Appalachian Community Histories – Lloyd, Greenup County: From Smith Branch and Biggs Landing to an Ohio River Community
Along the Ohio River a few miles north of Greenup, Kentucky, the small community of Lloyd has a history that reaches back more than two centuries. Its present name is relatively recent, but the surrounding riverbank was settled long before Lloyd appeared on twentieth-century maps. What began as a settlement near the mouth of Smith Branch eventually became associated with a river landing, a railroad station, several post offices, and two generations of Ohio River navigation projects.
Lloyd’s history is particularly interesting because it was never defined by a single name or industry. Early settlers knew the vicinity as Smith Branch, while William Biggs established Biggs Landing in the nineteenth century. Farther along the river, Oliver acquired a post office and a Chesapeake and Ohio Railway station. The post office that would eventually carry Lloyd’s name began operating as Riggs in 1930, only receiving its present name in 1952.
These names describe neighboring places and overlapping chapters of local history rather than one settlement simply changing its name every few decades. Together, they reveal how an Ohio River community developed through farming, river commerce, railroad transportation, federal improvements, and the gradual expansion of Greenup County’s educational and transportation infrastructure.
Smith Branch and the First Settlement
The earliest documented account of settlement in the Lloyd vicinity places its beginnings near the mouth of Smith Branch by 1810. According to the Kentucky Atlas, the branch was named for Godfrey Smith, whose surname became attached to the surrounding settlement. At a time when many small Kentucky communities lacked formally established towns, a creek or branch often provided the most recognizable geographical name for a neighborhood of farms and families.
The settlement developed during the early decades of Greenup County itself. Established in 1803, the county occupied a strategically valuable position along the Ohio River, which connected eastern Kentucky to river settlements in Ohio, western Pennsylvania, and the developing interior of the United States. For families living near Smith Branch, the river provided a transportation corridor that was considerably more practical for moving substantial quantities of goods than many of the roads leading into the surrounding countryside.
The surviving documentary record of this early period is incomplete. The 1811 Greenup County tax list, reproduced in local genealogical collections, identifies numerous early county residents, including members of the Biggs and Smith families. However, the presence of these surnames in a countywide record does not by itself establish that particular individuals lived at the mouth of Smith Branch. Connecting those families to the Lloyd vicinity requires surviving deeds, land descriptions, and contemporary maps.
One of the most useful original documents for reconstructing the nineteenth-century landscape is the Kentucky Geological Survey’s 1876 map of Greenup, Carter, Boyd, and part of Lawrence counties. Prepared by C. Schenk and W. C. Mitchell, the map identifies rivers, communities, and selected property owners, making it a valuable reference for investigating settlement and landownership before the name Lloyd came into use.
William Biggs and the Establishment of Biggs Landing
A more clearly documented chapter in the community’s history began in 1843, when William Biggs established Biggs Landing along the Ohio River. The Kentucky Atlas records the landing’s establishment and identifies Biggs as its founder. Its development reflected the growing importance of river transportation to northeastern Kentucky during the nineteenth century.
William Biggs was already familiar with the Ohio River long before the landing bore his name. An unusually detailed account of his earlier life appeared in the 1896 Biographical Cyclopedia of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, published while Biggs was still living. According to this contemporary biographical account, he was born in Montgomery County, Kentucky, on October 19, 1800, and moved to Greenup County when he was thirteen years old.
As a teenager, Biggs carried mail between Greenupsburg and the Little Sandy Salt Works before serving as a deputy sheriff. At eighteen, he began working on the Kanawha and Ohio rivers, spending approximately two years steering a keelboat between Charleston and Louisville. He also worked in the Kanawha salt industry and traded in iron, eventually making a final trip to New Orleans in 1827 before leaving the river trade.
After returning to Greenup County, Biggs pursued general merchandising, livestock trading, and farming. His subsequent wealth and extensive property holdings connected him to several aspects of the Ohio Valley economy. By the time the 1896 biography appeared, he reportedly owned a thousand-acre homestead in Greenup County, the nine-hundred-acre Waring farm, agricultural property in West Virginia, timberland in Arkansas, and the Biggs House in Portsmouth, Ohio. The same account described him as a substantial stockholder in the Lexington and Big Sandy Railroad Company.
