Appalachian Community Histories – Hargis, Pulaski County: Possum Trot, a Rural Post Office, and Life Along Buck Creek
Along the southern banks of the Cumberland River in Pulaski County, Kentucky, near the mouth of Buck Creek, the small community of Hargis developed in a landscape of river bends, wooded hills, scattered farms, and settlements connected by country roads. Although Hargis never became a large town, its history survives in postal records, early twentieth-century maps, newspaper accounts, school photographs, and the recollections of people who experienced life in rural Pulaski County.
The community stood southeast of Burnside, near Barnetts Bend, where Buck Creek approached the Cumberland River. For residents of this part of Kentucky, the river and its tributaries helped determine the location of farms, roads, and settlements long before the construction of Lake Cumberland transformed the surrounding countryside. Hargis belonged to this older geography, when small post offices connected rural neighborhoods with the larger commercial centers of Burnside and Somerset.
Historian Robert M. Rennick identified Hargis as a community whose post office occupied several locations near the mouth of Buck Creek. His research also established a connection between Hargis and the neighborhood known as Possum Trot, a name preserved in contemporary newspapers and the recollections of Appalachian novelist Harriette Simpson Arnow. Together, these records provide a picture of a rural community whose identity extended beyond its official postal name.
Barnetts Bend and the Establishment of Hargis in 1906
The documented postal history of Hargis began on June 28, 1906, when Sidney M. Hargis arranged for the establishment of a post office to serve the Barnetts Bend locality near the confluence of Buck Creek and the Cumberland River. According to Rennick’s research, Sidney initially proposed naming the office Barnett, reflecting the existing geographical name associated with that bend of the river.
Instead, the office received the name Hargis, probably in recognition of Sidney himself. Although he had been responsible for securing the office, Sidney declined the position of postmaster, and William T. Hyden received the appointment. The community consequently entered the federal postal system under a family name rather than the geographical name originally proposed.
The establishment of the office was significant for a rural neighborhood where distance and transportation could make even ordinary correspondence difficult. A post office provided a recognized address for residents, making it easier to receive letters, newspapers, government correspondence, and information from relatives living elsewhere. It also gave the community an official name that could appear in postal directories and on maps, even as the location of the office changed over time.
By 1911, Hargis appeared on Rand McNally’s published map of Pulaski County, southeast of Burnside and near other small communities, including Bird and Tateville. The map provides contemporary evidence that Hargis had acquired an established geographical identity within only a few years of its post office opening.
The surviving postal history also illustrates the changing boundaries of the surrounding area. When McCreary County was formed from portions of Pulaski, Wayne, and Whitley counties in 1912, the new county boundary affected the region south of the Cumberland River. Rennick believed that the Hargis post office may have operated within McCreary County between 1912 and the late spring of 1917, when Ila M. Walker returned it to Pulaski County. Because the office occupied several sites, its administrative history cannot necessarily be understood as the history of a single permanent building.
The Hargis Family and the Surrounding Neighborhoods
The Hargis surname was well established in the wider Buck Creek region during the early twentieth century, appearing repeatedly in newspaper accounts of family gatherings, neighborhood visits, local business, and community activities. These references help explain the broader family connections associated with the community, although not every person bearing the surname necessarily lived within the immediate settlement served by the Hargis post office.
An election advertisement published in The Somerset Journal on February 18, 1921, provides one example. The newspaper announced that S. M. Hargis, a resident of Hail and a former county magistrate, was seeking the office of Pulaski County jailer. The advertisement identified him as the son of William Hargis, whom it described as a Union soldier, and reported that he had previously served two terms as magistrate for the Seventh Magisterial District. The shared initials make this a potentially useful record for researching Sidney M. Hargis, although the precise identification and the advertisement’s genealogical claims require confirmation from additional records.
Other newspaper accounts preserve the personal relationships that connected households throughout the district. On March 18, 1921, The Somerset Journal reported a family reunion at the home of Lee Hargis in Hail, attended by his children and grandchildren. Such gatherings rarely received extensive coverage, but the surviving notices reveal the importance of family networks across rural Pulaski County, where relatives frequently lived in neighboring communities rather than within a single village.
