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Saturday, Jan. 06, 2007

GOLDEN ASH: From coal boom to Golden Ash

If you blink, you'll miss it, but for seven people, this former mining town is still home sweet home.

GOLDEN ASH -- Sometimes, during idle moments, Betty Jones thinks about putting up a sign alongside Ky. 38 at this little corner of Harlan County.

This is what it would say: Welcome To Golden Ash. Population: seven people; two cats; one dog.

A sign would be in order, Jones thinks, since there is now no marker of any kind to alert passersby that they are passing through Golden Ash. Or that the community's inhabitants consist only of the Jones family -- Roy and Betty and their children, Desiree, 10; LeRoy, 8, and Susan, 4 -- and Clandies Bennett and his wife, Lila, who live just across the road. Plus the Bennett's dog, Amy, and the Jones' two cats, Tiger, and, well, the second cat doesn't have a name yet. It wandered in recently, boosting the population of Golden Ash by some 11 percent.

But any thought that Golden Ash is growing would be totally off the mark.

This little coal camp, nestled between Harlan and Black Mountain, once was a bustling home to dozens of miners and their families, who made a good, though hard, living wrestling coal out of the ground hereabouts. But the coal played out, the mine closed, and Golden Ash has all but disappeared.

"We're all that's left now," Betty Jones says.

This is one place where that old blink-and-miss-it joke really holds true.

There's not even a wide spot in the road, and the trucks roaring by on Ky. 38 don't slow down. The highway just curves a little, and there's a railroad crossing and two houses. The Clover Fork of the Cumberland River slips by silently on its way toward Harlan. Though the name Golden Ash appears on some maps, there's really nothing here to indicate that a community ever existed.

But Clandies Bennett, who has lived most of his 72 years in Harlan County -- including the last 26 years in Golden Ash -- can remember when things were different.

"At one time, this whole bottom was full of houses," he told a visitor this week. "The old mine commissary was just across the road there. Now, there's just two houses left, and in two or three years there may not be any houses left in this camp, or what was called a camp."

A lot of Golden Ash history has faded away, like the place itself. But Bill Whitfield, who owns the land, tells it this way.

The spot once was the site of a mine that produced low-quality coal contaminated with chunks of sulfur. When burned, the coal produced a yellowish ash -- hence the name. But the quality was so bad that the mine eventually had to close. Sometime around the 1940s, Bill Whitfield's family acquired the Golden Ash property and built houses there for the miners who worked at the Whitfields' own nearby Clover Fork Coal Co. mine.

In those boom days, 250 miners worked at Clover Fork, producing 40-some railroad cars of coal every day, Bill Whitfield says. The coal came out of the mine, straight through the tipple, and into rail cars bound for distant destinations.

"The coal never touched the ground," Whitfield, 63, said.

But by the late 1950s most of the coal had been worked out, and mining was no longer profitable. Clover Fork shut down in 1957, and many other area mines followed within the next year or so.

"They say that 3,000 miners lost their jobs almost overnight, but I don't know if that's true," says Harlan County history buff William Forrester.

With mining jobs gone, the inhabitants of Golden Ash began drifting away, leaving houses vacant. When new people failed to move in, the empty places gradually were torn down, Bill Whitfield said, and Golden Ash slowly was nibbled away, one house at a time.

The two remaining houses, which the Joneses and Bennetts rent from Whitfield, are the only traces left from the old days.

And Whitfield says that, given the current economics of the coal business, it's unlikely that Golden Ash will ever be rebuilt.

"The coal industry built this area," he said, "but it's drying up now."

Betty Jones, however, thinks that despite the changing times Golden Ash still has plenty to offer. She and Roy -- he's a carpenter -- moved their family here four years ago.

"It's really beautiful," she said. "We've seen deer in the front yard. Sometimes in the summer, there are so many lightning bugs that they light up that bottom across the road. There's a swamp out back behind, where you can hear thousands of frogs singing at night.

"I wouldn't ever want to leave this spot."