This biography offers a particularly valuable connection between Lloyd’s early history and the wider commercial world of the nineteenth-century Ohio River. The establishment of Biggs Landing in 1843 was part of a much larger career built around transportation, landownership, and regional commerce, rather than an isolated development along the Greenup County riverbank.
The landing’s exact commercial activities, buildings, and operating history still require closer examination of contemporary deeds and river records. Nevertheless, its documented establishment illustrates how individual entrepreneurs helped create recognizable places along a river that functioned as one of the region’s principal transportation routes.
Oliver and the Arrival of the Railroad
As nineteenth-century transportation changed, railroad facilities introduced another name into the local geography. Approximately a mile downstream from Smith Branch, the community of Oliver developed a postal and railroad identity. Its post office operated from 1913 until 1923, while Olivers Station served the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway.
The distinction between Smith Branch, Biggs Landing, and Oliver is important. Although closely associated with the history of the present Lloyd vicinity, they were not necessarily identical geographical locations. Oliver’s position farther along the river helps explain why historical documents may refer to separate settlements or facilities within what is now understood as the broader Lloyd area.
The Chesapeake and Ohio Railway became one of the major transportation systems serving the Ohio Valley and the Appalachian coalfields. Its expansion connected eastern Kentucky’s industries to larger markets and offered communities along its routes transportation opportunities beyond traditional river traffic. For the Oliver vicinity, the presence of a named railroad station placed the neighborhood within this regional network.
The opening of the Oliver post office in 1913 also gave the community a formal place within the federal postal system. Its operation for approximately a decade provides a useful period in which to investigate local businesses, residents, and the relationship between the railroad and the surrounding farms.
The National Archives preserves original Post Office Department site-location reports, which were prepared to document the positions of post offices relative to streams, roads, neighboring offices, and railroad facilities. The surviving Greenup County records are found on roll 216 of Microfilm Publication M1126. Original reports for Oliver, where available, may provide further details about the community’s precise location and transportation connections.
From Riggs to Lloyd
The postal history of the present community began in 1930, when a nearby post office opened under the name Riggs. Unlike the earlier Oliver office, which had closed in 1923, Riggs would become the direct predecessor of the Lloyd post office. The Kentucky Atlas records that the name changed from Riggs to Lloyd in 1952, establishing the modern postal identity of the community.
The reason for the selection of the name Lloyd is less clearly established in the readily available published accounts. Robert M. Rennick’s extensive research on Kentucky place names, preserved at Morehead State University, provides an important avenue for investigating the original naming decisions and identifying individuals who may have been associated with the Riggs and Lloyd post offices. His collection includes county-specific notes, alphabetical place-name manuscripts, and research cards compiled during decades of historical investigation.
Original postal records may also help establish whether the change was associated with a postmaster, a local family, or another circumstance. The National Archives notes that records for renamed post offices can appear under either their earlier or later names, making it necessary to search both Riggs and Lloyd when examining the original federal records.
The Lloyd post office continued operating into the twenty-first century before closing in 2004. Its closure ended a postal history that had begun under the name Riggs seventy-four years earlier. Yet the community’s identity as Lloyd remained, illustrating how a post office name could outlast the institution that originally brought it into everyday use.
Lloyd on the 1953 Map
One of the most revealing surviving primary sources for the community is the United States Geological Survey’s 1953 Greenup quadrangle. Produced shortly after the Riggs post office was renamed, the map provides a geographical record of Lloyd during the middle of the twentieth century.
The map identifies Lloyd, Smith Branch, the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway, U.S. 23, and the older Ohio River Lock and Dam No. 30. It also records several nearby community landmarks, including Biggs School and other rural schools and churches in the surrounding area. These features illustrate how the community had developed beyond its early river-landing identity into a landscape of roads, educational institutions, rail transportation, and federal river infrastructure.
The appearance of Smith Branch and Biggs School on the same mid-century map is especially significant. Both names preserve connections to the area’s older settlement history, even after the name Lloyd had become established. The map also provides a useful reference point for distinguishing historic locations from the later changes brought about by modern river engineering and highway improvements.
Lock and Dam No. 30 and the Changing Ohio River
During the twentieth century, federal efforts to improve navigation transformed the Ohio River into a more dependable commercial waterway. A network of locks and dams regulated navigation pools and allowed boats and barges to move through sections of the river that had previously presented difficulties during periods of low water.
