Appalachian Community Histories – Hummel, Rockcastle County: The Kentucky Freestone Company, Sandstone Quarries
In the hills of Rockcastle County, near the old railroad settlement of Langford Station, a small community once supplied building stone to one of the largest cities along the Ohio River. Its workers extracted enormous blocks of sandstone from the mountainsides, operated heavy derricks, and loaded railroad cars bound for Cincinnati. Around the quarry grew a settlement with a school, church, commissary, and other buildings that served the families whose livelihoods depended on the stone industry.
The community became known as Hummel, taking its name from the Cincinnati company that acquired the local quarrying operation in the 1890s. For approximately three decades, the Kentucky Freestone Company connected this relatively isolated section of Rockcastle County to a regional market for architectural stone, shipping its products north while the surrounding settlement developed around the demands of the industry.
By the late 1920s, however, changes in building materials and the economics of quarrying had brought the operation to an end. Much of the industrial settlement eventually disappeared, leaving behind abandoned quarry workings, scattered stone, and a community name that survived long after the company responsible for its development had departed.
The Railroad and the Beginnings of the Kentucky Freestone Company
The origins of Hummel can be traced to the expansion of railroad transportation through southeastern Kentucky during the nineteenth century. Before the arrival of reliable rail connections, the expense of transporting heavy building stone made commercial quarrying difficult in many mountainous areas. Even where suitable sandstone deposits existed, moving large quantities of stone over primitive roads limited the markets that quarry operators could reach.
Railroad construction during the 1880s transformed the commercial possibilities of Rockcastle County. The railroad connecting Cincinnati and Knoxville passed through the county’s rugged terrain, providing access to distant markets for timber, stone, and other natural resources. Near Langford Station, the combination of substantial sandstone deposits and a nearby railroad encouraged investors to establish a commercial quarrying operation.
In 1885, twelve investors from Lexington purchased approximately 100 acres adjoining the railroad right-of-way near Langford Station and organized their holdings as the Kentucky Freestone Company. According to the company history preserved by Nancy Disher Baird and subsequently discussed by historian Karl Lietzenmayer, the investors selected Launey Clay, the adopted Russian son of Kentucky abolitionist Cassius M. Clay, to manage their enterprise.
Under its early management, the company established the infrastructure needed to extract and transport sandstone. A railroad spur connected the quarrying area with the main line, while derricks powered by mules helped workers lift the heavy blocks from the quarry. Much of the early production was shipped to Lexington, where growing demand for building materials offered a market for the stone taken from Rockcastle County.
The Hummel Family Comes to Rockcastle County
The transformation of the quarry into the settlement eventually known as Hummel began in late 1895, when the David Hummel Building Company of Cincinnati purchased the Kentucky Freestone Company. The acquisition connected the Rockcastle operation to an established stone business with decades of experience supplying building materials to the Cincinnati metropolitan area.
The company’s founder, David Hummel, was a German immigrant born in Württemberg in 1822. After completing an apprenticeship as a stonecutter, he emigrated to the United States in 1841 and eventually established himself in Cincinnati. He opened a stone business during the 1850s and developed it into an enterprise supplying building stone, masonry services, and materials for residential and commercial construction.
David Hummel died in 1894, shortly before his company acquired the Rockcastle County operation. His sons, including George, Frank, and William Hummel, continued the family business and oversaw its expansion into Kentucky. The company retained the Kentucky Freestone name for its quarrying enterprise while installing steam-powered derricks and expanding its transportation facilities.
Dave Carter, who had previously worked at the Rockcastle quarry, became manager of the operation under the Hummel family’s ownership. The first shipment of Rockcastle freestone reportedly reached the company’s Cincinnati stone yard in June 1896, establishing the transportation arrangement that would support the quarry throughout much of its subsequent history.
The business expanded further when the Hummel company opened a second quarry approximately a mile north of the original Langford operation. As employment and industrial activity increased, the settlement around the quarries and mills became associated with the family that owned the business, eventually acquiring the name Hummel.
