Appalachian Community Histories – Midas, Floyd County: Natural Gas, Railroad Tunnels, and a Place Name on Right Beaver Creek
The best way to find Midas, Kentucky, is not by looking for a courthouse square or a row of old storefronts. Midas is one of those Appalachian place-names that survives in the bends of roads, on old maps, in cemetery directions, in railroad memory, and in the records of an industry that once pushed natural gas out of the hills and into larger lines.
Midas sits in Floyd County, Kentucky, in the country of Right Beaver Creek, near Hueysville and the old road and rail corridors that tied together small communities such as Eastern, Garrett, Bosco, Wayland, and Martin. It has been described in modern geographic sources as an unincorporated populated place, but its history is not the story of incorporation, town government, or a commercial district. Its clearest historical record is quieter than that. Midas appears through a road name, a branch name, a tunnel, cemeteries, government maps, newspaper mentions, and the natural-gas company records that placed a compressor station there.
That makes Midas easy to overlook and worth studying. Many Appalachian communities were never large towns, but they still carried the labor, grief, travel, land ownership, and industrial change of the mountains. Midas is one of those places.
Finding Midas on the Map
The official geographic trail begins with the United States Geological Survey’s Geographic Names Information System, which records Midas as a Floyd County place-name. GNIS is important because it is the federal system used to record geographic names and locations. For a small place like Midas, that kind of record can be more valuable than a town charter, because no town charter appears to be the heart of the story.
The 1954 USGS Martin, Kentucky, topographic map is one of the best visual sources for Midas. That map places Midas in the Right Beaver Creek country and shows the surrounding landscape of roads, streams, hills, cemeteries, and nearby communities. It also helps explain why Midas appears in so many different kinds of records. It was not just an isolated name. It sat in a working corridor, where creek roads, rail lines, gas facilities, and family cemeteries all overlapped.
Modern highway maps continue that pattern. Kentucky Transportation Cabinet maps preserve the road geography around Midas, especially the connection to Kentucky Route 550 and Midas Road. A modern government contract record for the Hueysville to Midas Road, KY 550, also keeps the name alive in official language. In that sense, the road system is part of the archive. It tells us where the community name remained useful after the old industrial setting changed.
The Older Country Around Hueysville and Midas
The land around Midas had a history before the name became fixed in modern records. The nearby Hueysville and Right Beaver Creek area appears in Civil War memory connected to the movement of Confederate forces under Humphrey Marshall after the Battle of Middle Creek. Historical accounts of the Middle Creek campaign place Marshall’s men in the country near modern-day Hueysville, where the Joseph Gearhart farm was remembered as a place where food and forage might be found.
That does not prove Midas existed as a named community during the Civil War. It does show something more careful and useful. The farms, creeks, roads, and family names around the later Midas area were already part of Floyd County’s mountain geography long before the twentieth-century gas industry left its stronger paper trail. The Joseph Gearhart or Gayheart name also remained attached to the local landscape through cemetery and road references, which helps connect the older settlement geography to later place records.
For Midas, this matters because the community’s history is not found in one grand event. It is found by layering records. The Civil War landscape, the cemetery landscape, the road landscape, the railroad landscape, and the gas-field landscape all help explain how a small name in Floyd County stayed visible.
Natural Gas and the Big Sandy Field
The strongest historical identity of Midas appears to be tied to natural gas.
Eastern Kentucky’s natural-gas history reaches deep into the Big Sandy region. Kentucky Geological Survey material places early shale-gas activity in eastern Kentucky around the 1890s, with wells drilled along Beaver Creek in Floyd County. Later development made the Big Sandy gas field one of the major gas-producing regions of the Appalachian basin. By the twentieth century, Floyd County was not only coal country. It was also gas country.
Midas belongs in that story. A 1953 Kentucky Geological Survey and American Association of Petroleum Geologists study by Coleman D. Hunter and David M. Young focused on natural gas in eastern Kentucky’s Big Sandy gas field and included a production-pressure-decline graph for the Midas district of Floyd County. That kind of source is especially important because it shows that Midas was more than a casual map label. It was a named district in the technical language of natural-gas production.
