Appalachian Community Histories – Big Rock, Leslie County: School, Post Office, and Memory on the Cutshin Road
Big Rock is one of those eastern Kentucky communities that survives in the record not because it ever became large, but because it kept appearing where mountain life most often left its paper trail. Federal mapping shows Big Rock on the Leatherwood quadrangle in 1954, and the modern 2016 US Topo still places Big Rock in the same landscape with Yeaddiss and Big Fork. Kentucky’s current Leslie County state road inventory also fixes the community on KY 699, the road that runs via Smilax, Cutshin, Yeaddiss, and Big Rock toward the Perry County line.
That setting matters because Leslie County itself was a relatively late creation in Kentucky history. The county was formed in 1878 from parts of Clay, Harlan, and Perry counties, and communities like Big Rock developed inside that newer county framework of creek settlements, schools, roads, and local post offices. Big Rock did not become prominent through incorporation or industrial scale, but through the ordinary institutions that sustained everyday life in the mountains.
A place fixed by maps
The map record is the clearest starting point. The 1954 USGS Leatherwood quadrangle shows Big Rock and Big Rock School on the landscape, making clear that this was not just a family hollow or a passing nickname, but a recognized community with a school attached to it. More than sixty years later, the 2016 US Topo still identifies Big Rock in the same section of Leslie County, showing how the name endured even as older schools and post offices faded from daily use.
Kentucky’s transportation records reinforce that continuity. The state primary road system list for Leslie County says KY 699 runs from KY 80 southwest of Wooten via Smilax, Cutshin, Yeaddiss, and Big Rock to the Perry County line. In practical terms, that means Big Rock was and remains part of the road corridor that linked a chain of small Leslie County communities rather than standing apart from them.
The post office, the store, and the school
The strongest single description of the community comes from Robert M. Rennick’s Leslie County post office study and the postal history literature that drew on the same records. Those sources place the Big Rock post office at the mouth of Cutshin’s Low Gap Branch, three miles above Yeaddiss, near the local store and the nearby Big Rock School. A La Posta summary adds that on January 22, 1932, a huge bald rock gave its name to Dan F. Hendrix’s Big Rock post office. In a single cluster of details, the community comes into focus as a named place organized around mail service, commerce, and schooling.
The school itself left traces beyond the map. The Kentucky High School Athletic Association’s all time Kentucky school list includes Big Rock School and identifies it as the Bulldogs, with red and gold colors in Region 14. That does not tell the whole story of the school, but it does show that Big Rock’s school was remembered as more than a one room landmark. It had enough institutional life to enter the state’s historical school record and enough permanence to help define the identity of the community around it.
Big Rock in living memory
Oral history gives Big Rock its human dimension. In the Frontier Nursing Service oral history project, Ollie Baker recalled being born at Big Rock in 1906, attending a one room school there, and completing the eighth grade. The catalog summary notes that she also discussed home life and local herb medicine, which is exactly the kind of material that turns a place name into a lived world. Big Rock, in her memory, was not merely a dot on a map. It was a home community where schooling, family labor, and vernacular healing all met.
A second interview, with John R. Cornett in 1979, is likewise indexed to Big Rock and to subjects such as chores, one room schools, parents, and working life. Taken together, the Baker and Cornett interviews suggest that Big Rock’s historical importance lies less in dramatic public events than in the durable rhythms of mountain family life. The community mattered because children were raised there, schooled there, and shaped there before many of them moved through the wider economy of eastern Kentucky.
That pattern fits the broader historical attention Leslie County received during the New Deal era. Works Progress Administration and Historical Records Survey projects produced a general history of Leslie County, a folklore study, and a broader county survey between the mid 1930s and 1939. Even when Big Rock itself appears only in fragments, those county level projects show that outside researchers also understood Leslie County as a place where local custom, oral tradition, and community history deserved preservation.
