Appalachian Community Histories – Elic, Knott County: A Lost Lotts Creek Post Office on Youngs Fork and Kelly Fork
Elic, Kentucky was never a large town, and it does not survive in memory the way county seats, coal camps, or railroad towns often do. Its history appears in smaller traces: a post office name, a creek crossing, a geological survey, church minutes, death certificates, and the names of families who lived along Youngs Fork, Kelly Fork, Buck Branch, and Elk Lick Fork. That is often how the history of an Appalachian place has to be rebuilt. Elic was not simply a dot on a map. It was a local address, a postal stop, a church-network name, and a place people used to locate one another in the Lotts Creek country of Knott County.
The strongest source trail points to Elic as a small community and post office near the meeting of Youngs Fork and Kelly Fork. Modern geographic sources place Elic on the Carrie quadrangle at about 37.2676 north latitude and 83.0677 west longitude, with an elevation near 1,066 feet. TopoZone identifies it as a locale in Knott County, while the United States Geological Survey still uses Elic in the name of a water monitoring location, “Youngs Fork of Lotts C Above Kelly Fork at Elic.”
Lotts Creek and the Geography Around Elic
Elic belonged to the Lotts Creek world. Lotts Creek runs through the Perry and Knott County border region before joining the North Fork of the Kentucky River near Darfork, below Hazard. The creek system included the forks and branches that mattered most to Elic’s story: Youngs Fork, Kelly Fork, Buck Branch, and Elk Lick Fork. The meeting of Youngs Fork and Kelly Fork is especially important because both postal and geological records place Elic in relation to that junction.
This geography helps explain why Elic appears in sources without always looking like a formal town. In the mountains, community names often followed creeks, forks, post offices, family settlements, schools, churches, and road networks more than municipal boundaries. A person might be from Elic because that was the nearest post office. A coal report might mention Elic because it was the easiest landmark for a mine opening. A church minute book might list Elic because that was the mailing address of a clerk, minister, or delegate.
The Elic Post Office
The post office is the clearest documentary anchor for Elic. Jim Forte’s postal-history index lists Elic as a Knott County post office operating from 1908 to 1934. Robert M. Rennick’s Knott County post office survey, hosted by Morehead State University ScholarWorks, is the most important compiled source for this kind of Kentucky place-name history. The ScholarWorks record describes Rennick’s work as “A historical survey of post offices and communities in Knott County, Kentucky.”
The Elic-specific source trail says the post office was established on August 4, 1908, with Adeline Young as postmaster. It was first located on Kelly Fork, about three miles upstream from Cordia, and was named for Adeline Young’s father, Alexander “Elic” Young. Later, the office was moved about half a mile along Youngs Fork before it finally closed in 1934.
That naming pattern fits the way many small Appalachian post offices were created. A federal post office might be named for a local family member, a creek, a landowner, a mill, a church, or a practical landmark. In Elic’s case, the name appears to preserve a family memory as well as a mail route. The post office did not make Elic a town in the incorporated sense, but it gave the neighborhood a public name that could appear in records.
Coal Under the Creek
One of the best primary sources for Elic is James M. Hodge’s 1918 Kentucky Geological Survey report, Coals of the North Fork of Kentucky River in Perry and Portions of Breathitt and Knott Counties. The report was based on field work in the North Fork Kentucky River region and nearby tributary country between 1912 and 1915.
Hodge’s report places Elic directly in the coal geography of the area. It notes coal below Elic P.O., near the junction of Youngs Fork and Kelly Fork, and describes the Fire Clay coal at Elic at an altitude of about 1,050 feet, roughly ten feet below the creek. That one passage is especially valuable because it ties the post office name, the forks, the creek level, and the coal seam into the same historical snapshot.
The report also shows how closely local coal information depended on family land. On Youngs Fork, Hodge described Buck Branch and an opening on land associated with Mansard Young. Farther upstream, he described an entry on land connected to Reese Young and another location on John Young’s land. On Elk Lick Fork, he noted coal at William Young’s place. On Kelly Fork, he described coal at Thomas Kelly’s and a mine opening associated with Benjamin Everidge.
