Appalachian Community Histories – Burnaugh, Boyd County: Burgess Station, Compressor Station No. 14, and the Nickel Plant
Burnaugh is easy to pass without realizing how much history is compressed into the narrow strip of southern Boyd County around U.S. 23. The community never became an incorporated town, never developed a courthouse square, and rarely commanded the attention given to Ashland or Catlettsburg. Yet its location beside the Big Sandy River placed it directly in the path of several forces that transformed northeastern Kentucky. Railroads came first, followed by river improvements, natural gas pipelines, new churches, highways, and eventually a major nickel alloy plant.
Even the name Burnaugh reflects this position between older communities. Kentucky place-name tradition identifies Burnaugh as a combination of Burgess Station and Kavanaugh, two names that already belonged to the landscape before Burnaugh became common. The attached research material similarly points to Burgess Station, Kavanaugh, the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway, Tennessee Gas, and International Nickel as the threads needed to reconstruct the community’s history. Pasted markdown
The result is a history that is not really about a town springing into existence at a single moment. Burnaugh gradually emerged from a much older river and railroad corridor, then repeatedly changed as new transportation and industrial systems found the same narrow route useful.
Before Burnaugh There Was Burgess Station
One of the clearest early records of the area appears in a federal survey of the Big Sandy River prepared at the turn of the twentieth century. In the final report submitted to Congress in 1900, government engineers recorded a chain of benchmarks running southward from Catlettsburg. Their list included England Hill, Campbells Branch, Lockwood Station, Burgess Station, Lock No. 2, and other points farther up the river.
The importance of that list is easy to overlook. The federal survey did not identify Burnaugh at that location. It identified Burgess Station. The report also described the railroad, river crossings, roads, and locks with the precision required for engineering work, giving historians a snapshot of the corridor before Burnaugh became the dominant community name.
Burgess Station belonged to a transportation landscape shaped by the Big Sandy and the railroad running beside it. Rail service connected the small river communities south of Catlettsburg with Ashland, Huntington, and the coalfields farther upstream. Government improvement of the Big Sandy added another layer. Locks and dams were intended to make the river more dependable for commercial navigation, and federal engineers treated locations such as Burgess Station and Lock No. 2 as recognizable reference points.
That combination of river and rail explains much about Burnaugh’s later history. The mountains and hills limited where major transportation lines could go. The relatively narrow corridor along the Big Sandy repeatedly attracted railroads, pipelines, highways, utilities, and factories because the geography had already established the route.
Kavanaugh and an Older Methodist Community
Immediately south of what became Burnaugh stood Kavanaugh, another small settlement whose identity was tied closely to Kavanaugh Chapel. Local cemetery and historical records preserved by the Boyd County Public Library note that the present Kavanaugh Chapel replaced an older log schoolhouse that had also served as a church. The chapel and adjoining cemetery became enduring landmarks for families along this stretch of the Big Sandy.
This older religious landscape becomes especially important when Burnaugh’s twentieth-century growth is considered. Long before new workers began arriving with natural gas and industry, the area was made up of families connected through farms, schools, cemeteries, churches, and the railroad. Later Burnaugh Baptist Church historian Faye Craft remembered that Methodism had been deeply established in the neighborhood before the arrival of Tennessee Gas and Transmission Company. She wrote that several Methodist congregations could be found within roughly ten miles of Burnaugh and connected that religious tradition with families whose ancestors had lived in the area for generations.
The name Burnaugh is generally explained as a blending of Burgess Station and Kavanaugh. Robert M. Rennick’s extensive research into Kentucky place names became the principal scholarly source associated with that explanation, and his surviving collections at Morehead State University include maps and notes documenting communities that have disappeared, changed names, or been absorbed into neighboring settlements.
Whatever the exact moment when residents began using the blended name, the surviving record shows a transition. Burgess Station belonged prominently to the federal record around 1900. By the early twentieth century, Burnaugh was becoming recognizable enough to appear by name in newspapers.
Burnaugh Appears in the Newspaper Record
A particularly revealing notice appeared in the Big Sandy News in February 1920. Andrew Jackson Havens had died while staying at the Ashland home of his daughter. The newspaper reported that his body was taken by train to Burnaugh, where he was buried in the family burial ground.
