Current Time in Meads, United States

Meads is a suburban community in Boyd County in northeastern Kentucky, lying just west of the city of Ashland along the corridor that follows the Ohio River. It is a census designated place rather than an incorporated municipality, spread along the old Midland Trail route through a landscape of low wooded hills, creek valleys and river terraces at the western edge of the Appalachian plateau. The climate is humid continental, with hot summers, cool to cold winters and reliable rainfall.

Several thousand people live in the community, which functions as a residential district of the wider Ashland urban area and forms part of the Huntington Ashland metropolitan region where Kentucky, Ohio and West Virginia meet. Most residents work in the neighbouring towns, and the settlement has the character of a quiet, tree shaded suburb of houses, churches, schools and small businesses strung along the highway.

The history of the district is bound up with the industries of the Ohio Valley. In the nineteenth century these hills belonged to the Hanging Rock Iron Region, where charcoal fired blast furnaces produced pig iron in large quantities using local ore, limestone and hardwood forest. When that industry declined the valley turned to steel, oil refining, chemicals and railways, and Ashland became the centre of a substantial manufacturing economy. A large refinery still operates at nearby Catlettsburg, and healthcare, education and logistics now provide much of the region's employment.

Community life in Meads follows familiar American patterns, centred on schools, high school sports, churches and volunteer organisations. Boyd County high school football and basketball games draw large local crowds, and county fairs, church suppers and summer festivals mark the calendar.

Visitors to the area find their attractions in the surrounding countryside and in Ashland. Central Park in Ashland contains prehistoric burial mounds among its lawns and is famous locally for its winter light display, while the restored Paramount Arts Center is a fine example of an ornate cinema of the 1930s and now hosts concerts and theatre. Greenbo Lake State Resort Park offers fishing, hiking trails and a lodge dedicated to the Kentucky author Jesse Stuart, whose writing celebrated these hills, and Carter Caves State Resort Park to the west has limestone caverns, natural bridges and forest trails. Grayson Lake, with its sandstone gorge, is popular for boating and camping.

Road transport dominates, with US Route 60 running through the community and Interstate 64 giving fast access to Lexington in one direction and Charleston in the other. Ashland has a station on the long distance passenger railway between Chicago and Washington, and the nearest airports are at Huntington and Lexington.

Ashland Community and Technical College provides local higher education, with Marshall University across the river in West Virginia and Morehead State University about an hour away, so students have several options without leaving the region.

Meads is not a destination in its own right, but it represents the comfortable small town life of the Kentucky Ohio border country, with easy access to Appalachian forests, lakes and river history.