Appalachian Community Histories – Hardburly, Perry County: A Coal Camp Built by Hardy-Burlingham
Hardburly, in Perry County, grew out of the coal economy that reshaped much of eastern Kentucky in the early twentieth century. The clearest documentary trail shows that it began as a camp for the Hardy-Burlingham Mining Company and took its name from that company. Kentucky place-name references identify Hardburly as a community on Jakes Branch near Hazard, first associated with Burlingham Station on the Louisville and Nashville Railroad before the place itself came to be known as Hardburly. Those same sources place the opening of the post office in 1918, which marks the point when the settlement became firmly fixed in the federal and state record.
The naming story matters because Hardburly was not simply an old crossroads or creek settlement that later gained a mine. It was, from the beginning, a company town shaped by extraction, rail access, and the needs of a growing coal operation. The old station name of Burlingham preserved the railroad connection, while the later name Hardburly more fully reflected the Hardy-Burlingham enterprise that built the place into a recognizable coal camp.
The Mine and the Scale of the Operation
By the 1920s, Hardburly had become one of the substantial industrial points in Perry County’s coal belt. A 1928 photograph description from the Stuart S. Sprague collection states that the Hardy-Burlingham Mining Company at Hardburly was triple tracked, had one of the largest tipples in the world, employed as many as 700 underground miners, and could handle as much as 4,000 tons per day. Even allowing for the pride and promotional language common to coal-era descriptions, that record leaves little doubt that Hardburly was a major industrial camp during its peak years.
Other reference material reinforces that picture of scale. The Kentucky Atlas and Gazetteer notes that Hardburly’s population peaked in the 1920s or 1930s at about 1,700, which fits what one would expect from a camp built around a large mine, rail facilities, and company housing. A Perry County coal-camp listing also preserves Hardy-Burlingham Mining Company as the operator associated with Hardburly and gives a workforce figure of 487, a reminder that coal-camp numbers could vary by year, mine section, and source.
Federal technical and bibliographic records also show that Hardburly’s coal entered the formal research literature. HathiTrust cataloging for a 1945 U.S. Bureau of Mines publication specifically identifies “Hazard no. 7 coal from Hardburly mine, Perry County, Ky.,” showing that the mine’s output was important enough to be studied in detail for carbonizing properties and petrographic composition.
What Surviving Images Reveal About Camp Life
One of the strongest things about Hardburly’s paper trail is that it is not only textual. Historic image collections preserve visual evidence of the town’s layout and daily life. The Wikimedia Commons category drawing from NARA and DPLA holdings lists views of the Hardburley Elementary School, the camp from the east side, the water reservoir, privies and refuse areas along the creek, hog pens behind houses, and even the Perry County baseball park associated with Hardburly. One image is explicitly labeled as showing the “Black section of camp,” which is especially important because it preserves evidence of the camp’s racial geography rather than leaving that history invisible.
Those images make clear that Hardburly was more than mine openings and a tipple. It was a lived-in industrial settlement with housing, school facilities, utility structures, sanitation systems, recreation spaces, and segregated residential patterns. In other words, it had the full built environment of a coal camp. That helps explain why Hardburly remained so vivid in local memory long after its peak years had passed.
Hardburly in Government Records
Government records place Hardburly clearly on the map by the middle of the twentieth century. The 1940 Census enumeration district description for Perry County specifically names Hardburly as part of ED 97-12 and describes the district in relation to the Bulan-Hardburly Road and surrounding boundaries. This matters because it shows Hardburly as a recognized population center within the county’s census geography, not merely a casual local name.
A 1956 U.S. Geological Survey report on public and industrial water supplies in Kentucky’s eastern coal field adds another layer of detail. For Hardburly, the report lists a population served of 630, identifies Old King Mining Co. as owner, and notes that the community drew domestic water from an impounding reservoir while also using a nearby mine in the No. 7 seam of the Breathitt Formation. It further records pond-water treatment by blue vitriol and occasional chlorination. That is a remarkably concrete glimpse of the town in the postwar period and shows that Hardburly still functioned as a distinct utility-served mining community even after its earlier boom years.
The Post Office and the Long Afterlife of the Camp
Like many Appalachian coal camps, Hardburly outlasted its most productive years as a named community. Postal history is especially useful here because it gives a clean federal timeline. The strongest place-name references agree that the Hardburly post office was established on April 17, 1918. More than ninety years later, the United States Postal Service recorded the final institutional change. In Postal Bulletin 22326, the USPS listed the Hardburly post office and ZIP Code 41747 as discontinued, with Hardburly thereafter becoming an acceptable place name under Bulan’s ZIP Code 41722 arrangement in 2011.
That sort of postal discontinuance often marks the transition from working coal camp to legacy community. Hardburly did not vanish from local identity, but its federal status changed. The old company town remained in memory, in houses, in roads, and in the names people still used, even as formal postal functions were folded into nearby Bulan.
A Community That Endured Beyond the Boom
Modern reclamation records show that Hardburly’s story did not end with the closing of mines or the shrinking of its post office. Kentucky’s Energy and Environment Cabinet described Hardburly during the Joan Bernat Slide Reclamation Project as a historic coal camp established around 1918, one where many of the original houses still remained. The state also noted that drainage structures built by Italian immigrant stone masons in the early 1900s were still in use. Federal OSMRE materials repeated that Hardburly remained a living community whose residents feared renewed slide movement above their homes in 2016.
