Appalachian Community Histories – Burdine, Letcher County: Mine No. 201, Company Town Life, and a Community That Endured
Burdine in Letcher County is easy to treat as only a small part of greater Jenkins, but the surviving record shows a place with its own older name, its own precinct identity, and its own company-town life. The strongest evidence comes from early photographs, mine records, postal history, school records, and local newspapers. Taken together, those sources show that the Burdine most people recognize today grew quickly in the early Consolidation Coal years around Mine No. 201 and later Mine No. 202, while older postal evidence shows the name itself predated the best known coal-camp phase.
A name older than the better known coal camp
One reason Burdine’s history gets flattened in short summaries is that there were two Burdine post offices in Letcher County. Postal historian Robert M. Rennick traced an earlier Burdine office to January 1898, then a later office established in March 1907 with Mary Ison, followed by a March 30, 1912 reestablishment with Melvin M. Martin to serve the new coal town. Rennick’s place-name material also identifies Burdine Webb as the namesake, which means Burdine should not be described simply as a brand-new 1912 invention.
Burdine and the rise of the Consolidation coal camps
By spring 1912, Burdine was already visible as a planned mining settlement. The Kentucky Historical Society image titled “Town of Burdine, No. 201 Mine, Jenkins, Ky. April 20, 1912” and the matching Stuart Sprague image from Morehead State preserve one of the earliest clear views of the place. Related photo captions tied to the Consolidation archive suggest work at No. 201 was already underway by late 1911, with excavation, tramway work, and the mine portal all appearing in the photographic trail before and during 1912.
The larger Consolidation archive shows how complete the camp became in just a few years. Smithsonian finding aids list Burdine material that includes No. 201 houses from the tipple, fan houses, a school foundation, a YMCA, the No. 201 store and store interior, the mine portal, and miners’ houses at Mine No. 202. That record matters because it lets Burdine appear not just as a dot on the map, but as a full company settlement organized around work, housing, retail, and recreation.
By the middle 1920s, Burdine’s place in the Elkhorn Division was clear in the state mine reports. The Kentucky State Department of Mines reports for 1925 and 1927 list Mine No. 201 and Mine No. 202 at Burdine, and the 1928 report still treated 201 and 202 together in its machine-mining tables. The Dunham High School National Register nomination also summarizes the Jenkins district’s numbering scheme by noting that Consolidation’s mines in these towns ran from 201 at Burdine up through 215 at McRoberts.
More than a mine number
Local records show that Burdine was never only an industrial label. A Stuart Sprague photograph dated May 11, 1919 documents the Burdine ball team, a reminder that baseball was part of community identity in the coal camps just as surely as the tipple and store were. The History of Jenkins also preserves smaller but revealing details, including a Burdine School box and pie social that raised money to begin a library in the school.
That same local history adds another useful glimpse of everyday life. In 1922 it recorded A. F. McGuire as principal at Burdine and noted that a hack was run from Burdine to Jenkins to carry high school students living in the nearby numbered sections. That kind of detail matters because it shows Burdine functioning as a lived community inside the larger Jenkins system, with its own school routines while still feeding into the wider town’s institutions.
Burdine and Black education in the Jenkins coal camps
Some of the most important Burdine evidence survives in the history of Black education. Sprague’s April 13, 1921 image of the Burdine Colored School and the University of Kentucky’s description of the related schoolchildren photograph identify the school directly and place it inside the company-built Jenkins world. The image is especially valuable because Black school history in the eastern Kentucky coalfields is often harder to recover than the record of mines and managers.
Modern historical synthesis confirms Burdine’s place in that story. The Dunham High School National Register nomination states that Black elementary schools were established in Jenkins, Burdine, McRoberts, and Dunham, and the Notable Kentucky African Americans Database likewise includes Burdine in the list of African American schools in Letcher County. Those records make clear that any serious history of Burdine has to include race, segregation, and the lives of Black mining families who helped build the Jenkins district.
A precinct, a place, and a surviving name
Newspaper and census records show that Burdine was also a civic unit, not just a company nickname. In the Mountain Eagle’s 1921 primary returns, Burdine appears as its own precinct, and the 1940 federal enumeration district descriptions define ED 67-12 as Jenkins Town comprising Burdine Precinct. By then Burdine had long been tied closely to Jenkins, but both local and federal records still treated it as a recognizable place on the ground.
Geography helps explain that persistence. USGS records place Burdine on the Jenkins East quadrangle and identify Elkhorn Creek at Burdine as a named monitoring location, while GNIS listings also fix Burdine as a populated place on the Jenkins East sheet. In other words, Burdine was part of the Elkhorn valley system that connected Jenkins, Dunham, and McRoberts, but the terrain also encouraged the smaller identities that residents kept alive.
