Appalachian Community Histories – Steele, Pike County: A Post Office Community on Feds Creek
Steele is one of those Pike County communities that does not announce itself with a thick town history, a long run of newspaper headlines, or a famous coal company name. It sits more quietly in the records, appearing through a post office, a road, a school, a cemetery, a family line, and the older geography of Feds Creek. To understand Steele, the best approach is not to look for one single story. It is to follow the documents that small Appalachian communities left behind.
Federal geographic sources identify Steele as an unincorporated community in Pike County, Kentucky. Modern postal listings place the Steele Post Office on Feds Creek Road, and older summaries of postal history give the opening of the Steele post office as February 5, 1906. That date matters because many rural communities in eastern Kentucky became visible to the wider world first through the mail. A post office gave a scattered settlement a name that could be printed on letters, maps, routes, appointment records, and government lists.
The name Steele may appear small on the map, but the community belongs to a much older pattern of life in Pike County. Families settled in creek valleys, farmed bottomland where they could find it, cut timber, walked or rode to schools and churches, buried their dead on family ground, and later lived in the shadow of the coal industry that transformed the county around them. Steele’s history is therefore not just the history of one post office. It is part of the story of Feds Creek, Motley Fork, Steele Fork, and the families who made homes in that rugged corner of eastern Kentucky.
Feds Creek and the Shape of the Land
Pike County is Kentucky’s largest county by land area and lies in the Eastern Coal Field. Its hills, forks, narrow creek bottoms, and steep ridges shaped nearly every part of local life. Roads followed water. Schools and churches stood where families could gather. Cemeteries rested on family land. Post offices often appeared at stores, homes, or crossroads where a local resident could handle the mail.
Steele belongs to that landscape. The Kentucky Geological Survey’s Pike County mapping marks “Steele Post Office” among the county’s named places. That may seem like a small label, but for a place with a thin published history, an official map reference is important. It confirms that Steele was not simply a family surname or a vague local memory. It was a recognized place tied to a postal location and the surrounding terrain.
The larger neighborhood is best understood through Feds Creek. Historical and genealogical sources repeatedly connect Steele with Feds Creek, Motley Fork, nearby family settlements, and the surrounding forks and branches. In eastern Kentucky, these water names often carried more meaning than formal town names. A person might say they lived on a fork, at the head of a creek, near a school, or close to a family cemetery. Steele fits that pattern.
The Steele Post Office
The strongest direct public record trail for Steele begins with the post office. Small Appalachian communities often entered federal records through the Post Office Department before they appeared in county histories. A post office meant mail routes, postmaster appointments, route maps, postal directories, and, later, ZIP Code records.
The current Steele Post Office is listed at 2308 Feds Creek Road, Steele, Kentucky, 41566. Older postal summaries give February 5, 1906 as the establishment date. To fully document the post office, the best primary sources are the United States Postal Service Postmaster Finder and National Archives postmaster appointment records. For offices before 1971, the National Archives microfilm series M841, Record of Appointment of Postmasters, 1832 to September 30, 1971, is the key source. These appointment records can identify who served as postmaster, when appointments changed, and sometimes how the office shifted through time.
For a place like Steele, those postmasters may be among the most important named public figures in the record. A rural postmaster was often more than a mail clerk. The postmaster might be a storekeeper, landowner, farmer, teacher, or respected community member. In many Appalachian settlements, the post office served as a center of news, business, and identity.
Postal route maps are another valuable source. Nineteenth and early twentieth century post route maps can show post offices, mail routes, route distances, and service frequency. If Steele appears on these maps, it would help show how the community was connected to Pikeville, Feds Creek, Phelps, and other nearby settlements. For Steele, the mail route may be one of the clearest ways to reconstruct how people moved through the area before modern roads made travel easier.
Families Near Steele
The strongest digitized local-history lead for Steele appears in Pike County, Kentucky 1822-1977: Historical Papers Number Three, published by the Pike County Historical Society. In the section on the William and Pricey Bishop Hunt family, the authors trace William Hunt back to George and Celia Breeding Hunt. The entry states that George Hunt was born about 1808, Celia Breeding about 1812, and that they married in Pike County on April 2, 1826. It then points to the 1850 census of Pike County and says that George and Celia “resided near Steele, Kentucky.”
