Appalachian Community Histories – Pittsburg, Laurel County: Mines, Schools, and Memory on the Wilderness Road
Pittsburg sits just north of London in Laurel County, Kentucky, but its story reaches farther back than the coal boom that gave the place its name. Long before mine tipples, company stores, school districts, and homecomings marked the community, the old road through this part of Laurel County tied the mountains to the Bluegrass. The Kentucky historical marker for “Pittsburg and Wilderness Road” places the community beside the Madison Branch of the Wilderness Road, the route remembered as one of the last eighteenth century links from Cumberland Gap toward central Kentucky.
That older road matters because Pittsburg was never only a coal camp. It was also a crossroads. People passed through the country before they dug into it. Wagons, drovers, families, soldiers, timber men, merchants, and eventually miners all moved along routes that helped turn a rural Laurel County settlement into one of southeastern Kentucky’s early coal towns.
Today Pittsburg is remembered as a populated place in Laurel County, and the Kentucky Atlas describes it as a community north of London that was “mainly a coal town.” The same reference ties the place name to the Pitman family and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, while also noting its rise and fall as an incorporated town.
From Peacock to Pittsburgh to Pittsburg
The history of Pittsburg’s name is one of the best ways to see the community taking shape. Robert M. Rennick’s Laurel County post office research identifies the place through its post office trail. The office began as Peacock in 1882, became Pittsburgh in 1883, and took the spelling Pittsburg in 1894. Kentucky Atlas repeats the same chronology, making it one of the clearest facts in the town’s early record.
Those names point toward the town’s coal identity. Peacock, Pittsburgh, Pittsburg, Pitman, Laurel, Union, Victoria, Diamond, and Daisy all appear in the records around the same small section of Laurel County. The post office name changed, but the reason people were gathering there stayed the same. Coal had made the place matter.
Pittsburg was incorporated in 1884, during the early coal boom, but the town government did not last forever. A Sentinel-Echo Diamond Jubilee page later reported that Pittsburg petitioned in September 1907 to have its town charter dissolved. The phrase “No Longer City” says a great deal in only a few words. Pittsburg had grown fast with the mines, then receded as the mining order changed.
The Coal Boom Comes to Laurel County
Laurel County’s coal story was never as nationally famous as Harlan or Bell County, but it began early for southeastern Kentucky. A Sentinel-Echo historical section called Laurel County the first coal field in southeastern Kentucky and described the Cross Mountain mine near East Bernstadt, the Altamont operations, and the opening of mines around Pittsburg. The article states that shortly after the Altamont mine opened, the Laurel, Peacock, and Pitman mines at Pittsburg were opened, along with several other mines in the broader district.
By the 1880s, Pittsburg was tied to railroads, tipples, mines, scales, and company families. The same Sentinel-Echo page preserves photographs of the Pittsburg Coal Company mine tipple around 1906 and the Union Coal Company mine at Pittsburg in 1886. Those images are more than illustrations. They show how quickly the place became industrial, with men, mules, tracks, coal cars, and wooden structures transforming a rural Laurel County landscape into a working coal town.
The state mine reports make the same story harder and more precise. The Kentucky Inspector of Mines report for 1893 and 1894 printed the “Laurel Scale,” a schedule of wages and working conditions for the Laurel District adopted at Pittsburg on April 28, 1893. In 1894, the scale applied to companies including Pitman Coal Company, Laurel Coal Company, Peacock Coal Company, Victoria Coal Company, Union Coal Company, and Diamond Coal Company.
That list makes Pittsburg more than a dot on a map. It was a center where companies and miners negotiated the price of work. The scale named the price for mining, entry work, drivers, track layers, trappers, oilers, couplers, furnace workers, and other laborers. It also set a ten hour workday. These details bring the town down from memory into the daily arithmetic of coal life. A man’s day, a boy’s task, a mule driver’s pay, a pick’s sharpening, and a rent charge all belonged to the same world.
Work Underground
The official mine reports show that Pittsburg’s coal boom was not only a story of production. It was a story of wet entries, bad air, slate falls, timbering, and inspection. In 1894, the report listed an injury at Union Coal Company’s mine in Laurel County, where Robert McCann suffered a leg and ankle injury from a fall of slate.
The same report described Union operations near Pittsburgh and noted problems with ventilation and drainage. At one bank, ventilation had fallen behind in parts of the mine, one entry was too wet, and later inspections still found defects that had to be corrected. Another section noted the Peacock Left Hand Bank, operated by Union Coal Company, where the ventilation was not sufficient.
