Appalachian Community Histories – Myrtle, Mingo County: The Post Office, Trace Creek, and a Community Along U.S. 119
Myrtle is one of those Appalachian communities whose history can easily be overlooked by someone passing through, even though traces of its past remain scattered throughout the landscape. Today, the name belongs to an unincorporated community in Mingo County along U.S. 119, northeast of Williamson, where Trace Fork, Trace Creek, Duncan Fork, family cemeteries, and narrow mountain roads form the geography that has shaped local life for generations.
Unlike incorporated towns that developed around courthouse squares, municipal governments, or clearly defined business districts, Myrtle grew as a rural mountain community whose identity depended upon its post office, schools, stores, roads, cemeteries, churches, and the families who occupied the surrounding hollows. Its history survives through postal records, state directories, legislative resolutions, maps, oral histories, geological surveys, and county records rather than through the records of a town government.
Those sources also show that Myrtle is older than Mingo County itself. The community was already recognized before the county was created in 1895, and over the following century it experienced many of the changes that reshaped southern West Virginia, including the expansion of coal mining, highway construction, school consolidation, the decline of small rural stores, and the eventual loss of its own post office.
The history of Myrtle is therefore not the story of a town that suddenly appeared and later vanished. It is the story of a mountain community that changed gradually while the families, roads, waterways, and place names around it continued to preserve its identity.
Myrtle Before Mingo County
One of the most important surviving references to Myrtle appears in the historical place-name records maintained by the West Virginia State Archives. The state records Myrtle in Logan County in 1894 and specifically notes that the location is now in Mingo County, providing clear evidence that the community was recognized before the creation of the present county boundary.
Mingo County was established in 1895 from the southern portion of Logan County, making it the youngest county in West Virginia. The new county included Williamson and numerous communities along the Tug Fork and surrounding tributaries, including the area around Myrtle. This boundary change is particularly important for historical research because families who later became identified with Myrtle and Mingo County may appear in earlier deeds, court cases, marriages, tax records, and other documents as residents of Logan County.
For that reason, the earliest history of Myrtle belongs to both counties. Research limited only to Mingo County records can miss an important portion of the community’s nineteenth-century history.
The West Virginia State Archives later identified Myrtle as part of Hardee District, together with communities such as Belo, Lenore, Maher, Naugatuck, Blockton, and Rapp. That district designation is significant because rural residents were not always identified by the small community nearest their homes. Census enumerators, election officials, tax assessors, and courthouse clerks might instead describe someone simply as a resident of Hardee District.
Although political boundaries changed around Myrtle, the hollows, creeks, farms, and family settlements that defined everyday life continued to exist across those administrative divisions.
The Myrtle Post Office
One of the clearest indications that Myrtle had developed a recognizable community identity by the late nineteenth century was the establishment of its post office.
Indexes based on contemporary federal postal records show Myrtle appearing in postal material on October 19, 1891, and again on November 7, 1893. Later postal references identify September 2, 1891, as the establishment date of the Myrtle post office, placing an official postal identity several years before Mingo County itself was created.
In rural Appalachia, the creation of a post office represented much more than the opening of a place to receive letters. A post office gave a community a recognized address and connected residents with newspapers, businesses, government offices, distant relatives, catalogs, and the wider national economy. In settlements without incorporated governments or formal town centers, the post office often became one of the strongest institutions distinguishing one hollow or community from another.
Myrtle continued to appear in official West Virginia records during the early twentieth century. The 1917 West Virginia Blue Book listed Myrtle among the post offices of Mingo County, and the community appeared again in the 1921 edition. These repeated references show that Myrtle remained a recognized postal and geographic identity as the surrounding coalfields expanded.
Later postal histories place the discontinuance of the Myrtle post office in 1992, meaning that postal service under the community’s name survived for approximately a century. Few surviving records illustrate the importance of that institution more clearly than the history of Lee Dempsey Jr., whose grocery store and postal service became closely associated with community life during much of the twentieth century.
