Kamenskaya

Kamenskaya grew from a Don Cossack settlement on the Seversky Donets, traditionally dated to 1671. Its early site lay on the left bank near the mouth of the Kamenka. The settlement was destroyed during the suppression of the Bulavin rising of 1707–1709; rebuilding and repeated fires subsequently altered its location. By the eighteenth century it was a stanitsa within the Don Cossack Host.

Its administrative importance increased in 1802, when Kamenskaya became the centre of the Donets district. A further relocation in 1817 brought the stanitsa to higher ground on the river's right bank, a move associated with the advice of Ataman Matvei Platov. The early nineteenth-century settlement therefore combined a Cossack community with district administration. Its history before 1837 follows successive sites along the Donets and the consolidation of the Host's local institutions, long before the industrial city that later occupied the area.