Appalachian Community Histories – Glomawr, Perry County: East Tennessee Coal and a Community on the North Fork
Glomawr is one of those Perry County communities that comes into view through the records coal camps usually leave behind rather than through a long standalone town history. Federal geography still recognizes it as a populated place in Perry County, and Kentucky reference works place it about four miles southeast of Hazard on the North Fork of the Kentucky River at Raccoon Creek. When those place records are read beside mine reports, geological publications, and local newspapers, Glomawr emerges clearly as a real coal camp community rather than a stray map label.
Where Glomawr Took Shape
Modern official records provide the firmest baseline. The Geographic Names Information System lists Glomawr as a populated place in Perry County, Kentucky, and the Kentucky Geological Survey’s Perry County map continues to label it in the county landscape. That continuity matters because it shows that Glomawr did not vanish entirely from official memory even after the peak years of coal camp life had passed.
The Kentucky Atlas & Gazetteer gives the clearest compact summary of the community’s setting and early growth. It places Glomawr near Hazard on the North Fork at Raccoon Creek, reports that the East Tennessee Coal Company established a mine there around 1914, and says the town was built to support that operation. The same source reports that the population reached about 1,000 by the 1940s, which fits the broader pattern of eastern Kentucky camps that grew quickly around an operating mine and later contracted when production waned.
Coal Made the Community
Coal appears to have been the reason Glomawr came into being. Even before the town name settled into the record, Kentucky Geological Survey material from 1910 was already referring to East Tennessee Coal Company mines in Perry County. That does not prove Glomawr itself existed by that exact year, but it does show that the company tied to Glomawr’s origins was active in the county’s coal field before the community became firmly documented in postal and map records.
Once Glomawr appears by name, it stays visible in Kentucky mining records across the 1920s. The 1924 and 1925 state mine reports both include Glomawr in the Perry County listings. By 1927, the annual report identifies Hatfield-Reliance at Glomawr, and the 1928 report lists Hatfield-Campbell Creek Coal Company at Glomawr Nos. 1 and 2. Those entries are important because they show Glomawr as part of an active, continuing industrial landscape rather than a short-lived camp remembered only in local tradition.
Compiled coal-camp references line up with that same chronology. Coal Education’s Perry County coal-camp list ties Glomawr to East Tennessee Coal Company, Hatfield-Campbell Creek Coal Company, and Hatfield Reliance Coal Company, while the long-used RootsWeb Perry County coal-mines page also preserves Glomawr in operator and year listings. These are secondary compilations rather than first-generation records, but they are useful because they reinforce what the state mine reports already show. Glomawr was a working coal place with changing operators across multiple decades.
The Post Office and the Name Glomawr
The post office helped turn Glomawr from a company location into a place recognized more broadly. The Kentucky Atlas reports that the Glomawr post office opened in 1915 and closed in 1954. Postal-history material in La Posta agrees on the mine’s 1914 opening and treats the community, station, and post office as part of the same company-built settlement. These details fit a familiar eastern Kentucky pattern in which a mine opening and a post office establishment worked together to fix a community name in daily use.
The meaning of the name is best handled carefully. The Kentucky Atlas says Glomawr came from a Welsh word for coal, while the La Posta postal-history snippet indicates the company itself was said to have named the camp, station, and post office. Taken together, those sources suggest that the name was part company branding, part coalfield identity, and from the beginning tied tightly to the mining world that created the town.
School and Community Life
Like many Appalachian coal camps, Glomawr was more than a payroll point. Mid century newspaper evidence shows that it had its own community institutions. In August 1958, The Hazard Herald reported that American Friends Service Committee volunteers had painted the Glomawr school and helped set up an independent recreation program there. That is a small detail, but it matters because it places Glomawr inside the everyday civic life of Perry County, where school upkeep and children’s recreation were community concerns rather than industrial afterthoughts.
The record remains visible a few years later. A July 16, 1964 issue of The Hazard Herald included Glomawr School in Perry County school reimbursements, showing that the school still had an administrative presence in county education records. The local paper also carried Glomawr community columns. In an August 27, 1964 column by Mrs. Sam Ferguson, readers encountered church news, family visits, local weddings, illness reports, and neighborhood travel, exactly the kind of material that shows a coal camp functioning as a lived community with kin ties and routine social life.
