Appalachian Community Histories – Leatherwood, Perry County: Salt Works, Toner, and the Blue Diamond Coal Camp
Leatherwood, Perry County, is best understood as a place with two connected histories rather than a single, simple origin story. One Leatherwood belonged to the older world of Brashear’s Salt Works and the Cornettsville area at the mouth of Leatherwood Creek on the North Fork of the Kentucky River. The other belonged to the twentieth century coal camp built farther up the creek by Blue Diamond, first called Toner and later renamed Leatherwood. The shared name can make the record confusing, but when the sources are laid side by side, a clear pattern appears. The older Leatherwood was tied to salt, river travel, and Civil War memory. The later Leatherwood was tied to rail construction, underground mining, company housing, and the social life of a modern coal camp.
The result is one of the more layered community histories in Perry County. Leatherwood was not only a spot on a map. It was a working landscape whose meaning shifted over time. In the nineteenth century it mattered because brine and salt could be turned into cash, food preservation, and wartime supply. In the mid twentieth century it mattered because coal operators believed enough in the Leatherwood seam to push a railroad branch more than ten miles into difficult terrain and build a company town where none had existed before. Later photographs, oral histories, and newspaper notices show that the place developed a real civic and family life of its own, even after the coal camp became the dominant meaning of the name.
Salt, Water, and the Older Leatherwood
The oldest widely recognized Leatherwood story begins near Cornettsville. Kentucky’s historical marker for the site states that the Brashears’ well was producing salt there by 1835 and that for about half a century it supplied the area with a commodity essential to everyday life before floods ended production. In mountain Kentucky, that was no small thing. Before refrigeration and modern transportation, salt was a necessity. A salt works could turn a remote hollow into a place of regional significance, drawing labor, trade, and traffic into an otherwise isolated valley.
Maps and geological references show that this older Leatherwood was not merely a local memory preserved by descendants. The 1916 USGS Cornettsville quadrangle preserves the historical landscape in federal mapping, while later Kentucky Geological Survey bibliographic records and map indexes point back to a 1914 map of Leatherwood Creek in Perry County and related early coal and terrain surveys. Willard Rouse Jillson’s summary of Kentucky geological work likewise notes the existence of a “Map of Leatherwood Creek, Perry County” from 1914. Taken together, those sources show that Leatherwood had long been important enough to be surveyed, mapped, and indexed in state and federal work before the Blue Diamond camp gave the name a newer and more industrial identity.
War Comes to Leatherwood
Leatherwood also entered Civil War memory. The historical marker for the Battle of Leatherwood places the clash on October 19, 1862 and states that forces from the Harlan County Battalion fighting for the Union clashed there with Company B of Caudill’s Confederate command, producing numerous casualties. That brief marker language matters because it confirms that the salt works area was not an obscure backwater during the war. It had enough strategic value to become a contested site. In eastern Kentucky, war often gathered around passes, supply points, and local strongholds rather than the grand, open battlefields better known elsewhere in the state. Leatherwood fit that mountain pattern.
That wartime significance grew directly from the salt works. Salt meant preserved meat, stable food supplies, and practical military value. The old Leatherwood of the Brashear’s Salt Works period therefore belongs to a much older Perry County story than the twentieth century coal camp. It was already historically important before Blue Diamond ever laid rail up the creek. That is one reason the place name persisted. Even when the center of local activity shifted farther upstream in the coal era, the older name still carried weight in local geography and memory.
From Toner to Leatherwood
The later community that most people mean when they say Leatherwood today began as a Blue Diamond coal development in the mid 1940s. Postal history is especially useful here because it helps explain why the camp did not initially bear the Leatherwood name. La Posta’s Perry County postal history explains that when Breathitt County’s Leatherwood office was renamed Watts in 1949, the Perry County Toner office took the Leatherwood name. Genealogy Trails preserves the same local tradition in a compressed form, stating that Blue Diamond opened a mine there in 1944, first used the name Toner because Leatherwood was already in use by a Breathitt County office, and then renamed Toner to Leatherwood on July 1, 1949. Jim Forte’s postal listings confirm the Perry County Leatherwood post office operated from 1949 to 1995.
That naming transition matters because it explains why the record can seem contradictory. Researchers who search only for Leatherwood may miss early camp references filed under Toner. Researchers who search only for Toner may miss the older Leatherwood tied to Cornettsville and the salt works, or the later decades when the mining town had fully taken on the Leatherwood name. In practice, both names belong to the same twentieth century coal camp story, while the older Leatherwood belongs to the mouth of the creek and the salt-works era. The history becomes much clearer once those layers are separated.
