Appalachian Community Histories – Hubbardstown, Wayne County: Coal Banks, River Commerce, Railroads, and Life Along the Big Sandy
Hubbardstown is easy to pass without realizing how much history is tied to the name. The community sits in southeastern Wayne County along the Big Sandy River, where West Virginia faces Kentucky across a boundary that historically functioned as much as a connection as a division. Behind the river bottom, Hurricane Creek and a network of smaller branches reach into the hills, creating the narrow valleys where generations of families built homes, farmed, worshiped, mined coal, and buried their dead.
Today Hubbardstown is an unincorporated community, but that description does not capture the place it once occupied in the geography of the Big Sandy Valley. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it possessed its own post office, stores, blacksmiths, coal banks, churches, cemeteries, railroad connections, and a recognizable identity strong enough to appear repeatedly in federal records, geological surveys, business directories, newspapers, maps, and census descriptions. The documentary record assembled for Hubbardstown is unusually rich for a small Wayne County community. Pasted markdown
The physical geography helps explain why. Hubbardstown developed where Hurricane Creek meets the Big Sandy corridor, placing residents within reach of both the interior of Butler District and the transportation network that followed the river. Modern mapping still preserves that landscape, identifying Hubbardstown along with Hurricane Creek, the Big Sandy River, Bellomy Chapel Cemetery, Strother Cemetery, Lakin Cemetery, and the roads and branches surrounding the settlement.
Hubbardstown Before West Virginia
The strongest documentary starting point for Hubbardstown comes from the federal postal system.
On December 29, 1854, the United States Post Office Department established a post office at Hubbardstown in Wayne County. This was nearly nine years before West Virginia entered the Union, meaning the first federal record of the community identified Hubbardstown as a Wayne County, Virginia, post office. The 1854 record listed the first postmaster as “Casper Stacner,” apparently an OCR or printing variation of Casper Castner, whose name appears more clearly in later postal material.
The 1857 Post Office Department report is particularly useful because it again places Casper Castner at Hubbardstown, recording him as postmaster from April 1 through September 30. The repetition strengthens the identification and shows that the office was not a short-lived experiment. Within only a few years Hubbardstown had become part of the federal postal network connecting rural Wayne County with communities far beyond the Big Sandy Valley.
Exactly how the name Hubbardstown originated remains less certain. The surviving sources establish the community name by the mid-1850s, but the records reviewed here do not conclusively identify a particular Hubbard for whom the settlement was named. Rather than attaching the name to an individual without documentary proof, the federal postal date provides the safest landmark from which to trace the recognizable community.
The importance of a post office in a place like Hubbardstown should not be underestimated. Rural nineteenth-century post offices often became geographic anchors. A person might live several miles up a creek or on an isolated farm and still give Hubbardstown as a postal address. The office therefore represented a larger countryside than a compact village center.
An 1883 federal pension roll demonstrates exactly that kind of identity. Jane Peerry was listed with Hubbardstown as her post office address. She was identified as a War of 1812 widow receiving a federal pension of eight dollars per month, with her allowance dating from June 1881. By then Hubbardstown had been a recognized postal location for nearly three decades.
Coal Before the Great Coal Camps
Hubbardstown also occupies an interesting place in Wayne County’s coal history because mining there was remembered as an established activity before the rise of the larger industrial coal towns that came to define parts of southern West Virginia.
In December 1919, the Wayne County News published a history of Butler District that looked backward toward the district’s early industries. The writer specifically remembered coal mining near Hubbardstown, stating that coal had been taken from the vicinity “many years ago” and carried to market on barges traveling the Big Sandy River. The account described one vein in the range of about two and one-half to four feet and repeated a local claim that a deeper seam reached eight or nine feet. Because the newspaper qualified some of those figures with phrases such as “it is said,” the account should be treated cautiously when used by itself.
Fortunately, federal geologists had already examined the Hubbardstown coal country.
William C. Phalen’s 1908 United States Geological Survey study of the Kenova quadrangle found two coal beds outcropping around Hubbardstown and along Hurricane Creek. The lower bed was rarely thick enough to work profitably, but the upper seam had been opened at several places and commonly measured about two and one-half to three feet or more. Phalen followed the coal farther through the surrounding country, noting additional workable exposures around Tabor Creek and recording measurements from local country banks.
