Appalachian Community Histories – Blue Moon, Floyd County: The Post Office Named for a Bottle of Perfume
Blue Moon is one of those Floyd County names that can be easy to miss unless a person is already looking for it. It was never a large town, and it did not leave behind the kind of single town history that bigger Appalachian communities sometimes do. Its story survives in a different way. It appears in federal geographic records, old topographic maps, post office lists, local newspaper accounts, highway records, coal notices, and family cemetery references.
That kind of record trail is common in the mountains. A place could be known by a post office, a school, a church, a creek, a hollow, a store, or a road before it was ever known as a town. Blue Moon belonged to that world. It sat in Floyd County near Little Mud Creek and Trace Fork, along the road now known as KY 2030, in the country between Printer, Honaker, and Harold.
The name itself sounds almost too poetic for a postal entry. Yet the surviving tradition says the name came from something simple and personal: a bottle of perfume received at Christmas.
The Road Through Blue Moon
Modern state road records help place Blue Moon in the landscape. KY 2030 runs from KY 122 near Printer, through Blue Moon, and toward KY 1426 west of Harold. Transportation records identify the road with the Blue Moon name, which shows that the old community name did not disappear when the post office closed.
On the old Harold, Kentucky topographic quadrangle, Blue Moon appears in Floyd County among the branches, hills, and small settlements that filled the Little Mud Creek country. The map does not show a large town grid. Instead, it shows the kind of Appalachian settlement pattern that followed water, roads, hollows, and usable bottom land.
That is important to understanding Blue Moon. It was not a courthouse town or railroad city. It was a named place in the mountain road and creek system of Floyd County. People knew where it was because they knew the roads, the forks, the neighbors, the school, the post office, and the families buried nearby.
The Blue Moon Post Office
For many small Appalachian communities, the post office was the clearest sign that the place had an official identity. A post office could put a local name into federal ledgers, onto envelopes, into newspaper notices, and into the daily habits of the people who lived there.
Blue Moon’s post office history points to the 1930s. Floyd County post office lists compiled from postal records and Kentucky place name sources give Blue Moon an establishment date of December 1936 and a closing date in 1957. Those dates place the post office in a period when eastern Kentucky was still full of small rural mail centers. Many such offices served creek communities where travel to a larger town could take time, especially before improved roads made movement easier.
The National Archives postmaster appointment ledgers and post office site reports are the strongest primary sources for this part of the story. Appointment ledgers can confirm the post office dates and postmaster names. Site reports can sometimes do even more. They may describe the location of a post office by creek, road, nearby settlement, distance from another office, or the number of families served.
In a place like Blue Moon, those details matter. They can turn a name on a map into a real community with roads, households, routes, and neighbors.
The Name That Came From Christmas
The best known story about Blue Moon is its name origin. Robert M. Rennick’s Kentucky place name research, along with later Floyd County newspaper accounts, connects the name to Alex L. Meade and his daughter Alice. The tradition says that when the post office needed a name, Alice suggested Blue Moon after receiving Blue Moon perfume for Christmas.
That story has the quiet character of local history. There is no grand ceremony in it, no industrial charter, no battle, and no famous speech. A child received a bottle of perfume. A family remembered the name. A post office needed something to call itself. From that small household moment came a name that outlasted the post office.
Place names often survive because they are useful, but they endure because they become part of memory. Blue Moon is a good example. The perfume story may seem delicate beside the hard geography of Floyd County coal country, but that contrast is part of what makes the name memorable. In a landscape of creeks, hollows, mines, roads, and postmarks, Blue Moon carried a name that sounded almost like a song.
Alex L. Meade and the Local Record
Local accounts connect Alex L. Meade to the Blue Moon post office story. Meade is remembered in Floyd County records as a teacher and Blue Moon resident. That connection fits the naming tradition, since teachers were often among the people who helped small rural communities deal with forms, records, letters, and public business.
In mountain communities, a teacher could be more than someone who stood in a schoolroom. Teachers often served as record keepers, letter writers, community organizers, and trusted links to the outside world. If Meade was involved in the post office, that role would fit a wider Appalachian pattern. The school, the post office, and the road were all part of the same network that connected a creek community to the rest of the county.
