Mayo Mansion , Paintsville's Coal Baron Palace

In Paintsville, at the center of eastern Kentucky's Country Music Highway, stands a mansion that coal built. John Caldwell Calhoun Mayo was born poor in Pike County in eighteen sixty-four, recognized the coming value of coal, and systematically bought up mineral rights across the coalfields before the railroad arrived to make them worth a fortune. He became one of the richest men in Kentucky.

In nineteen oh five he broke ground on a home for his wife, Alice Jane Meek. He hired chief architect Herman Geisky and brought over a hundred Italian stonemasons from Cincinnati. Construction stretched seven years. The mansion was completed in December nineteen twelve at a cost of two hundred fifty thousand dollars. Today the building serves as Our Lady of the Mountains School , a coal baron's palace converted to educating children in the mountains that made him wealthy.