Appalachian Community Histories – Pleasureville, Fleming County: A Store, a Graveyard, and a Name No One Could Explain
There are places in Appalachia that announce themselves with courthouse squares, old churches, railroad depots, and rows of brick storefronts. Pleasureville, in northern Fleming County, Kentucky, is not one of them.
The community survives more quietly. It appears on maps along Kentucky Route 344, near the junction with Kentucky Route 989, between the Mount Carmel area and Foxport. The Kentucky Transportation Cabinet still recognizes the name, and official state road descriptions have used it for decades. A traveler can pass through the area without realizing that Pleasureville once had enough of an identity for local historians to record it as a community of its own.
That small identity is what makes Pleasureville interesting. It does not have a grand founding story, a famous industrial boom, or even a remembered explanation for its unusual name. In the local history collected by Martha Harlan Royse, Pleasureville was described simply as a place with one store, a number of homes, and a graveyard. The same account added two details that make the community more mysterious. Pleasureville was not believed to have been one of Fleming County’s early settlements, and local people themselves did not know why it was called Pleasureville.
For a historian, that leaves an unusual kind of story. Instead of tracing a town from its founding to its growth, the history of Pleasureville must be reconstructed from roads, gravestones, maps, family names, oral history, and the traces left by people who lived in a community small enough to escape much of the written record.
Before There Was a Pleasureville
Fleming County itself is old by Kentucky standards. The county was created from Mason County in 1798, becoming Kentucky’s twenty-sixth county, with Flemingsburg serving as its seat. Settlement in the larger county had already begun before its formal creation, with places such as Stockton’s Station dating to the 1780s.
That does not mean Pleasureville existed at the same time.
Royse’s community history specifically cautions against treating Pleasureville as one of the county’s pioneer settlements. The distinction is important. People were certainly living and working in the general countryside long before the community name came into regular use, but the existence of farms along a road is not the same thing as the existence of a recognized settlement called Pleasureville.
One glimpse of that older countryside comes from the area immediately south of Pleasureville around Rolph Hollow. Local historical material places the hollow east of Mount Carmel, southwest of Foxport, and south of Pleasureville. The road through the area was remembered as the Pleasureville-Mount Carmel Road and also as Black Diamond Pike. Family history collected there places gunsmith Elijah Mark’s shop beside a stream near the hollow, with Mark dying in 1854.
That account should be treated cautiously because part of it rests on family recollection, but it demonstrates something important. The countryside around the future Pleasureville was occupied decades before the surviving local histories clearly identify Pleasureville itself as a community.
The place appears to have developed from an already settled rural landscape rather than from an organized town plat or an early frontier station.
A Store, Homes, and a Graveyard
The best concise description of old Pleasureville comes from Martha Harlan Royse’s work on Fleming County communities.
Royse compiled information about the county’s small settlements, drawing in part on local knowledge and material supplied by Iolene Hawkins. Her account of Pleasureville did not describe a post office, mill complex, hotel, railroad depot, church district, or courthouse. Instead, she recorded one store, a number of homes, and the Pleasureville graveyard.
That short description says much about how communities could function in rural Kentucky.
A store could provide a focal point without creating a town in the formal sense. Families living on neighboring farms might identify themselves with the crossroads nearest them even when no municipal government existed, and no dense business district developed. Roads, stores, schools, churches, and graveyards often gave such places enough structure to acquire a community name.
Pleasureville seems to have belonged to that world.
Unfortunately, the surviving summary does not identify the storekeeper or explain when the business opened. Those are questions that may eventually be answered through Fleming County deed books, tax records, newspapers, and the papers collected by Kentucky place-name historian Robert M. Rennick. Until that evidence is found, giving the store an owner or a founding date would go beyond what the record can support.
The graveyard tells us more.
The Families in the Pleasureville Graveyard
In January 1970, Dr. William M. Talley published a transcription of the Pleasureville Graveyard in Kentucky Ancestors. Talley’s work is particularly valuable because he copied information directly from the stones rather than relying solely on later online cemetery databases. The Kentucky Historical Society’s index confirms his Pleasureville Graveyard contribution in volume 5, number 3.
The surviving transcription places the burial ground near Pleasureville and Foxport and preserves the names of families who formed part of the community’s human landscape.
There were Earleses, Plummers, Selsors, Carpenters, Longs, Millers, Porters, Dillons, Martins, Millions, Cassidys, Lumans, Berrys, and others. Some surnames appear repeatedly, particularly Carpenter, suggesting the kind of extended family network that often held rural communities together for generations.
