Appalachian Community Histories – Artemus, Knox County: The Railroad Station That Became a Community
Artemus sits in Knox County, Kentucky, along the Cumberland River and Brush Creek, about four miles southeast of Barbourville. Like many Appalachian communities, its story is not only a story of one town name. It is a story of older creek settlements, a railroad station, a post office, coal traffic, school photographs, and local memories that survived after the trains stopped running. The Kentucky Atlas and Gazetteer describes Artemus as a Knox County community that grew around Artemus Station on the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, on land associated with Artemus Herndon in 1888.
Artemus is easy to overlook if someone is searching only for courthouse records or incorporated city histories. It was not a county seat like Barbourville. It was not built around one single public square. Its history followed the creek, the road, the railroad line, the depot, the coal branches, and the families who worked between them. In that way, Artemus represents a kind of Appalachian place that mattered deeply in daily life even when it left a quieter paper trail.
Before Artemus Was Artemus
The land around present Artemus had a history before the railroad gave the community its lasting name. One useful regional source, Henry Harvey Fuson’s History of Bell County, Kentucky, describes Thomas Fuson living before 1826 at the mouth of Brush Creek, opposite Artemus. Since Artemus itself had not yet developed under that name, the passage is best read as a later description of an older settlement landscape. Still, it helps place the mouth of Brush Creek as a known location in the early nineteenth century, long before the railroad station became the center of the modern community.
That older Brush Creek world was part of Knox County’s larger early history. The Newberry Library’s Atlas of Historical County Boundaries traces Knox County’s creation from Lincoln County, effective June 2, 1800, under Kentucky’s 1799 acts. The county’s later shape changed as southeastern Kentucky counties were formed and adjusted, but the Artemus area remained tied to Knox County records, roads, streams, schools, and families.
Elon, Brush Creek, and Artemus
The name history of Artemus matters because the post office trail preserves the community’s early identity. The Kentucky Atlas gives the basic sequence clearly. The Elon post office opened in 1888, was renamed Brush Creek in 1889, and became Artemus in 1891. A postmaster transcription for Knox County gives James M. Durham as postmaster when the office was originally established as Elon on September 8, 1888, then notes the later change to Brush Creek.
Robert M. Rennick’s Knox County post office survey is one of the most important guides for this kind of work because it treats post offices as evidence for local communities. Morehead State University’s ScholarWorks entry identifies Rennick’s Knox County Post Offices as a historical survey of Knox County post offices and communities. Rennick’s place-name materials also connect Artemus to the railroad station and to Artemus Ward Herndon, who is identified as part of the naming story for the station and right-of-way.
The movement from Elon to Brush Creek to Artemus shows how a community name could settle only after several institutions lined up. A creek name could describe the place. A post office could serve the people. A railroad station could fix the name on timetables, freight records, maps, and memory. By the 1890s, Artemus had become the name that lasted.
Artemus Station and the L&N
Artemus grew because the Louisville and Nashville Railroad gave the place a station and a connection to the wider economy. The Kentucky Atlas states that Artemus grew around Artemus Station on the L&N, and that fact explains much of the community’s later history. In Appalachian Kentucky, a depot was more than a place where passengers waited. It was a point where mail, freight, groceries, coal, tools, machinery, newspapers, and people moved in and out.
For a rural community near Barbourville, the station changed the meaning of distance. Roads were not always reliable. Creek valleys and river crossings shaped travel. The railroad made Artemus a point on a larger commercial map. It connected the community to Barbourville, Corbin, Middlesboro, Knoxville, and coal markets beyond Kentucky.
This is why the land and right-of-way history matters. Knox County deed books, railroad valuation records, L&N station lists, and right-of-way maps would be the strongest next step for proving the exact land transfers connected to Artemus Herndon and the depot site. The public summaries give the framework, but the courthouse and railroad records would give the legal bones of the story.
Coal, Branch Lines, and the Artemus-Jellico Railroad
The railroad story around Artemus widened in the early twentieth century. A group connected to coal lands in Knox County organized the Cumberland Railroad in 1902 to reach coal operations south of Artemus. A modern summary of the Artemus-Jellico Railroad, based on Elmer G. Sulzer’s 1963 railroad history article, states that the Cumberland Railroad was organized to build from the L&N at Artemus toward the mining center at Warren, and that the work was completed by December 1905.
The line began at Artemus and crossed the Cumberland River near the mouth of Brush Creek. From there it followed Brush Creek toward Lunsford, later known as Kay Jay, with branches or extensions toward Wheeler and Anchor. The station list associated with the line included places such as Dean, Myrick or Avis, Rock Cliff, Bennettsville, Trosper, Tinsley, Bays, Warren, Lunsford or Kay Jay, Wheeler, and Anchor.