What still survives in the record
For historians and genealogists, Big Rock is also a reminder that small communities can often be reconstructed through county records rather than standalone town archives. The Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives shows substantial Leslie County holdings, including marriages from 1878 to 2003, deeds from 1879 to 2010, county order books from 1878 to 2004, and will books from 1883 to 2003. Its land records inventory also lists Leslie County deed books on microfilm from 1879 to 2010, tax assessment books across multiple runs from 1879 into 2010, and wills on microfilm from 1883 to 2011. For a place like Big Rock, those are the records that can recover landholding families, neighborhood networks, and long term settlement patterns.
Big Rock’s history is therefore modest in scale but not faint in outline. The surviving evidence places it on the road between Yeaddiss and the Perry County line, marks it on federal maps across generations, ties its name to a post office opened in 1932, links it to a store and school, and preserves it in the memories of people who were born and educated there. That is often how Appalachian local history survives. Not as a long sequence of headline events, but as a durable community name carried forward by maps, mail, schools, and memory.
Sources & Further Reading
United States Geological Survey. Leatherwood, Ky. 7.5-minute quadrangle map. 1954. https://prd-tnm.s3.amazonaws.com/StagedProducts/Maps/HistoricalTopo/PDF/KY/24000/KY_Leatherwood_803686_1954_24000_geo.pdf
United States Geological Survey. Leatherwood, KY. US Topo 7.5-minute map. 2016. https://prd-tnm.s3.amazonaws.com/StagedProducts/Maps/USTopo/PDF/KY/KY_Leatherwood_20160425_TM_geo.pdf
Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. Leslie County State Primary Road System. February 2, 2026. https://transportation.ky.gov/Planning/State%20Primary%20Road%20System%20Lists/Leslie.pdf
Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives. County Records. n.d. https://kdla.ky.gov/Archives-and-Reference/Documents/County%20Records.pdf
Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives. Inventory of Land Records. n.d. https://kdla.ky.gov/Archives-and-Reference/Documents/Inventory_Land_Records.pdf
Baker, Ollie. Interview, November 25, 1979. Frontier Nursing Service Oral History Project. Kentucky Oral History Commission. https://kentuckyoralhistory.org/catalog/xt7kwh2dbt7n
Cornett, John R. Interview, March 25, 1979. Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History. https://nunncenter.net/ohms-spokedb/render.php?cachefile=1979oh201_fns100_ohm.xml
Kentucky High School Athletic Association. All-time Kentucky School List. January 13, 2017. https://khsaa.org/all-time-kentucky-school-list/
Rennick, Robert M. Leslie County – Post Offices & Place Names. 1978. County Histories of Kentucky, Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/context/kentucky_county_histories/article/1243/viewcontent/Leslie_PostOffices.pdf
Works Progress Administration and Historical Records Survey. “Leslie County – General History.” 1939. County Histories of Kentucky, Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/240/
Works Progress Administration. “Leslie County – Folklore.” 1939. County Histories of Kentucky, Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/348/
Works Progress Administration and Historical Records Survey. Leslie County. n.d. County Histories of Kentucky, Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1348&context=kentucky_county_histories
Kentucky State Board of Elections. Leslie County Election Plan. 2023. https://elect.ky.gov/Resources/Documents/Leslie%20County%20Election%20Plan.pdf
Kentucky Historical Society. “Leslie County.” Kentucky Historical Marker Database. https://history.ky.gov/markers/leslie-county
KYGenWeb. “Cities, Towns and Maps.” Leslie County, Kentucky KYGenWeb. https://kygenweb.net/leslie/citiestowns.htm
FamilySearch. “Leslie County, Kentucky Genealogy.” February 9, 2026. https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Leslie_County%2C_Kentucky_Genealogy
Author Note: This article rebuilds Big Rock from the kinds of records small mountain communities most often leave behind, especially maps, school traces, postal records, and oral history. I have tried to privilege primary and near-primary sources first so the community appears through its surviving record rather than through later retellings.