Appalachian Community Histories – Kilgore, Boyd County: James Kilgore, Jim Town, and Coal Mining on Williams Creek
Along Williams Creek near present-day Rush, Kentucky, the history of Kilgore is difficult to separate from the creek itself. Here the watercourse does more than wind through a narrow northeastern Kentucky valley. It forms part of the boundary between Boyd and Carter counties, leaving a historical community divided between two counties, multiple post office names, several mining settlements, and records that can seem contradictory until they are placed back on the landscape.
A person looking only for “Kilgore, Boyd County” can easily miss half the story. Deeds may be recorded in Carter County. A cemetery associated with Kilgore lies just across the line in Carter County. Postal records can point to Kilgore, Rush, or Geigerville. Mining records sometimes identify operations by number rather than community name. Railroad documents may treat Kilgore as a station or location within the larger Rush industrial district. The sources gathered for this history reflect exactly that problem. Pasted markdown
Yet once those scattered records are brought together, Kilgore becomes something much more than a nearly forgotten name beside U.S. 60. Its history reaches from a large antebellum land purchase through the first industrial coal development of the 1870s, the creation of a company settlement called Jim Town, the building of the Ashland coal railroad, the decline of the earliest mines, and the persistence of the Kilgore name well into the twentieth century.
A Community on the Boyd-Carter Line
The geography of Kilgore explains much of its complicated historical identity.
Williams Creek runs through the valley and, in the vicinity of Kilgore and Rush, marks the division between Boyd and Carter counties. Kilgore Cemetery, for example, is identified in Boyd County cemetery documentation as lying in Carter County near the county line, with early residents of both Kilgore and Rush buried there.
The county boundary was itself younger than some of the settlement in the valley. Boyd County was not created until 1860, meaning that land now associated with Boyd County can appear in earlier Carter County records. That is especially important in reconstructing the life of the man whose surname eventually became attached to the community.
The 1876 map of Greenup, Carter, Boyd, and part of Lawrence counties prepared by C. Schenk and W. C. Mitchell for the Kentucky Geological Survey offers one of the strongest early views of this landscape. The map records property ownership, waterways, roads, towns, and county geography only a few years after industrial coal development began transforming Williams Creek.
The attachment research identifies this map, county deed books, census schedules, mine reports, railroad valuation records, postmaster records, and geological surveys as a particularly strong documentary chain for recovering Kilgore’s history. Pasted markdown
James Kilgore Comes to Williams Creek
The story begins before Kilgore was a coal community.
On November 26, 1850, James Kilgore acquired approximately 400 acres on Williams Creek from Charles B. Riggs. The transaction appears in Carter County Grantee Book K, page 15. At the time, James was only nineteen years old and had recently been enumerated with his family in Cabell County, Virginia, an area that would later become part of West Virginia.
The timing of the transaction was significant. Fourteen days after acquiring the Williams Creek property, Kilgore married Malinda Riggs in Cabell County. Local historical research identifies Malinda as closely related to Charles B. Riggs, the man from whom Kilgore acquired the land. By 1860, James Kilgore was living in the Star Furnace census district, which included the area that would later bear his name. He also appears in the surviving 1861 diary of Star Furnace resident J. Bertrand Norris.
These records place Kilgore in the Williams Creek region before the industrial transformation that would make the valley valuable to coal and railroad interests.
That distinction matters. Kilgore was not simply a mining-company name placed on an empty landscape. A family connection to the land existed before the large mines, company houses, tipples, sidings, and railroad cars arrived. The community that later developed around the mines inherited the name of an earlier landholder whose property became part of the industrial landscape. The surviving research identifies the 1850 deed as one of the key records for understanding the community’s origin. Pasted markdown
Coal Comes to Kilgore
The valley began changing dramatically after the Civil War.
Coal mining associated with the Lexington and Big Sandy Railroad’s Eastern Division had begun around Coalton by the middle of the 1860s. As those operations expanded, development pushed southward into the Rush and Kilgore area. By 1871, a major coal operation had opened on or near the former Kilgore lands. It would become known as Mine No. 5.
