Appalachian Community Histories – Hitchins, Carter County: Railroads, Fire Clay, and the Rise of a Firebrick Town
The Hitchins preserved in Kentucky’s historical record is in Carter County, not Clark County. Long before the community carried its present name, the place was known as E.K. Junction or East Kentucky Junction, while its post office was called Anglin. Its history is unusually well documented because railroads, industry, federal census takers, state geologists, courts, newspapers, and later federal workplace investigators all left records of a community that grew rapidly around transportation and fire clay.
A Town Built at the Crossing
Hitchins began as a railroad place before it became an industrial one. By the 1870s, the Eastern Kentucky Railway had pushed through this part of Carter County, creating a north-south route through the Little Sandy country. The line eventually connected the interior with Riverton on the Ohio River. In December 1881, the Elizabethtown, Lexington and Big Sandy Railroad reached the junction, creating the transportation crossroads that would define the community for the next half century.
The new settlement became known as Eastern Kentucky Junction, usually shortened to E.K. Junction. When a post office was established on October 16, 1882, however, postal authorities gave it another name, Anglin. Robert M. Rennick’s Kentucky place-name research identifies Anglin with the first telegraph operator at the junction. For roughly three decades, E.K. Junction and Anglin existed side by side as names for essentially the same growing railroad settlement.
The rail network itself was changing almost as quickly as the community. The Kentucky Historical Society notes that the Elizabethtown, Lexington and Big Sandy line and the Ashland Coal and Iron Railway became part of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway system in January 1882. At Hitchins, the C&O and the Eastern Kentucky Railway eventually shared a depot, making the community an unusually important point on Carter County’s railroad map. A later county railroad study called Hitchins the only community in Carter County to have been served by two railroads and two separate depots.
At first, the railroad itself was the reason for the settlement. Trains brought passengers, mail, goods, employment, and access to markets that had once seemed distant from the Little Sandy valley. Then the ground beneath Carter County began to matter just as much as the tracks laid across it.
Theodore Roosevelt Comes to E.K. Junction
For a brief moment in 1912, E.K. Junction became a stop on the national political stage.
Former president Theodore Roosevelt was attempting a political comeback that year, challenging President William Howard Taft for control of the Republican Party before ultimately leading the Progressive movement popularly remembered as the Bull Moose campaign. During a whistle-stop trip through Kentucky, Roosevelt’s train passed through the little Carter County junction.
According to contemporary reporting in the Louisville Courier-Journal, later traced by historian James M. Prichard, more than 1,000 people gathered to hear Roosevelt when he stopped there in early April 1912. For a settlement built around passing trains, it must have been an extraordinary sight. People from the surrounding countryside crowded around the tracks while one of the best-known Americans of the age spoke from the railroad line that had created their community.
Yet Roosevelt’s visit came at almost exactly the moment when E.K. Junction was about to acquire a new identity. Another force was arriving in Carter County, one that would shape local life much longer than a presidential campaign.
That force was firebrick.
“All Hail Hitchins”
The fire-clay deposits of northeastern Kentucky had already attracted brick manufacturers by the beginning of the twentieth century. Companies discovered that the clays around Olive Hill, Grahn, Hayward, and neighboring communities could be fashioned into refractory brick capable of enduring the tremendous heat of furnaces, boilers, steel mills, and other industrial installations.
General Refractories Company selected the railroad junction at Anglin for a major new plant. Local historical records place construction in 1911 and 1912, and the factory quickly drew workers into the community. Rennick’s place-name research indicates that both the post office and settlement were renamed Hitchins in May 1912 for Edward Stanley Hitchins, an official of General Refractories. Historical records sometimes render the surname as Hitchens, but Hitchins became the established spelling of the Kentucky community.
By the end of that year, the transformation was dramatic enough to attract newspaper attention. On December 20, 1912, the Louisville Courier-Journal ran a short piece under the triumphant heading “All Hail Hitchins.” The newspaper described the growing place and characterized its new General Refractories works as the “largest and most modern firebrick plant in the world.” Whether read as literal industrial ranking or the booster language common to the period, the statement captures how enormous the plant appeared beside the railroad village that had existed only a few years earlier.
