Appalachian Community Histories – Atlanta, Laurel County: Post Office, Railroad Station, and Little Raccoon Memory
Atlanta, Kentucky is not the kind of place that announces itself with courthouse records, incorporation papers, or a long shelf of published histories. It belongs instead to the older Appalachian world of post offices, railroad stops, creek roads, family cemeteries, and local memory.
Robert M. Rennick’s Laurel County place-name work places Atlanta at Kentucky Route 30 near Moren Road, while his separate Laurel County post-office study ties the name to the Little Raccoon area. Modern map listings for the London, Kentucky quadrangle also preserve Atlanta and Atlanta Railroad Station as named places, putting the community in the same mapped landscape as East Bernstadt, Pittsburg, Greenmount, Raccoon Creek, Little Raccoon Creek, Moren Cemetery, Mount Carmel Cemetery, Watkins Branch, and the old Hazel Patch country.
That kind of evidence matters. In rural eastern Kentucky, many communities never became incorporated towns, but they still had names people used every day. A post office could give a place an identity. A railroad stop could put it on maps and timetables. A cemetery could hold the family names long after the store, depot, school, or mail route disappeared.
Laurel County Before Atlanta
Laurel County itself was created out of older frontier counties. The Laurel County Historical Society notes that the act creating the county was approved in December 1825 and took effect in February 1826, forming a new county from parts of Rockcastle, Clay, Knox, and Whitley counties. By 1830 the federal census counted 2,206 people in the new county. The same local history page preserves names from the 1826 tax list, showing the early family networks that shaped the county before railroads and later highways changed the region.
The Kentucky Atlas and Gazetteer places Laurel County in the Eastern Coal Field region of Kentucky and notes that the county’s elevation ranges from 723 to 1,760 feet above sea level. That terrain helps explain why roads, railroads, creek valleys, and ridge routes mattered so much. Communities like Atlanta were not random dots. They grew where families, mail, timber, coal, rail lines, and old roads met the land.
Before the railroad age, Laurel County was already tied to famous travel corridors. Boone Trace and the Wilderness Road passed through the wider county landscape, and later roads followed older paths, branches, and ridge lines. This older road geography is especially important for understanding the Raccoon and Little Raccoon area, because the same names appear again and again in maps, land records, post-office histories, and local tradition.
Little Raccoon and the Atlanta Post Office
The strongest Atlanta-specific clue comes from Rennick’s post-office research. His Laurel County post-office study says that Mrs. James Watkins opened her Little Raccoon post office, located two miles below or northeast of the Raccoon post office, under the name Atlanta. The source also indicates that the Atlanta name shifted through several vicinity sites, which fits the pattern of many small rural post offices that followed the postmaster, store, road junction, or settlement center rather than a fixed town square.
That may sound small, but in a rural Appalachian community a post office could be the center of public life. It was where letters arrived, newspapers circulated, pensions were handled, notices were exchanged, and neighbors learned what was happening beyond the ridge. In places without incorporation papers, the post office often became the closest thing to an official community record.
The National Archives explains that postmaster appointment records from 1832 to 1971 are arranged by state, county, and post office name. It also identifies site-location reports from 1837 to 1950, which can describe a post office’s location in relation to rivers, creeks, postal routes, railroad stations, other post offices, roads, and sometimes hand-drawn maps. For Atlanta, those records are likely the best primary sources for confirming the names of postmasters, the movement of the office, and its relationship to Little Raccoon, Raccoon, nearby roads, and railroad service.
The United States Postal Service Historian also notes that its historical resources can provide postmaster names, appointment dates, establishment and discontinuance dates, name changes, annual reports, official postal guides, postal bulletins, rural route cards, and other postal material. For a small place like Atlanta, that kind of evidence may say more than a standard county history ever could.
Atlanta and the Railroad
Atlanta’s map life was also tied to the railroad. The London, Kentucky USGS quadrangle listing includes both Atlanta and Atlanta Railroad Station among its named places. The same map listing includes nearby railroad-related names such as Feltners Railroad Station, Pittman Railroad Station, Pittsburg, East Bernstadt, and other communities along the Laurel County rail corridor.
The railroad transformed Laurel County after the Civil War. A regional history source notes that London did not see major development until after the Louisville and Nashville Railroad built through the town in 1882. Another railroad history source, quoting information from the Louisville and Nashville, states that the railroad was operating to London by July 1, 1882, and reached the Tennessee state line at Jellico in April 1883.
