Appalachian Community Histories – Smilax, Leslie County: A Post Office at Polls Creek and a Community on the Cutshin Road
Smilax is the kind of Leslie County place that survives in the record not because it ever became a large town, but because mountain communities most often left their names in practical documents. Post offices, school maps, road lists, and courthouse books preserved Smilax far better than any booster history ever could. In a county created only in 1878 from parts of Clay, Harlan, and Perry counties, communities like Smilax took shape through creek settlement, family landholding, and the small institutions that tied scattered households together.
A name rooted in the landscape
The strongest single starting point for Smilax is Robert M. Rennick’s study of Leslie County post offices and place names. Search results from that work indicate that Smilax was probably named not for a person, but for a local plant or vine of the smilax family. That matters because many eastern Kentucky communities took their names from local families, mills, or postmasters. Smilax appears to have carried a more organic name, one that felt as if it belonged to the hills themselves. Postal historian D. Y. Meschter also noted that a second Smilax office was opened in 1939 by Grace Thomas, confirming that the name had enough local standing to be fixed in federal postal records.
Meschter’s summary is especially useful because it places Smilax in a very specific landscape. His Leslie County postal-history article says the second Smilax office stood just above the mouth of Polls Creek and served the surrounding Cutshin country. That is the sort of detail that turns a name into a mappable community. Smilax was not simply a loose regional label. It was tied to a recognizable junction of creek, road, and neighborhood life.
Smilax on the map
Official mapping confirms that Smilax was more than a postal notation. The 1961 USGS Hyden East quadrangle, field checked in 1954, explicitly shows Smilax and Smilax School on the landscape. That is important evidence for any Leslie County community history because it shows that mid twentieth century federal mapping recognized both the settlement and a school attached to it. In places like Smilax, the appearance of a school on a topographic map usually signals a real center of neighborhood life rather than an accidental label.
State road records reinforce the same picture. Kentucky’s current Leslie County state primary road list says KY 699 runs from KY 80 southwest of Wooten via Smilax, Cutshin, Yeaddiss, and Big Rock to the Perry County line. The same official list says KY 2057 begins at Smilax and runs to Daley, and that KY 3427 reconnects with KY 699 just northeast of Smilax. In practical terms, Smilax sits inside a road corridor linking a chain of Cutshin communities rather than standing alone as an isolated hollow. That geography helps explain why the post office and school mattered. Smilax functioned as one of the named points along a lived-in route through this section of Leslie County.
A post office that endured
The post office is one of the clearest threads running through Smilax history. In 2018 the United States Postal Service announced that it would relocate the Smilax Post Office to the former Lewis Dairy Bar building at 7040 Cutshin Road after the landlord at the existing site terminated the lease. Earlier that spring USPS had held a community meeting at the Ross and Ruth Baker Community Center in Cutshin to gather local input before making its final decision. Those notices are modern sources, but they show something important. Smilax was still a recognized postal community in the twenty first century, and the continuation of its post office was treated as a matter of local concern rather than a bureaucratic afterthought.
That kind of continuity is often the real story in Appalachian local history. Smilax did not have to become incorporated or commercially prominent to endure. Its identity lasted because people kept using the name for mail, roads, and place. A community can survive in the archives long after many of its older institutions have changed form, and Smilax is a good example of that pattern.
How older Smilax history can be rebuilt
For the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Smilax has to be reconstructed through Leslie County records rather than through any standalone town archive. FamilySearch catalog entries show that researchers can work through Leslie County deeds from 1879 to 1916 with indexes through 1931, county court order books from 1873 to 1956, circuit court order books from 1878 to 1941, a separate civil order-book run from 1893 to 1922, marriage bonds from 1884 to 1911, sheriff’s reports of land sold for taxes from 1895 to 1935, and reports of commissioner’s division of lands from 1881 to 1913. Those are exactly the records that recover who owned property around Polls Creek and Cutshin, how land passed through families, where roads were ordered or altered, and which surnames formed the neighborhood network around Smilax.
The Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives strengthens that research path by publishing statewide county-record, land-record, and circuit-court inventories designed to show researchers what survives and where those records can be accessed. For a place like Smilax, those finding aids matter almost as much as the records themselves. They make it possible to move from a post office name on a map to the deeds, tax sales, court actions, marriages, and estate divisions that gave the community its human shape.
