For attracting residents to the Williams Creek Basin (abbreviated WCB), the population boom from underground drift mining for coal within the WCB is likely unequaled. The large industrial scale coal mining operation that commenced at Coalton around 1865, instigated by a company that would eventually be known as the “Ashland Coal and Iron Railway” (AC&I), was the beginning of this boom.
The AC&I was an Ashland, KY based company owning iron furnaces in Ashland and coal mines in western Boyd and eastern Carter Counties. The AC&I also owned a railroad linking these separate industrial initiatives. They mined coal in the WCB, transported it to Ashland on their railroad, and used this coal to fire their iron furnaces.
This AC&I Mine Ledger contains 497 accounts with 473 of those accounts being associated with unique individuals. These 473 “people” accounts are mostly mine employees, but many others are suppliers and customers of this mining operation.
The ledger details what the miners were paid with some detail on the nature of the work, earnings of other “Day Laborers” employed by the AC&I, totals spent in company stores, and rent for company owned housing.
There is also detail on who was supplying goods and services to this AC&I operation and likewise what goods and services the AC&I operation is providing others.
In short this ledger is a genealogical, historical, and cultural goldmine and all that information is directly focused on the WCB.
About two years ago I became aware of an existence of an AC&I mine ledger at the University of Kentucky Libraries – Special Collections. Early in 2015 I traveled to Lexington to view this ledger housed in the M L King Library. It is always nice being back in the M L King Library. The M L King library was the main library at UK for many years including the 1970’s when I attended there. I certainly spent a lot of time at M L King both as a student at UK and while living only one block away for a few years after graduation (then working in Lexington). My partner, Linda Newman, also worked the reference desk at M L King for a few years.
As I paged through the ledger I quickly became aware of the importance of this document for the WCB. The hundreds of accounts are mostly accounts of individual miners working for this mining operation. Almost ever page had an account with a miner’s surname of families still living in the WCB or nearby. Accounts for Banfield, Bates, Davis, Gee, McCoy, Sexton, Thomas, Warman, and Wolf is a small sampling of the hundreds of these accounts.
On a very personal basis, I found accounts for my great grandfather, John C Coleman, and other known relatives with the Smart, Mayberry, and Tiller surnames.
The ledger is a physically large and imposing leather bound book. It is about 13 X 18.5 inches in size with about 600 pages. I reviewed this ledger for several hours. As I went through the pages I jotted down info that I though important but quickly realized that ALL of it was important. I returned home and reviewed my notes and realized just how insignificant the amount of info I had harvested compared to the potential of the ledger.
Here is what the ledger looks like (click to see link).
The reference room at M L King has a spiffy self service overhead scanner called a “Book Eye”. The Book Eye allows you to place book pages facing up and the Book Eye produces a high resolution scan in that most accommodation position. It’s software detects and trims the pages and provides a digital output image file to a USB thumb drive.
I sent an email to the Special Collections department and inquired if the Book Eye would accommodate this large ledger and received a very surprising reply. The librarian indicated the Book Eye would accommodate the AC&I Ledger’s large size, but it could only scan one page at a time (on smaller volumes it does two pages and the software separates the two pages). But they also indicated they would be happy to scan this 600 page ledger internally using their own equipment and provide a high resolution, digital output, scan of every page (300 DPI RGB TIFF files). What a surprise, what focused service. The librarian warned that the resultant collection of digital files would be enormous in size.
I returned to Lexington in late March 2015 with a large capacity external hard drive and the librarians downloaded these high resolution scans. Just to be safe, I also brought a 256 GB USB thumb drive for an immediate backup of these important files.
The Special Collections group has since made these scans available online. So now anyone with internet service can personally and conveniently review this ledger. I suspect they might have already been planning making this info available online and this factored into their unexpected decision to help me with this large scanning project (scanning would have been necessary for them to make the ledger available online).
But no index to the ledger exists. One has to basically review the entire ledger to be positive you have found information related to a focused need. I decided to create an index to help others review this important document efficiently.
Since I now have convenient instant access to these ledger files I have been able to spend far more time with them and have produced a searchable index to this ledger. The searchable index is an alphabetical listing of the 497 accounts in the ledger. The accounts are mostly, but not exclusively, peoples names. There are other predicable accounts for things important to a mining operation like, Air Courses, Building Machinery, Feed (animal feed), Running Machinery, Coal Sales, Smith Shop, etc. One account is with a prominent local store called “Castner & Barrett”.
All of the 473 accounts with peoples names are first in the searchable index. Peoples names are in alphabetical order by last name, then first name. The 24 “internal” accounts not associated with a person’s name (Air Courses, Building Machinery, Coal Sales, etc) are at the end of the index and in alphabetical order. So, there are two main parts of this index. Part one is 473 accounts with a person’s name in alphabetical order and part two is 24 accounts not associated with a person, and also in alphabetical order.
So you can locate a particular name you are interested in seeing and click on the pages associated with that account. Many accounts have more than one page associated with the account. The link takes you to an image of that page on a University of Kentucky Library System server.
I have also produced an overview and a glossary of ledger terminology to help the interested understand most of the terminology used. But you can go directly to the ledger index without any explanation.
Just click on these links:
Link to AC&I Ledger Glossary of Terms
Link to AC&I Mine Ledger Index
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Great article Lon