It is only a sentence in an obituary, but it tells us a great deal. Burnaugh was a name readers were expected to recognize. It could be reached directly by train. Families maintained burial grounds there, and the railroad was woven into ordinary events such as funerals as well as commerce.
Two years later, the Big Sandy News was casually referring to a “Miss Finney of Burnaugh” in its social columns. By this point Burnaugh required no geographical explanation. It had entered the newspaper vocabulary of the Big Sandy Valley as a community in its own right. Pasted markdown
The same pattern continues through the 1930s. When Sarah Preston died in 1935, the Big Sandy News-Recorder identified her specifically as a resident of Burnaugh in Boyd County. Her funeral was held at her residence, after which she was buried in a family cemetery near the home. The story provides a glimpse of Burnaugh before its great industrial transformation. Homes and family burial grounds remained important markers of place, while families maintained connections stretching across Boyd, Lawrence, Greenup, Johnson, and surrounding counties.
Cemetery records preserve the same pattern. The Newman Cemetery is described by the Boyd County cemetery survey as being at Burnaugh near the bank of the Big Sandy River, across the railroad and close to what later became Runyan Road. Local family tradition recorded with the survey remembered members of the Newman family dying during an epidemic, while surviving stones and property information helped preserve a settlement history that ordinary maps rarely captured.
Lock No. 2, Railroads, and Life Along the River
Burnaugh’s position near Lock No. 2 also brought residents into the federal river improvement system. A 1940 obituary for T. R. “Rice” McClure recalled that he had once lived at Burnaugh for two years while working at United States Lock No. 2. Afterward he moved to Louisa and became a longtime merchant there.
The notice connects the Burnaugh of family cemeteries and railroad stops with another type of employment. Federal river projects created jobs that could bring workers temporarily into the community, just as later pipeline and factory construction would do on a much larger scale.
Another 1940 obituary recorded that Lou Elkins Thompson had lived at Burnaugh for about three years after leaving the Horseford area. She remained connected to the Fallsburg Methodist Church, again showing how Burnaugh’s residents often belonged to a web of communities rather than to a single isolated settlement.
This was still a relatively rural Burnaugh, stretched between the railroad, river, road, churches, homes, and small family cemeteries. During the 1940s, however, another transportation network arrived that would permanently change the community.
Natural Gas Comes to Burnaugh
In July 1944, the Federal Power Commission published an application that placed Burnaugh squarely within the expanding American natural gas system.
Warfield Natural Gas Company proposed a ten-inch pipeline approximately 1,350 feet long near Burnaugh that would connect Tennessee Gas and Transmission Company’s pipeline with Warfield’s existing Line B. Another proposed ten-inch line, approximately 2,034 feet long, would extend eastward toward the Big Sandy River. United Fuel Gas Company proposed continuing the connection across the river with another pipeline nearly 2,000 feet long.
Those figures may sound like technical details, but they represented a major change in Burnaugh’s relationship with the wider country. The community was no longer simply beside a railroad and improved river. It was becoming a junction in an energy network moving natural gas across state lines.
The timing was significant. These plans appeared during World War II, when the federal government closely watched transportation, fuel, manufacturing, and industrial labor. The National Archives preserves an Office of Defense Transportation file specifically titled “Labor – strike at Tennessee, Gas and Transmission Company, Burnaugh, Kentucky.” The surviving finding aid does not provide enough information to reconstruct the strike itself without examining the underlying correspondence and reports, but the existence of the file shows that wartime activity at Burnaugh had become significant enough to enter federal transportation records.
Natural gas would prove far more than a temporary wartime development.
Compressor Station No. 14 and a Route Toward New England
By 1947, Tennessee Gas Transmission Company was planning an enormous expansion of its system. An application filed with the Federal Power Commission proposed hundreds of miles of new large-diameter pipeline.
Burnaugh occupied a remarkable position in that plan.
