Appalachian Community Histories – Westwood, Boyd County: From the 1915 Plat to an Industrial Community Beside Ashland
Westwood has always occupied an unusual place in the history of Boyd County. It sits so close to Ashland that the two communities have long shared schools of commerce, workplaces, roads, churches, family connections, and much of the same industrial story, yet Westwood never became simply another incorporated neighborhood of the city. Instead, it developed its own institutions and identity on the hills immediately west of Ashland’s industrial core.
For generations, the familiar local story dated Westwood’s beginning to 1920. When residents prepared to observe the community’s centennial in 2020, that date was repeated in local reporting, along with the explanation that Westwood developed as a working-class community for men employed at ARMCO and other nearby industries. Retired Fairview superintendent and local historian Bill Musick remembered an older Westwood in which a resident was likely to work at ARMCO, National Mines, or the railroad.
The documentary record, however, pushes the beginning farther back.
A Kentucky Transportation Cabinet cultural-resource investigation found that the first known Westwood subdivision plat dated to 1915, followed by later plats in the 1920s, early 1940s, and early 1950s. Even more convincingly, a Kentucky Court of Appeals case shows that the Westwood Real Estate and Development Company was already selling numbered residential lots in 1917. Westwood, therefore, did not suddenly appear in 1920. Its physical creation had begun several years earlier, while its transformation into the industrial working community remembered by later generations accelerated during the 1920s. Pasted markdown
Before There Was a Westwood
Long before subdivision maps divided the land into numbered lots, the area that would become Westwood was occupied by Boyd County families whose farms, homes, wells, fences, and burial grounds formed an older rural landscape.
One of the clearest surviving reminders is Dixon Cemetery. Local cemetery documentation traces the burial ground to the nineteenth century and records an especially important reference in the will of Jane Dixon. Executed on October 16, 1870, and probated in January 1871, the will reserved approximately one-quarter acre for a family burial ground. Later records identify the cemetery along Main Street in Westwood, between McClure and Fairview avenues.
The cemetery remained visible as Westwood grew around it. The Kentucky Historical Society surveyed the burial ground in 1968, and twentieth-century residents repeatedly worked to preserve it. A Dixon Cemetery Improvement Association existed during the 1950s, while the Westwood Woman’s Club and Westwood Lions Club later turned their attention to its preservation in the 1980s. The cemetery is therefore more than a collection of graves. It is one of the few places where the landscape of nineteenth-century Boyd County survives inside the residential community that replaced it.
Another glimpse of the land before full residential development appears in the Kentucky Court of Appeals record of Irwin v. Westwood Real Estate and Development Company. The case concerned property that had once belonged to Adolph Henneman. According to the court, Henneman had improved his parcel with a residence, outbuildings, a well, and a surrounding fence before the Westwood company incorporated the surrounding land into its subdivision.
Those details are small, but they preserve an important transition. Westwood was not constructed on empty ground. The subdivision was laid across an existing landscape of farms and family properties, and some of those older boundaries would become the source of disputes once surveyors began turning acreage into residential lots.
The Westwood Real Estate and Development Company
The most revealing early document in Westwood’s history is the 1923 Kentucky Court of Appeals decision in Irwin v. Westwood Real Estate and Development Co.
The opinion states plainly that the company owned land near Ashland that it had purchased from several different parties. The property was then divided into lots and streets and offered for sale. The dispute centered on several numbered lots near what the opinion called Wheatly Street, corresponding to the modern Wheatley Road area.
More important for establishing a chronology, the court described transactions that had occurred years before the traditional 1920 founding date. On May 27, 1917, the company sold two lots south of Wheatly Street to Irene Montgomery. In March 1918, another piece of property was sold to Milton Thompson and his wife. Thompson later conveyed his property to B. C. Irwin in May 1920. The lawsuit arose when Irwin discovered that the written property description did not match the land that the parties believed had originally been sold.
In other words, by 1917 Westwood was not simply an idea on a developer’s desk. Lots had been surveyed, numbered, marketed, and sold.