The Meade story should still be checked against the original postal ledgers and newspaper pages for final details, but the tradition has been repeated often enough to make it central to Blue Moon’s memory.
Little Mud Creek, Trace Fork, and the Community Around the Name
Blue Moon was tied to the Little Mud Creek area, with Trace Fork appearing in several records connected to the community. These water names help define the place more accurately than a modern town boundary would. In Floyd County, as in much of Appalachia, creeks and forks often served as natural addresses.
A person might say they lived on Little Mud, on Trace Fork, near Printer, near Honaker, or at Blue Moon. Those descriptions overlapped. They were not contradictions. They reflected how people actually navigated the mountains.
The cemetery records connected to the Blue Moon area also show how family history preserves place names. A cemetery may hold a community name long after stores close, schools consolidate, and post offices disappear. In that sense, Blue Moon remains not only a map label, but a family landmark.
Coal Notices and the Later Landscape
By the late twentieth century, Blue Moon appeared in another kind of record: mining and legal notices. Floyd County newspaper notices from the 1980s and 1990s place proposed coal operations near Blue Moon, KY 2030, Little Mud Creek, and Trace Fork. These notices are dry on the page, but they are useful historical evidence. They show that Blue Moon remained a recognized point of reference in the local coal landscape.
The Kentucky Geological Survey’s mined out area mapping also places Blue Moon within the wider coal geography of Floyd County. The area around Blue Moon belonged to a county deeply shaped by coal seams, permits, roads, surface disturbance, underground workings, and reclamation notices.
That does not necessarily mean Blue Moon should be understood only as a coal camp. Its records point more clearly to a small post office community near a creek road. But coal surrounded the world in which Blue Moon existed. By the 1980s, the name could help locate mining activity just as it had once helped locate mail.
When the Post Office Closed
Blue Moon’s post office closed in 1957, but the name did not vanish. That is one of the important lessons of Appalachian geography. A federal office might close, but the community name could remain in road records, maps, cemetery references, family stories, and local speech.
Many small places in Floyd County followed a similar path. Their schools closed. Their post offices were discontinued. Their stores disappeared. Their populations shifted as roads improved, mines changed, and families moved. Still, the names remained.
Blue Moon survived because people kept using it. It was still useful for describing a place on KY 2030. It was still meaningful in local memory. It still appeared in official and semi official sources long after the mail stopped being sorted under that name.
Why Blue Moon Matters
Blue Moon matters because it shows how small Appalachian communities can be recovered from scattered records. There may not be a single book called the history of Blue Moon, but the history is still there. It is in the federal name file, the Harold quadrangle, post office records, Floyd County newspaper pages, Kentucky highway documents, coal maps, legal notices, and cemetery references.
The story is also a reminder that not every place begins with a boom. Some begin with a road, a creek, a post office, and a name. In Blue Moon’s case, the remembered name came from a Christmas gift and a little girl’s suggestion.
That is a small origin, but small origins are often the truest kind of local history. The name Blue Moon turned a rural Floyd County post office into something people could remember. Nearly seventy years after the post office closed, the name still marks a place in the mountains.
Sources & Further Reading
Rennick, Robert M. Kentucky Place Names. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984.