This does not mean Atlanta became a large rail town. It did not. But the presence of Atlanta Railroad Station suggests that the community had enough local function to appear in railroad and map records. It may have served nearby families, farms, timber interests, coal-related traffic, local freight, passengers, mail, or simply acted as a named point along the line. The exact nature of the station still needs railroad timetables, valuation maps, employee records, and local newspapers to fully document it.
Still, the railroad name helps explain why Atlanta survived in the record. Many communities that never became towns remained visible because trains, mail, or maps needed names for them.
Roads, Creeks, and the Boone Trace Country
Atlanta also belongs to a much older road landscape. Neal O. Hammon’s 1968 article “Boone’s Trace Through Laurel County,” published in The Filson Club Quarterly, explains how difficult it can be to locate the earliest routes through Laurel County because older farms disappeared, houses burned, land changed hands, and local memory shifted over time. Hammon used older descriptions, farm locations, and USGS quadrangle maps to reconstruct sections of Boone’s Trace through the county.
Hammon’s route passed from London toward Raccoon Creek, followed present Kentucky Route 638 for part of the way, moved toward Twin Branch, and then climbed and descended through the Little Raccoon Creek country. He described the road passing the old Dalton and Scoville places before descending to Little Raccoon Creek at the William Feltner farm. From there, he discussed an old road or trail across Kentucky Route 30 near the Feltner farm, with possible routes toward Mount Carmel Cemetery, Watkins Branch, Hazel Patch Creek, and Wood’s Blockhouse.
That does not prove Boone’s Trace ran through the exact later center of Atlanta. It does show something more useful. Atlanta stood in a landscape where older roads, Raccoon Creek, Little Raccoon Creek, Watkins Branch, Kentucky Route 30, Hazel Patch, and family farms were part of a long travel corridor. The community’s later post office and railroad station were built on top of an older geography of movement.
Families, Cemeteries, and What Remains
Small communities often survive through cemeteries long after stores and post offices disappear. LDS Genealogy’s Laurel County cemetery guide has a separate Atlanta Cemetery Records section and lists Cathers Cemetery there. Find a Grave identifies Cathers Cemetery, also known as Cathers-Black Cemetery, in Atlanta, Laurel County, Kentucky.
That cemetery connection is important because family burial grounds often mark the real social center of a rural place. Post-office names can change. Railroad stops can be removed. Roads can be rerouted. But cemeteries preserve names, dates, kinship, and memory in a way that maps alone cannot.
The names tied to Atlanta’s research trail include Watkins, Cathers, Moren, Feltner, and others that appear in post-office notes, cemetery records, maps, and old road descriptions. Future research in Laurel County deeds, tax lists, wills, probate records, marriage records, death certificates, school census records, and newspapers would likely bring Atlanta’s family history into clearer focus.
Why Atlanta Matters
Atlanta matters because it represents the kind of Appalachian place that can be easily overlooked. It was not London, East Bernstadt, Pittsburg, or Corbin. It was smaller than that. It was a post-office community, a railroad name, a road-and-creek settlement, and a cemetery place.
Yet that is exactly why it is worth preserving. Most Appalachian history did not happen only in county seats or company towns. It happened at places like Atlanta, where a few families used a post office, walked a road, buried their dead, boarded trains, farmed hillsides, worked timber or coal, and gave a name to the land around them.
To write Atlanta’s history is to look closely at the small print of Laurel County. It is to follow the post office from Little Raccoon, the railroad through the London quadrangle, the old road toward Raccoon Creek, and the cemeteries where family names remain. The evidence is scattered, but the story is still there.
Atlanta was not a forgotten place because it lacked history. It was forgotten because its history was written in the ordinary records of rural life.