The Kentucky Inspector of Mines report for 1885 is particularly valuable because it looked backward at the mine’s development while recording its contemporary labor force. According to the report as preserved in regional research, the Rush No. 5 Mine had opened in 1871 and employed approximately 403 people in 1885. Pasted markdown
For a rural Appalachian valley, that represented an enormous concentration of industrial labor.
Mining in this period remained heavily dependent upon men, animals, hand tools, and relatively simple underground transportation. Hundreds of workers could therefore be required to extract, move, prepare, and load coal. Those workers needed houses, stores, roads, railroad connections, and services. Families came with them, creating a community around an industrial operation that only a generation earlier had been largely agricultural and tied to the iron-furnace economy.
A remarkable surviving lithograph from the nineteenth century captures the transformation.
The large printed view of scenes around Ashland includes an image of the Rush operation near Kilgore. It shows the mine, tipple structures, railroad facilities, animals moving coal cars, and rows of houses erected for miners and their families. Research into the lithograph places the scene in the late 1870s, only a few years after Mine No. 5 began operating.
It is one of the most important visual records of early Kilgore.
Jim Town
The cluster of company houses beside the mine became known locally as Jim Town.
The nineteenth-century image appears to show roughly twenty two-story houses concentrated near the railroad and mining operation. Later photographic evidence shows many of the same buildings standing in rows along the valley. The houses were situated on the Boyd County side of Williams Creek, although the wider Kilgore community spread across the county boundary.
Local research strongly suggests that Jim Town was named for James Kilgore, although the evidence is not conclusive enough to state that as certain. What is known is that James Kilgore had owned the bottomland before the mining company developed housing there, and the larger locality was itself known as Kilgore.
Jim Town illustrates how company settlements developed in the Appalachian coalfields long before the great eastern Kentucky mining boom usually associated with the early twentieth century. Employers did not simply open a mine. They had to create an industrial settlement around it.
The location was practical because workers could live beside Mine No. 5 and its transportation facilities, but it came with disadvantages. The houses occupied low ground near Williams Creek, leaving the settlement exposed to flooding. The valley floor also became increasingly crowded with railroad tracks, mine structures, roads, houses, stores, and industrial traffic.
From the windows and porches of Jim Town, residents would have seen coal moving almost constantly when the mine was operating at full capacity. Bank cars came from the mine. Horses and mules worked around the operation. Coal passed through the tipple before being loaded for shipment. Trains carried the product toward Ashland, where coal fed an expanding industrial economy.
Kilgore was becoming part of a much larger system.
The Railroad That Remade Williams Creek
Coal could be abundant beneath a mountain and still have little commercial value if there was no economical way to move it.
The railroad solved that problem.
The rail line was extended from the Coalton area toward the new Rush workings in the early 1870s, bringing the tracks to Mine No. 5. In the surviving nineteenth-century lithograph, the railroad effectively ends at Kilgore. At that stage its principal connection ran back toward Ashland. The line was later pushed farther through the Williams Creek valley, and by 1881 a connection had been established with the railroad extending eastward from the Lexington direction.
The Lexington and Big Sandy Railroad’s Eastern Division was eventually reorganized as the Ashland Coal and Iron Railway. Its purpose was deeply connected to the industrial network developing around Ashland. Coal properties, iron interests, landholdings, and transportation could be integrated into one system capable of moving raw material from Appalachian valleys toward furnaces and factories.
Later railroad records allow historians to reconstruct that system with extraordinary precision.
The Interstate Commerce Commission’s valuation program produced detailed maps of railroad property in the early twentieth century. The surviving Ashland Coal and Iron Railway valuation series documents tracks, sidings, industrial property, and railroad land between Ashland and Denton. Regional archival research identifies a valuation map from about 1916 that covers the Rush area and industrial properties near Blackleg. Pasted markdown
These records help explain why Kilgore can be difficult to find as a self-contained town. It functioned as part of a network of related settlements and industrial locations strung along Williams Creek and Rush Creek. Coalton, Kilgore, Rush, Geigerville, Blackleg, Grant, and other nearby names belonged to an interconnected mining and railroad landscape rather than a series of completely isolated communities.
