St. Mary's

Middlesboro, population 12,000, is located in the center of Appalachia, the highlands near Kentucky’s junction with Tennessee and Virginia. With an elevation of 1,200 feet, it is surrounded by mountains on all sides, and occupies an ancient meteor impact crater five miles across.

Our town is 60 miles North of Knoxville, Tennessee, and 120 miles South of Lexington, Kentucky. We are served by the Cumberland Gap Parkway (US Highway 25-E), which follows the old Wilderness Trail pioneered by Daniel Boone, running from North Carolina through Cumberland Gap, into the Bluegrass Region of Kentucky. This is a major four-lane connector from 1-40 and 1-81 to 1-75 and 1-64.

In 1886, Alexander A. Arthur (Canadian Scotsman), geologist and engineer, was employed by the English Iron, Coal, and Steel Interests to come into the Yellow Creek Valley, then a sparsely settled farming community. Arthur was searching for iron and timber. He discovered here large seams of coal and many deposits of high-grade iron ore. He returned to England with reports of his discoveries to his employers only to find that they had sold the company to a railway corporation that was not interested in his findings. Mr. Arthur resigned and dedicated himself to the development of the area and went to New York and Boston seeking funding to pay for his option on 25,000 acres of land. From the Northeast, he went to Scotland and England to raise the capital needed for the project.

The American Association Limited was founded, and more than 100,000 acres of land acquired in this Tri-State area. A modern, full gauge railroad was built from Knoxville, Tennessee, to Middlesboro, Kentucky.

The Middlesboro Town and Lands Company was incorporated to develop the city named for Middlesbrough, England. They created a planned community with broad avenues and streets all with English names. The valley was drained by a hand-dug canal with water and sewer systems, electrical and phone service built in. Fern Lake, which functions to this day, as the water supply for the City, was impounded and a tent city was built around all this with a population that grew to 30,000 persons in two years.

Railroads were extended from the main lines up the adjacent hollows into the coal fields. An iron furnace was built by the Watts Iron Consortium of England. The City had sixteen hotels, several spas, a tannery, a brewery and a distillery, furniture factories, cabinet works, sawmills, and lumber processing facilities. There were gun and stone works, brick works, coke ovens, and other miscellaneous factories together with saloons and restaurants.

The City also had free public schools for the town’s children, a public library, an opera house, an exhibition hall, British Gentlemen’s Club, golf links, a casino, several newspapers, a hospital, six banks, and a fine residential neighborhood of late Victorian homes.

Since that time, the community of Middlesboro has waxed and waned but remains a center of commerce and services in the tri-state area.