San Toy

The story

San Toy was a coal boomtown in the hills of Perry County, thrown up around the mines of the Sunday Creek Coal Company in the early 1900s. It was a hard place — men died in its saloons and streets as well as in the mines — but at its height it had a theater, a hospital (the only one ever built in the county), several saloons, stores, and schools, and by the boosters' count as many as 2,500 residents, though the 1920 census recorded closer to a thousand.

The end came fast and ugly. On September 25, 1924, a group of disgruntled miners rolled a coal car loaded with burning railroad ties into a mine; the fire that followed destroyed the theater and the hospital. When the second mine failed in 1927 there was nothing left to hold the town. Between 1920 and 1930 San Toy lost more of its population, per capita, than any other town in the United States, dropping from nearly a thousand people to about 128. In 1931, seventeen of the town's nineteen remaining voters chose to dissolve the municipality.

The woods have taken most of it. The brick skeleton of the one-room jail still stands, with company-store and school foundations nearby.

What remains today

The brick shell of the town jail, plus foundations of the company store and school, scattered in the woods.