That is perhaps the most important part of Hardburly’s history. It was created by coal, but it was not only a coal company property. Families stayed. Houses remained. Roads and stonework lasted. Descendants of miners continued to live in the place long after the high years of production were over. Hardburly became one of those eastern Kentucky communities where industrial history and family history fused together.
Why Hardburly Still Matters
Hardburly matters because it preserves, in one small Perry County community, many of the central patterns of Appalachian coal-town history. It was founded by a mining company, tied to railroad expansion, built out with housing and public facilities, marked by racial segregation within camp space, and sustained by industrial infrastructure such as reservoirs and treatment systems. Later, like so many camp towns, it declined as the coal economy changed, yet it never entirely disappeared.
The surviving sources are unusually good for a place of its size. Official place-name references, census geography, federal water-supply reporting, postal bulletins, technical mining literature, and historical image collections all preserve parts of the story. Taken together, they show Hardburly not as a footnote, but as a substantial Perry County coal camp whose physical layout, industrial importance, and community endurance can still be traced in the historical record.
Sources & Further Reading
Kentucky Atlas and Gazetteer. “Hardburly, Kentucky.” Accessed April 5, 2026. https://www.kyatlas.com/ky-hardburly.html
Kentucky Coal Heritage. “Hardburly.” Accessed April 5, 2026. https://www.coaleducation.org/coalhistory/coaltowns/hardburly.htm
Sprague, Stuart S. “Perry County – Hardburly Train.” ca. 1928. Stuart S. Sprague Photograph Collection, Morehead State University. Accessed April 5, 2026. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/sprague_photo_collection/421/
Wikimedia Commons. “Category: Hardburly, Kentucky.” Accessed April 5, 2026. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Hardburly,_Kentucky
United States Census Bureau. 1940 Census Enumeration District Descriptions – Kentucky – Perry County – ED 97-11, ED 97-12, ED 97-13. National Archives and Records Administration. Accessed April 5, 2026. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1940_Census_Enumeration_District_Descriptions_-_Kentucky_-_Perry_County_-_ED_97-11%2C_ED_97-12%2C_ED_97-13_-_NARA_-_5863017.jpg
United States Census Bureau. 1940 Census Enumeration District Maps – Kentucky – Perry County – Hardburly – ED 97-12, ED 97-18. National Archives and Records Administration. Accessed April 5, 2026. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1940_Census_Enumeration_District_Maps_-_Kentucky_-_Perry_County_-_Hardburly_-_ED_97-12%2C_ED_97-18_-_NARA_-_5832068.jpg
United States Postal Service. Postal Bulletin 22326. December 15, 2011. https://about.usps.com/postal-bulletin/2011/pb22326/pdf/pb22326.pdf
United States Geological Survey. Public and Industrial Water Supplies of the Eastern Coal Field Region, Kentucky.Circular 369. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1956. https://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/1956/0369/report.pdf
Kentucky Department of Mines. State Department of Mines: Alphabetical List of Coal Mines in the State of Kentucky for the Year Ending December 31, 1924. Lexington, KY: State Department of Mines, 1925. https://kgs.uky.edu/kgsweb/olops/pub/general/jonesminereport1924.pdf
Davis, J. D., D. A. Reynolds, W. H. Ode, C. R. Holmes, J. L. Elder, and J. E. Wilson. Carbonizing Properties and Petrographic Composition of Hazard No. 4 Coal from Columbus No. 4 Mine and High-Temperature Carbonizing Properties of Hazard No. 7 Coal from Hardburly Mine, Perry County, Ky. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, Bureau of Mines, 1945. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/005978995
Miller, James W., and T. R. Jolley. Preparation Characteristics of Coal from Perry County, Ky. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Mines, 1956. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/005980401
Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet. “Joan Bernat.” Accessed April 5, 2026. https://eec.ky.gov/Natural-Resources/Mining/Abandoned-Mine-Lands/projects/pages/joan_bernat.aspx
United States Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement. OSMRE FY 2018 Annual Report. Washington, DC, 2018. https://www.osmre.gov/sites/default/files/inline-files/OSMRE%20FY%202018%20Annual%20Report_0.pdf
Sloan, Gladys Potter. Hardburly, Perry County, Kentucky. Hardburly, KY: G. P. Sloan, 1999. https://books.google.com/books/about/Hardburly_Perry_County_Kentucky.html?id=HmwhGwAACAAJ
Hardy-Burlingham Mining Co. v. Baker, 10 F.2d 277 (6th Cir. 1926). https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/10/277/1482111/
Hardy-Burlingham Mining Co. v. Hurt, 238 Ky. 589, 38 S.W.2d 460 (Ky. Ct. App. 1931). https://www.casemine.com/judgement/us/5914a61fadd7b049346d5c9e
Hardy Burlingham Mining Co. v. Sawyer, 254 S.W.2d 350 (Ky. 1953). https://www.casemine.com/judgement/us/5914a007add7b049346730c5
Author Note: I always enjoy digging into Perry County coal camp history because places like Hardburly show how whole communities grew around mines, rail lines, schools, and company houses. Even after the boom years passed, the memory of the place stayed strong, and that is what makes Hardburly worth preserving.