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Historical Data:
JOHNSON COUNTY. Johnson County, the nineteenth county in order of formation, is located in eastern Kentucky and is bordered by Morgan, Lawrence, Martin, Floyd, and Magoffin counties. The county contains 264 square miles in the watershed of the Levisa Fork of the Big Sandy River. Named for Richard M. Johnson, it was created in 1843. Parts of Floyd, Lawrence, and Morgan counties went to make up Johnson; PAINTSVILLE was chosen as the county seat. Other communities are Flat Gap, Staffordsville, Hager Hill, East Point, River, Offut, Thelma, Whitehouse, Oil Springs, Van Lear, and West Van Lear. Human occupation of present-day Johnson County dates back at least to the Adena culture. In 1938 a Works Progress Administration crew, under the supervision of an archeological team from the Universities of Kentucky and New Mexico, excavated four Adena burial mounds along Paint Creek in Paintsville. According to local legends, by the seventeenth century Johnson County may have been inhabited by a Native American group known as the Totero. Their principal village was at Hager Hill. The Totero were probably related to the Siouian-speaking Tutelo of southwestern Virginia and they may have migrated southward with the Tutelo into western North Carolina. Anglo-Americans from Virginia began to explore the area during the 1750s. Dr. Thomas Walker's party traveled down Paint Creek in 1750 and other whites may have hunted in the area prior to the first permanent settlement, at the site that is now Blackhouse Bottom. By 1860 the population of the county exceeded 5,000, including twenty-seven slaves and nineteen free blacks. Even though most Johnson Countians remained loyal to the Union during the Civil War, the fiscal court in October of 1861 ordered that anyone publicly raising a Union or Confederate flag would be fined fifty dollars. While both Union and Confederate armies marched through the county during the war, the only substantial skirmish occurred along Jenny's Creek on January 7, 1862. Coal mining has dominated the economic history of Johnson County. As early as the 1840s, two Johnson County men opened a coal yard in Greentown. In 1888, the Chatterawha Railroad was extended from Ashland to White House to transport the cannel coal being mined there. Largely through the efforts of John C.C. Mayo, the Chesapeake & Ohio extended its line to Paintsville in 1904. Shortly thereafter, major coal companies began to develop the mineral wealth of the county. The Northeast Coal Company developed mines in the vicinity of Thealka and White House. Consolidation Coal Company purchased the rights to develop the extremely rich Miller's Creek seam. In 1909 Consolidation Coal began to build a model company town on Miller's Creek. The community was named for company director Van Lear Black. Within ten years, Van Lear was the largest town in the county, with a population of more than 4,000. Unlike Northeast Coal, Consolidation did not rely exclusively on local labor. Van Lear soon had a significant number of immigrants from Eastern Europe and Afro-Americans from the lower South. On Labor Day 1924, thousands of people gathered in Paintsville to witness a parade of two hundred robed members of the Ku Klux Klan. Coal mining in Johnson County slowly declined after 1946, when Consolidation Coal began to sell off its coal lands to the Farwest Coal Company, which ceased operations in 1955. Even though most of the deep mines were closed by 1960, nineteen strip mines were operating in Johnson County as late as 1973. In 1970, the state began construction of the Carl D. Perkins Rehabilitation Center in Thelma. In 1980, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers completed work on a dam at the juncture of Little Paint Creek and Open Fork. Paintsville Lake, four miles west of the city, stretches for eighteen miles and covers more than 11,000 acres. Recreational facilities have been added at various points to make the lake accessible to boaters and swimmers. Like much of the Big Sandy region, Johnson County has been flooded repeatedly. Major inundations occurred in 1862, 1918, 1929, 1936, 1939, 1955, 1957, 1962, 1963, and 1977. In 1957 the Levisa Fork crested in Paintsville at forty-six feet, fourteen feet above flood stage. The rising waters did more than $4 million worth of property damage. Dams on John's Creek in Floyd County and Little Paint Creek in Johnson County have helped in flood control. Famous Johnson Countians include entrepreneur John C.C. Mayo, physician Paul B. Hall, poet Rose Wiley Chandler, and country singers Loretta Lynn and Crystal Gayle. The population of Johnson County was 17,539 in 1970; 24,432 