Welcome to Van Lear






VanLearKy.com
Eastern Kentucky's Premier Coal-Mining Town of the 1920s-30s




Click here to read about our webmaster's books:
"BANKMULES: The Story of Van Lear, a Kentucky Coal Town"


To visit jevaughn.com, James Vaughn's personal Vaughn-Vaughan family web site, click here.





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Van Lear was Johnson County and Eastern Kentucky's premier coal-mining community in the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s. In decline since the 1950s, the non-profit Van Lear Historical Society has been at work for the past twenty-five years, striving to preserve the town and its history. A small group of dedicated volunteers have made some progress, and you're invited to see what they have done. There's even a town celebration!


Call 606-789-9725 for an appointment to see...
* Miners' Museum
* 1930s Model of Van Lear
* Veterans' Wall of Fame
* Restored C&O Railroad caboose
* Video Documentary of
VAN LEAR: A Town Remembered
* Country singer Loretta Lynn's childhood home



The VLHS Miners' Museum may be seen by appointment. Call one of the unpaid volunteers at 606-789-9725. You are also invited to attend a town celebration, replete with homegrown Bluegrass music and a soup-bean dinner, usually held the first weekend in August. The volunteer workers hosted both a town and school reunion in 2008. Call or write for current information. For a modest tax-deductible contribution of $15, you can join the society and help preserve this unique town's history. As a member, you will receive a year's subscription to THE BANKMULE, the society's official publication. All proceeds go toward preserving the town's history. If you have information that you wish to share on these pages, e-mail or write to:


Van Lear Historical Society
P. O. Box 369
78 Miller's Creek
Van Lear, Kentucky 41265
e-mail: blevinstar@yahoo.com











The Jesse Stuart Foundation has this to say about James Vaughan's new book, BANKMULES: The Story of Van Lear, a Kentucky Coal Town:

"In the summer of 1934, the town of Van Lear seemed an idyliic place to young James Vaughan and his buddies, even though it was also the time of the Great Depression. Here in this personal account, an older Vaughan shares his warm memories of growing up in Van Lear and recalls many incidents from the history of the town, a town created by the Consolidation Coal Company to serve its new mines along Millers Creek. Drawing on his own recollections and on many interviews, Vaughan recreates Van Lear in its heyday from 1910 to 1940 when it was a prosperous community of 3,000 people, the largest in the county, and when the Bankmules athletic teams, so-called from the mules that hauled coal from the coal seams or 'banks,' were the pride of the town. He tells of the games and amusements enjoyed with his boyhood buddies, of lessons and school, of his friends and family, of the dark day in 1935 when a mine explosion took the lives of his father and eight other miners. He describes the town itself - the company store and the club house, the different neighborhoods and hollers - and also the men who shaped the town - mine manager Jack Price who fostered the schools and the teams, Doctors Hall and Lyon who took care of the miners and their families, and the teachers and superintendents of the schools who provided a solid education for the children of Van Lear. Though many writers have criticized coal towns as depressing and poverty-stricken, for Vaughan and others, Van Lear was altogether different - a good place to live, a good place for children to grown up. Sadly, with the depletion of the coal, the town declined, and in the 1950s Consolidation sold off all its properties and abandoned the town. In the latter part of the book, Vaughan describes the valiant efforts of a small group of individuals to preserve the heritage of Van Lear by the creation of a museum and a historical society, and the publication of a newsletter devoted to the town's history. James Vaughan has written a memorable story of a town and a part of Kentucky history that is fast disappearing."

Available for $22 plus $4 shipping/handling, BANKMULES, in hardback with 265 pages and more than a hundred photos, may be ordered from the Van Lear Historical Society or Words n Stuff at 1245 Route 302, Van Lear KY 41265, or from JESSE STUART FOUNDATION at 1645 Winchester Avenue, Ashland KENTUCKY 41105; or you may phone JSF for the location of your nearest bookstore at (606) 326-1667. If you prefer to send an e-mail for further information, simply click here.

If you wish to access the JESSE STUART website for information on BANKMULES or other Appalachian books, click here.



Below are links to some other books written by our Webspawner webmaster:






The Vaughan Family in Wales and America  is a 2008 update of a family history first published in 1990 by Higginson Book Company of Salem, Massachusetts. Originally conceived as a "search for the Welsh ancestors of William Vaughan (1750-1840)," this book became a global search for Vaughans of all seasons. Revised in 1992, this 2009 edition has been further revised by the author, 83 year-old James E. Vaughan, for publication and distribution by Trafford Publishing of 2657 Wilfert Road, Victoria BC CANADA V9B 5Z3, the publisher of his historical novels The Alchymist and The Silurist, and Diana and Leo. To learn more about this book and its availability, click here, and then return to this site via your browser's back button to continue to this personal family web site.






The Alchymist and The Silurist is a new historical novel based on the lives of 17th-century Welsh twins Thomas and Henry Vaughan, distant kinsmen of the author. Members of a family with a tradition of strong Loyalist ties, the twins interrupted their studies at Oxford to join their Cousin Colonel Herbert Price during the Parliamentarian and Puritan uprising. Following military service, Henry took up work as a physician, while Thomas, now a defrocked Anglican minister, intensified his study of alchemy, and sought the key to the fabled philosopher's stone in the king's laboratory at Whitehall in London. The attention of the author was first drawn to his distant Welsh kinsmen while browsing in Robert Vaughan's antiquarian bookshop in Stratford. Click here.




Stories of the controversial alchymist Thomas Vaughan were revived some two hundred years after his death by a roguish French writer named Gabrielle Jogand-Pages, who created elaborate hoaxes, pitting Freemasons against Catholics. Writing under various pseudonyms, he published a series of salacious stories about a young American girl named Diana Vaughan, who had journeyed to Paris hoping to prove her kinship to the 17th-century Welsh scientist. This book, Diana and Leo, the sequel to The Alchymist and The Silurist, is now available from the publisher, Trafford Publishing, and on-line at Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble. Click here for details.





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