Repurposed Appalachia Series – Our Lady of the Mountains and the Mayo Mansion in Paintsville, Kentucky
On Third Street in Paintsville, Our Lady of the Mountains occupies one of the most unusual school sites in eastern Kentucky. The school stands in the former John C. C. Mayo mansion, a landmark long associated with coal wealth, regional ambition, and changing educational missions. Official Catholic sources today still place the school at 405 Third Street as the parish school of St. Michael, which means the institution carries both the legacy of the Mayo estate and the continuing life of Catholic education in Johnson County.
A mansion built for power and display
The story begins with John C. C. Mayo, the eastern Kentucky coal operator whose wealth reshaped Paintsville in the early twentieth century. The National Register nomination for the John C. C. Mayo Mansion and Office describes the house as a three story, roughly forty room brick mansion with a full basement, built between 1905 and 1912 at a reported cost of $250,000. Architect Herman Geisky designed both the mansion and the office, and the nomination emphasizes the extraordinary labor that went into the work, including quarried limestone from across Paint Creek, transport by overhead tram, and teams of oxen hauling the shaped stone to the site. The present school history repeats many of those same details, which shows how central the mansion itself remains to the identity of Our Lady of the Mountains.
The mansion was never simply a private home for very long. Mayo died in 1914, and both the National Register nomination and the current school history agree that the Mayo family left Paintsville within a few years, settling in Ashland and taking much of the interior work with them. What followed was not a single clean transition, but a layered reuse of the property that reflected changing educational and civic needs in Paintsville. The National Register form notes that the Methodist Church operated a school there for a time, and that at one point a business school and dancing academy used part of the building as well.
From Sandy Valley Seminary to John C. C. Mayo College
Before the site became Catholic, it had already become an educational landmark. Methodist conference minutes from 1910 recorded a half interest in Sandy Valley Seminary with a property value of $57,000, an endowment of $50,000, six professors, and 197 pupils. By 1914 the same conference statistics listed Sandy Valley Seminary with property valued at $55,000, an endowment of $15,000, eight professors, and 192 pupils. Those figures make clear that the school was not a marginal undertaking. It was a substantial institution in the educational life of the region.
The visual record supports that same point. Kentucky Historical Society postcard holdings for Paintsville include separate items titled “Mayo College and Girls Dormitory,” “Mayo’s Res. and S. V. Seminary,” “Sandy Valley Seminary,” and later “Our Lady of the Mountains School.” Another Kentucky Historical Society entry for the seminary identifies it as operating between 1914 and 1936. Taken together, those postcards show the same ground and buildings passing through several identities while remaining tied to schooling. They also preserve something historians often struggle to recover, the way Paintsville residents and visitors visually understood the campus in each era.
The current school history states that after the Mayo family left, the estate was sold to Sandy Valley Seminary, later renamed John C. C. Mayo College. That version fits the broader documentary trail. By the mid 1930s the college had failed financially, and the property returned to the Mayo family orbit before passing to E. J. Evans, a former Mayo associate. In that sense, the school now known as Our Lady of the Mountains grew out of an already established tradition of using the old Mayo property for education rather than from an entirely new beginning in 1945.
The Catholic transition
The Catholic phase of the story belongs both to St. Michael parish and to the Sisters of Divine Providence. The St. Michael parish history says that Fr. Charles Donovan moved the center of Catholic life from St. Casmir at Van Lear to Paintsville and that Bishop Howard dedicated the new St. Michael center on June 29, 1941. The same parish history says that during Fr. Joseph Wimmers’s pastorate the first Catholic school in the Big Sandy area was established, and that Our Lady of the Mountains Academy began in 1945. It further explains that the school originally began as a diocesan school run by the Sisters of Divine Providence and only later became formally part of St. Michael parish.
The school’s own history page is more specific about the transfer of the Mayo property. It says that in 1945 E. J. Evans sold the mansion and grounds to Bishop William T. Mulloy of the Diocese of Covington, and that in October of that same year the Sisters of Divine Providence from Melbourne established Our Lady of the Mountains School. A denominational history of the Sisters of Divine Providence independently confirms that the congregation opened Our Lady of the Mountains School at Paintsville in 1945 as part of Bishop Mulloy’s expanding mountain mission work.
The 1941 and 1945 question
One point deserves careful handling. The 1974 National Register nomination says that the property had been owned by the Covington Diocese since 1941. The present school history, however, places the Evans to Mulloy sale in 1945, and the parish history also identifies 1945 as the year the academy began. Those sources do not actually contradict one another on the school’s founding date, but they do leave open a question about when Catholic control of the mansion property itself formally began. The most cautious reading is that 1941 marks the establishment of St. Michael in Paintsville, while 1945 marks the school’s actual founding in the Mayo mansion. The Johnson County deed books remain the best place to settle that ownership question with final precision.
A school inside a preserved landmark
By the time the mansion and office were listed on the National Register in 1974, Our Lady of the Mountains had already become the building’s defining modern use. The nomination says the property served as a school for grades one through eight and as a convent, and it notes that the old office building was in use as part of the school. A 1974 Johnson County and Paintsville history published through Morehead State University also placed “Our Lady o~ the Mountain Parochial School” on Third Street adjacent to Mayo Vocational School, which shows how firmly the institution had entered the civic geography of modern Paintsville.
That continuity remains visible today. The Diocese of Lexington directory lists St. Michael as a 1941 parish in Paintsville and identifies Our Lady of the Mountains School at 405 Third Street as its parish school. In other words, the same site that once symbolized John C. C. Mayo’s private fortune has now spent decades functioning as a religious and educational institution. Its architecture still recalls the age of railroads, coal deeds, and regional boosters, but its later history belongs to teachers, sisters, parish families, and generations of local children who learned in rooms first designed for a millionaire household.
