Appalachian Community Histories – Harbell, Bell County: The Harbell Branch, Colmar Road, and a Community in the Records
Harbell is not one of those Bell County communities that left behind a long shelf of written town histories. Its story is quieter than that. It appears in maps, census boundaries, railroad documents, road names, and the older geography of the Cumberland River valley. That does not make Harbell less historical. In some ways, it makes the place more typical of southeastern Kentucky, where many communities were known first by the road, the creek, the mine, the railroad stop, or the family names that gathered around them.
Harbell sits in Bell County, a county formed just after the Civil War from parts of Harlan and Knox counties. The county government’s own history places Bell County in Kentucky’s Eastern Coal Field and notes its connection to the Cumberland Gap, one of the major routes into Kentucky. That larger setting matters for Harbell because the community’s records are tied to the same forces that shaped the county itself: mountain roads, railroad corridors, coalfield expansion, and the movement between Pineville, Middlesboro, and the Harlan County line.
Harbell on the Maps
One of the strongest ways to document Harbell is through mapping. The Middlesboro North quadrangle includes Harbell and Harbell Railroad Station, along with nearby places such as Colmar, Ponza, Wasioto, East Pineville, Clear Creek Springs, Ferndale, Yellow Creek, and Pine Mountain State Resort Park. Historic USGS topographic mapping is especially useful because it shows Harbell not as a large incorporated town, but as a named place within a network of roads, railroads, waterways, churches, cemeteries, and neighboring settlements.
Harbell Railroad Station appears as a historical railroad-related feature on the Middlesboro North USGS quadrangle. That is important because it points to the community’s practical role. Harbell was not just a label on a map. It was a point along a working transportation landscape. The station listing places Harbell Railroad Station in Bell County at roughly 1,020 feet in elevation, which fits the ridge-and-valley setting between Pineville and Middlesboro.
The land itself also helps explain Harbell. The U.S. Geological Survey’s geologic map of the Middlesboro North Quadrangle was prepared by Charles L. Rice and Russell G. Ping in cooperation with the Commonwealth of Kentucky and the Kentucky Geological Survey. It covers the quadrangle that includes Harbell and places the community within the coalfield geology, folded terrain, and river-and-creek corridors that made railroad routes and road alignments so important in Bell County.
A Community Marked by Roads
Federal census geography gives another strong piece of evidence for Harbell. In the 1940 Census enumeration district descriptions for Bell County, Harbell appears through road boundaries rather than through a town government. One district was bounded on the west by Colmar-Harbell Road, while another was described as lying west of Harbell-Colmar Road, north of State Highway 188, and west of U.S. Highway 25E. That kind of language shows Harbell as a known point in the local landscape, useful enough that federal census workers used it to define where one group of households ended and another began.
This is often how small Appalachian communities survive in the public record. A place may not have a city hall, a newspaper, or a long published history, but it may still be written into the route a school bus followed, the road a family lived on, the railroad siding where cars were handled, or the census district where an enumerator walked from house to house. Harbell belongs to that kind of history. It was a place people could locate, even when the written record described it indirectly.
Modern transportation mapping keeps that pattern alive. The Kentucky Transportation Cabinet’s 2024 State Primary Road System map for Bell County labels Harbell among other communities and road corridors near Pineville, Middlesboro, East Pineville, Varilla, Wasioto, Colmar, Ferndale, and surrounding mountain country. The map also marks the larger road, rail, stream, state park, and national park geography that continues to define the area.
The Railroad Meaning of Harbell
The railroad record is where Harbell becomes more than a small map name. In railroad documents, Harbell appears as the beginning point of the Harbell Branch. A 2005 CSX Huntington Division West employee timetable identifies the Harbell Branch with Harbell at milepost CV 205.7 and Middlesboro at milepost CV 215.0. The same timetable describes the distance as 9.3 miles from Harbell to Middlesboro and notes that part of the branch between CV 206.0 and CV 215.0 was designated as excepted track.