Smilax in the coal era
Later federal mine-safety records show that Smilax also belonged to Leslie County’s coal story. Mine Safety and Health Administration accident reports from 2002, 2003, and 2004 identify Calvary Coal Company’s Mine No. 4 as being near Smilax in Leslie County. Those reports are grim sources because they were created in the wake of fatal accidents, but they also establish that Smilax remained part of the county’s working coal landscape into the late twentieth and early twenty first century. In that sense the community’s history moved along the same arc as much of Leslie County itself, from creek settlement and post office geography into the labor and danger of the eastern Kentucky coal economy.
Why Smilax matters
Smilax matters because it shows how small Appalachian communities become visible in the historical record. Its name appears to have come from the natural world rather than a prominent founder. Its location was fixed by the Polls Creek and Cutshin junction, by a post office, and by a school that appeared on federal maps. Its continuity can still be traced through state road records and modern postal notices. Its deeper family and land history remains recoverable through Leslie County deed books, court books, marriage bonds, tax-sale records, and archival inventories. Smilax was never a large place, but it was a real one, and the surviving record is strong enough to show that its story belongs firmly inside the history of Leslie County.
Sources & Further Reading
Rennick, Robert M. “Leslie County – Post Offices & Place Names.” County Histories of Kentucky. Morehead State University, 2000. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/241/
Rennick, Robert M. “Leslie County – Place Names.” Robert M. Rennick Manuscript Collection, no. 91. Morehead State University, 2016. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_ms_collection/91/
Meschter, D. Y. “The Post Offices of Leslie County.” La Posta 34, no. 6 (2004). https://www.lapostapub.com/Backissues/LP34-6.pdf
United States Geological Survey. Hyden East, Kentucky, 7.5-Minute Quadrangle. Revised 1961. https://prd-tnm.s3.amazonaws.com/StagedProducts/Maps/HistoricalTopo/PDF/KY/24000/KY_Hyden%20East_708944_1961_24000_geo.pdf
Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. Leslie County State Primary Road System. Frankfort, KY: Kentucky Transportation Cabinet, February 2, 2026. https://transportation.ky.gov/Planning/State%20Primary%20Road%20System%20Lists/Leslie.pdf
United States Postal Service. “USPS to Relocate Smilax Post Office.” July 24, 2018. https://about.usps.com/news/state-releases/ky/2018/ky_2018_0724.htm
United States Geological Survey. “Geographic Names Information System (GNIS).” Accessed March 28, 2026. https://www.usgs.gov/tools/geographic-names-information-system-gnis
Works Progress Administration, Historical Records Survey. “Leslie County – General History.” County Histories of Kentucky. Morehead State University, 1939. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/240/
Works Progress Administration. “Leslie County – Folklore.” County Histories of Kentucky. Morehead State University, 1939. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/348/
Works Progress Administration, Historical Records Survey. “Leslie County.” County Histories of Kentucky. Morehead State University, ca. 1936-1939. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/18/
Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives. County Records. Frankfort, KY: KDLA. https://kdla.ky.gov/Archives-and-Reference/Documents/County%20Records.pdf
Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives. Inventory of Land Records. Frankfort, KY: KDLA. https://kdla.ky.gov/Archives-and-Reference/Documents/Inventory_Land_Records.pdf
Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives. Circuit Court Records. Frankfort, KY: KDLA. https://kdla.ky.gov/Archives-and-Reference/Documents/CircuitCourtInventory.pdf
FamilySearch. Deeds, 1879-1916; indexes, 1879-1931. Leslie County, Kentucky catalog entry. https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/42637
FamilySearch. Order Books, 1873-1956. Leslie County, Kentucky catalog entry. https://www.familysearch.org/en/search/catalog/34396
National Archives. “Enumeration District (ED) Search: Leslie County, Kentucky.” 1950 Census. https://1950census.archives.gov/search/?county=Leslie&page=1&state=KY
Mine Safety and Health Administration. Report of Investigation: Fatal Machinery Accident, Mine No. 4, Calvary Coal Co. Inc., Smilax, Leslie County, Kentucky. June 9, 2003. https://arlweb.msha.gov/FATALS/2003/ftl03c14.pdf
Author Note: Smilax is exactly the kind of mountain community I love writing about because so much of its history survives in maps, post office records, and courthouse traces rather than in big public histories. Places like this can look small on paper, but they often preserve some of the clearest evidence of how Leslie County families, roads, schools, and community identity endured over time.