Qualla: Pikeville, Kentucky

Pikeville, Kentucky: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit FatCat96, CC0. Between 1973 and 1987, the people of Pikeville moved nearly eighteen million cubic yards of rock. They did not move it for ore, or for highway, or because anyone in Washington had told them to. They moved it because their town was drowning every spring and choking on freight train traffic the rest of the year, and the only solution anyone could think of was to cut a new path for the Levisa Fork River straight through Peach Orchard Mountain. The Pikeville Cut-Through, when it was finished, was the second-largest earthmoving project ever undertaken in the Western Hemisphere - second only to the Panama Canal. The county seat of Pike County, Kentucky, had quite literally moved a mountain to save itself.

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Image: FatCat96 | CC0

Pikeville, Kentucky: Hatfield-McCoy Country

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit FatCat96, CC0. Pikeville sits in the heart of the country where Randolph McCoy raised his family and where, through the 1880s, his clan and the Hatfields across the Tug Fork in West Virginia fought the most famous family feud in American history. Both families had fought for the Confederacy dur...

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Image: FatCat96 | CC0

Pikeville, Kentucky: Moving the Mountain

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nyttend, Public domain. The Levisa Fork of the Big Sandy River used to make a tight bend around downtown Pikeville, which sat in the narrow valley the river had cut. Every wet spring, the river jumped its banks. Every day of the week, a freight train rolled through the middle of town. By the early 1970s...

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Image: Nyttend | Public domain

Pikeville, Kentucky: The University on the Hill

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Madgeek1450 at English Wikipedia, Public domain. The University of Pikeville sits on a hillside above downtown - a small Presbyterian college founded in 1889 that has, against the odds, become one of three medical schools in Kentucky. The Kentucky College of Osteopathic Medicine opened here in 1997, and in 2016 the university a...

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Image: Madgeek1450 at English Wikipedia | Public domain

Pikeville, Kentucky: Mountain Music and Hillbilly Days

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AkersUPIKE, CC BY-SA 3.0. Every April, the Shriners take over downtown Pikeville for Hillbilly Days, a festival that began in 1977 as a hospital fundraiser and is now the second-largest festival in Kentucky. The setup is exactly as advertised: six stages of mountain music, costume contests where people tr...

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Image: AkersUPIKE | CC BY-SA 3.0

Pikeville, Kentucky: After the Coal

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown authorUnknown author or not provided, Public domain. Pike County is still officially the largest coal-producing county in Kentucky, but the mines that built Pikeville no longer employ what they did. The town's bet on medicine, education, and tourism is the bet that small Appalachian cities everywhere are trying to make - and Pikevi...

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Image: Unknown authorUnknown author or not provided | Public domain