Appalachian Community Histories – Fourmile, Bell County: Belva Mine, Lone Jack, and a Cumberland River Coal Community
Fourmile sits in Bell County, Kentucky, northwest of Pineville, in the valley country where the Cumberland River, coal seams, roads, schools, and rail lines shaped daily life. In official and map-based records, it appears as a populated place associated with the Pineville U.S. Geological Survey map. Modern gazetteer data places Fourmile at latitude 36.793 and longitude -83.742, while also tying it to Bell County and the Pineville USGS map sheet.
The name appears both as Fourmile and Four Mile. That small spelling difference matters because older photographs, mining records, and disaster indexes often use “Four Mile,” while modern school and postal references tend to use “Fourmile.” The place itself is the same community, remembered in the records as a coal town, railroad station, post office, school district, and river settlement.
Fourmile’s history is not preserved in one single town history. It has to be pieced together from post office studies, USGS maps, school records, mine disaster listings, Russell Lee photographs, utility records, and local memory. That is common for Appalachian coal communities. Some places left behind city council minutes and formal histories. Others left behind post office dates, maps, photographs, school yearbooks, mine reports, grave markers, and the memories of families who stayed.
The Name and the Post Office
One of the clearest documentary anchors for Fourmile is its post office. Robert M. Rennick’s survey of Bell County post offices identifies Fourmile as a post office community. The Morehead State University record for Rennick’s work describes it as a historical survey of Bell County post offices, and the indexed text for the study gives Fourmile’s establishment date as December 16, 1899, with Edward L. Shell as postmaster.
The meaning of the name is less certain. The most common explanations point either to the community’s distance from Pineville or to nearby Fourmile Creek. In either case, the name belongs to the kind of practical Appalachian geography that marked a place by distance, water, or local use before it became fixed in official records.
A post office did more than handle mail. In small mountain communities, it helped define a place. It gave people a mailing address, a point of contact, and a name that could appear in government documents, newspapers, family letters, mining correspondence, and school records. Fourmile’s post office date places the community firmly in the turn-of-the-century period when Bell County was being reshaped by coal, railroads, timber, and new settlement patterns.
Coal, Rail, and the Shape of the Community
Fourmile’s story belongs to the coalfield edge of Bell County. The community stood near the Cumberland River and within reach of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad network that helped tie Pineville and the surrounding coal camps to larger markets. In the historical record, Fourmile appears as a coal town and railroad station as much as a residential community.
That railroad connection mattered. Coal towns did not grow only because coal was under the hills. They grew because coal could be moved. Tracks, tipples, company houses, schools, stores, and roads became part of the same landscape. The mountains supplied coal, but the railroad made coal a business that could organize whole communities around extraction.
USGS mapping helps explain why Fourmile developed where it did. The Pineville quadrangle and related geologic work place the community in a landscape of river valleys, ridges, and coal-bearing formations. A 1974 USGS publication by A. J. Froelich and James Tazelaar mapped the Pineville quadrangle in Bell and Knox Counties, giving researchers a geological framework for understanding the area around Fourmile, Pineville, Straight Creek, and the Cumberland River.
For Fourmile, geography was not background. It was destiny. The river shaped movement. The railroad shaped industry. The coal seams shaped work. The narrow valleys shaped where people could build houses, schools, roads, and churches.
Belva No. 1 and the Disaster of 1945
The darkest and most historically documented chapter in Fourmile’s story is the Belva No. 1 mine disaster. Mining disaster indexes list the Belva No. 1 explosion at Fourmile on December 26, 1945. The Denver Public Library’s United States Mining Disasters Index lists Fourmile, Kentucky, Belva No. 1, dated December 26, 1945, with 25 deaths.
That date came one day after Christmas. For the families of Fourmile, the disaster was not an abstract entry in a mining index. It was a break in household life. Men went into the mine and did not come home. Women became widows. Children lost fathers. Families waited for news while rescue efforts and official investigations moved through the slow, terrible process that followed mine explosions.