Building a Modern Coal Camp
The most detailed official summary of the later Leatherwood comes from the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet’s Roger Cornett AML project page. It describes Leatherwood as a “modern” coal camp town built in the wilderness about ten miles from existing highways or railroads, states that development began in 1944, and says Blue Diamond mined extensively underground in the Leatherwood coal seam beginning in 1946. To reach the site, the L&N Railroad built a 10.3 mile spur line from the main line at Dent up Leatherwood Creek and Clover Fork. The page also describes the center of town as a cluster of substantial native-stone buildings that housed the store, offices, supply functions, recreation spaces, theater, post office, lunch counter, barber shop, beauty shop, and poolroom.
The same state page preserves a valuable quotation from a 1951 issue of Coal Age, reporting that since 1945 Blue Diamond had built 323 houses at Leatherwood. It also notes the camp’s industrial infrastructure, including a tipple, repair shop, laboratory, lamp house, and bathhouse that could accommodate 500 men. This is strong evidence that Leatherwood was not a tiny drift-mouth settlement. It was a major planned coal camp, built on a scale large enough to require transportation infrastructure, service buildings, and a carefully organized company town. The 1968 USGS Geologic Map of the Leatherwood Quadrangle confirms that by the late 1960s Leatherwood had become important enough to anchor an official federal quadrangle map of the surrounding terrain.
Life in the Camp
Coal camps were workplaces, but they were also communities, and Leatherwood left a rich visual and documentary trail. The John Cohen collection at the Library of Congress includes images titled “Leatherwood, Kentucky, 1959” and “Holiness Church, Leatherwood, Kentucky, 1959,” showing that the camp had already become a place of documentary interest by the late 1950s. William Gedney photographed the Blue Diamond Mining Camp at Leatherwood in July 1964, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum holds Robert K. Hower’s 1975 photograph “The Blue Diamond Mines, Leatherwood, KY.” Together those records trace Leatherwood across more than a decade of coalfield visual history.
Other sources help fill in the human side. The Kentucky oral history project entry for Gaynell Watts identifies her as born in Leatherwood in 1947 and says she discussed family life and the transition from farming. The Nunn Center’s Robert Lee Lootens interview carries keywords including Leatherwood, railroads, coal camps, and coal mines and mining. The International Center of Photography’s record for Shelby Lee Adams’s “The Home Funeral, Leatherwood, Kentucky” from 1990 shows that Leatherwood continued to exist as a lived and remembered place long after the camp’s boom years. Even routine newspaper notices help. OCR snippets from The Hazard Herald show a Leatherwood Garden Club active in the late 1950s and early 1960s, a small but revealing sign that camp residents built organized civic and social life beyond the mine itself.
After the Peak Years
Leatherwood’s industrial identity did not vanish the moment the classic company-town era faded. Federal mine-safety records show the name continued in official use into the twenty first century. An MSHA petition filed in 2002 referred to Blue Diamond Coal Company’s #76 Leatherwood Preparation Plant in Perry County, and the Federal Register summary linked the plant to abandoned openings in the Leatherwood seam. That kind of bureaucratic trace matters because it shows Leatherwood remained more than a nostalgic place name. It continued as a working industrial label in mine regulation and environmental management.
At the same time, later state reclamation work shows the long shadow of coal development on the landscape. The Kentucky AML Roger Cornett project tied a dangerous slide area to older mining in the Leatherwood seam and treated the site as part of the historic coal-camp town of Leatherwood. In other words, the place persisted in memory, administration, and environmental consequence even after the classic company-town world had changed. Leatherwood’s later history, like that of many coal camps, is partly a story of survival in the aftermath of the very industry that created it.
Why Leatherwood Still Matters
Leatherwood matters because it condenses two major chapters of Perry County history into one place name. The first chapter reaches back to salt, river geography, and Civil War conflict around Brashear’s Salt Works near Cornettsville. The second chapter belongs to Blue Diamond’s mid twentieth century coal camp, first Toner and then Leatherwood, built with rail access, company houses, public buildings, and the full social machinery of a modern mining settlement. What makes Leatherwood especially interesting is not that one history erased the other, but that both remained visible in the record. Markers, maps, geological references, postal history, photographs, newspapers, oral histories, and mine records all preserve part of the story.
For Appalachian history, that layered record is valuable. It reminds us that communities do not always move neatly from one era to the next. Sometimes an old name survives while the center of local life shifts up a creek, from a salt works to a mine portal, from wagons and brine kettles to rail sidings and bathhouses. Leatherwood is one of those places. Its history is not only the history of a coal camp, and not only the history of an older settlement. It is the history of how eastern Kentucky landscapes keep older meanings alive even as new industries remake them.
