Biohazard Cleanup Near Downtown Wheelwright Wheelwright, KY

Wheelwright is a home rule-class city in southern Floyd County, Kentucky, set in the valley of the Right Fork of Otter Creek in the eastern Kentucky coalfield.

The town began in 1916, when the Hall family sold their land to the Elk Horn Coal Company, which built a coal camp and named it for the company's president, Jere H. Wheelwright; the city was officially incorporated on February 6, 1917.

Wheelwright is a classic coal company town: the company built the miners' housing, stores, churches, schools, and medical facilities, and at its peak the company had at least 2,300 miners on its payroll.

Consolidation Coal sold the Wheelwright camp to Inland Steel in 1930, and the town's coal went to feed Inland's steel mills; Island Creek Coal bought the camp in 1966, and the mine closed in the 1970s.

After the mine was abandoned, the Kentucky Housing Corporation purchased the town, rehabilitated the company houses, and sold the homes to the residents.

The 2020 census counted 509 residents in Wheelwright, down from 780 in 2010 and far below its peak of 2,037 residents in 1950.

Wheelwright was home to one of Kentucky's pack horse libraries in the 1930s and early 1940s, part of the New Deal program that carried books on horseback to remote mountain families.

There is just one way in and out of Wheelwright, across the Timothy Hall Memorial Bridge at Wheelwright Junction, also called Bypro, on Kentucky Route 122.

The former Otter Creek Correctional Center, a privately run prison in Wheelwright, closed in 2012; the facility reopened in September 2020 as the Southeast State Correctional Complex, a state-run prison for men.

Most students living in Wheelwright attend South Floyd Elementary School and Floyd Central High School in the Floyd County Schools district.