The cemetery record also gives Pleasureville a clearer nineteenth-century connection than the surviving written description of the settlement itself.
Among the stones Talley recorded was that of Bidwell Wikoff, who died in 1890. Loucinda M. Porter died in 1894. Grace Million died in 1896, as did young Guy Martin. John Alexander Selsor died in 1897, and J. P. Selsor apparently died in 1898. Other burials followed closely after 1900.
Those dates do not tell us when the graveyard was established. Older graves may have existed without surviving stones, and the cemetery may have been known by another name before Pleasureville became the accepted community name. Still, the stones demonstrate that the neighborhood was home to an established network of families by the closing years of the nineteenth century.
They also help explain why the graveyard became such an important part of local memory. A store could close, and a house could disappear, but the cemetery remained tied to the people who had lived along the surrounding roads.
When Did Pleasureville Become Pleasureville?
This is the question the surviving sources cannot yet answer with confidence.
Royse believed the community was not especially early, and one modern reconstruction based on an 1895 Rand McNally atlas reports that Pleasureville was not listed there even though nearby Foxport and Mount Carmel were. That absence does not prove that nobody used the name in 1895. Small rural communities were often omitted from statewide atlases. It does, however, fit Royse’s recollection that Pleasureville was not one of Fleming County’s older or more prominent settlements.
The graveyard evidence suggests that the period around the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries deserves particularly close attention.
Newspapers may eventually provide the missing link. Flemingsburg supported a remarkable number of newspapers during the nineteenth century, including the Fleming County Dispatch, Fleming County Gazette, Fleming Star, Flemingsburg Democrat, and several earlier titles. The Fleming County Gazette began publication in 1880, making its surviving issues especially promising for discovering an early reference to Pleasureville, its store, or the families living there.
Land records could be equally important. If deeds begin describing property as being “at Pleasureville” or “in the village of Pleasureville,” that language could help establish when the name became locally recognized.
The fact that a modern Fleming County deed notice can still describe property as being in the “village of Pleasureville” shows how durable the old community identity became even without incorporation.
The Mystery of the Name
Pleasureville is the sort of name that invites explanation.
Perhaps there was a particularly pleasant farm. Perhaps a storekeeper chose the name. Perhaps it began as a joke, a promotional name, or an expression of optimism. Kentucky contains many communities whose names developed from families, postmasters, railroads, biblical references, local geography, and stories that became increasingly difficult to separate from folklore.
But there is no good evidence for any of those explanations here.
The strongest surviving local account says residents did not know why Pleasureville was named Pleasureville.
That uncertainty deserves to remain in the story.
There is also a major trap for anyone researching the subject. Kentucky has another, much larger Pleasureville in Henry and Shelby counties. That community has a completely different history, including nineteenth-century incorporation, a post office, railroad connections, and the names Bantatown and North Pleasureville. Sources concerning that Pleasureville frequently dominate searches and can easily be mistaken for Fleming County history.
The Fleming County Pleasureville is a separate place.
Robert M. Rennick’s work is therefore particularly important. Rennick spent decades studying Kentucky place names and conducted interviews with local historians around the state during the 1970s. Morehead State University preserves six recorded interview segments between Rennick and Martha Royse concerning Fleming County. The collection was specifically created to investigate the origins of Kentucky community names.
If an explanation for Pleasureville’s name survived anywhere in twentieth-century oral tradition, those recordings and Rennick’s unpublished research notes are among the most promising places to look.
The frustrating possibility remains that Royse had already reached the end of the trail. The people she spoke with may simply have inherited the name without inheriting the story behind it.
Pleasureville Reaches the Map
Whatever its exact beginning, Pleasureville eventually became established enough that mapmakers and state officials recognized it without hesitation.
The U.S. Geological Survey’s 1951 Burtonville quadrangle identifies Pleasureville as one of the named settlements in the area, alongside Foxport, Burtonville, Wallingford, and other communities. The map places it in the rugged landscape near Sugar Loaf Mountain, where roads wind among ridges, hollows, streams, farms, churches, cemeteries, and scattered houses.
That map is one of the clearest mid-twentieth-century snapshots of the community’s setting.
Pleasureville was never isolated in the sense of being alone. Foxport lay immediately to the east. Mount Carmel was to the west. Burtonville was nearby to the northeast. Wallingford lay farther south. The roads connecting those places mattered as much as the boundaries between them.
By the 1970s, the Kentucky state government was using Pleasureville as an official geographic reference point. A 1975 to 1976 Kentucky Administrative Register described Kentucky Route 989 as beginning at its junction with Kentucky Route 344 “at Pleasureville in Northern Fleming County” and continuing toward Charters in Lewis County.
