Uz, Letcher County: From Field Post Office to Uz Station and the UZ Mines

Appalachian Community Histories – Uz, Letcher County: From Field Post Office to Uz Station and the UZ Mines

Uz is one of those small Letcher County communities that does not leave behind one large, easy town history. Its past has to be pieced together from postal records, place name files, survey work, maps, oral history, and later mining reports. When those records are placed side by side, a clear pattern emerges. The community should be researched under both Uz and the earlier postal name Field. Robert M. Rennick’s work on Letcher County post offices and Kentucky place names records that the local post office began as Field on March 2, 1906, and that the place later became Uz when the railroad station took that name. Rennick also preserved the local pronunciation as “Yuzee,” which is one of the most valuable details in the surviving record because it shows how local speech carried the name even when outsiders might have guessed otherwise.

The Earlier Name of Field

That earlier name matters because it explains why Uz can seem to vanish in some records and then reappear in others. A person looking only for Uz will miss part of the paper trail, while a person looking only for Field will miss the later community identity. Rennick’s research suggests that the place was first known through the post office as Field and then through the station as Uz, which is a common enough pattern in Appalachian railroad country where postal, railroad, and community names did not always line up neatly at first. Another Rennick piece on Kentucky’s two letter place names preserved a local explanation that connected the station name to the biblical land of Uz, showing that local memory and railroad era storytelling both helped shape how the place was understood.

Uz on the Railroad and River Corridor

Federal and state technical records place Uz firmly in the North Fork Kentucky River and Kingdom Come Creek corridor. The U.S. Geological Survey’s Results of Spirit Leveling in Kentucky, 1898 to 1913 includes benchmark descriptions using “Uz station,” which shows that by the early twentieth century Uz was established enough to serve as a reference point in formal survey work. Kentucky Transportation Cabinet control data for the Whitesburg quadrangle also identifies Uz station in relation to the mouth of Kingdom Come Creek and the railroad bridge over the North Fork Kentucky River. Those records are dry on the surface, but they matter because they anchor Uz to a real transportation landscape of river crossings, railroad grades, creek mouths, and measured distances. In eastern Kentucky, that kind of survey language often tells us where daily life was concentrated even when narrative histories are thin.

A Community Visible on the Map

By the middle of the twentieth century, Uz was still visible enough to appear clearly on mapping. The 1954 USGS Roxana quadrangle shows “Uz” and “Uz Sch.”, along with nearby cemetery markings, which helps confirm that the community was more than a station name on paper. It had a school landscape and a burial landscape, which are often two of the best signs of durable local identity in the mountains. Local historical indexing reinforces that impression. The Letcher County Historical and Genealogical Society’s index for Letcher Heritage News notes an “Uz School Photo” in the Fall 2006 issue, suggesting that school memory remained part of local historical preservation well after the community’s railroad era had passed.

Uz in Lived Memory

Modern oral history shows that Uz also survived in lived geography, not just in old maps. In the Library of Congress interview “Rural Free Delivery: Mail Carriers in Central Appalachia,” Kenny Miles described a mail route that ran through Cowan, Line Fork, King’s Creek, and then “Uz, Kingdom Come Creek.” His account is especially valuable because it places Uz within an everyday route of work, neighbors, newspapers, and memory rather than treating it as a vanished name from the archives. He even recalled delivering The Mountain Eagle along that route, which ties Uz to the continuing communication networks of the county. That kind of testimony reminds us that small communities often persist through routes, habits, and local speech long after they stop appearing often in broad historical writing.

The Uz Name in the Coal Record

In the late 2000s and early 2010s, the Uz name also appeared in Kentucky mining records through Sapphire Coal Company’s UZ and UZ 2 operations in Letcher County. The 2008 licensed mines list shows both UZ and UZ 2. The 2009 annual report lists UZ with reportable tonnage and employment, and UZ 2 with 247,446 tons and 68 employees. In 2010, UZ 2 was listed with 423,407 tons and 65 employees, and in 2011 it remained active with 326,208 tons and 63 employees. The 2012 licensed mines list continued to show UZ 2 in Letcher County. These records do not tell the whole social history of the community, but they do show that the Uz name remained meaningful in the county’s coal geography well into the twenty first century.

Why Uz Still Matters

The history of Uz matters partly because it shows how small Appalachian communities survive in fragments. A post office called Field, a station called Uz, a pronunciation remembered as Yuzee, survey benchmarks, a school on a mid century map, a mail carrier’s route, and mine names in state reports all point to the same place. None of those records alone tells the full story. Together, though, they reveal a community rooted in the Kingdom Come and North Fork corridor, shaped by rail and coal, and remembered through local institutions and everyday speech. That is often how the history of mountain places survives, not in a single grand narrative, but in a chain of records that still speak when read side by side.

