Appalachian Community Histories – Garner, Boyd County: Poor House Fork, Iron Ore, Folk Songs, and Life Along the Creek
Garner is the kind of eastern Kentucky community whose history is easier to find in creek names, court orders, family papers, and old roads than in the records of any incorporated town. The name survives today in southern Boyd County, where Kentucky Route 854 passes through Garner and Kentucky Route 1945 ends there, but the older community spread along Garner Creek and its branches, including the hollow later known successively as Poor House Fork and Long Branch. The Kentucky Transportation Cabinet still uses Garner as a geographic reference, while a 1905 map from George F. Cram’s Ideal Reference Atlas placed Garner on the Boyd County landscape alongside Rush, Boltsfork, Coalton, and Mavity.
This is not the Garner in Knott County on the Left Fork of Troublesome Creek. Boyd County’s Garner has a considerably older documentary trail. Newspapers were already referring to the “Garner section” in the early 1870s, and by the 1890s local correspondence appeared under the heading “Garner, Ky.” Its story reaches through the iron industry, the Civil War era, subscription schools, farming, the county poor farm, blacksmith shops, family cemeteries, folk music, and the public works of the Great Depression.
What survives is not the history of a large town. It is the history of an Appalachian neighborhood that changed names without disappearing.
Garner Before Boyd County
The political boundaries around Garner changed before the community itself acquired a stable place in the records. Boyd County was organized in 1860 from portions of Carter, Greenup, and Lawrence counties, which means anyone looking for Garner’s earliest families has to follow records backward across county lines. The Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives identifies Boyd as Kentucky’s 107th county, created in 1860 with Catlettsburg as the county seat.
Local research built from early tax records, deeds, cemetery evidence, and court orders shows families settling along what became Garner Creek and Long Branch well before the Civil War. Names including Hood, Howe, Banfield, Ross, Sexton, Mayhew, and later Klaiber became closely associated with the hollow. Cemeteries scattered across the ridges preserved that settlement pattern even when houses, schools, and farm buildings disappeared.
Road records provide some of the clearest evidence of how isolated the community could be. In December 1865, the newly established Boyd County Court appointed Hiram Gallion to examine a road running “from the forks of Garner Creek to the Carter line.” The route followed the creek country toward Carter County, while travel farther toward Denton still depended heavily upon woodland paths and mule trails.
Within only a few years, the Garner name had become recognizable enough to require little explanation. A death notice drawn from the Big Sandy Herald reported on November 5, 1872, that Col. Bryant Fannin “of the Garner section” had died suddenly at his home, describing him as one of the earliest settlers of Boyd County. That small notice is important because it shows Garner functioning as a locally understood geographic identity by the early 1870s.
Iron in the Hills Above Garner
Before coal came to dominate the popular image of eastern Kentucky industry, northeastern Kentucky belonged to the Hanging Rock iron region. Furnaces consumed enormous quantities of timber for charcoal while miners and farmers extracted iron ore from hillsides throughout Boyd, Greenup, and Carter counties.
Garner sat close to that economy. Sandy Furnace, west of the community near Bolts Fork, was constructed in 1853 by Young, Foster and Company. The Kentucky Historical Society’s marker records a stone stack originally about thirty-two feet high and states that the furnace produced approximately 1,000 tons of iron in 1854, all of which had to be transported overland toward the Big Sandy River.
The Kentucky Geological Survey continued documenting the region after Boyd County was formed. Its 1876 Reports of Progress included an entire study of the iron ores of Greenup, Boyd, and Carter counties as well as a separate report on iron manufacture in the Kentucky portion of the Hanging Rock region.
Local research places some of the ore workings directly on ridges connected with Garner. Accounts connected with the Howe property describe ore being removed from the hills and hauled toward Bolts Fork, and old trenches were still visible above the Klaiber Cemetery generations later. A haul road through what became known as Marcum Hollow may also have provided a route across the ridge. Although the exact workings are difficult to reconstruct from surviving records, the larger industrial context is clear. Garner’s farms were not isolated from the furnace economy. The hills themselves were part of it.
Schools, Roads, and a Community Taking Shape
For children in nineteenth-century Garner, formal education first developed on the community level rather than through a centralized school system. Local families pooled money for subscription schools, hiring teachers for short terms when enough funds could be collected.
