Web Design in Jenkins, KY

Web Design Services in Jenkins, Kentucky

AppWT Web & AI Solutions has been providing exceptional web design and digital marketing services to Jenkins businesses since 1997. Located in Letcher County, Jenkins is home to approximately 0 residents and a thriving business community.

About Jenkins, Kentucky

Jenkins is a home rule-class city in eastern Letcher County, Kentucky, holding 1,902 residents at the 2020 census. It was built from nothing by a coal company between 1911 and 1912 and named for one of that company's directors. The southern city limit is the Kentucky-Virginia state line, running along the crest of Pine Mountain, and at 1,539 feet, or 469 metres, this is the highest-sitting of the twelve places in this batch. U.S. Route 23 runs through, twenty-nine miles north to Pikeville and twenty-one miles south over the mountain to Norton in Virginia, while U.S. Route 119 runs twelve miles southwest to the county seat at Whitesburg. The city lies in the valley of Elkhorn Creek, which drains northeast to the Russell Fork and on through the Levisa Fork and Big Sandy to the Ohio. The ZIP code is 41537 and the area code 606.

History of Jenkins

• In the autumn of 1911 the Consolidation Coal Company bought the ground Jenkins now stands on, part of a hundred thousand acre tract across Pike, Letcher and Floyd counties acquired from the Northern Coal and Coke Company. The plan that followed had two halves: extend the Lexington and Eastern Railroad from Jackson to a town called McRoberts, and found a town named for George C. Jenkins, one of Consolidation's directors. Building it took nine sawmills and two brickyards raised on the spot, a dynamo put up to generate power for the houses on a temporary basis, and a temporary narrow-gauge railway thrown over Pine Mountain from Glamorgan in Virginia purely to carry supplies in. The company set up the city government as soon as it had businesses and land to sell, and it went as far as supplying the town with its own marshals to enforce the law. Formal incorporation as a sixth-class city came on 9 January 1912. Ownership changed hands once: Consolidation Coal sold Jenkins to Bethlehem Steel in 1956, and Bethlehem closed the mine in 1988. In 1973 the Beth-Elkhorn Coal Company here hired Diana Baldwin and Anita Cherry, who are believed to have been the first women to work in an underground coal mine anywhere in the United States and were the first female members of the United Mine Workers of America to work inside one. Between 1948 and 1951 the town also fielded minor league baseball. The census record begins at 1920, the first count after the town existed, and runs unbroken to 2020 with no decade missing: 4,707, then 8,495, a peak of 9,428 in 1940, then 6,921, 3,202, 2,552, a rise to 3,271 in 1980 that interrupts the pattern, then 2,751, 2,401, 2,203 and 1,902, which is about a fifth of the 1940 figure.

Landmarks and Places in Jenkins

• Jenkins School, 75 Pane Street - listed on the National Register in 2011, built in 1912, and described in its nomination as the largest and finest school produced by Consolidation Coal Company's development of the coal camp. The nomination adds that other Jenkins buildings of the period have been lost to neglect or demolition, which leaves this one as a touchstone for the town's coal heritage. It was redeveloped into 26 affordable apartments for senior citizens plus a senior citizens centre, in a project completed in 2014 (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenkins_School_(Jenkins,_Kentucky)).
• David A. Zegeer Coal-Railroad Museum, 102 Main Street - a restored 1911 train station shared with a bank, standing across from the former Jenkins High School, dedicated 9 May 1998 (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_A._Zegeer_Coal-Railroad_Museum).
• Jenkins Masonic Lodge Hall - in the town since 16 October 1912, sourced to the Grand Lodge of Kentucky's own 1912 proceedings (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenkins,_Kentucky).

The Jenkins Economy

• Coal is the whole of it, and the article traces the arc from one end to the other. The town existed to work a coalfield bought in 1911, was owned outright by Consolidation Coal until 1956, passed to Bethlehem Steel, and lost its mine when Bethlehem closed it in 1988. The company town model is documented in detail rather than asserted: sawmills and brickyards built to supply construction, a power plant erected as a stopgap, a narrow-gauge railway laid over a mountain from another state, a city government created at the moment there was property to sell, and company-supplied marshals. Scrip issued for the company stores survives in the town museum's collection. The railway that made the coal moveable ran from Jackson, which is a separate target of this same batch, and the two articles name that line slightly differently, which is noted below. Present-day employment content is absent from the article entirely, and none is invented here. Financial census columns are out of bounds for this record, declared here and nowhere reproduced.

Community Life in Jenkins

• The David A. Zegeer Coal-Railroad Museum at 102 Main Street is the town's memory of itself, dedicated on 9 May 1998 and housed in a restored 1911 train station that it shares with a bank. Its collection runs to photographs of historic and modern mining, tools and artefacts from the railroads and the mines, and scrip once spent in the company stores, and many of the objects on display belong to local residents rather than to the museum. Jenkins Homecoming Days is an annual festival usually held in August. A lending library branch of the Letcher County Library serves the city, and Jenkins Independent Schools runs two schools, Jenkins Middle High School and Burdine Elementary, covering the city and the neighbouring community of Burdine. The notable-people list is long for a town this size and unusually varied: the fiddle player Kenny Baker of the Bluegrass Boys; the basketball coach Matt Figger, listed with Austin Peay; the Medal of Honor recipient Darwin K. Kyle; the pilot Francis Gary Powers, whose CIA U-2 was shot down over Soviet airspace and whose story was dramatised in Bridge of Spies; the country musician and songwriter Gary Stewart; and Milt Ticco, an All-American at Kentucky and an early professional in the National Basketball League.

Local reference: en.wikipedia.org, en.wikipedia.org, en.wikipedia.org