That evidence fits closely with the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet’s finding that Westwood’s first subdivision plat appeared in 1915. The development initially followed portions of the modern road system around Wheatley Road, Main Street, Dalton Avenue, Bellefonte Road, High Street, Laurel Avenue, and Central Avenue, after which later subdivisions extended the community farther across the surrounding hills. Pasted markdown
The old lawsuit therefore does something that later reminiscences cannot. It places buyers, sellers, numbered lots, fences, houses, and a development company on the ground during Westwood’s earliest years.
From Subdivision to Steel Community
If 1915 marks the beginning of the subdivision, the industrial expansion of Ashland explains why Westwood grew into something much larger.
During the early twentieth century, Ashland was becoming one of the major industrial centers along the Ohio River. Steelmaking, iron production, rail transportation, coal mining, chemical manufacturing, petroleum refining, and related businesses drew thousands of workers into Boyd County.
ARMCO became particularly important. Contemporary Ashland history records that the American Rolling Mill Company acquired the Ashland Iron and Mining Company in 1921, tying a large portion of Ashland’s existing iron industry into the growing corporation.
Housing had to follow employment.
Westwood offered land immediately outside the crowded industrial city. Its streets could accommodate modest detached houses instead of the denser commercial and residential blocks closer to Ashland’s riverfront. The community stood close enough for workers to reach the city’s mills and railroad facilities while remaining beyond Ashland’s municipal limits.
This is where the traditional 1920 story retains much of its meaning even if the literal founding date is too late. Local memory identifies the 1920s as the period when Westwood became recognizably a working-class industrial community. The subdivision already existed, but Ashland’s industrial boom gave it the population, purpose, and identity that would define Westwood for much of the twentieth century. The Kentucky Transportation Cabinet’s historical research similarly describes Westwood as closely associated with employees of ARMCO and other major Ashland-area industries. Pasted markdown
The connection became so strong that generations later residents still explained their family’s arrival in Westwood through the mills. Musick recalled that his own family moved there from Argillite in 1966 because his stepfather worked at ARMCO and wanted to live closer to his job.
Westwood was not a company town in the strict sense. ARMCO did not own the entire community or govern residents as coal companies did in many Appalachian mining camps. Yet Westwood became an industrial workers’ neighborhood in nearly every practical sense. The fortunes of the mills and the fortunes of families living along Main Street, Wheatley Road, and the surrounding streets were closely connected.
Fairview and the Making of a Community
Industry may have supplied the jobs, but the Fairview schools helped give Westwood its own identity.
The Fairview school district was already substantial enough by the 1930s to generate a dispute that reached Kentucky’s highest court. In Board of Trustees of Fairview Graded Common School District v. Renfroe, decided in 1935, the Court of Appeals described a disagreement between successive school boards over contracts for principals, teachers, and other employees.
The case records that W. P. Renfroe had been employed as principal for the 1934 to 1935 school year, along with high school teacher Raymond Carroll and a larger group of grade-school teachers. A subsequent board attempted to employ a different principal and teaching staff, producing litigation over which contracts remained valid.
The legal dispute itself concerned school governance, but for Westwood history its greater value is the picture it provides of an established educational institution. By the middle of the Great Depression, Fairview was already operating with a principal, high school instruction, multiple elementary teachers, a janitor, an elected governing board, and enough local importance for disputes over its administration to reach the state courts.
A later firsthand recollection gives the school a more personal dimension. One former pupil remembered entering the large two-story red-brick Fairview Grade School in 1944 while Renfroe was still principal. The account names teachers, recalls the beginning of a school cafeteria in 1945, and remembers the close relationship between the school and Fairview Missionary Baptist Church. As with any personal recollection written decades afterward, individual details should be checked against contemporary records, but the account captures how thoroughly the school became woven into community life.
Local memory also preserves the importance of Fairview’s old gymnasium. Musick told The Daily Independent that the old gym was a Works Progress Administration project whose stone construction required extensive handwork. A newer gym followed in 1968.