Rennick, Robert M. “Floyd County: Place Names.” Robert M. Rennick Manuscript Collection. Morehead State University, 2016. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_ms_collection/63/
Morehead State University. “Robert M. Rennick Kentucky Place Name Collection.” ScholarWorks at Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/robert_rennick_collection/
Morehead State University. “Robert M. Rennick Oral History Collection.” ScholarWorks at Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_oh_collection/
United States Geological Survey. “Geographic Names Information System.” U.S. Geological Survey. https://www.usgs.gov/tools/geographic-names-information-system-gnis
United States Geological Survey. “Download GNIS Data.” U.S. Geological Survey. https://www.usgs.gov/us-board-on-geographic-names/download-gnis-data
United States Geological Survey. Harold, Kentucky, 7.5-Minute Topographic Quadrangle. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1954. https://prd-tnm.s3.amazonaws.com/StagedProducts/Maps/HistoricalTopo/PDF/KY/24000/KY_Harold_708832_1954_24000_geo.pdf
United States Geological Survey. “Historical Topographic Maps: Preserving the Past.” U.S. Geological Survey. https://www.usgs.gov/programs/national-geospatial-program/historical-topographic-maps-preserving-past
National Archives. “Appointment of Postmasters, 1832–September 30, 1971.” National Archives. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/postmasters-1832-1971.html
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. Post Office Department Reports of Site Locations, 1837–1950. Microfilm Publication M1126. Washington, DC: National Archives, 1986. https://www.archives.gov/files/research/post-offices/m1126.pdf
National Archives. “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. Washington, DC: United States Postal Service. https://about.usps.com/who/profile/history/pdf/sources-of-historical-information.pdf
Traum, Carolyn, comp. “Floyd County Post Offices.” KYGenWeb: Floyd County, Kentucky. https://kygenweb.net/floyd/county/list-floyd-co-post-offices.html
Floyd County Historical and Genealogical Society. “Post Offices.” RootsWeb. https://sites.rootsweb.com/~kyfchgs/postoffice.html
The Floyd County Times. “Blue Moon Post Office” reference. November 23, 1994. https://fclib.org/Floyd%20County%20Times/The_Floyd_County_Times_1994/11-23-1994.pdf
The Floyd County Times. Mining notice mentioning Blue Moon, Floyd County, and Trace Fork. July 1, 1981. https://papers.fclib.org/Floyd%20County%20Times%20%28renamed%29/The_Floyd_County_Times_1981/July%2001%2C%201981.pdf
The Floyd County Times. Mining notice mentioning Blue Moon in Floyd County. April 6, 1983. https://fclib.org/Floyd%20County%20Times/The_Floyd_County_Times_1983/04-06-1983.pdf
The Floyd County Times. Mining notice mentioning Blue Moon in Floyd County. March 14, 1984. https://fclib.org/Floyd%20County%20Times/The_Floyd_County_Times_1984/03-14-1984.pdf
The Floyd County Times. Mining notice mentioning Blue Moon in Floyd County. June 12, 1985. https://fclib.org/Floyd%20County%20Times/The_Floyd_County_Times_1985/06-12-1985.pdf
Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. “Notice to Contractors.” July 29, 2016. https://transportation.ky.gov/Construction-Procurement/Publications/2016-07-29/NOTICE%20TO%20CONTRACTORS.pdf
Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. “162211 Item List: Printer-Blue Moon-Little Mud Creek Road, KY 2030.” https://transportation.ky.gov/Construction/Contract%20Items/162211items03092.html
Kentucky Geological Survey. Floyd County, Kentucky: Mined-Out Areas. Lexington: University of Kentucky. https://kgs.uky.edu/kgsweb/download/gwatlas/gwcounty/floyd/FLOYDMO.pdf
Kentucky Geological Survey. “Groundwater Resources of Floyd County, Kentucky: Topography.” University of Kentucky. https://www.uky.edu/KGS/water/library/gwatlas/Floyd/Topography.htm
Kentucky Geological Survey. Floyd County, Kentucky. Coal Atlas map series. Lexington: University of Kentucky. https://kgs.uky.edu/kgsweb/olops/pub/kgs/mc178_12.pdf
TopoZone. “Blue Moon Topo Map, Floyd County KY.” https://www.topozone.com/kentucky/floyd-ky/city/blue-moon/
HometownLocator. “Blue Moon, Floyd County, Kentucky Populated Place Profile.” https://kentucky.hometownlocator.com/ky/floyd/blue-moon.cfm
Find a Grave. “Parsons Cemetery, Blue Moon, Floyd County, Kentucky.” https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/2578077/parsons-cemetery
Author Note: Appalachian places survive less through monuments than through postmarks, roads, creeks, cemeteries, and family stories. Blue Moon is one of those small Floyd County communities where a name on a map opens the door to a much larger mountain memory.