Lee Dempsey Jr. and the Store at Myrtle
In 2002, the West Virginia Legislature considered a resolution requesting that the road across from Duncan Fork at Myrtle be named Lee Dempsey, Jr. Drive. The resolution preserved important details about Dempsey’s life and revealed the central role he played in Myrtle for more than four decades.
According to the Legislature, Lee Dempsey Jr. owned and operated Dempsey Grocery Store in Myrtle for forty-four years while also serving as the community’s postmaster for the same length of time. He remained Myrtle’s postmaster until his death in 1987.
Holding both positions placed Dempsey at the center of everyday life in a rural community. The grocery store supplied families with food and household necessities that could not easily be produced at home, while the post office provided access to letters, newspapers, packages, government correspondence, bills, and news from relatives living elsewhere. When both services operated from the same location, the building naturally became a gathering place where residents could exchange information as well as purchase goods and collect their mail.
Dempsey’s long service also illustrates how much small Appalachian communities often depended upon individual residents rather than formal municipal institutions. Myrtle did not require a town hall or incorporated government to possess a recognizable community center. For many years, the combination of a grocery store and post office provided a practical center around which local life could revolve.
The later designation of Lee Dempsey Drive ensured that his connection to Myrtle remained visible even after the store and post office had disappeared from everyday community life.
Myrtle Families in the Public Record
Myrtle residents also appear throughout the political and administrative records of early twentieth-century Mingo County. These references provide another indication that the community had developed a distinct identity recognized beyond the immediate Trace Creek area.
Jacob Runyon of Myrtle was involved in county Democratic politics and appears in official records connected with local political organization. By 1927, the West Virginia Blue Book identified Runyon as a Democrat from Hardee District serving on the Mingo County Board of Review and Equalization, with his residence listed as Myrtle and his term extending into 1931.
Such entries are valuable because they show that Myrtle was more than an informal local name. State officials considered it a sufficiently established place to identify the residence of someone serving in county government.
The surviving records also reveal family names that recur throughout the history of Myrtle and the surrounding Trace Creek country, including Runyon, Maynard, Mounts, Ooten, Hall, Dempsey, and Sheppard. Their presence in cemeteries, government records, military memorials, deeds, and oral histories helps reconstruct a community whose population was spread across forks, branches, creek bottoms, and mountain roads rather than concentrated in a conventional town center.
Cemeteries are particularly important for understanding that landscape. The Andrew Jackson Maynard Cemetery at Trace Creek contains members of several families associated with the community, while Ooten Cemetery became closely connected with the story of a Myrtle soldier who died during World War II. Estepp Cemetery appears in later oral history not only as a burial ground, but also as part of the landscape where local children spent their time.
Together, these burial places demonstrate how family cemeteries served as enduring landmarks within mountain communities. They preserved family connections to particular sections of the hollow even when homes disappeared, roads changed, and later generations moved away.
Myrtle Grade School and Growing Up on Trace Creek
One of the most detailed surviving accounts of everyday life around Myrtle comes from an oral history interview with Warren McClung preserved through Southern West Virginia Community and Technical College’s Appalachian Oral History Collection.
McClung, born in 1957, spent much of his childhood on Scarlet Road along Trace Creek after his family moved to Mingo County. He remembered beginning school at Myrtle Grade School in 1963, where Merle Tingler taught his first-grade class and became one of the teachers he remembered most fondly. After attending the local grade school, he eventually continued his education at Lenore High School.
His recollections provide valuable insight into the social world surrounding Myrtle during the 1960s, when many older patterns of Appalachian rural life remained familiar even as the region was changing rapidly.
Children were expected to contribute to the household, and McClung remembered carrying coal for heating, cutting wood, feeding chickens, and helping in the garden. Recreation was usually found outdoors and close to home. He recalled squirrel hunting in the surrounding woods and playing softball in the bottom near Estepp Cemetery, where an ordinary part of the community landscape could become a gathering place for neighborhood children.
McClung also remembered a community in which neighbors knew one another and children moved freely through the hollow. He recalled Henry Gillman living down the road, Opal and Mike Ooten farther up, and his grandmother nearby. People sitting on their porches might invite passing children inside for something to eat, while small neighborhood stores provided inexpensive treats that children could purchase after collecting discarded pop bottles for spending money.
