Appalachian Community Histories – Winslow, Boyd County: Coal Mines, Railroads, and the County Poor House
Today Winslow can be easy to pass without realizing how much history lies in the hills around it. The unincorporated Boyd County community sits only a few miles from Ashland, in a landscape where roads wind between narrow valleys, wooded slopes, old railroad grades, cemeteries, and former industrial sites. Modern federal geographic records still distinguish Winslow itself, the historical Winslow Post Office, the historical Winslow Railroad Station, and Winslow Cemetery, small traces of a place that once occupied a much more visible position in northern Boyd County.
Winslow was never a large city or commercial center. Its importance came instead from what lay beneath it and what passed through it. Coal brought miners into the surrounding hills. The railroad connected those mines to Ashland’s furnaces and industries. Later, the same accessibility that made Winslow useful to mining companies persuaded Boyd County officials to establish a new county home there in 1909.
For several generations, Winslow stood at the intersection of two very different stories in Appalachian history. One was the familiar story of coal, railroads, industrial capital, and workers cutting into hillsides. The other was the quieter history of public welfare, involving elderly residents, poor families, children, people with disabilities, and others who depended upon county institutions when few alternatives existed.
Both stories left their marks on the same small patch of Boyd County.
Before the Mines
The landscape around Winslow was being studied for its mineral wealth before the community reached its industrial height. In the nineteenth century, Kentucky Geological Survey work examined Greenup, Carter, Boyd, and Lawrence counties as geologists attempted to understand the region’s coal seams, iron deposits, limestone, and other resources.
That work coincided with a much larger transformation around Ashland. Railroads, coal companies, iron furnaces, and landholding corporations were beginning to connect the hills of Boyd and Carter counties to markets far beyond northeastern Kentucky.
An important part of that transformation was the railroad line leading west from Ashland. The route had begun as part of the Lexington and Big Sandy Railway project. Construction west of Ashland started before the Civil War, and after years of financial difficulty the line became increasingly tied to the region’s coal and iron interests. A later history of the railroad corridor notes that the line eventually passed from Ashland through Winslow and Summit before reaching the mining communities farther west. In 1880, the railroad took the name Ashland Coal & Iron Railway, a name that accurately described the industries it served.
Coal was already central to the business. An Ashland history records that the Ashland Coal Company was incorporated in November 1864 by a group that included William Biggs, A. S. Winslow, John Means, John G. Peebles, and other prominent investors. The company acquired thousands of acres of coal property in Boyd County, and coal began moving from the Coalton area toward Ashland during the late 1860s.
The presence of A. S. Winslow among these early industrial figures is suggestive given the later community name, although the available sources located for this article do not establish the naming of Winslow firmly enough to state that connection as fact. What is certain is that by the late nineteenth century the name Winslow had become attached not merely to a place but to one of the area’s most important coal seams.
The Winslow Coal
In 1908, United States Geological Survey geologist William Clifton Phalen published one of the most valuable contemporary descriptions of northern Boyd County’s coal industry. His Economic Geology of the Kenova Quadrangle, Kentucky, Ohio, and West Virginia devoted considerable attention to what he called the “Winslow coal,” identified in Kentucky geological reports as coal No. 6.
The importance of the name becomes clear in Phalen’s description. The Winslow seam was not simply a tiny deposit worked beside the community. It was a recognized geological horizon found across part of northern Boyd County. Phalen reported that it was extensively mined there and noted that it was also called the limestone coal because of its position above the Vanport limestone. It was correlated with the Lower Kittanning coal of Pennsylvania.
Phalen’s survey preserves a remarkably detailed snapshot of mining around Winslow itself. His coal sections included measurements taken along a county road about half a mile east of Winslow, on property north and northeast of the community, at an Ashland Iron and Mining Company operation near Winslow, and at the company’s No. 8 Mine. The study also analyzed coal from the No. 12 Mine near Winslow and washed coal from No. 8.
These records reveal that Winslow was not simply located near the coal industry. The surrounding hills were being systematically measured, leased, mined, processed, and connected to an industrial network centered on Ashland.
