Qualla: Paintsville, Kentucky

Paintsville, Kentucky: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit J654567, CC BY-SA 3.0. Long before there was a town here, the Shawnee came to the salt lick where Paint Creek empties into the Levisa Fork. They debarked the trees nearby and painted on the pale wood - images of game, of clan, of the hunting grounds these mountains held. When the first white settlers found the place in the 1780s, the paintings were still there, faded but unmistakable. The settlers called the spot Paint Lick. The town that grew around it became Paintsville. The art is gone now, weathered off the dead wood centuries ago, but the name remembers what was here.

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Image: J654567 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Paintsville, Kentucky: Paint Lick Station

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nyttend, Public domain. United States Army dispatches reference a Paint Lick Station as early as 1780, which would have made it one of the western-most outposts of European settlement during the Revolutionary War. The site sat inside a 19,050-acre tract owned by George Lewis, a Virginia speculator. Cabi...

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Image: Nyttend | Public domain

Paintsville, Kentucky: John C. C. Mayo's Mansion

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit J654567, CC BY-SA 3.0. John C. C. Mayo, the schoolteacher who quietly bought up the mineral rights to vast swaths of eastern Kentucky in the 1880s and 1890s, built his forty-three room mansion on Third Street between 1905 and 1912. Across the street, he built the Mayo Memorial United Methodist Church, ...

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Image: J654567 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Paintsville, Kentucky: Country Music Stars and a Highway

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit J654567, CC BY-SA 3.0. U.S. Route 23 runs north from Paintsville along the Levisa Fork and the railroad. In Kentucky it has been re-named the Country Music Highway, and Paintsville's U.S. 23 Country Music Highway Museum tells you why. Crystal Gayle was born here in 1951. Her sister Loretta Lynn was bor...

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Image: J654567 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Paintsville, Kentucky: Festivals and the Apple King

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit J654567, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Kentucky Apple Festival has run on the first weekend of October every year since 1962, taking over downtown with live music, a pageant, a parade, and a car show. Local lore holds that the first Apple King was crowned at a county fair in 1914 - the same year John C. C. Mayo di...

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Image: J654567 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Paintsville, Kentucky: The Mountain Homeplace

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit J654567, CC BY-SA 3.0. Just outside town, at Paintsville Lake State Park, the Mountain Homeplace recreates an Eastern Kentucky farming community as it existed in the mid-1800s. The blacksmith shop, one-room schoolhouse, church, cabin, and barn were all moved from nearby locations in the early 1980s, wh...

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Image: J654567 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Paintsville, Kentucky: A Town Still Telling Stories

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nyttend, Public domain. Paintsville has lost population since 1990, like most coal-economy towns - 4,345 then, 3,459 by 2010, recovering modestly to 4,312 by 2020. In 2018, a horrific shooting spree killed five people in the area, a tragedy the community is still working through. But the museums fill up...

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Image: Nyttend | Public domain