Rockcastle Freestone and the Geology Beneath Hummel
The stone extracted at Hummel was particularly well suited to architectural construction. Known commercially as Rockcastle freestone, it was a fine-grained sandstone that could be cut, shaped, and finished into building materials without the extensive difficulties associated with harder or more irregular stone.
Geologist Charles Butts documented the sandstone deposits in his 1922 study, The Mississippian Series of Eastern Kentucky. He identified the commercially valuable material as the Wildie sandstone, describing its relatively uniform grain, bluish coloration, and suitability for construction.
Butts observed that the sandstone thickened to approximately six feet at Hummel Station, just north of the railroad tunnel near Langford. His study included contemporary geological photographs of the surrounding area and identified the sandstone as an important component of the region’s rock formations.
The commercial importance of the deposit was also recognized in broader studies of Kentucky’s mineral resources. Geological accounts identified Rockcastle freestone as a building stone suitable for cutting and sawing, with much of its production intended for markets outside Kentucky.
By the early twentieth century, the Kentucky Freestone Company was advertising several varieties of stone to architects and contractors. A 1904 advertisement in Western Architect and Builder offered blue, buff, and olive Rockcastle stone, identifying the company’s quarries at Hummels, Kentucky, and its mills at Langford.
The advertisement also documented the company’s management. George Hummel was listed as president and general manager, Frank Hummel as treasurer, G. Ellis Hummel as secretary, and William Hummel as superintendent. Its appearance in an architectural trade publication demonstrates how the company promoted Rockcastle County’s natural resources to an established urban construction market.
Quarrying the Sandstone and the Work of Hummel’s Laborers
Extracting sandstone at Hummel required considerable physical labor, particularly during the earlier years when workers depended heavily on hand tools and relatively simple machinery. According to Lietzenmayer’s history, based substantially on Baird’s research, the commercially valuable stone lay between approximately five and thirty-five feet beneath the surface.
Before workers could reach the sandstone, they had to remove the soil and other material covering the deposit. Much of this preliminary work took place during winter, when quarrying itself was generally suspended. Laborers then cut channels into the exposed rock, preparing sections that could be separated into blocks large enough for commercial use.
The next stage involved drilling a series of holes along the intended breaking line. During the early years, this work was performed manually, with one worker holding a drilling tool while two others struck it with heavy hammers. After each blow, the drill was turned slightly, allowing the men to gradually deepen the holes.
Once the drilling was complete, workers placed black powder into the holes and blasted the sandstone loose. The resulting blocks could then be lifted with derricks, transported to the mill, or loaded onto railroad equipment for shipment. After approximately 1910, steam-powered drills increasingly replaced the earlier manual drilling methods, reducing some of the physical labor involved in preparing stone for extraction.
A surviving photograph dated 1910 provides an unusually detailed view of the industrial operation. Reproduced on the cover of the July and August 2015 Bulletin of the Kenton County Historical Society, it shows quarry workers standing among enormous blocks of sandstone beneath a derrick used to lift the heavy material. Railway tracks are visible in the foreground, illustrating how closely the quarrying process depended upon the transportation infrastructure established around the settlement.
The photograph preserves a rare glimpse of the people whose labor sustained Hummel during its industrial years, while also demonstrating the scale of the equipment and stone blocks handled at the quarry.
From the Rockcastle Hills to Cincinnati
The Kentucky Freestone Company’s commercial success depended on its ability to deliver substantial quantities of sandstone to customers beyond Rockcastle County. Although the stone was extracted in the hills surrounding Hummel, much of the company’s business was conducted through its Cincinnati facilities.
Once the sandstone had been prepared for transportation, workers loaded it onto railroad cars that could be connected to trains operating along the Louisville and Nashville Railroad. The line linked the Rockcastle operation with Cincinnati, where the Hummel company maintained its established stoneworking business.
Rail transportation allowed the company to market Rockcastle freestone for substantial architectural projects rather than depending entirely on nearby construction. Stone could be transported from Kentucky to the Cincinnati yards, where it could be shaped, finished, and distributed according to customer requirements.