For people living in the region, this industry was not abstract. Wells, lines, compressor stations, warehouses, roads, and company jobs shaped everyday life. The gas industry created a second geography on top of the older creek and family geography. A place could be known not only by who lived there, but by which company operated there, which road reached the site, which pipeline crossed the hill, and which compressor station moved the gas.
The Midas Compressor Station
One of the strongest primary sources for Midas is a Federal Register notice published on April 29, 1970. The notice involved the Federal Power Commission and a joint application by Inland Gas Company and United Fuel Gas Company. The companies sought permission for changes in their natural-gas facilities in Floyd County.
The notice is valuable because it specifically names the Midas Compressor Station. Inland and United proposed an interconnection that would allow United to receive gas from Inland, transport it, and redeliver an equivalent volume of gas. The point of the plan was to reduce operating expenses and make certain Inland facilities unnecessary. Among the facilities Inland sought permission to abandon were the Hillsdale Compressor Station and the Midas Compressor Station in Floyd County.
That single notice confirms several important things. Midas had a named compressor station. The facility was part of a larger gas system. It was connected to corporate decisions involving pipelines, transportation of gas, and operating costs. It was also significant enough to appear in a federal regulatory record.
A compressor station is not the kind of landmark that usually becomes romanticized in local memory. It is industrial, practical, and often hidden in plain sight. But in a gas field, it matters. Gas had to be gathered, moved, measured, and pushed through lines. The Midas Compressor Station was part of that system, and its appearance in federal records gives Midas one of its clearest historical anchors.
Workers, Warehouses, and Local Newspaper Traces
The gas industry also appears in local newspaper records. A wartime issue of The Floyd County Times from November 16, 1944, mentions Temp Prater working at the Midas compressor station for Inland. That small notice is the kind of detail that brings an industrial site back down to the level of a person and a job. Midas was not only a dot on a map or a name in a federal notice. It was a workplace.
Later newspaper records show the name still active in gas-company life. Floyd County Times items from the 1970s and 1980s connect company operations with the Midas field location, the Midas warehouse, and nearby compressor-station work. These references suggest that even after corporate structures changed and facilities were altered, Midas remained part of the working vocabulary of the regional gas system.
This is one of the most important points about the community. Midas may not have left behind the public record of a large town, but it left behind the records of labor. The people who worked there, drove those roads, maintained those lines, and knew those company locations kept the name in use.
Railroads, the Midas Tunnel, and Movement Through the Hills
Midas also belongs to the transportation history of Floyd County. The community name is tied to railroad references and the Midas Tunnel, placing it within the broader story of how rail lines cut through the Beaver Creek country. In eastern Kentucky, railroads did more than carry passengers. They moved coal, supplies, mail, machinery, and people. They also tied small communities to the outside economy.
A 1944 Big Sandy News item, preserved in a Lawrence County genealogical transcription, reported the death of Leonard Norris, the fourteen-year-old son of Mr. and Mrs. Emmett Norris of Midas, Floyd County, after a Chesapeake and Ohio train struck a car. The notice is tragic, but it is also historically revealing. It places a Midas family within the railroad corridor and shows how railroads entered daily life, sometimes with fatal consequences.
Other later newspaper references involving tracks near Midas and the Midas Tunnel point to the same reality. Midas was part of a landscape where movement mattered. Roads, rails, and gas lines followed the same general mountain logic. They used valleys where possible, crossed ridges when necessary, and made small communities part of larger networks.
Cemeteries and the Family Record
For many small Appalachian places, cemeteries preserve what official records leave thin. Midas is no exception. Cemetery references such as Fitzpatrick Cemetery No. 1 and Joseph Gearheart or Joseph Gearhart Cemetery help place families in the local landscape. Find A Grave and similar memorial sites can be useful starting points, especially when they include gravestone photographs, but they should be checked against death certificates, cemetery books, land records, and family records whenever possible.
The Joseph Gearheart Cemetery is especially important because the Gearhart or Gayheart name appears in several kinds of local geography, including Civil War context, road references, and cemetery records. A memorial for William Waddle, for example, gives the cemetery location as Midas off Highway 550. That kind of cemetery direction may seem minor, but it shows how local people continued to use Midas as a practical place-name.