One of these structures, Ohio River Lock and Dam No. 30, stood near Lloyd. Its presence became an important feature of the community’s physical landscape and linked the locality to the larger federal navigation system extending along the Ohio River.
Contemporary federal charts are particularly useful for studying this period. The Army Corps of Engineers’ Ohio River survey of 1911 through 1914 produced 280 charts covering the waterway from Pittsburgh to its mouth. The original maps contain river landmarks and landowner names along both banks, providing evidence of the communities, transportation facilities, and property boundaries that surrounded the river during the early twentieth century.
By the middle of the century, the federal government was considering more extensive improvements that would eventually render several of the older locks and dams obsolete. These plans had consequences beyond navigation itself, particularly where changes in river levels affected roads, drainage facilities, and private property.
A contemporary report prepared by Eugene M. West at the University of Kentucky in July 1952 examined the effects of a proposed increase in the normal pool elevation associated with Lock and Dam No. 30. The report specifically investigated the hydraulic conditions affecting drainage structures along U.S. 23 near Greenup. Its technical analysis demonstrates that changes to the river’s navigation system could influence the surrounding transportation infrastructure as well as the river itself.
For Lloyd, these developments formed the beginning of a much larger transformation of its riverfront setting.
Construction of the Greenup Locks and Dam
The most substantial twentieth-century engineering development associated with the Lloyd vicinity was the construction of the modern Greenup Locks and Dam. Designed to replace several older navigation structures, the project represented a new approach to managing commercial traffic on the Ohio River.
According to the United States Army Corps of Engineers, construction began in October 1954. Work on the locks commenced the following year, and the new lock chambers entered operation on November 27, 1959. Construction of the dam itself began in June 1958, and the navigation pool reached its full height on June 4, 1962.
The new facility replaced Ohio River Locks and Dams Nos. 27, 28, 29, and 30, along with Lock and Dam No. 1 on the Big Sandy River. Rather than maintaining several smaller navigation pools, the Corps consolidated a substantial stretch of the regional waterway under a modern system designed to accommodate larger commercial traffic.
The scale of the project required considerable engineering preparation. In 1958, the U.S. Army Engineer Waterways Experiment Station published Navigation Conditions at Greenup Locks and Dam, Ohio River: Hydraulic Model Investigation. The original technical report documented investigations conducted during the planning and design period, including the use of hydraulic models to evaluate navigation conditions around the proposed structure. A separate 1961 report examined the design of the spillway.
The construction project also required adjustments to transportation and utility infrastructure affected by the changed navigation pool. The Corps identifies railroad and highway drainage structures, embankment slopes, municipal water and sewer facilities, pipelines, power lines, and waterway terminals among the facilities requiring remedial work to accommodate the new conditions.
For the surrounding Greenup County communities, the new dam marked the end of the older lock-and-dam system and introduced a much larger permanent engineering landmark. The disappearance of Lock and Dam No. 30 from the active navigation network also meant that one of the defining features of Lloyd’s earlier river landscape had been superseded.
The Jesse Stuart Memorial Bridge
The Greenup Locks and Dam eventually provided the foundation for another major transportation development: a highway bridge connecting Kentucky and Ohio. Construction of the Jesse Stuart Memorial Bridge began in March 1984, adding a roadway crossing to the existing river facility.
The bridge was named in honor of Jesse Stuart, the nationally recognized writer and Greenup County native whose novels, poetry, and autobiographical works drew heavily upon the people and landscapes of northeastern Kentucky.
The bridge was inaugurated on October 31, 1986, and opened to traffic several weeks later. Its completion established an additional connection between U.S. 23 in Greenup County and U.S. 52 in Scioto County, Ohio, strengthening the transportation relationship between the two sides of the river.
For Lloyd and its neighboring communities, the crossing represented another stage in the area’s transportation history. The same stretch of river that had once supported keelboats, commercial landings, and early navigation structures now carried a modern highway connection between two states.
Schools and Community Life
Although the river and its transportation facilities dominate much of Lloyd’s surviving historical record, the community’s more recent history also includes its development as an educational center for Greenup County.
