FREEBURN - There's simply no good way to get to this little Pike County coal town 4 miles east of Phelps and 1.4 miles from the West Virginia line. Three highways, narrow, serpentine and dangerous, slither through steep, mining-shaved hillsides overlooking Peter Creek. One road is bad; the other two, worse.

Yet, since William "Beward" Coleman, 67, opened his collection of coal-mining memorabilia to the public nine years ago, several thousand have made the trip to Freeburn. They come not only from Lexington, 180 miles away, and Cincinnati, more than 250, but from New York and California, Minnesota and New Mexico, New Jersey and Arizona, Washington and Wisconsin, Iowa and Michigan, Kansas and Georgia.

Forty years ago, Coleman, son of a miner and a miner himself from 1960 until 1990, began picking up an item here and there. Now, after four decades of roaming from Cincinnati to Tennessee, from West Virginia to Louisville -- along with his four children's scouring flea markets and garage sales -- his collection has grown so large, he cannot display it all at once. Some are on loan to Eastern Kentucky museums; the rest are in storage.

His wife, Sylvia, and several friends also have helped him find things for his collection.

"I just like to share it all with people. I like to piddle with it," said Coleman, who not only does not charge admission, but will not even accept donations. Nor will he sell any of it, he said, despite repeated offers from a man from Seattle eager to buy it all.

Some items are directly related to daily mining operations, among them miner's caps, including one his father wore in 1936, as well as shovels, drills and other tools; safety posters; wiring splices; lunch buckets; photographs of old Freeburn buildings, once-thriving businesses and mine entrances; a 1880s book of mining survey maps; and a punching machine used at a Freeburn mine to drill for coal.

His collection is really a comprehensive record of coal-town culture, of how people lived, not only in Pike County but throughout the region.

There are booklets of scrip, paper money issued on payday in lieu of cash and redeemable only at the company store; a scrip machine used in the 1930s to convert metal slugs into scrip coins; and 1924 payroll books that document who made how much.

The first entry reveals that on Oct. 15, one Nevada Gasser was paid $133 for two weeks' work. Unfortunately, Gasser owed $130 of it to the company store.

From miners' homes, Coleman has salvaged a 1920s kitchen stove; toys their children played with; still-working electric light fixtures that once illuminated their homes; a 1935 kerosene-powered refrigerator; license plates; soda bottles, some never opened and others no longer made; a green, red-sealed, never-opened, 1940 pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes.

Some show what miners saw, and used, when they went to town. Outside and inside his museum building, Coleman displays 1950s Texaco and Gulf gasoline pumps and 1947 Texaco signs. There's also a 1951, five-cent Coca-Cola machine. All of the pumps look pristine. All still work.

Yet, Coleman's collection also reveals some of the harsher aspects of life in a booming coal town. Photographs show teams of ponies, oxen and even big dogs straining to pull carloads of coal; another shows what is thought to be the last hanging in Pike County, the man standing on the scaffold, hands tied behind his back, a black hood over his head. Coleman also has a complete still, and on a nearby shelf, a jar of moonshine.

During its heyday, between 1924, when mining operations began in the Freeburn area, until mid-century, thousands of miners worked around Freeburn, Coleman said. Many were European immigrants. Some lived in Williamson, 27 miles away, and rode the train to work -- it the only way to get to Freeburn in those days. At one time, he said, 16,000 men worked the mines in this neck of the woods.

Today, mining jobs around Freeburn are scarce, but relics from the boom years are even fewer, Coleman said.

"I don't go looking much anymore," he said. "The last five years, I haven't found anything. It's all gone. It just isn't there."