Mine No. 5 Gives Way to New Workings
Coal communities rarely remained fixed when the underground resource moved elsewhere.
As the readily accessible coal around Mine No. 5 diminished, mining activity shifted farther into the Rush area. New numbered mines appeared, and the numbers themselves became part of the geography. Residents could say that someone lived at No. 10 or No. 11 and be understood locally even after the original industrial operation had changed or disappeared.
Mine No. 6 became one of the important successors to the earlier Kilgore workings. The 1889 Kentucky mine report recorded an average workforce of 216 employees at No. 6. Later reports preserve glimpses of the hazards involved. On November 6, 1900, Thomas Tiller, identified as a driver, suffered a broken leg while assisting another worker with a standing shot inside the mine.
Those short entries in mine inspectors’ reports are among the most useful surviving sources because they bring individual workers back into a history otherwise dominated by company names, property maps, and railroad statistics.
For every railroad siding drawn on an engineering map there were miners underground. There were drivers handling animals and mine cars, blacksmiths repairing equipment, laborers around tipples, clerks in stores, railroad crews moving loaded cars, and families living in rows of company houses.
As the center of mining moved deeper into Rush Creek, Kilgore’s position changed. The community did not immediately disappear, but the heaviest industrial activity gradually moved away from the original No. 5 location. Local research into the 1912 landscape notes that mining had already shifted toward newer workings farther up Rush Creek because the earlier drift mines around Kilgore had largely played out.
The Kilgore Post Office and a Moving Community Name
The postal history of Kilgore reflects the same shifting geography.
A small building near Williams Creek once served as the Kilgore post office. Local historical reconstruction places it near a bridge across the creek, just inside Carter County. Over time, postal service for the immediate area moved among locations associated with Kilgore, Rush, and Geigerville. When the post office moved, its official name could move with it.
The National Archives’ Record of Appointment of Postmasters, 1832 to 1971, provides one of the strongest primary sources for tracing those changes. Robert M. Rennick’s Kentucky place-name research at Morehead State University provides another important guide for connecting postal names to physical communities. Rennick spent more than thirty years documenting Kentucky communities, post offices, and local place names, leaving a collection containing more than 33,000 scanned typescripts and research cards.
This is why maps and postal records have to be read carefully in places like Kilgore. A disappearance from one record does not necessarily mean the people disappeared. Sometimes the name changed while the community remained.
James Kilgore’s Funeral Procession
One photograph ties together much of Kilgore’s nineteenth and early twentieth-century history.
James Kilgore died on May 8, 1912. A surviving photograph taken during his funeral procession shows his casket being carried through the community in a horse-drawn wagon. Members of a Masonic lodge, recognizable by their ceremonial aprons, accompanied the procession. The burial party was headed toward the cemetery on the hill overlooking the community that carried Kilgore’s name.
The image was made near what is now the intersection of U.S. 60 and Kentucky Route 854.
What makes the photograph extraordinary is not simply the funeral itself. It captures the community.
A large general store stands along the road. Houses occupy the valley. One surviving building had formerly served as the Kilgore post office. A Jim Town company house is visible. The road that would eventually become KY 854 is still dirt, marked by deep wagon ruts. Williams Creek crosses the scene invisibly but decisively, dividing Boyd County from Carter County.
The photograph therefore records several layers of Kilgore history at once.
At the center is James Kilgore, whose 1850 land purchase preceded the coal boom. Around him stands the settlement that grew after mining and railroads arrived. Beyond the procession lies the cemetery where members of the old community were buried. Near the road are commercial buildings representing a community that had become far more substantial than the scattered rural settlement Kilgore first encountered six decades earlier.
By 1912, however, the photograph was also recording a place already changing.
The original Mine No. 5 era was ending. New mines farther up Rush Creek had taken the center of industrial activity elsewhere. Jim Town remained, but the reason it had been constructed was disappearing.
The photograph is almost a portrait of the transition.
Kilgore After the First Mining Boom
Kilgore did not simply vanish when the earliest mine closed.
