fields.
A Floyd County Times report from January 1941 noted the 1940 figure and said Weeksbury had gained sixty seven people. That matters because it places Weeksbury in the wartime and prewar growth years, when coal employment and community population were still strong. In those years the town was not remembered as fading. It was still being counted among the growing places of Floyd County.
Kentucky Atlas states that Weeksbury was incorporated in 1917 and dissolved in 1953. Those dates fit the arc of many coal towns. Incorporation came during the boom years when the mines, railroad, post office, and camp population made a town government useful. Dissolution came after the best years had passed and after company town life was changing across the eastern Kentucky coal field.
The post office opened in 1914, according to Kentucky Atlas. That date is important because post offices often marked the public identity of Appalachian communities. A post office made a place visible to state and federal systems. It placed Weeksbury on envelopes, postal routes, maps, directories, and family records.
Roads, Services, and the Town After Dissolution
Dissolution did not erase Weeksbury. People remained, property remained, and the name remained. The town’s later history appears in notices about roads, utilities, land, and service routes.
A 1962 Federal Register notice discussed proposed natural gas facilities to serve Weeksbury. The notice described approximately 15,000 feet of new three inch gas pipeline to extend a distribution system to the community and approximately 12,000 feet of new four inch pipeline for a new physical connection in Floyd County. By then Weeksbury was no longer incorporated, but it was still a community that needed infrastructure and still appeared in federal records.
A 1965 Federal Register notice also named Weeksbury in transportation service language, along with Wheelwright and Lackey. The notice authorized service to and from intermediate and off route points including those communities. This was the post municipal life of Weeksbury, not gone, but folded into county, state, federal, and private service systems.
The railroad, too, changed. Passenger service on the Long Fork line declined after the coal town era reached its peak. Later railroad histories describe disuse and abandonment along parts of the line tied to Weeksbury, Wheelwright, and East Weeksbury. The old rail corridor that once gave the town its life eventually became another trace of the coal age, visible in maps, abandonment records, and local memory.
What the Records Leave Behind
Weeksbury’s history survives in scattered sources. The state mine reports give the strongest early evidence of the mines. Census records show the town’s population. The Federal Register preserves later utility and service history. Trade journals record company changes and local facilities. The UMWA archive gives a human face to the camp through a miner’s family and home. Photographs show the shape of the mining camp. Maps keep the name on the land.
Together these sources show that Weeksbury was more than an abandoned or faded coal camp. It was a planned industrial community that rose with the Long Fork railroad, grew around the No. 1 Elkhorn seam, and remained important enough to appear in state, federal, union, railroad, newspaper, and photographic records.
Its story is also a Floyd County story. Weeksbury belonged to the same coal world that shaped Wheelwright, Wayland, Lackey, Martin, and Price. It was part of the transformation that turned narrow creek valleys into industrial corridors. It brought wages, danger, outside capital, modern machinery, crowded houses, company oversight, and community life into a mountain landscape that had changed more slowly before the railroad arrived.
Why Weeksbury Matters
Weeksbury matters because it shows how a coal town could be both powerful and fragile. In 1920, inspectors found modern electric mining equipment, multiple mines, and hundreds of men working in the hills. By 1940, more than 1,500 people were counted there. By 1950, the number had fallen to 1,340. By 1953, the incorporated town was dissolved.
That rise and decline was not unusual in the Appalachian coal fields, but Weeksbury gives us a well documented example. The town grew from coal investment, railroad access, and company planning. It remained alive through families, churches, schools, stores, and local memory. Then, as mining changed and the old company town system weakened, Weeksbury became what many coal towns became, a community whose official power faded before its people and name disappeared.
Today, Weeksbury is still on the map. The mines that built it no longer define the valley as they once did, but the records remain. A mine inspector’s note, a census table, a theater notice, a union housing record, a railroad map, and a photograph of the upper station all point back to the same place.
Weeksbury was a coal town on Long Fork. It was a place where the railroad entered the hollow, where the No. 1 Elkhorn seam shaped daily life, and where Floyd County families built homes in the shadow of a company mine. Its history belongs in the larger record of Appalachian coal towns, not as a forgotten footnote, but as a community that carried the full weight of the coal age.
Sources & Further Reading
Kentucky State Department of Mines. Annual Report of the Kentucky State Department of Mines, 1920. Frankfort, KY: State Journal Company, 1921. https://archive.org/stream/annualreport41deptgoog/annualreport41deptgoog_djvu.txt.