These memories are especially valuable because county histories often emphasize coal companies, mine disasters, elections, labor struggles, and political conflicts while giving comparatively little attention to ordinary daily life. McClung’s recollections help recover the social relationships that made places such as Myrtle function as communities.
The Myrtle of his childhood was held together by family ties, school attendance, neighborhood stores, shared work, nearby cemeteries, roads, and the creeks that provided the natural framework of the settlement.
Coal Beyond the Company Town
Coal shaped the history of Myrtle even though the community did not develop in the same manner as the carefully planned company towns found elsewhere in the southern West Virginia coalfields.
The mining economy surrounded Myrtle and influenced the occupations available to generations of residents throughout the twentieth century. Families living along Trace Creek and neighboring hollows found work in mining, timbering, construction, transportation, and industries connected to the extraction and movement of coal.
Warren McClung’s later employment history illustrates some of those changes. After beginning work locally with tree-trimming companies, he entered construction associated with the coal industry and eventually became involved in surface mining. His experience reflects a broader transition within the southern West Virginia economy, where underground mining remained important but large-scale surface operations became increasingly visible during the second half of the twentieth century.
Those operations affected more than employment because they also transformed the physical landscape surrounding communities such as Myrtle.
The West Virginia Geological and Economic Survey documented that transformation while studying mountaintop removal mining within the Myrtle 7.5-minute quadrangle, an area extending across portions of both Mingo and Logan counties. Using aerial photography from 1996, researchers estimated that approximately 1,291 acres within the quadrangle had been affected by mountaintop removal mining, while another 324 acres were occupied by valley fills.
Those figures describe the wider Myrtle quadrangle rather than the residential community itself, but they nevertheless illustrate the scale of industrial change within the surrounding mountains. For people who had grown up along the creeks and hollows, the coal industry altered both the local economy and the physical appearance of the landscape.
The historical geography of Myrtle can therefore be read in two directions. Along the creek bottoms are the roads, cemeteries, homes, former schools, and sites of neighborhood stores that once connected local families. Above them are mountains that bear the marks of more than a century of coal extraction.
Private Lawrence Ooten
Myrtle’s history also extends well beyond Mingo County through residents who left the community for military service, including Private Lawrence Ooten, whose life became the subject of an official West Virginia memorial resolution.
In 2008, the West Virginia Legislature recorded that Lawrence Ooten had been born at Myrtle on October 3, 1921, the son of James and Leota Ooten. He grew up in a family that included four brothers and two sisters before entering military service during World War II.
Ooten served overseas and received both the Silver Star and Purple Heart. He was killed in action on December 24, 1944, during the final winter of the war in Europe, only months before the defeat of Nazi Germany.
The Legislature later requested that a bridge in Mingo County be designated the Private Lawrence Ooten Memorial Bridge, preserving his name within the transportation network of the county where he had been born and raised.
Ooten’s remains were eventually returned to Myrtle, where he was buried in Ooten Cemetery on Lee Dempsey Drive. That location connects several different chapters of the community’s history within a remarkably small area. A road named for Myrtle’s longtime grocer and postmaster leads toward the cemetery where a local World War II soldier rests, while the nearby highways and bridges carry the names of other residents remembered for their service.
In Myrtle, as in many Appalachian communities, public memory is preserved as much through the names attached to roads, bridges, and cemeteries as through conventional monuments.
The Myrtle Bridge and James L. “Bud” Hall Sr.
Another important memorial within the community is the bridge carrying U.S. 119 across Trace Fork.
In 2017, the West Virginia Legislature requested that the structure long known locally as the Myrtle Bridge be designated the James L. “Bud” Hall Sr. Memorial Bridge. Hall was born at Delbarton in 1921 and later served during World War II, where he experienced injuries that affected him for the remainder of his life.
According to the legislative resolution, Hall deployed to France twice and served in the Normandy theater. His military service ended after the jeep in which he was traveling struck a land mine. The explosion killed the other occupants of the vehicle and left Hall severely wounded. He lost an eye and suffered injuries serious enough that part of his skull had to be replaced with a metal plate.
