Appalachian Community Histories – Doorway, Perry County: Squabble Creek and a Community That Stayed in the Record
Doorway is one of those eastern Kentucky communities whose history survives best in fragments. It appears in postal records, on the Mistletoe topographic maps, in Kentucky Geological Survey mapping, and in county community lists, but it never generated the kind of long standalone printed history that larger places did. That does not mean it lacked a history. It means the story has to be rebuilt from the kinds of records that small mountain communities often leave behind, maps, mail routes, cemeteries, funeral records, and scattered local notices.
From Buffalo Creek to Squabble Creek
The strongest thread in Doorway’s early history is postal. Robert M. Rennick’s Owsley County research places the Doorway post office’s establishment on August 8, 1883, and ties its earliest location to the Right Fork of Buffalo Creek. La Posta’s postal-history material adds the crucial later movement, noting that the office was relocated and eventually came to serve the Squabble Creek area in Perry County. Taken together, those sources show that Doorway did not begin as a fixed Perry County settlement in the modern sense. It developed through a shifting postal geography on the Owsley and Perry county borderlands before settling into the Squabble Creek country most people now associate with it.
That movement matters because in mountain Kentucky the post office often gave a place its public identity. A named office could turn a hollow or creek settlement into something legible to outsiders, to government records, and to neighboring communities. Doorway’s paper trail suggests exactly that kind of evolution. It began as a mail point in the Buffalo Creek country, then drifted westward or southwestward with the needs of residents until it was recognized in the Squabble Creek section of Perry County, where postal histories place its closing in 1959.
Doorway on the Map
Once Doorway reached the Perry County side of its history, the cartographic record became one of the clearest ways to follow it. The Mistletoe quadrangle and later US Topo mapping preserve Doorway as a named place in the upland landscape, and the Kentucky Geological Survey’s Perry County mined-out areas map also labels Doorway among nearby communities. Those sources do not tell the whole social history, but they do something just as important. They fix Doorway on the ground. They show it was not merely a family tradition or an obsolete mailing name. It was a place recognized by official mapping agencies and connected to the broader coalfield terrain of eastern Perry County.
That mapped setting also helps explain the kind of community Doorway was. It belonged to a countryside of creeks, ridges, small settlements, and later coal-related land use rather than to an incorporated town grid. In that sense, Doorway resembles many Appalachian communities whose lives were organized by hollows, branches, and creek roads more than by formal town plats. The map record places it in relationship to Squabble Creek and neighboring communities, which is often the only dependable way to understand how such places functioned.
Families, Cemeteries, and Local Continuity
The human side of Doorway shows up most clearly in genealogical and near-primary records. One especially revealing source is the Civil War pension material for John Gilbert, which preserves a formal statement giving his post office address as Doorway in Owsley County. That wording is valuable because it preserves an older phase of the community’s borderland identity, before later postal-history sources place Doorway more securely on Perry County’s Squabble Creek. In a single record, the community appears both local and fluid, anchored in everyday life but not yet locked into the county framework that later generations would assume.
By the mid twentieth century, Doorway appears in more routine local records. Engle Funeral Home records from the 1940s explicitly list Doorway as a residence for several individuals, which shows the community functioning as a living address and not merely as an old map label. Cemetery finding aids and memorial listings likewise identify burial grounds tied directly to Doorway, including Henry Gilbert Cemetery and Jim Spurlock Cemetery, with the Barger-Spurlock cemetery tradition also attached to the area. These records are not a complete social history, but they reveal the structure that sustained the place, kin networks, burial grounds, and repeated family residence across generations.
Doorway in the Twentieth Century
Doorway also surfaces in local newspaper-era records after the post office years that usually define such places. In a 1965 Hazard Herald delinquent-tax notice, Troy Colwell is listed with Doorway as his residence. That small item matters because it shows that even after postal historians date the office’s closure to 1959, the community name still lived in ordinary county usage. A post office could close while a place name continued to endure in tax notices, funeral records, and family memory. That is often how Appalachian community names survive, not through incorporation or commercial growth, but through repetition in everyday documents.
The same pattern continues into the present. Perry County still lists Doorway among its communities, which means the name remains part of the county’s recognized geography. Modern official recognition does not prove continuity of population at every stage, but it does show that Doorway was never wholly erased. The name stayed on maps, in records, and in county consciousness long after its post office and whatever local institutions once defined it had faded.
Why Doorway Matters
Doorway deserves to be remembered because it illustrates how many Appalachian places actually survive in history. Not through one grand event, and not through a thick local history volume, but through a chain of practical records left by people who lived, died, mailed letters, paid taxes, buried kin, and gave directions by creek and ridge. Its story begins in the Buffalo Creek country, crosses a county-line ambiguity, settles into the Squabble Creek landscape of Perry County, and remains visible today because maps and family records kept repeating the name.
