Appalachian Community Histories – Stone, Pike County: Henry Ford, Fordson Coal, and the Company Town on Pond Creek
Stone, Kentucky sits on Pond Creek in Pike County, about twenty miles northeast of Pikeville. To anyone passing through today, it may look like one more narrow Appalachian community tucked between creek, road, railroad, and hillside. But in the early twentieth century, Stone became one of the most unusual coal company towns in eastern Kentucky.
Its name came from Galen L. Stone, chairman of the Pond Creek Coal Company and a Massachusetts businessman tied to the Boston brokerage firm Hayden, Stone, and Company. The community’s post office opened in 1912, the same year often given for the founding of the company town, and remained part of local life until its closure in 2004.
Stone’s story is not just a mining story. It is also a story of outside capital, railroad expansion, company housing, company stores, Ford Motor Company, Red Robin coal, and the long effort of local people to preserve what the coal companies left behind.
Pond Creek Coal and Galen Stone
The Pond Creek Coal Company developed Stone during the rise of industrial coal mining in Pike County. The company laid out a modest grid of streets and planned company houses and related buildings for the men and families who would live close to the mine.
This mattered because a coal camp was never only a place of work. It was a whole system of life. The company controlled the mine, owned much of the land, built many of the houses, and often provided the store, office, entertainment, school connections, and medical services that families depended on. In remote mountain valleys, where roads were limited and railroad lines often existed to move coal before people, the company town could become the center of daily life.
By the early 1920s, Galen Stone’s company held mineral rights to thousands of acres of Kentucky coal land. Its coal was already important enough to draw the attention of one of the most famous industrialists in America, Henry Ford.
Henry Ford Comes to Pike County
Henry Ford wanted coal for his industrial empire. Ford Motor Company needed fuel for plants, furnaces, and production. Rather than depend entirely on outside suppliers, Ford looked to eastern Kentucky and the Pond Creek operation.
In 1922, Fordson Coal Company purchased the Pond Creek firm. Fordson was part of the larger Ford world, and the name was familiar from Ford’s tractors. In Stone, that name took on a new meaning. It meant that a Pike County coal community had become connected to Detroit automobile production.
The Henry Ford collection preserves a 1923 Ford Motor Company Photographic Department image titled “Fordson Coal Company Pond Creek Mine, Stone, Kentucky, October 1923.” That photograph is one of the clearest primary-source windows into the moment when Stone moved from Pond Creek Coal Company ownership into Ford’s coal system.
Fordson’s operations around Pond Creek included several nearby mining communities, each associated with a mine number. Pinsonfork was No. 5, McVeigh was No. 7, McAndrews had Nos. 4 and 8, and Stone was No. 3. In federal geological records, Fordson Coal Company Mine No. 3 at Stone appears as a working Pike County coal operation tied to the Pond Creek coal bed.
The Coal Under Stone
Stone existed because of the Pond Creek coal bed, also known in parts of Pike County as the Lower Elkhorn coal bed. The United States Geological Survey’s 1937 bulletin, Coal Deposits of Pike County, Kentucky, described the Pond Creek bed as one of the important commercial coal beds in the county.
The report noted that the Pond Creek bed was generally four to five feet thick in much of Pike County, though the top portion often contained laminated material with higher ash. In one section of the report, the USGS identified samples from the Fordson mine at locality 402. The table entry names “Fordson Coal Co., mine 3, Stone, Ky.”
Those dry technical lines matter. They tie the preserved buildings, local memory, Ford company photographs, and community stories to the actual underground geology that made Stone possible.
Building Fordson’s Company Town
After acquiring Pond Creek, Henry Ford began planning improvements at Stone. He hired Meanor and Handloser, a prominent architectural firm from Huntington, West Virginia, to design three large company buildings. These structures stood out in a town otherwise marked by modest houses, churches, and small-scale community buildings.
The three main Fordson buildings were the Entertainment Building, the Office Building, and the Commissary. Together, they show how a coal company could shape nearly every part of life in a company town.
The Entertainment Building was more than a theater. It included a post office, barbershop, pharmacy, and eventually a library. The theater hosted movies and occasional live performances. The National Register file notes that it was open seven days per week. The same file also records the racial segregation of the period, stating that African Americans were restricted to balcony seating unless the main floor was otherwise full.
The Office Building contained the company offices and the office of the company doctor. The Commissary served as the company store. There, Fordson employees and their families could buy groceries, meat, produce, dry goods, shoes, clothing, and furniture. The building even included a separate room for exchanging scrip for goods.
In a place like Stone, the company store was not simply a business. It was a symbol of power. It was where wages, credit, debt, food, and household needs met under the shadow of the same company that employed the miners.
The Fordson System of Welfare and Control
Henry Ford’s company-town improvements reflected what historians often call welfare capitalism. The idea was that employers could provide amenities, recreation, housing, and services while also encouraging loyalty, discipline, and dependence.
