Appalachian Figures Series – The Story of Kelly Collins of Leslie, Kentucky
On November 25, 1927, the name Kelly Collins entered the federal postal record beside a small Leslie County place called Sizerock.
The surviving appointment trail is brief, but it matters. In the Leslie County postmaster transcription drawn from National Archives postal records, the line is simple: Sizerock, Kelly Collins, 25 Nov. 1927. Robert M. Rennick’s Leslie County post office and place-name research gives the same basic finding, stating that the future Sizerock post office was established by Kelly Collins on November 25, 1927.
For many Appalachian communities, that kind of entry is one of the clearest moments when a place stepped into the written record. A post office did not create the people, the creek roads, the families, or the older neighborhood ties that were already there, but it did give the community a recognized postal name. It put Sizerock into a federal system of routes, appointments, ledgers, maps, and public memory.
Kelly Collins’s life remains harder to recover than the post office Collins helped establish. The records now available do not yet give a full biography. They do not safely identify a birth date, a set of parents, a spouse, or a burial place. What they do show is that Collins stood at the beginning of Sizerock’s postal history, and that is enough to make the name worth preserving.
Leslie County and the World Around Sizerock
Leslie County was still a relatively young county when Sizerock entered the postal records. Kentucky created Leslie County in 1878 from parts of Clay, Harlan, and Perry counties and named it for Preston H. Leslie, who had served as governor of Kentucky. Hyden became the county seat, and the county’s official life formed around courthouse records, roads, creek settlements, schools, stores, churches, and mail routes.
By the 1920s, Leslie County’s mountain communities were tied together by a mixture of older footpaths, wagon roads, local stores, stream valleys, and expanding government systems. In a county where ridges and creeks shaped daily movement, a post office could become more than a place to pick up letters. It could mark where people gathered, where news arrived, where orders and notices passed through, and where a community name became stable enough to survive on maps.
Sizerock was one of those places. Later map and place-name sources identify it as an unincorporated community in Leslie County, northwest of Hyden, in the Hyden West topographic map area. Nearby names such as Bullskin help place it in the local geography of creek roads and mountain settlement. The place had a life before the postal record, but the 1927 establishment of the post office gave that life a clearer documentary trace.
Establishing the Sizerock Post Office
The main historical claim about Kelly Collins rests on postal evidence. The National Archives identifies the postmaster appointment ledgers as records that show post office establishment and discontinuance dates, name changes, postmaster names, and appointment dates. For Leslie County, the accessible transcription of those appointment records lists Kelly Collins at Sizerock on November 25, 1927.
That date is the anchor for Collins’s story. It does not tell us everything, but it tells us something important. It places Collins in connection with a recognized federal office in Leslie County at a precise moment. It also suggests that the community had reached the point where a named post office was useful, practical, and approved.
In many small Appalachian communities, post offices were often connected to local stores, residences, or other everyday gathering places. The appointment of a postmaster could reflect a person’s standing in the community, ability to manage mail, and location along a practical route. For Sizerock, the next layer of research would be the Post Office Department site-location reports. Those records may describe the office’s position in relation to nearby roads, streams, routes, and other post offices. They may not identify the exact building, but they can help rebuild the postal geography around Collins’s appointment.
Until those site-location reports are checked directly, the safest statement is that Kelly Collins was the first known postmaster named for Sizerock and that Collins is credited in Rennick’s work with establishing the office on November 25, 1927.
Why a Post Office Mattered
It is easy to overlook a postmaster appointment because the record is so short. A single name and date can look minor beside wars, elections, coal companies, disasters, and famous biographies. In a mountain county, however, a post office was often one of the institutions that made a community visible.
Mail connected families to relatives who had moved away. It brought newspapers, government notices, pension papers, business correspondence, catalog orders, school communication, church materials, and personal letters. It helped people in small settlements participate in wider county, state, and national life without leaving their home ground.
For Sizerock, the establishment of a post office meant the community name was no longer only local speech. It became part of a postal route system. It appeared in appointment ledgers. It could appear on maps, in bulletins, in post office directories, and eventually in photographs and later local references. The community could be found, sorted, routed, and remembered.