By 1903, the family business had moved into new premises at 2629 Spring Grove Avenue in Cincinnati. The relationship between the Kentucky quarry and its Ohio headquarters remained evident in subsequent commercial directories. In 1918, the Cincinnati directory identified the Kentucky Freestone Company as a producer of Rockcastle stone, listed its quarries and mills at Wards in Rockcastle County, and named John Sperry as president, Frank Hummel as vice president, and G. Ellis Hummel as secretary and treasurer. The directory’s use of Wards illustrates the different locality names associated with the enterprise in contemporary records.
Life in the Hummel Quarry Community
The development of the quarry brought more than industrial machinery to the hills surrounding Langford Station. As the Kentucky Freestone Company expanded, the settlement around the quarries acquired buildings and facilities that supported the workers and their families.
Historical accounts identify a schoolhouse, church, commissary, depot, and mill among the structures established during Hummel’s industrial years. Together, these institutions helped turn what had initially been an isolated quarrying operation into a community where working families could establish homes and participate in local religious and social life.
The commissary provided a commercial center associated with the company, while the schoolhouse and church served needs extending beyond the working day. The railroad depot connected residents to surrounding communities and provided an important transportation link for the industry. The settlement’s development was closely tied to the company’s continued success, leaving much of its local economy dependent upon quarrying.
Hummel eventually gained its own post office, an important development for a community whose identity had grown around a private industrial enterprise. Kentucky place-name researcher Robert M. Rennick recorded that the Hummel post office was established on June 11, 1923, with James A. Franklin serving as its first postmaster. Rennick’s research drew partly on Baird’s company history and an interview with Opp Bussell Jr., preserving information about the community that might otherwise have disappeared from the written record.
The creation of the post office came relatively late in the quarry’s history. By that time, the community had already experienced more than two decades of industrial activity under the Hummel family’s ownership, although the building-stone industry was beginning to face substantial competition from alternative materials.
The Decline of the Freestone Industry and the Closing of the Quarry
The circumstances that had encouraged the Kentucky Freestone Company’s expansion began to change during the early twentieth century. Freestone had been a popular building material during the nineteenth century and remained commercially important into the 1900s, but competing stone products and new construction materials gradually reduced its position in the market.
Indiana limestone became a particularly significant competitor. It was widely available, suitable for architectural construction, and increasingly economical for builders purchasing large quantities of finished stone. The growing use of concrete and other manufactured construction materials added further competition for traditional stone suppliers.
For a quarrying operation in the hills of Rockcastle County, these changes presented substantial difficulties. The expense of extraction and transportation made it increasingly difficult to compete with other sources of building materials. Lietzenmayer also suggested that the difficulty of attracting sufficient labor to a relatively remote part of Kentucky may have contributed to the company’s withdrawal from Hummel.
According to the historical account, quarrying ceased in 1925, and by 1928 the company had begun disposing of its Rockcastle County property. The closure effectively ended the principal industry around which the settlement had developed.
One contemporary record complicates the exact chronology of the company’s departure. The 1926–1927 Cincinnati directory continued to advertise the Kentucky Freestone Company as a producer of Rockcastle stone, identifying its quarries and mills at Hummel and its office at 2629 Spring Grove Avenue.
The listing demonstrates that the company continued to maintain a commercial identity associated with Hummel after the reported end of quarrying. It does not, however, establish that new stone was still being extracted when the directory appeared. Existing inventory, the continuation of commercial operations, or the delay involved in updating directory information could account for the listing.
What Remained After the Quarry Closed
The departure of the Kentucky Freestone Company brought significant changes to the settlement it had helped establish. Without the quarry and mill operations, the industrial infrastructure that had supported Hummel gradually disappeared, and many of the buildings associated with the company’s earlier years were eventually lost.
The abandoned railroad spur was removed, while former industrial roadbeds became part of the area’s rural transportation network. Lietzenmayer’s 2015 account described Hummel Road as following portions of the old quarrying landscape, where time and vegetation had increasingly obscured the former industrial workings.