At Stone, Fordson built more than a mine and store. The company provided a theater, medical office, post office space, pharmacy, recreational facilities, and a club house. It also sponsored activities such as Safety Day, when miners demonstrated rescue and first-aid skills. Such events could build pride and community, but they also existed in a dangerous industry where rescue work was not ceremonial. It was a necessity.
Ford’s Stone operation was impressive, but it should not be romanticized. Coal mining in eastern Kentucky was hard, hazardous work. Company towns could provide order and services, but they also tied workers’ homes, purchases, doctors, and daily routines to their employer.
Railroad, Road, and Creek
Stone’s layout shows how coal towns were shaped by geography and transportation. The Fordson buildings stood near Kentucky Route 199. Pond Creek flowed nearby, and the Norfolk and Western Railway tracks ran across the road.
That arrangement was not accidental. Coal had to move from mine to market. Railroads turned remote Appalachian valleys into industrial corridors. Pond Creek gave the community its physical setting, but the railroad gave the coal a route outward.
The National Register file notes that other company-associated properties remained in the village, including a boarding house, the coal company manager’s house, a club house, and company houses. Even where the mining operation changed or declined, the town plan still carried the imprint of the company era.
From Fordson to Red Robin Coal
Fordson operated at Stone for more than a decade. In 1936, Henry Ford sold the Fordson Coal Company and its assets to the Tierney brothers, sons of coal developer Lawrence Tierney. They operated the business as Eastern Coal Company.
Eastern marketed its product as Red Robin coal. That name still survives in one of Stone’s most recognizable historic features: the Red Robin ghost sign painted on the Entertainment Building. The sign proclaimed the quality of the coal mined, prepared, and shipped by American workmen. Today, it stands as both advertisement and artifact, a fading public memory of the industry that once dominated the town.
The company later passed to Pittston Coal Company, while Eastern Coal’s name continued in use. The buildings eventually became connected to Stone Mining Company, a subsidiary of Massey Energy. The operation closed in 1992.
The End of the Company Town Era
By the middle of the twentieth century, the classic company town system had begun to fade. Across Appalachia, coal companies sold houses, transferred properties to private owners, closed older facilities, or abandoned buildings that no longer fit the modern coal business.
Stone followed that pattern, but with one important difference. The town was not simply erased. The National Register file notes that unlike some company towns, Stone’s owners did not dismantle the community. Over time, Stone became an independent rural hamlet in the mountains of the eastern Kentucky coalfields.
The old Fordson buildings remained. They had survived as physical reminders of a time when one company could build, employ, entertain, supply, and govern much of a town’s daily life.
Preservation and the Stone Heritage Museum
In 2001, Stone Heritage, Inc., a local nonprofit corporation, received the Fordson buildings by deed of gift. The preservation of those buildings became part of a larger community effort to keep Stone’s coal-camp history alive.
Today, the Stone Heritage Museum stands at 1355 Pond Creek Road. It preserves artifacts, photographs, mining memorabilia, publications, news clippings, scrapbooks, household items, school mementos, and other pieces of Appalachian community history. The museum is operated by Stone Heritage, Inc. and is open by appointment.
This local preservation work matters because coal towns are easy to lose. Buildings decay. Company records disappear. Families move away. Mine names change. But when a community preserves photographs, buildings, oral history, school items, store objects, and workplace artifacts, it keeps the human side of industrial history from vanishing.
Why Stone Matters
Stone is important because it shows the full arc of an Appalachian coal company town. It began with Pond Creek Coal Company and Galen Stone. It grew into a Fordson Coal Company showplace tied to Henry Ford’s national industrial system. It continued under Eastern Coal and the Red Robin brand. It passed through later corporate hands before mining operations closed and preservation began.
The old Fordson buildings are more than brick and mortar. They are evidence of how coal companies organized work, family life, shopping, recreation, health care, mail, and movement in the mountains. They also reveal the contradictions of the company town. Stone had impressive buildings, a theater, a library, a doctor’s office, and community institutions, but all of them existed within a system built around coal extraction and employer control.
For Pike County, Stone is one of the strongest surviving places to study that world. Its buildings still speak to the Ford years. Its Red Robin sign still points to the Eastern Coal era. Its museum keeps the memory of miners, families, schools, stores, and local life from being reduced to corporate names alone.
Stone’s history is not only about Henry Ford coming to Kentucky. It is about the people who lived in the narrow valley on Pond Creek, worked the No. 3 mine, shopped at the commissary, watched movies in the company theater, rode the railroad, raised children in company houses, and later fought to preserve what remained.
In that way, Stone is not a footnote to Ford Motor Company. It is a Pike County coal town whose surviving buildings tell one of the clearest stories of industrial Appalachia.
