Appalachian Community Histories – Alphoretta, Floyd County: A Beaver Creek Coal Community Remembered in Maps, Mines, and Memory
In the records of Floyd County, the little community above Martin does not always keep the same spelling. The official form is Alphoretta, but newspapers, obituaries, family records, and local references often wrote it as Alpharetta. That small spelling difference has hidden the place from many searches, even though the community itself appears again and again in maps, surveys, mining records, cemetery listings, and old Floyd County newspapers.
Alphoretta was never a large incorporated town. It was one of those eastern Kentucky places whose history was written in post office names, creek forks, railroad stops, coal seams, country stores, family cemeteries, and newspaper notices. The official geographic record places Alphoretta in Floyd County at about 37.56306 north latitude and 82.76444 west longitude, with an elevation near 692 feet. On the ground, it belonged to the Beaver Creek world, close to Martin, Dinwood, and the older routes that followed water and coal.
At the Forks Above Martin
A local history source from Morehead State University describes Alpharetta as being “at the forks of Beaver Creek, about one mile above Martin, Kentucky.” That short description may be the best way to understand the old community. It was not defined by a courthouse square or a city limit. It was defined by the meeting of creeks, roads, houses, stores, and work.
Federal survey records make the location more exact. In the U.S. Geological Survey and Kentucky Transportation Cabinet control-data sheets for the Prestonsburg quadrangle, one benchmark was described as being one half mile north of Alphoretta, at the west abutment of a steel highway bridge over Right Fork Beaver Creek, at the store of T. J. Craft & Co. The description is plain, but it gives a living picture of the place. There was a highway bridge. There was the Right Fork of Beaver Creek. There was a store close enough to be used as a landmark by federal surveyors.
That is how many Appalachian communities entered the record. A store became a fixed point. A bridge became a marker. A post office name told travelers where they were. A creek fork placed the settlement in the memory of everyone who lived up and down the valley.
The Post Office and the Store
One Floyd County Historical Society summary of an 1883 or 1884 gazetteer describes Alphoretta as a rural post office with about twenty citizens and a general store owned by S. P. Dingus and C. T. Flanery. The original gazetteer should still be checked before using the wording as a direct quotation, but the information fits the pattern of Alphoretta’s early documentary life.
A post office did not have to serve a large town. In the mountains, it could mark a scattered settlement, a store, a cluster of farms, or a small coal and creek community. The names Dingus and Flanery also connect Alphoretta to family networks that appear in later cemetery and genealogical records. The Samuel P. Dingus Cemetery at Alphoretta preserves one of those names on the land itself.
In a place like Alphoretta, the store was more than a place to buy goods. It was where mail might be handled, debts recorded, news exchanged, and neighbors met. Before paved roads and easy travel, such stores helped hold a creek community together.
Coal Beneath the Hills
Alphoretta sat in the Eastern Kentucky Coal Field, where the mountains are made from layers of sandstone, shale, and coal. Kentucky Geological Survey maps of Floyd County place the area among the Breathitt rocks and show mined-out areas across the county. One KGS map labels the place as “Alphoretta (Dinwood Station),” a useful clue that Alphoretta’s local identity overlapped with the nearby Dinwood railroad or station identity.
The coal record also gives Alphoretta a place in the industrial history of Floyd County. The Kentucky Department of Mines report for 1925 includes a Floyd County mine listing tied to Alphoretta and “Mine No. 1.” That does not tell the whole story by itself, but it shows that Alphoretta was not only a creek settlement or post office name. It was part of the coal geography that shaped Floyd County in the early twentieth century.
Coal towns in Floyd County often grew around a seam, a company, a tipple, a station, or a road junction. Some became well-known places. Others stayed small and faded into neighboring towns on modern maps. Alphoretta appears to have belonged to the second group. It remained important enough to show up in surveys, newspapers, mine notices, and family records, but not large enough to become a city with a lasting municipal government.
In the Floyd County Times
The Floyd County Times is one of the best places to follow Alphoretta through the middle decades of the twentieth century. Searching both Alphoretta and Alpharetta is necessary because the newspaper used both forms.
The name appears in personal notices, political announcements, birthplaces, addresses, service lists, obituaries, and mining-related public notices. In 1940, the paper mentioned a person born at Alpharetta. In the early 1940s, candidate notices and political references used Alpharetta addresses. In 1945 and 1946, the name appeared in service and local lists. Later references in the 1950s and 1960s kept it alive in obituaries, burial notices, and birthplace statements.
These small notices matter. They show Alphoretta not as a lost name on a map, but as a community people used to identify themselves. A person might be born there, live there, be buried there, run for local office from there, or be remembered there after moving away.
The newspaper record continued into the late twentieth century. A 1981 Floyd County Times article on a mine-explosion hearing mentioned Alphoretta, and a 1984 public notice referred to the May Coal Company at Alpharetta. By then, many small coal-place names across Floyd County were already being folded into larger postal and town identities, but the old name still had legal, mining, and local meaning.
