Brief History of Wolfe County


Wolfe County, the 110th county in order of formation, is located
in eastern Kentucky. It is bounded by Powell, Menifee, Morgan, Magoffin,
Breathitt, and Lee counties and has an area of 223 square miles. The county was
formed in 1860 from portions of Breathitt, Owsley, and Powell counties, and was
named for Nathaniel Wolfe, an eloquent criminal lawyer who represented Jefferson
County in the Kentucky legislature (1853-55, 1859-63). The seat of Wolfe County
is CAMPTON.
Hazel Green was incorporated in 1856 as the first city in Wolfe County.

When the county was established in 1860, the more centrally located community of Campton
was made county seat.
During the Civil War, the provisional Confederate government of Kentucky tried unsuccessfully to change Wolfe County's name to honor the late Gen. Felix K. Zollicoffer, who died in battle at Mill Springs on January 19, 1862. The retreating army of Union Gen. George Morgan camped in Hazel Green on September 23, 1862. On June 7, 1864, Gen. John Hunt Morgan's
Confederate cavalry passed near Hazel Green.

Wolfe County remained an isolated scattering of agricultural communities for
most of the nineteenth century. Pine Ridge, established in 1856, later became a
logging center. The pace of timbering picked up in 1898 after the Swan-Day
Lumber Company acquired territory in Wolfe and Powell counties.

To work the forests in the Red River region, the Mountain Central, a narrow-gauge railroad,
was built in 1907 from the Lexington & Eastern in Powell County eastward along
Pine Ridge to Campton. With the depletion of the timber, the railroad lingered
as a freight and passenger hauler, then ceased operations in 1928. The town of
Eastin was established by Swan-Day five miles west of Campton. Eastin flourished
as a logging town and by 1900 had thirty-five homes and two hundred people, but
when the timber gave out it rapidly became a ghost town.

Wolfe County was known for its resort hotels in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. The El Park Hotel was built between 1890 and 1896 at
Torrent, six miles west of Campton. It flourished until the Great Depression and
was destroyed by fire in 1935. At Swango Springs near Hazel Green, three hotels
and several boardinghouses were in operation by 1895 for those who came to take
the mineral waters. Fire destroyed the largest hotel in 1910, but mineral water
was bottled and shipped from there until 1943.
Because of Wolfe County's isolation and apparent poverty, several Christian
mission societies founded schools there. Hazel Green Academy was founded in 1880
by J.H. Day, G.B. Swango, and W.O. Mize as a college preparatory school. In 1888
the school was taken over by the National Christian Board of Missions.

In 1896 Kentucky Wesleyan Academy established a branch of its Winchester campus in
Campton, but the school was discontinued in 1912. The Alvan Drew school was
started as a Methodist institution in 1913 at Pine Ridge by missionary Mrs. M.O.
Everett. The school closed after a 1947 fire, and the property was taken over in
1950 by the Dessie Scott Children's Home.

The U.S. Forest Service acquired 14,178 acres of Wolfe County between 1933 and
1948 for what is now the Daniel Boone National Forest. Small amounts of mining
and logging continued there, but by the early 1960s the isolated county was one
of Kentucky's poorest.

The May 1963 completion of the Mountain Parkway helped to attract some new industry to Campton, and tourists to the Red River Gorge area.

Since 1969 the county's largest manufacturing employer has been Campton
Electronic, and in 1989 Whiting Manufacturing announced plans to build a bedding
supply plant in eastern Wolfe County.
The population of the rural county was 5,669 in 1970; 6,698 in 1980; and 6,503
in 1990.