Appalachian Community Histories – Colfax, Fleming County: Spring Hill, Rural Life, and Kentucky’s Colfax Oil Pool
Along the southern edge of Fleming County, not far from the Rowan and Bath County lines, a country road still carries the name of a community whose busiest years have largely slipped from view. Colfax never became an incorporated town, never developed a courthouse square, and never grew around a railroad depot. Its history was built instead around farms, country stores, a school, a post office, family cemeteries, and, for a time, an oil field beneath the surrounding hills.
The name Colfax officially entered the postal record in 1901, but the community was already older. Local histories remember the neighborhood as Spring Hill, a name that survived even after the Post Office Department required another name for the mail. For more than half a century afterward, Colfax appeared on letters, commercial directories, government maps, and geological reports. In 1920, oil added another chapter to the community’s history when the Colfax field was discovered in the Silurian rocks beneath the countryside.
Today the post office is gone, but the name remains on Colfax Road and on maps of Fleming County. What survives is the story of one of the county’s small rural communities that became more important than its size might suggest.
Before Colfax Was Colfax
The creation of the Colfax post office did not create the settlement. Families had already established farms and homes in this part of southern Fleming County during the nineteenth century, when communities were often known by schools, churches, creeks, family names, or other local landmarks rather than an official town name.
Later Fleming County accounts identify the neighborhood as Spring Hill. A 2024 historical column in the Fleming Gazette, drawing from earlier local research, states that Spring Hill was being used as the community name by 1885. The same account connects some of the early settlement with families including the Kissicks, Reeves, Keerans, Rogers, Moores, Estills, and Bristows. It also remembers the community as eventually supporting two general stores, a school, and the post office that would give it its more permanent name.
That older settlement can also be approached through the 1884 atlas of Bath and Fleming counties, county deeds, census schedules, and the small family cemeteries scattered through the neighborhood. These records matter because Colfax was never a compact town with clearly surveyed city limits. It was a rural community whose boundaries were understood through farms, roads, schools, stores, and families.
The later postal history would give that scattered neighborhood a recognizable name, but the people and landscape were already there.
A Post Office Creates Colfax
The clearest date in the history of Colfax is June 12, 1901.
Kentucky place-name historian Robert M. Rennick, working extensively with federal Post Office Department records, found that the Colfax post office was established on that date with Allen Henderson as postmaster. Rennick placed the new office in the community south of Grange City and north of the Rowan County line.
The National Archives preserves the federal records behind this kind of research. The Record of Appointment of Postmasters, Microfilm Publication M841, includes Fleming County on Kentucky Roll 45. The separate Reports of Site Locations, Microfilm Publication M1126, place Fleming County on Roll 214. Those site reports can identify neighboring post offices, roads, streams, mail routes, populations served, and sometimes even contain sketches showing exactly where an office stood.
Local information attributed to Henderson placed the proposed office about three miles south of Grange City, four miles north of the Moore’s Ferry post office, and four and one-half miles southwest of Ringo’s Mills. That description situates Colfax within an older rural network rather than in isolation. Grange City tied the neighborhood northward into Fleming County, while Moore’s Ferry, Salt Lick, and the Licking River connected residents southward toward Bath and Rowan counties.
The federal post office did more than deliver letters. It gave the neighborhood an official geographical identity that appeared in directories, newspapers, government documents, and family records.
From Spring Hill to Colfax
Why the community became Colfax is less certain.
According to Rennick, local tradition held that residents were discussing a name for their post office when a stranger named “Coldfax” entered the conversation and suggested that they use his name. The spelling became Colfax. Rennick preserved the story but did not present it as proven fact. He even wondered whether the office might instead have been named for Schuyler Colfax of Indiana, the former Speaker of the United States House of Representatives and vice president under Ulysses S. Grant.
Deborah Harmon McConnel and Barbara Spurlock Flora encountered the same problem while researching their book Colfax, Kentucky Memories and History 1900-1950. Their work preserves several competing traditions. One version again places a man named Colfax at the Salt Lick post office. Another remembers a Rufus Colfax as the person who suggested the name. Other possibilities were investigated as well. None has produced enough documentary evidence to settle the question completely.
One part of the story is clearer. Spring Hill could not easily become the official postal name because another Kentucky post office already used it. Rennick found that in 1903 Allen Henderson’s successor, James S. Davis, moved the Colfax office approximately two hundred yards south so that it more directly served the Spring Hill community. The existing Spring Hill post office in Hickman County prevented the Fleming County neighborhood from simply keeping its familiar name for postal purposes.