An earlier federal geological report from 1905 provides an especially useful glimpse of the industry while it was still operating. It reported that the Winslow coal had been extensively developed and that the Ashland Iron and Mining Company had mined and coked the seam. At the time of the report, the company was operating only its No. 8 Mine in the area, and even that mine was below full capacity, shipping about 150 tons of coal per day to the company’s works in Ashland.
The coal therefore traveled only a few miles geographically, but it participated in a much larger industrial economy. Coal taken from the hills around Winslow could be loaded onto railroad cars, carried into Ashland, and consumed in furnaces, manufacturing plants, or other industrial facilities.
No. 8 and the Numbered Mining Landscape
The No. 8 Mine became one of the most enduring parts of Winslow’s identity.
Mining communities throughout northeastern Kentucky often inherited names from the industries surrounding them. A hollow, road, settlement, or cluster of houses could become known simply by the number assigned to a nearby mine. That happened around Winslow.
Research based on Kentucky’s annual mine reports identifies No. 8 as a Winslow operation sometimes called the Clinton Mine. A railroad siding near Little Hood Creek connected its tipple with the main rail corridor. According to figures cited from Kentucky’s 1889 mine report, the operation averaged 67 employees that year. The surrounding district eventually became locally known simply as “No. 8,” and the road later called Roberts Drive was remembered for years as No. 8 Mine Road.
The persistence of the number is important. Mining companies could change names, leases could pass from one operator to another, and mines could close, but local geography often preserved the industrial vocabulary long afterward. Someone could say that a family lived at “No. 8” and residents familiar with the area understood the location.
Phalen’s federal survey gives No. 8 a more technical identity. The coal taken there was sampled and analyzed, and the company washed the product before attempting to manufacture coke from it. The resulting coke was not considered ideal by itself because of its softness and relatively high sulfur content, but Phalen reported satisfactory results when it was mixed with other coal or coke.
The mines surrounding Winslow therefore belonged directly to Ashland’s ironmaking economy. The connection between the mine portal in the hill and the furnace in the city was physical, economic, and corporate.
The Railroad Through Winslow
Coal mining on the scale reached around Winslow would have been difficult without the railroad.
The old Ashland Coal & Iron route climbed away from Ashland through the communities that developed southwest of the city. Historical railroad research traces the line through Winslow and Summit toward the Coalton, Kilgore, and Rush districts before continuing farther west. The line had been designed to reach mineral country, and communities along it consequently developed in close relationship with railroad stops and industrial sidings.
Winslow eventually had its own railroad station. Federal geographic records continue to preserve the former station as a historical feature, at essentially the same location as the historical post office.
For residents, the railroad represented more than freight transportation. It connected a relatively small rural community with Ashland, neighboring mining settlements, businesses, government offices, and institutions. Coal cars may have represented its industrial purpose, but passenger movement also made Winslow accessible in a period when road travel through the hills could be slow and difficult.
That accessibility would become especially significant in 1909, when Boyd County began looking for a new place to house some of its poorest and most vulnerable residents.
Boyd County’s Poor Farm
Long before modern social-service agencies, nursing homes, Medicaid programs, and other public assistance systems existed, Kentucky counties carried much of the responsibility for people who could not support themselves.
The terminology could be harsh. County records and newspapers referred to “paupers,” poor farms, poor houses, infirmaries, and county homes. The residents might include elderly people without families able to care for them, people with illnesses or disabilities, widows, children, and others who had reached the edge of what family or community charity could provide.
Boyd County maintained a poor farm on Long Branch Road in the Garner area before establishing its institution at Winslow. Cemetery research in the county still identifies graves associated with that earlier farm and distinguishes them from the later poor-house cemetery at Winslow.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, conditions at the old institution had attracted concern. A detailed local study based on Boyd County records and the activities of the Friends of the Children Society describes efforts during the first decade of the 1900s to remove children and other residents whose needs were not being adequately met by the existing poor-farm system.
By 1909, Boyd County was ready to replace the old property.