Today Fairview Independent Schools still operates from Main Street, continuing one of the strongest institutional links between modern Westwood and the neighborhood that emerged during the industrial boom.
Westwood in the 1940 Census
By 1940, Westwood had grown enough that the federal government explicitly placed its name on the census landscape.
The Census Bureau grouped the area as Fairview-Westwood-Millseat in Lower Ashland District 4. The 1940 population report counted 3,416 people in the combined unincorporated community, while National Archives enumeration maps divided the area among districts 10-34, 10-35, and 10-36.
Those records are particularly valuable because the individual schedules can reveal the community house by house. They recorded names, ages, occupations, places of birth, education, housing status, and other details. Combined with Ashland city directories, subdivision plats, and old street names, the census can potentially reconstruct much of Westwood’s population during the period when the neighborhood was filling with industrial families.
The census also confirms something important about Westwood’s identity. By 1940 it was no longer merely an extension appearing on real estate plats. Federal officials recognized Westwood by name as part of a substantial unincorporated population immediately outside Ashland.
The Postwar Building Boom
Westwood continued expanding after the Second World War.
The historical survey prepared for the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet found additional subdivision activity in the early 1940s and early 1950s. A 1953 Westwood plat survives as an especially important record of this phase, while aerial photographs from 1952, 1956, 1960, and 1967 make it possible to watch houses and streets spread across the surrounding land over time. Pasted markdown
This was the era when Westwood assumed much of the physical form residents recognize today. Older streets from the early subdivision were joined by later residential development, while schools, churches, small businesses, fire protection, clubs, and recreational organizations made it increasingly unnecessary to think of Westwood merely as a place where workers slept between shifts in Ashland.
It had become a community of its own.
The Westwood Fire Department
One of the clearest expressions of that independence came in 1949.
According to the Westwood Fire District’s own history, the department was founded that year as the first volunteer fire department established outside a city limit in Boyd County. The district now describes its service area as roughly five square miles and serves thousands of residents.
Its role extended beyond answering fire calls. The department became part of Westwood’s everyday culture. Musick recalled that the fire whistle sounded at nine o’clock each evening as a curfew signal for children younger than sixteen. For generations of Westwood residents, the whistle was not merely emergency equipment. It was the neighborhood clock, an audible reminder that it was time to head home.
The Westwood Fire Department still operates from Main Street, one of several institutions that give an unincorporated community many of the functions normally associated with a small town. Boyd County continues to list the department among the county’s local fire services.
Main Street and the Westwood People Remember
Westwood’s commercial history was never as large as downtown Ashland’s, but Main Street developed its own collection of neighborhood businesses.
In his recollections for The Daily Independent, Musick named places once familiar to generations of Westwood residents, including the Dari Hut, the Dollhouse, Osbourne Drug Store, Barber’s Gateway, Pennington’s, Clarke’s Garage, and family grocery stores operated by families such as the Ashbys, Halls, and Blevinses. Some disappeared as shopping patterns changed, while other businesses survived or left descendants elsewhere in the region.
One particularly important business story began with Clark’s Pump-N-Shop. John W. Clark, a Fairview graduate and Westwood resident, founded what grew into a familiar regional chain, and the original Westwood location remained an identifiable landmark on Main Street.
Churches likewise became anchors of neighborhood life. Government transportation studies have identified numerous congregations in and around Westwood, including Fairview Baptist Church, Westwood Wesleyan, Westwood Christian Church, Westwood Christian Baptist, and several United Baptist and independent congregations. The density of churches reflected the neighborhood institutions that developed alongside schools, businesses, and civic clubs as Westwood matured.
A Town That Never Became a City
Westwood looks remarkably like a small incorporated town.
It has a Main Street. It has schools, churches, a fire district, businesses, clubs, recreation, cemeteries, and neighborhoods extending from a recognizable central corridor. Yet Westwood remained unincorporated.
That fact became part of its identity.