That small administrative problem created a lasting identity. Spring Hill survived in local memory and in the name of the school, while Colfax became the name carried through the mail.
Stores, School, and Rural Community Life
Colfax never needed a large commercial district to function as a community.
A country store could sell groceries, tools, cloth, tobacco, medicine, and other necessities while serving as a place where neighbors exchanged news. The post office was often inside or beside such a business. A rural school brought children from farms spread across the surrounding countryside. Cemeteries preserved the geography of families whose connection to the place could reach back generations.
The persistence of the Spring Hill name is especially revealing. More than fifty years after the establishment of the Colfax post office, the 1953 United States Geological Survey mapping of the area still identified Spring Hill School. The same historical mapping preserved Colfax itself and features associated with the surrounding landscape, including the Colfax postal location, the Colfax Oil Pool, and Reeves Cemetery. The research assembled for this article identified those historical maps as some of the strongest primary cartographic evidence for reconstructing the community. Pasted markdown
The survival of both names on the landscape shows how rural communities could possess several overlapping identities. A resident might attend Spring Hill School, receive mail through Colfax, bank or trade at Salt Lick, and describe the location of a farm by the road, branch, cemetery, or neighboring family.
Colfax was therefore less a village in the conventional sense than a network of people and places tied together by geography and habit.
Colfax and Salt Lick
Although Colfax was in Fleming County, its history cannot be separated completely from Bath County.
Salt Lick was particularly important. The community lay to the south, connected with the Licking River valley and, unlike Colfax, enjoyed railroad access. Even the stories surrounding the naming of Colfax repeatedly place the decisive conversation at the Salt Lick post office.
A contemporary commercial directory provides unusually good evidence of that connection. The January 1920 Rand McNally Bankers’ Directory listed communities without banks and identified the nearest accessible banking point for each. Its Kentucky entries gave a simple instruction for Colfax: “Colfax to Salt Lick.”
That short entry says a great deal. Colfax was sufficiently established to appear as a recognized postal and commercial community, but it lacked a bank of its own. For financial services, residents looked south toward Salt Lick.
The connection also helps explain why Colfax history sometimes crosses county lines. Families moved between Fleming, Bath, and Rowan counties, and residents followed whichever road led most conveniently to stores, mills, rail transportation, banks, churches, or relatives. County boundaries mattered to courts and government records, but daily life was not always organized so neatly.
Oil Beneath the Hills
In 1920, Colfax acquired another identity.
Kentucky Geological Survey records list the discovery date of the Colfax oil field as 1920. The recorded producing formation was the Bisher, with production identified as oil from Silurian rocks.
For a rural farming community, oil exploration brought a different kind of economic activity. Land that had long been valued for crops, livestock, timber, and family inheritance could suddenly possess value beneath the surface. Mineral leases, drilling rights, access roads, equipment, and well locations became part of the countryside.
The field was important enough that the name endured as the Colfax Oil Pool. Decades after the first discovery, historical mapping continued to identify it, preserving the industrial geography alongside schools, roads, cemeteries, streams, and farms.
The oil did not transform Colfax into an eastern Kentucky boomtown. There is no evidence of the kind of explosive settlement growth associated with the great coal camps farther south and east. Instead, oil became another layer of an already established agricultural community. Farmers and landowners remained on the same countryside, but derricks and wells joined barns, schoolhouses, stores, and fences as features of the local landscape.
The coincidence of the discovery year with the banking directory is particularly revealing. In 1920, Colfax was both a small rural postal community dependent on Salt Lick for banking and the name of a newly recognized oil field.
A Community Preserved on the Map
By the middle of the twentieth century, federal maps captured Colfax near the end of its postal era.
The landscape remained unmistakably rural. Roads followed valleys and ridges rather than a street grid. Schools, churches, cemeteries, creeks, and scattered buildings were more important landmarks than municipal boundaries. The Colfax name occupied this landscape beside older names such as Spring Hill and newer industrial terminology such as the Colfax Oil Pool.
The road itself eventually became one of the strongest surviving reminders of the community. Kentucky Transportation Cabinet records now identify KY 1722 as the highway running from the Rowan County line through Colfax and Stringtown to KY 111 at Grange City. The roadway is officially described in Fleming County as Colfax Road.
