Appalachian Community Histories – Mount Carmel, Fleming County: Turnpikes, Mail Routes, Civil War, and a Kentucky Crossroads
Mount Carmel can be easy to overlook on a modern map of Fleming County. It is no longer an incorporated town, and the commercial center that once drew travelers, merchants, mail carriers, and farming families has largely given way to a quieter rural community. Yet the surviving historical record tells a much different story. During the nineteenth century, Mount Carmel was important enough to have its own town government, post office, federal mail routes, turnpike companies, cemetery, businesses, school, churches, and a place on some of the most detailed maps of Fleming County.
Lewis and Richard Collins, writing in the nineteenth century, placed Mount Carmel about seven miles northeast of Flemingsburg and fifteen miles from Maysville. They estimated its population at roughly 200 and recorded December 21, 1825, as the date of incorporation. That made Mount Carmel one of Fleming County’s formally established communities well before many of the smaller places that would later appear across the county.
The documentary record that followed is unusually rich for a community of its size. Congress placed Mount Carmel on a federal post road. The Kentucky General Assembly repeatedly passed legislation concerning the town and roads leading from it. The federal census counted the town separately. Civil War records identified a skirmish there. An 1884 atlas gave Mount Carmel its own town map, while later local historians traced individual houses and lots across generations.
Taken together, those records show that Mount Carmel was not simply a name attached to a crossroads. For much of the nineteenth century, it was a small but recognized center of community life in northern Fleming County.
An Incorporated Town by 1825
The precise beginnings of Mount Carmel are more difficult to reconstruct than its later history. Local and place-name histories indicate that the name was in use by the early 1820s and was taken from the biblical Mount Carmel. What is clearer is that by December 1825 the settlement had reached a point where Kentucky recognized it as an incorporated town. Collins later recorded the incorporation date as December 21, 1825.
The original 1825 charter deserves some caution because a clean online copy of its complete text has not yet been located. Later records, however, confirm that an earlier legislative act had established the town. In 1838 the Kentucky legislature considered an act specifically described as amending the earlier law establishing Mount Carmel. The town therefore already possessed a legal identity that state lawmakers could revise as local needs changed.
Incorporation mattered in a small nineteenth-century Kentucky community. It allowed residents to develop a formal structure for governing streets, property, public order, taxation, and other local concerns rather than depending entirely upon Fleming County authorities. The repeated appearance of Mount Carmel in later session laws shows that the community continued to function as more than an informal rural neighborhood.
The surviving plats may eventually tell even more of the story. Local historian Ralph B. Clary, in his book Nothing Is the Same: Houses and People of Mount Carmel, Kentucky, used plats dated 1838, 1884, and 1997. He connected lot numbers with houses, property owners, businesses, and other parts of the town’s physical history. Brenda Plummer of the Fleming County Covered Bridge Museum later noted how valuable Clary’s work became because he preserved a property-by-property picture of a community whose older landscape was steadily disappearing.
Mount Carmel Becomes a Federal Mail Destination
One of the clearest signs of Mount Carmel’s regional importance came through the mail.
In 1838, Congress authorized a post road running from Poplar Flat in Lewis County to Mount Carmel in Fleming County. The route appears directly in the United States Statutes at Large, placing this small Fleming County town within the federal transportation and communication network.
A surviving mail schedule makes the route far more tangible. Route 3349 stretched fifteen miles between Poplar Flat and Mount Carmel and operated once each week. The carrier was scheduled to leave Poplar Flat at seven o’clock on Friday morning and arrive at Mount Carmel at noon. At noon the carrier started back, reaching Poplar Flat by six that evening.
For residents, that weekly arrival connected Mount Carmel with a much larger world. Letters, newspapers, business correspondence, legal notices, political news, and information from relatives elsewhere could all move through the community. Before telephones and automobiles, a dependable postal connection could help make the difference between an isolated settlement and a functioning regional center.