Moving the County Home to Winslow
During the March 1909 term of the Boyd County Court, according to the local study drawing from county records, officials reported the sale of the old poor-house farm for $1,500. The proceeds were to be applied toward the purchase of a new property.
The location chosen was Winslow.
The new land was reportedly part of the old Clinton Tract and had previously passed through the Means and Russell Iron Company. The purchase price was $2,055, with the deed dated July 1, 1909. The property was only a few miles from the Ashland and Cannonsburg Pike, but the railroad was one of its greatest advantages. The Winslow station provided a direct transportation link through which residents, supplies, and visitors could reach the new county institution.
The move itself illustrates just how intertwined Boyd County’s transportation and welfare histories had become.
Residents of the old poor farm were placed aboard wagons and taken toward Rush Station. From there, the Ashland Coal & Iron train carried them through mining communities along the line before they disembarked at Winslow. The same railroad infrastructure developed to move coal and serve industrial settlements was now transporting some of Boyd County’s poorest residents to their new home.
By July 26, 1909, the new infirmary had been completed. The opening was treated as a public occasion. The Friends of the Children Society participated, refreshments were sold, and Martin’s Zouave Band provided music. An excursion on the railroad allowed visitors to travel out from Ashland for the event.
Behind the celebration, however, stood a serious purpose. The large brick county home represented Boyd County’s attempt to replace an older poor-farm system with a more accessible and presumably improved institution.
Winslow had gained a second identity.
It was still a coal community, but it was now also the place where generations of Boyd Countians would associate the county’s public care for the poor.
Coal Mining Into the Twentieth Century
The arrival of the county institution did not immediately erase Winslow’s mining history.
State mining records demonstrate that No. 8 remained an identifiable working mine well into the twentieth century. The Kentucky State Department of Mines’ report for 1925 listed the Wurtland Coal Company’s operation as “Winslow No. 8.”
The scale was much smaller than the 1889 employment figure associated with the earlier operation. The 1925 report recorded nine workers at Winslow No. 8 and indicated that the mine operated for 240 days during the year.
That small workforce tells part of the larger story of older mining districts around Ashland. The industrial geography remained, but individual mines could shrink, change operators, close, or be replaced by other sources of coal. The enormous growth of mining farther south in eastern Kentucky also shifted the center of the state’s coal economy away from older northern Boyd County workings.
Still, the Winslow name remained embedded in Kentucky geology. Later geological references continued to identify No. 6 in Boyd and Carter counties as the Winslow coal, demonstrating how thoroughly the community’s name had become associated with the seam.
The People Behind the Records
Government reports tend to reduce mining communities to numbers.
They record tons of coal, days worked, seam thickness, percentages of sulfur, railroad mileage, or numbers of employees. County institutional records can be equally impersonal, listing residents as expenses or describing them through categories that would sound dehumanizing today.
Yet Winslow was lived by people.
Miners went underground following the No. 6 seam into the hills. Railroad workers moved coal cars between mine sidings and Ashland. Families lived close enough to No. 8 that the mine number became part of their address and identity. At the county home, elderly residents spent the last years of their lives on the same hillsides where industrial companies had once measured coal beds.
The community therefore differed from some of the better known company towns deeper in the eastern Kentucky coalfields. Winslow’s history was tied to mining, but it was never only a mining story. The railroad station, post office, county home, cemetery, nearby roads, and connections to Ashland produced a more complicated landscape.
That complexity becomes most visible in the cemetery above the former county institution.
Winslow Cemetery and the County’s Forgotten Dead
Winslow Cemetery is one of the most important surviving physical reminders of the county-home era.
Boyd County cemetery records describe it as having originally been used for elderly people who lived at the county poor house. The county continued to maintain the burial ground for indigent burials, extending its significance beyond the period when the original institution operated.
The cemetery was surveyed in 1968 and updated in September 1977. Researchers recorded dozens of unidentified graves. A plat was later filed in Boyd County Plat Book 4, page 25, in 1994.
Those unidentified graves may tell the most sobering part of Winslow’s story.
