This book reviews the history of Perry County, Kentucky from 1772-1951.

By: Eunice T. Johnson, Pub. 1953, Reprinted 2016, 286 pages, Index, ISBN #0-89308-919-2. Perry County was created 1820 from Clay and Floyd Counties. It in turn was carved up to create in part and whole the counties of: Breathitt, Harlan, Knott, Letcher, and Leslie. This is the story of one of the most colorful communties in the Appalachian Mountains. Located on the north fork of the Kentucky River, It sits in the southeastern corner of the state bordering Virginia. This book covers the whole story from the time the first hardy pioneers moved across the mountains from Virginia to build cabins, stake out land claims, and subdivide this part of Kentucky into a county. The author has also included a section of the book entitled "Early Perrry County Families" Baker, Begley, Boling, Brashear, Campbell, Combs, Cope, Cornett, Davidson, Duff, Eversole, Francis, Fugate, Grigsby, Gross, Hall, Holliday, Ison, Johnson, Lusk, Morgan, Napier, Noble, Ritchie, Smith, Stamper, Webb and a list of individuals from the counties First Tax Book, 1821-1822.

Hazard and Perry County have enjoyed a long and colorful history since founder Elijah Combs first settled in the area in 1795. The years have brought a multitude of changes, explored in this engaging visual history. Contained within these pages are vintage photographs depicting the history of an American small town that has always fancied itself a city. Images were culled from the collection at the Bobby Davis Museum, which includes selected photographs from John Kinner, Hal Cooner, L.O. Davis, and others. This work traces the area's development from an isolated mountain village to a center of Eastern Kentucky commerce and culture. Recorded in these images are the devastating floods that often threatened the community, as well as the building of the railroad that brought in everything from automobiles and telephones to Sears and Roebuck prefabricated homes. Aerial shots from the 1940s and 1950s are also included, and accompanying captions document the names and places familiar to oldtimers and intriguing to newcomers in Hazard, Perry County.

Floyd County, named for Kentucky pioneer John Floyd, was formed in 1799. Originally encompassing all of the Big Sandy River Valley and much of eastern Kentucky, the boundaries included portions of what are now Pike, Martin, Knott, Magoffin, and Johnson Counties. Because of its river access, Floyd County developed earlier than many counties in eastern Kentucky. Prestonsburg, the county seat, became a major river port and center of trade in the region. With the coming of the railroad in 1903 and the coal industry, which began booming in the early 20th century, the county rapidly grew. This growth included a rapid rise in population due to the migration of native-born whites from around the country, European immigrants, and African Americans from southern plantations and coalfields. What had been an agrarian, white population suddenly took on a whole new face, one more reflective of the nation. The railroads and coal industry permanently changed both the economy and culture of Floyd County.

" ... provides updated county and town listings within the same overall state-by-state organization ... information on records and holdings for every county in the United States, as well as excellent maps from renowned mapmaker William Dollarhide ... The availability of census records such as federal, state, and territorial census reports is covered in detail ... Vital records are also discussed, including when and where they were kept and how"--Publisher decription.

“Twilight in Hazard paints a more nuanced portrait of Appalachia than Vance did...[Maimon] eviscerates Vance's bestseller with stiletto precision.” —Associated Press From investigative reporter and Pulitzer Prize finalist Alan Maimon comes the story of how a perfect storm of events has had a devastating impact on life in small town Appalachia, and on the soul of a shaken nation . . . When Alan Maimon got the assignment in 2000 to report on life in rural Eastern Kentucky, his editor at the Louisville Courier-Journal told him to cover the region “like a foreign correspondent would.” And indeed, when Maimon arrived in Hazard, Kentucky fresh off a reporting stint for the New York Times’s Berlin bureau, he felt every bit the outsider. He had landed in a place in the vice grip of ecological devastation and a corporate-made opioid epidemic—a place where vote-buying and drug-motivated political assassinations were the order of the day. While reporting on the intense religious allegiances, the bitter, bareknuckled political rivalries, and the faltering attempts to emerge from a century-long coal-based economy, Maimon learns that everything—and nothing—you have heard about the region is true. And far from being a foreign place, it is a region whose generations-long struggles are driven by quintessentially American forces. Resisting the easy cliches, Maimon’s Twilight in Hazard gives us a profound understanding of the region from his years of careful reporting. It is both a powerful chronicle of a young reporter’s immersion in a place, and of his return years later—this time as the husband of a Harlan County coal miner’s daughter—to find the area struggling with its identity and in the thrall of Trumpism as a political ideology. Twilight in Hazard refuses to mythologize Central Appalachia. It is a plea to move past the fixation on coal, and a reminder of the true costs to democracy when the media retreats from places of rural distress. It is an intimate portrait of a people staring down some of the most pernicious forces at work in America today while simultaneously being asked: How could you let this happen to yourselves? Twilight in Hazard instead tells the more riveting, noirish, and sometimes bitingly humorous story of how we all let this happen.