Alphoretta, Now Martin
One of the clearest modern clues to the fading of the place name comes from a later obituary for Virgil David Reffett, which says he was born in “Alpharetta, now Martin.” That phrase tells the story in only a few words. Alphoretta did not necessarily vanish from memory, but in daily use it became attached to Martin, Dinwood, and the larger Beaver Creek area.
This happened to many Appalachian places. A community could have a post office, a store, and a name in the newspaper, then gradually lose that name as roads changed, post offices closed, mines shut down, or younger generations identified with the nearest larger town. What remained were cemetery names, birthplaces in obituaries, old survey notes, and the memories of families who still knew which hollow or bend in the creek was meant.
Other modern obituaries preserve the name as Alpharetta or Alphoretta. Those later records are not always primary proof of nineteenth-century settlement, but they are useful evidence of memory. They show that people continued to carry the name with them even after the community no longer appeared clearly on every modern map.
Cemeteries and Family Memory
Cemetery records give Alphoretta another kind of permanence. Find a Grave lists three cemeteries under Alphoretta: Cole Cemetery #1, Prater Cemetery #3, and Samuel P. Dingus Cemetery. These should be checked against photographs, cemetery books, and local knowledge, but their presence supports the idea of Alphoretta as a family-based creek community rather than a simple map label.
In Appalachian history, cemeteries often outlast stores, schools, coal camps, and post offices. A bridge can be replaced. A mine can be sealed. A road can be rerouted. A name can disappear from the post office. But a cemetery keeps a community tied to a hillside. For Alphoretta, the cemeteries help connect the official place name to the people who lived and died there.
The Dingus name is especially important because it appears in the early gazetteer lead and in cemetery records. The Flanery name also appears in family records connected to Alphoretta. Together, these names suggest that the community’s story should be researched not only through coal records, but also through deed books, marriage records, birth records, death certificates, and cemetery surveys.
Records Still Worth Searching
Alphoretta’s history is not complete from the sources available online. The strongest next step would be a careful search of Floyd County deed records, PVA parcel history, old post office records, and original Kentucky vital records. The Floyd County Clerk’s office notes that the county’s first courthouse burned in 1808 and destroyed the earliest records, but later land and court records remain essential for tracing ownership and settlement.
The original 1883 or 1884 gazetteer should also be located and checked. If it does list Alphoretta as a rural post office with a store, that would be one of the best early printed descriptions of the community. The Kentucky Department of Mines annual reports should be searched year by year to identify the company behind the mine listing and to see whether Alphoretta appears in production, accident, inspection, or employment records.
The Floyd County Times should be searched page by page because OCR errors can hide the name. “Alphoretta,” “Alpharetta,” “Dinwood,” “Right Fork Beaver,” “T. J. Craft,” “Dingus,” “Flanery,” and “May Coal Company” are all useful search terms. Page images should be checked before quoting any newspaper line.
Why Alphoretta Matters
Alphoretta matters because it represents a kind of Appalachian place that is easy to miss. It was not a county seat, not a famous coal camp, and not a battlefield. Yet it sat in the middle of the forces that shaped Floyd County: water, roads, stores, post offices, family land, cemeteries, rail connections, and coal.
Its name appears in official geographic records, federal survey notes, mining reports, local newspapers, cemetery listings, and obituaries. That scattered paper trail is exactly how many small mountain communities survive in the historical record. Alphoretta’s story is not one of a vanished town so much as a name that became layered into the Beaver Creek and Martin area.
To find Alphoretta today, a researcher has to look in more than one place. It is in the surveyor’s note beside a bridge over Right Fork Beaver Creek. It is in the store name used as a landmark. It is in the old post office reference. It is in the mined hills mapped by the Kentucky Geological Survey. It is in the Floyd County Times, where people were born, ran for office, served, died, and were remembered. It is in the cemeteries where family names remain.
That is often how Appalachian history works. The smallest places leave the thinnest records, but those records are rarely silent. They wait in maps, deeds, newspapers, graves, and family memory until someone searches the name both ways.