This made Artemus a junction between the L&N world and a smaller coal railroad world. Coal camps and mining places south of Artemus depended on the branch line, while Artemus depended on the larger railroad connection. The unbuilt dream was even larger. Plans called for an extension toward Jellico, Tennessee, but the full Artemus to Jellico route was never completed.
In 1924, after receivership and financial trouble, James A. McDermott of Barbourville bought the line and renamed it the Artemus-Jellico Railroad. The name preserved the ambition of a railroad that had been imagined as a larger connection than it ever became.
The Cumberland River Bridge
One of the strongest surviving physical reminders of this railroad story is the Cumberland River bridge near Artemus. Bridges & Tunnels identifies the bridge as a Parker through truss built for the Cumberland Railroad and later tied to the Artemus-Jellico Railroad route. The same source states that the bridge was completed in December 1905 as part of the mainline connecting Artemus and Warren.
The bridge mattered because it carried the branch line out of Artemus and across the Cumberland River toward Brush Creek and the coal camps. Without that crossing, the railroad’s geography would have been different. With it, Artemus became the northern anchor of a short line that reached into mining country.
When the railroad declined, the bridge outlived much of the track. Bridges & Tunnels notes that after the 1952 abandonment and 1953 salvage work, the main Cumberland River bridge remained in use as a county road bridge. That kind of survival is common in Appalachian transportation history. A railroad bridge became a road bridge, and an industrial structure became part of ordinary local travel.
A Depot Town Remembered by Columbus Mills
The best local voice for Artemus as a railroad community comes from Columbus Mills, interviewed in 1992 at age 99 as part of the Knox Historical Museum Oral History Project. Mills moved to Artemus in September 1918 after his cousin Ev Hammons offered him work with the A & J Railroad. The interview outline says he rented a four-room house converted from the Artemus Coal Company shop house for seven dollars a month and earned sixty dollars a month in cash.
Mills worked at the depot keeping records straight between the A & J and L&N railroads. The L&N agent Bill Lawson later named him “Clerk and Operator,” with a raise to eighty-seven dollars a month. Those details make Artemus feel less like an abstract railroad point and more like a working place where one person’s job involved two railroads, freight records, mail, coal, and daily movement.
His memory also explains why the depot mattered. Mills said that before the 1920s there were no roads of much worth in the area and that everything had to be shipped in by railroad freight. He remembered grocery shipments, coal commissaries, and merchandise being picked up directly from railroad cars. He also remembered that new roads, trucking services, and grocery warehouse delivery eventually killed the railroad grocery shipping business.
That statement is one of the clearest summaries of Artemus’s twentieth-century change. The railroad built the community’s commercial life, but roads and trucks later replaced many of the daily functions that had made the depot central.
Decline of the Artemus-Jellico Railroad
The decline of the Artemus-Jellico Railroad followed the decline of the coal traffic that supported it. Passenger service had already weakened before the final abandonment. AbandonedOnline’s summary, drawing on Sulzer’s railroad history, notes that passenger service ended in 1941 after road competition and loss of passenger business. From that point, the railroad relied mostly on coal and mining traffic.
By the late 1940s and early 1950s, the remaining coal traffic was not enough. The same railroad history summary states that the Kentucky-Jellico Coal Company, the railroad’s largest remaining shipper, notified management in April 1952 that its mine was closing. The railroad applied to the Interstate Commerce Commission for abandonment on June 3, 1952, approval came July 29, operations ceased November 1, and salvage was completed around March 31, 1953.
For Artemus, the end of the railroad did not mean the end of the community. It did mean the end of the system that had made Artemus Station the center of a coal and freight network. The depot world faded into road travel, school memory, family memory, and the physical traces that remained.
School, Photographs, and Community Life
Artemus was not only a railroad and coal place. It was also a school community. The Knox Historical Museum’s “Looking Back with Mike Mills” collection includes Artemus school images, including Artemus High in 1931, Artemus High School in 1948 to 1949, and Artemus School in 1913 to 1914. The museum describes the wider collection as photographs of churches, schools, and miscellaneous images from Knox County spanning the period from 1895 through the 1950s.
The 1948 to 1949 Artemus High School photograph is identified as a Junior-Senior Prom image, with many students and community members named. The 1931 Artemus High page preserves another school image from an earlier generation. These photographs are important because they show Artemus after the railroad had already shaped the community but before the old railroad world had fully disappeared.
Schools often preserve the history of small communities better than formal town records do. A school photograph can hold names, clothing, buildings, social events, families, and community identity in one image. For Artemus, the school record helps balance the coal and railroad story with the story of students, teachers, dances, sports, and everyday life.
