This article fills an historiographical and methodological gap in our knowledge of the lived experience of the process of rural industrialisation. It uses a microhistorical study of a rapidly developing parish in the Somerset coalfield to question notions current in the historiography of rural class structures and community identity. It employs a variety of sources, including extracts from a particularly detailed early nineteenth-century journal, to demonstrate that the growing proportion of coal miners in the parish population from the late eighteenth century was well integrated, economically and culturally, into the local community. This argument runs counter to the stereotype that coal miners tended to form a ‘breed apart’ from the wider population. It is further argued that parish-based definitions of community, which have been emphasised in some of the most recent historiography, are less relevant in regions experiencing significant economic growth and structural change.