Postal histories place the establishment of the Mount Carmel post office in 1829 and its discontinuance in 1932, meaning that some form of postal service operated there for approximately a century. Later federal post-road legislation also placed Mount Carmel on a longer route running from Owingsville through Wyoming, Hillsboro, Poplar Plains, Flemingsburg, and Mount Carmel toward Mount Gilead. The routes show how Mount Carmel was tied not only to Flemingsburg but also to communities across Fleming, Bath, Lewis, and surrounding counties.
The National Archives postmaster records preserve the names of the people who operated this system. Among them was Isaac Kelly, whose life would tie Mount Carmel’s postal history directly to the Civil War.
The 1850 Census and the Enslaved People of Mount Carmel
The federal census offers one of the clearest snapshots of antebellum Mount Carmel.
In 1850, the Census Office counted 142 people within the town. Of those residents, 117 were white and 25 were enslaved. The figures were not estimates from a later county history. They appeared in the official published statistics of the Seventh Census of the United States.
Those numbers are important because histories of small Kentucky communities have often concentrated on landowners, businessmen, ministers, soldiers, and prominent families while leaving enslaved residents almost invisible. In Mount Carmel, enslaved people made up more than one-sixth of the town’s population in 1850. Their labor and presence were therefore a substantial part of the community that existed before the Civil War.
The manuscript population and slave schedules can take the history further. Enslaved individuals were usually recorded by age, sex, and color rather than by name, making their lives much harder to reconstruct than those of white residents. Even so, pairing the slave schedules with deeds, wills, tax records, estate inventories, family papers, and postwar records may eventually restore identities to some of the men, women, and children represented only as numbers in the federal schedules.
The case of Isaac Kelly illustrates the contradictions of Fleming County during this period. Kentucky Historical Society research compiled for the Civil War Governors of Kentucky project shows that Kelly was a tailor in Fleming County in 1850 and owned one enslaved person. By 1860, he was operating a tavern and owned three enslaved people. Yet Kelly would serve the United States during the Civil War, eventually becoming a captain in the 40th Kentucky Volunteer Mounted Infantry.
That combination was not unusual in Civil War Kentucky. Loyalty to the Union did not necessarily mean opposition to slavery, especially during the opening years of the conflict. Mount Carmel’s surviving records therefore reveal some of the complicated loyalties that existed throughout a border state where slavery, Unionism, and local political interests could exist in the same household.
A much later piece of community memory also preserved a trace of Mount Carmel’s enslaved population. An anonymous 1951 Flemingsburg Gazette history, later preserved in a Fleming County museum scrapbook and reprinted by Brenda Plummer, described enslaved people associated with the early Arnold family and recalled a separate burial area marked largely with limestone rather than inscribed stones. The article further preserved a local belief that construction of a later highway disturbed some of those graves. Because this account was written generations after slavery ended, it should be treated as local memory rather than conclusive archaeological evidence. Even so, it offers a valuable clue about people whose lives rarely entered the written record.
Roads and Turnpikes Made Mount Carmel a Crossroads
If the post office connected Mount Carmel through information, the turnpikes connected it physically to the surrounding countryside.
Kentucky’s session laws from the years after the Civil War repeatedly placed Mount Carmel at the center of road-building projects. Legislation in 1868 incorporated the Mount Carmel and Fox Spring Turnpike. Another act incorporated a road company linking Mount Carmel, Esculapia, and Kinniconick. State lawmakers also passed an act specifically “for the benefit of Mount Carmel in Fleming County.”
Another road company connected Salt Lick, Esculapia, and Mount Carmel, with later legislation identifying the original act as having been approved in 1867. The General Assembly returned to that company in 1873 to amend its earlier law. These repeated acts are evidence of a landscape in which Mount Carmel functioned as an important point between numerous smaller settlements, farms, springs, creek valleys, and county roads.
Turnpikes were economic arteries. Farmers needed dependable roads to move livestock, grain, tobacco, timber, and other products toward market. Merchants depended upon the same routes for manufactured goods arriving from larger towns. Travelers needed taverns, blacksmiths, stores, and other services along the way. A place positioned at the meeting point of several roads could support businesses that the surrounding countryside alone could not.