These details do not describe an industrial coal camp with a company town layout. Instead, they show a rural coal landscape where mineral seams, creek branches, family land, and small openings were all linked. Elic’s history, at least in the surviving record, belongs to that earlier pattern of small-scale local geography before the name faded from everyday public use.
Families Along the Forks
The names connected to Elic’s source trail include Young, Kelly or Kelley, Everidge or Everage, Ritchie, Boggs, Combs, and Mullins. Some of those names appear through the post office story. Others appear in Hodge’s coal report, church minutes, or death-record transcriptions. Together, they suggest a community held together by creek geography, family networks, churches, and mail routes rather than by a courthouse-style town center.
The Young family is especially central. The post office name itself appears to come from Alexander “Elic” Young, through Adeline Young’s role as the first postmaster. Hodge’s coal descriptions then place several Young men or Young landholdings along Youngs Fork, Buck Branch, and Elk Lick Fork. That does not mean every Young reference belonged to one household, but it does show why the fork carried the family name and why Elic’s story cannot be separated from the Youngs Fork settlement pattern.
The Kelly or Kelley name also mattered. Kelly Fork was one of the two main geographic markers for Elic, and Hodge recorded coal at Thomas Kelly’s about a mile up Kelly Fork. Later church and death-record evidence also keeps the Kelley name tied to Elic addresses.
Elic in Old Regular Baptist Records
Church minutes add another layer to Elic’s history. The Indian Bottom Association of Old Regular Baptists recorded ministers, church clerks, delegates, and addresses across eastern Kentucky. These minutes show Elic functioning as a recognizable postal and community address within the religious life of the region.
In the 1916 Indian Bottom Association minutes, Elic appears in the statistical table of church clerks and post office addresses. E. W. Ritchie of Clear Creek was listed with an Elic, Kentucky address, and R. B. Young of Little Dove was also listed at Elic.
The 1919 minutes list Silas Boggs of Elic, Kentucky among ordained ministers. By 1931, the association minutes still show Elic in use. David Kelley of Elic was listed among ordained ministers, and J. D. Kelly of Elic was listed as the clerk for Liberty Bell.
Those entries matter because they show that Elic was more than a post office record on paper. It was an address used by ministers and church officers. For a mountain community, that kind of evidence is important. Churches carried news, kinship, authority, and memory. If the name Elic appeared in church minutes, it was a name people expected others to recognize.
Elic in Vital Records
Vital records give another view of the community. Transcribed Kentucky death certificates in the Knott County KYGenWeb source trail include several references to Elic as a place of death, address, informant location, or related community marker. These transcriptions should always be checked against original certificate images when possible, but they are useful research leads.
One transcription for Josephine Kelley gives her place of death in Lotts Creek, Elic, Knott County, Kentucky, in 1928. Another stillbirth record names Mark Ritchie of Elic as informant. A 1921 death certificate transcription for Michel Kelley lists David Kelley of Elic as informant.
These records help show how Elic remained in use during the same general period as the post office. They also point researchers toward families and neighborhoods that may be found in census schedules, cemetery records, land records, and church rolls.
How Elic Faded
Elic did not disappear because of one dramatic event. It faded the way many small Appalachian place names faded. When the post office closed in 1934, the name lost one of its most important official uses. Roads changed. Mail routes changed. Families moved, married into other communities, or began using nearby post offices and town names. A place that once appeared naturally in church minutes and death certificates could become a historical name known mostly through maps, records, and older family memory.
Still, Elic did not vanish completely. It remains attached to the geography of Youngs Fork and Kelly Fork. It survives in postal indexes, geological reports, church minutes, vital-record transcriptions, and modern USGS water data. The evidence is scattered, but the pieces fit together.
Why Elic Matters
Elic matters because it represents a kind of Appalachian history that is easy to overlook. It was not a county seat. It was not a famous coal camp. It was not the site of a well-known battle or disaster. Yet it was a real place in the lives of people who received mail there, preached from there, reported deaths from there, opened coal seams there, and described their homes by the forks and branches around it.
The history of Elic is the history of a community built around water, land, family names, churches, coal seams, and the federal mail. It shows how a small Knott County place could enter the record through practical needs rather than grand events. To recover Elic is to remember that Appalachian history often lives in the margins of official records, waiting for someone to connect the post office name, the creek fork, the church minute, and the family name back into one story.