Research into Long Branch identifies an early school at Green Hill and records that in December 1869 Chrisley Banfield and other residents agreed to employ James W. Mullan as a subscription teacher. A one-room Long Branch School later operated on land connected with George W. Ross and Henry Powell Sexton. The school itself was eventually moved, and surviving recollections identify teachers who served the neighborhood through the first half of the twentieth century. Garner School opened in 1957, carrying the old community name into a new educational era.
Church meetings and social gatherings bound the scattered farms together in much the same way. The Ashland Republican of April 27, 1893, published a column headed “Garner, Ky.” that named Sude Ross, Olive Hazlett, Rany Klaiber, Demmie Mayhew, Lade Sexton, and Gracie Davis among those attending a Methodist quarterly meeting. Other notices in the same Garner correspondence recorded illness, visits, and weekend guests. It was the ordinary material of community journalism, yet those few lines preserve something valuable. By 1893 Garner was not simply the name of a creek. It was a neighborhood whose residents identified themselves with the place.
The Boyd County Poor Farm on Garner Creek
The most substantial institution ever established in the Garner community began with one of the most difficult responsibilities of nineteenth-century county government: caring for people who could no longer support themselves.
During Boyd County’s first decade, the county generally paid private households to care for individual residents classified in the language of the period as paupers. Court orders recorded payments for food, lodging, medical treatment, and other necessities. By 1870 officials were searching for a more centralized solution.
Chrisley Perry Banfield was appointed to help purchase 118 acres from William Lewis Geiger for a county poor farm. A deed was prepared on February 28, 1870, describing the land as being on a fork of Garner Creek. That branch soon became known as Poor House Fork. County officials arranged construction while the land was temporarily rented so the farm could remain productive.
James Clay completed the first main house during the summer of 1870 for $594. Officials ordered additional work, including a kitchen, upper-story windows, stairs, and a well. John Higgins became the first superintendent and received one dollar per day. Furniture, medical care, food, burial clothing, coffins, and other expenses passed through the county court.
The surviving record is especially revealing because it contains the names and voices of people who otherwise would have nearly disappeared from history. In September 1870, Boyd County Sheriff J. C. Eastham reported gathering several people and delivering them to the poor house. Others refused to go. Sally Sammons, according to the sheriff’s report, insisted that she was capable of supporting herself and her children, and Eastham left her alone. Ned Norris also refused. The document turns what might appear to be a simple county institution into a much more complicated story about poverty, independence, race, old age, family responsibility, and the power of local government.
Deaths soon created another permanent feature of the Garner landscape. William France received burial clothing and a coffin paid for by the county and may have been among the earliest people buried in the poor-farm cemetery. James Bartram died soon afterward. Over the following decades, other residents were buried on the hill near the home, many apparently beneath unmarked fieldstones.
Life Inside the Poor House
The Garner poor farm operated for nearly four decades, and its surviving records show an institution that was never static. Superintendents changed. Buildings were repaired or replaced. Local farmers provided meat, timber, furniture, and labor. Residents worked where they were able, while physicians were paid to treat the sick.
A fire in the late 1870s destroyed the earlier buildings, according to a detailed reconstruction of the Long Branch community from county records and family material. A new two-story log structure followed, with local men including William Banfield, John Andrew Klaiber, and William J. Ross participating in construction.
County regulations gradually became more detailed. By the 1890s, the keeper was expected to provide horses or mules, wagons, farm tools, dairy cattle, proper bedding, food, clothing, clean rooms, and medical notification when residents became ill. Death brought another obligation. The keeper was to obtain burial clothing and provide what county rules described as humane interment.
Conditions still drew criticism. Charitable women from Ashland who visited the institution during the early twentieth century became concerned about children living there, including children with disabilities who they believed should be placed in more appropriate institutions or homes. Their records also preserve the scale of the Garner home. Twenty-eight residents received Christmas gifts in 1906, and twenty-nine were reported the following year.
The poor farm therefore occupied an unusual position in Garner. It was a county institution, but it was also tied closely to neighborhood life. Local people worked there, supplied it, visited it, buried its dead, and traveled the road that took its name from it. Long after the county stopped operating the property, census takers and residents continued calling the route Poor House Road or Poor House Fork.