KYGenWeb’s Kentucky mining accident compilation also lists the December 26, 1945 Belva No. 1 explosion at Fourmile in Bell County, with 25 deaths. That list is best treated as a finding aid, not the final authority, but it matches the broader disaster indexing and points researchers toward deeper federal, state, and newspaper records.
The Belva disaster places Fourmile within the wider history of Appalachian mine safety. Mine explosions were not only industrial events. They were family events, church events, school events, and community events. Every death moved outward through kinship networks. Every injury changed a household economy. Every sealed mine entrance became part of the memory of a place.
Russell Lee Comes to Fourmile
Fourmile’s most powerful surviving historical record may be visual. In 1946, photographer Russell Lee documented coal communities for the Solid Fuels Administration for War. The National Archives explains that Lee went into coal communities in 13 states, including Kentucky, as part of a survey connected to the Department of the Interior and the United Mine Workers of America.
The National Archives exhibition Power & Light describes the survey as a nationwide look at housing, medical, and community facilities in bituminous coal mining communities. These photographs were not casual snapshots. They were part of a federal effort to document conditions in coal communities after years of labor conflict, wartime production, and public concern about miners’ lives.
Fourmile appears repeatedly in this collection because of the Kentucky Straight Creek Coal Company’s Belva Mine. One National Archives caption identifies miners’ wives and children on the porch of a typical fifty-year-old house at the Belva Mine in Four Mile, Bell County, after the mine had been abandoned following the December 1945 explosion.
Lee’s Fourmile photographs show the community after disaster, but they also show ordinary life. They show houses, porches, kitchens, children, widows, water sources, schoolrooms, and the spaces where mining families lived when the mine was no longer producing. The National Archives checklist for the Power & Light exhibit includes an abandoned tipple of the Belva Mine, miners’ wives and children on a porch, Mrs. Edna Lingar getting wash water from a polluted stream, overcrowded schoolrooms, a widow at a kitchen window, children looking through a window with no panes, and children walking along railroad tracks to their homes and lunches.
Those images are difficult records. They document poverty, danger, and neglect, but they also preserve names, faces, homes, and the human dignity of people who might otherwise have appeared in history only as statistics. Fourmile is remembered through them not only as a mine disaster site, but as a living community of families.
Houses, Water, and the Human Cost of Coal
The Russell Lee captions are especially important because they record details that ordinary mining reports often miss. One caption describes Mrs. Edna Lingar getting wash water from a dirty stream where livestock waded, privies drained, garbage decayed, and a dead animal lay upstream. Another describes children in the Monroe Jones house looking through a kitchen window with no panes and no doors in the frames, with quilts and boxes used for winter protection.
These details show what coalfield life could mean beyond the wage statement. A miner’s pay mattered, but so did rent, water, sanitation, school conditions, disability, and the ability of a widow to remain in a company house after a husband’s death. The Fourmile photographs make those conditions visible.
They also complicate simple memory. Coal communities were not only places of hardship. They were places of family, church, school, sports, gardens, music, work, and neighborly care. But the hardship was real, and it was often built into the structure of company life. The houses, water, and schoolrooms at Fourmile were part of the same system that sent men underground.
Lone Jack and Upper Four Mile
Fourmile’s history is also tied to Lone Jack. School history gives the community another documentary trail outside the mines. A Bell County school history states that the Lone Jack District became independent in 1923, voted bonds in 1927 to build part of the school plant, added four high school rooms in 1932, added a gym in 1937, and merged the Upper Four Mile Independent Graded School with Lone Jack that same year.
This matters because schools are some of the strongest anchors of community identity in mountain places. A school district could bring together families from creek roads, coal camps, farms, and river settlements. It gave children a shared identity beyond the mine where their fathers worked or the hollow where their families lived.
The same school history described Lone Jack as a civic-minded school community with churches, a basketball tradition, modern equipment for its time, and a district population of about 3,500. That language reflects the pride Appalachian communities often placed in their schools. Even when coal companies and outside observers defined a place by its mines, residents often defined it by its school, church, teams, teachers, and families.