Sources & Further Reading
Rennick, Robert M. “Knott County: Post Offices.” County Histories of Kentucky 237. Morehead State University ScholarWorks, 2000. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/237/
Hodge, James M. Coals of the North Fork of Kentucky River in Perry and Portions of Breathitt and Knott Counties. Frankfort, KY: State Journal Company, 1918. https://archive.org/details/coalsofnorthfork00hodgrich
Forte, Jim. “Knott County, Kentucky Post Offices.” Jim Forte Postal History. https://www.postalhistory.com/postoffices.asp?county=Knott&state=KY
National Archives. “Post Office Reports of Site Locations, 1837–1950.” National Archives. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/locations-1837-1950.html
National Archives. “Records of the Post Office Department.” Record Group 28. National Archives. https://www.archives.gov/research/guide-fed-records/groups/028.html
United States Postal Service. “Postmaster Finder.” USPS: Postal History. https://about.usps.com/who/profile/history/postmaster-finder/
United States Postal Service. “Post Offices by County.” Postmaster Finder. https://about.usps.com/who/profile/history/postmaster-finder/post-offices-by-county.htm
United States Postal Service. “Post Offices by Discontinued Date.” Postmaster Finder. https://about.usps.com/who/profile/history/postmaster-finder/post-offices-by-disc-date.htm
Marshall, R. B. Results of Spirit Leveling in Kentucky, 1898 to 1913, Inclusive. U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 554. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1914. https://doi.org/10.3133/b554
United States Geological Survey. “Historical Topographic Maps: Preserving the Past.” USGS National Geospatial Program. https://www.usgs.gov/programs/national-geospatial-program/historical-topographic-maps-preserving-past
United States Geological Survey. “Historical Topographic Map Explorer.” ArcGIS Living Atlas. https://livingatlas.arcgis.com/topomapexplorer/
University of Texas Libraries. “Kentucky Historical Topographic Maps.” Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection. https://maps.lib.utexas.edu/maps/topo/kentucky/
United States Geological Survey. “Youngs Fork of Lotts C Above Kelly Fork at Elic.” USGS Water Data for the Nation. https://waterdata.usgs.gov/monitoring-location/371606083040401/
TopoZone. “Elic, Knott County, Kentucky.” TopoZone. https://www.topozone.com/kentucky/knott-ky/locale/elic/
Indian Bottom Association of Old Regular Baptists. Minutes of the Indian Bottom Association of Old Regular Baptists, 1916. https://oldregularbaptist.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/1916.pdf
Indian Bottom Association of Old Regular Baptists. Minutes of the Indian Bottom Association of Old Regular Baptists, 1919. https://oldregularbaptist.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/1919.pdf
Indian Bottom Association of Old Regular Baptists. Minutes of the Indian Bottom Association of Old Regular Baptists, 1931. https://oldregularbaptist.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/1931.pdf
FamilySearch. “Minutes of the Indian Bottom Association, Regular Baptists of Jesus Christ.” FamilySearch Catalog. https://www.familysearch.org/en/search/catalog/172353
KYGenWeb. “Knott County Cities & Towns.” Knott County KYGenWeb. https://kygenweb.net/knott/area/cities-towns.htm
KYGenWeb. “Knott County.” Knott County KYGenWeb. https://kygenweb.net/knott/
KYGenWeb. “Knott County Research Sites.” Knott County KYGenWeb. https://kygenweb.net/knott/resources/researchsites.htm
KYGenWeb. “Death Certificate: Josephine Kelley.” Knott County KYGenWeb. https://kygenweb.net/knott/records/death_certificates/k_death_certificates/kelley_josephine.htm
FamilySearch. “Knott County, Kentucky Genealogy.” FamilySearch Wiki. https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Knott_County%2C_Kentucky_Genealogy
USGenWeb Archives. “Knott County, Kentucky Archives.” USGenWeb Archives. https://usgwarchives.net/ky/knott/toc.html
Author Note: Elic is the kind of Knott County place that reminds me how much Appalachian history survives in old post office names, creek forks, family names, and church minutes. I wanted to preserve it because even a small community with scattered records can tell us a lot about how people lived, worked, worshiped, and remembered home.