Molasses, Blacksmiths, Floods, and Farm Life
Most Garner residents did not live inside the county institution. Their world was one of small farms, livestock, gardens, timber, family labor, mills, and the constant demands created by the creek and surrounding hills.
Newspaper correspondents occasionally captured that life. In 1883 the Independent reported that the Sexton family was producing around 1,000 gallons of molasses at a new mill. Another item joked about barrels of molasses traveling “down Garner” during high water. The stories may sound small compared with elections, wars, and industrial development, but they reveal how a rural household economy worked. Sorghum, livestock, blacksmithing, timber, and crops circulated through networks of neighbors whose farms were connected by a road that could become difficult or impossible after heavy rain.
Flooding was nothing new. Henry Powell Sexton wrote a family letter on May 2, 1880, mentioning both a severe hailstorm and very high water. More than a century later, flooding remained part of life on the same road.
By the early twentieth century, James Matthew Klaiber operated a blacksmith shop in the community. His surviving ledger from 1902 through 1906 is one of Garner’s most unusual historical sources. Blacksmith account books can preserve a rural economy at ground level, showing customers, repairs, farm equipment, horses, wagon work, and money changing hands in a place that left relatively few commercial records. Klaiber even subscribed to American Blacksmith, connecting his small Boyd County shop to a broader professional trade.
One Sheet of Paper From 1923
Perhaps no record brings old Garner closer than a battered sheet of paper discovered among Sexton and Klaiber family possessions.
Written in blue ink on the back of a NeedleCraft Magazine form letter, the document has been identified through its contents as a 1923 diary kept by Julina Leota Sexton Horton Klaiber. The sheet survived in an old smokehouse on family property in the area remembered as Big Garner.
The entries are brief, but together they rebuild a year. Babies were born. Neighbors died. School closed and later reopened. Family members came to visit. Marriages took place. A horse fell on Julina. She recorded President Warren G. Harding’s death in August. She noted the death of four-year-old Martha Edith Lucas after the child’s clothing caught fire. Other entries were simply names, dates, burials, arrivals, and departures.
There is almost nothing dramatic about most of it, which is precisely why the diary matters. County histories usually preserve judges, industries, elections, and major institutions. Julina’s paper preserves what people in Garner actually talked about from week to week: who was sick, who had a baby, who married, who came home, when school began, and who had died.
Jean Thomas and the Birth of a Folk Festival
Garner’s most unexpected connection to a wider American cultural story came after the poor farm closed.
In 1909 Boyd County sold the old Garner poor-farm property to Burns Banfield for $1,500 and transferred the residents to a newer county home at Winslow. They traveled by wagon from Poor House Fork across the hills to Rush Station, then boarded the Ashland Coal and Iron Railway for the trip to their new home. Nearly forty years of institutional life on Garner Creek had ended.
Yet the old log property soon became connected with Jean Thomas, the eastern Kentucky writer, photographer, promoter, and folklorist known as the “Traipsin’ Woman.”
The exact chronology is complicated by the way Thomas herself developed and publicized the festival. A detailed local reconstruction based on newspaper reports and Banfield family material places an October 1930 musical gathering in a log building on the former poor-farm property, rented from Burns Banfield. Jilson Setters and New York singer Dorothy Gordon were among the featured performers.
The broader archival record confirms the importance of 1930. The University of Louisville’s Jean Thomas collection identifies a first American Folk Song Festival connected with Thomas’s Traipsin’ Woman Cabin in Boyd County around 1930, and another archival description records Thomas meeting Susan Steele Sampson at the Kentucky governor’s mansion in August 1931 after Sampson had attended Thomas’s first festival the previous year. They discussed organizing an American Folk Song Society and creating an annual event open to the public.
By 1932, photographs show Thomas outside a cabin carrying a banner for the “Second American Folk Song Festival.” The University of Louisville now preserves more than a thousand images in the Jean Thomas collection, including musicians, cabins, instruments, performers, and scenes from the festival’s long history.
The Alan Lomax Kentucky Recordings project likewise identifies Thomas’s festival as a Boyd County event beginning in 1930 and documents musicians she recruited to perform there. The festival presented dulcimers, fiddles, guitars, banjos, ballads, hymns, dances, and carefully staged images of mountain culture to audiences from outside the region.
