Middlesboro, KY
The Cumberland Gap is located at the juncture of Kentucky, Virginia & Tennessee. North of that famous highway is what would eventually become Bell County, Kentucky and even later the town of Middlesboro.
Africans, both enslaved & Free, would arrive in the area at the same time as the long hunters, land speculators and colonists from the East. Their presence in the Cumberland Gap would account for 1 out of every 5 people that passed through the passage on the way to the Bluegrass,
(40,000 to 60,000 individuals).
Census Data
Bell County was created after the US Civil War (1867) out of parts of Knox & Harlan Counties. Because of that, data on the enslaved & slaveholders in Bell County specifically, must be sourced from those counties' data. You can access our transcriptions of those census records here:
Lynching of Thomas Hunter, 1891
On March 24, 1891, an argument at a Cumberland Gap saloon led to the fatal shooting of John Burkes & the extra judicial murder of Thomas Hunter. John Burkes, a 45 year old white man, was the ticket agent for the Knoxville, Cumberland Gap & Louisville Railroad. Thomas Hunter was a 19 year old Black man, working as a valet for a wealthy Englishman in the Gap.
Watch our short film on this extrajudicial murder below. Utilize the film in the classroom with downloadable Teachers Guide.
Lincoln School
In partnership with Middlesboro Independent Schools, Black in Appalachia was able to digitize, catalog and transcribe thousands of enrollment cards from Lincoln School, the late Black educational institution that served students from not only Bell County, Kentucky but Claiborne and Hancock Counties in Tennessee and Lee County, Virginia, as well as surrounding Kentucky Counties.