Hitchins had gone from being a place identified by its railroad junction to a community identified with a factory.
Fire Clay Beneath the Hills
The reason General Refractories came to Carter County can still be seen in geological reports from the period.
In 1922, the Kentucky Geological Survey devoted extensive attention to Kentucky’s clay resources. Its published volume included an open cut through plastic fire clay at General Refractories in Hitchins, a photograph of the company’s clay pit, and a general view of the plant itself. The placement of those photographs in a state geological report shows that Hitchins was not merely a local brickyard. It had become an important example of Kentucky’s mineral industry.
The manufacturing process turned clay dug from the surrounding landscape into a product needed far beyond Carter County. Refractory brick was designed to withstand temperatures that ordinary building brick could not survive. It lined blast furnaces, boilers, steel-making equipment, cement and lime plants, cupolas, and locomotive fireboxes. In that sense, Hitchins occupied an unusual place in Appalachian industrial history. The community was rural and mountainous, but its products were connected directly to the heavy industries that powered cities, railroads, foundries, and steel districts hundreds of miles away.
Kentucky’s 1928 mine reporting still listed General Refractories at Hitchins as an active Carter County operation. A few years later, a C&O Railway industrial publication offered a remarkable picture of the scale of the business. General Refractories operated plants at both Olive Hill and Hitchins, and their combined capacity was reported at approximately 180,000 bricks per day. The Hitchins operation specialized in products that included locomotive arch brick, while the two Kentucky plants shipped refractory products throughout the United States and Canada and into foreign markets.
Clay from a Carter County hillside could therefore end up inside industrial furnaces far beyond Appalachia.
A Community of Railroad Men and Brick Workers
Industry changed the physical scale of Hitchins, but a 1919 Kentucky Court of Appeals decision gives one of the clearest surviving glimpses of the town itself.
The case, Ratcliffe’s Administrator v. Chesapeake & Ohio Railway Company, concerned the death of John R. Ratcliffe, who had been struck by a train while crossing the C&O bridge over the Little Sandy River. In describing the circumstances, the court called Hitchins a place of about 1,000 inhabitants. It also recorded how frequently residents used the railroad bridge as a footway and noted that the Eastern Kentucky Railway crossing stood only about 500 or 600 feet away.
Those details reveal something that industrial statistics cannot. Hitchins was not simply a factory beside a siding. By the end of the First World War era, it had become a substantial community where people walked between homes, stores, railroad facilities, and workplaces within a landscape dominated by tracks and the river.
Federal census records reinforce that picture. Hitchins appears separately in Carter County enumeration material during the twentieth century, including a dedicated Hitchins Village designation in the 1930 census. By 1940, the United States Census recorded 983 people in the unincorporated community of Hitchins, strikingly close to the population estimate contained in the 1919 court case.
For several decades, in other words, Hitchins remained roughly a thousand-person Appalachian industrial community.
Hitchins Goes to War
The First World War reached Hitchins only a few years after the firebrick plant transformed the town.
James M. Prichard’s study of Hitchins during World War I, built from draft records, military documents, newspapers, and family memories, identified more than fifty men from the community who answered the call to military service. Their occupations reflected the economy around them. Railroad work, carpentry, farming, and industrial labor connected the men of Hitchins to both the older rural Carter County and the newer industrial settlement along the tracks.
One was Prichard’s grandfather, Omar Henry Thomas, a C&O Railroad carpenter who initially tried to join the Navy but was rejected because of a hearing problem before later entering Army service. Another member of the Thomas family, French Lyman Thomas, served with the 116th Infantry and experienced some of the brutal fighting of the final months of the war in France. Prichard’s later reconstruction of the community’s wartime generation demonstrates how a small Appalachian town only a few years removed from being called E.K. Junction became connected to a global conflict.