For a brief moment, a hollow once associated with Boyd County’s poorest residents became part of a national movement to collect, interpret, and sometimes romanticize Appalachian folk culture.
The WPA Comes to Garner
The Great Depression brought another federal presence into the community.
A Kentucky Heritage Council study of New Deal construction preserves a historic photograph captioned “Steel arch on Garner Road built by the WPA.” The Garner Road Arch was described as a small poured-concrete bridge or culvert constructed around a semicircular steel pipe, with an estimated span of approximately ten feet. Investigators later traveled Garner Road attempting to locate it but concluded that the structure may have been replaced.
The bridge was part of a larger transformation of rural roads. Local history also records a rock crusher operating in the Garner area during the WPA period, using stone from a quarry on former Sexton property to improve roads. The quarry remained useful to county road work into the 1940s.
Even as the roadway improved, the old poor-farm name lingered. The 1940 census still identified the road as “Poor House.” Later road improvements, creek alterations, power lines, telephones, dairies, and new housing gradually changed the landscape, but older names survived in deeds and memory.
Garner on the Map
Garner never needed incorporation to exist.
George F. Cram placed it on a Boyd County map in 1905. Later United States Geological Survey mapping continued to recognize the community, and modern mapping locates Garner on the Boltsfork quadrangle. Kentucky’s current highway records still direct KY 854 through Rush and Garner and identify KY 1945 as terminating at KY 854 at Garner.
The road names changed from an unnamed branch to Poor House Fork, Poor House Road, and Long Branch. Schools opened and closed. The iron furnace ceased operating. The blacksmith shop went quiet. The county moved its poor farm. Jean Thomas carried her festival elsewhere. The WPA bridge may be gone.
Garner remained.
Why Garner’s History Matters
Small Appalachian communities are often easiest to lose because they rarely leave behind a single archive labeled with their name. Their history becomes divided among courthouse books, census pages, tax rolls, newspaper columns, graveyards, family letters, diaries, photographs, road maps, and stories handed down inside the families who stayed.
Garner is unusually fortunate. Enough of those pieces survive to reconstruct a community that was connected to nearly every major transition in Boyd County’s rural history.
Its hills supplied ore during the iron era. Its men maintained roads and registered during the Civil War period. Its families built subscription schools and sent neighborhood news to Ashland newspapers. Its farmers raised livestock, made molasses, cut timber, and endured the flooding of Garner Creek. Its blacksmith recorded the workings of a rural economy one repair at a time. Its poor farm became home to some of Boyd County’s most vulnerable people, including men, women, children, the elderly, and people with disabilities. Decades later, a log cabin associated with the same landscape became part of Jean Thomas’s effort to turn eastern Kentucky folk music into a public festival.
One fragile diary page from 1923 recorded births and deaths. One 1893 newspaper column preserved the names of young women visiting a Methodist meeting. One 1872 obituary casually referred to the “Garner section,” assuming readers already knew where it was.
Taken together, those records tell us what a map alone cannot.
Garner was never simply a dot in southern Boyd County. It was a network of families, farms, roads, graves, institutions, music, and memory built around a creek, a hollow, and the people who called them home.