The Daisy Mine, also near Pittsburgh, gives another glimpse of how small companies and leased operations worked. The state report said Daisy was operated part of the year by Daisy Coal Company and part by Welsh Coal Company. It also noted that the Daisy company was an association of miners, with G. W. Fields as secretary and A. L. Delph as general manager. The mine produced coal from old Pitman workings, and the coal was tipped and screened at the old Pitman tipple.
At the Laurel Mine, the report recorded large output for 1894, but it also described the ordinary dangers of the underground workplace. Inspectors noted that air did not always reach working places, props were not always kept close enough to room faces, drainage sometimes needed improvement, and one later inspection found ventilation very poor. The report’s warning that poor props could matter in a future damage suit reads like a small window into the legal and physical risks miners faced every day.
Coal Lands and Courtrooms
Pittsburg’s coal history also went into the courts. In 1925, the Kentucky Court of Appeals decided Horseshoe Coal Co. v. Fields, a case involving coal land about halfway between Pittsburg and East Bernstadt. The case described the New Diamond Coal Company’s 1902 agreement with Perry V. Cole of Pittsburg for coal underlying two tracts near Pittsburg, formerly connected with James Pitman and Mrs. Maggie Givens. The agreement also mentioned sidetracks, spur tracks, houses, tram roads, wagon roads, timber rights, and air shafts.
That one case shows how coal reshaped land ownership. In an agricultural community, land was soil, timber, water, road frontage, and family inheritance. In a coal community, land also became underground seams, leases, contracts, mineral rights, air shafts, tipples, and rail connections. Pittsburg’s story was written not only by miners and operators, but by deeds, lawsuits, and arguments over who owned what lay beneath the ground.
Families, Churches, Schools, and Memory
The local memory of Pittsburg is richer than the official mine reports. The Sentinel-Echo’s “Diamonds in the Rough” material remembers families, schools, railroad men, mine bosses, merchants, baseball players, and homecomings. It speaks of Baxtertown, Welsh families, the Jefferys, the Baxters, Hugheses, Cornells, Sheedys, Watsons, Williamses, Braces, and others. It also remembers the building of the Baxtertown church, later known as New Salem.
Pittsburg was not one single cluster of houses. It had neighborhoods and school districts. Jno. C. McNeil recalled four school districts: Peacock in the center of town, Sulphur Spring in the Baxtertown settlement, Laurel north of the fairgrounds and south of the old Laurel tipple, and East Pittsburg, a section once known as Welsh-town. That school memory matters because it shows a coal town trying to become a complete community. Children learned in the shadow of tipples, but they still had teachers, churches, plays, ball games, and memories that outlasted the mines.
The same local page remembers the Pittsburg baseball team of 1913 and the annual visits of the Bloomer Girls Club to play the Pittsburg team. It remembers Ross and Randall as merchants, railroad workers, mine scales, coal bins, and a small locomotive hauling coal from East Pittsburg to the Pittsburg Coal Company tipple. A few lines of memory can do what ledgers cannot. They put movement back into the town. Coal was weighed, trains stopped, boys gathered, games were played, and people carried the place with them after they left.
Homecoming After the Boom
One of the most telling parts of Pittsburg’s story came after its greatest coal days had passed. The Sentinel-Echo reported that the first Pittsburg Homecoming began the weekend of September 23, 1938. It was called by a committee of local women, including Anna McCoy Keller, Lettie Lusk Hunter, Eva McNeill, Bertha Fiechter, and Jennie Brown. The article says old timers returned by the score and that no group was more loyal to its old home than former Pittsburgers.
That homecoming tradition shows how Pittsburg survived as memory even after its charter dissolved and its industrial importance faded. Coal towns often disappear in layers. First the biggest payrolls go. Then the stores thin out. Then the railroad work changes. Then the old school districts consolidate or vanish. Finally, the people who moved away begin returning once a year to prove that the place still exists in them.
A sentence in the Sentinel-Echo captures the feeling: “Pittsburg, as it existed in those days, is just a memory now.” That was written decades ago, yet it remains the heart of the story. Pittsburg did not vanish all at once. It became a memory while people were still alive who could name its teachers, churches, mines, ballplayers, merchants, and railroad men.
Why Pittsburg Matters
Pittsburg matters because it shows a different side of Laurel County history. London often dominates the county story, and Camp Wildcat and the Wilderness Road claim much of the older historical attention. Pittsburg adds the coal chapter. It was a place where the old road met the industrial age, where a post office called Peacock became Pittsburgh and then Pittsburg, where mine scales set wages, where state inspectors recorded dangerous conditions, and where families built schools and churches beside coal tracks.
It also reminds us that Appalachian coal history is not only about the largest camps or the bloodiest labor battles. Sometimes it is about a smaller town whose paper trail is scattered through post office records, mine reports, court cases, local memory columns, old photographs, school recollections, and cemetery stones. Pittsburg’s record has to be pieced together, but the pieces are strong.
