Jenkins, Kentucky , Coal Town on the Music Highway

Jenkins, Kentucky was not discovered , it was built. In nineteen eleven, the Consolidation Coal Company purchased a vast block of Letcher County land and laid out a planned company town from scratch: streets, housing, a hospital, churches, and schools. The town was named for George C. Jenkins, a Baltimore banker who helped finance the enterprise. By nineteen sixteen, Letcher County had become the largest coal-producing county in Kentucky, its output flowing through fourteen tipples.

When coal declined mid-century, Jenkins people left for factory work in Ohio and Indiana , a migration that seeded Great Lakes cities with Appalachian families and their music. Jenkins also produced Gary Stewart, whom Time magazine called the king of honky-tonk, whose nineteen seventy-five single topped the country charts. This small planned town, built by a coal company in a mountain hollow, sits near the heart of the Country Music Highway.