The Landscape Around Artemus
The physical setting of Artemus helps explain why railroads and roads mattered so much. The community lies near river and creek corridors, where the Cumberland River, Brush Creek, Tye Fork, and nearby hollows shaped settlement and transportation. The U.S. Geological Survey published Dudley D. Rice’s Geologic Map of the Artemus Quadrangle, covering Bell and Knox Counties, Kentucky, in 1974 at a scale of 1:24,000.
That map is useful for more than geology. It helps researchers understand why rail lines followed particular valleys, why coal operations developed where they did, and why travel across the landscape depended on narrow routes. In Appalachian history, geology is often social history in another form. Coal seams, river crossings, creek bottoms, ridges, and gaps shaped where people lived and how goods moved.
Older maps also matter. Lloyd’s 1862 official map of Kentucky, held by the Library of Congress, was compiled to show railroads, stations, towns, villages, post offices, wagon roads, canals, county seats, and related features. It predates Artemus under that name, but it helps place the pre-railroad landscape into a larger nineteenth-century map world.
Artemus in the Census Record
Modern federal records treat Artemus as a census-designated place. The Census Bureau’s 2010 CDP file lists Artemus CDP with a population of 590 and 282 housing units. The 2020 Census CDP file lists Artemus CDP with a population of 453 and 219 housing units.
Those numbers should not be read as the whole story of Artemus. A census-designated place is a statistical boundary, while a community’s historical memory often reaches into surrounding roads, creeks, cemeteries, and family networks. Still, the numbers show that Artemus remained a recognized population center long after the railroad that gave it shape had disappeared.
Why Artemus Matters
Artemus matters because it shows how many Appalachian communities were made. A creek settlement came first. A post office changed names. A railroad station fixed a new identity. Coal branch lines pushed into the hills. A depot connected local lives to regional markets. Schools, photographs, oral histories, and cemetery records preserved what the freight records could not.
The history of Artemus is not only a story of industrial rise and decline. It is a story of place-making. Elon, Brush Creek, and Artemus were not just names on paper. They were attempts to describe a living community as it changed. The name that lasted came from the station, but the community was larger than the station.
Today, Artemus remains part of Knox County’s historical landscape. Its story runs through the Cumberland River, Brush Creek, the L&N, the Artemus-Jellico Railroad, local schools, coal work, and family memory. To understand Artemus is to understand how a small Appalachian railroad station could become a place people still recognize generations after the last train left.
Sources & Further Reading
Rennick, Robert M. “Knox County: Post Offices.” Morehead State University ScholarWorks, 2000. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/390.
Rennick, Robert M. “Knox County: Post Offices.” Morehead State University ScholarWorks, PDF. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1385&context=kentucky_county_histories.
Rennick, Robert M. “Place Names Beginning with the Letter A.” Morehead State University ScholarWorks. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1385&context=kentucky_county_histories.
Kentucky Atlas and Gazetteer. “Artemus, Kentucky.” Accessed May 19, 2026. https://www.kyatlas.com/ky-artemus.html.
RootsWeb. “Knox County, Kentucky Postmasters.” Accessed May 19, 2026. https://sites.rootsweb.com/~kyknox/Postmaster.html.
National Archives. “Post Office Reports of Site Locations, 1837–1950.” Accessed May 19, 2026. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/locations-1837-1950.html.
U.S. Geological Survey. “Geographic Names Information System.” Accessed May 19, 2026. https://www.usgs.gov/tools/geographic-names-information-system-gnis.
U.S. Geological Survey. “Download GNIS Data.” Accessed May 19, 2026. https://www.usgs.gov/us-board-on-geographic-names/download-gnis-data.
Rice, Dudley D. Geologic Map of the Artemus Quadrangle, Bell and Knox Counties, Kentucky. U.S. Geological Survey Geologic Quadrangle Map GQ-1207, 1974. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/gq1207.
U.S. Geological Survey. “US Topo 7.5-Minute Map for Artemus, Kentucky.” 2016. https://prd-tnm.s3.amazonaws.com/StagedProducts/Maps/USTopo/PDF/KY/KY_Artemus_20160401_TM_geo.pdf.
U.S. Geological Survey. “USGS 1:24000-Scale Quadrangle for Artemus, Kentucky.” 1974. https://prd-tnm.s3.amazonaws.com/StagedProducts/Maps/HistoricalTopo/PDF/KY/24000/KY_Artemus_708079_1974_24000_geo.pdf.
U.S. Census Bureau. “State of Kentucky Census Designated Places, 2010 Census.” Accessed May 19, 2026. https://tigerweb.geo.census.gov/tigerwebmain/Files/tab20/tigerweb_tab20_cdp_2010_ky.html.
U.S. Census Bureau. “State of Kentucky Census Designated Places, 2020 Census.” Accessed May 19, 2026. https://tigerweb.geo.census.gov/tigerwebmain/Files/bas26/tigerweb_bas26_cdp_2020_tab20_ky.html.