Sources & Further Reading
U.S. Geological Survey. “Geographic Names Information System (GNIS): Alphoretta, Floyd County, Kentucky, Feature ID 485898.” U.S. Geological Survey. https://edits.nationalmap.gov/apps/gaz-domestic/public/search/names
Kentucky Office of Geographic Information. “Kentucky Geographic Names Information System (GNIS).” Kentucky Open Data Portal. https://opengisdata.ky.gov/datasets/ky-geographic-names-information-system-gnis
U.S. Geological Survey and Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. “Prestonsburg Quadrangle Control Data Sheets.” Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. https://transportation.ky.gov/Highway-Design/Kentucky%20USC%20and%20GS%20Control%20Data%20Sheets/BK%20114-PRESTONSBURG.pdf
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://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/b554
U.S. Geological Survey. Martin Quadrangle, Kentucky, Floyd County, 7.5 Minute Series. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1954. https://prd-tnm.s3.amazonaws.com/StagedProducts/Maps/HistoricalTopo/PDF/KY/24000/KY_Martin_709230_1954_24000_geo.pdf
Rice, Charles L. Geologic Map of the Martin Quadrangle, Floyd County, Kentucky. U.S. Geological Survey Geologic Quadrangle Map GQ-563. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1966. https://www.usgs.gov/publications/geologic-map-martin-quadrangle-floyd-county-kentucky
Kentucky Geological Survey. Floyd County, Kentucky. Lexington: University of Kentucky, Kentucky Geological Survey. https://kgs.uky.edu/kgsweb/olops/pub/kgs/mc178_12.pdf
Kentucky Geological Survey. Floyd County Geology and Groundwater Resources. Lexington: University of Kentucky, Kentucky Geological Survey. https://kgs.uky.edu/kgsweb/download/gwatlas/gwcounty/floyd/FLOYDGEO.pdf
Kentucky State Department of Mines. Annual Report of the State Department of Mines, 1925. Lexington: Kentucky Geological Survey. https://kgs.uky.edu/kgsweb/olops/pub/general/jonesminereport1925.pdf
Kentucky State Department of Mines. Annual Report of the State Department of Mines, 1924. Lexington: Kentucky Geological Survey. https://kgs.uky.edu/kgsweb/olops/pub/general/jonesminereport1924.pdf
Floyd County Clerk. “Floyd County KY Clerk.” Floyd County, Kentucky. https://floydcoclerkky.gov/
Floyd County Clerk. “Deeds.” Floyd County, Kentucky. https://floydcoclerkky.gov/deeds/
Floyd County Property Valuation Administrator. “Property Record Search.” Floyd County PVA. https://www.qpublic.net/ky/floyd/search.html
FamilySearch. “Floyd County, Kentucky Genealogy.” FamilySearch Research Wiki. https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Floyd_County%2C_Kentucky_Genealogy
Find a Grave. “Cemeteries in Alphoretta, Kentucky.” Find a Grave. https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery-browse/USA/Kentucky/Floyd-County/Alphoretta?id=city_49688
KYGenWeb. “Floyd County Cemeteries.” KYGenWeb Project. https://kygenweb.net/floyd/records/cemeteries/
KYGenWeb. “Dingus Cemetery, Floyd County, Kentucky.” USGenWeb Archives. https://files.usgwarchives.net/ky/floyd/cemeteries/dingus.txt
Floyd County Public Library. “Floyd County History Collection.” Floyd County Public Library. https://www.fclib.org/floyd-county-history-collection/
The Floyd County Times. “March 20, 1941.” Floyd County Public Library Newspaper Archive. https://papers.fclib.org/Floyd%20County%20Times%20%28renamed%29/The_Floyd_County_Times_1941/March%2020%2C%201941.pdf
The Floyd County Times. “December 16, 1981.” Floyd County Public Library Newspaper Archive. https://papers.fclib.org/Floyd%20County%20Times%20%28renamed%29/The_Floyd_County_Times_1981/December%2016%2C%201981.pdf
The Floyd County Times. “August 29, 1984.” Floyd County Public Library Newspaper Archive. https://fclib.org/Floyd%20County%20Times/The_Floyd_County_Times_1984/08-29-1984.pdf
Newspapers.com. “Floyd County Times Archives, 1930–2000.” Newspapers.com. https://www.newspapers.com/paper/floyd-county-times/5040/
Legacy.com. “Virgil Reffitt Obituary.” Legacy.com, December 21, 2015. https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/floydcountytimes/name/virgil-reffitt-obituary?id=18164964
Hall Funeral Home. “Colin Kelly Dingus Sr. (Kokie) Obituary.” Hall Funeral Home, August 23, 2025. https://www.hallfuneralservice.com/obituary/Colin-DingusSrKokie
Legacy.com. “Colin Dingus Obituary.” Legacy.com, August 23, 2025. https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/name/colin-dingus-obituary?id=59270965
Kentucky.gov. “Floyd County.” Commonwealth of Kentucky. https://kentucky.gov/government/Pages/AgencyProfile.aspx?Title=Floyd+County
Appalachian Regional Commission. “About the Appalachian Region.” Appalachian Regional Commission. https://www.arc.gov/about-the-appalachian-region/
Author Note: This article follows the scattered record trail of a small Floyd County place whose name survived in maps, mines, newspapers, cemeteries, and family memory. Readers with family photographs, deeds, cemetery knowledge, or stories from Alphoretta, Dinwood, or Martin are welcome to help add to the record.