People who possessed little property and left behind few personal papers were often among the least likely to enter conventional historical narratives. A prominent industrialist might leave business correspondence, deeds, photographs, newspaper profiles, and corporate records. A resident of the county poor house might leave only a line in an institutional register, a death certificate, or an unmarked grave.
For that reason, Winslow Cemetery should be understood as an archive in its own right.
Its marked and unmarked graves preserve the physical presence of people whose names can sometimes be recovered only by comparing county-home records with death certificates, census schedules, newspaper notices, and burial lists.
The cemetery also gives the community’s industrial and welfare histories an unusual proximity. Within the same landscape where federal geologists measured coal seams and mining companies drove entries into hillsides, Boyd County buried people who died with little wealth and, in some cases, without permanent grave markers.
From the Poor House to the Ramey Home
The old county-home property eventually entered another chapter of institutional history.
Gertrude Ramey had begun caring for children in Catlettsburg during the 1940s after a local judge asked whether she could shelter children who had nowhere else to stay. What started within her boarding house grew into an orphanage.
Ramey-Estep’s official institutional history states that in 1960 the Ramey Home moved to Bob McCullough Drive and occupied the site that had formerly been the Boyd County Poor House. The organization later evolved from an orphanage into a residential treatment program, and in 1992 the Ramey Home merged with the Hack Estep Home for Boys to form Ramey-Estep Homes.
The continuity is striking.
Land once devoted to a county poor farm later became associated with caring for children who needed somewhere to live. The institution changed, professional standards changed, and the language surrounding social welfare changed dramatically, but the Winslow property remained connected to the care of vulnerable people for much of the twentieth century.
Few places in Boyd County illustrate the evolution of local social welfare so clearly.
What Remains of Winslow
Modern Winslow is far quieter than the documentary record of its industrial years suggests.
The post office is historical. The railroad station is historical. Coal mining no longer defines daily life in the way it once did. Roads and later development have changed the landscape, while vegetation has reclaimed many traces of earlier industrial activity.
Yet the old names have proved remarkably durable.
Federal maps still identify Winslow and Winslow Cemetery. Historical geographic records preserve the post office and station. The No. 8 designation survived in local memory after the mine itself faded from operation. Geological literature continues to carry the name “Winslow coal.”
These fragments make it possible to reconstruct a community that might otherwise disappear into the outskirts of Ashland.
They also demonstrate why small Appalachian communities deserve careful study. Places like Winslow rarely produce a single famous event around which their history can be organized. Their importance emerges only after records from different institutions are placed beside one another.
A geological survey describes a coal seam.
A mine report counts workers.
A railroad history explains how the coal moved.
A deed records land changing hands.
Fiscal Court records document a poor farm.
A cemetery survey notes unidentified graves.
An institutional history remembers an orphanage occupying the former county property.
Separately, each source seems narrow. Together, they reconstruct more than a century of life in one small corner of Boyd County.
Why Winslow Matters
Winslow’s history reflects several of the forces that reshaped northeastern Kentucky after the Civil War.
Its hills contained coal close enough to Ashland and the Ohio River to make commercial development practical. Railroads turned that coal into an industrial resource by carrying it toward furnaces and factories. Mining companies cut No. 8, No. 12, and other workings into the surrounding landscape, while federal geologists studied the seam so closely that Winslow gave its name to a recognized coal bed.
Then the community took on another role.
In 1909, Boyd County brought its poor-house residents by wagon and railroad to a new institution at Winslow. Some spent the rest of their lives there. Some were buried on the hill nearby, including people whose names have since been lost. Decades later, the former county property became the Ramey Home, extending the site’s association with institutional care into another generation.
That combination makes Winslow more than a former coal camp.
It is a place where northeastern Kentucky’s industrial history and social history occupy the same ground. Coal miners, railroad workers, county officials, poor-house residents, orphaned children, and unidentified dead all belong to its story.
A traveler passing through Winslow today may see little evidence of the activity that once surrounded the community. The mines have quieted, trains no longer stop at the old station, and the county poor house belongs to another era. Yet beneath the modern landscape remains an unusually rich record of how Appalachian communities were created, changed, and sometimes nearly forgotten.
