Appalachian Community Histories – Hemphill, Letcher County: Jackhorn Post Office, Elk Horn Coal, and a Community That Endured
In the mountains of eastern Letcher County, just north of Fleming-Neon, one small community has carried two names for more than a century. In local and historical usage it is Hemphill, but in postal records it is Jackhorn. That is not a modern mix-up. It is one of the central facts of the place’s history. Kentucky reference works identify Hemphill on Yonts Fork at the mouth of Quillen Fork, while Rennick’s post office notes and current official records show that the post office name was Jackhorn, established on November 17, 1916. Kentucky’s official Letcher County transportation map still labels the community “Hemphill (Jackhorn P O),” and USPS continues to operate the Jackhorn post office there.
Like many eastern Kentucky coal communities, Hemphill was built out of industrial ambition and then reshaped by the people who stayed after the boom years passed. The surviving record suggests that the camp took shape in the mid 1910s under Elk Horn Coal. Some sources place its beginnings around 1914, while others date the naming and fuller development slightly later. A June 30, 1916 report in The Big Sandy News noted that Elk Horn Coal Corporation’s plant at Hemphill was expected to be “started in full soon,” which anchors the camp firmly in the early buildout years of the First World War coal economy.
Hemphill and Jackhorn
The dual naming of the community tells an important story about how coal camps were organized. Hemphill was the community name applied by Elk Horn Coal, while Jackhorn became the official post office name. Rennick’s Letcher County notes identify Hemphill as a coal town and tie the Jackhorn post office to November 17, 1916. Kentucky Atlas likewise notes that the place may first have been known as Jackhorn, but that the Hemphill name was applied by Elk Horn Coal Corporation. The exact origin of the Jackhorn name remains uncertain in the surviving reference material, which is worth stating plainly because not every local name puzzle can be solved cleanly.
The Hemphill name itself is tied to finance as much as to geography. Kentucky Atlas says the camp was named for Alexander Hemphill, who was involved in financing Elk Horn Coal, while Kentucky Coal Heritage identifies him more fully as Alexander Julian Hemphill. That detail matters because it reminds us that eastern Kentucky coal camps were shaped not only by miners and local families, but also by distant capital and company leadership. Hemphill was a mountain settlement, but its name reflected decisions made in corporate offices far from Yonts Fork.
Building an Elk Horn coal camp
Hemphill emerged as part of the larger Elk Horn Coal system that spread across eastern Kentucky in the 1910s. Kentucky Atlas places the coal camp’s creation around 1914, while the Morehead post office material summarized in search results points to a town built in the 1913 to 1914 period for company employees. By the summer of 1916, newspaper evidence shows Elk Horn pushing the Hemphill plant toward fuller operation. Read together, those records suggest a camp that was laid out in the early to mid 1910s and moving into heavier production by 1916.
Hemphill also belonged to a broader network of Elk Horn towns that included places like Fleming and Haymond. A Western Kentucky University finding aid for Elk Horn Coal Corporation papers identifies Hemphill among the company’s towns, which helps place it in the larger corporate geography of the Elkhorn field. Hemphill was not an isolated hollow settlement that accidentally grew up around a mine. It was part of a deliberate company-town system, with housing, utilities, and services arranged around extraction.
Relief workers and life in the Depression
One of the richest surviving primary collections for Hemphill comes from the Library of Congress. The American Friends Service Committee records preserve a typescript diary, reports, correspondence, and related material from volunteers who served in the community during the summer of 1933. The finding aid states that the volunteers were working in a mining community in Letcher County and that the diary details their efforts to improve social conditions in Hemphill. For historians, that is a rare gift. Coal camps often appear in records as production sites, property disputes, or map labels. Here, Hemphill appears as a lived community facing the human pressures of the Depression.
That collection suggests a Hemphill history larger than company records alone can tell. It points toward households, health concerns, children, food, housing, and the daily strains of life in a mining settlement during one of the hardest years in Appalachian history. Even without quoting the diary at length, the existence of such a focused Hemphill collection shows that outside observers recognized the community as a place of serious social need by 1933. It also offers future researchers one of the clearest archival paths into everyday life there.
Hemphill in the postwar years
A 1956 U.S. Geological Survey publication offers a sharp snapshot of Hemphill in the mid twentieth century. Its entry for Hemphill says the population served was 160, that the ownership was Elkhorn Coal Corp., and that the water source was a mine at Hemphill. The report adds that the water was used both for domestic purposes and for washing coal, and that storage consisted of a 5,000 gallon wooden tank on the hillside used for fire protection. In just a few lines, the report captures the company-town logic still shaping life there. Water service, household life, industrial process, and fire safety all ran through the same corporate system.
That same period also shows how long company control could last, even as classic camp life began to change. In Hall v. Elk Horn Coal Corporation, a Kentucky Court of Appeals case involving property in Jackhorn, the court record shows Elk Horn still enforcing residential restrictions in the town and still tied to mining property in the Jackhorn area years after the original camp era. The case makes clear that Jackhorn was not merely an old postal name on a map. It remained a legal and lived townsite shaped by the legacy of coal-company ownership.
