State atlas · filed under KY
Ghost Towns of Kentucky
Kentucky's vanished places are overwhelmingly coal: company camps up every Appalachian hollow, built whole by operators and closed the same way, with river landings and iron furnaces from an earlier century beneath them.
2,788 sites surveyed across Kentucky — 2 charted with full records so far, entered by year of settlement. The rest are awaiting verification.
Survey note
The federal place-name archive records 2,788 vanished or historical sites in Kentucky — ghost towns, mining camps, townsites, and railroad stops. We chart them a few at a time, as the records can be verified. Every mark on this map is a place that once had a name.
Society Pro
See Kentucky as the surveyors drew it, 1879 to 1919
355 USGS survey sheets from those years cover Kentucky. Pro lays them over today's map with a swipe between then and now, and adds every mine feature, lost place and mineral site the federal record holds for the state.
The full survey ledger
Every vanished town the federal archive records in Kentucky — each with its own record page, verified and expanded over time.