Appalachian Community Histories – Current, Wayne County: How a Heading Became a Phantom Appalachian Community
Wayne County, West Virginia, contains the kind of geography that can make local history difficult. Communities have grown around creek mouths, railroad sidings, post offices, schools, mines, churches, and family settlements, while some names disappeared so completely that only an old deed or newspaper column preserves them. A place missing from a modern map is therefore not necessarily a place that never existed.
That possibility makes a name such as Current seem believable.
Placed among the communities of Wayne County, “Current” looks ordinary enough. There are communities called Cyrus, Crockett, Booton, Armilda, Brabant, and Cove Gap, so there is little reason at first glance to question another unusual place name. A researcher might reasonably assume that Current was an abandoned settlement, a former post office, a mining camp, or a small hollow community that disappeared during the twentieth century.
The deeper the historical record is searched, however, the stranger Current becomes. It does not gradually emerge from forgotten maps and county documents. Instead, the evidence points in the opposite direction. Current appears to be a digital misunderstanding, a heading that was separated from its context and transformed into the name of a place.
The story is useful not because Wayne County once contained a mysterious lost community called Current, but because it apparently did not.
The clue hidden in the community list
The most likely source of the confusion appears on modern descriptions of Wayne County. In the county’s community listings, cities and towns are followed by a section for magisterial districts. Beneath that heading, the districts are divided into two groups labeled “Current” and “Historic.”
“Current” is therefore an adjective. It identifies the magisterial districts presently recognized, rather than naming a district or settlement itself.
The present group consists of Butler, Ceredo, Stonewall, Union, and Westmoreland. The U.S. Census Bureau independently recognizes those five names as Wayne County subdivisions. Its current geographic records identify Butler, Ceredo, Stonewall, Union, and Westmoreland districts, but there is no corresponding county subdivision called Current.
The wording becomes even clearer when the historic districts are examined. Older census records show that Wayne County’s administrative geography changed over time, which is precisely why a distinction between current and historic districts is useful. In the 1900 census, Wayne County was divided among Butler, Ceredo, Grant, Lincoln, Stonewall, and Union districts. Westmoreland had not yet taken its later place in the county’s district system.
By 1980, census tables listed Butler, Ceredo, Lincoln, Stonewall, Union, and Westmoreland. Modern census geography now recognizes Butler, Ceredo, Stonewall, Union, and Westmoreland. In other words, the word “Current” makes perfect sense as a heading separating present districts from ones that disappeared or changed. It makes very little sense as an additional Wayne County community.
Searching the old maps
Still, a modern webpage can be wrong, and Appalachia is filled with place names that never became incorporated towns or census communities. To dismiss Current simply because it does not appear in the modern Census Bureau database would be risky. Historical maps provide a much better test.
One of the most valuable early maps is M. Wood White’s 1873 county and district atlas of West Virginia. Its map covering Cabell, Wayne, Lincoln, and Logan counties was created only a decade after West Virginia entered the Union. The atlas depicts townships, settlements, transportation routes, and other geographic features across the region. It provides an important early snapshot of Wayne County before the large scale industrial development that would transform parts of the county during the following decades.
Current does not emerge there as a recognizable Wayne County settlement.
That absence alone cannot settle the question. Small settlements were often omitted from county atlases, particularly places consisting of only a handful of families. A stronger case comes from comparing maps and geographic records produced across different periods.
The West Virginia Geological and Economic Survey’s 1913 report on Cabell, Wayne, and Lincoln counties is particularly valuable for this kind of research. Although created as a geological study, the 483 page government publication contains extensive information about roads, waterways, coal, timber, industrial development, and named geographic locations. Its surviving maps and indexed place names preserve numerous small Wayne County features. Once again, the documentary trail does not reveal a community called Current.
The historical highway maps preserved by the West Virginia GIS Technical Center add another layer. The West Virginia State Road Commission produced detailed county maps in 1933 and again in 1937. These are particularly important for local historians because road maps often recorded tiny rural settlements, schools, churches, road junctions, and other place names that were too small to appear prominently in national atlases. The Wayne County sheet survives in the 1933 collection, yet the broader historical mapping evidence still fails to establish Current as a locality.
By this point, a pattern begins to form. Current is not simply absent from one modern list. It fails to develop the historical footprint normally left even by very small Appalachian communities.