Winslow’s history is still there. Much of it is simply waiting in old mine reports, railroad records, county books, and a cemetery on the hill.
Sources & Further Reading
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
Phalen, William Clifton. Description of the Kenova Quadrangle, Kentucky-West Virginia-Ohio. Geologic Atlas of the United States, Folio 184. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1912. https://pubs.usgs.gov/pp/p1151h/references.html
Crandall, A. R. “Report on the Geology of Greenup, Carter, Boyd, and a Part of Lawrence Counties.” In Reports of Special Subjects: Eastern Coal Field, 1–78. Frankfort: Kentucky Geological Survey, 1884. https://books.google.com/books?id=aBC8AAAAIAAJ
Kentucky State Department of Mines. Annual Report for the Year Ending December 31, 1925. Frankfort, KY: State Department of Mines, 1926. See Boyd County tables for Winslow No. 8. https://kgs.uky.edu/kgsweb/olops/pub/general/jonesminereport1925.pdf
Kentucky Geological Survey. “Coal Publications and Annual Reports of Mines.” University of Kentucky. Accessed September 29, 2026. https://kygs.uky.edu/pubs/coal
Schenk, C., and W. C. Mitchell. Map of the Counties of Greenup, Carter and Boyd and a Part of Lawrence. Map. Kentucky Geological Survey, 1876. Kentucky Historical Society Digital Collections. https://www.kyhistory.com/digital/collection/Maps/id/200/
United States Post Office Department. Record of Appointment of Postmasters, 1832–September 30, 1971. National Archives Microfilm Publication M841. Record Group 28, Records of the Post Office Department. Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/postmasters-1832-1971.html
United States Post Office Department. Reports of Site Locations, 1837–1950. National Archives Microfilm Publication M1126. Record Group 28, Records of the Post Office Department. Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/files/research/post-offices/m1126.pdf
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/
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/
Sanborn Map Company. Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Ashland, Boyd County, Kentucky. New York: Sanborn Map Company, September 1901. Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/sanborn03122_004/
A History of Ashland, Kentucky, 1786–1954. Ashland, KY, 1954. Useful for the Ashland Coal Company, Ashland Coal & Iron interests, early rail development, and the industrial network surrounding Winslow. https://en.geneanet.org/library/doc/5555216/a-history-of-ashland-kentucky-1786-1954
Klaiber, Teresa Martin. “Boyd County Kentucky Monographs I: ‘Poor’ Folks.” Genealogy Pilgrimage & Stories Along the Way, April 2020. Particularly useful as a guide to the underlying Boyd County deeds, Fiscal Court proceedings, poor farm, and Winslow county-home records. https://easternkentuckygenealogy.blogspot.com/2020/04/boyd-county-kentucky-monographs-i-poor.html
Boyd County Public Library. Boyd County Cemetery Location Guide. Ashland, KY. Entry for Winslow Cemetery, including the county poor-house association, indigent burials, 1968 and 1977 surveys, and the 1994 plat. https://www.thebookplace.org/media/document/173
Kentucky GenWeb. “Boyd County Cemetery Location Guide: Winslow.” Accessed September 29, 2026. https://kygenweb.net/boyd/Cemeteries/Boyd%20County%20Cemetery%20Location.htm
Ramey-Estep Homes, Inc. “About Us.” Accessed September 29, 2026. Includes the Ramey Home’s 1960 relocation to the former Boyd County Poor House property on Bob McCullough Drive. https://www.rameyestep.com/about/
United States Geological Survey. Contributions to Economic Geology, 1905. Bulletin 285. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1906. Includes a contemporary map locating Winslow and discussion of the northeastern Kentucky coalfield. https://pubs.usgs.gov/bul/0285f/report.pdf
Author Note: Winslow’s history shows how even a small Appalachian community can preserve important stories of coal mining, railroads, public welfare, and ordinary people whose lives rarely entered the historical record. I hope this article helps preserve the memory of the miners, county-home residents, railroad workers, families, and others who made this corner of Boyd County their home.