Possum Trot and Everyday Life in the Early Twentieth Century
One of the more revealing details in Rennick’s postal research is his identification of Possum Trot as the neighborhood served by the Hargis post office. While Hargis became the official postal designation, Possum Trot remained part of the area’s local identity. The distinction is important because rural Kentucky communities often carried geographical or informal neighborhood names that differed from their official post office addresses.
The Somerset Journal published regular reports from Possum Trot during the early twentieth century, preserving details that would otherwise have disappeared from the historical record. Its December 10, 1920, community column described a neighborhood where church services, family visits, illness, land purchases, and social gatherings filled the ordinary course of life. Reverend Reese had delivered a Sunday sermon, Colutha Burton had entertained friends with a singing, and Henry Hines had purchased an acre of land from William Ashley with plans to build a home.
The same column reported that C. P. Hargis had visited Sunday school at Pleasant Hill and addressed those in attendance. The account also documented residents traveling between their homes and relatives in other communities, demonstrating how social and religious relationships extended beyond individual settlements.
These seemingly minor newspaper notices are important for understanding places such as Hargis. They reveal rural communities as active social networks rather than isolated points on a map, with families moving between farms, churches, schools, and neighboring settlements while maintaining connections with relatives who had migrated elsewhere.
Schools, Children, and the Hargis Family
Education was an important part of community life throughout the Buck Creek region, and surviving records provide evidence of the families and local institutions associated with Hargis.
A particularly valuable record appears in the January 2, 1920, edition of The Somerset Journal, which published a list of Pulaski County’s census enumerators and their post office addresses. The newspaper identified William R. Campbell as the enumerator for Beaver, District 33, and gave his address as Hargis. The entry provides direct contemporary evidence that Hargis served as a recognized postal address for people working in the surrounding district.
An earlier photograph from Whetstone School, taken during the 1914–1915 school year, offers another glimpse of families living in the wider Buck Creek area. Contributed to KYGenWeb by Denton Hargis, the photograph includes numerous children belonging to Hargis families, alongside pupils from the Phelps, Stogsdill, Randall, Bradley, Adkins, Parkey, and other families.
Among those identified are Melvin, Oather, Victor, and Alonzo Hargis, children of Jack and Martha Stogsdill Hargis, as well as Mitchell, Okel, Walter, and Mary Ann Hargis, children of Cyrus Milford and Harriet Barnes Hargis. Dewey Hargis, identified as a son of Marion and Jane Bray Hargis, also appears in the photograph. The teacher was Rob Cat Sears, whose photograph with his pupils preserves a rare visual record of childhood and education in the region.
Although the photograph does not establish that every Hargis child pictured lived in the immediate Hargis community, it documents the broader family network that occupied the countryside around Buck Creek.
Harriette Simpson Arnow and the Memory of Possum Trot
One of the most intriguing possible connections to Hargis appears in the recollections of Appalachian novelist Harriette Simpson Arnow, who grew up near Burnside and later taught in rural Pulaski County. During an April 1976 oral history interview with Mimi Conway for the Southern Oral History Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Arnow described her experiences teaching at a remote school known as Possum Trot.
When Conway asked Arnow to identify the community where she taught, the novelist struggled to remember its official name. She suggested that it might have been Hargis but acknowledged that she was uncertain. Rennick’s identification of Possum Trot as the neighborhood served by the Hargis post office supports a possible connection between the community and Arnow’s recollections, although her uncertainty prevents the precise identification of the school from being considered conclusively established.
Arnow’s account nevertheless provides remarkable firsthand evidence of life in the rural Cumberland River region during the early twentieth century. She remembered a community approximately fifteen miles from Burnside, where difficult roads limited access to surrounding towns and where many children had never seen an automobile. Mail arrived three times each week, carried in saddlebags on a mule, while residents traveled to Somerset or traded agricultural products and other goods with merchants across the river.
Her recollections also described an economy in which families supplemented their livelihoods by gathering natural resources from the surrounding hills. Some collected ginseng, yellowroot, and mayapple root for sale, while others earned additional money by selling animal hides. Arnow remembered the extraordinary familiarity her pupils possessed with the local environment, particularly their ability to identify different species of trees.
These memories illuminate the wider rural world in which Hargis developed. They should not be treated as proof that every detail occurred within the settlement itself, but the connection between Hargis and Possum Trot makes the interview particularly valuable for understanding the area’s history.