Sources & Further Reading
The Henry Ford. “Fordson Coal Company Pond Creek Mine, Stone, Kentucky, October 1923.” Photographic print, October 24, 1923. The Henry Ford. https://www.thehenryford.org/collections/explore/artifact/317587
National Park Service. “Fordson Coal Company Buildings.” National Register of Historic Places Registration Form. Washington, DC: National Park Service, 2006. https://npgallery.nps.gov/GetAsset/c7df79ea-1ad6-45cc-8f4e-4ec86591ec4a
Hunt, Charles B., Guy H. Briggs Jr., Arthur C. Munyan, and George R. Wesley. Coal Deposits of Pike County, Kentucky. U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 876. Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1937. https://pubs.usgs.gov/bul/0876/report.pdf
United States Geological Survey. “Coal Deposits of Pike County, Kentucky.” USGS Publications Warehouse. Accessed June 25, 2026. https://www.usgs.gov/publications/coal-deposits-pike-county-kentucky
Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet. “Annual Reports.” Division of Mine Safety. Accessed June 25, 2026. https://eec.ky.gov/Natural-Resources/Mining/Mine-Safety/safety-inspections-and-licensing/Pages/annual-reports.aspx
Kentucky Department of Mines and Minerals. Annual Report. Frankfort, KY: Kentucky Department of Mines and Minerals, 1928. https://kgs.uky.edu/kgsweb/olops/pub/general/DanielReportMines1928.pdf
Fordson Coal Co. v. Carter, 269 Ky. 805, 108 S.W.2d 1007. Kentucky Court of Appeals, 1937. https://www.casemine.com/judgement/us/5914a433add7b049346b56bb
Kentucky Atlas and Gazetteer. “Stone, Kentucky.” Accessed June 25, 2026. https://www.kyatlas.com/ky-stone.html
Rennick, Robert M. “Pike County: Post Offices.” County Histories of Kentucky. Morehead State University ScholarWorks, 2000. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/280/
National Archives. “Post Office Reports of Site Locations, 1837–1950.” Accessed June 25, 2026. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/locations-1837-1950.html
Lawrence County Public Library. “Big Sandy News Digital Collection.” Accessed June 25, 2026. https://lcplky.org/big-sandy-digital-collection/
Library of Congress. “The Big Sandy News.” Chronicling America. Accessed June 25, 2026. https://www.loc.gov/chroniclingamerica/lccn/sn83004226/
Stone Heritage Museum. “The Stone Heritage Museum.” Stone Heritage, Inc. Accessed June 25, 2026. https://stoneheritagemuseum.weebly.com/
Stone Heritage Museum. “Henry Ford and Fordson Mining.” Stone Heritage, Inc. Accessed June 25, 2026. https://stoneheritagemuseum.weebly.com/history-and-people-through-video.html
Tour Pike County. “Stone Heritage Museum.” Pikeville-Pike County Tourism. Accessed June 25, 2026. https://tourpikecounty.com/things-to-see-do/history_culture/stone-heritage-museum/
Pike County Historical Society. “Stone.” Accessed June 25, 2026. https://pikecountykyhistoricalsociety.com/stone/
Pike County Historical Society. “Stone, KY.” Accessed June 25, 2026. https://pikecountykyhistoricalsociety.com/stone-ky/
Pike County Historical Society. “Coal Age Magazine 1926.” Accessed June 25, 2026. https://pikecountykyhistoricalsociety.com/coal-age-magazine-1926/
Pike County Historical Society. “Miners’ YMCA.” Accessed June 25, 2026. https://pikecountykyhistoricalsociety.com/miners-ymca/
Pike County Historical Society. “Railroads.” Accessed June 25, 2026. https://pikecountykyhistoricalsociety.com/railroads/
Virginia Tech Special Collections and University Archives. “Norfolk & Western Railway and Associated Companies Collection, 1851–1978.” Accessed June 25, 2026. https://aspace.lib.vt.edu/repositories/2/resources/2456
Stories of Appalachia. “Stone, Kentucky.” December 18, 2021. https://storiesofappalachia.com/?p=1471
Rich, Tamela. “Henry Ford’s Kentucky Coal Camps.” June 1, 2017. https://tamelarich.com/roadtripping/connect-deep/henry-ford-coal-camps-memories/
CoalZoom. “Kentucky’s Stone Heritage Museum a Real Treasure.” June 23, 2018. https://www.coalzoom.com/article.cfm?articleid=14818
HathiTrust. “Annual Report, Kentucky Department of Mines and Minerals.” Accessed June 25, 2026. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006206733
Author Note: Stone’s story is a reminder that coal towns were not just industrial sites, but full communities shaped by work, family, company power, and survival. I hope this article helps preserve the memory of the miners, families, buildings, and local historians who kept Stone’s story alive.