Appalachian Community Histories – Allock, Perry County: Carrs Fork Coal, the Stacy Branch Spur, and a Community on the Map
Allock was one of the many small Perry County communities that grew out of the coal economy rather than out of nineteenth century town building. It never developed into an incorporated town with a long independent civic paper trail. Instead, its history survives in the kinds of records that coal camps usually leave behind: mine reports, postal records, railroad references, census district descriptions, topographic maps, and photographs of everyday life. Those records show Allock as a real and active community in the Carrs Fork and Vicco area of Perry County, and they also explain why its history is best reconstructed piece by piece rather than told through one single town history.
A Community Fixed by Maps and District Lines
Federal and mapping records place Allock in the Vicco country of northern Perry County. The historical USGS Vicco quadrangle shows Allock by name, and the modern Vicco US Topo continues to place it in the same mapped landscape. The 1940 census enumeration district descriptions are especially helpful because they show how the federal government understood the community on the ground. In that year, Allock was divided between ED 97-24 and ED 97-25 in the Masons Creek area, with the descriptions tying it to Stacy Branch, Vicco, State Highway 15, and the North Fork of the Kentucky River. A Kentucky Transportation Cabinet control data sheet adds another precise local marker, placing Allock just southeast of the post office, northwest of Vicco, and near a coal tipple.
Allock as a Coal Camp
The strongest documentary trail for Allock runs through the coal industry. Kentucky state mine reporting from the 1920s already listed Allock and nearby Perronne or Perrone among Perry County mining operations, tying the place directly to the Carrs Fork Coal Company system. By 1937, the Federal Register still listed Carrs Fork Coal Company, Inc. with mines at Allock and Perrone in the Hazard district. Taken together, those records show that Allock was not just a place name on a creek. It was part of a working coal network whose mines, tipples, rail connections, and labor force made the community legible to the state and federal governments.
That coal identity also shaped the transportation history of the place. Specialized railroad sources describe the Stacy Branch spur as trackage constructed and owned by the Carrs Fork Coal Company to serve operations just beyond the company town of Allock. A state railroad corridor inventory later recorded the abandoned line from Sassafras to Anco and Allock, preserving the route in the historical record even after the working railroad era had faded. Like many eastern Kentucky camps, Allock was tied to coal not only through shafts and tipples, but through the branch lines that carried its coal outward and linked it to nearby settlements.
The Post Office and the Meaning of the Name
Postal history helps explain when Allock became an established community name. La Posta and Robert Rennick’s Kentucky place-name work agree that the Allock post office was established on July 14, 1920, with Edward H. Griffith as the first postmaster. La Posta also preserves the most widely repeated explanation of the name, stating that both the post office and the Stacy Branch Spur station were called Allock for company executives John B. Allen and H. E. Bullock. If that explanation is correct, then Allock was a coal company name from the beginning, a blended label created by the industrial men behind the camp rather than by a creek, a pioneer family, or an older settlement tradition.
Business and directory records show that the name quickly entered ordinary circulation. Rand McNally’s Bankers Directory listed “Allock to Hazard,” which may look like a small notation, but it matters. Such entries show how the community fit into regional communication and business geography. It was a recognized destination, and Hazard was its larger reference point. That is exactly how many eastern Kentucky camps functioned: locally distinct, but economically and administratively tied to a county seat or commercial center.
School, Medicine, and the Shape of Daily Life
One of the richest surviving sources for Allock is visual rather than textual. The image set preserved through DPLA and Wikimedia Commons includes views of the doctor’s office, Carrs-Fork Elementary School, children leaving school for recess, workers’ housing, privies, pumps, and a road crossing the creek into part of the camp. These are remarkable documents because they move Allock out of abstraction. They show that this was not merely a mine name in a government report. It was a lived place with children, medical care, water infrastructure, sanitation problems, roads, and company housing. In other words, it had all the ordinary structures of a coal camp community, and all the vulnerabilities that came with that world.
Those photographs also suggest something important about how Allock should be remembered. Coal camps are often flattened into production statistics or labor history alone, but the surviving pictures remind us that families built their lives there. The doctor’s office points to illness and injury in a mining district. The school images point to children growing up in the shadow of tipples and branch lines. The housing, pumps, and privies point to the uneven material conditions that shaped daily life. For a small place like Allock, these visual records are as valuable as any town charter would have been.
Allock in the Census Era
The census record shows that Allock remained part of a definable local landscape well into the mid twentieth century. In 1940, the federal government still treated it as a place important enough to mention directly in the enumeration district descriptions. By 1950, census publications grouped it with Vicco as “Allock-Vicco (uninc.),” with a reported population of 1,616. That figure should be read carefully because it belongs to the combined unincorporated area rather than to Allock alone, but it still tells us that this was a substantial lived district, not just a vanished dot on an old map.
What Remains of Allock
Like many Appalachian coal camps, Allock outlived its peak industrial moment without entirely disappearing from the landscape or the record. It still appears on modern mapping products for the Vicco area, and Perry County continues to include Allock on its official list of communities. That kind of survival matters. It means the place remains part of Perry County’s usable geography even after the era that created it has largely passed. The coal camps of eastern Kentucky often slipped from national attention once the mines slowed, but at the county level they remained home places, memory places, and reference points for the people who knew the roads and branches by name.