Hall survived the war, returned home, married, raised a family, and lived for decades with the lasting effects of those wounds.
The bridge named in his honor crosses Trace Fork within Myrtle, connecting a modern transportation structure with the history of military service in the surrounding communities. Thousands of motorists may pass over the bridge without knowing the story behind its name, yet the designation preserves Hall’s experiences within the landscape he knew after returning home.
The bridge also represents the transformation of transportation through Myrtle. What was once a community primarily shaped by creeks, narrow mountain roads, and local travel eventually became part of the much larger U.S. 119 corridor linking Williamson, Logan, and communities throughout the southern West Virginia coalfields.
U.S. 119 and a Changing Myrtle
For much of Myrtle’s early history, the surrounding waterways determined where residents could build homes, establish farms, and travel between settlements. Trace Fork, Trace Creek, Duncan Fork, and numerous smaller branches provided relatively narrow areas of usable land between steep mountain slopes.
The development and improvement of U.S. 119 gradually changed that relationship by making Myrtle part of a larger regional transportation network. Roads that had once primarily served local residents became connected with routes carrying coal trucks, construction crews, commuters, school buses, commercial traffic, and travelers moving between Williamson, Logan, and other communities.
Despite those changes, older place names survived alongside the modern highway. Duncan Fork remains recognizable on maps, while Lee Dempsey Drive preserves the memory of Myrtle’s longtime postmaster and storekeeper. Ooten Cemetery continues to identify a family with deep connections to the community, and the bridge across Trace Fork remains associated locally with Myrtle even after receiving an official memorial designation.
In this way, the road system has become a form of historical record. Even where old buildings have disappeared, place names attached to roads, creeks, cemeteries, and bridges continue to identify the people and institutions that once shaped community life.
The Closing of the Post Office
One of the most significant changes in Myrtle’s public identity came with the eventual closing of its post office.
Postal histories place its discontinuance on August 22, 1992, roughly a century after postal service under the Myrtle name had begun. By that time, the community and the wider Mingo County coalfields had undergone profound changes in transportation, population, commerce, and education.
The loss of the post office did not mean that Myrtle ceased to exist. Families continued to live along its roads and creeks, while the community name remained visible on maps, bridges, government records, and local addresses. The closing nevertheless removed an institution that had once helped define Myrtle as a distinct place.
Similar changes occurred throughout rural Appalachia during the twentieth century as improved highways allowed residents to travel farther for work, shopping, education, and government services. Small schools were consolidated, neighborhood stores closed, rural postal operations were reorganized, and many residents moved away in search of employment.
As those institutions disappeared, the older pattern of a hollow supporting its own school, post office, stores, extended family networks, and gathering places gradually became less common.
Myrtle remained, but the way residents experienced the community changed.
A Community Preserved in Roads, Cemeteries, and Memory
Myrtle never needed to become an incorporated town to leave behind a meaningful historical record. The West Virginia State Archives confirms that the community was recognized while the area still belonged to Logan County, while federal postal records establish a distinct Myrtle identity during the 1890s. State Blue Books connect local residents to Mingo County political life, legislative resolutions preserve the stories of Lee Dempsey Jr., Lawrence Ooten, and James L. Hall Sr., geological studies document the transformation of the surrounding mountains, and oral history preserves the everyday experiences of childhood along Trace Creek.
When those records are considered together, they reveal a community whose importance cannot be measured by population figures or municipal boundaries alone.
Myrtle was a place where the same man could operate the grocery store and serve as postmaster for more than four decades, where children carried coal and firewood as part of ordinary household responsibility, and where the bottom near a family cemetery could become a neighborhood softball field. Residents raised gardens and chickens, worked in mines and construction, served overseas during wartime, and traveled roads that eventually became part of a major regional highway.
The institutions that once defined Myrtle have changed considerably, and some have disappeared altogether, but the community remains visible through the landscape that generations of residents helped shape.