That wording is valuable because it leaves no uncertainty over which Pleasureville the state meant.
The name continued in later transportation records. Kentucky Transportation Cabinet documents describe KY 344 as traveling from KY 57 near Mount Carmel “via Pleasureville and Foxport” to the Lewis County line. Modern state maps still label both Pleasureville and Foxport as separate places.
Even road construction projects have carried the old name forward. State highway planning documents have referred to reconstruction near the “Pleasureville Bridge” on KY 989.
The community that once consisted of little more than a store, homes, and a graveyard had become permanently attached to Kentucky’s official geography.
A Community Without a Town Square
Pleasureville is useful for understanding the difference between a community and a town.
Many places throughout Appalachia never had legal boundaries, elected governments, commercial districts, or large populations. They were communities because people said they were communities.
A road junction acquired a name. Mail might come through another post office. Children attended a nearby school. Families buried their dead in a local graveyard. A store became a meeting point. Directions depended on knowing that one road went toward Foxport, another toward Mount Carmel, and another through Pleasureville.
Over time, some of those places disappeared from common speech.
Pleasureville did not.
Its name survived long enough to enter federal topographic maps, Kentucky highway documents, property descriptions, cemetery records, and local histories. Even when the institutions that once gave the place its daily rhythm changed or vanished, the geographic identity remained.
That survival matters because official histories tend to favor communities that produced large quantities of records. County seats generated court books. Incorporated towns produced ordinances and tax rolls. Railroads printed timetables. Coal companies kept employment records. Churches maintained membership books.
A place like Pleasureville could leave much less behind.
Its history therefore has to be assembled differently.
What the Graveyard Remembers
The most tangible historical record of Pleasureville may still be its graveyard.
Talley’s transcription preserves more than dates. It reveals repeated marriages, family clusters, children who died young, couples buried together, and surnames that remained in the neighborhood for decades.
The Carpenter family alone occupies a substantial portion of the recorded stones. Charles Carpenter, born in 1865, lived until 1934. George Carpenter lived from 1852 to 1914. James Carpenter lived from 1850 to 1941. Other Carpenter burials stretch well into the twentieth century.
The cemetery also contains Reverend J. A. Miller, born in 1815 and dead by 1907, along with his wife Hannah. Their lifetimes reached backward almost to the earliest years of Fleming County and forward into the age when Pleasureville was becoming a recognizable local name.
That does not mean Miller spent his entire life at Pleasureville. Gravestones alone cannot establish that. But his burial there demonstrates how a relatively small cemetery could gather together generations whose lives extended across most of the nineteenth century.
The name on the cemetery eventually became inseparable from the name on the map.
Why Pleasureville Matters
It would be easy to dismiss Pleasureville as too small for a history of its own.
That would be a mistake.
The story of Appalachia is not made only from county seats, coal towns, famous feuds, major battles, and large industrial communities. Much of the region was built from places more like Pleasureville, communities that existed because several roads, several families, a store, a church or school nearby, and a burial ground gave people a shared sense of place.
Pleasureville also reminds us how easily that history can disappear.
By the time Martha Royse gathered information about the community, local residents apparently could no longer explain its name. The person who first called the place Pleasureville may once have been widely known. There may have been a story everyone understood. Then one generation passed, then another, until the name remained while the explanation vanished.
Fortunately, not everything disappeared.
The cemetery remained. The road remained. Families remembered neighboring hollows. Maps preserved the community name. State officials continued writing Pleasureville into highway records. Robert Rennick recorded Martha Royse and gathered place-name research that may yet hold another piece of the puzzle.
Pleasureville survives today not as a large town but as something more fragile and, in many ways, more representative of rural Appalachian history.
It survives as a name attached to a landscape.
A store once stood among a number of homes. Families buried their dead nearby. Roads carried people toward Mount Carmel, Foxport, Burtonville, and the Lewis County line. Nobody now seems certain why the place was called Pleasureville.
Yet more than a century later, the name is still there.
