Editing Madisonville, Kentucky (section)

==History==
Madisonville was founded in 1807 and named for then-[[United States Secretary of State|Secretary of State]] [[James Madison]].<ref name=Enky>{{cite book|title=''Encyclopedia of Kentucky''|chapter=Dictionary of Places: Madisonville|publisher=Somerset Publishers|location=[[New York, New York]]|year=1987|isbn=0-403-09981-1}}</ref> It was named the seat of Hopkins County in 1808 and formally incorporated in 1810.<ref name=sos/>

Hopkins County and Madisonville were divided by the [[American Civil War|Civil War]]. [[Union (American Civil War)|Union]] supporters joined a regiment recruited locally by James Shackleford; Al Fowler recruited [[Confederate States of America|Confederate]] troops. The courthouse in Madisonville was burned by Confederates led by [[Hylan B. Lyon|Gen. Hylan B. Lyon]] on December 17, 1864, as they passed through western Kentucky. While Kentucky remained mostly in the Union, half the state had seceded at the [[Russellville Convention]] and was controlled by the Confederacy early in the war before being conquered by the Union.

Farming was the major occupation in Hopkins County for most of the 1800s, with [[tobacco]] the leading crop. Around 1837 an outcropping of coal was discovered, and the first coal mine in the county opened in 1869. Mining did not become a major industry until the [[Louisville & Nashville Railroad]] pushed its line southward from [[Henderson, Kentucky|Henderson]] through Madisonville and toward [[Nashville, Tennessee|Nashville]] in 1870.

Madisonville was home to schools for African Americans including [[Atkinson Literary and Industrial College]].<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://nkaa.uky.edu/nkaa/items/show/2304|title=African American Schools in Madisonville and Hopkins County, KY · Notable Kentucky African Americans Database|website=nkaa.uky.edu}}</ref>

From 1892 to 1912 ''The Hustler'', originally ''The Madisonville Hustler'', was a newspaper serving Madisonville.<ref>{{cite web | url=https://www.loc.gov/item/sn87060026/ | title=The Hustler (Madisonville, Ky.) 1893-1912 | website=[[Library of Congress]] }}</ref>

By the early 1900s, Madisonville was a rail hub, coal mining center, and had a large tobacco market. This continued until the 1960s when manufacturing and service industries came to the area.