Tennessee Gas proposed roughly 777 miles of thirty-inch loop pipeline and another 124 miles of twenty-six-inch pipe extending northeastward to Compressor Station No. 14 near Burnaugh. From the suction side of the Burnaugh station, the company proposed an additional network of twenty-six-inch, twenty-four-inch, and twenty-inch lines extending toward Boston.
The estimated cost of the overall project was $150 million, an extraordinary sum in 1947. The application described Burnaugh not as an obscure community on the Big Sandy, but as a major turning point in a proposed system intended to carry southwestern natural gas toward markets in the northeastern United States.
It is important to distinguish a regulatory application from proof that every mile described was constructed exactly as proposed. Still, the document demonstrates how Tennessee Gas viewed the geography. Burnaugh had become strategically important because the same river corridor that had attracted the railroad could also accommodate one of the nation’s rapidly expanding natural gas systems.
The effect was visible within the community itself. Workers arrived, families moved in, and Burnaugh’s religious makeup began to change.
The Founding of Burnaugh Baptist Church
In 1974, Faye Craft prepared a history of Burnaugh Baptist Church for the congregation’s twenty-fifth anniversary. Her account provides one of the most valuable local descriptions of how the natural gas era altered the community.
Craft wrote that in the summer of 1949 the Reverend Bert Caldwell, a missionary for the Greenup Association of Baptists, held a tent meeting in Burnaugh on property owned by Charles S. Rankin. Several people professed their faith, and organizers discovered that enough Baptists lived in the community to consider establishing a congregation.
Many of them, Craft explained, had moved into the area because of Tennessee Gas Transmission Company.
Burnaugh Missionary Baptist Church was formally organized on October 16, 1949, with ten charter members. Eight additional people were received for baptism. Meetings initially continued in the tent and later in the home of Alex and Mrs. Fry. In November the congregation purchased a lot, and construction began on a permanent church building the following spring. Services were being held inside the new building by May 1950.
Craft’s history is significant beyond the story of one congregation. She explicitly contrasted the newcomers with an older community that had been predominantly Methodist. Burnaugh’s religious landscape was changing because its population was changing, and its population was changing because a national energy company had placed important infrastructure there.
The same church history also remembered one of the persistent problems facing Burnaugh. Many residents were transient. Workers arrived, stayed for a time, and moved elsewhere. Industrial development could bring population without necessarily creating the permanence associated with a traditional town center.
Burnaugh was becoming an industrial community, but it remained a place people might enter because of a job and leave when that job moved them somewhere else.
International Nickel Changes Burnaugh Again
A second major industrial transformation arrived during the 1960s.
Federal Power Commission records from 1965 state plainly that natural gas service was being arranged for the International Nickel Company for use in “a new plant being constructed at Burnaugh, Boyd County, Ky.” The project included plans for gas transmission and measuring facilities serving the new industrial operation.
The wording provides unusually strong evidence for dating the beginning of Burnaugh’s modern metals industry. Rather than relying on a later recollection, the federal record captures the plant while it was actually being constructed.
Only a few years later, Interstate Commerce Commission notices show the facility becoming integrated into a wider freight transportation network. In 1969, motor carriers sought authority to serve the International Nickel Company’s Alloy Products Division plant, described as approximately eleven miles south of Catlettsburg and fifteen miles north of Louisa on U.S. 23 at or near Burnaugh.
The nickel plant introduced a new scale of industrial activity to a community that had already been reshaped by natural gas. Burnaugh’s location again mattered. It had rail access, highway access, natural gas infrastructure, and a position within the larger Huntington, Ashland, Catlettsburg industrial region.
For Burnaugh, the arrival of International Nickel marked a transition from being primarily a transportation and pipeline location to becoming a manufacturing center in its own right.
From INCO to Special Metals
The Burnaugh plant remained tied to the nickel alloy industry through subsequent corporate changes. Environmental records from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency identify the Burnaugh facility as INCO Alloys International Inc. on Old U.S. 23 and associate it with the federal facility identification number KYD049465255. EPA records from the late twentieth century document reporting involving metals and compounds associated with alloy manufacturing, including cobalt and other industrial materials.
