Author Willie Davis was born in the 40s in Olive Hill, Kentucky. At the age of 12, his family became part of the mass exodus as Olive Hill residents left the area, now depleted of its natural resources, to seek their fortune in Mansfield. He details his story in “The Ghost Towns of 174,” which weaves a rich history of the area and explains how Olive Hill helped build the nation.
“Here was an area that was giving everything it had, which was being shipped out to help the rest of the world,” said Davis. “We gave all of our iron ore. We gave huge amounts of timber. We gave huge amounts of salt peter, which was for gun powder in 1812. And then the big boon hit, and that big boon was the fire clay.”
“Fire clay was resilient enough to withstand the heat produced by the new steel furnace technology. By the early 1900s, eight brick plants were shipping hundreds of thousands of bricks a day to Pennsylvania and Ohio steel mills,” added Davis.
Those Ohio steel mills are what brought many of the Olive Hill residents to the Mansfield area ahead of the Olive Hill migration. Then, when the migration from Olive Hill began in earnest due to the lack of jobs, those residents looked to family already employed in the Mansfield area.
“The clay started petering out in the 1940s,” said Davis. “My family hung on as long as possible. My dad’s plant closed in ’56 or ’57, so we were one of the last of the brick people to make the migration north.”
“The great people that need to be patted on the back are the ones that uprooted and moved. You had to do what you had to do,” said Davis.
Davis’ aunt, Kathaleen Hall, now 83 years old, also left Olive Hill at a young age. She worked at the A&P grocery store in Mansfield for approximately 30 years.
“She was one of thousands of people that came into this community [Mansfield], helped build this community and fired those furnaces,” said Davis.
“Steel changed this country,” noted Davis. “We stopped growing out and started growing up. All of that steel was manufactured with bricks that came from Olive Hill clay.”
“If you hadn’t had Olive Hill to fire those furnaces, life would be different,” noted Davis. “Olive Hill came at the right place at the right time for this country.”
Hall went back to visit Olive Hill. “There’s no house at the home place. School House Holler has a lot of newer houses,” she said.
The area is still home to many, and Davis was invited earlier this year to travel to Olive Hill and speak to the local high school students on the area’s history.
“The Ghost Towns of 174” is available on Amazon.com.
“Olive Hill came at the right place at the right time for this country,” said author Willie Davis.
“If Mansfield has a true sister city it is Olive Hill—we are two branches of one tree. There are people in Mansfield who come from all over everywhere, but no one place on the globe is more represented here than Olive Hill,” wrote Tim McKee in his Native Son story.