Federal Register. “Applications for Relief.” February 2, 1951. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/86/Federal_Register_1951-02-02-_Vol_16_Iss_23_%28IA_sim_federal-register-find_1951-02-02_16_23%29.pdf.
Federal Register. “Washington, Tuesday, November 27, 1951.” November 27, 1951. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-1951-11-27/pdf/FR-1951-11-27.pdf.
Interstate Commerce Commission. Finance Docket Records Concerning Railroad Abandonments and Operations, Artemus-Jellico Railroad Company. National Archives, Record Group 134. https://catalog.archives.gov.
Knox Historical Museum. “Content Outline of Interview of Columbus Mills at Age 99.” Knox Historical Museum Oral History Project. https://knoxhistoricalmuseum.org/exhibits/audio-video-collections/transcriptions-of-interviews-2/columbus-mills-at-age-99-interviewed-by-david-cole.html.
Knox Historical Museum. “Looking Back with Mike Mills.” Accessed May 19, 2026. https://knoxhistoricalmuseum.org/exhibits/photographs-and-online-exhibits/looking-back-with-mike-mills.html.
Knox Historical Museum. “Artemus High, 1931.” Accessed May 19, 2026. https://knoxhistoricalmuseum.org/exhibits/photographs-and-online-exhibits/looking-back-with-mike-mills/artemus-high-1931.html.
Knox Historical Museum. “Artemus High School, 1948–49.” Accessed May 19, 2026. https://knoxhistoricalmuseum.org/exhibits/photographs-and-online-exhibits/looking-back-with-mike-mills/artemus-high-school-1948-49.html.
AbandonedOnline. “Artemus-Jellico Railroad.” Accessed May 19, 2026. https://abandonedonline.net/location/artemus-jellico-railroad/.
Bridges & Tunnels. “Cumberland River Bridge, Artemus-Jellico Railroad.” Published March 26, 2025. https://bridgestunnels.com/location/cumberland-river-bridge-artemus-jellico-railroad/.
Sulzer, Elmer G. “An Abandoned Kentucky Railroad: The Artemus-Jellico R.R.” Railway and Locomotive Historical Society Bulletin, no. 108, April 1963.
Sulzer, Elmer G. Ghost Railroads of Kentucky. Indianapolis: Vane A. Jones Company, 1967.
Railway and Locomotive Historical Society. “Railroad History Index, 1921–2009.” June 2022. https://rlhs.org/WP/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Railroad-History-Index.pdf.
The Mountain Advocate. Barbourville, Kentucky. Searchable issues and local historical columns through local archives, newspapers, and the Knox Historical Museum.
Lloyd, James T. Lloyd’s Official Map of the State of Kentucky. New York: J. T. Lloyd, 1862. Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3950.cw0216400/.
Newberry Library. “Kentucky Consolidated Chronology.” Atlas of Historical County Boundaries. https://publications.newberry.org/ahcb/documents/KY_Consolidated_Chronology.htm.
ExploreKYHistory. “Knox County.” Kentucky Historical Society Historical Marker Database. https://explorekyhistory.ky.gov.
Fuson, Henry Harvey. History of Bell County, Kentucky, Volume 1. KYGenWeb transcription. https://kygenweb.net/bell/area/bell_history1.htm.
FamilySearch. “Knox County, Kentucky Genealogy.” FamilySearch Research Wiki. https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Knox_County,_Kentucky_Genealogy.
Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. A Context of the Railroad Industry in Clark County, Kentucky. Frankfort: Kentucky Transportation Cabinet, 2016. https://transportation.ky.gov/Archaeology/Documents/Winchester%20Report%20Complete.pdf.
Kentucky Geological Survey. Knox County, Kentucky Planning Guidance by Rock Unit Type. University of Kentucky. https://kgs.uky.edu/kgsweb/olops/pub/kgs/mc170_12.pdf.
Love, P. M. Soil Survey of Knox County and the Eastern Part of Whitley County, Kentucky. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Soil Conservation Service, 1988.
Knox County Clerk. Deed Books and Land Records, Knox County, Kentucky. Barbourville, Kentucky.
Knox County Board of Education. School Board Minutes and School Records, Knox County, Kentucky.
Kentucky Heritage Council. Survey Files and New Deal Context Records for Knox County, Kentucky. Frankfort, Kentucky.
University of Kentucky Office of State Archaeology. Archaeological Survey Reports for the Artemus Area, Knox County, Kentucky. Lexington, Kentucky.
Author Note: Artemus is the kind of Knox County place where the history is scattered across post office records, railroad stories, school photographs, maps, and local memory. The community’s name came through the railroad station, but its deeper story belongs to Brush Creek, the Cumberland River, and the families who made a lasting home there.