Boyd County Judge-Executive Eric Chaney told The Daily Independent that his review of Westwood’s legal history suggested the area had once been considered as a northern residential extension of Ashland. According to Chaney, when annexation was put before Westwood residents, they rejected joining the city.
Whatever the precise chronology of each annexation discussion, the larger result is unmistakable. Westwood remained outside Ashland.
That independence created an interesting arrangement. Residents could participate in the economic and social life of the larger city while maintaining separate schools and community institutions. In time, remaining unincorporated became almost as important to Westwood’s identity as the steel mills that had helped drive its growth.
Civic Clubs and Community Memory
Westwood’s identity was also maintained through organizations that rarely leave the kind of paper trail produced by courts or corporations.
The Westwood Woman’s Club and Westwood Lions Club participated in community improvement and historical preservation projects, including work at Dixon Cemetery. The Lions Club became so closely connected to local recreation that what was long known as Westwood Lions Club Park is now identified by Boyd County as Bill Grizzle Memorial Park.
These organizations helped preserve a sense of local ownership over a place without a mayor or municipal government.
That helps explain why later descriptions of Westwood so often emphasize families rather than boundaries. Residents interviewed for the 2021 centennial story described houses remaining within families for generations and people growing up alongside many of the same classmates from childhood through graduation. Suzanne Griffith, who returned to Westwood after living elsewhere, described Fairview schools and local churches as crucial institutions holding the community together.
Westwood’s history, then, cannot be understood only through industrial employment figures or subdivision maps. Much of what made it a distinct community existed in relationships among neighbors, schools, churches, firemen, coaches, shop owners, civic clubs, and extended families.
From Population Peak to Industrial Change
By 1980, Westwood had reached a population of 5,973 according to the United States Census Bureau.
The decades that followed brought changes familiar to industrial communities across Appalachia and the Ohio Valley. Employment patterns shifted, heavy industry contracted, families moved away, and the population gradually declined.
The Census Bureau counted 5,300 residents in 1990 and 4,888 in 2000. By 2010 the population stood at 4,746. The 2020 census recorded 4,387 residents and 2,080 housing units.
Those figures tell only part of the story. Westwood’s twentieth-century growth had been connected to an industrial economy centered on mills, mines, railroads, and related employers. As that economy changed, the community had to confront aging housing, infrastructure needs, vacant properties, and uncertainty surrounding former industrial land.
Yet unlike some company towns that virtually disappeared when their principal employer closed, Westwood had long since developed institutions independent of the mill. Fairview schools, the fire district, churches, businesses, parks, and family networks gave the community a structure capable of surviving economic changes that would have been devastating to a settlement built around a single company.
The Question of Westwood’s Founding Date
Westwood’s history presents a useful lesson about the difference between community memory and documentary evidence.
The traditional date of 1920 should not simply be discarded. It clearly meant something to generations of residents, and 2020 was commemorated locally as Westwood’s centennial. The period around 1920 also corresponds with the industrial expansion that transformed the subdivision into a large working-class neighborhood.
But the surviving evidence does not support describing 1920 as the literal beginning of Westwood.
The Kentucky Transportation Cabinet’s historical investigation identified a Westwood plat dating to 1915. The Kentucky Court of Appeals documented sales of Westwood lots in 1917 and 1918. By the time 1920 arrived, houses, fences, property boundaries, streets, buyers, and numbered lots already existed.
The better interpretation is that Westwood was first formally platted in 1915 and began selling residential property shortly afterward, then experienced substantial expansion during the 1920s as Ashland’s industrial economy created new demand for working-class housing.
That distinction gives Westwood a longer and more interesting story.
Why Westwood’s History Matters
Westwood can easily appear to be simply another residential area on the outskirts of Ashland. Its history shows something different.
The community preserves several layers of northeastern Kentucky history within a relatively small space. Dixon Cemetery reaches back to the rural families who occupied the land before subdivision. The 1915 plat represents the speculative real-estate development that accompanied the growth of industrial Ashland. The 1917 and 1918 property sales show houses and lots taking shape before the traditional founding date. The expansion of ARMCO and neighboring industries explains why so many working families followed.