Sources & Further Reading

Rennick, Robert M. “The Post Offices of Letcher County, Kentucky.” Kentucky County Histories. Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/context/kentucky_county_histories/article/1392/viewcontent/Letcher_PostOffices.pdf.

Rennick, Robert M. “Place Names Beginning with the Letter U.” Robert M. Rennick Manuscript Collection, no. 28. Morehead State University, 2016. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_ms_collection/28.

Rennick, Robert M. “Letcher County – Place Names.” Robert M. Rennick Manuscript Collection, no. 94. Morehead State University, 2016. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_ms_collection/94.

Marshall, Robert Bradford. Results of Spirit Leveling in Kentucky, 1898 to 1913, Inclusive. U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 554. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1914. https://doi.org/10.3133/b554.

Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. BK 57-Whitesburg. Kentucky USC and GS Control Data Sheets. Frankfort: Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. https://transportation.ky.gov/Highway-Design/Kentucky%20USC%20and%20GS%20Control%20Data%20Sheets/BK%2057-WHITESBURG.pdf.

United States Geological Survey. Roxana, KY 7.5-Minute Quadrangle. 1:24,000. 1954. https://prd-tnm.s3.amazonaws.com/StagedProducts/Maps/HistoricalTopo/PDF/KY/24000/KY_Roxana_803947_1954_24000_geo.pdf.

Kentucky Office of Mine Safety and Licensing. Mines Licensed. Frankfort: Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet, 2008. https://eec.ky.gov/Natural-Resources/Mining/Mine-Safety/safety-inspections-and-licensing/Mines%20Licensed/2008%20Mines%20Licensed.pdf.

Kentucky Office of Mine Safety and Licensing. Mines Licensed. Frankfort: Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet, 2010. https://eec.ky.gov/Natural-Resources/Mining/Mine-Safety/safety-inspections-and-licensing/Mines%20Licensed/2010%20Mines%20Licensed.pdf.

Kentucky Office of Mine Safety and Licensing. Mines Licensed. Frankfort: Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet, 2011. https://eec.ky.gov/Natural-Resources/Mining/Mine-Safety/safety-inspections-and-licensing/Mines%20Licensed/2011%20Mines%20Licensed.pdf.

Kentucky Office of Mine Safety and Licensing. Mines Licensed. Frankfort: Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet, 2012. https://eec.ky.gov/Natural-Resources/Mining/Mine-Safety/safety-inspections-and-licensing/Mines%20Licensed/2012%20Mines%20Licensed.pdf.

Kentucky Office of Mine Safety and Licensing. Annual Report. Frankfort: Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet, 2009. https://eec.ky.gov/Natural-Resources/Mining/Mine-Safety/safety-inspections-and-licensing/Annual%20Reports/2009%20Annual%20Report.pdf.

Kentucky Office of Mine Safety and Licensing. Annual Report. Frankfort: Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet, 2010. https://eec.ky.gov/Natural-Resources/Mining/Mine-Safety/safety-inspections-and-licensing/Archived_Annual_Reports/2010%20Annual%20Report.pdf.

Kentucky Office of Mine Safety and Licensing. Annual Report. Frankfort: Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet, 2011. https://eec.ky.gov/Natural-Resources/Mining/Mine-Safety/safety-inspections-and-licensing/Archived_Annual_Reports/2011%20Annual%20Report.pdf.

Hilliard, Emily, interviewer. “Kenny Miles Interview Conducted by Emily Hilliard, 2021-09-03.” Rural Free Delivery: Mail Carriers in Central Appalachia. Library of Congress, 2021. https://www.loc.gov/resource/afc2021010.afc2021010_001_ms01/.

Letcher County Historical and Genealogical Society. “LCHGS’s Letcher Heritage News Index.” https://sites.rootsweb.com/~kyletch/lchgs/lhn_ndx.htm.

USGenWeb Letcher County. “Jim Brown Cemetery, Uz, Letcher County, Kentucky.” https://usgenwebsites.org/KYLetcher/cemetery/surveys/jbrn_cem.htm.

USGenWeb Letcher County. “The Caudill Cemetery, Uz, Letcher County, Kentucky.” https://usgenwebsites.org/KYLetcher/cemetery/surveys/caud_cem.htm.

USGenWeb Letcher County. “Letcher County Cemetery Records – Uz, KY, Cemeteries.” https://sites.rootsweb.com/~kyletch/cemetery/records/uz_.htm.

Author Note: I like stories like Uz because they survive in fragments, and putting those fragments together helps a small place come back into view. This one especially stood out because even the pronunciation, Yuzee, carries local memory that the records alone would never fully explain.