The war also arrived at a moment when Hitchins was still growing into its new name. Men who had been born when the place was known as Anglin or E.K. Junction returned home to a community whose identity was now tied to General Refractories.
School, Stores, and Community Life
Industrial communities survive through more than payrolls. Hitchins developed schools, businesses, entertainment, churches, and the ordinary institutions that turned a worksite into a hometown.
One remarkable surviving photograph records Hitchins School during the New Deal era. The Stuart S. Sprague Photograph Collection at Morehead State University preserves a 1937 image connected to the Works Progress Administration and the University of Kentucky Photo Archives. The record identifies Hitchins School as a WPA project, placing the community within the massive federal building and employment programs of the Great Depression.
Historic Carter County photograph collections also preserve images of the Stephens Theatre at Hitchins and the General Refractories plant around 1919. Taken together, such photographs show a town that contained much more than kilns and railroad sidings. A theater points to evening entertainment and community gathering. A substantial school points to families putting down roots. Company seniority records from later decades reveal generations of workers whose employment at General Refractories stretched back through much of the twentieth century.
Morehead State University’s Roger W. Barbour collection adds another visual record. Numerous photographs taken around 1945 document General Refractories at Hitchins during the middle of the twentieth century, when the plant and community were still deeply intertwined.
When the Eastern Kentucky Railway Disappeared
Hitchins had been born at a junction, but one half of that junction did not last forever.
The Eastern Kentucky Railway struggled during the early years of the Great Depression and ceased operations in December 1932. The Kentucky Historical Society’s marker at Hitchins now commemorates the spot where the Eastern Kentucky line once met the C&O.
The loss mattered symbolically as much as practically. E.K. Junction had owed its first identity to the crossing of the two rail systems. Once the Eastern Kentucky Railway disappeared, the landscape that had created the community was permanently altered.
Yet Hitchins did not disappear with it. The C&O remained, and General Refractories continued shipping brick. Firebrick, rather than the railroad junction alone, now anchored the local economy.
That endurance becomes particularly clear four decades later, when the railroad again tried to reduce its presence in town.
The Fight to Keep the Hitchins Freight Agency
In the early 1970s, the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway asked permission to close its freight agency at Hitchins and transfer the work to Olive Hill. The resulting dispute reached the Kentucky Court of Appeals and produced one of the most detailed primary sources for Hitchins in the later twentieth century.
The railroad argued that eliminating the Hitchins agency would save approximately $20,000 per year. Yet the station was not operating at a loss. C&O admitted that the Hitchins agency was profitable and that its revenue exceeded its cost by a considerable amount.
Residents and local businesses opposed the closure. Testimony showed that the agency handled incoming fertilizer, surplus commodities intended for area schools, finished lumber, wood chips, logs, and other freight. General Refractories remained the giant in the room, accounting for approximately 90 to 95 percent of the agency’s business. A union representative testified that the number of railroad cars handled through the agency had actually been increasing.
Closing the agency would have required other customers to deal with Olive Hill, which the court described as roughly nineteen miles away. Witnesses pointed to poor telephone service and the inconvenience of what could become a forty-mile round trip for people needing railroad services.
The Kentucky Railroad Commission refused to approve the closure. A lower court overturned the commission, but in 1973 the Kentucky Court of Appeals reversed that decision and upheld the commission’s order.
The case is important because it captures Hitchins at a transitional moment. The town no longer possessed the two-railroad importance it had enjoyed in 1912, yet its freight station remained profitable, its factory remained dominant, and local residents still considered rail service vital enough to fight for it in court.
Inside General Refractories in the 1980s
Even seventy years after construction of the Hitchins plant, federal investigators found a substantial refractory operation still at work.
In September 1982, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health evaluated General Refractories at Hitchins as part of a study of industrial control technology. The resulting federal report, published in 1983, stated that the plant employed as many as 190 workers producing high-duty fire-clay bricks and specialized shapes from locally mined soft and hard clays.
