Huntleyville was named after Chet Huntley, a former NBC News correspondent and member of NBC’s Huntley-Brinkley Report team, whose publicity in 1965 aided a small group of Eastern Kentuckians in building a badly needed road now known as the Huntley-Brinkley Road. Huntley died of lung cancer in 1974. He was respected as a hardworking and often outspoken journalist, and he urged people, before retiring from NBC News, to “Be patient and have courage—there will be better and happier news someday, if we work at it.”