That helps explain why Mount Carmel maintained a distinct town identity even though its population remained small. Its importance was not measured only by how many people lived inside the town boundaries. It also served families scattered across a much larger rural district.
State government continued to acknowledge that municipal identity. In 1874, the General Assembly passed another act amending the charter of the town of Mount Carmel, almost half a century after the incorporation date recorded by Collins.
The Civil War Reaches Mount Carmel
The Civil War transformed Fleming County into contested ground. Union troops, Confederate raiders, Home Guards, recruiting parties, and civilians moving between eastern Kentucky and the Ohio River traveled many of the same roads that had made Mount Carmel commercially useful.
On June 16, 1863, the war reached Mount Carmel directly.
The Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies list skirmishes at Maysville, Mount Carmel, and Fox Springs on that date as part of Captain P. M. Everett’s Confederate raid into eastern Kentucky. The National Park Service likewise identifies Mount Carmel as the site of a June 16 skirmish involving Kentucky Home Guards.
Everett’s own report provides the surviving Confederate version of what happened. After riding through Flemingsburg and Maysville, where his men seized military property, Everett reported that he encountered an organization of Home Guards commanded by Colonel Charles Marshall at Mount Carmel. Everett claimed that the organization numbered about 170 men and that he dispersed it before continuing toward Fox Spring and ultimately the fighting around Triplett’s Bridge.
There is no equally detailed surviving Home Guard report of the Mount Carmel encounter, so Everett’s statement must be read for what it is: the report of the Confederate officer commanding the raid. Nevertheless, the official military records independently identify Mount Carmel as a skirmish site on June 16, confirming that the community became part of the wider campaign moving through northeastern Kentucky.
Mount Carmel residents themselves also served in the Union forces. Isaac Kelly was postmaster of Mount Carmel from December 1861 until September 1864, apart from the wartime disruptions reflected in the postal record, and again from February 1865 until April 1868. Beginning in July 1863, he served as a captain in the 40th Kentucky Volunteer Mounted Infantry, a Union regiment.
John N. Wallingsford represents another direct connection. The 1850 census placed him in Mount Carmel as a child. By 1860, he was a merchant, and during the war he served as adjutant of the 10th Kentucky Volunteer Cavalry from August 1862 until September 1863.
The Wallingsford name would remain closely associated with Mount Carmel long after the war. The 1951 local history remembered the family among the community’s prominent early residents, illustrating how military records, census schedules, and later community memories can overlap.
A Cemetery Becomes a Permanent Institution
The years after the Civil War also brought the formal organization of another institution that would long outlast the incorporated town.
In 1869, the Kentucky General Assembly passed “An act to incorporate the Mount Carmel Cemetery in Fleming county.” The law appears in the official acts of that year’s legislative session and places the cemetery among the organizations that Mount Carmel residents were formalizing during the community’s nineteenth-century growth.
A cemetery is especially important when reconstructing a small community because it can preserve relationships long after stores close, roads change names, and houses disappear. Family groups visible in census schedules reappear on stones. Veterans recorded in military documents can be connected to spouses and children. Families who moved elsewhere sometimes continued returning to a community cemetery because burial plots remained tied to older generations.
Mount Carmel Cemetery became one of those anchors. Even after Mount Carmel ceased to operate as an incorporated municipality, the cemetery continued to preserve the names of generations who had lived in the town and surrounding precinct.
Mount Carmel on the 1884 Map
By the 1880s, Mount Carmel remained substantial enough to receive separate treatment in one of the best surviving visual records of nineteenth-century Fleming County.
D. J. Lake & Company’s An Atlas of Bath & Fleming Counties, Ky.: From Actual Surveys, published in 1884, included both a map of the Mount Carmel Precinct and a separate map of Mount Carmel itself. The atlas was created from surveys rather than simply repeating a generalized state map, making it especially valuable for studying roads, streams, property boundaries, landowners, and individual town lots.
