Appalachian Community Histories – Garrett, Floyd County: Elk Horn Coal, Stone Coal Church, and the Right Fork of Beaver Creek
Garrett sits in Floyd County on the Right Fork of Beaver Creek, a place where roads, rail, water, coal, church life, school life, and flood memory all meet in a narrow mountain valley. Like many eastern Kentucky communities, it is easy to mistake Garrett for only a coal camp, but the records tell a longer story. Settlement in the area reached back before the boom years, but the town known as Garrett took its modern shape when the Elk Horn Coal interests moved into the Beaver Creek country in the early twentieth century.
The strongest records do not describe Garrett as a city built by courthouse decree. They show it as a working coal community built through land purchases, rail access, numbered mines, rows of houses, company ownership, churches, schools, family cemeteries, and later the hard transition from company property to private home places. Garrett’s history is the story of how a coal corporation made a town, and how the people who lived there made that town into a community.
Ballard, Garrett, and the Coming of Elk Horn Coal
The name Garrett was not the first post office name tied to the place. Kentucky place-name sources record that the Ballard post office opened in 1910 and was renamed Garrett in 1914. That name is generally connected to John and Robert Garrett, Baltimore bankers and coal-company financiers whose name became attached to the developing coal town.
The timing matters. Garrett’s post office name changed just as Elk Horn’s coal-town system was taking shape along the Right Fork of Beaver Creek. A 1914 photograph in the West Virginia University West Virginia and Regional History Center collection shows miners’ houses at Garrett for the Elk Horn Mining Corporation. The image is simple, but powerful. It shows the company-town landscape before memory softened it into nostalgia. Houses were already standing in rows. Garrett was already becoming a built environment shaped by outside capital and underground work.
Court records add another piece. In Martin v. Elkhorn Coal Corporation, the Kentucky Court of Appeals described what happened after the company purchased land in the area in 1915. The company installed mining operations, opened mines, and built houses at what the court called “now the town of Garrett.” That line is one of the clearest early legal statements tying Garrett’s town formation to Elk Horn’s mining expansion.
Mines 325, 326, and 327
The Kentucky State Department of Mines annual reports give Garrett one of its strongest primary-source foundations. In the 1920 report, Elk Horn Coal Corporation appears at Garrett with Mines No. 325, 326, and 327. These were not vague references to mining near town. The report listed individual operations, mine foremen, seam thicknesses, machinery, haulage, roof conditions, ventilation concerns, and the connection to the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad.
Mine No. 325 was listed at Garrett on the C. and O. Railroad, working the No. 1 Elkhorn seam. The report described the seam as about thirty-six inches thick, with mostly sandstone top. Coal was mined by electric machines and hauled by electric motors. The inspector found the mine in very fair condition except for trolley wires that were not properly guarded.
Mine No. 326 was also at Garrett and worked the No. 1 Elkhorn seam. It was described as a slope mine with a coal seam about forty-six inches thick. The report was more troubled here. It noted bad roof conditions, the use of cross timbers on entries, weak ventilation at working places, and loose slate. It also said the mine had recently restarted after being closed for more than a year.
Mine No. 327 was called the largest mine the company operated at Garrett. It worked the same seam, about forty-eight inches thick at that place, with coal mined and hauled by electric machinery. Like the other Garrett mines, it was part of a larger system that tied local men, company houses, railroad tracks, timbered entries, and coal markets together.
These mine reports are valuable because they cut through generalizations. They show Garrett as a place of specific underground work. The town was not simply “coal country.” It was Mine 325, Mine 326, Mine 327, men with names, machines, motors, roof problems, and the daily judgment of whether a mine was safe enough to keep operating.
A Company Town on the Right Fork
Garrett’s built landscape grew from the company-town system. Houses, stores, schools, roads, and churches existed in a world where the coal company owned much more than the coal seam. The 1914 WVU photograph of miners’ houses shows this world at its beginning. Later court records show how long it lasted.
In Hall v. Elk Horn Coal Corporation, decided in 1965, the Kentucky Court of Appeals described Elk Horn’s ownership of mining towns in Letcher and Floyd counties. In 1946, the company began selling lots and houses to employees for residential purposes. The towns included Jackhorn and Fleming in Letcher County and Garrett and Wayland in Floyd County. The company subdivided and mapped the towns and additions, sold houses and lots, and reserved coal and other minerals under the land.