That is probably the best way to understand Burdine. It was part of the greater Jenkins company-town network, but it was not merely a footnote to Jenkins. The post office record shows the name ran deeper than the coal boom alone. The photographs show a quickly built settlement around Mine No. 201 and later No. 202. The school record shows both ordinary community life and the harder history of segregation. The precinct and census record show that Burdine endured as a place people recognized long after the first years of camp construction. Even now, Burdine remains an official USPS location, a small reminder that the name never disappeared.
Sources & Further Reading
Kentucky Historical Society. “Town of Burdine, No. 201 Mine, Jenkins, Ky. April 20, 1912.” Ronald Morgan Kentucky Postcard Collection. Accessed April 4, 2026. https://www.kyhistory.com/digital/collection/Morgan/id/9017/
Sprague, Stuart S. “Letcher County -Burdine.” Stuart S. Sprague Photograph Collection, Morehead State University, April 20, 1912. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/sprague_photo_collection/216/
Sprague, Stuart S. “Letcher County – Burdine Colored School.” Stuart S. Sprague Photograph Collection, Morehead State University, April 13, 1921. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/sprague_photo_collection/213/
Sprague, Stuart S. “Letcher County – Burdine Ball Team.” Stuart S. Sprague Photograph Collection, Morehead State University, May 11, 1919. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/sprague_photo_collection/214/
Rennick, Robert M. “Letcher County – Post Offices.” County Histories of Kentucky 394. March 2002. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/394
Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History, Archives Center. Guide to the Pittsburgh Consolidation Coal Company Photographs and Other Materials, NMAH.AC.1007. Accessed April 4, 2026. https://sirismm.si.edu/EADpdfs/NMAH.AC.1007.pdf
Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History. “Burdine, Kentucky House at Mine #201.” Pittsburgh Consolidation Coal Company Photographs and Other Materials. Accessed April 4, 2026. https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/ac-component/sova-nmah-ac-1007-ref1713
Kentucky State Department of Mines. Annual Report of the State Department of Mines for the Calendar Year Ending December 31, 1925. Lexington, KY, 1926. https://kgs.uky.edu/kgsweb/olops/pub/general/jonesminereport1925.pdf
Kentucky State Department of Mines. Annual Report of the State Department of Mines for the Calendar Year Ending December 31, 1927. Lexington, KY, 1928. https://kgs.uky.edu/kgsweb/olops/pub/general/jonesminereport1927.pdf
Kentucky State Department of Mines. Annual Report of the State Department of Mines for the Calendar Year Ending December 31, 1928. Lexington, KY, 1929. https://kgs.uky.edu/kgsweb/olops/pub/general/DanielReportMines1928.pdf
Jones, Reinette F. “Schoolchildren in Jenkins, KY.” University of Kentucky Libraries, 2013. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/black_history_month_2013/18/
Notable Kentucky African Americans Database. “African American Schools in Letcher County, KY.” University of Kentucky. Accessed April 4, 2026. https://nkaa.uky.edu/nkaa/items/show/2642
United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service. National Register of Historic Places Registration Form: Dunham High School, Letcher County, Kentucky. January 21, 2025. https://heritage.ky.gov/historic-places/national-register/Documents/Letcher%20County%2C%20Dunham%20High%20School%2C%20final.pdf
McCullum, Kristan L. “‘They will liberate themselves’: Education, Citizenship, and Civil Rights in the Appalachian Coalfields.” History of Education Quarterly 61, no. 4 (2021): 449–477. https://doi.org/10.1017/heq.2021.46
The Mountain Eagle (Whitesburg, Letcher County, Ky.). August 24, 1922. Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/sn83025555/1922-08-24/ed-1/
Thayer, Bill, ed. “Burdine, Kentucky.” Penelope. March 10, 2006. https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Gazetteer/Places/America/United_States/Kentucky/Letcher/Burdine/home.html
Thayer, Bill, ed. The History of Jenkins, Kentucky: They Built a Town. Penelope. September 14, 2021. https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Gazetteer/Places/America/United_States/Kentucky/Letcher/Jenkins/_Texts/HJK/C*.html
Kentucky Coal Heritage. “Burdine, Kentucky.” Coal Camps & Communities. Accessed April 4, 2026. https://www.coaleducation.org/coalhistory/coaltowns/history_of_burdine.htm
Pike County Historical Society. “Consolidation Coal Company.” Accessed April 4, 2026. https://pikecountykyhistoricalsociety.com/consolidated-coal-company/
USPS. “BURDINE.” USPS Locations. Accessed April 4, 2026. https://tools.usps.com/locations/details/1356351
Author Note: Burdine is one of those places that can disappear into the larger Jenkins story if you are not careful with the records. I wanted to let the post office trail, school history, mine photographs, and local newspapers speak for a community that had its own identity.