Lee Dempsey Drive still recalls a storekeeper and postmaster who served Myrtle for decades. Ooten Cemetery preserves the resting place of a local soldier killed during World War II. The bridge across Trace Fork carries another memorial name, while Trace Creek continues through the same narrow mountain landscape where children once walked to school, visited neighbors, hunted in the surrounding woods, and gathered around neighborhood stores.
The old post office and Myrtle Grade School may no longer serve the community as they once did, but their stories remain part of the larger history of Mingo County and southern West Virginia. Through roads, cemeteries, government records, oral histories, and family memory, Myrtle continues to preserve the history of a mountain community that has endured even as the world around it has changed.
Sources & Further Reading
Library of Congress. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Washington, DC: Library of Congress. Accessed July 29, 2026. https://www.loc.gov/collections/chronicling-america/
The Logan Banner. Logan, WV, 1914–present. Directory of U.S. Newspapers in American Libraries. Library of Congress. Accessed July 29, 2026. https://www.loc.gov/item/sn83008176/
The Logan County Banner. Logan, WV, 1889–1903. Chronicling America. Library of Congress. Accessed July 29, 2026. https://www.loc.gov/item/sn86092009/
The Mingo Republican. Williamson, WV, 1904–1951. Chronicling America. Library of Congress. Accessed July 29, 2026. https://www.loc.gov/item/sn86092084/
The Progressive West Virginian. Williamson, WV, 1911–1913. Chronicling America. Library of Congress. Accessed July 29, 2026. https://www.loc.gov/item/sn86092086/
The Williamson Enterprise. Williamson, WV, 1907–1911. Chronicling America. Library of Congress. Accessed July 29, 2026. https://www.loc.gov/item/sn86092085/
National Archives and Records Administration. “1950 Census.” Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration. Accessed July 29, 2026. https://1950census.archives.gov/
National Archives and Records Administration. “Appointment of Postmasters, 1832–September 30, 1971.” Microfilm Publication M841. Records of the Post Office Department, Record Group 28. Accessed July 29, 2026. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/postmasters-1832-1971.html
National Archives and Records Administration. “Enumeration District Maps for the 1950 Census.” Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration. Accessed July 29, 2026. https://www.archives.gov/research/census/1950/ed-maps
National Archives and Records Administration. “Post Office Records.” Records of the Post Office Department, Record Group 28. Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration. Accessed July 29, 2026. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices
Perry, Huey. They’ll Cut Off Your Project: A Mingo County Chronicle. Foreword by Jeff Biggers. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2011. https://wvupressonline.com/node/308
Rand McNally and Company. West Virginia. Chicago: Rand McNally and Company, 1911. Map. David Rumsey Map Collection. Accessed July 29, 2026. https://www.davidrumsey.com/
Southern West Virginia Community and Technical College. “Appalachian Oral History Collection.” Interview with Warren McClung, 2019. Southern West Virginia Community and Technical College. Accessed July 29, 2026. https://ourappalachiablog.wordpress.com/2019/05/
U.S. Census Bureau. Federal Population Census Schedules for Mingo County, West Virginia. 1900, 1910, 1920, 1930, 1940, and 1950. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Commerce. National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/research/census
U.S. Geological Survey. “Historical Topographic Map Collection.” topoView. National Geologic Map Database. Reston, VA: U.S. Geological Survey. Accessed July 29, 2026. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/topoview/
U.S. Geological Survey. “USGS Water Data for the Nation.” Reston, VA: U.S. Geological Survey. Accessed July 29, 2026. https://waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis
United States Postal Service. “Postmaster Finder.” Postal History. Washington, DC: United States Postal Service. Accessed July 29, 2026. https://about.usps.com/who/profile/history/postmaster-finder/
Van Meter, Linda. “Mingo County.” e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. West Virginia Humanities Council. Updated April 23, 2026. https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/entries/1772
