Appalachian Community Histories – Public, Pulaski County: William Taylor, Sinking Valley, and the Post Office That Lasted 86 Years
In the eastern countryside of Pulaski County, Kentucky, a small community once appeared on maps under the unusual name of Public. Situated near Sinking Valley, it was one of the many rural settlements whose identities became closely connected to the post offices that served them. Although Public never developed into a major town, its documented history stretches from the closing years of the nineteenth century into the final decades of the twentieth.
Public’s best-documented history begins on July 19, 1895, when William Taylor opened its post office. For approximately 86 years, the name remained part of Pulaski County’s postal geography before the office closed in 1981. The community’s name also appeared on a 1911 Rand McNally county map, providing a contemporary record of its existence during the early twentieth century.
The surviving evidence offers a relatively narrow picture of Public’s history, but it also provides an opportunity to examine the importance of rural postal service, the geography of eastern Pulaski County, and the ways small Appalachian communities can disappear from everyday use while remaining preserved in historical records.
The Geography of Sinking Valley
Public was located in eastern Pulaski County, approximately one-half to one mile east of the former Eaton post office, according to Kentucky place-name historian Robert M. Rennick. Its location placed it among several small postal settlements associated with the countryside surrounding Sinking Valley, an area whose scattered communities developed independently of the larger commercial center at Somerset.
Sinking Valley received its name from the region’s distinctive drainage. Much of Pulaski County rests upon limestone formations in which surface water can enter underground channels through sinkholes and disappearing streams. This landscape influenced the location of roads, farms, and settlements, making valleys and accessible routes especially important to the development of rural communities.
For families living in these parts of Pulaski County during the nineteenth century, geography could determine which markets, schools, churches, and postal facilities were reasonably accessible. The establishment of small post offices provided a means of connecting dispersed households with the larger county and national transportation networks.
Public belonged to this landscape of small communities rather than to the county’s growing railroad and commercial centers. Its precise original post-office building and the boundaries of the community have not been established by the published evidence.
William Taylor and the Establishment of Public in 1895
The most important documented event in Public’s history occurred on July 19, 1895, when William Taylor established the community’s post office. Robert M. Rennick recorded this date in his study of Pulaski County’s postal history, published in La Posta: A Journal of American Postal History in 2007. Rennick identified Taylor as the first postmaster and placed the new office between one-half and one mile east of Eaton.
By the time Public opened, rural post offices had become an essential part of everyday life in Kentucky. For communities outside larger towns, the local postmaster provided access to correspondence, newspapers, government notices, and commercial communications. An office could serve a broad area of scattered farms, even where the surrounding settlement contained relatively few buildings.
Public’s establishment came during a period when small post offices continued to extend federal postal service into the Kentucky countryside. Unlike the larger towns connected directly to railroads, these offices often served residents living along rural roads and valleys, where the distance to another post office could make collecting or sending mail inconvenient.
The surviving published account does not identify the building in which Taylor operated his office, nor does it establish whether he combined his postal duties with a general store, farming, or another occupation. Such arrangements were common in rural communities, but they cannot be attributed specifically to Taylor without additional documentary evidence.
Nevertheless, the establishment of the office gave Public a recognized place in the federal postal system and left a documentary record of a community that might otherwise have received little attention in county histories.
Where Did Public Get Its Name?
One of Public’s most unusual features was its name. While many Kentucky communities were named for early settlers, prominent families, local landforms, or nearby waterways, the origin of Public remains uncertain.
Rennick, who devoted much of his career to investigating the origins of Kentucky place names, did not establish an explanation for Public. His published account identifies it as an unusually named settlement but provides no documented story explaining Taylor’s choice or the circumstances surrounding its adoption.
It is possible that the name originally referred to a local institution, gathering place, or characteristic of the settlement. However, without a contemporary account or documented local tradition, these possibilities remain speculation.
This uncertainty illustrates one of the difficulties of researching small Appalachian communities. A town might survive in postal registers, maps, and land records long after the circumstances surrounding its name had been forgotten. Even when an establishment date and the identity of a first postmaster are known, the personal decisions and local conversations that produced a community’s name may have left no surviving written record.
Public on the 1911 Map of Pulaski County
A significant contemporary source for Public is the 1911 Rand McNally map of Pulaski County. The map identifies Public in eastern Pulaski County, providing evidence that the name had become sufficiently established to appear in a commercially published county atlas sixteen years after the post office opened.