That legal detail is important. It shows that even when miners and their families became homeowners, the old company order did not disappear all at once. Surface homes could pass into private hands while underground mineral rights remained separate. The coal company could sell the house, but keep the coal.
The Floyd County newspaper trail shows how difficult the company-house era could become. Local-history summaries from Floyd County Times material record that in 1941 families connected to Elk Horn properties at Garrett, Wayland, and Sizemore Branch faced removal from company houses. Another entry records the eviction of families of former employees at Garrett and Wayland. These short newspaper notes point to the human side of company ownership. A job, a house, and a family’s security could be tied together in ways that left little room for error.
Work, Danger, and Memory
Mining made Garrett, but mining also marked it with grief. Floyd County Times death listings record that on July 29, 1932, Emmett Sanders, age thirty-five, died after a slate fall at the Elk Horn Coal Corporation mine at Garrett. A single newspaper line cannot tell a whole life, but it does remind us that each mine number carried human risk.
The Department of Mines report had already identified slate, roof, ventilation, and trolley-wire problems in Garrett operations. Those details were not technical trivia. They were the conditions men carried with them underground. In a low seam, every movement required the body to bend to the mine. In a bad roof, every sound mattered. In a company town, a mine accident was never only an industrial event. It was a household event, a church event, a school event, and a community event.
The cemeteries around Garrett help fill in the names behind the town. Howard Cemetery, located up Howard Branch in Garrett, preserves family names that belonged to the local hillsides. Cemetery records are not just burial lists. In a coal town, they are a second archive, one that ties surnames to hollows, branches, churches, work, sickness, accident, and kinship.
Schools, Churches, and Daily Life
A coal company could build houses, but it could not alone create a community. That happened through families, worship, schoolrooms, ball games, funerals, reunions, and the daily attachments that lasted longer than a payroll.
Garrett school records are one of the best ways to see that community life. Floyd County library and genealogical indexes point researchers toward Garrett school yearbooks and records from the twentieth century, including Garrett High School material. These records preserve teachers, students, athletes, clubs, class photographs, and local families year by year. They show Garrett as more than a mine location. They show it as a place where children grew up, where classmates remembered each other, and where the town’s identity passed from one generation to another.
Church history is just as important. Stone Coal Old Regular Baptist Church is one of Garrett’s deepest community institutions. Local reporting after the 2022 flood described the church as more than two hundred years old and established in 1808. Whether one approaches that claim through church tradition, association minutes, or family memory, Stone Coal belongs to the older religious landscape of Floyd County. It connects Garrett not only to coal history, but to the Old Regular Baptist world of association meetings, lined-out hymns, funerals, kin networks, and mountain faith.
The church’s importance became visible again after the July 2022 flood, when several feet of water damaged the sanctuary and left members trying to save more than a building. For the people connected to Stone Coal, the church represented a lifetime of worship and community memory.
Water, Roads, and the Shape of the Valley
The same creek valley that made Garrett livable also made it vulnerable. A 1956 United States Geological Survey report on public and industrial water supplies in eastern Kentucky included a detailed entry for Garrett. At that time, the water system served about six hundred people. It drew from the Right Fork of Beaver Creek about three-tenths of a mile south of the Garrett post office. The system used coagulation with alum and lime, filtration, and chlorination. Storage included a clear well and a wooden tank on a hillside east of the post office.
That small government entry captures mid-century Garrett in a practical way. The town depended on the creek, pumps, tanks, treatment, and hillside storage. It was a coal town, but it was also a water system, a post office, and a set of households trying to keep daily life functioning in a narrow valley.
Transportation shaped the community too. Modern maps place Garrett along Kentucky routes tied to the Right Fork of Beaver Creek corridor. KY 7, KY 80, KY 550, and KY 777 all help explain Garrett’s place in Floyd County geography. The road network also shows how Garrett connects to Wayland, Martin, Maytown, Prestonsburg, and other Beaver Creek communities. In older days the railroad made coal movement possible. In later decades, highways reshaped the town, and local photo captions remember houses lost to the new Route 80.
The 2022 Flood
Garrett’s history cannot end with the coal-camp era. In July 2022, the Right Fork of Beaver Creek again became the center of the town’s story. The National Weather Service described the eastern Kentucky flooding from late July 2022 as the result of repeated training thunderstorms that brought deadly flash flooding and devastating river flooding to the region. The event caused catastrophic damage across eastern Kentucky, with rainfall rates at times exceeding four inches per hour. The NWS storm report summary specifically noted that Garrett was inundated by several feet of flood water from the Right Fork of Beaver Creek on July 28, 2022.