Special Metals later emerged from the acquisition of Inco Alloys International in 1998. The company describes itself as a producer of high-nickel alloys used in demanding engineering applications. Its Burnaugh operation remains part of that manufacturing system. Current company information lists air induction melting, electroslag remelting, and tube extrusion among the capabilities of the Kentucky plant, including a 6,000-ton extrusion press.
That industrial continuity gives Burnaugh an unusual place in Boyd County history. Many small Appalachian communities that developed around a particular industry saw their economic reason for existence disappear entirely when mines, mills, or transportation systems closed. Burnaugh has changed repeatedly, but industrial activity has remained part of its landscape for generations.
The Highway Replaces the Old Road
Transportation continued to reshape Burnaugh even after the industrial plants were established. The old highway corridor eventually gave way to the modern U.S. 23 alignment, changing traffic patterns through Burnaugh and neighboring Kavanaugh.
That change followed a familiar Appalachian pattern. Roads built to improve regional access often bypassed the small businesses and houses that had grown beside older two-lane routes. A faster highway could make a community more accessible while simultaneously making it easier to pass through without stopping.
Faye Craft sensed that contradiction as early as 1974. Near the conclusion of her church history, she reflected that industry and better highways had not necessarily produced the permanent population growth residents once expected. People continued to move through Burnaugh as jobs and circumstances changed.
The gas network also remained visible long after its first arrival. In 2013, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission reported that Tennessee Gas Pipeline sought authorization to abandon two redundant and obsolete pipeline segments crossing the Big Sandy River north of Burnaugh. Nearly seventy years after the 1944 pipeline filings, federal energy records were still documenting infrastructure tied directly to the community.
A Small Place Connected to Much Larger Systems
Burnaugh’s history makes more sense when viewed not as the story of a small town, but as the story of a corridor.
The Big Sandy River came first, carrying people and commerce through the valley. Federal improvements brought locks and engineers. The railroad followed the river and gave Burgess Station a place on official maps. Families established churches, schools, farms, homes, and cemeteries around Kavanaugh and the station. Somewhere within that landscape, the blended name Burnaugh took hold.
By 1920, trains were carrying bodies there for burial. By the 1930s, newspapers routinely identified residents as being from Burnaugh. During World War II, pipelines connected the community to a growing natural gas system, and federal records even preserved evidence of a labor dispute involving Tennessee Gas. After the war, Compressor Station No. 14 placed Burnaugh in plans for a vast transmission network stretching toward New England.
That energy development brought new residents and helped produce Burnaugh Baptist Church in 1949. Then, in the 1960s, International Nickel began building a plant that pushed the community into another industrial era.
Each transformation followed the same narrow geography.
River. Railroad. Gas line. Highway. Factory.
Burnaugh never needed to become a large incorporated town to become important.
Why Burnaugh’s History Matters
Small communities are sometimes difficult to write about because they rarely leave behind a single collection labeled with their name. Burnaugh is a perfect example. Its history survives in a federal river survey that says Burgess Station, an obituary describing a train carrying a body home, cemetery surveys recording vanished families, church minutes remembering gas-company workers, federal pipeline applications measuring construction in feet and miles, and regulatory notices describing a new nickel plant along U.S. 23.
Taken separately, each source seems minor. Put together, they reveal more than a century of change.
Burnaugh illustrates how industrial Appalachia was built not only around famous coal camps, large factories, or railroad cities, but also through hundreds of small places positioned beside the infrastructure connecting them. National corporations and federal agencies may have viewed Burnaugh as a station, compressor site, pipeline crossing, or plant location. Residents experienced the same landscape as home.
The old names still help tell the story. Burgess Station recalls the railroad. Kavanaugh preserves the older Methodist settlement. Burnaugh itself joins the two. Tennessee Gas represents the postwar energy economy, while International Nickel and Special Metals carry the story into modern manufacturing.
Along the Big Sandy south of Catlettsburg, those layers remain close together. The trains, highway, industrial facilities, churches, cemeteries, and river all occupy the same narrow corridor that federal engineers were measuring more than a century ago.
Burnaugh may never have become the bustling town some residents imagined, but its history reveals something equally important. Sometimes the smallest places are the ones through which the largest systems pass.