The population table accompanying the atlas reported 185 people in Mount Carmel town in the 1880 census. That figure was close to the population of approximately 200 that Collins had associated with the town during the previous decade. Mount Carmel was never a large place, but it had demonstrated remarkable persistence. More than half a century after incorporation, mapmakers still treated it as a distinct town surrounded by a much larger rural precinct.
The map becomes even more useful when paired with Clary’s later work. Clary compared the nineteenth-century layout with later property lines and attempted to follow individual lots through changes in ownership and use. This allows Mount Carmel to be studied in a way that is unusual for many small Appalachian communities. Rather than knowing only that a general store, school, or family once existed somewhere in the vicinity, researchers may be able to determine which lot contained a particular building and how that property changed across generations.
The original Fleming County deed books offer the next step. Deeds connected with Mount Carmel survive in the county record, and following those transactions backward from the lots shown in the 1884 atlas could reveal how the early town was divided, sold, inherited, mortgaged, and rebuilt.
The Families Who Gave the Community Continuity
Maps and laws explain the structure of a town, but local histories preserve something different: the relationships that made residents consider it home.
The anonymous 1951 Flemingsburg Gazette history of Mount Carmel, preserved by the Fleming County Covered Bridge Museum, discussed buildings, businesses, churches, residents, and prominent families. Brenda Plummer revisited that material in 2024 and helped make portions of the old article available again.
Among the families remembered were the Arnolds, Glascocks, Foxworthys, O’Bannons, Marshalls, Wallingfords, Lukins, DeBells, and Farrows. Some of those surnames also appear in nineteenth-century deeds, military records, government documents, and cemetery records, giving researchers opportunities to compare later community tradition with contemporary evidence.
The Marshall family had a particularly interesting connection to education. The 1951 article remembered Miss Eliza Marshall as a teacher whose students included many Fleming County residents. The Wallingford family was likewise remembered as one of the major families associated with Mount Carmel, while the Lukins and DeBell families were described as early settlers whose descendants intermarried.
The landscape itself carried family names. The old history associated Farrow Creek near Mount Carmel with the Farrow family, another example of how settlement patterns became embedded in local geography.
These family traditions should not automatically be accepted in every detail simply because they appeared in a twentieth-century newspaper. Their value becomes greatest when they can be tested against deeds, census schedules, wills, marriage records, court books, tax lists, and family Bibles. In Mount Carmel, enough of those records survive that much of the community’s family history can potentially be reconstructed with unusual precision.
Houses, Stores, Churches, and the Mount Carmel School
The same 1951 newspaper account preserved glimpses of the built environment that had survived from an earlier Mount Carmel.
One photograph showed a log house once owned by T. A. Henderson. The accompanying caption described it as one of the earliest structures in the village. The house had later been covered with weatherboarding and was remembered as the home of Harry Dobyns. The transformation was typical of nineteenth-century Kentucky houses, where older log construction could disappear beneath later siding while the original structure remained inside.
Another photograph showed Mount Carmel School. By the middle of the twentieth century, the school building contained six classrooms and served all eight elementary grades. That is an important reminder that Mount Carmel continued functioning as a community center long after the period when turnpike companies and municipal charters dominated its paper record.
Schools were often among the last institutions holding rural communities together. Children from farms scattered across the surrounding countryside shared classrooms, while parents gathered for school programs, meetings, and other events. Teachers could become community figures remembered decades after the buildings themselves were replaced.
Religious life also crossed community boundaries. Fleming and neighboring Mason County records include nineteenth-century marriage certificates connected with Mount Carmel, demonstrating that ministers working from or around the community served families beyond the immediate town. Churches, like schools and cemeteries, created networks that did not follow municipal boundaries neatly.
For historians, those institutions help explain why Mount Carmel did not simply cease to exist when its legal and commercial importance declined. A community can survive after its town government disappears because the relationships that created it were never confined to a charter.
From Incorporated Town to Rural Community
The twentieth century gradually changed Mount Carmel’s role.