Robert F. Kennedy’s stop in Hemphill
Hemphill briefly entered the national story in February 1968 when Robert F. Kennedy visited eastern Kentucky. The RFK in EKY project states that Kennedy’s February 14 itinerary included visits with families in Hemphill and Haymond after the Fleming-Neon hearing. The Fleming-Neon tour page specifically includes a Hemphill stop and identifies a photograph as “RFK Visits a Home in Hemphill, KY.” Prestonsburg material from the same project recalls that Kennedy had spoken that day about seeing severe hunger among families in the region.
That visit matters because it linked Hemphill to one of the most remembered moments in the national conversation about Appalachian poverty. By 1968, Hemphill was already more than fifty years old as a coal community. Kennedy did not arrive at a new industrial camp. He arrived at a place carrying decades of extraction, uneven prosperity, and hardship. Hemphill’s appearance in that tour record places it within a larger history of eastern Kentucky communities whose struggles became visible to the nation only after generations of local endurance.
A school, a community center, and the memory of the camp
The later history of Hemphill is not only a story of decline. It is also a story of reuse and community persistence. The Hemphill Community Center says the original community organization was formed in 1968 and first operated in the back of the old Hemphill Fountain, identified there as one of the original Elkhorn Coal Corporation buildings. The center also states that the building it now occupies was formerly Hemphill Grade School, where three generations of students attended between 1944 and 1990, before local efforts turned the vacant structure into a gathering place beginning in 1997.
That matters because it shows how a coal camp becomes a community with a longer memory than the company that built it. In Hemphill, the school outlasted the classic camp era, and the community center outlasted the school. The old industrial landscape did not simply disappear. Buildings were repurposed, traditions were carried forward, and a place once organized around coal found ways to organize itself around music, food, memory, and neighborly gathering.
Why Hemphill still matters
Hemphill matters because it preserves, in one small place, several of the most important patterns in Appalachian history. It is a coal camp with a dual identity, one local and one postal. It is a community whose name reflects outside capital but whose surviving story rests in local endurance. It appears in industrial newspapers, federal scientific reports, relief archives, road maps, postal records, and the remembered route of Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 eastern Kentucky trip. Very few small communities can be traced across that many kinds of records.
Today, the official map still preserves the paired name, “Hemphill (Jackhorn P O),” which may be the best short summary of the place’s history. Hemphill was never only a mine camp, and Jackhorn was never only a post office. Together the two names record how industry, government, and local identity layered themselves onto the same Appalachian hollow and stayed there.
Sources & Further Reading
American Friends Service Committee Records. Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. Accessed April 4, 2026. https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mss/eadmss.ms008126
Appalshop. “About Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 Tour.” RFK in EKY. Accessed April 4, 2026. https://rfkineky.org/1968-tour.htm
Appalshop. “Prestonsburg, KY.” RFK in EKY Tour Sites. Accessed April 4, 2026. https://rfkineky.org/tour/prestonsburg.htm
Baker, J. A. 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://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/1956/0369/report.pdf
Hemphill Community Center. “Our Story.” Accessed April 4, 2026. https://hemphillcenter.org/our-story
Kentucky Atlas & Gazetteer. “Hemphill, Kentucky.” Accessed April 4, 2026. https://www.kyatlas.com/ky-hemphill.html
Kentucky Coal Heritage. “Hemphill.” Accessed April 4, 2026. https://www.coaleducation.org/coalhistory/coaltowns/history_of_hemphill.htm
Kentucky Coal Heritage. “Letcher County, Kentucky Coal Camps.” Accessed April 4, 2026. https://www.coaleducation.org/coalhistory/coaltowns/coalcamps/letcher_county.htm
Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives. “Requesting Records from the Archives.” Accessed April 4, 2026. https://kdla.ky.gov/Archives-and-Reference/Pages/Records-Requests.aspx
Kentucky Secretary of State, Land Office. “Kentucky Land Office.” Accessed April 4, 2026. https://sos.ky.gov/land/Pages/default.aspx
Kentucky Secretary of State, Land Office. “Patent Series Overview.” Accessed April 4, 2026. https://sos.ky.gov/land/non-military/patents/Pages/default.aspx
Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. State Primary Road System: Letcher County. Frankfort: Kentucky Transportation Cabinet, June 2022. https://transportation.ky.gov/Planning/SPRS%20Maps/Letcher.pdf
Letcher County Clerk. “Records.” Accessed April 4, 2026. https://letchercountyclerk.ky.gov/records/
Letcher County Clerk. “Deeds.” Accessed April 4, 2026. https://letchercountyclerk.ky.gov/records/deeds/
Letcher County Clerk. “Plats.” Accessed April 4, 2026. https://letchercountyclerk.ky.gov/records/plats/
Letcher County Clerk. “Wills.” Accessed April 4, 2026. https://letchercountyclerk.ky.gov/records/wills/
Rennick, Robert M. The Post Offices of Letcher County, Kentucky. Morehead State University, n.d. Accessed April 4, 2026. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/context/kentucky_county_histories/article/1392/viewcontent/Letcher_PostOffices.pdf
The Big Sandy News (Louisa, KY), June 30, 1916. https://archive.org/download/xt7vt43hzs40/xt7vt43hzs40_text.pdf
United States Postal Service. “Jackhorn.” Accessed April 4, 2026. https://tools.usps.com/locations/details/1368163
Author Note: Hemphill is one of those Letcher County places where company coal history, postal identity, Depression-era hardship, and community memory all meet in the same hollow. I wanted to tell its story not just as an old camp, but as a place that kept remaking itself long after the first coal buildings went up.