The evidence is important because it independently supports the basic memory preserved in the Wayne County News. Coal was not simply rumored to exist around Hubbardstown. It had been opened and worked at multiple locations, and federal geologists physically inspected the surrounding seams.
These were not necessarily enormous industrial mines employing hundreds of men. Much of the activity appears to have consisted of smaller country banks, openings driven into exposed coal where families or local operators could obtain fuel and, in some cases, produce coal for outside markets. Such workings belonged to an older Appalachian mining tradition that preceded the huge tipples, company houses, coke ovens, and payrolls associated with the better-known coal boom.
The Big Sandy gave those small operations something especially valuable: transportation. Before a modern railroad or paved highway followed the valley, the river provided a route by which a commodity taken from a Wayne County hillside could move toward larger markets. The 1919 recollection of coal moving from Hubbardstown by barge fits the broader history of the Big Sandy Valley, where river transportation, timber drives, steamboats, and unpowered craft connected communities on both sides of the state line.
A Border Community Tied to Kentucky
The Big Sandy River divided West Virginia from Kentucky politically, but the economic life of Hubbardstown crossed that boundary constantly.
A state gazetteer and business directory from the opening years of the twentieth century provides one of the clearest snapshots of the community. R. L. Polk & Company’s directory described Hubbardstown as lying directly on the Kentucky state line in Wayne County, about ten miles west of the town of Wayne and seven miles from Louisa, Kentucky. Louisa was identified as Hubbardstown’s usual banking point. The nearest railroad station was then reported at Curnutts, Kentucky, across the Big Sandy on the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway. Mail arrived daily.
That description says a great deal about life in the community. County government might have been centered at Wayne, but everyday commerce could pull residents toward Kentucky. For banking, transportation, newspaper coverage, shopping, family connections, and medical services, the river was often easier to cross than the Wayne County hills were to travel through.
The directory also named several people whose occupations help reconstruct Hubbardstown’s commercial center. John Selbee served as postmaster. W. N. Davis operated a general store, while J. J. Thompson worked as a blacksmith.
A federal gazetteer published in 1904 similarly classified Hubbardstown as a “post village” in Wayne County. That term should not be mistaken for an incorporated municipality. It instead reflects the way federal geographers understood many small rural settlements, identifiable communities organized around postal service, roads, businesses, farms, and neighboring households rather than a formal town government.
By the early twentieth century, Hubbardstown was therefore more than a name on a map. A resident could collect daily mail, visit a local store, hire a blacksmith, cross toward Kentucky for banking or rail connections, work a farm or coal bank, and move through a network that linked the settlement to Louisa, Fort Gay, Prichard, and the wider Big Sandy Valley.
The Railroad Reaches Hubbardstown
The transportation world surrounding Hubbardstown changed quickly after 1900.
Norfolk & Western constructed its major Big Sandy improvement through Wayne and Mingo counties during the opening years of the twentieth century. The approximately fifty-nine-mile Big Sandy route became one of the railroad’s most significant main-line improvements, providing a better route for the increasingly heavy coal traffic moving toward the Ohio River than the older, curving Twelvepole alignment.
Hubbardstown soon found itself directly beside the railroad.
A remarkably detailed advertisement in the Big Sandy News in March 1910 offered property for sale in the community. W. R. Strother advertised two acres at Hubbardstown located both on the Big Sandy River and on the Norfolk & Western Railroad. The property included two dwelling houses, a storehouse measuring forty by twenty-two feet, a cellar, cistern, well, stable, coal house, and other outbuildings.
Few single newspaper advertisements reveal so much about a small Appalachian community.
Here was Hubbardstown in physical form. Homes stood near a commercial building. A stable reflected an older transportation system that still depended on horses. A coal house spoke to the importance of local fuel. A well and cistern supplied water. Beside everything ran the railroad, while the Big Sandy remained close enough for the seller to promote river frontage as another advantage.