The post office test
Post office records provide one of the best ways to investigate obscure Appalachian place names.
Before automobiles and modern addressing systems, a rural post office could give an entire neighborhood its public identity. Some West Virginia communities were little more than a store, a post office, and a cluster of farms, yet their names survive because the federal postal system recorded them. Other names disappeared when the post office closed, leaving the postal records as one of the few remaining clues that the community ever existed.
The West Virginia and Regional History Center at West Virginia University preserves West Virginia Postmasters Appointment Records covering Wayne County from 1857 through 1971. The collection records the creation and discontinuance of post offices, changes in their names, appointment dates for postmasters, and, beginning in 1870, the offices that inherited the mail of discontinued locations.
That makes the collection exactly the sort of record in which a forgotten community named Current might be expected to appear if it had served as a postal locality.
Yet the available indexed evidence does not reveal such a Wayne County post office. This does not mean that every handwritten page of every surviving postal record can be dismissed without examination, but it removes another plausible explanation. There is no evidence so far that Current began as a postal settlement and later vanished from the map.
Wayne County’s paper trail
Wayne County also possesses an unusually deep local paper trail.
The West Virginia State Archives preserves county records reaching back into the nineteenth century. Wayne County’s holdings include deeds beginning in 1842, deed indexes, surveyors’ books, survey entry books, wills, chancery records, fiduciary records, marriages, births, deaths, and court material. These records are the documents through which obscure creek settlements and neighborhood names often surface, especially when a locality never had formal municipal standing.
Newspapers provide an equally useful window. The surviving Wayne County News material demonstrates how carefully local reporters recorded small places that might otherwise have escaped the historical record. A 1925 issue could mention Ferguson and Coleman in reports about farming, while other editions discussed Bethesda, Missouri Branch, Butler District, and numerous family settlements and rural schools. The newspaper’s own retrospective history of Wayne County went back through local papers from 1884, 1885, and 1886 to reconstruct forgotten people, businesses, land values, and events.
This matters because forgotten Wayne County names did survive in the historical record. They appear in deeds, newspapers, census schedules, postal documents, geological reports, maps, church references, and school records.
Current does not behave like one of those names.
Rather than appearing occasionally and then fading away, it appears to have no independent history to fade from.
Crockett, Current, and Cyrus
The simplest explanation becomes apparent when the modern community list is read according to its actual structure.
Among Wayne County’s unincorporated communities, Crockett is followed by Cyrus. Current does not belong between them. The research gathered for this investigation likewise found that Cyrus, unlike Current, is independently identified as a Wayne County populated place.
The likely error is therefore remarkably small.
Someone working through a county page, database, copied list, or automatically extracted set of names could reach the section marked “Magisterial districts,” encounter the subheading “Current,” and mistake that heading for another geographic entry. Once removed from the visual hierarchy of the original page, the word would look exactly like a place name.
From there, the error could easily reproduce itself. A spreadsheet might list Current among Wayne County communities. A research project might create a blank entry for it. A search engine could index later references created from that list. Eventually, repetition could make an accidental heading appear increasingly legitimate.
This is one of the dangers of digital history. Information can travel faster than its context.
What the real records show
The historical record does not support writing a conventional community history for Current, Wayne County, because there is no reliable evidence that such a community existed.
That conclusion is not based simply on failing to find the name in one source. It comes from comparing several different kinds of evidence across more than a century. The 1873 county atlas documents nineteenth century geography. The 1900 census records Wayne County’s districts. The 1913 geological survey preserves hundreds of geographic and industrial references. State road maps provide detailed twentieth century local geography. Postal records document old post offices. County court collections preserve property and survey records. Newspapers preserve settlements so small that many have almost disappeared from modern memory.
Against that documentary background, Current leaves no recognizable footprint.
Meanwhile, the source of the apparent name is visible in plain sight. Modern Wayne County listings distinguish “Current” magisterial districts from historic ones, and federal census geography identifies the actual districts by name.
For a historian, that is an important distinction. Absence of evidence should not automatically become evidence of absence, especially in rural Appalachian history. Too many real communities were poorly documented for that rule to be safe. Yet when several independent record groups fail to establish a place and a clear documentary explanation exists for how the supposed name originated, the responsible conclusion changes.
Current was almost certainly not a forgotten Wayne County town.
It was a heading.