Sources & Further Reading
Rennick, Robert M. “Laurel County – Post Offices.” County Histories of Kentucky. Morehead State University ScholarWorks, 2004. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/389/
Rennick, Robert M. “Laurel County.” County Histories of Kentucky. Morehead State University ScholarWorks, 2000. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1238&context=kentucky_county_histories
Morehead State University. “Robert M. Rennick Kentucky Place Name Collection.” ScholarWorks at Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/robert_rennick_collection/
National Archives. “Post Office Records.” National Archives. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices
National Archives. “Post Office Reports of Site Locations, 1837–1950.” National Archives. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/locations-1837-1950.html
United States Postal Service. “Additional Resources: Postal History.” USPS Historian. https://about.usps.com/who/profile/history/research-sources.htm
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
United States Geological Survey. “topoView.” National Geologic Map Database. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/topoview/
University of Texas Libraries. “Kentucky Historical Topographic Maps.” Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection. https://maps.lib.utexas.edu/maps/topo/kentucky/
Kentucky Geological Survey. “Generalized Geologic Map for Land-Use Planning: Laurel County, Kentucky.” University of Kentucky. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/kgs_mc/164/
Carey, Daniel I., and others. “Laurel County, Kentucky.” Kentucky Geological Survey. https://kgs.uky.edu/kgsweb/olops/pub/kgs/mc165_12.pdf
Kentucky Atlas and Gazetteer. “Laurel County, Kentucky.” Kentucky Atlas and Gazetteer. https://www.kyatlas.com/21125.html
Kentucky Historical Society. “Laurel County.” Kentucky Historical Marker Database. https://history.ky.gov/markers/laurel-county
Laurel County Historical Society. “Laurel County Historical Society.” https://www.laurelkyhistory.org/
Berea College Special Collections and Archives. “Laurel Co., Ky.” LJAC Digital Access. https://ljacatc.berea.edu/pawtucket/index.php/Detail/places/75
Hammon, Neal O. “Boone’s Trace Through Laurel County.” The Filson Club Quarterly 42, no. 2, April 1968. https://www.boonetrace1775.com/History/Neal-Hammon/68_FCQ_Laurel.pdf
Friends of Boone Trace. “Boone Trace Master Plan.” Boone Trace 1775. https://www.boonetrace1775.com/
Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. “Call No. 305, Contract ID 242032, Laurel County, East Bernstadt to Atlanta, KY 3094.” Kentucky Transportation Cabinet, January 25, 2024. https://transportation.ky.gov/Construction-Procurement/Proposals/305-LAUREL-24-2032.pdf
Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. “Final Estimate 242032-01947 0003, East Bernstadt to Atlanta, KY 3094.” Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. https://transportation.ky.gov/Construction/Pay%20Estimates/242032-01947-FINAL-0003.html
Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. “State Primary Road System: Laurel County.” Kentucky Transportation Cabinet, August 9, 2021. https://transportation.ky.gov/Planning/State%20Primary%20Road%20System%20Lists/Laurel.pdf
Laurel County Clerk. “Records.” Laurel County Clerk. https://laurelcountyclerk.ky.gov/records/
Kentucky Secretary of State. “Kentucky Land Office.” Kentucky Secretary of State. https://sos.ky.gov/land/Pages/default.aspx
Kentucky Secretary of State. “Patent Series Overview.” Kentucky Land Office. https://sos.ky.gov/land/non-military/patents/Pages/default.aspx
FamilySearch. “Laurel County, Kentucky Genealogy.” FamilySearch Research Wiki. https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Laurel_County%2C_Kentucky_Genealogy
FamilySearch. “Kentucky Land and Property.” FamilySearch Research Wiki. https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Kentucky_Land_and_Property
LDS Genealogy. “Laurel County KY Cemetery Records.” LDS Genealogy. https://ldsgenealogy.com/KY/Laurel-County-Cemetery-Records.htm
Genealogy Trails. “Genealogy and History: Laurel County, Kentucky.” Genealogy Trails. https://genealogytrails.com/ken/laurel/
National Archives. “Enumeration District Maps.” 1950 Census Records. https://www.archives.gov/research/census/1950/ed-maps
National Archives. “1950 Census Search: Laurel County, Kentucky.” Official 1950 Census Website. https://1950census.archives.gov/search/?county=Laurel&page=1&state=KY
Appalachian Regional Commission. “Appalachian Counties Served by ARC.” Appalachian Regional Commission. https://www.arc.gov/appalachian-counties-served-by-arc/
Author Note: This article follows the scattered record trail of a small Laurel County community whose history survives through maps, mail routes, railroad names, and cemeteries. Readers with Atlanta, Little Raccoon, Raccoon Creek, Watkins, Cathers, Moren, or Feltner family connections may hold pieces of the story still missing from public archives.