Families remained. Houses continued to be occupied. Workers could live around Kilgore while traveling to mines elsewhere in the Rush district. Stores and roads continued serving the valley. The railroad still passed through the larger community, while successive mining operations kept coal central to the local economy.
Federal geological work also placed Kilgore firmly within the documented coal landscape of northeastern Kentucky.
William Clifton Phalen’s 1908 U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 349, Economic Geology of the Kenova Quadrangle, Kentucky, Ohio, and West Virginia, provided a detailed government study of the region’s coal and iron geology. The later Kenova Folio, published as Geologic Atlas of the United States No. 184 in 1912, supplemented that work with geological and topographical mapping. The research assembled for Kilgore notes that federal geological material specifically used the Kilgore name while discussing old Star Furnace workings west of the community. Pasted markdown
By then, Kilgore belonged to a mature industrial landscape whose mines, railroads, seams, and settlements were important enough to appear in federal surveys.
The Kilgore Coal Company
The Kilgore name survived even after the nineteenth-century mining operation that had first transformed the community was gone.
Federal records from 1942 identify a Kilgore Coal Company operating at Rush in Carter County. The records are especially useful because they name individual operators and specific mines.
A Bituminous Coal Division proceeding identified Kilgore Mine No. 1 as Mine Index No. 3139 at Rush. The company was operated as a partnership involving Wesley Conley, Leonard Conley, Arthur Bates, and Risom Fankell. A separate proceeding identified Kilgore Mine No. 2, Mine Index No. 676, also at Rush.
These were not the same nineteenth-century numbered mines operated by the Ashland Coal and Iron interests. They belonged to a later stage of mining. What matters for the community’s history is that more than seventy years after the opening of the old No. 5 Mine, the Kilgore name still possessed enough geographic meaning to identify coal operations in federal records.
The old landowner’s surname had become part of the industrial vocabulary of the valley.
From Mining Settlement to Rush-Kilgore
The twentieth century gradually stripped away much of the physical landscape visible in the early photographs.
Company houses disappeared. Railroad infrastructure changed. Roads were reconstructed. U.S. 60 was improved around the middle of the century, altering portions of the older road pattern and requiring the removal of at least some structures. The field where Jim Town once stood eventually became open ground.
Yet the community’s name persisted socially.
On September 2, 1974, residents and former residents gathered for the third annual Rush Reunion. The event was sponsored by an organization called the Rush-Kilgore Community Club, a name that preserved the old connection between the two localities long after the height of company mining had passed. Dan Thomas filmed part of the reunion on 8mm film, leaving an audiovisual record filled with local families, music, food, conversation, and community memory.
The film is important precisely because it contains so little of the industrial spectacle visible in the nineteenth-century lithograph.
Instead of mine cars and company houses, it shows descendants of the people who had lived through that industrial age returning to see one another. Mining created much of the settlement pattern, but community identity survived beyond the mines.
What Remains of Kilgore
Very little of old Kilgore announces itself dramatically today.
The rows of Jim Town company houses are gone. The nineteenth-century Mine No. 5 landscape has largely disappeared. Portions of the old railroad alignment can still be traced across the valley, but the industrial structures that once dominated it have vanished or survive only through maps, photographs, archaeological traces, and altered ground.
The cemetery remains one of the clearest links.
Located just inside Carter County near the Boyd County line, Kilgore Cemetery contains early residents of the Kilgore and Rush communities. Cemetery documentation describes dozens of graves scattered through the wooded hillside, including unidentified burials.
The landscape itself preserves another clue. Williams Creek still runs through the valley and still explains why so much of Kilgore’s history seems divided. A house might have stood in one county while the cemetery serving the family stood in another. A post office could move across the creek and acquire another name. A mine might be associated with Rush in a state report, Kilgore in local speech, and Carter County in a federal proceeding.
That confusion is not a failure of the records.
It is part of the history.
Why Kilgore Matters
Kilgore is a remarkably complete example of how an Appalachian industrial community could form, change, and almost disappear without ever truly losing its identity.