The report described the industrial process in unusual detail. Clay was crushed, finely ground, measured, mixed with water, shaped by machinery and presses, fired, ground, sawed, and prepared as finished refractory products. Workers operated amid machinery, dust, heat, and noise, while the company maintained safety inspections, environmental monitoring, medical monitoring, protective equipment, and local exhaust ventilation in certain operations.
It is an extraordinary contrast with the Hitchins of eighty years earlier. The community had begun because two railroads crossed near the Little Sandy. By the 1980s, the factory that had arrived afterward had outlived the Eastern Kentucky Railway and continued turning Carter County clay into specialized industrial products using increasingly mechanized methods.
Rail transportation itself was soon entering another period of decline. By the mid-1980s, portions of the old C&O Lexington Subdivision were being abandoned, further weakening the transportation system around which Hitchins had originally developed. Secondary railroad histories record that General Refractories was then shipping only a small number of carloads annually compared with the industrial traffic of earlier decades.
Remembering Hitchins
Hitchins is easy to overlook if its history is judged only by its present size. That would miss what made the community important.
This was a place created by nineteenth-century railroads, transformed by twentieth-century heavy industry, visited by Theodore Roosevelt, represented by dozens of men during the First World War, photographed by state geologists and New Deal workers, and repeatedly documented by courts because transportation remained so central to daily life.
Its history also illustrates a larger Appalachian pattern. Natural resources alone did not create industrial communities. Fire clay had lain beneath Carter County for ages. What changed the region was the combination of those resources with rail transportation, outside capital, industrial technology, and a labor force willing to build lives around the plants that followed the tracks.
At Hitchins, the sequence can be read almost perfectly. First came the Eastern Kentucky Railway. Then came another railroad and E.K. Junction. A post office gave the place the name Anglin. General Refractories arrived, and Anglin became Hitchins. Firebrick moved outward while workers and families moved in. Schools, stores, entertainment, homes, and community institutions followed. One railroad vanished, then railroad traffic declined more broadly, while the industrial works endured beyond the transportation system that had first made their location attractive.
The old story survives today in photographs, census schedules, court opinions, geological reports, railroad records, company documents, and the Kentucky historical marker standing near the former junction. Those records preserve something the modern landscape can no longer fully reveal.
For much of the twentieth century, Hitchins was not simply a name beside a road in Carter County. It was a thousand-person Appalachian industrial town where railroads crossed, kilns burned, clay became firebrick, and products made in a narrow Kentucky valley traveled into the furnaces of an industrial world.
Sources & Further Reading
Prichard, James M. “Reflections of a Vanished Generation: War and Memory in a Small Kentucky Town.” Kentucky Humanities, Spring 2018. Particularly valuable for Hitchins, Theodore Roosevelt’s 1912 visit, the General Refractories plant, and Hitchins men who served during World War I. https://www.kyhumanities.org/assets/files/Page-Editor-Files/Past_issue_pdf29.pdf
Kentucky Historical Society. “Eastern Kentucky Railway-Hitchins.” Historical Marker No. 2246. Dedicated November 10, 2007. Accessed October 9, 2026. https://history.ky.gov/markers/eastern-kentucky-railway-hitchins
Rennick, Robert M. Kentucky Place Names. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1988. See the Hitchins entry, 142. https://www.kentuckypress.com/9780813101798/kentucky-place-names/
Rennick, Robert M. “Carter County: Post Offices.” County Histories of Kentucky, no. 171. Morehead, KY: Morehead State University, 2000. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/171/
Crawford, Hubert V., and Paul L. Crawford. “The Role of Railroads and Heavy Industry in Carter County, Kentucky.” County Histories of Kentucky, no. 16. Morehead, KY: Morehead State University, 1992. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/16/
