Current Time in Ironville, United States

Ironville is a small unincorporated community in Boyd County in the far northeastern corner of Kentucky, set in the wooded hill country a few kilometres inland from the Ohio River. It lies just outside the city of Ashland, within the tri state area where Kentucky, Ohio and West Virginia meet, and forms part of the Huntington Ashland metropolitan region. The landscape is one of steep forested ridges, narrow hollows and creek bottoms on the western edge of the Appalachian plateau, and the climate is humid continental, with warm summers, cool winters and rain distributed through the year.

Only a few hundred people live in the community itself, which is classified as a census designated place rather than an incorporated town, but it sits at the edge of an urban area of well over a hundred thousand. Its interest lies less in size than in what its name records.

Ironville takes its name from the charcoal iron industry that made this district nationally important in the nineteenth century. The surrounding hills formed part of the Hanging Rock Iron Region, an area rich in iron ore, limestone and hardwood timber, where dozens of stone blast furnaces were built between the 1820s and the 1880s. For several decades this region was among the leading producers of pig iron in the United States, supplying foundries, railways and the Union war effort, and the remains of several furnaces can still be found in the woods nearby. When the industry moved to areas better served by coal and rail, the furnaces went cold, but the ironworking tradition passed to the steel mills and refineries that grew along the Ohio River.

Modern employment in the area comes from a large petroleum refinery at Catlettsburg, from chemicals, healthcare and transport, and from the regional medical centre in Ashland, one of the largest hospitals in eastern Kentucky.

Attractions in the district are mostly outdoors. Greenbo Lake State Resort Park, a short drive north, offers fishing, hiking and a lodge named after the Kentucky writer Jesse Stuart, whose home and nature preserve are close by. Carter Caves State Resort Park, with its limestone caverns and natural bridges, lies to the west, and Grayson Lake provides boating beneath sandstone cliffs. Ashland itself has the restored Paramount Arts Center, an ornate 1930s theatre, and the Highlands Museum, while the region is proud of its country music heritage and of performers who came from these hills.

Transport is by road, with US Route 60 and Interstate 64 giving access to Lexington and Charleston, and the Ashland station on the long distance passenger rail route to Chicago and Washington. Regional air service is available at Huntington.

Ashland Community and Technical College serves the area, and Marshall University lies across the river in West Virginia, while Morehead State University is about an hour away.

Ironville is not a tourist destination in its own right, but it is a good example of the small Appalachian communities whose history is written in furnaces, railroads and rivers, and whose surroundings offer some of the finest scenery in Kentucky.