Death records can also help fill out the human story. FamilySearch and Kentucky death certificate indexes include leads for people whose deaths were recorded at Midas or whose families were connected to the area. Those records should be followed back to original certificates when possible. In a place where no city hall stood, the death certificate, the grave marker, and the deed book often become the town record.
Land, Deeds, and the Records Still Waiting
The next layer of Midas history is likely waiting in Floyd County land records. The Floyd County Clerk’s records are essential for deeds, plats, mortgages, wills, liens, corporate records, and land transfers around Midas Road, Midas Fork, Right Beaver Creek, Cooley Branch, and the Gearhart or Gayheart cemetery area. These records could show how land moved between families, how companies acquired rights-of-way, and how roads, gas lines, and cemetery access were recorded.
Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives records may also help. Deeds, death records, probate files, tax records, court cases, and marriage records can all reveal how the people of Midas lived beyond the few public references already found. National Archives postmaster appointment records are also worth checking to determine whether Midas ever had a post office of its own or whether residents used nearby offices such as Hueysville, Eastern, Garrett, Bosco, or another community.
That uncertainty is part of the historical work. A small place like Midas should not be forced into a larger story than the records support. The better approach is to follow each record carefully. Where the evidence is strong, the story can speak plainly. Where the evidence is only a lead, it should remain a lead until the original record is found.
What Midas Leaves Behind
Midas is a small Floyd County name, but it opens a large Appalachian story. It shows how a place can survive through maps, roads, cemeteries, railroads, and industry even when it never becomes a city or a famous town. It also shows how eastern Kentucky’s history cannot be reduced to coal alone. Natural gas shaped parts of Floyd County in ways that deserve more attention.
The Midas Compressor Station, the Midas district of the Big Sandy gas field, the road from Hueysville to Midas, the railroad tunnel, and the cemeteries all point to the same conclusion. Midas was a working place. It was part of the movement of gas, people, trains, and families through the hills of Right Beaver Creek.
Not every Appalachian place leaves behind a courthouse, a depot, or a row of brick buildings. Some leave a road sign, a cemetery direction, a federal notice, a newspaper line, and a name on an old topographic map. Midas belongs to that quieter kind of history. It is small on the map, but it carries the record of a mountain community shaped by land, labor, and the industries that passed through Floyd County.
Sources & Further Reading
United States Geological Survey. “Geographic Names Information System.” U.S. Geological Survey. Accessed June 15, 2026. https://www.usgs.gov/tools/geographic-names-information-system-gnis
United States Geological Survey. Martin, Kentucky, 7.5-Minute Quadrangle. 1:24,000. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1954. https://prd-tnm.s3.amazonaws.com/StagedProducts/Maps/HistoricalTopo/PDF/KY/24000/KY_Martin_709230_1954_24000_geo.pdf
Rice, Charles L. Geologic Map of the Martin Quadrangle, Floyd County, Kentucky. Geologic Quadrangle Map GQ-563. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1966. https://www.usgs.gov/publications/geologic-map-martin-quadrangle-floyd-county-kentucky
Kentucky Geological Survey. Floyd County, Kentucky. Map and Chart 178, Series 12. Lexington: Kentucky Geological Survey. Accessed June 15, 2026. https://kgs.uky.edu/kgsweb/olops/pub/kgs/mc178_12.pdf
Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. Floyd County Highway Map. Frankfort: Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. Accessed June 15, 2026. https://transportation.ky.gov/Planning/SPRS%20Maps/Floyd.pdf
Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. State Primary Road System in Floyd County. Frankfort: Kentucky Transportation Cabinet, June 17, 2025. https://transportation.ky.gov/Planning/State%20Primary%20Road%20System%20Lists/Floyd.pdf
Kentucky Transportation Cabinet, Department of Highways, Division of Construction Procurement. Notice to Contractors, Letting Date Friday, December 11, 2020. Frankfort: Kentucky Transportation Cabinet, 2020. https://transportation.ky.gov/Construction-Procurement/Publications/2020-12-11/Notice%20to%20Contractors.pdf