Sources & Further Reading
United States War Department. Final Report on Survey of Big Sandy River, Kentucky and West Virginia, Including Levisa and Tug Forks. House Document 235, 56th Cong., 2nd sess. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1900. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/SERIALSET-04155_00_00-007-0235-0000/pdf/SERIALSET-04155_00_00-007-0235-0000.pdf. Pasted markdown
United States War Department. Preliminary Survey of the Big Sandy River, Kentucky and West Virginia, Including Levisa and Tug Forks. House Document 326, 56th Cong., 1st sess. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1900. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/SERIALSET-03980_00_00-002-0326-0000/pdf/SERIALSET-03980_00_00-002-0326-0000.pdf. Pasted markdown
“Andrew Jackson Havens.” Big Sandy News, February 27, 1920. Transcribed by Lawrence County Kentucky Genealogical and Historical Society. https://lckghs.com/index.php/en/obituaries?id=369&layout=edit.
“Miss Finney of Burnaugh.” Big Sandy News, April 7, 1922, 8. Library of Congress, Chronicling America. https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ndnp/kyu/batch_kyu_flamingo_ver01/data/sn83004226/0020219588A/1922040701/0709.pdf. Pasted markdown
“Sarah Preston.” Big Sandy News-Recorder, September 27, 1935. Transcribed by Lawrence County Kentucky Genealogical and Historical Society. https://lckghs.com/index.php/en/obituaries?id=379&layout=edit. Pasted markdown
Library of Congress. “Big Sandy News.” Chronicling America Historic American Newspapers. Accessed September 29, 2026. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83004226/.
United States Federal Power Commission. “Cincinnati Gas Transportation Co. et al.” Federal Register 9, no. 141, July 15, 1944. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-1944-07-15/pdf/FR-1944-07-15.pdf. Pasted markdown
National Archives and Records Administration. “Railway Transport Department Files, 1942–1946.” Record Group 219, Office of Defense Transportation. Includes file L-10-14, “Labor – strike at Tennessee, Gas and Transmission Company, Burnaugh, Kentucky.” https://www.archives.gov/atlanta/finding-aids/rg219-6925612.html. Pasted markdown
United States Federal Power Commission. “Tennessee Gas Transmission Co., Docket G-962.” Federal Register 12, no. 214, October 31, 1947. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-1947-10-31/pdf/FR-1947-10-31.pdf. The application identifies Compressor Station No. 14 near Burnaugh as a major junction in Tennessee Gas’s proposed northeastern expansion. GovInfo
Craft, Faye. “History of Burnaugh Baptist Church.” Prepared for the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of Burnaugh Baptist Church, 1974. Burnaugh Baptist Church. https://burnaughbaptist.org/about/. Pasted markdown
United States Geological Survey. Burnaugh Quadrangle, Kentucky. 7.5-minute topographic map, 1957. Robert M. Rennick Kentucky Place Name Collection, Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_maps_all/103/. Pasted markdown
Rennick, Robert M. Annotated Burnaugh Quadrangle map. Robert M. Rennick Kentucky Place Name Collection, Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_maps_c-e/.
Rennick, Robert M. Boyd County – Place Names. Robert M. Rennick Kentucky Place Name Collection, Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_ms_collection/36/. Pasted markdown
Rennick, Robert M. Kentucky Place Names. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984. https://www.kentuckypress.com/9780813101798/kentucky-place-names/. Pasted markdown
Morehead State University. “Robert M. Rennick Kentucky Place Name Collection.” Morehead State University Digital Archives. Accessed September 29, 2026. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/robert_rennick_collection/. Pasted markdown
Boyd County Public Library. Boyd County Cemetery Survey. Boyd County Public Library, Winder Room for Genealogy and Local History. https://www.thebookplace.org/media/document/173. The survey includes the Newman Cemetery at Burnaugh and records connected with Kavanaugh Chapel. Pasted markdown
Kentucky Historical Society Cemetery Project. Cemetery readings for Boyd County, Kentucky, 1960s–1970s. Incorporated into the Boyd County Public Library cemetery collection. https://www.thebookplace.org/media/document/173.