The advertisement captures a community living through a transportation transition. Only a few years earlier the business directory had directed Hubbardstown residents across the Big Sandy to a Kentucky railroad station. By 1910, a seller could advertise property in Hubbardstown itself as lying directly on the N&W.
The river did not instantly become irrelevant. Instead, Hubbardstown briefly occupied a particularly advantageous position where old and new transportation systems overlapped. River, railroad, wagon roads, and creek routes all passed through the same narrow strip between the Big Sandy and the surrounding hills.
Stores, Farms, and Everyday Life
Coal and railroads are the most visible pieces of industrial history, but neither explains Hubbardstown by itself.
The community remained tied to farming and small-scale commerce. Families cultivated the better bottomlands along the river and creeks while using narrower hollows and hillsides farther inland. Stores were especially important because rural families might depend upon them for flour, sugar, tools, clothing, hardware, medicines, and news as well as for local exchange.
Hubbardstown’s commercial tradition continued well beyond the early directory era. A twentieth-century obituary for Luttie Bellomy stated that she and her husband, Edd Bellomy, had operated a store at Hubbardstown for a number of years. When she died in 1949, the newspaper still identified Hubbardstown as her home.
Historic preservation work has found physical evidence of this commercial landscape as well. A 2017 reconnaissance survey conducted for the West Virginia State Historic Preservation Office documented Watts Store at Hubbardstown, dating the property to approximately 1905 and specifically recommending additional research.
The survival of a store associated with the early twentieth century matters because rural stores were often the closest thing an unincorporated community possessed to a civic center. People came not simply to purchase goods but to exchange information, collect mail, discuss crops and prices, arrange work, hear local news, and encounter neighbors they might otherwise see only at church or on the road.
Churches, Chapels, and the Dead
Some of the richest evidence for Hubbardstown’s social history survives not in business records but in obituaries.
Again and again, twentieth-century newspaper notices connect local families with Bellomy Chapel, the Hubbardstown Church, Lakin Cemetery, Strother Cemetery, Lincoln Cemetery, Ellis Cemetery, and family burial grounds scattered around the community. Together, these references reveal a landscape organized around kinship and religion.
In 1938, for example, Matilda Caroline Workman died near Hubbardstown at the age of ninety-four. Her funeral was conducted at Bellomy Chapel, with burial in Lakin Cemetery on Big Hurricane Creek. During the same year, Caroline Hodge, formerly of Hubbardstown, was returned to the community for funeral services at Hubbardstown Church and burial in Lincoln Cemetery. The records also identify residents of Big Hurricane and surrounding branches, showing how the name Hubbardstown extended into a broader rural neighborhood.
Bellomy Chapel became particularly prominent in the surviving record. When Everett Hurley died in 1947 after being struck by a train at Hubbardstown, his funeral was held at Bellomy Chapel and burial followed in Ellis Cemetery. The details bring several strands of Hubbardstown history together in a single event: a local family, the railroad, a rural chapel, and a nearby cemetery.
In 1954, funeral services for Berry Bellomy were again conducted at Bellomy Chapel, followed by burial at Strother Cemetery. Five years later, the funeral of Myrtle Copley Bellomy was held at the same chapel, with burial in the same cemetery.
These repeated references demonstrate continuity. Even as residents moved to Huntington, Kenova, Ohio, and other industrial communities, Hubbardstown remained a place to which families returned for funerals, burials, worship, and remembrance.
That pattern was common across Appalachia. Economic migration could scatter a family across several states without severing attachment to a home church or cemetery. In communities without formal municipal boundaries, those sacred places often preserved local identity longer than post offices or stores.
Hubbardstown on the 1940 Census Map
Federal census geography provides another measure of the community’s importance.
For the 1940 census, Hubbardstown was divided between two enumeration districts within Butler Magisterial District. Enumeration District 50-2 covered the portion north of specified state roads and included “Hubbardstown (part)” along with Prichard. Enumeration District 50-3 covered the southern portion and likewise included “Hubbardstown (part).”
That does not mean Hubbardstown was a large town in the conventional sense. Instead, it demonstrates how geographically dispersed the settlement had become. The community name covered enough households and countryside that census officials had to divide it between districts.