That educational connection continues into the present. Lone Jack School Center’s official contact page places the school at 101 Creech Hollow Road, Fourmile, Kentucky. The National Center for Education Statistics also lists Lone Jack School Center at that Fourmile address within Bell County.
The Pineville Generating Station and the River
Fourmile also belongs to the industrial history of the Cumberland River. Near the community stood Kentucky Utilities’ former Pineville Generating Station. An EPA ash pond inspection report described the Pineville Generating Station as located approximately five miles northwest of Pineville and noted that its last operational unit, Unit 3, was retired in 2001.
The plant is another reminder that Bell County coal did not only leave the mountains by rail. It also helped produce electricity. Coal mined from Appalachian seams fed homes, businesses, factories, and towns far beyond the coal camps themselves. The generating station tied the river landscape around Fourmile to a larger story of power production and industrial growth.
In 2025, LG&E and KU announced the removal of a century-old low-head dam at the former Pineville Generating Station site at Fourmile. The company stated that the dam had been installed in 1924 as part of plant operations to maintain water levels, that the plant was decommissioned in 2001, and that the site was later demolished and converted into green space in 2020.
That removal changed the river landscape again. For decades, the dam had been part of the industrial river. Its removal marked a different chapter, one focused on restoring natural flow, improving aquatic habitat, and making the river safer for recreation. Fourmile’s history, then, reaches from coal extraction to power generation to environmental restoration.
Remembering Fourmile
Fourmile is easy to miss if a person looks only for incorporated towns, courthouse records, or large written histories. But when the records are gathered together, the community becomes much clearer. It was a named place on the map, a post office, a railroad station, a coal town, a school community, a disaster site, a subject of federal photography, and part of the industrial river history of Bell County.
Its history is held in fragments. Rennick gives the post office. USGS maps give the geography. Mining disaster indexes give the date and death toll of Belva No. 1. Russell Lee’s photographs give faces and rooms and porches. Bell County school history gives Lone Jack and Upper Four Mile. EPA and utility records give the story of the generating station and the dam.
Together, those fragments tell the story of a community shaped by work, loss, education, water, coal, and memory. Fourmile was never only a dot on the Pineville map. It was a place where families waited for mail, children walked to school, miners crossed between home and work, widows held households together, and the Cumberland River carried the long history of Bell County past the old coal and power sites.
Sources & Further Reading
Rennick, Robert M. “Bell County: Post Offices.” County Histories of Kentucky. Morehead State University, 2000. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/383/
Rennick, Robert M. Kentucky Place Names. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984. https://www.kentuckypress.com/9780813101798/kentucky-place-names/
Morehead State University. “Robert M. Rennick Kentucky Place Name Collection.” ScholarWorks at Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/robert_rennick_collection/
U.S. Geological Survey. “Geographic Names Information System.” https://www.usgs.gov/tools/geographic-names-information-system-gnis
U.S. Geological Survey. “TopoView.” National Geologic Map Database. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/topoview/
U.S. Geological Survey. “Topographic Maps.” National Geospatial Program. https://www.usgs.gov/programs/national-geospatial-program/topographic-maps
Froelich, A. J., and James Tazelaar. “Geologic Map of the Pineville Quadrangle, Bell and Knox Counties, Kentucky.” U.S. Geological Survey, Geologic Quadrangle 1129, 1974. https://www.usgs.gov/publications/geologic-map-pineville-quadrangle-bell-and-knox-counties-kentucky
HomeTownLocator. “Fourmile Populated Place Profile, Bell County, Kentucky.” https://kentucky.hometownlocator.com/ky/bell/fourmile.cfm