A community that had grown around country roads, a post office, nearby farms, local businesses, and horse-era transportation faced an economy increasingly organized around automobiles, improved highways, consolidated schools, larger commercial centers, and new methods of communication. Postal histories record the discontinuance of the Mount Carmel post office in 1932, ending an institution that had served the community for roughly a century.
The incorporated town also eventually lost its municipal status. Yet Mount Carmel did not vanish. Federal census geography still recognized Mount Carmel in descriptions of Fleming County decades later, while its school, cemetery, roads, churches, families, and place-name continued to hold the community together. The 1940 census enumeration descriptions, for example, still identified a Mount Carmel district and used Mount Carmel as an important geographic reference point when dividing the surrounding countryside.
By 1951, the Flemingsburg Gazette was already treating Mount Carmel as a place with a history worth deliberately preserving. That timing is significant. Residents were living through changes that erased many of the physical features of the nineteenth-century town, but people who remembered older buildings, businesses, teachers, families, and neighborhood traditions were still alive.
Danny Landreth continued that work with his 1970 history, “Mt. Carmel: My Home Town.” Around 2000 Ralph B. Clary went even further in Nothing Is the Same: Houses and People of Mount Carmel, Kentucky, assembling plats, photographs, lot histories, and earlier writings into a record of how the town had changed. Plummer later praised Clary for recognizing that the story needed to be written down before still more of it disappeared.
That chain of preservation is one reason so much can still be recovered. Nineteenth-century laws and federal records establish the chronology, but local historians preserved the connections between those records and actual houses, families, stores, schools, and memories.
Why Mount Carmel Still Matters
Mount Carmel’s history is a reminder that population alone is a poor measure of a community’s importance.
At its nineteenth-century height, the town contained only a few hundred people. Yet Congress routed the mail there. Kentucky lawmakers incorporated roads leading from it. A cemetery received its own legislative charter. Federal census takers counted Mount Carmel separately. Unionists and Confederate raiders clashed there during the Civil War. Mapmakers surveyed its lots, and generations of families continued using its schools, churches, cemetery, stores, and roads.
Its story also contains subjects that reach far beyond one Fleming County community. The 1850 census exposes the presence of slavery within a small Kentucky town. Isaac Kelly’s life demonstrates the complicated relationship between slaveholding and Union loyalty. The June 1863 skirmish connects Mount Carmel to the wider struggle for northeastern Kentucky. Its turnpikes illustrate how rural commerce functioned before automobiles, while the later disappearance of its post office and municipal government reflects changes that transformed hundreds of small communities throughout Appalachia.
Perhaps the most unusual part of Mount Carmel’s story is how much of the physical town may still be reconstructed on paper.
An 1838 plat preserved through later local research, the detailed 1884 atlas, county deeds, tax books, census schedules, probate files, newspaper accounts, photographs, and Clary’s lot histories provide pieces of the same puzzle. Used together, they offer the possibility of following Mount Carmel house by house and lot by lot through much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. That is an extraordinary documentary inheritance for a place now classified simply as an unincorporated community.
The town government is gone, the weekly mail carrier from Poplar Flat stopped coming generations ago, and many of the businesses and buildings remembered in 1951 have disappeared. Mount Carmel itself, however, has endured.
Its name remains attached to the landscape because generations continued to recognize the place as a community long after the legal boundaries ceased to matter. Beneath that quiet modern appearance lies the history of an incorporated Kentucky town whose roads once carried mail carriers, soldiers, merchants, farmers, ministers, and schoolchildren through one of Fleming County’s most persistent rural crossroads.
Sources & Further Reading
Clary, Ralph B. Nothing Is the Same: Houses and People of Mount Carmel, Kentucky. Ca. 2000. Discussed and excerpted in Brenda Plummer, “Museum Musings.” https://kynewsgroup.com/tfg031324.pdf
Collins, Lewis, and Richard H. Collins. History of Kentucky. Vol. 2. Covington, KY: Collins & Co., 1874. https://dokumen.pub/history-of-kentucky-2-revised-and-enlarged.html
Cooper, Wade. Early Fleming County Pioneers: Historical Facts. Ashland, KY, 1974.