When historical research means leaving something out
There is a temptation in local history to turn every name into a story. Appalachian geography encourages it because the region contains thousands of communities that existed outside formal city limits, and many were known only by a post office, church, creek, family, railroad stop, or coal company.
Sometimes the historian’s job, however, is to determine that there is no community story to tell.
That is what makes the case of Current worthwhile. The investigation demonstrates why old maps, census tables, county records, newspapers, postal files, and government geographic records should be compared before a modern online list is treated as historical fact. A single misplaced heading can create a convincing place name. Repetition can make it look established. Only returning to the historical record separates the real community from the accidental one.
Wayne County has no shortage of actual communities whose histories deserve to be recovered. The list continues after Crockett with Cyrus, and from there into the many hollows, creek valleys, railroad settlements, and rural neighborhoods that have shaped the county for generations.
Current does not need to be added to that history.
Finding out why may be its most interesting story of all.
Sources & Further Reading
Appalachian Regional Commission. “Appalachian Counties Served by ARC.” Accessed October 3, 2026. https://www.arc.gov/appalachian-counties-served-by-arc/
Appalachian Regional Commission. “Wayne County, West Virginia.” Accessed October 3, 2026. https://www.arc.gov/states_counties/wayne-west-virginia/
Krebs, Charles E., and D. D. Teets Jr. Cabell, Wayne, and Lincoln Counties. County Geologic Report 4. Morgantown: West Virginia Geological Survey, 1913. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/Prodesc/proddesc_10497.htm
Library of Congress. Ceredo Advance (Ceredo, WV), June 21, 1893. Chronicling America. https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn86092392/1893-06-21/ed-1/
Library of Congress. Ceredo Advance (Ceredo, WV), October 23, 1907. Chronicling America. https://www.loc.gov/item/sn86092392/1907-10-23/ed-1/
Library of Congress. Ceredo Advance (Ceredo, WV), March 5, 1913. Chronicling America. https://www.loc.gov/item/sn86092392/1913-03-05/ed-1/
United States Census Bureau. Population of West Virginia by Counties and Minor Civil Divisions. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1900. https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1900/bulletins/demographic/53-population-wv.pdf
United States Census Bureau. “Wayne County, West Virginia.” Data.census.gov. Accessed October 3, 2026. https://data.census.gov/all?q=Wayne%20County%2C%20West%20Virginia
West Virginia Archives and History. “Wayne County News: Table of Contents.” West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. Accessed October 3, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcntoc.html
Wayne County News. “History of School System in Wayne County Shows Immense Growth in Century.” October 23, 1919. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn191023.html
Wayne County News. “Wayne County of Forty Years Ago Pictured in Local Papers of the 1880s.” January 15, 1925. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn250115.html
Wayne County News. “First Deed Recorded in This County 84 Years Ago; 2,100 Recorded Last Year.” January 28, 1926. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn260128.html
West Virginia and Regional History Center. “Postmasters Appointment Records.” A&M 3110. West Virginia University Libraries. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/1346
West Virginia and Regional History Center. “Wayne County (W. Va.).” West Virginia University Libraries. Accessed October 3, 2026. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/subjects/724
West Virginia and Regional History Center. “West Virginia Postmasters Appointment Records, 1857–1971.” A&M 3026. West Virginia University Libraries. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/1217
West Virginia Geological and Economic Survey. Cabell, Wayne, and Lincoln Counties. Morgantown: West Virginia Geological Survey, 1913. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/Prodesc/proddesc_10497.htm
West Virginia GIS Technical Center. “Historic County Highway Maps, 1933 and 1937.” West Virginia University. Accessed October 3, 2026. https://wvgis.wvu.edu/data/dataset.php?ID=409
West Virginia State Archives. “County Court Records: Wayne County.” West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. Accessed October 3, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/bluenote.html
White, M. Wood. White’s New County and District Atlas of the State of West Virginia. Grafton, WV: M. W. White, 1873. “Cabell, Wayne, Lincoln, Logan Counties.” David Rumsey Historical Map Collection. https://www.davidrumsey.com/maps1120365-28431.html
Author Note: While researching Wayne County’s historic communities, I discovered that “Current” appears to have entered modern place lists through a misunderstanding of a webpage heading rather than from an actual settlement. I chose to document the investigation because identifying places that did not exist can be just as important as recovering those that have been forgotten.