Lake Cumberland and a Changing River Landscape
For generations, communities along the Cumberland River had developed around the transportation routes, agricultural land, and settlement patterns created by the river and its tributaries. During the twentieth century, however, this landscape underwent a dramatic transformation following the construction of Wolf Creek Dam and the creation of Lake Cumberland.
The federal government authorized the Wolf Creek project through legislation passed in 1938 and 1946, and construction began in August 1941. Work was delayed during the Second World War, but the dam became operational for flood control in 1950 and was completed for full beneficial use in August 1952. The resulting reservoir permanently altered the Cumberland River valley, changing shorelines, transportation routes, and the geographical relationships among numerous communities.
For Hargis, situated near the Cumberland River and Buck Creek, the creation of the reservoir formed part of a broader transformation of the surrounding region. Nevertheless, the available sources do not establish that the entire community was flooded or that the reservoir directly caused the relocation or closure of its post office. Determining the precise effects of impoundment on individual Hargis properties would require historical land acquisition records, pre-impoundment surveys, and contemporary topographical maps.
The Closing of the Hargis Post Office in 1959
The Hargis post office continued operating long after its establishment in 1906, surviving the creation of McCreary County, changes in local transportation, and the construction of Lake Cumberland. Rennick’s postal research records its closure in 1959, ending more than five decades of federal postal service under the Hargis name.
The closure marked the end of the community’s independent postal identity, although it did not necessarily mean that the surrounding neighborhood ceased to exist. Rennick noted that the locality served by the office retained the name Possum Trot, illustrating how an informal community name could outlast its official postal designation.
The surviving records do not establish a specific cause for the closure. Changes in population, transportation, and postal service affected many rural Kentucky communities during the twentieth century, but attributing the end of the Hargis office to any one of these developments would require additional documentary evidence.
Remembering Hargis and Possum Trot
The history of Hargis demonstrates how a small rural community can leave a substantial historical record without ever becoming a large town. From its establishment as a post office in 1906 to its closure in 1959, Hargis served as both a geographical landmark and an administrative connection between the Cumberland River countryside and the larger world.
Postal records preserve the names of Sidney M. Hargis, William T. Hyden, and Ila M. Walker, while historical maps locate the community within the changing geography of southern Pulaski County. Contemporary newspapers provide evidence of family relationships, schools, religious gatherings, and the ordinary events that shaped neighborhood life. The possible connection to Harriette Simpson Arnow’s recollections adds a particularly valuable perspective on the experience of teaching and growing up in the isolated hill communities of the early twentieth century.
Although the Hargis post office disappeared, the historical record preserves the broader identity of Possum Trot and the families associated with the surrounding countryside. Their story belongs to the larger history of Appalachian communities whose significance was measured not by population or commercial importance, but by the relationships, institutions, and traditions that connected people to their homes.
Sources & Further Reading
Rand McNally & Company. Map of Pulaski County, Kentucky. Chicago: Rand McNally & Company, 1911. https://thegenealogyhound.com/maps/kentucky-maps/KY-Pulaski-County-Kentucky-1911-Rand-McNally-map-Somerset-Burnside-Science-Hill.html
The Somerset Journal. “Bent.” September 26, 1919. Transcribed by Pulaski County KYGenWeb. https://kygenweb.net/pulaski/news/9_26_1919.htm
The Somerset Journal. “Bent.” October 3, 1919. Report concerning Armetia Hargis. Transcribed by Pulaski County KYGenWeb. https://kygenweb.net/pulaski/news/10_3_1919.htm
The Somerset Journal. “Enumerators for 1920 Census Begin Work Today.” January 2, 1920. Includes William R. Campbell’s Hargis postal address. Transcribed by Pulaski County KYGenWeb. https://kygenweb.net/pulaski/news/1_2_1920.htm
The Somerset Journal. “Bent.” August 27, 1920. Transcribed by Pulaski County KYGenWeb. https://kygenweb.net/pulaski/news/8_27_1920_2.htm
The Somerset Journal. “Bent.” October 29, 1920. Transcribed by Pulaski County KYGenWeb. https://kygenweb.net/pulaski/news/10_29_1920.htm
The Somerset Journal. “Possum Trot.” December 10, 1920. Transcribed by Pulaski County KYGenWeb. https://kygenweb.net/pulaski/news/12_10_1920_3.htm