The 1940 descriptions also reinforce an important point about Appalachian community geography. A place such as Hubbardstown did not have to possess incorporated boundaries to be real. Residents, postal employees, newspaper editors, census officials, merchants, ministers, railroad workers, and mapmakers all understood what Hubbardstown meant, even when the exact edge of the community blended into Prichard, Hurricane Creek, and the surrounding countryside.
Roads Replace Some of the Old Routes
By the 1930s, another transportation shift was underway.
Automobiles and improved highways were gradually changing the relationship between the scattered communities of Wayne County. River travel had already lost much of its earlier importance, and railroads no longer enjoyed an exclusive hold over long-distance movement.
In 1938, work began on a five-mile stretch of the Prichard-Hubbardstown-Hurricane Creek road. The Wayne County News reported that the State Road Commission had awarded the project to Tri-State Construction Company of Huntington for $38,375. The work called for a traffic-bound gravel base, part of the continuing effort to improve automobile transportation through the district.
For Hubbardstown, the road represented the latest stage in a much longer transportation history.
Coal had once gone out by barge. Residents crossed the Big Sandy for rail service and banking. The Norfolk & Western then placed tracks through the community. Finally, improved roads brought automobiles, buses, trucks, and easier connections with Prichard, Fort Gay, Kenova, Huntington, and other towns.
The routes changed, but Hubbardstown survived beside them.
Hubbardstown and the Cost of War
The community’s history also reaches beyond coal, commerce, and transportation.
Charles Edward Ellis and Ira Virgil Ellis were brothers born at Hubbardstown who entered the United States Army during World War II. Both were killed while serving their country, Charles on December 30, 1943, and Ira on March 23, 1945.
In 2016, the West Virginia Legislature considered a resolution recognizing the brothers by renaming the bridge carrying U.S. Route 52 across Hurricane Creek. The structure had previously been known locally as the Hubbardstown Bridge. The legislature requested that it become the Charles Edward Ellis and Ira Virgil Ellis Memorial Bridge.
The memorial provides a striking link between historic and modern Hubbardstown. Hurricane Creek had helped shape the community from its beginning. The old road network followed its valley. Coal banks appeared along the creek. Families lived and worshiped nearby. Later, U.S. Route 52 crossed the same landscape on a bridge bearing the community’s name.
Remembering the Ellis brothers attached another layer of meaning to that crossing.
What Remains of Hubbardstown
Hubbardstown never became a large incorporated town, and that is precisely why its surviving documentary trail matters.
Its history represents the kind of Appalachian past that is easiest to lose. There was no courthouse square around which the community developed, no municipal government preserving decades of council minutes, and no enormous mining corporation whose records automatically found their way into a university archive.
Instead, Hubbardstown has to be reconstructed from scattered evidence.
A federal postal ledger records its appearance in 1854. A pension roll places an elderly War of 1812 widow there in 1883. A business directory introduces a postmaster, merchant, and blacksmith. Federal geologists walk the hills and measure coal seams. A newspaper advertisement reveals houses, a store, a stable, a coal house, a railroad, and the river in 1910. Local newspapers preserve the names of families who worshiped at Bellomy Chapel and buried their relatives in Strother, Lakin, Ellis, Lincoln, and family cemeteries. Census officials divide Hubbardstown between enumeration districts. Highway builders improve the road through the community. Preservationists document an old store. A state legislature later attaches the sacrifice of two Hubbardstown brothers to a bridge over Hurricane Creek.
Viewed together, the records turn a small name on the Wayne County map into a recognizable historical community.
Hubbardstown’s story is also a condensed history of transportation in the Big Sandy Valley. The river came first as the great commercial artery. Coal traveled by barge. Kentucky towns across the water provided markets and banking. Then the railroad arrived beside the river and tied the community more closely to an industrial network stretching far beyond Wayne County. Improved highways eventually replaced many of the older patterns of movement.
Through all of those changes, local life remained rooted in farms, stores, churches, cemeteries, and families.