The map is useful not only because it records Public but also because it places the settlement within the wider geography of Pulaski County. The surrounding countryside contained numerous small communities whose postal identities appeared on maps of the period, even when they never developed municipal governments or large commercial districts.
Public’s appearance on the map confirms that the name was not confined to an isolated postal record. It had entered the geographical vocabulary used to describe the county, appearing alongside the towns, roads, and neighboring settlements familiar to residents in the early twentieth century.
Historical maps cannot establish the exact population or physical extent of a small settlement. They do, however, preserve community names that may disappear from later publications as transportation patterns change and rural postal service becomes consolidated.
Public and the Other Post Offices of Eastern Pulaski County
Public was not an isolated development in the postal history of eastern Pulaski County. Rennick’s research places it within a network of small offices that included Eaton, Plato, Vanhook, and Sinking Valley, each of which served communities scattered across the region.
One nearby example was Vanhook, named for a local family and established on January 5, 1898, with Samuel W. Vanhook as its first postmaster. The office closed in February 1915 before reopening in 1926 under Everett Harper. It eventually closed in 1963. Another office, Hislope, was established by Ethus Burton on July 30, 1924, and remained in operation until 1933.
These neighboring offices demonstrate how rural postal geography could change over relatively short periods. Some communities maintained offices for only a few years, while others continued to receive postal service across several generations.
The relationships between the communities were also geographical. A post office’s location in relation to nearby offices, roads, and settlements mattered to the Post Office Department, which collected detailed site reports to determine where new facilities should be established.
The National Archives preserves these reports, many of which contain descriptions of nearby waterways and transportation routes, along with sketches showing the approximate location of a proposed office. The surviving reports provide an important means of reconstructing the historical geography of places such as Public, although an individual site report for Public has not been examined for this account.
Public During the Twentieth Century
Public’s post office remained in operation through major transformations in American rural life. Between its establishment in 1895 and its closure in 1981, Pulaski County experienced the spread of automobiles, improvements to its road network, rural electrification, and substantial changes in communication and transportation.
These developments gradually altered the importance of small, independently operated post offices across Appalachia. Improvements in roads and the expansion of rural mail delivery made it increasingly practical to serve households from larger postal facilities, reducing the need for numerous small offices.
Public’s continued existence into the late twentieth century is notable when compared with nearby communities whose post offices closed considerably earlier. Its postal history extended across approximately 86 years, although the available published account does not establish whether service was uninterrupted throughout that entire period.
The identities of Public’s later postmasters, the number of households served, and the extent of commercial or institutional activity in the community remain subjects for further research. Original postmaster appointment registers, census schedules, and contemporary newspaper accounts may provide a more complete picture of Public’s changing population and the families who maintained its postal service.
The Closing of the Public Post Office in 1981
Public’s post office closed in 1981, bringing to an end the postal history that William Taylor had begun nearly nine decades earlier. Rennick records the closing year but does not provide a detailed explanation of the circumstances or identify the exact date on which service ended.
By the early 1980s, the national postal system had undergone considerable modernization. Rural delivery and improved transportation had changed the way mail reached households throughout the country, and the consolidation of small offices was part of a much broader transformation in postal service.
Whether Public’s closing resulted from consolidation, declining use, changes in local population, or some combination of these circumstances has not been established. Contemporary records from the United States Postal Service or coverage in the Commonwealth Journal may help explain the decision.
The closure was nevertheless an important event in the history of the community’s name. For many small settlements, a local post office provided more than mail service. It also supplied an official designation that appeared in directories, on envelopes, and in government records. When an office closed, its name could gradually fall out of everyday circulation, even when the surrounding families and neighborhood remained.
Remembering Public, Kentucky
Public’s surviving history is largely a postal history, but that does not make it insignificant. The community represents the numerous small settlements whose names once organized the rural geography of Pulaski County, providing recognizable places for residents living beyond the county’s larger towns.
The original establishment of the post office in 1895, its appearance on the 1911 county map, and its eventual closure in 1981 form the principal documented milestones in Public’s history. Together, they establish the existence of a community that remained part of the county’s postal network for much of the twentieth century.
Much of its human history, however, remains to be recovered. The families who collected mail at Public, the postmasters who followed William Taylor, and the roads and buildings associated with the office may yet be identified through federal records, local newspapers, property documents, and family collections.