That small phrase is one of the most important known local-history references to Steele. It places a family near Steele long before the commonly repeated 1906 post office date. It also suggests that Steele as a place-name, family neighborhood, or local landmark may have had older roots than the federal post office record alone can show.
The same Hunt family entry connects later descendants to the Feds Creek community. James Martin Hunt, born January 18, 1858 in Pike County, married Sarah Jane Justice in 1877. The Historical Papers state that James Martin and Sarah Jane lived in the Feds Creek community for most of their married life. This matters because it ties the Steele-area Hunt reference to the broader Feds Creek settlement pattern.
To go further, a researcher would need to compare the 1850 census with Pike County deed books, tax lists, marriage bonds, probate records, and cemetery inventories. The goal would be to place families on specific forks, trace land ownership, and determine whether the Steele name came from a family, a postmaster, a landholder, or another local association.
Motley Fork and the Neighboring Settlement World
Pike County, Kentucky Historical Papers Number Four helps fill in the nearby settlement world. Its section on the Millers of Feds Creek states that Eli Jackson Miller and Rachel South Miller came to Pike County shortly before June 1860, probably early that spring, and settled on Motley’s Fork of Feds Creek. There they built a log house with the help of neighbors, made furniture, cleared land, and planted corn, oats, beans, potatoes, and other vegetables.
That description is not specifically a Steele town history, but it is exactly the kind of nearby evidence that helps explain the community. Steele existed in a network of creek settlements where families arrived, built homes, cleared land, raised children, and depended on neighbors. The land was not easy, and the historical record often preserves these places only through family studies rather than formal town narratives.
Motley Fork, Feds Creek, and Steele should therefore be read together. The local history of one helps explain the others. When records mention Steele, Feds Creek, Motley Fork, or nearby families such as the Hunts, Millers, Rowes, Justices, Bishops, and others, they are often pointing to overlapping neighborhoods rather than separate towns with hard borders.
Coal Under the Hills
Steele’s local history also belongs to Pike County’s coal landscape. The United States Geological Survey’s 1937 report Coal Deposits of Pike County, Kentucky describes the county as a major part of the eastern Kentucky coal field. The report states that thirteen coal beds were being mined commercially in the county at the time and that about seventy five shipping mines, along with country banks, had operated there. It also noted that Pike County had produced more than 110 million tons of coal since 1909.
For the Steele area, the most useful coal references are not always named “Steele.” They appear through nearby creek and coal-bed names. The USGS report identifies the Bingham coal bed as also known as the Feds Creek coal bed. It says this bed was commonly three feet or more thick in the eastern part of Pike County, though it thinned westward and northward. Since Steele is tied geographically to Feds Creek, this coal-bed name is an important reminder that the land around Steele was part of a studied and mapped mineral landscape.
An earlier USGS report, Ralph W. Stone’s 1908 Coal Resources of the Russell Fork Basin in Kentucky and Virginia, is another useful source trail. It includes discussion of coal measurements and mapping in the Russell Fork basin and references coal sections at Steele Fork. This must be used carefully, since Steele Fork may refer to a drainage or nearby feature rather than the post office community itself. Still, it shows that the names around Steele were already attached to coal geology in the early twentieth century.
Coal changed Pike County, but not every settlement became a large company town. Some places remained road, creek, school, and post office communities that felt the coal economy indirectly through work, land sales, transportation, and family migration. Steele appears to have been one of those places whose history is best recovered through the records surrounding it rather than through a single company archive.
Jackson Rowe Elementary and Community Memory
Education offers another way to find Steele in the modern record. Jackson Rowe Elementary School was located at 3835 Feds Creek Road in Steele and served students from kindergarten through eighth grade before closing in 2005. PublicSchoolReview preserves a summary based on National Center for Education Statistics and Kentucky Department of Education data, listing the school with 260 students in its final reported period.
Schools like Jackson Rowe Elementary were central to rural Appalachian community life. They were places where children from different branches and hollows met, where families gathered for programs, where teachers became community figures, and where local identity passed from one generation to the next. Even when a school closes, its name remains a landmark in memory.