Modern maps still label Hubbardstown. They still show Hurricane Creek descending from the hills toward the Big Sandy and identify cemeteries where generations of residents were laid to rest. The surviving landscape may be quieter than it was when railroad trains passed local stores and coal banks operated in nearby hollows, but the community did not disappear from history.
It remains along the Big Sandy, where the documentary record allows the lives behind a small Appalachian place name to be recovered.
Sources & Further Reading
United States Post Office Department. Register of Officers and Agents in the Service of the United States. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1855. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GOVPUB-CS1-fdf20842fd1b2395a74a236299c45740/pdf/GOVPUB-CS1-fdf20842fd1b2395a74a236299c45740-2.pdf
United States Post Office Department. Register of Officers and Agents in the Service of the United States. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1857. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GOVPUB-CS1-8b822170bdcf25bb07ffa0df1f1e45dd/pdf/GOVPUB-CS1-8b822170bdcf25bb07ffa0df1f1e45dd-2.pdf
West Virginia and Regional History Center. West Virginia Postmasters Appointment Records, 1857–1971. A&M 3026. West Virginia University Libraries, Morgantown, WV. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/1217
West Virginia Archives and History. “Place Names in West Virginia.” West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/placenames/placnamh.html
United States Pension Bureau. List of Pensioners on the Roll, January 1, 1883. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1883. https://mail.newhorizonsgenealogicalservices.com/1883-pensioners-on-the-roll/1883-pensioners-on-the-roll-wv-wayne.htm
Hardesty, H. H. Hardesty’s Historical and Geographical Encyclopedia Illustrated: Maps and Histories of Wayne, Lincoln and Cabell Counties, West Virginia. Chicago and Toledo: H. H. Hardesty & Co., 1884. https://books.google.com/books?id=s7kM0gEACAAJ
United States Geological Survey. Kenova Quadrangle, Kentucky-West Virginia-Ohio. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1903. https://store.usgs.gov/
Gannett, Henry. A Gazetteer of West Virginia. U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 233. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1904. https://pubs.usgs.gov/bul/0233/report.pdf
R. L. Polk & Co. West Virginia State Gazetteer and Business Directory, 1904–1905. Detroit: R. L. Polk & Co., 1904. https://ldsgenealogy.com/WV/books/West-Virginia-state-gazetteer-and-business-directory-pt-1-part-43.htm
Phalen, William C. Economic Geology of the Kenova Quadrangle, Kentucky, Ohio, and West Virginia. U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 349. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1908. https://pubs.usgs.gov/bul/0349/report.pdf
Big Sandy News (Louisa, KY), March 18, 1910. Library of Congress, Chronicling America. https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ndnp/kyu/batch_kyu_flamingo_ver01/data/sn83004226/00295875768/1910031801/0820.pdf
Phalen, William C. Kenova Folio, Kentucky-West Virginia-Ohio. Geologic Atlas of the United States, Folio 184. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1912. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/gf184
Krebs, Charles E., and D. D. Teets Jr. Cabell, Wayne, and Lincoln Counties, West Virginia. County Geologic Report 4. Wheeling, WV: West Virginia Geological Survey, 1913. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/Prodesc/proddesc_10497.htm
Big Sandy News (Louisa, KY), June 9, 1916. Library of Congress, Chronicling America. https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ndnp/kyu/batch_kyu_flamingo_ver01/data/sn83004226/00202195878/1916060901/0876.pdf
“Squibs From Early History of District in This County.” Wayne County News, December 4, 1919. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/wcn/wcn191204.html
Wayne County News, May 27, 1926. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn260527.html
West Virginia State Road Commission. Wayne County Highway Map. Charleston: West Virginia State Road Commission, 1933. West Virginia GIS Technical Center. https://wvgis.wvu.edu/data/dataset.php?ID=409