Much of the company’s physical presence disappeared, including its original schoolhouse, mill, commissary, depot, and other structures. Nevertheless, substantial quantities of quarried and sawed sandstone remained scattered across the hillsides, leaving a physical reminder of the industry that had once operated there.
The disappearance of the company’s industrial facilities did not mean the immediate disappearance of Hummel as a community. Local newspaper records demonstrate that residents continued to identify with the settlement decades after quarrying ended.
An issue of The Mount Vernon Signal dated August 18, 1960, included an obituary for Hayes Clark, who had died earlier that month. The obituary identified him as a member of Hummel Grove Baptist Church and named his widow, Mynie Clark, as a resident of Hummel. Notices elsewhere in the same issue also referred to property owned by residents in the community.
These records are valuable because they establish that Hummel remained a recognized residential and religious community well into the twentieth century, even though the industrial operation responsible for its development had closed more than three decades earlier.
The Hummel Homecoming and the Preservation of Community Memory
As the physical remains of the quarry diminished, former residents and their descendants continued to preserve their connection to Hummel through community gatherings and family recollections.
Newspaper announcements from the late twentieth century document an annual Hummel Homecoming at the old Hummel Church. An August 20, 1992, issue of The Mount Vernon Signal invited residents and visitors to attend a gathering scheduled for September 5, with participants encouraged to bring food and spend the day together.
Similar announcements continued into later decades. In September 1998, the newspaper again advertised a Hummel Homecoming at the old church, demonstrating that the gathering had become an established community tradition.
The tradition remained active in the twenty-first century. On August 25, 2016, The Mount Vernon Signal announced another annual Hummel Reunion, scheduled for September 3 below the old Hummel Church. Participants were invited to bring a covered dish and share their memories of the community.
Such gatherings provided a means of maintaining relationships among families who had once lived in the quarry settlement or who continued to identify with Hummel through their parents and grandparents. They also preserved local memories of a place whose industrial history was becoming increasingly difficult to recognize in the surrounding landscape.
Hummel’s Place in Rockcastle County History
The history of Hummel illustrates how railroad expansion and industrial development transformed small communities across Appalachia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. What began as a sandstone quarry near Langford Station became a settlement with its own institutions, employment opportunities, and connections to a commercial market extending well beyond Kentucky.
Unlike many eastern Kentucky industrial communities that developed around coal, Hummel depended upon the extraction of architectural stone. Its sandstone was promoted to architects and builders in Cincinnati, while its workers participated in an industry that supplied materials for the growth of American cities.
The surviving geological surveys, commercial directories, historical photographs, and newspaper records provide an unusually detailed account of its industrial development and subsequent decline. They also demonstrate that the community’s history did not end when quarrying ceased in 1925, since residents continued to live in the area and maintain connections to Hummel through churches, property ownership, and annual reunions.
The Kentucky Freestone Company eventually left the Rockcastle hills, but the community it helped establish retained its name and its place in local memory. Today, Hummel’s history survives through the abandoned quarry landscape, the written records of its industrial years, and the generations of families who continued to remember the settlement long after the last commercial stone was removed from its hillsides.