Local reporting from Floyd County described damage in Wayland, Garrett, and Maytown, where homes and businesses were damaged or destroyed by several feet of water. On Front Street and Magnolia Street in Garrett, residents began the exhausting work of cleaning mud, disinfecting homes, handing out meals, and helping neighbors. The flood showed the old truth of the mountains. Disaster moves through a valley all at once, but recovery depends on house-by-house labor.
The federal record also placed Floyd County within the official disaster framework. FEMA-4663-DR covered severe storms, flooding, landslides, and mudslides beginning July 26, 2022. Floyd County was among the counties designated for emergency protective measures. For Garrett, those formal declarations sat beside the more personal record of ruined floors, water-stained pews, washed-out streets, and neighbors working in mud.
Why Garrett Matters
Garrett matters because it holds the whole arc of an Appalachian coal community in one place. It began with older settlement and a post office name, then became a company town under Elk Horn’s expansion. It was photographed in 1914 as a row of miners’ houses. It appeared in state mine reports as numbered underground operations. It entered court records as company property, town lots, mineral reservations, and house sales. It lived through the dangerous work of slate falls, bad roofs, motors, and low seams. It built schools, churches, cemeteries, and family networks that outlasted the company-town system.
Garrett also matters because it did not disappear when the boom years faded. It remained a community on the Right Fork of Beaver Creek, tied to roads, churches, homes, memories, and flood recovery. The place-name records, mine reports, photographs, court cases, school records, cemetery surveys, water-supply reports, and flood documents all point to the same conclusion. Garrett was never only a dot on a map. It was a mountain town built by coal, tested by water, and remembered through the people who kept calling it home.
Sources & Further Reading
Kentucky State Department of Mines. Annual Report of the State Department of Mines for the Year 1920. Frankfort, KY: State Department of Mines, 1921. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015080084642
Kentucky State Department of Mines. Annual Report of the State Department of Mines for the Year 1925. Frankfort, KY: State Department of Mines, 1926. https://kgs.uky.edu/kgsweb/olops/pub/general/jonesminereport1925.pdf
West Virginia University Libraries. “Group of Miners’ Houses, Elk Horn Mining Corporation, Garrett, Ky.” West Virginia History OnView. Accessed June 15, 2026. https://onview.lib.wvu.edu/catalog/036191
Martin v. Elkhorn Coal Corporation, 244 Ky. 753, 52 S.W.2d 727. Kentucky Court of Appeals, 1932. https://case-law.vlex.com/vid/martin-v-elkhorn-coal-895807910
Hall v. Elk Horn Coal Corporation, 412 S.W.2d 142. Kentucky Court of Appeals, 1965. https://law.justia.com/cases/kentucky/court-of-appeals/1967/412-s-w-2d-142-1.html
Abdoo, Mary. “The Elk Horn Coal Corporation.” Typescript, 1935. Western Kentucky University, Manuscripts and Folklife Archives finding aid. https://digitalcommons.wku.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=6060&context=dlsc_mss_fin_aid&filename=0&type=additional
Kentucky Mine Mapping Information System. “Kentucky Mine Mapping Information System.” Accessed June 15, 2026. https://minemaps.ky.gov/
Kentucky Mine Mapping Information System. “Interactive Maps.” Accessed June 15, 2026. https://minemaps.ky.gov/Maps/InteractiveMaps
Kentucky Geological Survey. “Interactive Map Services.” University of Kentucky. Accessed June 15, 2026. https://kygs.uky.edu/maps/
Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement. “National Mine Map Repository.” U.S. Department of the Interior. Accessed June 15, 2026. https://www.osmre.gov/programs/national-mine-map-repository
Floyd County Public Library. “Floyd County History Collection.” Accessed June 15, 2026. https://www.fclib.org/floyd-county-history-collection/
KYGenWeb. “Floyd County, Kentucky.” Accessed June 15, 2026. https://kykinfolk.org/floyd/
Kentucky Atlas and Gazetteer. “Garrett, Kentucky.” Accessed June 15, 2026. https://www.kyatlas.com/ky-garrett.html