Sources & Further Reading
Royse, Martha Harlan. “Communities of Fleming County.” Manuscript. Morehead State University Archives, Morehead, Kentucky. Discussed in Brenda Plummer, “Museum Musings,” Flemingsburg Gazette, August 21, 2024. URL: kynewsgroup.com/tfg082124.pdf
Plummer, Brenda. “Museum Musings.” Flemingsburg Gazette, August 21, 2024. Includes material drawn from Martha Harlan Royse’s “Communities of Fleming County.” URL: kynewsgroup.com/tfg082124.pdf
Rennick, Robert M., and Martha Royse. “Martha Royse Interview, Parts 1–6 (Fleming County).” Robert M. Rennick Oral History Collection. Morehead State University. URL: scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_oh_collection/index.5.html
Morehead State University. “Robert M. Rennick Oral History Collection.” Camden-Carroll Library. URL: scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_oh_collection
Morehead State University. “Robert M. Rennick Manuscript Collection.” Camden-Carroll Library. Collection of more than 33,000 Kentucky place-name typescripts and research cards. URL: scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_ms_collection
Rennick, Robert M. “Fleming County: Post Offices.” County Histories of Kentucky. Morehead State University, 2000. URL: scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/192
Rennick, Robert M. “Kentucky Gateway-Buffalo Trace Area Post Offices.” Robert M. Rennick Manuscript Collection, 1997. Morehead State University. URL: scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_ms_collection/161
Rennick, Robert M. “Kentucky Place Name Derivations.” Robert M. Rennick Manuscript Collection, 1986. Morehead State University. URL: scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_ms_collection/157
Talley, William M. “Pleasureville Graveyard, Fleming County, Kentucky.” Kentucky Ancestors 5, no. 3 (January 1970): 152. Kentucky Historical Society. URL: kyhistory.com/digital/collection/LIB/id/1822
Talley, William M. “Pleasureville Graveyard.” Transcribed by Nancy Overlander. Kentucky Genealogy Trails. Originally published in Kentucky Ancestors 5, no. 3 (January 1970). URL: genealogytrails.com/ken/fleming/pleasurevillecem.html
Kentucky Genealogy Trails. “Cemetery Index, Fleming County, Kentucky.” Based on Geographic Names Information System records. URL: genealogytrails.com/ken/fleming/cemeteries.html
Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. Fleming County State Primary Road System. Frankfort, KY: Kentucky Transportation Cabinet, October 4, 2022. URL: transportation.ky.gov/Planning/State Primary Road System Lists/Fleming.pdf
Kentucky Department of Transportation. “KY 989.” Kentucky Administrative Register 2, no. 7 (February 1976). Describes KY 989 as beginning at KY 344 at Pleasureville in northern Fleming County and continuing to Charters in Lewis County. URL: apps.legislature.ky.gov/law/kar/registers/02KyR_1975-76/07_feb.pdf
Morris, Robert H. Geology of the Burtonville Quadrangle, Kentucky. Geologic Quadrangle 396. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1965. URL: pubs.usgs.gov/publication/gq396
Works Progress Administration and Historical Records Survey. “Fleming County: General History.” County Histories of Kentucky. Morehead State University, 1939. URL: scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/191
Fleming Gazette. “Fleming County: Bicentennial Edition.” July 11, 1974. Morehead State University, County Histories of Kentucky. URL: scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/107
Flemingsburg Times. Flemingsburg, Kentucky. Library of Congress, Directory of U.S. Newspapers in American Libraries. URL: loc.gov/item/sn88061189
Cotterill, Robert Spencer. History of Fleming County, Kentucky: The First One Hundred Years, 1780–1880. 1991. URL: Google Books record
Cotterill, Robert Spencer. History of Fleming County, Kentucky: The First One Hundred Years, 1780–1880: Manuscript, 1981–1985. Manuscript and correspondence, with maps compiled by Samuel M. Cassidy. WorldCat. URL: WorldCat archival record
Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives. County Records Availability: Land Records. Frankfort, Kentucky. Includes surviving county deeds, tax books, wills, surveys, plats, and related records. URL: KDLA county land-record inventory
“Fleming County Microfilmed Resources.” KYGenWeb. Includes deed books and indexes beginning in 1798, tax books, probate records, court orders, mortgages, and marriage records. URL: kygenweb.net/fleming/flemldsdocs.html
“Fleming County Deed Indexes and Images.” KYGenWeb. Includes digitized early Fleming County deeds, property plats, maps, and deed indexes. URL: kygenweb.net/carter/deeds/fleming_county/1_fleming_county.html
Flemingsburg Gazette. “Fleming County Deeds.” January 10, 2024. Includes contemporary deed descriptions identifying property in the community and “village” of Pleasureville. URL: kynewsgroup.com/tfg011024.pdf
Author Note: Pleasureville is one of those small Fleming County communities whose history survives more clearly in cemetery records, old roads, maps, and local memory than in a conventional town archive. I have tried to preserve what can be documented while leaving the mystery of its beginnings and unusual name open where the surviving evidence does not provide an answer.