in 1980; and 23,248 in 1990. See J.K. Wells, A Short History of Paintsville and Johnson County (Paintsville, Ky., 1962); C. Mitchell Hall, Johnson County, Kentucky: A History of the County and Genealogy of Its People Up to the Year 1927 (Louisville 1928). THOMAS D. MATUASIC From The Kentucky Encyclopedia, edited by John Kleber. Copyright 1992. Reprinted with permission of The University Press of Kentucky. Historical Overview of Paintsville and Johnson CountyOn February 24, 1984, the City of Paintsville celebrated its 150th Anniversary as a chartered city in the Commonwealth of Kentucky.Although Paintsville was a small village, then located in Floyd County (Johnson County was not formed until 1843), the town had its beginnings much earlier than the year it received its charter. As early as 1780, what is now Paintsville was referred to in military dispatches of the American Revolution by two colonial officers scouting the area. Because of its location at the confluence of the Big Sandy River and Paint Creek, Paintsville was first called Paint Lick Station and/or Paint Landing by the early settlers and visitors to this area. The first post office was established in 1824 and is listed in the National Archives as Paint Creek Post Office. The name was not formally changed to Paintsville by the U. S. Postal Service until June 21, 1843. There have been many stories about how the names Paintsville and Paint Creek were attached to the village and the small stream which ran beside it and which now bisects it. Some would have Daniel Boone involved. Others attribute the name to such early explorers and frontiersmen as Dr. Thomas Walker and Matthias Harmon. Whichever is true, the names were clearly derived from the colorful Indian markings on the numerous white birch trees and rocks which lined the banks of Paint Creek. These early Indian ideographs gave evidence of frequent Indian visits to the junction of our two waterways. Indeed, archeological discoveries have confirmed that the Adena Indians, mound builders by tradition, were in the Paintsville area centuries before the discovery of North America by white men. Although nomadic tribes of Indians from what is now Ohio and Tennessee made life hazardous along the Big Sandy River until the dawn of the 19th Century, by the time Paint Lick Station was established as a permanent village, Indian threats were no longer a problem. As J. K. Wells observed so eloquently in his volume entitled The Gathering of Trades People, 1992, "It is difficult to pinpoint that hour at which a boy becomes a man or a group of buildings become a town. Certainly, in each instance the process is slow and gradual and the line to be crossed is ill defined. It was in the 1810s that the first homes were built on the site of present day Paintsville and in the 1820s that the bottom land was subdivided and laid off in lots." Among the first settlers and property owners in what is now Paintsville were the Preston, Remy (Ramey), Dixon (Dickson), Huff, Franklin and Auxier families. These were soon joined by such names as Hager, Vaughan, Castle, VanHoose, Stafford and others. As the names indicate, most of the families were of Scotch-Irish, English or German extraction. Many had fought in the late Revolutionary War and migrated from North Carolina, Virginia and Pennsylvania to the sheltering hills of eastern Kentucky. Paintsville, like many small mountain villages, struggled along for its first 25 years. There were no roads or highways. Communication with the outside world was very limited. Mail arrived by horseback and steamboat. Eventually, stage coaches ran from the Bluegrass. Travel was restricted to horseback and even then the horses stepped along creek beds and Indian paths. The first steamboat traveled up the Big Sandy to Paintsville and beyond in 1837. It was the most exciting transition in the area's history. For the next 75 years, steamboats were a common and welcome sight along the banks of the Big Sandy River. Just as Paintsville began to thrive as a commercial center, the onset of the Civil War in 1860 began to take its toll. As in other border states, brother was set against brother and families were torn by the deep emotional and political issues of the day. At one point, the Johnson County Fiscal Court passed an ordinance that neither the United States nor the Confederate States flags could be flown in the county. When Colonel James A. Garfield and his Union Brigade marched on Paintsville in January of 1862, this law was quickly repealed and a new one passed which permitted only the Union flag to be flown at the Courthouse. Garfield, a young lawyer soon to be an Ohio congressman and later President of the United States, routed