Cotterill, Robert Spencer. History of Fleming County, Kentucky: The First One Hundred Years, 1780–1880. 1991. https://books.google.com/books?id=11KhSwAACAAJ
Dickey, J. J. History of Fleming County. 1930–1932. Martin F. Schmidt Research Library, Kentucky Historical Society, Frankfort, KY. Call no. 976.902 F597d. https://kyhistory.com/digital/api/collection/p16602coll3/id/35/download
Fischer, Daniel T. A Condensed History of Fleming County, Kentucky. Flemingsburg, KY, 1908.
Fleming County Chamber of Commerce. A Bicentennial History of Fleming County in Pictures. Flemingsburg, KY, 1992.
Fleming County Clerk. “Records.” Fleming County, Kentucky. Accessed October 17, 2026. https://fleming.countyclerk.us/records/
Fleming Gazette. “Mount Carmel.” 1951. Copy preserved in the Fleming County Covered Bridge Museum collection, Flemingsburg, KY.
Fleming Gazette. 175th Anniversary Edition. July 6, 1972. Morehead State University, County Histories of Kentucky Collection. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/
Fleming Gazette. Bicentennial Edition. July 11, 1974. Morehead State University, County Histories of Kentucky Collection. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/107/
Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives. “Local and County Records.” Frankfort, KY. Accessed October 17, 2026. https://kdla.ky.gov/Archives-and-Reference/Documents/Handout-LocalCountyRecords.pdf
Kentucky General Assembly. Acts of the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Kentucky. 1868. “An Act for the Benefit of Mount Carmel in Fleming County,” 471. https://books.google.com/books?id=Ixw0AQAAMAAJ
Kentucky General Assembly. Acts Passed at the Session of the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Kentucky. 1868. “An Act to Incorporate the Mount Carmel and Fox Spring Turnpike,” 513. https://books.google.com/books?id=taHrBbxh9BwC
Kentucky General Assembly. Acts Passed at the Session of the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Kentucky. 1868. “An Act to Incorporate the Mount Carmel, Esculapia and Kinniconick Turnpike Road Company,” 524. https://books.google.com/books?id=taHrBbxh9BwC
Kentucky General Assembly. Acts of the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Kentucky. 1869. “An Act to Incorporate the Mount Carmel Cemetery in Fleming County,” 169. https://books.google.com/books?id=hR40AQAAMAAJ
Kentucky General Assembly. Acts Passed at the Session of the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Kentucky. 1873. “An Act to Amend an Act Entitled An Act to Incorporate the Salt Lick, Esculapia and Mount Carmel Turnpike Road Company,” 276. https://books.google.com/books?id=gkpNAQAAMAAJ
Kentucky General Assembly. Acts of the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Kentucky. 1874. “An Act to Amend the Charter of the Town of Mt. Carmel in Fleming County,” 396. https://books.google.com/books?vid=OSU:32437123672475
Kentucky Historical Society. “Isaac Kelly.” Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition. Accessed October 17, 2026. https://test.discovery.civilwargovernors.org/item/3608
Kentucky Historical Society. “John N. Wallingsford.” Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition. Accessed October 17, 2026. https://www.fromthepage.com/lva/governors-letters-received-1781/article/32207650
Kentucky Historical Society. “Power Family Bible.” Kentucky Ancestors, July 1972. https://www.kyhistory.com/digital/api/collection/p16602coll3/id/120/download
Kentucky Heritage Commission. Survey of Historic Sites in Kentucky: Fleming County. Frankfort, KY: Kentucky Heritage Commission, 1978–1979.
