St. Charles, Kentucky: Coal Country

The small Hopkins County community of St. Charles started not as a town but as a company camp. In eighteen seventy-two the Saint Bernard Mining Company bought land from a farmer named Woodruff and sank a drift mine into the coal of the western Kentucky coalfield.

A post office opened the next year under the seller's name, Woodruff, but when the place incorporated in eighteen seventy-four it was rechristened St. Charles, the reason now lost to history, though local tradition credits a founder's son named Charles. The mine ran for decades, and the camp eventually settled into the small residential community of about two hundred seventy souls it remains today.