In that sense, Doorway is not minor at all. It is a good example of how eastern Kentucky communities were made. A post office helped define it. Families and cemeteries sustained it. Maps preserved it. Local records kept it from disappearing. When those pieces are read together, Doorway emerges not as a lost dot on an old quadrangle, but as a real mountain community whose history still sits plainly in the record for anyone willing to gather it.
Sources & Further Reading
Rennick, Robert M. “Owsley County.” In Kentucky County Place Names, Morehead State University, 2016. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1119&context=rennick_ms_collection
Rennick, Robert M. “Owsley County – Post Offices.” Morehead State University Special Collections. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1272&context=kentucky_county_histories
La Posta: A Journal of American Postal History. “Owsley County Post Offices.” Vol. 34, no. 3. https://www.lapostapub.com/Backissues/LP34-3.pdf
United States Geological Survey. Mistletoe Quadrangle, Kentucky. 7.5-minute series, 1953. https://prd-tnm.s3.amazonaws.com/StagedProducts/Maps/HistoricalTopo/PDF/KY/24000/KY_Mistletoe_709310_1953_24000_geo.pdf
United States Geological Survey. Mistletoe, KY. 1:24,000-scale quadrangle, 1979. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/35/KY_Mistletoe_709309_1979_24000_geo.pdf
United States Geological Survey. Mistletoe, KY. US Topo, 2016. https://prd-tnm.s3.amazonaws.com/StagedProducts/Maps/USTopo/PDF/KY/KY_Mistletoe_20160425_TM_geo.pdf
United States Geological Survey. Mistletoe Quadrangle, Kentucky. Current edition, 2022. https://prd-tnm.s3.amazonaws.com/StagedProducts/Maps/USTopo/Current/PDF/KY/KY_Mistletoe.pdf
Kentucky Geological Survey. Perry County Mined-Out Areas. Lexington: University of Kentucky. https://kgs.uky.edu/kgsweb/download/gwatlas/gwcounty/perry/PERRYMO.pdf
Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. State Primary Road System: Perry County, Kentucky. Last revised February 2025. https://transportation.ky.gov/Planning/SPRS%20Maps/Perry.pdf
Perry County, Kentucky. “About Perry County.” https://perrycountyky.gov/about-perry-county/
Perry County, Kentucky. “Communities.” https://perrycounty.ky.gov/things-to-do/Pages/Communities.aspx
KYGenWeb. “Cities, Towns & Maps – Perry County, Kentucky.” https://kygenweb.net/perry/citiestowns.htm
“The Hazard Herald.” OCR text archive, local notices and legal items. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/download/kd9rr1pg1x5k/kd9rr1pg1x5k_text.pdf
“The Hazard Herald.” OCR text archive, local notices and legal items. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/download/kd90r9m32p12/kd90r9m32p12_text.pdf
Engle Funeral Home Records, 1940-1947. Perry County KYGenWeb. https://sites.rootsweb.com/~kyperry3/englefuneralhome1940_1947.html
Engle Funeral Home Records, 1945-1946. Perry County KYGenWeb. https://sites.rootsweb.com/~kyperry3/Engles_Funerals1945_1946.html
“John Gilbert Pension.” RootsWeb Kentucky military pension transcription. https://sites.rootsweb.com/~kyclay2/military/pensions/civil/jgilbert.html
Perry County cemetery listings. Perry County KYGenWeb. https://sites.rootsweb.com/~kyperry3/perrycokycemeterylistings.html
Find a Grave. “Henry Gilbert Cemetery, Doorway, Perry County, Kentucky.” https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/2403769/henry-gilbert-cemetery
Find a Grave. “Jim Spurlock Cemetery, Doorway, Perry County, Kentucky.” https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/2396918/jim-spurlock-cemetery
Johnson, Eunice Tolbert. History of Perry County, Kentucky. Hazard, Ky.: Hazard Chapter, Daughters of the American Revolution, 1953. WorldCat entry: https://search.worldcat.org/title/History-of-Perry-County-Kentucky/oclc/25680657
Johnson, Eunice Tolbert. History of Perry County, Kentucky. University of Kentucky Notable Kentucky African Americans Database catalog entry. https://nkaa.uky.edu/nkaa/index.php/items/show/300003121
Quigley, Martha Hall. Hazard, Perry County. Charleston, S.C.: Arcadia Publishing. Series reference: https://www.librarything.com/nseries/3448/Images-of-America
Author Note: I always enjoy working on places like Doorway because so many small Appalachian communities survive only in scattered records and memory. Putting this one together reminded me how much local history still lives in maps, cemeteries, funeral books, and old newspaper lines.