A Smaller but Still Documented Place
By the mid 1950s, Glomawr was no longer just a boom era camp. A 1956 U.S. Geological Survey circular gave the community a population served of 360 and reported that its water system was owned by Ellen Coal Co., drawing from a nearby mine and a well. That entry is especially valuable because it captures Glomawr in transition. The community was smaller than the roughly 1,000 people reported for its 1940s peak, but it was still large enough, organized enough, and industrial enough to appear in a federal survey of water supply.
That is what makes Glomawr historically legible. It shows up first as a coal-created place, then as a camp sustained through operator changes, and later as a community that retained school, church, family, and utility life even after its biggest years had passed. The paper trail is scattered across geology bulletins, mine reports, postal-history work, federal surveys, and local newspapers, but taken together those records leave little doubt. Glomawr was one of Perry County’s real coal communities, and it remained part of the county’s lived landscape long after its founding generation.
Sources and Further Reading
U.S. Geological Survey. “Glomawr.” Geographic Names Information System. https://edits.nationalmap.gov/apps/gaz-domestic/public/summary/512332
Kentucky Atlas & Gazetteer. “Glomawr, Kentucky.” https://www.kyatlas.com/ky-glomawr.html
Kentucky Geological Survey. Bulletin 12, Series 3. 1910. https://kgs.uky.edu/kgsweb/olops/pub/kgs/s_3/KGS3BN121910.pdf
Kentucky State Department of Mines. Annual Report, 1924. https://kgs.uky.edu/kgsweb/olops/pub/general/jonesminereport1924.pdf
Kentucky State Department of Mines. Annual Report, 1925. https://kgs.uky.edu/kgsweb/olops/pub/general/jonesminereport1925.pdf
Kentucky State Department of Mines. Annual Report, 1927. https://kgs.uky.edu/kgsweb/olops/pub/general/jonesminereport1927.pdf
Kentucky State Department of Mines. Annual Report, 1928. https://kgs.uky.edu/kgsweb/olops/pub/general/DanielReportMines1928.pdf
U.S. Geological Survey. Public and Industrial Water Supplies of the Eastern Coal Field Region, Kentucky. 1956. https://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/1956/0369/report.pdf
The Hazard Herald (Hazard, KY), March 10, 1958. https://archive.org/stream/kd9833mw2f06/kd9833mw2f06_djvu.txt
The Hazard Herald (Hazard, KY), August 7, 1958. https://ia601207.us.archive.org/11/items/kd9bz6154m98/kd9bz6154m98_text.pdf
The Hazard Herald (Hazard, KY), July 16, 1964. https://archive.org/download/kd9gq6qz2b2r/kd9gq6qz2b2r_text.pdf
The Hazard Herald (Hazard, KY), August 27, 1964. https://archive.org/download/kd9j09w0959m/kd9j09w0959m_text.pdf
National Archives and Records Administration. “1950 Census Records.” https://www.archives.gov/research/census/1950
National Archives and Records Administration. “Search | 1950 Census,” Perry County, Kentucky. https://1950census.archives.gov/search/?county=Perry&page=1&state=KY
Perry County Clerk. “Records Center.” https://perry.countyclerk.us/records-center/
Perry County Clerk. “Online Land Records.” https://perry.countyclerk.us/records-center/online-land-records/
Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives. “County Deeds, Tax Assessment Books, Wills, Land Warrants, and Related Land Records Inventory.” https://kdla.ky.gov/Archives-and-Reference/Documents/Inventory_Land_Records.pdf
Kentucky Mine Mapping Information System. “Interactive Maps.” https://minemaps.ky.gov/Maps/InteractiveMaps
Kentucky Mine Mapping Information System. “GIS Data.” https://minemaps.ky.gov/Maps/GISData
Coal Education. “Perry County, Kentucky Coal Camps.” https://www.coaleducation.org/coalhistory/coaltowns/coalcamps/perry_county.htm
Author Note: Glomawr is one of those Perry County places whose history survives in mine reports, newspapers, and scattered county records more than in big published histories. I wanted to pull those pieces together so the community would still have a clear record of its place in Perry County’s coalfield story.