The documentary trail begins with James Kilgore’s 1850 purchase of roughly 400 acres along Williams Creek. Within a generation, coal mining had transformed part of that property. Mine No. 5 opened in the early 1870s, the railroad reached the operation, and rows of company houses created Jim Town. Hundreds of miners worked in an industry tied directly to the industrial growth of Ashland.
As the first workings declined, mining moved farther up Rush Creek. Kilgore’s post office changed location and name. The railroad ceased to terminate there and became part of a larger transportation network. New mines replaced old ones, while federal geological surveys, mine reports, railroad maps, and census records continued documenting the people and industries of the valley.
Then came a different kind of survival.
The Kilgore name endured in a cemetery, in later coal-company operations, in family memory, in the Rush-Kilgore Community Club, and in photographs handed down through generations. A funeral photograph from 1912 preserved the road and buildings. A nineteenth-century lithograph preserved Jim Town and Mine No. 5. Interstate Commerce Commission maps preserved railroad property. State mine reports preserved workers and accidents. Federal proceedings preserved later mining companies. An 8mm camera preserved a community reunion in 1974.
Taken together, they allow Kilgore to reappear.
It was never simply a forgotten stop beside a railroad or an obscure section of Rush. It was a place where a family farm became coal property, where company houses filled the creek bottom, where hundreds of miners entered the hills, where railroads tied a small Appalachian valley to Ashland’s industrial economy, and where a county line running through a creek ensured that the community would always be a little harder to find in the records than it was on the ground.
That may be the most important lesson preserved at Kilgore. Appalachian communities do not always disappear when their mines close or their post offices lose their names. Sometimes they survive in the landscape, in family memory, and in records scattered across two counties, waiting to be placed together again.
Sources & Further Reading
Carter County Court Clerk. Deed from Charles B. Riggs to James Kilgore, November 26, 1850. Carter County Grantee Book K, 15. Carter County, Kentucky. Discussed in Lon Coleman, “James Kilgore’s Funeral Procession.” https://loncoleman.com/2023/10/01/james-kilgores-funeral-procession/ Pasted markdown
Schenk, C., and W. C. Mitchell. Map of the Counties of Greenup, Carter and Boyd and a Part of Lawrence. Kentucky Geological Survey, 1876. Kentucky Historical Society Digital Collections. https://www.kyhistory.com/digital/collection/Maps/id/200/ Kentucky History
Kentucky Inspector of Mines. Annual Reports of the Inspector of Mines of the State of Kentucky, 1884–1885. Frankfort, KY: Commonwealth of Kentucky. Kentucky Mine Mapping Information System. https://minemaps.ky.gov/Maps/AnnualReports Kentucky Mine Maps
Kentucky Inspector of Mines. Sixth Annual Report of the Inspector of Mines of the State of Kentucky. Frankfort, KY: Public Printer, 1889. Kentucky Mine Mapping Information System. https://minemaps.ky.gov/Maps/AnnualReports Kentucky Mine Maps
Kentucky Inspector of Mines. Annual Report of the Inspector of Mines of the State of Kentucky for 1900. Frankfort, KY: Commonwealth of Kentucky, 1900. Kentucky Mine Mapping Information System. https://minemaps.ky.gov/Maps/AnnualReports Kentucky Mine Maps
Crandall, A. R. “Report on the Geology of Greenup, Carter, Boyd, and a Part of Lawrence Counties.” In Reports of the Kentucky Geological Survey, Second Series. Frankfort, KY: Kentucky Geological Survey. https://kygs.uky.edu/pubs/coal Kentucky Geological Survey
Phalen, William Clifton. Economic Geology of the Kenova Quadrangle, Kentucky, Ohio, and West Virginia. U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 349. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1908. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/b349 USGS Publications
Phalen, William Clifton. Kenova Folio, Kentucky-West Virginia-Ohio. Geologic Atlas of the United States 184. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1912. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/gf184 USGS Publications
United States Census Bureau. Seventh Census of the United States, 1850. National Archives Microfilm Publication M432, Record Group 29. Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/research/census/1850 National Archives