Kentucky Geological Survey. Series 6: Geologic Reports. Vol. 8. Lexington: Kentucky Geological Survey, 1922. See especially the General Refractories Company clay workings and Hitchins plant, 178–183. https://books.google.com/books/about/Series_6.html?id=kG_a6fcWpywC
United States Bureau of the Census. Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1930: Carter County, Kentucky. Enumeration District 22-3, “Hitchins Village and Magisterial District 1, Grayson.” National Archives microfilm publication T626, roll 739. https://www.us-census.org/states/kentucky/teams/Carter1930-T626-739.htm
Kentucky Court of Appeals. Ratcliffe’s Administrator v. Chesapeake & Ohio Railway Co., 184 Ky. 94, 211 S.W. 420. 1919. https://case-law.vlex.com/vid/ratcliffe-s-adm-r-901827274
Kentucky Court of Appeals. Railroad Commission v. Chesapeake & Ohio Railway Co., 490 S.W.2d 763. Decided February 2, 1973. https://openjurist.org/490/sw2d/763/railroad-commission-v-chesapeake-ohio-railway-co
Godbey, F. W. Preliminary Control Technology Assessment of General Refractories Company, Hitchens, Kentucky. Cincinnati: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Public Health Service, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, 1983. https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/238684
Sprague, Stuart S. “Carter County – Hitchins School.” Photograph, 1937. Stuart S. Sprague Photograph Collection, University of Kentucky Photo Archives and Works Progress Administration. Morehead State University Digital Archives. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/sprague_photo_collection/88/
Barbour, Roger W. “General Refractories Company – Hitchins, Kentucky.” Photographs, ca. 1945. Roger W. Barbour Photograph Collection, Morehead State University Digital Archives. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/2019.2.html
Carter County KYGenWeb. “Hitchins General Refractories Firebrick Plant.” Photograph, ca. 1919. Accessed October 9, 2026. https://kygenweb.net/carter/photos/place/fb_plant.htm
Carter County KYGenWeb. “Places and Things Section.” Carter County historical photograph collection. Includes the Stephens Theatre at Hitchins and the General Refractories firebrick plant. Accessed October 9, 2026. https://kygenweb.net/carter/photos/place/1_index_place.htm
Chesapeake & Ohio Railway. “C&O Magazine Boosts Olive Hill.” C&O Railway Magazine, February 1932. Reprinted in the Carter County Herald, February 11, 1932. https://kygenweb.net/carter/news/cch211321.html
Morehead State University. “County Histories of Kentucky.” Camden-Carroll Library, ScholarWorks. Collection includes Carter County histories covering railroads, schools, post offices, towns, industries, and community records. Accessed October 9, 2026. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/
Carter County KYGenWeb. “Carter County Deed Images.” Digital collection of Carter County deeds, including railroad right-of-way and industrial-era property records. Accessed October 9, 2026. https://kygenweb.net/carter/deeds/carter_county/1_deed_images.html
University of Alabama Libraries, Angelo Bruno Business Library. “Historical Annual Reports: G.” Historical Annual Reports Collection. Includes General Refractories Company annual reports from 1924 through 1980. Accessed October 9, 2026. https://www.lib.ua.edu/libraries/bruno/annual-reports/historical-annual-reports-collection/historical-annual-reports-g/
Louisville Courier-Journal. April 4, 1912. Contemporary coverage of Theodore Roosevelt’s stop at E.K. Junction, cited and discussed in James M. Prichard, “Reflections of a Vanished Generation.” https://www.kyhumanities.org/assets/files/Page-Editor-Files/Past_issue_pdf29.pdf
Louisville Courier-Journal. “All Hail Hitchins.” December 20, 1912. Contemporary report on the renamed community and the General Refractories firebrick works, reproduced and cited in James M. Prichard’s research. https://www.kyhumanities.org/assets/files/Page-Editor-Files/Past_issue_pdf29.pdf
Author Note: Hitchins is one of those Appalachian communities whose present size can hide how important it once was to regional transportation and industry. I hope this article helps preserve the story of the railroad workers, firebrick laborers, families, and institutions that built this Carter County community.