Sources & Further Reading
Boyd County, Kentucky. County Court Order Books, beginning 1860. Boyd County Clerk’s Office, Catlettsburg, Kentucky. https://boyd.kycountyclerk.us/
Boyd County, Kentucky. Deed Books, including books 4, 12, 17, 25, 26, 28, 47, 50, 57, and 61. Boyd County Clerk’s Office, Catlettsburg, Kentucky. https://boyd.kycountyclerk.us/
Boyd County, Kentucky. Fiscal Court Order Books, including books 2, 3, 6, 7, and 8. Boyd County Clerk’s Office, Catlettsburg, Kentucky. https://boyd.kycountyclerk.us/
United States Census Office. Tenth Census of the United States, 1880: Kentucky, Boyd County. Washington, DC, 1880. National Archives and Records Administration. 1880 Census microfilm catalog
Ashland Republican. “Garner, Ky.” April 27, 1893. Transcribed in Teresa Martin Klaiber, “Secrets & Clues From the Smokehouse,” Genealogy Pilgrimage & Stories Along the Way, October 20, 2020. Transcription and source discussion
The Big Sandy News. Louisa, Kentucky, 1885–1929. Chronicling America, Library of Congress. Library of Congress collection
Klaiber, Teresa Martin. “A Brief History of Long Branch Road Rush, KY.” Genealogy Pilgrimage & Stories Along the Way, September 19, 2016. A Brief History of Long Branch Road
Klaiber, Teresa Martin. “Boyd County Kentucky Monographs I: ‘Poor’ Folks.” Genealogy Pilgrimage & Stories Along the Way, April 5, 2020. Originally published in Boyd County Kentucky Monographs I, 2004. Boyd County Poor House history
Klaiber, Teresa Martin, trans. and annot. “Garner, Boyd County, KY 1923 Diary Entries.” Genealogy Pilgrimage & Stories Along the Way, June 15, 2010. 1923 Garner diary
Klaiber, Teresa Martin, trans. “The Epworth Herald June 10, 1900.” Genealogy Pilgrimage & Stories Along the Way, August 12, 2024. Original manuscript in the compiler’s collection. The Epworth Herald transcription
Klaiber, Teresa Martin, trans. “Saving Voices Part 4.” Genealogy Pilgrimage & Stories Along the Way, June 2, 2011. Oral-history recording made on Big Garner, Boyd County, Kentucky, 1978. Saving Voices Part 4
Klaiber, Teresa Martin. Boyd County, Kentucky Cemeteries Location Guide. Revised March 2009. KYGenWeb. Boyd County Cemetery Location Guide
Cram, George F. Cram’s Ideal Reference Atlas. Chicago: George F. Cram, 1905. Boyd County, Kentucky map. 1905 Boyd County map
Owen, David Dale. Report of the Geological Survey in Kentucky, Made During the Years 1854 and 1855. Frankfort, KY: A. G. Hodges, 1856. Kentucky Geological Survey. Digitized geological survey
Owen, David Dale. Second Report of the Geological Survey in Kentucky, Made During the Years 1856 and 1857. Frankfort, KY, 1857. Kentucky Geological Survey. Digitized second geological survey
Shaler, Nathaniel S., ed. Reports of Progress: Volume 1, New Series. Frankfort, KY: Kentucky Geological Survey, 1876. Includes Phillip N. Moore, “Report on the Iron Ores of Greenup, Boyd & Carter Counties.” Kentucky Geological Survey volume
Kentucky Historical Society. “Sandy Furnace.” Kentucky Historical Marker 1131. Frankfort: Kentucky Historical Society. Sandy Furnace marker
University of Louisville Photographic Archives. Jean Thomas, The Traipsin’ Woman, Collection. University of Louisville Digital Collections. Boyd County Jean Thomas photographs
Alan Lomax Kentucky Recordings. “Boyd County.” Association for Cultural Equity and University of Kentucky. Boyd County recordings and context
Alan Lomax Kentucky Recordings. “American Folk Song Festival Performers.” Association for Cultural Equity and University of Kentucky. American Folk Song Festival collection
Library of Congress, American Folklife Center. “American Folklife Center Collections: Kentucky.” Library of Congress Research Guides. Kentucky Folklife collections
Kentucky Heritage Council. New Deal Builds: Construction of the New Deal Era in Kentucky. Frankfort: Kentucky Heritage Council. See discussion and historic photograph of the WPA-built Garner Road Arch. New Deal Builds
Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. Boyd County, Kentucky County Road Series Map. Frankfort: Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. Boyd County highway map
Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. State Primary Road System: Boyd County. Frankfort: Kentucky Transportation Cabinet, revised October 2024. Boyd County state highway map
Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives. “Kentucky County Formation Chart.” Frankfort: Commonwealth of Kentucky. Kentucky County Formation Chart
Author Note: Garner’s history survives not in a single town archive, but across courthouse records, family papers, newspapers, maps, cemeteries, photographs, and memories preserved by generations of Boyd County residents. This article brings those scattered records together to preserve the story of a small Appalachian community whose history reaches from the iron era and county poor farm to folk music and twentieth-century life.