Our Lady of the Mountains matters because it compresses several eastern Kentucky histories into one place. It is a Mayo story, a Methodist education story, a Catholic mission story, and a preservation story all at once. The Kentucky Historical Society postcards make that transformation almost visible frame by frame, from seminary to college to parochial school. Few institutions in Appalachia show so clearly how one landmark can be repeatedly repurposed without losing its local meaning. In Paintsville, the old mansion did not simply survive. It kept teaching.
Sources & Further Reading
National Park Service. National Register of Historic Places Inventory–Nomination Form: John C. C. Mayo Mansion and Office. 1974. https://npgallery.nps.gov/pdfhost/docs/NRHP/Text/74000887.pdf
St. Michael Catholic Church. “Our Lady of the Mountains School.” Accessed March 10, 2026. https://www.stmichaelcatholicchurch.org/our-lady-of-the-mountains-school
St. Michael Catholic Church. “About.” Accessed March 10, 2026. https://www.stmichaelcatholicchurch.org/about
Catholic Diocese of Lexington. Diocesan Directory. 2025. https://cdlex.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/2025CompleteDirectorydraft.pdf
Catholic Diocese of Lexington. “School Finder.” Accessed March 10, 2026. https://cdlex.org/school-finder/
Kentucky Historical Society. “Our Lady of the Mountains School, Paintsville, Ky.” Ronald Morgan Kentucky Postcard Collection. Accessed March 10, 2026. https://www.kyhistory.com/digital/collection/Morgan/id/5483/
Kentucky Historical Society. “Mayo College and Girls Dormitory, Paintsville, Ky.” Ronald Morgan Kentucky Postcard Collection. Accessed March 10, 2026. https://www.kyhistory.com/digital/collection/Morgan/id/5495/
Kentucky Historical Society. “Sandy Valley Seminary, Paintsville, Ky.” Ronald Morgan Kentucky Postcard Collection. Accessed March 10, 2026. https://www.kyhistory.com/digital/collection/Morgan/id/5485/
Kentucky Historical Society. Ronald Morgan Kentucky Postcard Collection, Graphic 5: Paintsville, Johnson County, KY. Finding aid and inventory PDF. Accessed March 10, 2026. https://www.kyhistory.com/digital/api/collection/LIB/id/2029/download
Johnson County Public Library. “Digital Archives of Johnson County Kentucky.” Accessed March 10, 2026. https://johnson.advantage-preservation.com/
Johnson County Public Library. “Magazines & Newspapers.” Accessed March 10, 2026. https://johnsoncountypubliclibrary.org/subject/magazines-newspapers/
Paintsville Herald (Paintsville, Ky.). “Paintsville Herald Archive.” Morehead State University, accessed March 10, 2026. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/paintsville_herald/
Castle, Tommy. “Johnson County – Paintsville.” County Histories of Kentucky. Morehead State University, 1974. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1229&context=kentucky_county_histories
Wells, J. K. A Short History of Paintsville and Johnson County. Paintsville, KY: The Paintsville Herald, 1962. https://openlibrary.org/books/OL59036846M/A_short_history_of_Paintsville_and_Johnson_County
Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Nashville: Publishing House of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, 1910. https://archive.org/stream/27838123.1910.emory.edu/27838123_1910_djvu.txt
Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Nashville: Publishing House of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, 1913. https://archive.org/stream/27838123.1913.emory.edu/27838123_1913_djvu.txt
Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Nashville: Publishing House of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, 1914. https://archive.org/stream/27838123.1914.emory.edu/27838123_1914_djvu.txt
Johnson County Clerk. “Records.” Accessed March 10, 2026. https://johnson.countyclerk.us/records/
Johnson County Clerk. “Online Land Records.” Accessed March 10, 2026. https://johnson.countyclerk.us/online-land-records/
Johnson County Clerk. “Johnson County Clerk.” Accessed March 10, 2026. https://www.johnsoncoky.com/elected-officials/county-court-clerk
Traum, Carolyn Hay. John C. C. Mayo Research Collection, MS081-2022: Inventory/Finding Aid. Morehead State University, 2022. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1074&context=manuscripts_fa&filename=0&type=additional
Turner, Carolyn Clay, and Carolyn Hay Traum. John C.C. Mayo, Cumberland Capitalist. Pikeville, KY: Pikeville College Press, 1983. https://books.google.com/books/about/John_C_C_Mayo_Cumberland_Capitalist.html?id=ZSImAAAAMAAJ
Kentucky Historical Society. “John C.C. Mayo.” ExploreKYHistory. Accessed March 10, 2026. https://explorekyhistory.ky.gov/items/show/364
Kentucky Historical Society. “The Mayo Mansion.” ExploreKYHistory. Accessed March 10, 2026. https://explorekyhistory.ky.gov/files/show/1624
Paintsville Tourism. “Mayo Mansion & Mayo Memorial United Methodist Church.” December 5, 2022. https://paintsvilletourism.com/2022/12/05/mayo-mansion-mayo-memorial-united-methodist-church/
Ryan, Paul E. History of the Diocese of Covington, Kentucky, on the Occasion of the Centenary of the Diocese, 1853–1953. Excerpted text, “Sisters of Divine Providence.” Accessed March 10, 2026. https://www.nkyviews.com/campbell/text/ryan_melb_sisters_of_dp.html
Author Note: Our Lady of the Mountains is one of those rare Appalachian places where architecture, religion, and education all meet in the same story. I hope this piece helps readers see the old Mayo Mansion not just as a landmark, but as a living part of Paintsville’s community history.