Greenup County High School is located in the Lloyd area, where it became an important institution for students from multiple communities across the county. The present school is commonly dated to 1972, when the consolidation of McKell, Greenup, and Wurtland high schools brought students together under a new countywide institution.
The Greenup County Public Library preserves an extensive collection of historical school yearbooks, including volumes from Greenup County High School beginning in the 1970s and older yearbooks from Greenup High School. These publications are valuable primary sources for reconstructing school activities, faculty, student organizations, athletics, and the changing social life of Greenup County communities.
The surrounding landscape retains evidence of older rural educational institutions as well. Biggs School, identified on the 1953 USGS map, reflects an earlier period when individual community schools served the scattered settlements of the county. Although further research is needed to establish its complete history, its appearance on the map offers another connection between Lloyd’s nineteenth-century settlement names and its twentieth-century community institutions.
Preserving Lloyd’s Earlier History
The history of Lloyd is distributed across a series of names and records rather than contained within the history of a single incorporated town. Smith Branch, Biggs Landing, Oliver, Riggs, and Lloyd each represent a different aspect of the area’s development, making the recovery of its past a matter of bringing together sources that were often organized under different geographical labels.
Nina Mitchell Biggs and Mabel Lee Mackoy’s 1951 History of Greenup County, Kentucky includes a section on Smith Branch, offering an important starting point for understanding how the older settlement was remembered in local historical writing. Biggs’s supplementary county history, published in 1962, provides another perspective on the changes that had taken place during the middle of the twentieth century.
Robert M. Rennick’s place-name research, the original Greenup County deed books, nineteenth-century maps, federal postal reports, and Army Corps engineering records provide opportunities to reconstruct the community through original evidence. Comparing these materials is particularly important because a reference to Smith Branch or Oliver may concern a neighboring location rather than the precise site of the later Lloyd post office.
The surviving historical maps offer a record of the landscape before the modern navigation project. The 1876 Geological Survey map, the Army Corps’ early twentieth-century river surveys, and the USGS maps from the 1950s and 1960s allow researchers to trace changes in transportation routes, geographical names, and the relationship between the community and the Ohio River.
A Community Built Around the Ohio
Lloyd’s history illustrates how a small northeastern Kentucky settlement could be transformed by successive generations of transportation and economic development. Its earliest documented identity grew around Smith Branch, where settlement began by 1810. William Biggs brought another name to the riverbank with the establishment of Biggs Landing in 1843, while Oliver and its railroad station reflected the growing importance of rail transportation during the following decades.
The establishment of Riggs in 1930 and its renaming as Lloyd in 1952 gave the community its modern identity, just as federal plans for the Ohio River were beginning to reshape its surroundings. The construction of Greenup Locks and Dam and the later Jesse Stuart Memorial Bridge brought developments that connected the locality to the commercial and transportation networks of the wider Ohio Valley.
Today Lloyd’s history can still be recovered through the names of its streams, surviving maps, original land records, and the federal documents created to record the changing river. The community’s story is not simply the story of a postal name or a modern dam. It is the history of a place that developed alongside the Ohio River, adapting as the transportation systems that sustained the region changed around it.