That railroad language is plain, technical, and easy to overlook, but it preserves a central part of Harbell’s history. To the railroad, Harbell was a control point, a branch name, and a location in the operating system. The name marked where one part of the rail network could be separated, described, worked, and maintained. In a coalfield county, that kind of name could matter for generations.
The Harbell Branch also remained important enough to appear in later federal railroad proceedings. In 2022, the Federal Register published a Surface Transportation Board notice involving Knoxville and Cumberland Gap Railroad, LLC. The notice described the company’s acquisition and operation plans involving rail lines in Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia, including parts of Bell County. It specifically named the Harbell Branch and described connections near Cumberland Gap, Middlesboro, Bennett’s Fork Branch, Stony Fork Branch, and CSXT’s Middlesboro Yard.
The 2022 proceeding shows that Harbell’s railroad name did not disappear when the older coalfield economy changed. Even in the twenty-first century, the name still appeared in the legal and operating language of regional rail service. Harbell remained part of how railroads explained the movement between Cumberland Gap, Middlesboro, and the old Bell County coalfield routes.
Coalfield Roads Toward Harlan
Harbell’s railroad history also connects to the broader story of rail expansion toward Harlan County. Secondary railroad histories and local history accounts connect Harbell with the Wasioto and Black Mountain Railroad, Thomas Jefferson Asher, and the push of rail service farther into the coalfields. One scanned historical account describes Asher’s branch line as starting at Harbell, then continuing up the Cumberland River from Yellow Creek toward Tom’s Creek, helping open the way into upper Bell County and Harlan County coal territory.
This connection is important because Harbell stood near one of the transition points between the older Bell County rail world and the coalfield expansion that reached deeper into the mountains. Railroads did not simply pass through southeastern Kentucky. They changed how coal was mined, how timber and freight moved, how towns grew, and how families understood distance. A community like Harbell may not have become a large town, but it sat inside the machinery of that change.
By the early twentieth century, the route toward Harlan County had become one of the defining corridors of southeastern Kentucky. The coal industry needed railroads, and the railroads needed names, mileposts, junctions, branches, and stations. Harbell’s place in that network helps explain why the name appears in railroad documents more clearly than in ordinary town histories.
Harbell and the Nearby Communities
Harbell should also be understood beside its neighbors. The maps place it near Colmar, East Pineville, Varilla, Wasioto, Ferndale, Ponza, Clear Creek, and other Bell County places. That cluster of names tells a story of small communities tied together by roads and rail lines rather than by a single town center. Pineville and Middlesboro served as the larger anchors, while places like Harbell filled in the local geography between them.
The 1940 census district descriptions show this clearly. Harbell was useful as a boundary marker alongside Colmar, Varilla, State Highway 188, and U.S. Highway 25E. The community was part of a lived landscape where people moved from road to road, from creek to creek, and from railroad point to railroad point. The official record did not have to describe Harbell in romantic terms. It only had to use the name because people knew where it was.
A Small Place With a Durable Record
Harbell’s history is not best told as the story of a courthouse town or a booming commercial center. It is better understood as the story of a place that remained legible in the records because it mattered to transportation, census geography, and local movement. It was a railroad point, a road reference, a map label, and a community name.
That kind of history is easy to miss. The surviving documents do not always give names of families, churches, stores, or schools in one convenient narrative. Instead, they leave a trail through topographic maps, railroad timetables, federal notices, and census district descriptions. When those records are placed together, Harbell becomes visible again.
In Bell County history, Harbell stands as one of the small places that helped organize a larger landscape. It connected Pineville and Middlesboro, appeared near the routes toward Cumberland Gap and Harlan County, and remained attached to the rail language of the Harbell Branch. Its story is not loud, but it is recorded. In Appalachian history, that is often where the best local stories begin.