West Virginia State Road Commission. Wayne County Highway Map. Charleston: West Virginia State Road Commission, 1937. West Virginia GIS Technical Center. https://wvgis.wvu.edu/data/dataset.php?ID=409
Big Sandy News (Louisa, KY), March 5, 1937. Lawrence County Kentucky Genealogical and Historical Society. https://lckghs.com/index.php/en/obituaries?id=381&layout=edit
United States Census Bureau. 1940 Census Enumeration District Descriptions: West Virginia, Wayne County, ED 50-1, ED 50-2, ED 50-3, ED 50-4, and ED 50-5. Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration, 1940. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1940_Census_Enumeration_District_Descriptions_-_West_Virginia_-_Wayne_County_-_ED_50-1,_ED_50-2,_ED_50-3,_ED_50-4,_ED_50-5_-_NARA_-_5888787.jpg
Big Sandy News (Louisa, KY), July 24, 1947. Lawrence County Kentucky Genealogical and Historical Society. https://www.lckghs.com/index.php/en/obituaries?id=419&layout=edit
Big Sandy News (Louisa, KY), February 12, 1948. Lawrence County Kentucky Genealogical and Historical Society. https://lckghs.com/index.php/en/obituaries?id=420&layout=edit
Big Sandy News (Louisa, KY), August 26, 1954. Lawrence County Kentucky Genealogical and Historical Society. https://lckghs.com/index.php/en/2-uncategorised/426-obit-1954
Big Sandy News (Louisa, KY), 1959. Lawrence County Kentucky Genealogical and Historical Society. https://www.lckghs.com/index.php/en/obituaries/2-uncategorised/431-obit-1959
United States Geological Survey. Availability of Low-Sulphur Coal in Wayne County, West Virginia. Open-File Report 72-359. Reston, VA: U.S. Geological Survey, 1972. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/ofr72359
Marshall University Special Collections. Cabell-Wayne Historical Society Collection, ca. 1880s–1973. Accession 1975/06.0099. Huntington, WV: Marshall University. https://mds.marshall.edu/sc_finding_aids/87/
Marshall University Special Collections. Cabell-Wayne Historical Society Collection. Marshall Digital Scholar. https://mds.marshall.edu/cabell_wayne_hist_soc_collection/
West Virginia and Regional History Center. “Maps, Atlases, and Gazetteers.” West Virginia University Libraries. https://wvrhc.lib.wvu.edu/collections/maps-atlases-and-gazetteers
West Virginia Archives and History. “County Court Records Microfilm Holdings.” West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/bluenote.html
West Virginia Archives and History. “West Virginia Vital Research Records.” West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/vrr/
West Virginia Archives and History. “Marriage Records Search.” West Virginia Vital Research Records. https://archive.wvculture.org/vrr/va_mcsearch.aspx
West Virginia Archives and History. “Birth Records Search.” West Virginia Vital Research Records. https://archive.wvculture.org/vrr/va_bcsearch.aspx
West Virginia Archives and History. “Death Records Search.” West Virginia Vital Research Records. https://archive.wvculture.org/vrr/va_dcsearch.aspx
West Virginia State Historic Preservation Office. Reconnaissance Historic Resource Survey for Pleasants, Lincoln, Jackson, Mason and Wayne Counties, West Virginia. Charleston: West Virginia Division of Culture and History, 2017. https://mapwv.gov/shpo/docs/PDFs/ArchitecturalSurveys/RMU-51.pdf
United States Geological Survey. US Topo: Prichard Quadrangle, West Virginia-Kentucky. The National Map. https://prd-tnm.s3.amazonaws.com/StagedProducts/Maps/USTopo/Current/PDF/WV/WV_Prichard.pdf
Library of Congress. “Big Sandy News, Louisa, Kentucky.” Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. https://www.loc.gov/item/sn83004226/
Lawrence County Kentucky Genealogical and Historical Society. “Big Sandy News Obituary Collection.” https://www.lckghs.com/
West Virginia Legislature. “Senate Concurrent Resolution No. 26: Charles Edward Ellis and Ira Virgil Ellis Memorial Bridge.” 2016. https://www.wvlegislature.gov/bulletin_board/2016/RS/h_journal/hdj2016-02-18-37.pdf
Author Note: Hubbardstown is one of those Appalachian communities whose importance becomes clearer only after its scattered records are brought back together. Postal records, newspapers, geological surveys, maps, cemeteries, and family histories reveal a Big Sandy community that remained connected to both West Virginia and Kentucky for generations.