Vanhorn, Mary Stewart. “History of Kavanaugh Chapel United Methodist.” Manuscript, Boyd County Public Library, Winder Room for Genealogy and Local History. Referenced in the Boyd County cemetery survey. https://www.thebookplace.org/media/document/173. Pasted markdown
Boyd County Public Library. “Genealogy and Local History.” Winder Room for Genealogy and Local History. Accessed September 29, 2026. https://www.thebookplace.org/index.php/research-learn/genealogy-local-history. Pasted markdown
Boyd County Public Library. “Boyd County Cemeteries Database.” Accessed September 29, 2026. https://db.thebookplace.org/about-the-databases/. Pasted markdown
Works Progress Administration. “Boyd County – General History.” 1940. County Histories of Kentucky. Morehead State University Digital Archives. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/313/. Pasted markdown
Ashland Daily Independent. “200 Years: A Bicentennial Tribute to Northeastern Kentucky.” July 4, 1976. Morehead State University Digital Archives. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/88/. Pasted markdown
Boyd County Clerk. “Clerk’s Office.” Boyd County, Kentucky. Accessed September 29, 2026. https://boyd.kycountyclerk.us/. Pasted markdown
Boyd County Property Valuation Administrator. “Property Valuation.” Boyd County, Kentucky. Accessed September 29, 2026. https://boydcountyky.gov/203/Property-Valuation. Pasted markdown
United States Federal Power Commission. “United Fuel Gas Co., Docket CP65-207.” Federal Register 30, 1965. Federal records identify natural gas service for International Nickel Company’s new plant being constructed at Burnaugh, Boyd County. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-1965-09-04/pdf/FR-1965-09-04.pdf. GovInfo
United States Interstate Commerce Commission. “Motor Carrier Applications and Certain Other Proceedings.” Federal Register 34, no. 44, March 6, 1969. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/99/Federal_Register_1969-03-06-_Vol_34_Iss_44_%28IA_sim_federal-register-find_1969-03-06_34_44%29.pdf. Pasted markdown
United States Environmental Protection Agency. “Toxic Release Inventory Geographic Reports: INCO Alloys International Inc., Burnaugh, Kentucky.” EPA National Service Center for Environmental Publications. https://nepis.epa.gov/Exe/ZyPURL.cgi?Dockey=940095CX.TXT. Pasted markdown
United States Environmental Protection Agency. “Huntington Alloys/INCO, Burnaugh, Boyd County, Kentucky.” Superfund Enterprise Management System Public Access. https://semspub.epa.gov/src/document/HQ/406253. Pasted markdown
Chesapeake & Ohio Historical Society. “Archives and Collections.” Accessed September 29, 2026. https://cohs.org/archives/. The collection includes company engineering records, employee timetables, maps, photographs, annual reports, and materials useful for researching Burgess Station and the Big Sandy corridor. Pasted markdown
Spencer, Frank D. Geology of the Boltsfork Quadrangle and Part of the Burnaugh Quadrangle, Kentucky. Geologic Quadrangle Map GQ-316. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1964. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/gq316. USGS Publications
United States Department of Agriculture, Soil Conservation Service. Soil Survey of Boyd and Greenup Counties, Kentucky. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1979. This is particularly useful for the physical landscape, floodplain, land use, woodland, agriculture, and development surrounding Burnaugh. Pasted markdown
Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. Boyd County Highway Map. Frankfort: Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. https://transportation.ky.gov/Program-Management/Six%20Year%20Plan%20Maps/boyd.pdf. Pasted markdown
Kentucky Historical Society. “Library Catalog and Research Tools.” Accessed September 29, 2026. https://history.ky.gov/explore/catalog-research-tools/library-catalog. Pasted markdown
Field, Thomas P. A Guide to Kentucky Place Names. Lexington: Kentucky Geological Survey, 1961. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED352064.pdf.
Author Note: Burnaugh’s story survives less through a single town archive than through railroad surveys, church histories, federal energy records, cemeteries, and industrial documents. I hope this article helps preserve how a small Boyd County community became connected to transportation, natural gas, and manufacturing networks far beyond the Big Sandy Valley.