The name Jackson Rowe also points back toward the family networks of the area. Rowe families appear in Pike County genealogical sources connected to Feds Creek and neighboring communities. A school name can preserve the memory of a local family or individual long after younger generations no longer know the full story behind it.
Cemeteries and the Ground of Memory
For Steele, cemetery records are another essential source. Find a Grave lists a Steele Family Cemetery and a Ratliff-Steele Cemetery in Kentucky, but cemetery websites should be treated as leads rather than final proof. The stronger method is to compare gravestone photographs, Pike County cemetery inventories, funeral home records, death certificates, and local cemetery books.
Family cemeteries are among the most important archives in eastern Kentucky. They show where people lived, who married into which family lines, which surnames remained in a community, and how memory stayed tied to land. In a place like Steele, where published town history is thin, cemeteries may preserve the names of the people who made the place more clearly than newspapers do.
A full Steele history would need a cemetery survey that links graves to deeds, census households, church minutes, and school records. That kind of work could reveal whether Steele developed around a particular family cluster, a postal site, a road junction, or a combination of all three.
Why Steele Matters
Steele matters because it represents a kind of Appalachian place that is easy to overlook. It was not a county seat. It was not one of Pike County’s best-known coal camps. It does not have a famous feud story attached to its name. Yet it appears in the records in ways that are deeply familiar across eastern Kentucky.
It was a post office community. It was part of a creek settlement world. It was connected to Feds Creek and Motley Fork. It was surrounded by families whose names appear in census, marriage, cemetery, and local-history records. It stood in a county shaped by coal geology, steep land, and difficult travel. It had a school that served children from the surrounding area. It had cemeteries that kept family memory close to home.
The history of Steele is not a single dramatic event. It is the story of continuity. Families lived near the forks, sent and received mail, worked the land, entered the census, married into neighboring families, raised children, attended school, and buried their dead on Pike County hillsides. The records are scattered, but together they show a real community.
For Steele, the historian’s task is not simply to tell what is already known. It is to show readers where the history is hiding. The post office record, the Hunt family entry, the Feds Creek settlement accounts, the coal reports, the Kentucky Geological Survey map, Jackson Rowe Elementary records, cemetery inventories, and Pike County courthouse records all point toward the same conclusion. Steele’s story is there, but it has to be gathered creek by creek, name by name, and record by record.
Sources & Further Reading
United States Geological Survey. “Geographic Names Information System (GNIS).” U.S. Geological Survey. Accessed June 25, 2026. https://www.usgs.gov/tools/geographic-names-information-system-gnis
United States Geological Survey. “Download GNIS Data.” U.S. Geological Survey. Accessed June 25, 2026. https://www.usgs.gov/us-board-on-geographic-names/download-gnis-data
United States Postal Service. “Find USPS Locations: Steele Post Office.” United States Postal Service. Accessed June 25, 2026. https://tools.usps.com/locations/home.htm?location=1383485
United States Postal Service. “Postmaster Finder.” United States Postal Service. Accessed June 25, 2026. https://about.usps.com/who/profile/history/postmaster-finder/welcome.htm
United States Postal Service. “Additional Resources: Postal History.” United States Postal Service. Accessed June 25, 2026. https://about.usps.com/who/profile/history/research-sources.htm
National Archives and Records Administration. “Post Office Records.” National Archives. Accessed June 25, 2026. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices
National Archives and Records Administration. “Appointment of Postmasters, 1832 to September 30, 1971.” National Archives. Accessed June 25, 2026. 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. Accessed June 25, 2026. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/locations-1837-1950.html
United States Post Office Department. Post Route Map of the State of Kentucky. Washington, DC: United States Post Office Department, 1942. David Rumsey Map Collection. https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~357793~90124720:Post-Route-Map-of-the-State-of-Kent