Kentucky Transportation Cabinet, Department of Highways. Proposal, Call No. 204, Contract ID 202270, Floyd County. Frankfort: Kentucky Transportation Cabinet, 2020. https://transportation.ky.gov/Construction-Procurement/Proposals/204-FLOYD-20-2270.pdf
Kentucky Transportation Cabinet, Department of Highways, Division of Construction Procurement. Notice to Contractors, Part 3, Revised, January 20, 2006. Frankfort: Kentucky Transportation Cabinet, 2006. https://transportation.ky.gov/Construction-Procurement/Publications/2006-01-20/Notice%20to%20Contractors%20-%20Part%203%20-%20Revised.pdf
Kentucky Transportation Cabinet, Department of Highways. Proposal, Call No. 435, Contract ID 083308, Floyd County. Frankfort: Kentucky Transportation Cabinet, 2008. https://transportation.ky.gov/Construction-Procurement/Proposals/435-FLOYD-08-3308.pdf
Federal Power Commission. “Inland Gas Co., Inc., and United Fuel Gas Co.: Notice of Joint Application.” Federal Register 35, no. 83, April 29, 1970, 6779-6780. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-1970-04-29/pdf/FR-1970-04-29.pdf
Hunter, Coleman D., and David M. Young. “Relationship of Natural Gas Occurrence and Production in Eastern Kentucky, Big Sandy Gas Field, to Joints and Fractures in Devonian Bituminous Shale.” AAPG Bulletin 37, no. 2, 1953, 282-299. https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/aapg/aapgbull/article/37/2/282/33881/Relationship-of-Natural-Gas-Occurrence-and
Hamilton-Smith, Terence. Gas Exploration in the Devonian Shales of Kentucky. Kentucky Geological Survey, Series 11, Bulletin 4. Lexington: Kentucky Geological Survey, 1993. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/kgs_b/5/
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Jillson, Willard Rouse. An Outline of the Geology of Floyd County, Kentucky. Lexington, KY, 1918. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/011812183
Jillson, Willard Rouse. The Oil and Gas Resources of Kentucky: A Geological Review of the Past Development and the Present Status of the Industry in Each of the One Hundred and Twenty Counties in the Commonwealth. Frankfort, KY: Department of Geology and Forestry, 1919. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/012407138
Jillson, Willard Rouse. The Conservation of Natural Gas in Kentucky. Louisville, KY: J. P. Morton, 1922. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001042463
Jillson, Willard Rouse. Natural Gas in Eastern Kentucky: A Summary Account of the Occurrence of Natural Gas in the Eastern Part of This Commonwealth Coupled with Brief Statements as to the Production and Geology of Each Separate Field. Louisville, KY: Standard Printing Co., 1937. https://www.uky.edu/KGS/emsweb/history/references.htm
Kemper, J. R., W. T. Frankie, R. A. Smath, J. R. Moody, I. M. Johnston, and R. R. Elkin. “History of Gas Production from Devonian Shale in Eastern Kentucky.” OSTI, 1988. https://www.osti.gov/biblio/5790796
The Oil & Gas Journal. Volume 25. Tulsa: PennWell Corporation, 1926-1927. https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/serial?id=oilgasjournal
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The Floyd County Times. “November 9, 1977.” Floyd County Public Library Digital Archive. https://fclib.org/Floyd%20County%20Times/The_Floyd_County_Times_1977/11-09-1977.pdf
The Floyd County Times. “July 30, 1980.” Floyd County Public Library Digital Archive. https://fclib.org/Floyd%20County%20Times/The_Floyd_County_Times_1980/07-30-1980.pdf
Floyd County Public Library and Big Sandy Community and Technical College. “Newspaper Indexes: Floyd County Times.” Updated June 12, 2025. https://bigsandy.libguides.com/localnewspaperindex
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FamilySearch. “Wayne Damron Allen, 1891-1937.” Accessed June 15, 2026. https://ancestors.familysearch.org/en/2T1P-YN2/wayne-damron-allen-1891-1937
Find a Grave. “Fitzpatrick Cemetery #1.” Accessed June 15, 2026. https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/73948/fitzpatrick-cemetery-%231
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Author Note: Midas is one of those Floyd County places where a road name, a railroad tunnel, a cemetery direction, and a gas-company record all carry part of the story. I wanted to follow the official maps and industrial records first, then bring in newspapers and cemetery leads to show how a small place-name stayed alive in local memory.