United States Census Bureau. Federal Population Census Schedules, 1860–1950. Record Group 29. National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/research/census/online-resources National Archives
United States Post Office Department. Record of Appointment of Postmasters, 1832–September 30, 1971. National Archives Microfilm Publication M841, Record Group 28. Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/postmasters-1832-1971.html National Archives
United States Department of the Interior, Bituminous Coal Division. “In the Matter of Kilgore Coal Company.” Federal Register 7, January 17, 1942. Proceedings concerning Kilgore Mine No. 2, Mine Index No. 676, Rush, Carter County, Kentucky. https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/fedreg/fr007/fr007012/fr007012.pdf Library of Congress Tile
United States Department of the Interior, Bituminous Coal Division. “In the Matter of Wesley Conley, Leonard Conley, Arthur Bates, and Risom Fankell, Individually and as Copartners, Doing Business under the Name and Style of Kilgore Coal Company.” Federal Register 7, May 1, 1942. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-1942-05-01/pdf/FR-1942-05-01.pdf GovInfo
Rennick, Robert M. “Boyd County: Place Names.” Robert M. Rennick Manuscript Collection, no. 36. Morehead State University, 2016. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_ms_collection/36/ ScholarWorks
Rennick, Robert M. “Boyd County: Post Offices.” County Histories of Kentucky. Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/ ScholarWorks
Rennick, Robert M. “Carter County: Post Offices.” County Histories of Kentucky. Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/ ScholarWorks
Works Progress Administration. “Boyd County: General History.” County Histories of Kentucky, no. 313. Morehead State University, 1940. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/313/ ScholarWorks
Works Progress Administration and Historical Records Survey. “Carter County: Towns & Villages.” County Histories of Kentucky, no. 172. Morehead State University, 1939. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/172/ ScholarWorks
Crawford, Hubert V. The Role of Railroads and Heavy Industry in Carter County, Kentucky. 1992. County Histories of Kentucky. Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/ ScholarWorks
Boyd County Public Library. “Genealogy and Local History.” Winder Room for Genealogy and Local History. Includes the Arnold Hanners Tri-State Photograph Collection, Armco Photograph Collection, Boyd County historical records, early furnace records, newspapers, and microfilm. https://www.thebookplace.org/index.php/research-learn/genealogy-local-history The Book Place
Kentucky Division of Mine Safety. “Kentucky Mine Mapping Information System.” Includes historical mine reports, mine-map searches, abandoned mine data, and annual reports dating to 1884. https://minemaps.ky.gov/ Kentucky Mine Maps
Morehead State University. Robert M. Rennick Kentucky Place Name Collection. Camden-Carroll Library. More than 33,000 scanned research cards and typescripts documenting Kentucky communities and place names. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_ms_collection/ ScholarWorks
Morehead State University. County Histories of Kentucky. Camden-Carroll Library. Collection of WPA surveys, manuscripts, local histories, oral testimony, place-name research, and county records. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/ ScholarWorks
Coleman, Lon. “James Kilgore’s Funeral Procession.” Williams Creek Basin in Northeast Kentucky, October 1, 2023. https://loncoleman.com/2023/10/01/james-kilgores-funeral-procession/
Coleman, Lon. “Jim Town.” Williams Creek Basin in Northeast Kentucky, February 7, 2023. https://loncoleman.com/2023/02/07/jim-town/
Coleman, Lon. “What’s With All the Numbered Location Names? The AC&I / AI&M Mines.” Williams Creek Basin in Northeast Kentucky, July 31, 2020. https://loncoleman.com/2020/07/31/whats-with-all-the-numbered-location-names-the-aci-aim-mines/
Coleman, Lon. “Rush Reunion Video, 1974.” Williams Creek Basin in Northeast Kentucky, August 13, 2023. https://loncoleman.com/2023/08/13/rush-reunion-video-1974/
Author Note: Kilgore’s history shows how a small Appalachian community could be shaped by family land, coal mining, railroads, and a county line running through its landscape. I hope this article helps preserve the memory of Kilgore and Jim Town while encouraging descendants to share photographs, records, and stories from the Williams Creek valley.