The story of Public is consequently also a reminder of how easily small Appalachian places can disappear from the historical record. Their importance cannot always be measured by population, surviving buildings, or the number of times they appear in published histories. Sometimes a place survives through little more than a name on an old map and a few lines in a postal register, leaving later generations to recover the lives and communities behind those records.
Sources & Further Reading
Rennick, Robert M. “The Post Offices of Pulaski County, Kentucky, Part 3.” La Posta: A Journal of American Postal History 38, no. 5 (2007): 64. https://www.lapostapub.com/Backissues/LP38-5.pdf.
Rand McNally & Company. Map of Pulaski County, Kentucky. 1911. Digitized by My Genealogy Hound. https://mygenealogyhound.com/maps/kentucky-maps/KY-Pulaski-County-Kentucky-1911-Rand-McNally-map-Somerset-Burnside-Science-Hill.html.
Rennick, Robert M. “Pulaski County: Place Names.” Robert M. Rennick Manuscript Collection, no. 123. Morehead State University. Cataloged December 5, 2016. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_ms_collection/123/.
Works Progress Administration and Robert M. Rennick. “Pulaski County: Post Offices & Place Names.” 1939. County Histories of Kentucky, no. 284. Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/284/.
National Archives and Records Administration. Post Office Department Records of Site Locations, 1837–1955. Microfilm Publication M1126. Record Group 28, Records of the Post Office Department. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/locations-1837-1950.html.
National Archives and Records Administration. Record of Appointment of Postmasters, 1832–September 30, 1971. Microfilm Publication M841. Record Group 28, Records of the Post Office Department. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices.
United States Post Office Department. United States Official Postal Guide. January 1896. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1896. HathiTrust Digital Library. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015018002496.
United States Post Office Department. United States Official Postal Guide. 1897. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1897. HathiTrust Digital Library. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=pst.000032366198.
Pulaski County Public Library. Digital Archives of the Pulaski County Public Library. Historical newspapers, census records, court records, deeds, and tax lists. Somerset, KY. https://pulaskilibrary.advantage-preservation.com/.
Kentucky Historical Society. Kentucky Newspapers on Microfilm: Counties Nelson–Robertson. Frankfort: Kentucky Historical Society. Includes historical Somerset newspapers, 1854–1922, reel 98-0038. https://www.kyhistory.com/digital/api/collection/LIB/id/1469/download.
Rennick, Robert M. “The Post Offices of Pulaski County, Kentucky, Part 1.” La Posta: A Journal of American Postal History 38, no. 3 (2007): 64 ff. https://www.lapostapub.com/Backissues/LP38-3.pdf.
Rennick, Robert M. “The Post Offices of Pulaski County, Kentucky, Part 2.” La Posta: A Journal of American Postal History 38, no. 4 (2007): 58 ff. https://www.lapostapub.com/Backissues/LP38-4.pdf.
Morehead State University. Robert M. Rennick Annotated Maps Collection. Morehead, KY: Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_maps_all/.
United States Geological Survey. Historical Topographic Map Collection. Reston, VA: U.S. Geological Survey. https://www.usgs.gov/tools/topoview.
Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division. Mendenhall’s Road Map of Kentucky. C. S. Mendenhall, early twentieth century. Washington, DC: Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3951p.ct010423/.
Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives. Inventory of Kentucky Land Records. Frankfort: Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives. https://kdla.ky.gov/Archives-and-Reference/Documents/Inventory_Land_Records.pdf.
United States Postal Service. “Postmaster Finder.” Postal History. Washington, DC: United States Postal Service. https://about.usps.com/who/profile/history/postmaster-finder/.
Collins, Lewis, and Richard H. Collins. History of Kentucky. Vol. 2. Covington, KY: Collins & Co., 1874. https://ldsgenealogy.com/KY/books/Collins-historical-sketches-of-Kentucky-History-of-Kentucky-Vol-II-part-111.htm.
RoadsideThoughts. “Public (Pulaski County, KY).” Community profile. https://roadsidethoughts.com/ky/public-xx-pulaski-profile.htm.
Author Note: Public, Kentucky, is one of the many small Appalachian communities whose stories survive primarily through maps, postal records, and the work of dedicated local historians. If your family lived near Public, Eaton, or Sinking Valley, I encourage you to share photographs, documents, or memories that might help preserve more of this community’s history.