Historical Data:
Pike County, the seventieth county in order of formation, is the easternmost
county in Kentucky. It is bordered by Martin, Floyd, Knott, and Letcher
counties; by Virginia on the southeast; and by West Virginia on the northeast.
The county is separated from West Virginia by the Tug Fork of the Big Sandy
River, while Pine Mountain forms the border with Virginia. The county seat is
PIKEVILLE.
Topographically, the county is a part of the Central Appalachian Highlands, a
well-dissected plateau with alternating steep, narrow ridges and narrow
stream-made valleys extending in all directions. The county's highest elevation
is Pine Mountain (also known locally as Cumberland Mountain), part of the
one-hundred-mile-long ridge that is Kentucky's southeast border. Settlements
and transportation lines are largely restricted to the valleys. Pike County is
drained exclusively by the two forks of the Big Sandy River. Over two-thirds of
its area is drained by the larger of these, the Levisa and its main Pike County
tributaries (the Johns, Island, Shelby, Grapevine, and Feds creeks and Russell
Fork). Tug Fork and its principal branches (Big, Pond, Blackberry, Peter, and
Knox creeks) drain over two hundred square miles of the county's northeast and
eastern sections.
The first white explorers known to have visited Pike County were the members of
Maj. Andrew Lewis's ill-fated Big Sandy expedition of 1756, who camped on the
Kentucky side of the Tug Fork. Daniel Boone and a companion are believed to
have descended Shelby Creek in their 1767 search for the Bluegrass region. In
1773 Enoch Smith and party may have built a horse pen on upper Johns Creek. The
first known permanent settlement in Pike County was made in 1790 at the mouth
of Sycamore Creek, on lower Johns Creek by the family of William Robert Lesley.
By 1800 other settlements were being made on the Levisa in the vicinity of
present-day Pikeville.
Before Pike County was formed on December 19, 1821, it had been, in succession,
a part of Fayette, Bourbon, Mason, and Floyd counties. The county was named for
Gen. Zebulon M. Pike, the U.S. Army officer and explorer who discovered Pike's
Peak.
The first session of the county court
met on March 4, 1822, at the home of Spencer Adkins on the Levisa Fork near the
mouth of Russell Fork. On March 25 a permanent county seat was selected at a
site to be called Liberty, about a mile and a half below the mouth of Russell
Fork. Opposition by settlers north of the Levisa led to a decision the
following year to relocate the seat on Elijah Adkins's land on Peach Orchard
Bottom, across the Levisa from the mouth of Lower Chloe Creek. After the site
was surveyed by James Honaker, a town was laid out in the early spring of 1824
and named Pikeville after the county. Pikeville, the county's largest city, is
on the Levisa Fork, seven and a half stream miles from the Floyd County line
and 145 road miles east-southeast of downtown Lexington. Elkhorn City, on
Russell Fork, two stream miles from the Virginia line, is the county's second
largest town. Other major communities include Belfry, Phelps, Virgie, Coal Run,
Hellier, Huddy, and McCarr-Buskirk.
Pike County, located in the heart of the Appalachian coal fields, has been one
of the principal coal producing counties in the nation since 1910. Though
exploitable coal deposits in nearly every section of the county were known to
geologists and others before the Civil War, their large-scale commercial
development awaited the coming of the railroads in the first two decades of the
twentieth century. In 1986 Pike County had 319 underground coal mines and 148
surface mines, more than any other Kentucky county. In 1987 some 31.4 million
tons were mined (18 percent of the state's total) with a gross value in excess
of $697 million.
Until rail shipping made coal production practical, Pike County's hardwood
forests were its major economic resource. In the late nineteenth century,
millions of board feet of timber were shipped down nearly every major stream to
the Big Sandy River and ultimately to the Ohio River markets at Catlettsburg
and Cincinnati. Excessive exploitation depleted this valuable resource, and
today the resurgence of the timber industry is still years away. Extensive gas
deposits in the northern section of the county have also contributed
substantially to Pike County's economic development.
Many Pike Countians have been subsistence farmers, but because of irregular
terrain and the limited amount of available land, commercial agriculture was
never an important source of income. Mining and quarrying continue to employ
the highest proportion of the county's work force (28 percent in 1986).
Economic planners see tourism and light industry as Pike County's hope for the
future. Today there are several small manufacturing plants on Johns Creek and
in the greater Pikeville area.
Since the 1910s, Pike County has been served by two major railroads: the
Chesapeake & Ohio Railway (now part of CSX Transportation) and the Norfolk &
Western Railroad (now part of the Norfolk-Southern Corporation). An improved
system of state and federal highways, which includes U.S. 23/ 119, U.S. 460,
and KY 80, links the county with the rest of the state and the eastern states.
A county airport for small private craft is six miles north of Pikeville.
The county's most notable landmarks include the Fish Trap Dam and its
1,331-acre impoundment of the Levisa Fork, ten stream miles southeast of
Pikeville. Authorized by the Federal Flood Control Act of 1938, the
1,100-foot-long, 195-foot-high dam was built by the U.S. Army Corps of
Engineers and dedicated in 1968.
The Breaks of the Big Sandy, often called the Grand Canyon of the South, is a
five-mile-long, 100-foot-deep channel formed by the Russell Fork on the
Kentucky-Virginia border just above Elkhorn City. Since 1945 the two states
have jointly maintained the 4,600-acre Breaks Interstate Park.
During the decade of the 1970s, Pike County was one of the fastest growing
counties in eastern Kentucky and experienced a 33 percent increase in
population. The population of the county was 61,059 in 1970; 81,123 in 1980;
and 72,583 in 1990.
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