Kelly Collins’s role belongs in that story. Collins may not have been a famous officeholder, soldier, writer, or politician, but the act of establishing or first serving at a post office gave Sizerock a documentary beginning. In Appalachian local history, those beginnings matter.
The Problem of Identifying Kelly Collins
One difficulty in writing about Kelly Collins is that the name is not yet tied securely to a full life record. There are later records for people named Kelly Collins in or connected to Leslie County, but they should not be merged carelessly with the first Sizerock postmaster.
One especially important caution concerns a FamilySearch profile for a Kelly Collins of Leslie County born in 1914. If that birth date is correct, that person would have been only thirteen years old when the Sizerock appointment was made in 1927. That makes the profile a poor fit for the first postmaster unless other primary records prove the birth date is wrong or prove an unexpected connection. Without that proof, the responsible approach is to separate the postal figure from later genealogical assumptions.
The next records to check would be the 1930 federal census for Leslie County, Leslie County land and tax records, court order books, deed indexes, local newspapers, and any available postal personnel files. Those sources may identify where Collins lived, whether Collins owned land near Sizerock or Bullskin, whether the post office was associated with a store or residence, and whether Collins continued in postal service after the initial appointment.
For now, the article should preserve what the strongest records actually say. Kelly Collins is the name attached to the beginning of Sizerock’s post office. More personal details may exist, but they still need to be proven.
Sizerock After Collins
Sizerock’s later postal history continued beyond the first appointment. A Kentucky Historical Society photograph titled “Sizerock P.O. & Postmaster” shows a later post office scene with the caption “U.S. Post Office, Sizerock, Ky. & Postmaster – John Barnes.” That photograph is not evidence for Kelly Collins, but it is valuable because it shows that Sizerock’s postal identity continued into later community memory.
The photograph also helps explain why Collins’s brief appearance in the records matters. The 1927 appointment was not just an isolated name. It was the first known entry in a longer local story. Later postmasters, later mail service, and later community references all stood on the foundation of a postal name that had been formally established in the late 1920s.
In that sense, Kelly Collins belongs to the hidden layer of Appalachian history. These are the people who appear in ledgers, plats, route records, court books, and census pages rather than in monuments. Their lives may be hard to reconstruct, but their work shaped how communities functioned.
Remembering Kelly Collins
Kelly Collins’s known story is short, but it is not empty. On November 25, 1927, Collins became the name connected with Sizerock’s entrance into the postal record. That appointment linked a Leslie County community to a broader system of mail, maps, routes, and public documentation.
For Sizerock, the post office was a marker of local identity. For Collins, it was a role that left a trace when many other parts of daily life did not. For historians, genealogists, and descendants of Leslie County families, that trace is worth following.
The next discovery may be waiting in a site-location report, a deed book, a census page, an old newspaper column, or a family memory. Until then, the record gives us a careful but meaningful conclusion. Kelly Collins was the first known postmaster of Sizerock, Leslie County, Kentucky, and one of the people who helped fix that mountain community’s name in the records.