Older records used KY 211 for the Colfax Road designation, the route number appearing in Rennick’s 1998 account and in Kentucky highway records from the early 2000s. The numbering has changed, but the community name remained attached to the road.
For small communities, that kind of survival matters. A post office can close. A school can disappear. Stores can become houses or vacant ground. Yet a road name can preserve a community identity for generations after the institutions that created it are gone.
The Closing of the Colfax Post Office
The Colfax post office did not remain in one building for all of its fifty-seven years.
Rennick found that it moved several times, beginning with James S. Davis’s relocation toward Spring Hill in 1903. By its later years, the office was recorded roughly eighteen and one-quarter miles south-southeast of Flemingsburg. It finally closed in late May 1958.
Other postal-history records independently give the lifespan as 1901 to 1958.
Its disappearance was part of a much broader twentieth-century transformation of rural America. Improved roads, automobiles, changing postal routes, school consolidation, and the increasing concentration of businesses and services in larger towns gradually reduced the need for hundreds of tiny country post offices.
Closing the office did not erase Colfax.
People continued to live on its farms and roads. The Colfax name remained attached to the landscape, and the older Spring Hill identity survived in historical records. The oil field continued to appear in geographical databases and geological literature. Family cemeteries remained on the hills and bottoms. Colfax Road continued north toward Grange City and south toward Rowan County.
The community simply returned to something closer to what it had been before 1901: a place defined more by the people who lived there than by a federal institution.
Why Colfax Matters
Colfax represents a kind of Appalachian history that can easily disappear.
There was no famous battle here, no great courthouse, no major railroad station, and no industrial city. Its history is instead scattered through postmaster records, old maps, geological tables, deeds, census schedules, cemeteries, newspapers, family memories, and the name painted on a highway sign.
Yet those sources reveal a surprisingly layered story.
The neighborhood existed as Spring Hill before the twentieth century. A federal post office established in 1901 gave it the name Colfax. Nobody can now say with certainty whose Colfax supplied that name. James S. Davis moved the office nearer Spring Hill in 1903. Stores and a rural school served the surrounding farm families. Salt Lick functioned as an important commercial connection. Oil was discovered in the Colfax field in 1920. The post office survived until 1958, and the road continued carrying the name after the mail stopped coming through a Colfax postmaster.
For more than a century, those names have overlapped on the same piece of Fleming County countryside.
Spring Hill belongs to the settlement that came first. Colfax belongs to the postal community that followed. The Colfax Oil Pool records the resources found beneath it. Colfax Road carries all of that history forward, marking a place that never needed city limits to become part of Fleming County’s story.
Sources & Further Reading
United States Post Office Department. Record of Appointment of Postmasters, 1832–September 30, 1971. Microfilm Publication M841, Record Group 28, Records of the Post Office Department. Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/postmasters-1832-1971.html
United States Post Office Department. Post Office Department Reports of Site Locations, 1837–1950. Microfilm Publication M1126, Record Group 28, Records of the Post Office Department. Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/locations-1837-1950.html
National Archives and Records Administration. “Post Office Records.” National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices
Rennick, Robert M. “The Post Offices of Fleming County, Kentucky.” La Posta: A Journal of American Postal History 29, no. 2 (May 1998). https://www.lapostapub.com/Backissues/LP29-2.pdf
Rennick, Robert M. “Fleming County – Post Offices.” County Histories of Kentucky. Morehead State University, 2000. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/192/
Rennick, Robert M. “Northeastern Kentucky Post Offices.” Robert M. Rennick Manuscript Collection. Morehead State University, 1998. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_ms_collection/160/
Rennick, Robert M. “Place Names Beginning with the Letter C.” Robert M. Rennick Manuscript Collection. Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_ms_collection/16/
Rennick, Robert M. Kentucky Place Names. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984. https://www.si.edu/object/kentucky-place-names-robert-m-rennick%3Asiris_sil_269010
McConnel, Deborah Harmon, and Barbara Spurlock Flora. Colfax, Kentucky Memories and History 1900–1950. Local history of Colfax, Kentucky. Discussed in the Fleming Gazette, January 25, 2022. https://kynewsgroup.com/tfg012522.pdf
Fleming Gazette. “Colfax.” July 17, 2024. https://kynewsgroup.com/tfg071724.pdf