YellowMaps. “Fourmile Map, Bell County, Kentucky.” https://www.yellowmaps.com/usgs/topo.cfm?map=ky-492381-fourmile
National Archives. “Power & Light: Russell Lee’s Coal Survey.” https://www.archives.gov/press/press-kits/power-and-light
National Archives Museum. “Power & Light: Russell Lee’s Coal Survey.” https://visit.archives.gov/whats-on/explore-exhibits/power-light-russell-lees-coal-survey
National Archives Museum. “Russell Lee: Home.” https://visit.archives.gov/galleries/russell-lee-home
National Archives Museum. “Power & Light Photo List.” https://museum.archives.gov/sites/default/files/2024-04/power-light-photo-list.pdf
National Archives Catalog. “Miners’ Wives and Children on the Front Porch of a Typical, Fifty Year Old House. Kentucky Straight Creek Coal Company, Belva Mine.” https://catalog.archives.gov/id/541201
National Archives Catalog. “Children of Miners Look Out the Kitchen Window of the Monroe Jones House. Kentucky Straight Creek Coal Company, Belva Mine.” https://catalog.archives.gov/id/541187
National Archives Catalog. “Forty Seven Pupils in the Second, Third and Fourth Grades Attended School in This One Room with One Teacher.” https://catalog.archives.gov/id/541273
National Archives Catalog. “Boys of Miners in the First Grade. Kentucky Straight Creek Coal Company, Belva Mine.” https://catalog.archives.gov/id/541225
National Archives Catalog. “Houses of Miners. Kentucky Straight Creek Coal Company, Belva Mine.” https://catalog.archives.gov/id/541239
DocsTeach. “Oliver Hinkle, Disabled Miner, Washing His Hands in the Kitchen.” National Archives. https://docsteach.org/document/oliver-hinkle-disabled-miner-washing-hands/
Denver Public Library. United States Mining Disasters Index. https://history.denverlibrary.org/sites/history/files/USDisasterIndexFINAL.pdf
KYGenWeb. “Mining Accidents in Kentucky.” https://kygenweb.net/johnson/MineAcc.htm
KYGenWeb. “History of Bell County Schools.” https://kygenweb.net/bell/books/History_Bell_1/Chapter_XIV_XV.htm
Fuson, Henry Harvey. History of Bell County, Kentucky, Volume II. KYGenWeb transcription. https://kygenweb.net/bell/area/bell_history2.htm
Lone Jack School Center. “Contact Us.” Bell County Schools. https://ljsc.bell.kyschools.us/our-school/contact-us
National Center for Education Statistics. “Lone Jack School Center.” https://nces.ed.gov/ccd/schoolsearch/school_list.asp?DistrictID=2100390&Search=1
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Ash Pond Inspection Report: Pineville Generating Station, Kentucky Utilities Company. 2011. https://www3.epa.gov/epawaste/coal/pdf/ku-pineville-final.pdf
LG&E and KU. “Cumberland River at Fourmile Returns to Its Natural Flow After More Than a Century.” September 8, 2025. https://lge-ku.com/newsroom/press-releases/2025/09/08/cumberland-river-fourmile-returns-its-natural-flow-after-more
Kentucky Geological Survey. “Georeferenced Map Imagery, Maps and GIS Products.” University of Kentucky. https://www.uky.edu/KGS/gis/mapimages.htm
Kentucky Geological Survey. State Department of Mines Annual Report, 1925. https://kgs.uky.edu/kgsweb/olops/pub/general/jonesminereport1925.pdf
Kentucky Geological Survey. Annual Report, 1928. https://kgs.uky.edu/kgsweb/olops/pub/general/DanielReportMines1928.pdf
Find a Grave. “Four Mile Cemetery, Fourmile, Bell County, Kentucky.” https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/2345583/four-mile-cemetery
Find a Grave. “Bain Cemetery, Fourmile, Bell County, Kentucky.” https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/2251719/bain-cemetery
LDS Genealogy. “Bell County, Kentucky Cemetery Records.” https://ldsgenealogy.com/KY/Bell-County-Cemetery-Records.htm
FamilySearch. “Bain Cemetery, Fourmile, Bell, Kentucky, United States.” https://www.familysearch.org/en/cemeteries/sites/92145/bain-cemetery
Appalachian Regional Commission. “Appalachian Counties Served by ARC.” https://www.arc.gov/appalachian-counties-served-by-arc/
Author Note: Fourmile is one of those Bell County communities whose story survives in pieces, through maps, post office records, school history, mine disaster records, and Russell Lee’s photographs. I wanted this article to bring those pieces together so the community is remembered as more than a dot on the Pineville map.