Sources & Further Reading
U.S. Geological Survey. “Geographic Names Information System (GNIS).” U.S. Geological Survey. https://www.usgs.gov/tools/geographic-names-information-system-gnis
U.S. Geological Survey. “Harbell, Bell County, Kentucky.” Geographic Names Information System, Feature ID 508178. https://edits.nationalmap.gov/apps/gaz-domestic/public/search/names
TopoZone. “Harbell Railroad Station (Historical) Topo Map, Bell County, Kentucky.” https://www.topozone.com/kentucky/bell-ky/locale/harbell-railroad-station-historical/
U.S. Geological Survey. “Middlesboro North, KY-VA 7.5-Minute Topographic Quadrangle.” US Topo. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/topoview/
U.S. Geological Survey. “Historic Topographic Maps, Middlesboro North Quadrangle, Kentucky-Virginia.” TopoView. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/topoview/
Rice, Charles L., and Russell G. Ping. “Geologic Map of the Middlesboro North Quadrangle, Bell County, Kentucky.” U.S. Geological Survey Open-File Report 87-413. Reston, VA: U.S. Geological Survey, 1987. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/ofr87413
Rice, Charles L., and Russell G. Ping. “Geologic Map of the Middlesboro North Quadrangle, Bell County, Kentucky.” U.S. Geological Survey Geologic Quadrangle Map GQ-1663. Reston, VA: U.S. Geological Survey, 1989. https://www.usgs.gov/publications/geologic-map-middlesboro-north-quadrangle-bell-county-kentucky
Carey, Daniel I. “Generalized Geologic Map for Land-Use Planning: Bell County, Kentucky.” Kentucky Geological Survey. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/kgs_mc/181/
National Archives and Records Administration. “1940 Census Enumeration District Descriptions: Kentucky, Bell County, ED 7-26 to ED 7-30.” National Archives Identifier 5862280. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1940_Census_Enumeration_District_Descriptions_-_Kentucky_-_Bell_County_-_ED_7-26,_ED_7-27,_ED_7-28,_ED_7-29,_ED_7-30_-_NARA_-_5862280.jpg
National Archives and Records Administration. “1940 Census Enumeration District Descriptions: Kentucky, Bell County, ED 7-31 to ED 7-33.” National Archives Identifier 5862281. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1940_Census_Enumeration_District_Descriptions_-_Kentucky_-_Bell_County_-_ED_7-31,_ED_7-32,_ED_7-33_-_NARA_-_5862281.jpg
National Archives and Records Administration. “Enumeration District Maps.” 1950 Census Records. https://www.archives.gov/research/census/1950/ed-maps
National Archives and Records Administration. “1950 Census Search: Bell County, Kentucky.” https://1950census.archives.gov/search/?county=Bell&page=1&state=KY
Seaboard System Railroad. Corbin Division Timetable No. 2. October 28, 1984. https://www.cincyrails.com/files/SBD_CorbinDivision_No2_October28_1984.pdf
CSX Transportation. Huntington Division West Employee Timetable No. 1. January 1, 2005. https://www.multimodalways.org/docs/railroads/companies/CSX/CSX%20ETTs/CSX%20Huntington%20Div%20West%20ETT%20%231%201-1-2005.pdf
Surface Transportation Board. “Knoxville and Cumberland Gap Railroad, LLC, Acquisition and Operation Exemption with Interchange Commitment, Rail Lines of Norfolk Southern Railway in Anderson, Campbell, Claiborne, Grainger, Knox, and Union Counties, Tennessee, Bell and Whitley Counties, Kentucky, and Lee County, Virginia.” Federal Register 87, no. 28, February 10, 2022. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2022/02/10/2022-02871/knoxville-and-cumberland-gap-railroad-llc-acquisition-and-operation-exemption-with-interchange
Surface Transportation Board. “R. J. Corman Railroad Company, LLC and R. J. Corman Railroad Group, LLC, Continuance in Control Exemption, Knoxville and Cumberland Gap Railroad, LLC.” Federal Register 87, no. 28, February 10, 2022. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2022/02/10/2022-02875/rj-corman-railroad-company-llc-and-rj-corman-railroad-group-llc-continuance-in-control
