Built in a back-of-the-truck office on Leroy Lane.

Twenty-seven winters, four trucks, one phone number.

Frank spent the late 1980s and early '90s driving for one of the big regional propane co-ops. He liked the work — the route, the customers, the satisfying physics of moving energy from a tank to a furnace — but not the way pricing kept getting opaque. So in the fall of 1998 he leased a tired International from a friend in Pikeville, painted "Hearthridge" on the doors with a $9 stencil from a hardware store in Prestonsburg, and started filling tanks for thirty households who'd asked him to.

By 2004 there were two trucks. By 2012 the company added its first service tech, Daniel, who's still here. We added a second bobtail in 2017 after the snow event that buried half the county for nine days. The fourth truck came on after we picked up the contract for the regional Christmas-tree farm in 2022.

We've never taken outside investment, never been acquired, and we don't intend to be. Frank's daughter, Rachel, took over the books in 2019 and handles dispatch on Saturdays.