Fairview schools reveal how residents built institutions separate from Ashland. The volunteer fire department illustrates a community providing services normally associated with an incorporated town. Main Street businesses, churches, clubs, school gyms, ballfields, and the nightly fire whistle created traditions that belonged specifically to Westwood.
Even the decision to remain outside Ashland became part of that story.
Today Westwood is smaller than it was at its late twentieth-century population peak, and the industrial economy that produced much of the community has changed dramatically. Yet its streets still follow a history that can be reconstructed through subdivision plats, court cases, census schedules, aerial photographs, school records, newspaper files, cemeteries, and the memories of residents.
Few unincorporated communities in eastern Kentucky have such a strong documentary trail.
When those records are placed together, Westwood emerges not as a nameless suburb of Ashland but as a planned residential community born before the First World War, transformed by steel and industry, and sustained for more than a century by the institutions its residents built for themselves.
Sources & Further Reading
Irwin v. Westwood Real Estate & Development Co. 200 Ky. 760, 255 S.W. 546. Kentucky Court of Appeals, November 2, 1923. https://openjurist.org/200/ky/760/irwin-v-westwood-real-estate-and-development-co
Board of Trustees of Fairview Graded Common School District v. Renfroe. 259 Ky. 644, 83 S.W.2d 27. Kentucky Court of Appeals, May 28, 1935. https://openjurist.org/259/ky/644/board-of-trustees-of-fairview-graded-common-school-district-v-renfroe
Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. KY 168 Corridor Study: Final Report. Frankfort: Kentucky Transportation Cabinet, 2023. Includes the Cultural/Historic Overview documenting Westwood’s development and relationship to Ashland industry. https://transportation.ky.gov/Planning/Planning%20Studies%20and%20Reports/9-125%20-%20KY%20168%20Study%20Final%20Report.pdf
Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. I-64 to US 23 Ashland Connector Study: Final Report. Frankfort: Kentucky Transportation Cabinet, 2009. https://transportation.ky.gov/Planning/Planning%20Studies%20and%20Reports/US%2023%20Ashland%20Connector%20Study%20-%20I-64%20to%20US%2023%20Ashland%20Connector_Final%20Report.pdf
Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. I-64 to US 23 Ashland Connector Study: Final Report, Complete with Appendices. Frankfort: Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. https://transportation.ky.gov/Planning/Planning%20Studies%20and%20Reports/US%2023%20Ashland%20Connector%20Study%20-%20I-64%20to%20US%2023%20Ashland%20Connector_Final%20Report%20-%20Complete.pdf
Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. I-64 to US 23 Ashland Connector Study: Draft Final Report. 2009. Especially useful for Westwood, Fairview, Summit, transportation, and environmental-justice context. https://transportation.ky.gov/ProfessionalServices/Procurement%20Bulletins/2010-01%20%28July%202009%29/2010-01%20Ashland%20Connector-Draft%20Report.pdf
Sanborn Map Company. Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Ashland, Boyd County, Kentucky. October 1920. Washington, DC: Library of Congress Geography and Map Division. https://www.loc.gov/item/sanborn03122_007/
Sanborn Map Company. Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Ashland, Boyd County, Kentucky. June 1907. Washington, DC: Library of Congress Geography and Map Division. https://www.loc.gov/item/sanborn03122_005/
Sanborn Map Company. Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Ashland, Boyd County, Kentucky. September 1901. Washington, DC: Library of Congress Geography and Map Division. https://www.loc.gov/item/sanborn03122_004/
Sanborn Map Company. Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Ashland, Boyd County, Kentucky. February 1895. Washington, DC: Library of Congress Geography and Map Division. https://www.loc.gov/item/sanborn03122_003/
Sanborn Map Company. Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Ashland, Boyd County, Kentucky. August 1890. Washington, DC: Library of Congress Geography and Map Division. https://www.loc.gov/item/sanborn03122_002/
Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives. Inventory of County Land Records. Frankfort: Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives. Boyd County holdings include deeds from 1860 to 1968 and 1990 to 2003, tax books, and wills. https://kdla.ky.gov/Archives-and-Reference/Documents/Inventory_Land_Records.pdf Kentucky Libraries and Archives
Boyd County Public Library. “Local & Regional Resources.” Genealogy and regional collections, including the Arnold Hanners Photograph Collection, cemetery records, marriage records, and Ashland Daily Independent obituary indexing. Accessed September 29, 2026. https://www.thebookplace.org/research-learn/genealogy-regional-resources Boyd County Public Library
Kentucky Historical Society. City Directories Available in the KHS Library and Special Collections. Frankfort: Kentucky Historical Society. Includes historical Ashland city-directory holdings useful for reconstructing Westwood residents and occupations. https://www.kyhistory.com/digital/collection/LIB/id/1155/
Kentucky Historical Society. Kentucky Historical Society Digital Collections. Frankfort: Kentucky Historical Society. Accessed September 29, 2026. https://www.kyhistory.com/ Kentucky History
Culvyhouse, Henry. “INSIGHT 2021: 100 Years of Westwood.” The Daily Independent, January 4, 2021; republished November 2, 2021. https://currently.att.yahoo.com/amphtml/att/insight-2021-100-years-westwood-104500081.html Currently
Westwood Fire District. “A Tradition of Excellence.” Westwood, KY. Documents the department’s founding in 1949 as Boyd County’s first volunteer department outside a city limit. Accessed September 29, 2026. https://www.westwoodfiredistrict.com/ Westwood Fire District
Boyd County Public Library. Boyd County Cemetery Location Guide. Boyd County, Kentucky. Particularly useful for Dixon Cemetery and the older landscape that preceded the Westwood subdivision. https://kygenweb.net/boyd/Cemeteries/Boyd%20County%20Cemetery%20Location.htm
United States Bureau of the Census. Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940. Population of Unincorporated Places. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1940. Includes Fairview-Westwood-Millseat in Boyd County. https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1940/population-unincorporated-communities/1940uninc.pdf
United States Census Bureau. 1950 Census of Population and Housing. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Commerce, 1950. Boyd County population schedules provide household-level evidence for postwar Westwood. https://1950census.archives.gov/
United States Census Bureau. 1980 Census of Population. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Commerce, 1980. Westwood census-designated-place population data. https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1980/volume-1/kentucky/1980a_kyabc-12.pdf
United States Census Bureau. 1990 Census of Population and Housing: Kentucky. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Commerce, 1990. https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1990/cph-2/cph-2-19.pdf
United States Census Bureau. 2000 Census of Population and Housing: Kentucky. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Commerce, 2003. https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/2003/dec/phc-3-19.pdf
United States Census Bureau. 2010 Census of Population and Housing: Kentucky. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Commerce, 2012. https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/2012/dec/cph-1-19.pdf
United States Census Bureau. “Westwood CDP, Kentucky.” TIGERweb/2020 Census Geography. Washington, DC: U.S. Census Bureau. https://tigerweb.geo.census.gov/tigerwebmain/Files/acs25/tigerweb_acs25_cdp_2020_tab20_ky.html
Ashland Centennial Committee. A History of Ashland, Kentucky, 1786 to 1954. Ashland, KY: Ashland Centennial Committee, 1954. Useful for the industrial growth of Ashland, ARMCO, transportation, and the economic setting in which Westwood expanded. https://www.kykinfolk.org/boyd/general/History-Ashland/HistoryAshland.pdf
Author Note: Westwood’s history is a reminder that the dates preserved in community tradition do not always tell the entire story, as surviving records place its organized development several years before the commonly remembered 1920 beginning. I hope this article helps preserve both the documentary history of Westwood and the experiences of the families, workers, students, businesses, and institutions that made it a community of its own.