Top 10 Worst Towns In Kentucky | Don't Live In These Kentucky Towns

#TheFogottenFiles #SmallTown #ForgottenUSTowns Top 10 Worst Towns In Kentucky | Don't Live In These Kentucky Towns In Beattyville, the typical household brings in less than $23,000 a year. Middlesborough was built inside a meteorite crater to become the Pittsburgh of the South, and it never got there. Wheelwright was once a model coal town with its own golf course, and today about 500 people live there. And near Cumberland, coal miners blocked a railroad for almost two months after their paychecks bounced. These are the ten worst towns in Kentucky, ranked by what happened to them. The numbers come from the Census Bureau, the National Weather Service and historical records: poverty, household income, home values, population change, and the industries that disappeared. None of these places are abandoned. People still live there, still work there, and still keep them going. 10 · WHEELWRIGHT - an Inland Steel model coal town with a hospital, theater, bowling alley and golf course, now down to 509 people from a 1950 peak of 2,037 9 · CUMBERLAND - once called Poor Fork, a coal-era trade center of more than 4,000 people, the 2019 Blackjewel train blockade, and a poverty estimate around half the town 8 · MIDDLESBOROUGH - a city built inside a meteorite crater, broken by the Panic of 1893, hit by a 1988 tornado, and down about 39 percent from its 1950 peak 7 · MONTICELLO - the Houseboat Capital of the World, where four factories once employed nearly 1,000 people and every one of them left 6 · LONDON - a railroad-era trading hub on I-75 and home of the World Chicken Festival, where about 30 percent of residents live below the poverty line 5 · PINEVILLE - the old Cumberland Ford crossing on the Wilderness Road, buried under 15 feet of floodwater in 1977, with a median household income of $24,547 4 · HARLAN - "Bloody Harlan," the 1931 coal wars, a 65 percent drop from its 1940 peak, and incomes about half the state median 3 · SOMERSET - a growing lake city that lost its GE glass plant after almost 60 years, where only half of adults are in the workforce 2 · BEATTYVILLE - Slab Town, the Swan-Day sawmill, the 2021 flood that destroyed up to 80 homes, and poverty above 42 percent 1 · HAZARD - the Queen City of the Mountains, a coal boom that peaked near 7,400 people, and major floods in 1957, 2022 and 2025 These aren't ghost towns. They're places where the past still shows up in old courthouse squares, coal-era storefronts, flood lines and empty factory sites. The question is what happened to the mines, mills and jobs that built them. The ranking follows the order you sent the scripts in. If your final countdown is different, send me the order and I'll rearrange it.