U.S. Geological Survey. “Garrett.” Geographic Names Information System. Accessed June 15, 2026. https://edits.nationalmap.gov/apps/gaz-domestic/public/search/names/492717
Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. Floyd County, Kentucky State Primary Road System. Last revised December 2024. https://transportation.ky.gov/Planning/SPRS%20Maps/Floyd.pdf
Baker, John A., and William E. Price. Public and Industrial Water Supplies of the Eastern Coal Field Region, Kentucky. U.S. Geological Survey Circular 369. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1956. https://doi.org/10.3133/cir369
Rice, Charles L. Revised Correlation Chart of Coal Beds, Coal Zones, and Key Stratigraphic Units in Eastern Kentucky. U.S. Geological Survey Miscellaneous Field Studies Map MF-2275. Reston, VA: U.S. Geological Survey, 1994. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/mf2275
Stone, Ralph W. Coal Resources of the Russell Fork Basin in Kentucky and Virginia. U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 348. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1908. https://pubs.usgs.gov/bul/0348/report.pdf
Kentucky Historical Society. “Elkhorn Coking Coal Region Kentucky.” Kentucky Historical Society Digital Collections. Accessed June 15, 2026. https://www.kyhistory.com/digital/collection/Maps/id/193/
National Archives and Records Administration. “Enumeration District Maps and Descriptions, 1940 Census.” Accessed June 15, 2026. https://www.archives.gov/research/census/1940/finding-aids
FamilySearch. “Floyd County, Kentucky Genealogy.” FamilySearch Research Wiki. Accessed June 15, 2026. https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Floyd_County,_Kentucky_Genealogy
Berea College Special Collections and Archives. “New Salem Association of Old Regular Baptist of Jesus Christ Records.” Accessed June 15, 2026. https://bereaarchives.libraryhost.com/
Pike County Historical Society. “Elk Horn Fuel Company Leases to Elk Horn Mining Company: Fleming and Wayland Divisions.” Accessed June 15, 2026. https://pikecountykyhistoricalsociety.com/elk-horn-fuel-company-fleming-wayland-divisions/
Kentucky Coal Museum. “Kentucky Coal Museum.” Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College. Accessed June 15, 2026. https://www.kentuckycoalmuseum.southeast.kctcs.edu/
National Weather Service, Jackson, Kentucky. “Historic July 26th-July 30th, 2022 Eastern Kentucky Flooding.” Accessed June 15, 2026. https://www.weather.gov/jkl/july2022flooding
National Weather Service. July 2022 Significant River and Flash Flood in Southeastern Kentucky. Service Assessment. Silver Spring, MD: National Weather Service, 2023. https://www.weather.gov/media/publications/assessments/July_2022_Significant_River_Flash_Flood_SE_KY.pdf
Federal Emergency Management Agency. “Kentucky Severe Storms, Flooding, Landslides, and Mudslides, DR-4663-KY.” Accessed June 15, 2026. https://www.fema.gov/disaster/4663
Federal Emergency Management Agency. “Designated Areas: Disaster 4663.” Accessed June 15, 2026. https://www.fema.gov/disaster/4663/designated-areas
Federal Register. “Kentucky; Major Disaster and Related Determinations.” September 2, 2022. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2022/09/02/2022-19032/kentucky-major-disaster-and-related-determinations
Office of Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear. “Flood Response: Executive Actions.” Accessed June 15, 2026. https://governor.ky.gov/Pages/Flood-Response.aspx
Mullins, Jordan. “‘That’s Just the Way We Are’: Communities Band Together Following Historic Flooding in Floyd County.” WYMT, July 29, 2022. https://www.wymt.com/2022/07/29/thats-just-way-we-are-communities-band-together-following-historic-flooding-floyd-county/
Cavalier, Tony. “Garrett Kentucky a Year After the Flood.” WYMT, July 29, 2023. https://www.wymt.com/2023/07/30/garrett-kentucky-year-after-flood/
Forbes, Buddy. “Floyd County Church Calling on Community to Help Rebuild After 2022 Floods.” WYMT, August 14, 2023. https://www.wymt.com/2023/08/14/floyd-county-church-calling-community-help-rebuild-after-2022-floods/
Author Note: Garrett’s history is best read through the records left by miners, families, churches, schools, maps, and courts. I hope this article helps preserve the town as a living Floyd County community, not just an old coal camp.