Kentucky Geological Survey. Pike County Karst Areas. Lexington: University of Kentucky, Kentucky Geological Survey. Accessed June 25, 2026. https://kgs.uky.edu/kgsweb/download/gwatlas/gwcounty/pike/PIKEK.pdf
Alvord, Donald C. Geologic Map of the Pikeville Quadrangle, Pike and Floyd Counties, Kentucky. U.S. Geological Survey Geologic Quadrangle Map GQ-480. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1965. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/gq480
Stone, Ralph W. Coal Resources of the Russell Fork Basin in Kentucky and Virginia. U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 348. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1908. https://pubs.usgs.gov/bul/0348/report.pdf
Hunt, Charles B., Guy H. Briggs Jr., Arthur C. Munyan, and George R. Wesley. Coal Deposits of Pike County, Kentucky. U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 876. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1937. https://pubs.usgs.gov/bul/0876/report.pdf
Hunt, Charles B., Guy H. Briggs Jr., Arthur C. Munyan, and George R. Wesley. “Coal Deposits of Pike County, Kentucky.” U.S. Geological Survey Publications Warehouse. Accessed June 25, 2026. https://www.usgs.gov/publications/coal-deposits-pike-county-kentucky
Pike County Historical Society. Pike County 1822-1977: Historical Papers Number Three. Pikeville, KY: Pike County Historical Society, 1978. Revised ed., 1984. https://archive.org/details/pikecounty18221903robe
Pike County Historical Society. Pike County, Kentucky 1821-1980: Historical Papers Number Four. Pikeville, KY: Pike County Historical Society, 1980. Revised ed., 1984. https://archive.org/details/pikecountykentuc04maye
Pike County Historical Society. Pike County, Kentucky 1821-1987: Historical Papers Number Six. Pikeville, KY: Pike County Historical Society, 1987. https://archive.org/details/pikecountykentuc06maye
Pike County Historical Society. 150 Years in Pike County, Kentucky, 1822-1972. Pikeville, KY: Pike County Historical Society, 1972. https://archive.org/details/150yearspikecoun01pike
Pike County Historical Society. “Pike County Historical Society.” Accessed June 25, 2026. https://pikecountykyhistoricalsociety.com/
Rennick, Robert M. “Pike County: Place Names.” Robert M. Rennick Manuscript Collection. Morehead State University, 2016. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_ms_collection/125/
Rennick, Robert M. “Pike County: Place Names.” County Histories of Kentucky. Morehead State University, 1990. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/281/
Morehead State University. “Robert M. Rennick Kentucky Place Name Collection.” ScholarWorks at Morehead State University. Accessed June 25, 2026. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/robert_rennick_collection/
Kentucky Atlas and Gazetteer. “Pike County, Kentucky.” Accessed June 25, 2026. https://www.kyatlas.com/21195.html
FamilySearch. “Pike County, Kentucky Genealogy.” FamilySearch Research Wiki. Accessed June 25, 2026. https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Pike_County%2C_Kentucky_Genealogy
FamilySearch. “Circuit Court Records of Pike County, 1860-1882.” FamilySearch Catalog. Accessed June 25, 2026. https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/438183
PublicSchoolReview. “Jackson Rowe Elementary School, Closed 2005.” Accessed June 25, 2026. https://www.publicschoolreview.com/jackson-rowe-elementary-school-profile
National Center for Education Statistics. “Feds Creek Elementary School.” Search for Public Schools. Accessed June 25, 2026. https://nces.ed.gov/ccd/schoolsearch/school_detail.asp?ID=210480002012
Find a Grave. “Steele Family Cemetery.” Accessed June 25, 2026. https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/2264287/steele-family-cemetery
Find a Grave. “Ratliff-Steele Cemetery.” Accessed June 25, 2026. https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/2434500/ratliff-steele-cemetery
LDsGenealogy. “Pike County, Kentucky Cemetery Records.” Accessed June 25, 2026. https://ldsgenealogy.com/KY/Pike-County-Cemetery-Records.htm
Pike County Public Library. “Genealogy Department.” Accessed June 25, 2026. https://informationplace.org/genealogy
Library of Congress. Lloyd’s Official Map of the State of Kentucky. New York: J. T. Lloyd, 1862. https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3950.rr002250/
Appalachian Regional Commission. “Appalachian Counties Served by ARC.” Accessed June 25, 2026. https://www.arc.gov/appalachian-counties-served-by-arc/
Author Note: Steele is the kind of Appalachian community that has to be rebuilt from scattered records rather than one long published history. I hope this article helps readers see how post offices, creek names, schools, cemeteries, and family papers can preserve the story of a mountain place.