Sources & Further Reading
Baird, Nancy Disher. Tradition & Progress: A History of Hummel Industries, Inc. Circa 1977. Historical photographs and excerpts reproduced in the Bulletin of the Kenton County Historical Society, July–August 2015. https://kentoncountyhistoricalsociety.org/data/documents/July-Aug-2015.pdf
Butts, Charles. The Mississippian Series of Eastern Kentucky: A Regional Interpretation of the Stratigraphic Relations of the Subcarboniferous Group. Kentucky Geological Survey, 1922. https://www.uky.edu/OtherOrgs/KPS/books/butts1922/butts1922ch05.pdf
Campbell, Marius R. London Folio, Kentucky. Geologic Atlas of the United States, Folio 47. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1898. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/gf47
The Cincinnati Directory. 1918. Kentucky Freestone Company advertisement, 1026. https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/view/9896672/pdf-part-2-virtual-library-of-the-public-library-of-cincinnati/355
The Cincinnati Directory. 1926–1927. Kentucky Freestone Company advertisement, 966. Cincinnati and Hamilton County Public Library Digital Collections. https://digital.cincinnatilibrary.org/digital/api/collection/p16998coll5/id/195367/download
Fohs, F. Julius. Report on the Geology and Economic Resources of Rockcastle County. County Report No. 4. Frankfort: Kentucky Geological Survey, 1912. Bibliographic record. https://www.uky.edu/KGS/pdf/ic11_02.pdf
Kentucky Freestone Company. “Rockcastle Stone.” Advertisement in Western Architect and Builder 21 (1904). Cincinnati and Hamilton County Public Library Digital Collections. https://cdm16998.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/api/collection/p16998coll17/id/79612/download
Lietzenmayer, Karl. “Stone in Nineteenth Century Greater Cincinnati: The Hummell Company and Kentucky.” Bulletin of the Kenton County Historical Society, July–August 2015, 2–6. https://kentoncountyhistoricalsociety.org/data/documents/July-Aug-2015.pdf
The Mount Vernon Signal. August 18, 1960. Rockcastle County Public Library Newspaper Archives. https://www.rockcastlelibrary.org/sites/default/files/content/minutes/MVS19600818.pdf
The Mount Vernon Signal. November 22, 1990. Profile of Beverly Carter Sexton. Rockcastle County Public Library Newspaper Archives. https://www.rockcastlelibrary.org/sites/default/files/content/minutes/MVS19901122.pdf
The Mount Vernon Signal. August 22, 1991. Hummel Homecoming announcement. Rockcastle County Public Library Newspaper Archives. https://www.rockcastlelibrary.org/sites/default/files/content/minutes/MVS19910822.pdf
The Mount Vernon Signal. August 20, 1992. Hummel Homecoming announcement. Rockcastle County Public Library Newspaper Archives. https://www.rockcastlelibrary.org/sites/default/files/content/minutes/MVS19920820.pdf
The Mount Vernon Signal. August 25, 2016. Annual Hummel Reunion announcement. Rockcastle County Public Library Newspaper Archives. https://www.rockcastlelibrary.org/sites/default/files/content/minutes/MVS20160825.pdf
Rennick, Robert M. Kentucky Place Names. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt13x1s3p
Rennick, Robert M. “Rockcastle County: Post Offices.” 2000. County Histories of Kentucky, no. 387. Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/387/
Richardson, Charles Henry. The Building Stones of Kentucky: A Detailed Report Covering the Examination, Analysis and Industrial Evaluation of the Principal Building Stone Deposits of the State. Frankfort: Kentucky Geological Survey, 1923. https://archive.org/details/buildingstonesof00rich
U.S. Geological Survey. London Quadrangle, Kentucky. Historical topographic map, 1893. https://store.usgs.gov/product/865017
U.S. Geological Survey. London Quadrangle, Kentucky. Surveyed 1897, published 1904. Historical topographic map. https://store.usgs.gov/product/865016
U.S. Geological Survey. Wildie Quadrangle, Kentucky. Topographic map, 1:24,000. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1953. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:KY_Wildie_710014_1953_24000_geo.pdf
Works Progress Administration and Robert M. Rennick. “Rockcastle County: General History.” 1939. County Histories of Kentucky, no. 291. Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/291/
Works Progress Administration. “Rockcastle County: Folklore.” 1939. County Histories of Kentucky, no. 372. Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/372/
Geology of Kentucky. Chapter 28, “Miscellaneous Mineral Resources.” University of Kentucky. https://www.uky.edu/OtherOrgs/KPS/goky/pages/gokych28.htm
Rockcastle County, Kentucky and Its People. 1992. Available through Rockcastle County Public Library’s Genealogy and Local History Collection. https://www.rockcastlelibrary.org/genealogy-local-history
Author Note: Hummel’s history preserves the story of a Rockcastle County community whose sandstone quarries connected Appalachian workers to the expanding construction industry of Cincinnati. Through historical photographs, geological surveys, business records, and local newspapers, this article explores the industry that created Hummel and the community that endured after its closure.