How We Owned a Mine, or A Brief History of Kentucky’s Mining Cooperative

For over 100 years, Himler House stood on a hill overlooking Beauty, formerly Himlerville, in Martin County, Kentucky. Once the site of grand Christmas parties and banquets, the house was eventually abandoned and fell to ruins. 

But few of the teens, vandals, and ghost hunters who frequented the abandoned mansion knew that it had been the center of a unique and radical experiment in Appalachian history: a cooperatively owned coal mine.