Black Mountain, KY : the story of Benham and Lynch

America’s Most Endangered Mountains – Benham and Lynch KY on Black Mountain Pledge to Help End Mountaintop Removal. Visit: www.iLoveMountains.org – – – COMMUNITY STORY – – – Benham and Lynch are nestled in Harlan County at the foot of Black Maintain, Kentucky’s highest peak. Established as “coal camps” in 1911 and 1917 respectively, they were towns built to support the coal mining operations of two corporations: the Wisconsin Steel division of International Harvester and the US Coal and Coke Company. (Coal camps were towns where every building, home, school, and store was owned by a company. They typically paid the workers in script that could only be used at the company store.) Benham and Lynch were “captive” mines. Neither had to rely on the fluctuations of the coal market to sell the coal they mined. To maintain a stable workforce, these coal companies provided a better quality of life than found in most coal camps. For example, by the 1940s, approximately one-third of the graduates of Benham High School had completed at least one year of college. In 1945, Lynch’s population of 10000 was reportedly the world’s largest coal camp. Today, with one-third of the residents being African-American and many others tracing their ancestry to Eastern Europe and Italy, Lynch is one of the most diverse communities in Appalachian Kentucky. As the years passed, the coal companies sold their property in the towns to town residents, but kept ownership of the surrounding mountains (and …