R. J. Corman Railroad Company. “Knoxville and Cumberland Gap Railroad.” https://www.rjcorman.com/companies/railroad-company/our-short-lines/knoxville-and-cumberland-gap-railroad-kxcg
Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. “State Primary Road System: Bell County, Kentucky.” Last revised November 2024. https://transportation.ky.gov/Planning/SPRS%20Maps/Bell.pdf
Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. “Appalachia Development Highway System.” https://transportation.ky.gov/Planning/Pages/Appalachia.aspx
Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. “Corridor F, Sheet 2.” Appalachia Maps. https://transportation.ky.gov/planning/appalachia%20maps/forms/allitems.aspx
Bell County, Kentucky. “About Us.” https://bellcounty.ky.gov/Pages/about.aspx
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. “Bell County Section 202 Flood Risk Management Study.” https://www.lrh.usace.army.mil/
Rennick, Robert M. “Bell County: Post Offices.” County Histories of Kentucky. Morehead State University ScholarWorks, 2000. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/383/
Rennick, Robert M. “Bell County: Place Names.” Robert M. Rennick Manuscript Collection. Morehead State University ScholarWorks, 2016. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_ms_collection/34/
Rennick, Robert M. Kentucky Place Names. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984. https://www.kentuckypress.com/9780813101798/kentucky-place-names/
Fuson, Henry Harvey. History of Bell County, Kentucky. 2 vols. Louisville, KY: Roberts Printing Company, 1947. https://kygenweb.net/bell/area/bell_history2.htm
Cornett, Tim. Bell County, Kentucky: A Brief History. Charleston, SC: History Press, 2014. https://www.arcadiapublishing.com/products/9781626198098
The Biography of Thomas Jefferson Asher; The History of T. J. Asher & Sons, 1890-1910; The Wasioto and Black Mountain Railroad, 1907-1915; The Asher Coal Mining Company, 1910-1963; The Coal Mining Industry, 1900-1962. Kingsport, TN: Watson Lithographing Co., 1964. https://www.kuenzigbooks.com/pages/books/22594/coal-mining-biography-thomas-jefferson-asher-wasioto-black-mtn-railroad-1964
“Harlan County Round-up: Library News and Harlan History.” Harlan Enterprise, March 12, 2022. https://harlanenterprise.net/2022/03/12/harlan-county-round-up-library-news-and-harlan-history/
O’Neal, Kristen. “Home and Hell: Black Women’s Lives in the Kentucky Coalfields.” PhD diss., University of Georgia. https://openscholar.uga.edu/record/3287/files/ONeal_dissertation_final.pdf
Coleman, Christopher. Guide to Appalachian Coal Hauling Railroads. Volume 2a. https://www.appalachianrailroadmodeling.com/
Coleman, Christopher. Guide to Appalachian Coal Hauling Railroads. Volume 2c. https://www.appalachianrailroadmodeling.com/
Kentucky Atlas and Gazetteer. “Bell County, Kentucky.” https://www.kyatlas.com/21013.html
FamilySearch. “Bell County, Kentucky Genealogy.” FamilySearch Research Wiki. https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Bell_County,_Kentucky_Genealogy
KYGenWeb. “Bell County, Kentucky.” https://kygenweb.net/bell/
University of Kentucky Libraries. “Kentucky Digital Newspaper Program.” https://kdnp.uky.edu/
Chronicling America. “Search America’s Historic Newspaper Pages.” Library of Congress. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/
Author Note: Harbell is one of those Bell County places that does not give up its history in one neat story, but it keeps appearing in maps, rail records, census roads, and local geography. I wrote this piece to show how even a small railroad and road community can still hold an important place in Appalachian memory.