Our early settlers were mostly second, third or even fourth generation Americans. There were a few exceptions such as George Burkhart who is believed to have been born in Germany and to have come to America as a young boy. A majority of our early settlers trace their lines back by various routes to coastal Virginia. A few came from other of the colonies, such as Hezekiah Branson from Maryland and David Fee from Pennsylvania. These coastal Virginia immigrants came to the colonies from the British Isles with a very few originating in France and Germany.

Men, women and children who could not afford passage from the poverty of their existence in the British Isles would sign contracts to serve as a servant or farmhand for a specified period of years, usually seven, in exchange for transportation to the colonies. In the 1700's, the British, under pressure from the colonists who were in need of skilled and unskilled labor, began transporting people for various criminal and civil offenses.

The demand became so great that people were arrested and sentenced to deportation on the most trivial of offenses such as the theft of a handkerchief. It is said that there were many individuals who committed a crime in order to be deported to a new life in America. These poor immigrants brought with them a hope and a dream for a future better than anything possible in the Old World. After completion of their contracts or their penal sentence, they moved sough into the Carolinas or west into inland Virginia where land was still available for little or nothing.

In North Carolina, many of them soon found that their land titles were not secured. There were several arguments over the validity of some of the early royal grants, particularly the Granville grants and rather than work for years on a farm that might not even be theirs, they or their grown children moved on, following the frontier. Some went west into Tennessee, other north into Virginia. Many followed the Wilderness Road blazed by Daniel Boone, through the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky.

By the late 1780's, the fertile farmlands of the central part of the state were already settled and available only to those with the money to buy them. But, the Kentucky mountains still had thousands of acres of land available for homesteading for a few cents an acre. Until the late 1800's when timber companies began to take an interest, there were vacant lands in Harlan County, available for a few cents an acre. The cheap land continued to attract people looking for a better future and some of those who had settled in Tennessee and Virginia moved on into the Kentucky mountains. Others followed from those states and from North Carolina, joining their brothers, sisters and cousins in the Kentucky mountains.