Sources & Further Reading
Biggs, Nina Mitchell, and Mabel Lee Mackoy. History of Greenup County, Kentucky. Louisville, KY: Franklin Press, 1951. https://openlibrary.org/works/OL4900977W/History_of_Greenup_County_Kentucky
Biggs, Nina Mitchell. A Supplementary Edition of a History of Greenup County, Kentucky. 1962. Reprint, Southern Historical Press, 2025. https://books.google.com/books/about/A_Supplementary_Edition_of_a_History_of.html?id=caQZ0QEACAAJ
Gresham, John M., Company. Biographical Cyclopedia of the Commonwealth of Kentucky: Embracing Biographies of Many of the Prominent Men and Families of the State. Chicago and Philadelphia: J. M. Gresham Company, 1896. https://archive.org/details/biographicalcycl00gres
Jackson, Evelyn, and Mildred Dupry. “Greenup County: Place Names.” County Histories of Kentucky. Morehead State University, n.d. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/index.2.html
Kentucky Atlas and Gazetteer. “Lloyd, Kentucky.” Accessed September 26, 2026. https://www.kyatlas.com/ky-lloyd.html
Kentucky Geological Survey. Map of the Counties of Greenup, Carter and Boyd and a Part of Lawrence. Cartography by C. Schenk and W. C. Mitchell. 1876. Kentucky Historical Society Digital Collections. https://www.kyhistory.com/digital/collection/Maps/id/200/
National Archives and Records Administration. “Post Office Reports of Site Locations, 1837–1950.” Record Group 28, Microfilm Publication M1126, roll 216, Greenup through Hardin Counties, Kentucky. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/locations-1837-1950.html
Rennick, Robert M. “Greenup County: Place Names.” Robert M. Rennick Manuscript Collection, no. 71. Morehead State University, digitized November 21, 2016. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_ms_collection/71/
Rennick, Robert M. “Greenup County: Post Offices.” County Histories of Kentucky. Morehead State University, n.d. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/index.2.html
Rennick, Robert M. “Northeastern Kentucky Post Offices.” Robert M. Rennick Manuscript Collection, no. 160. Morehead State University, 1998. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_ms_collection/160/
Rennick, Robert M. Kentucky Place Names. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/robert_rennick_collection/
Russell Times. “Greenup County: Historic Souvenir Edition.” September 15, 1974. County Histories of Kentucky, Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/index.2.html
Savage, Jake, Bertha Savage, and Lucille Maynard. Interview by Robert M. Rennick, August 18, 1977. Robert M. Rennick Oral History Collection, no. 312. Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_oh_collection/312/
United States Army Corps of Engineers. Atlas of the Ohio River, Consisting of 280 Charts and Index Sheet, Survey of 1911–14. Washington, DC: War Department, Corps of Engineers, 1914. USACE Digital Library. https://usace.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p16021coll10/id/9686/
United States Army Corps of Engineers. “Greenup Locks and Dam.” Great Lakes and Ohio River Division. Accessed September 26, 2026. https://www.lrd.usace.army.mil/Mission/Projects/Article/3640169/greenup-locks-and-dam/
United States Army Engineer Waterways Experiment Station. Navigation Conditions at Greenup Locks and Dam, Ohio River: Hydraulic Model Investigation. Technical Report No. 2-469. Vicksburg, MS: Waterways Experiment Station, January 1958. https://usace.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p266001coll1/id/1763
United States Army Engineer Waterways Experiment Station. Spillway, Greenup Locks and Dam, Ohio River, Kentucky and Indiana: Hydraulic Model Investigation. Vicksburg, MS: Waterways Experiment Station, 1961. https://usace.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p266001coll1/id/1757
United States Geological Survey. Greenup Quadrangle, Kentucky–Ohio. 7.5-minute series, surveyed 1953, published 1955. Historical Topographic Map Collection. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:KY_Greenup_708777_1953_24000_geo.pdf
United States Geological Survey. Greenup Quadrangle, Kentucky–Ohio. 7.5-minute series, 1961. USGS Store. https://store.usgs.gov/product/864030
West, Eugene M. Head Determinations for Structures on U.S. 23 That Are Affected by Raising the Normal Pool Elevation of Ohio River Lock and Dam No. 30 at Greenup, Kentucky. Kentucky Highway Materials Research Laboratory Report No. 81. Lexington: University of Kentucky, July 1952. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/ktc_researchreports/1296/
Works Progress Administration and Historical Records Survey. “Greenup County.” County Histories of Kentucky, no. 35. Morehead State University, 1936. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/35/
Works Progress Administration. “Greenup County: General History.” County Histories of Kentucky. Morehead State University, n.d. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/index.2.html
Hyland Studio. “Greenup High Level Dam & Lock.” Postcard. Zanesville, OH: Hivnor Card Co., 1962. Scioto County Public Library Local History Digital Collection. https://www.sciotolibrary.org/history/items/show/21671
Greenup County Public Library. “Genealogy and Local History.” Greenup County Public Library District. Accessed September 26, 2026. https://www.greenuplib.org/genealogy
Author Note: Lloyd’s history shows how a small Ohio River community can preserve several generations of settlement, commerce, and transportation within its changing place names. I hope this article encourages readers to explore the surviving records of Smith Branch, Biggs Landing, and Olivers Station and preserve more of Greenup County’s local history.