Confederate forces camped in Paintsville and along the Big Sandy River, defeating the forces under General Humphrey Marshall at the Battle of Middle Creek in nearby Floyd County. What made the Civil War even worse for the residents of Johnson County was the fact that not only was Kentucky a border state but Johnson County was a border county. Floyd County to the south was generally Southern in its sympathies while Lawrence County to the north was pro-Union. It is not surprising to learn, therefore, that General Daniel Hager, Johnson County's first sheriff and an officer in the Kentucky Militia, had one son in Confederate service and another in the Union Kentucky 14th Volunteer Mounted Infantry. More significantly, it was learned much later that the elder Hager had joined the forces of General Marshall as a supply officer and spent the balance of the war in Virginia. His many relatives and friends in Johnson County thought he had retired to his Hager Hill farm. Although emotions remained raw and tempers frequently flared, Paintsville and Johnson County joined the nation in recovering from the terrible effects of the War Between The States. Doctors, lawyers and teachers had been present in Johnson County since soon after Paintsville's chartering. One of the more prominent teachers was a young man from Floyd County named Thomas Jefferson Mayo. Mayo moved to Paintsville soon after the Civil War and established a reputation as a gifted and talented teacher. He was to become far more famous as the father of John C. C. Mayo, the aggressive visionary and entrepreneur who opened the coal field of eastern Kentucky to the industrial north and single-handedly brought railroad service to the region. Without the life and work of John C. C. Mayo Paintsville, its banks and churches, its streets and public utilities would have been many years later in arriving. On September 1, 1904, the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway opened its Paintsville depot. It had taken more than 25 years for the rails to travel 18 miles from Richardson in Lawrence County to Paintsville. Mayo, and the coal he made available, was totally responsible. Coal had become an important potential resource for eastern Kentucky since before the Civil War. But the war had interrupted its development and dried up the necessary financing. John C. C. Mayo had the vision and the tenacity to make coal king in the mountains. By 1910 tens of thousands of tons of coal were pouring out of eastern Kentucky. Mayo was a millionaire, a political titan and eastern Kentucky's only member of the Democratic National Committee. He was influential in electing governors, senators and congressmen and contributed heavily to the presidential campaign of Woodrow Wilson in 1912. It was said of Mayo that he was "a teacher from the hills of eastern Kentucky who elected a West Virginia Senator from Maryland." This was in reference to the election of Clarence Watson, a native of Maryland, to the United States Senate from West Virginia. The description was, by all accounts, true. With the coming of coal and rail service Paintsville truly came into its own. In 1901 The Paintsville Herald ran its first issue. It is today the oldest continuous business in Paintsville. In 1902, Paintsville's first bank opened for business. In 1906, the remarkable invention of Alexander Graham Bell revolutionized communications in Paintsville as three full time operators responded to the rings of 26 telephones. By 1908 Paintsville had paved streets. 1905 saw the first vehicular bridge across Paint Creek, connecting the two of the major sections of what is now the City of Paintsville. 1912 brought natural gas and electrical service and in 1926 the city had full public water service and its first official fire department. The first county fair was held in 1914 and the first Apple King was named in that year. But it was not until 1962 that the Johnson County Kentucky Apple Festival was held. In the intervening years, Paintsville has continued to maintain its base as a center of commercial, professional, legal, medical, financial and transportation interests in the Big Sandy Valley. It has grown from less than 200 people in 1860 to nearly 5000. Its boundaries have expanded 9 times since 1834. Most important, Paintsville and Johnson County have produced a greater proportion of physicians, lawyers, teachers, scientists, military leaders, outstanding athletes, businessmen and public servants than most towns of its size could ever boast. The same character traits which made this fact possible made Paintsville a reality and have kept it in the forefront of progress and development in eastern Kentucky Source:Johnson County History |