Works Progress Administration and Historical Records Survey. “Fleming County – General History.” 1939. County Histories of Kentucky. Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/191/
Lathrop, J. M., and J. H. Summers. An Atlas of Bath & Fleming Counties, Ky., from Actual Surveys. Philadelphia: D. J. Lake & Co., 1884. https://archive.org/details/atlasofbathflemi00djla
United States Geological Survey. Colfax, Kentucky. 7.5-Minute Topographic Quadrangle. 1953. Reston, VA: U.S. Geological Survey. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/topoview/
United States Geological Survey. Salt Lick, Kentucky. Topographic Quadrangle. 1929. Reston, VA: U.S. Geological Survey. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/topoview/
United States Geological Survey. Salt Lick, Kentucky. Topographic Quadrangle. 1934. Reston, VA: U.S. Geological Survey. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/topoview/
United States Geological Survey. Colfax, Kentucky. 7.5-Minute Topographic Quadrangle. 1970. Reston, VA: U.S. Geological Survey. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/topoview/
Kentucky Geological Survey. Petroleum field records for the Colfax oil field, Fleming County, Kentucky. Lexington: University of Kentucky. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/232597173.pdf
Rand McNally and Company. Rand McNally Bankers’ Directory. January 1920. Chicago: Rand McNally & Co. Digitized by FRASER, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/rand-mcnally-bankers-directory-105/january-1920-579676
United States Bureau of the Census. Twelfth Census of the United States, 1900: Population Schedules, Fleming County, Kentucky. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1900. https://www.archives.gov/research/census
United States Bureau of the Census. Thirteenth Census of the United States, 1910: Population Schedules, Fleming County, Kentucky. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1910. https://www.archives.gov/research/census
United States Bureau of the Census. Fourteenth Census of the United States, 1920: Population Schedules, Fleming County, Kentucky. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1920. https://www.archives.gov/research/census
United States Bureau of the Census. Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1930: Population Schedules, Fleming County, Kentucky. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1930. https://www.archives.gov/research/census
United States Bureau of the Census. Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940: Population Schedules, Fleming County, Kentucky. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1940. https://www.archives.gov/research/census/online-resources
United States Bureau of the Census. Seventeenth Census of the United States, 1950: Population Schedules, Fleming County, Kentucky. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1950. https://1950census.archives.gov/
Fleming County Clerk. “Records.” Fleming County, Kentucky. https://fleming.countyclerk.us/records/
Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives. “Research Guides and County Records.” Frankfort, KY: Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives. https://kdla.ky.gov/Archives-and-Reference/Pages/Research-Guides.aspx
Morehead State University. “County Histories of Kentucky.” ScholarWorks. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/
Morehead State University. “Robert M. Rennick Manuscript Collection.” ScholarWorks. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_ms_collection/
Morehead State University. “Robert M. Rennick Oral History Collection.” ScholarWorks. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_oh_collection/
Kentucky Historical Society. “Library Catalog and Research Tools.” Frankfort, KY: Kentucky Historical Society. https://history.ky.gov/explore/catalog-research-tools/library-catalog
University of Kentucky Libraries. “Archival and Primary Sources.” Special Collections Research Center. Lexington: University of Kentucky. https://libraries.uky.edu/find-borrow/find-library-materials/find-materials-type/archival-primary-sources
Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. Fleming County State Primary Road System. Frankfort: Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. https://transportation.ky.gov/Planning/State%20Primary%20Road%20System%20Lists/Fleming.pdf
Cotterill, Robert Spencer. History of Fleming County, Kentucky: The First One Hundred Years, 1780–1880. Manuscript, 1981–1985. https://search.worldcat.org/title/16440102
Collins, Lewis, and Richard H. Collins. History of Kentucky. 2 vols. Covington, KY: Collins & Co., 1874. https://books.google.com/books?id=pdfInQEACAAJ
Kentucky Heritage Commission. Survey of Historic Sites in Kentucky: Fleming County. Frankfort: Kentucky Heritage Commission, 1978–79. https://npgallery.nps.gov/NRHP/GetAsset/NRHP/64500245_text
Fleming Gazette. Fleming County Bicentennial Edition. July 11, 1974. Digitized by Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/107/
Author Note: Colfax is one of the many Appalachian communities whose history survives more clearly in postal records, maps, cemeteries, and family memories than in the landscape itself. I hope this article helps preserve the story of Spring Hill, Colfax, and the generations who made this corner of Fleming County their home.