Allock’s history, then, is the history of a small Appalachian coal camp seen through the records that endure. State mine reports show its industrial purpose. Postal history explains its name. Railroad evidence connects it to the branch line economy of the coalfields. Census descriptions and topo maps pin it to the ground. Photographs recover the human scale of the place. Put together, those sources reveal Allock as one of Perry County’s coalfield communities that was small in size but fully woven into the working and family life of the region.
Sources & Further Reading
Kentucky Geological Survey. “State Department of Mines, Annual Report, 1924.” Accessed April 4, 2026. https://kgs.uky.edu/kgsweb/olops/pub/general/jonesminereport1924.pdf
Kentucky Geological Survey. “State Department of Mines, Annual Report, 1925.” Accessed April 4, 2026. https://kgs.uky.edu/kgsweb/olops/pub/general/jonesminereport1925.pdf
Kentucky Geological Survey. “State Department of Mines, Annual Report, 1926.” Accessed April 4, 2026. https://kgs.uky.edu/kgsweb/olops/pub/general/jonesminereport1927.pdf
Kentucky Geological Survey. “State Department of Mines, Annual Report, 1928.” Accessed April 4, 2026. https://kgs.uky.edu/kgsweb/olops/pub/general/DanielReportMines1928.pdf
United States. Federal Register 2, no. 234, December 3, 1937. https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/fedreg/fr002/fr002234/fr002234.pdf
United States Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census. “1940 Census Enumeration District Descriptions, Kentucky, Perry County, ED 97-23, ED 97-24, ED 97-25.” National Archives Identifier 5863022. Accessed April 4, 2026. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1940_Census_Enumeration_District_Descriptions_-_Kentucky_-_Perry_County_-_ED_97-23,_ED_97-24,_ED_97-25_-_NARA_-_5863022.jpg
United States Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census. 1950 Census of Population. Vol. 1, Number of Inhabitants. Kentucky. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1952. https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1950/population-volume-1/vol-01-20.pdf
National Archives. “1950 Census.” Accessed April 4, 2026. https://1950census.archives.gov/
United States Geological Survey. “Vicco, KY, 1954, 1:24,000-Scale Historical Topographic Map.” Accessed April 4, 2026. https://prd-tnm.s3.amazonaws.com/StagedProducts/Maps/HistoricalTopo/PDF/KY/24000/KY_Vicco_804064_1954_24000_geo.pdf
United States Geological Survey. “Vicco, Kentucky, US Topo.” Accessed April 4, 2026. https://prd-tnm.s3.amazonaws.com/StagedProducts/Maps/USTopo/PDF/KY/KY_Vicco_20160425_TM_geo.pdf
Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. “58 Cornettsville QDAS.” Accessed April 4, 2026. https://transportation.ky.gov/Highway-Design/Kentucky%20USC%20and%20GS%20Control%20Data%20Sheets/BK%2058-CORNETTSVILLE.pdf
Rand McNally & Company. Rand McNally Bankers Directory, July 1930. Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, FRASER. Accessed April 4, 2026. https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/rand-mcnally-bankers-directory-105/july-1930-598549/content/fulltext/rmbd_193007_13_accessiblebanking
Rennick, Robert M. “Perry County – Post Offices.” County Histories of Kentucky, 2000. Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/273/
Rennick, Robert M. “Place Names Beginning with the Letter A.” Robert M. Rennick Manuscript Collection, 2016. Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_ms_collection/6/
Randolph, Helen F. “Perry County – General History.” County Histories of Kentucky, 1936. Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1053&context=kentucky_county_histories
Coal Education. “Perry County, Kentucky Coal Camps.” Accessed April 4, 2026. https://www.coaleducation.org/coalhistory/coaltowns/coalcamps/perry_county.htm
RootsWeb. “Coal Mines in Perry County Kentucky.” Accessed April 4, 2026. https://sites.rootsweb.com/~kycoalmi/perrycomines.html
Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. Kentucky Abandoned Railroad Corridor Inventory. Accessed April 4, 2026. https://transportation.ky.gov/BikeWalk/2019%20Grant%20Applications/KY%20Abandoned%20Railroad%20Corridor%20Inventory.pdf
Vaughn, Robert D. Guide to Appalachian Coal Hauling Railroads, vol. 3d. Accessed April 4, 2026. https://www.spikesys.com/Trains/App_coal/apcl_3d.html
The Filson Historical Society. The Filson 10, no. 1 (Spring 2010). https://filsonhistorical.org/wp-content/uploads/TheFilson-V10N1-Spring2010.pdf
Wikimedia Commons. “Category: Allock, Kentucky.” Accessed April 4, 2026. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Allock,_Kentucky
Perry County, Kentucky. “Perry County Communities.” Accessed April 4, 2026. https://perrycounty.ky.gov/things-to-do/Pages/Communities.aspx
Author Note: Small places like Allock rarely get a full town history, which is exactly why I think they deserve careful reconstruction from maps, mine reports, postal records, and photographs. I hope this piece helps preserve one more Perry County community that mattered deeply to the families who lived and worked there.