Lake, D. J., and Company. An Atlas of Bath & Fleming Counties, Ky.: From Actual Surveys. Philadelphia: D. J. Lake & Co., 1884. https://kygenweb.net/carter/maps/1884_Fleming_Bath_map/1884_Fleming_Bath.htm
Landreth, Danny. “Mt. Carmel: My Home Town.” 1970. Reproduced in Ralph B. Clary, Nothing Is the Same: Houses and People of Mount Carmel, Kentucky. https://kynewsgroup.com/tfg031324.pdf
National Archives and Records Administration. “Record of Appointment of Postmasters, 1789–1832.” Microfilm Publication M1131, Records of the Post Office Department, Record Group 28. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices
National Archives and Records Administration. “Record of Appointment of Postmasters, 1832–September 30, 1971.” Microfilm Publication M841, Records of the Post Office Department, Record Group 28. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/postmasters-1832-1971.html
National Archives and Records Administration. “Reports of Site Locations, 1837–1950.” Microfilm Publication M1126, Records of the Post Office Department, Record Group 28. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/locations-1837-1950.html
Perkins, Marlitta H. “Everett’s June 1863 Raid: A Detailed Account.” Eastern Kentucky and the Civil War, July 2022. https://eakycivilwar.blogspot.com/2022/07/everetts-june-1863-raid-detailed_3.html
Plummer, Brenda. “Museum Musings.” Flemingsburg Gazette, March 2024. https://kypublicnotice.com/KYLegals/2024/70144-2024-03-13_1005.pdf
Rennick, Robert M. “Fleming County: Post Offices.” Morehead State University, 2000. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/192/
Rennick, Robert M. Kentucky Place Names. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984.
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
Royse, Martha Harlan. Communities of Fleming County. Unpublished manuscript. Morehead State University Special Collections, Morehead, KY.
United States Census Bureau. Eighth Census of the United States, 1860: Population Schedule, Fleming County, Kentucky. Washington, DC, 1860.
United States Census Bureau. Eighth Census of the United States, 1860: Slave Schedule, Fleming County, Kentucky. Washington, DC, 1860.
United States Census Office. The Seventh Census of the United States: 1850. Washington, DC: Robert Armstrong, Public Printer, 1853. https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1850/1850a/1850-census-report-kentucky.pdf
United States Census Office. Seventh Census of the United States, 1850: Population Schedule, Fleming County, Kentucky. Mount Carmel, p. 349A and surrounding pages. Washington, DC, 1850.
United States Census Office. Seventh Census of the United States, 1850: Slave Schedule, Fleming County, Kentucky. Washington, DC, 1850.
United States Congress. Congressional Record. 50th Cong., 1st sess., March 2, 1888. Petition of Isaac Kelly and S. E. Foxworthy of Mount Carmel, Fleming County. https://www.congress.gov/50/crecb/1888/03/02/GPO-CRECB-1888-pt2-v19-20.pdf
United States Congress. The Statutes at Large of the United States of America. 25th Cong., 2nd sess. Washington, DC, 1838. Federal post-road legislation establishing a route from Poplar Flat, Lewis County, to Mount Carmel, Fleming County. https://dheller.org/Timeline-files/US-Statutes/v5/c25/Public-Laws-c25-s2.pdf
United States Pension Bureau. List of Pensioners on the Roll, January 1, 1883. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1883. Fleming County entries. https://newhorizonsgenealogicalservices.com/1883-pensioners-on-the-roll/1883-pensioners-on-the-roll-ky-fleming.htm
United States Post Office Department. “Mail Route No. 3349, Poplar Flat to Mount Carmel.” Nineteenth-century mail-route schedule. https://cdm17538.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/api/collection/p17538coll2/id/6980/download
United States. Revised Statutes of the United States Relating to Post Roads. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1870s. Includes the route from Owingsville through Wyoming, Hillsboro, Poplar Plains, Flemingsburg, and Mount Carmel to Mount Gilead. https://dheller.org/Timeline-files/US-Statutes/volumes-reduced/v18-2-Post-Roads.pdf
United States War Department. The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. Series I, vol. 23, pt. 1. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1889. https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth154602/m1/392/
Works Progress Administration and Historical Records Survey. “Fleming County: General History.” 1939. Morehead State University, County Histories of Kentucky Collection. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/191/
Author Note: Mount Carmel is one of those Fleming County communities whose quiet appearance today hides a surprisingly substantial past. I hope this history helps preserve the story of the town, its families, roads, institutions, and the people who called it home.