Sources & Further Reading
Kentucky Historical Society. “Salt Works.” Kentucky Historical Marker Database. Accessed April 5, 2026. https://history.ky.gov/markers/salt-works.
Historical Marker Database. “Battle of Leatherwood.” Accessed April 5, 2026. https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=97061.
Wells, J. W., and N. A. Strait. An Alphabetical List of the Battles of the War of the Rebellion, with Dates. Washington, D.C., 1882. Library of Congress digital edition. https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcmassbookdig.alphabeticallist00well/.
U.S. Geological Survey. “CORNETTSVILLE, KY Historical Map GeoPDF.” USGS Store. 1916. Accessed April 5, 2026. https://store.usgs.gov/product/864854.
Prostka, H. J., and V. M. Seiders. Geologic Map of the Leatherwood Quadrangle, Southeastern Kentucky. U.S. Geological Survey Geologic Quadrangle Map GQ-723, 1968. https://doi.org/10.3133/gq723.
Hodge, James M. Coals on the North Side of the North Fork of the Kentucky River in Perry and Knott Counties. Kentucky Geological Survey, Report of Investigation 2, pt. 4, 1913. https://kygs.uky.edu/pubs/coal.
Jillson, Willard Rouse. Geological Research in Kentucky. Kentucky Geological Survey, ser. 6, vol. 15. Frankfort, 1923. https://archive.org/download/kgs6ri151923/KGS6RI151923_text.pdf.
Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet. “Roger Cornett.” Accessed April 5, 2026. https://eec.ky.gov/Natural-Resources/Mining/Abandoned-Mine-Lands/projects/Pages/Roger_Cornett.aspx.
Mine Safety and Health Administration. “Petitions for Modification.” Federal Register, March 28, 2002. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2002/03/28/02-7466/petitions-for-modification.
Forte, Jim. “Perry County, Kentucky Post Offices.” Jim Forte Postal History. Accessed April 5, 2026. https://www.postalhistory.com/postoffices.asp?county=Perry&pagenum=4&searchtext=&state=ky&task=display.
Rennick, Robert M. “The Post Offices of Perry County, Kentucky. Part II.” La Posta: A Journal of American Postal History 34, no. 3. Accessed April 5, 2026. https://www.lapostapub.com/Backissues/LP34-3.pdf.
Perry County, Kentucky. “Perry County Communities.” Accessed April 5, 2026. https://perrycounty.ky.gov/things-to-do/Pages/Communities.aspx.
The Hazard Herald (Hazard, Ky.). Kentucky Digital Newspaper Program and Internet Archive holdings. Accessed April 5, 2026. https://view.kentuckynewspapers.org/view.php?id=kd9z89280n7b.
Cohen, John. John Cohen Collection, circa 1939-2019. Library of Congress, American Folklife Center. Accessed April 5, 2026. https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.afc/eadafc.af020003.3.
Gedney, William. “Blue Diamond Mining Camp, Leatherwood, Kentucky, July 3-14, 1964.” Duke University Libraries Digital Repository. Accessed April 5, 2026. https://repository.duke.edu/dc/gedney/gedst011009004.
Hower, Robert K. “The Blue Diamond Mines, Leatherwood, KY.” Smithsonian American Art Museum. 1975. Accessed April 5, 2026. https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/blue-diamond-mines-leatherwood-ky-10831.
Adams, Shelby Lee. “The Home Funeral, Leatherwood, Kentucky.” International Center of Photography. 1990. Accessed April 5, 2026. https://www.icp.org/browse/archive/objects/the-home-funeral-leatherwood-kentucky.
Watts, Gaynell. “Family Farms of Kentucky: Transition from Farming To …” Kentucky Oral History Commission. May 31, 1991. Accessed April 5, 2026. https://kentuckyoralhistory.org/ark%3A/16417/xt7wdb7vqh38.
Lootens, Robert Lee. Interview with Robert Lee Lootens, July 22, 1986. Nunn Center for Oral History. Accessed April 5, 2026. https://nunncenter.net/ohms-spokedb/render.php?cachefile=1986oh261_app072_ohm.xml.
FamilySearch. “FamilySearch Catalog: Land Records, 1821-1964, Perry County, Kentucky.” Accessed April 5, 2026. https://www.familysearch.org/en/search/catalog/190103.
Author Note: Leatherwood is one of those Perry County places where the name carries more than one history, and that is what drew me to it. I wanted to bring together the older salt works and Civil War story with the later Blue Diamond coal camp so readers can see the full arc of the community.