Sources & Further Reading
National Archives and Records Administration. “Appointment of Postmasters, 1832 to September 30, 1971.” National Archives. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/postmasters-1832-1971.html
National Archives and Records Administration. “Post Office Reports of Site Locations, 1837 to 1950.” National Archives. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/locations-1837-1950.html
National Archives and Records Administration. “Post Office Records.” National Archives. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices
United States Postal Service. “Sources of Historical Information on Post Offices, Postal Employees, Mail Routes, and Mail Contractors.” USPS Historian. https://about.usps.com/who/profile/history/pdf/sources-of-historical-information.pdf
United States Postal Service. “Postmaster Finder.” USPS Historian. https://about.usps.com/who/profile/history/postmaster-finder/
United States Postal Service. “Postmasters by City.” USPS Historian. https://about.usps.com/who/profile/history/postmaster-finder/postmasters-by-city.htm
United States Postal Service. “Postmasters by Where Served.” USPS Historian. https://about.usps.com/who/profile/history/postmaster-finder/postmasters-by-served.htm
Genealogy Trails. “Postmasters, Leslie County Kentucky.” Genealogy Trails History Group. https://genealogytrails.com/ken/leslie/Postmasters.html
Rennick, Robert M. “Leslie County: Post Offices and Place Names.” Morehead State University ScholarWorks, County Histories of Kentucky. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/context/kentucky_county_histories/article/1243/viewcontent/Leslie_PostOffices.pdf
Works Progress Administration and Historical Records Survey. “Leslie County.” County Histories of Kentucky 18. Morehead State University ScholarWorks, 1936. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/18/
Works Progress Administration and Historical Records Survey. “Leslie County: General History.” County Histories of Kentucky 240. Morehead State University ScholarWorks, 1939. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/240/
Works Progress Administration. “Leslie County: Folklore.” County Histories of Kentucky 348. Morehead State University ScholarWorks, 1939. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/348/
Morehead State University. “County Histories of Kentucky.” Morehead State University ScholarWorks. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/
Kentucky Historical Society. “Leslie County.” Historical Marker Number 213. https://history.ky.gov/markers/leslie-county
Kentucky Historical Society. “Sizerock P.O. & Postmaster.” Kentucky Historical Society Digital Collections. https://www.kyhistory.com/digital/collection/PH/id/12690/
United States Geological Survey. “Geographic Names Information System.” USGS. https://www.usgs.gov/tools/geographic-names-information-system-gnis
United States Geological Survey. “TopoView.” National Geologic Map Database. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/topoview/
FamilySearch. “Leslie County, Kentucky Genealogy.” FamilySearch Research Wiki. https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Leslie_County%2C_Kentucky_Genealogy
FamilySearch. “Order Books, 1873 to 1956.” FamilySearch Catalog. https://www.familysearch.org/en/search/catalog/34396
FamilySearch. “Deeds, 1879 to 1916; Indexes, 1879 to 1931.” FamilySearch Catalog. https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/42637
FamilySearch. “Records of Land Sold for Taxes, 1877 to 1927.” FamilySearch Catalog. https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/674593
FamilySearch. “Sheriff’s Report of Land Sold for Taxes, 1895 to 1935.” FamilySearch Catalog. https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/788317
FamilySearch. “United States, Census, 1930.” FamilySearch Historical Records. https://www.familysearch.org/en/search/collection/1810731
National Archives and Records Administration. “1930 Federal Population Census.” National Archives. https://www.archives.gov/research/census/1930
Internet Archive. “15th Census, Population, 1930, Kentucky, Reel 765.” Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/kentuckycensus00reel765
WorldCat. “The Leslie County News.” WorldCat. https://search.worldcat.org/title/The-Leslie-County-news/oclc/15057002
University of Kentucky Libraries. “Kentucky Newspapers.” Research Guides. https://libguides.uky.edu/newspapers/kentucky
University of Kentucky Libraries. “Newspapers and Microforms.” UK Libraries. https://libraries.uky.edu/find-borrow/find-library-materials/find-materials-type/newspapers-microforms
FamilySearch. “Kelly Collins, 1914 to 1998.” FamilySearch Family Tree. Use cautiously because the birth year appears too late for the 1927 postmaster appointment. https://ancestors.familysearch.org/en/L1JT-FS3/kelly-collins-1914-1998
Stidham, Sadie Wells. Trails Into Cutshin Country: A History of the Pioneers of Leslie County, Kentucky. Viper, KY: Graphic Arts Press, 1978. https://search.worldcat.org/
Brewer, Mary Taylor. Rugged Trail to Appalachia: A History of Leslie County, Kentucky and Its People, Celebrating Its Centennial Year, 1878 to 1978. Wooton, KY: Mary Taylor Brewer, 1978. https://search.worldcat.org/
Author Note: Kelly Collins’s record is short, but it shows how much Appalachian history survives in small government entries, postal ledgers, and county place-name work. I wanted to preserve this Leslie County story carefully because a single post office appointment can be the paper trail that keeps a mountain community’s name alive.