In those pieces, a picture appears. Pittsburg was a Laurel County coal town on an old migration road. It rose with the mines, organized itself into schools and neighborhoods, negotiated wages, endured dangerous underground work, produced families who carried the place into other towns, and then turned homecoming into a form of preservation.
The town’s charter may have disappeared, but Pittsburg did not. It remains in the road, in the records, in the old mine names, in the Pittsburg Cemetery, in the memory of East Pittsburg and Baxtertown, and in the story of Laurel County’s first great coal age.
Sources & Further Reading
Kentucky Atlas and Gazetteer. “Pittsburg, Kentucky.” Accessed July 2, 2026. https://www.kyatlas.com/ky-pittsburg.html
Rennick, Robert M. “Laurel County.” County Histories of Kentucky. Morehead State University ScholarWorks, 2000. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1238&context=kentucky_county_histories
Rennick, Robert M. “Laurel County: Post Offices.” County Histories of Kentucky. Morehead State University ScholarWorks, 2004. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/389/
Kentucky Historical Society. “Pittsburg and Wilderness Road.” Kentucky Historical Marker Database, Marker No. 1757. Accessed July 2, 2026. https://history.ky.gov/markers/pittsburg-and-wilderness-road
United States Geological Survey. “Pittsburg.” Geographic Names Information System. Accessed July 2, 2026. https://edits.nationalmap.gov/apps/gaz-domestic/public/search/names/514634
Kentucky Inspector of Mines. Annual Report of the Inspector of Mines for the Years 1893 and 1894. Frankfort, KY: E. Polk Johnson, Public Printer and Binder, 1894. https://archive.org/stream/documents1893kent/documents1893kent_djvu.txt
Kentucky Geological Survey. Annual Report of the Inspector of Mines, 1898. Lexington: Kentucky Geological Survey. https://kgs.uky.edu/kgsweb/olops/pub/general/stoneminereport1898.pdf
Kentucky Inspector of Mines. Annual Report of the Inspector of Mines, 1903 and 1904. Lexington: Kentucky Geological Survey. https://kgs.uky.edu/kgsweb/olops/pub/general/norwoodminereport190304.pdf
Horseshoe Coal Co. v. Fields, 207 Ky. 172, 268 S.W. 1078. Kentucky Court of Appeals, 1925. https://case-law.vlex.com/vid/horseshoe-coal-co-v-901793109
The Sentinel-Echo. “Laurel Has First Coal Field in Southeastern Kentucky.” Diamond Jubilee Section. London, KY. https://kygenweb.net/laurel/news/51843032.pdf
The Sentinel-Echo. “Diamonds in the Rough.” Diamond Jubilee Section. London, KY. https://kygenweb.net/laurel/news/51843037.pdf
Laurel County Historical Society. “Laurel County Historical Society.” Accessed July 2, 2026. https://www.laurelkyhistory.org/
Laurel County History Museum and Genealogy Center. “Laurel County History Museum and Genealogy Center.” Accessed July 2, 2026. https://laurelcokyhistorymuseum.org/
FamilySearch. “Laurel County, Kentucky Genealogy.” FamilySearch Research Wiki. Updated May 19, 2026. https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Laurel_County%2C_Kentucky_Genealogy
National Archives. “Post Office Reports of Site Locations, 1837–1950.” National Archives. Accessed July 2, 2026. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/locations-1837-1950.html
Hammon, Neal O. “Boone’s Trace Through Laurel County.” Filson Club Quarterly 68. https://www.boonetrace1775.com/History/Neal-Hammon/68_FCQ_Laurel.pdf
Friends of Boone Trace. “Boone Trace Map.” Accessed July 2, 2026. https://www.boonetrace1775.com/Maps/PDF-Map/bt.pdf
Historical Marker Database. “Pittsburg and Wilderness Road.” Accessed July 2, 2026. https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=88210
Old Maps Online. “Old Maps of Laurel County, Kentucky.” Accessed July 2, 2026. https://www.oldmapsonline.org/en/Laurel_County%2C_Kentucky
University of Kentucky Appalachian Center. “Website Documents Kentucky Coal Company Towns.” University of Kentucky, March 31, 2014. https://history.as.uky.edu/website-documents-kentucky-coal-company-towns
Author Note: Pittsburg’s story is one of those Laurel County histories that survives in scattered records, old mine reports, newspaper memories, and road names. If your family has photographs, school records, church material, or homecoming memories from Pittsburg, East Pittsburg, Peacock, or Baxtertown, those pieces may help preserve a fuller version of the community’s past.