The Somerset Journal. “Magistrate S. M. Hargis.” Political advertisement, February 18, 1921. Transcribed by Pulaski County KYGenWeb. https://kygenweb.net/pulaski/news/2_21/2_18_1921.htm
The Somerset Journal. “Hail.” March 18, 1921. Community report concerning the Lee Hargis family reunion. Transcribed by Pulaski County KYGenWeb. https://kygenweb.net/pulaski/news/3_21/3_18_1921_2.htm
“Whetstone School, 1914–1915.” Historical photograph and identifications contributed by Denton Hargis. Pulaski County KYGenWeb. https://kygenweb.net/pulaski/school/whetstone1914.html
Arnow, Harriette Simpson. Oral history interview by Mimi Conway, April 1976. Interview G-0006, Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. https://openlibrary.org/works/OL33181002W/Oral_history_interview_with_Harriette_Arnow_April_1976
“I Had Never Been in a Community That Was So Remote.” Appalachian History, April 2017. Excerpts from Harriette Simpson Arnow’s April 1976 oral history interview. https://www.appalachianhistory.net/2017/04/i-had-never-been-in-community-that-was.html
Rennick, Robert M. “The Post Offices of Pulaski County, Kentucky, Part 1.” La Posta: A Journal of American Postal History 38, no. 3 (2007). https://www.lapostapub.com/Backissues/LP38-3.pdf
Rennick, Robert M. “The Post Offices of Pulaski County, Kentucky, Part 3.” La Posta: A Journal of American Postal History 38, no. 5 (2007). https://www.lapostapub.com/Backissues/LP38-5.pdf
Rennick, Robert M. Kentucky Place Names. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984. https://books.google.com/books/about/Kentucky_place_names.html?id=ivUTAAAAYAAJ
Rennick, Robert M. “Pulaski County: Post Offices.” County Histories of Kentucky, no. 388. Morehead State University, 2000. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/388/
Rennick, Robert M. “Pulaski County: Place Names.” Robert M. Rennick Manuscript Collection, no. 123. Morehead State University. Digitized 2016. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_ms_collection/123/
Works Progress Administration and Robert M. Rennick. “Pulaski County: Post Offices & Place Names.” County Histories of Kentucky, no. 284. Morehead State University. Cataloged as 1939; includes material attributed to Rennick. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/284/
Morehead State University. Robert M. Rennick Topographical Maps Collection. Historical United States Geological Survey maps, including the Hail quadrangle covering Pulaski and McCreary counties. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_maps_all/index.17.html
United States Post Office Department. Post Office Reports of Site Locations, 1837–1950. National Archives Microfilm Publication M1126. Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/locations-1837-1950.html
United States Post Office Department. Record of Appointment of Postmasters, 1832–1971. National Archives Microfilm Publication M841. Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/postmasters-1832-1971.html
Arnow, Harriette Simpson. Old Burnside: A Memoir of a Southern Girlhood. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1977. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_english_language_and_literature_north_america/8/
Blevins, Cameron, and Richard W. Helbock. US Post Offices. Historical geographical dataset. Harvard Dataverse, 2021. https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/NUKCNA
Blevins, Cameron. “US Post Offices Data Biography.” March 31, 2021. https://cblevins.github.io/us-post-offices/data-biography/
Pulaski County Public Library. Digital Archives of the Pulaski County Public Library. Somerset, KY. Historical newspapers, federal census schedules, county court records, and other digitized primary sources. https://pulaskilibrary.advantage-preservation.com/
United States National Archives and Records Administration. 1950 Census. Digitized federal population schedules and enumeration records. https://1950census.archives.gov/
United States Geological Survey. TopoView: Historical Topographic Maps. National Geologic Map Database. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/topoview/
Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. Historical Maps. Frankfort: Commonwealth of Kentucky. https://transportation.ky.gov/Planning/Pages/Historical-Maps.aspx
United States Army Corps of Engineers. “Wolf Creek Dam.” Louisville District. Official project history documenting construction and the development of Lake Cumberland. https://www.lrd.usace.army.mil/Missions/Projects/Article/3642683/wolf-creek-dam/
Author Note: The history of Hargis reminds us that even the smallest Appalachian communities leave behind records of the people and families who once called them home. If your family has connections to Hargis, Possum Trot, or the Buck Creek region, I encourage you to share your photographs, documents, and memories to help preserve this community’s history.