Kentucky State Department of Mines. Annual Report of the Kentucky State Department of Mines, 1925. Frankfort, KY: State Journal Company, 1926. https://kgs.uky.edu/kgsweb/olops/pub/general/jonesminereport1925.pdf.
United States Bureau of the Census. 1950 Census of Population: Preliminary Counts, Population of Kentucky by Counties. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1950. https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1950/pc-02/pc-2-31.pdf.
United States Geological Survey. “Weeksbury.” Geographic Names Information System. Accessed June 14, 2026. https://edits.nationalmap.gov/apps/gaz-domestic/public/search/names/509333.
Kentucky Atlas & Gazetteer. “Weeksbury, Kentucky.” Accessed June 14, 2026. https://www.kyatlas.com/ky-weeksbury.html.
Penn State University Libraries. “Miners’ Homes: District 30: Weeksbury, Kentucky: Bill Newsome.” United Mine Workers of America District 30 Records. Accessed June 14, 2026. https://digital.libraries.psu.edu/digital/collection/umwap/id/1375/.
United States Department of the Interior. “Public and Industrial Water Supplies of the Eastern Coal Field Region, Kentucky.” U.S. Geological Survey Circular 369. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1956. https://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/1956/0369/report.pdf.
Federal Power Commission. “Kentucky West Virginia Gas Company Notice.” Federal Register 27, no. 241, December 13, 1962. https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/fedreg/fr027/fr027241/fr027241.pdf.
Interstate Commerce Commission. “Motor Carrier Notices.” Federal Register 30, no. 35, February 20, 1965. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/35/Federal_Register_1965-02-20-_Vol_30_Iss_35_%28IA_sim_federal-register-find_1965-02-20_30_35%29.pdf.
Motion Picture News. “Weeksbury Theatre Notice.” April to June 1928. https://archive.org/stream/motionpic37moti/motionpic37moti_djvu.txt.
Coal Age. “Eastern Gas & Fuel Associates Weeksbury Mine Notice.” October 1947. https://archive.org/stream/sim_coal-age_1947-10_52_10/sim_coal-age_1947-10_52_10_djvu.txt.
Floyd County Public Library. Floyd County Times Digital Archive. Accessed June 14, 2026. https://fclib.org/.
The Floyd County Times. “Population Report Naming Weeksbury.” January 9, 1941. https://fclib.org/Floyd%20County%20Times/The_Floyd_County_Times_1941/01-09-1941.pdf.
AbandonedOnline. “Chesapeake & Ohio Railway Long Fork Subdivision.” Accessed June 14, 2026. https://abandonedonline.net/location/chesapeake-and-ohio-railway-long-fork-subdivision/.
Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. Kentucky Abandoned Railroad Corridor Inventory. Frankfort, KY: Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. https://transportation.ky.gov/BikeWalk/2019%20Grant%20Applications/KY%20Abandoned%20Railroad%20Corridor%20Inventory.pdf.
National Archives. “Russell Lee Checklist.” Power & Light: Russell Lee’s Coal Survey. Accessed June 14, 2026. https://museum.archives.gov/sites/default/files/2024-04/power-light-photo-list.pdf.
Louisville Public Media. “Five Awesome Kentucky Coal Camp Photos from the National Archives.” March 9, 2014. https://www.lpm.org/news/2014-03-09/five-awesome-kentucky-coal-camp-photos-from-the-national-archives.
May, Roger. “Looking Back at Russell Lee’s Appalachia, 1946.” Roger May Photography. January 2, 2013. https://www.rogermayphotography.com/walkyourcamera/looking-back-at-russell-lees-appalachia-1946.
Callahan, Richard J., Jr. Work and Faith in the Kentucky Coal Fields: Subject to Dust. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. https://iupress.org/9780253220469/work-and-faith-in-the-kentucky-coal-fields/.
Torok, George D., ed. Coal Towns in East Kentucky. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2004. https://www.arcadiapublishing.com/products/9780738541782.
Saadati, N. The Evolution of Coal Company Towns in Kentucky. Thesis. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/.
FamilySearch. “Floyd County, Kentucky Genealogy.” Accessed June 14, 2026. https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Floyd_County,_Kentucky_Genealogy.
Find a Grave. “Cemeteries in Weeksbury, Kentucky.” Accessed June 14, 2026. https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/search?cemetery-name=&locationId=city_99810.
Author Note: Weeksbury’s story is pieced together from mine reports, census records, newspapers, railroad history, and coal-camp memory. If your family has photographs, stories, or records from Weeksbury, they may help preserve a fuller picture of this Floyd County community.