West Virginia Archives and History. “Districts and Place Names in West Virginia.” Charleston: West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. Accessed July 29, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/placenames/
West Virginia Archives and History. “Place Names in West Virginia: M.” Charleston: West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. Accessed July 29, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/placenames/placnamm.html
West Virginia Archives and History. “West Virginia Vital Research Records.” Charleston: West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. Accessed July 29, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/vrr/
West Virginia Archives and History. “County Records on Microfilm: Logan County.” Charleston: West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. Accessed July 29, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/countyrecords/
West Virginia Archives and History. “County Records on Microfilm: Mingo County.” Charleston: West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. Accessed July 29, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/countyrecords/
West Virginia Geological and Economic Survey. “A Geologic Overview of Mountaintop Removal Mining in West Virginia.” Morgantown: West Virginia Geological and Economic Survey, 1998. https://www.wvgis.wvu.edu/data/otherdocs/wvgesmtr.pdf
West Virginia Legislature. West Virginia Blue Book. Charleston: State of West Virginia, 1917. West Virginia Legislature. https://www.wvlegislature.gov/
West Virginia Legislature. West Virginia Blue Book. Charleston: State of West Virginia, 1919. West Virginia Legislature. https://www.wvlegislature.gov/
West Virginia Legislature. West Virginia Blue Book. Charleston: State of West Virginia, 1921. West Virginia Legislature. https://www.wvlegislature.gov/
West Virginia Legislature. West Virginia Blue Book. Charleston: State of West Virginia, 1927. West Virginia Legislature. https://www.wvlegislature.gov/
West Virginia Legislature. “House Concurrent Resolution No. 44.” 2002 Regular Session. Resolution concerning Lee Dempsey Jr. and the naming of Lee Dempsey, Jr. Drive at Myrtle. https://www.wvlegislature.gov/bill_status/bills_text.cfm?billdoc=hcr44+intr.htm&billtype=cr&houseorig=h&i=44&sesstype=RS&yr=2002
West Virginia Legislature. “Senate Concurrent Resolution No. 49.” 2008 Regular Session. Resolution concerning the Private Lawrence Ooten Memorial Bridge and Lawrence Ooten of Myrtle. https://www.wvlegislature.gov/Bill_Status/bills_text.cfm?billdoc=scr49+intr.htm&billtype=cr&houseorig=s&i=49&sesstype=RS&yr=2008
West Virginia Legislature. “House Concurrent Resolution No. 74.” 2017 Regular Session. Resolution designating the Myrtle Bridge over Trace Fork as the James L. “Bud” Hall Sr. Memorial Bridge. https://www.wvlegislature.gov/Bill_Status/bills_text.cfm?billdoc=hcr74+intr.htm&billtype=cr&houseorig=h&i=74&sesstype=RS&yr=2017
West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection. “Mining and Reclamation.” Charleston: West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection. Mining permit and regulatory records applicable to the Myrtle area. Accessed July 29, 2026. https://dep.wv.gov/dmr/
West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection. “WVDEP Interactive Mapping.” Charleston: West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection. Surface mine, permit, environmental, and geographic information for Mingo County. Accessed July 29, 2026. https://tagis.dep.wv.gov/
West Virginia Department of Transportation, Division of Highways. “County Highway Maps.” Charleston: West Virginia Department of Transportation. Road records and mapping for Mingo County, including roads within the Myrtle and Trace Creek area. Accessed July 29, 2026. https://transportation.wv.gov/highways/programplanning/gti/gis/maps/Pages/CountyMaps.aspx
West Virginia and Regional History Center. “West Virginia Oral Histories.” West Virginia University Libraries. Morgantown: West Virginia University. Accessed July 29, 2026. https://wvrhc.lib.wvu.edu/collections/oral-histories
Water Quality Portal. “Water Quality Data.” National Water Quality Monitoring Council, U.S. Geological Survey, and Environmental Protection Agency. Environmental monitoring records for Trace Fork and the Myrtle area. Accessed July 29, 2026. https://www.waterqualitydata.us/
Author Note: Myrtle’s history is preserved less through famous events than through the post office, school, family cemeteries, roads, and memories of the people who lived along Trace Creek. I hope this article helps preserve the story of a Mingo County community whose name has survived even as many of the institutions that once defined it have disappeared.