Appalachian Community Histories – Boons Camp, Johnson County: From Greasy Creek Settlement to a Kentucky Mountain Community
Boons Camp sits in the hills of eastern Johnson County where the branches of Greasy Creek cut through a landscape that was settled long before the community acquired a post office, a ZIP code, or a fixed place on Kentucky maps. Like many Appalachian communities, its history is easier to find in the names of creeks, families, churches, cabins, deeds, and old newspaper notices than in the records of a formal town government.
The name itself carries Boons Camp back toward Kentucky’s frontier era. Robert M. Rennick’s place-name research attributes the community’s name to a hunting camp used by Daniel Boone in the 1790s while Boone hunted with settlers associated with nearby Blockhouse Bottom. That tradition has been repeated widely, but the surviving evidence deserves careful wording. No eighteenth-century journal, survey, letter, or other contemporary document located for this article identifies the exact modern Boons Camp site as one of Boone’s hunting camps. The tradition is important, and Rennick is a major authority on Kentucky place names, but it is better understood as the accepted explanation for the community’s name rather than as a fully documented episode in Boone’s life.
What can be documented much more firmly is the nineteenth-century settlement that grew along Greasy Creek. By the 1850s the families who would shape Boons Camp for generations were farming, trading, worshiping, and building homes in the surrounding hollows. From that foundation came a postal community, local stores, churches, family cemeteries, and a name that gradually expanded beyond one point on the road to describe a much larger section of Johnson County.
Before Boons Camp Had a Name
The early history of Boons Camp is inseparable from Greasy Creek. Federal geographic records place the community near Right Fork Greasy Creek, while surrounding names such as Pigeon Roost, Daniels Creek, Buffalo Creek, and the different forks of Greasy Creek preserve the older geography by which nineteenth-century residents understood the area. The settlement was not originally a compact village. Families occupied creek bottoms and hollows, with houses and farms separated by ridges but connected by kinship, roads, worship, trade, and the waterways themselves.
One of the strongest surviving accounts of the community’s early development concerns William Green Wells. Research compiled by John Britton Wells III from deeds, tax records, family records, and nineteenth-century histories states that Wells had accumulated extensive property in the region by the 1850s. On March 26, 1857, he exchanged land on Oak Log Fork of Daniels Creek for 1,235 acres on the Right Fork of the Middle Fork of Greasy Creek and moved his family across the mountain to what the family history identifies as present-day Boons Camp.
There Wells built a two-story log house near the meeting of Middle Fork and the main course of Greasy Creek and established a store nearby. His property continued to expand, and the farm became an important center in the surrounding creek community. Wells was not only a farmer and merchant. He also practiced as a country doctor, served in local public positions, preached in the Methodist Episcopal Church South, and performed marriages throughout the region. William Ely’s 1887 history of the Big Sandy Valley, published while many of the first generation of Boons Camp settlers were still alive, remembered Wells as a prominent Methodist minister and physician known throughout the upper valley.
The Wells farm therefore represented more than a private household. In an era before consolidated schools, paved highways, modern hospitals, and easy travel into Paintsville, a farm operated by a merchant, minister, and physician could function as a social center for a dispersed rural population. People came to trade, seek medical attention, conduct business, attend religious gatherings, and visit relatives. Long before Boons Camp appeared in directories, a recognizable community was already forming along Greasy Creek.
The Pigeon Roost Settlement
Another remarkable piece of physical evidence survives in the Kentucky Historic Resources Inventory for the Ben Mollett Cabin, later known as the John Webb House. The state survey located the property on Pigeon Roost Fork of Greasy Creek and identified James Butcher as its builder. The log residence was dated to about 1865. Its dovetail-notched construction, sandstone chimney, adjacent log barn, and surviving setting led surveyors to describe it as an important connection to Johnson County’s nineteenth-century agricultural history.
The property also reveals how settlement in Boons Camp moved through family networks. According to the historic inventory, James Butcher held a large tract on Pigeon Roost in 1865 and later transferred the property to his daughter Nancy and her husband, Ben Mollett. It passed through subsequent generations before becoming associated with the Webb family. The history of one cabin therefore connects several names that recur throughout the Boons Camp documentary record.
This is particularly valuable because small Appalachian communities often lose their earliest built environment. Log houses are remodeled, abandoned, covered with siding, dismantled, or replaced. The Pigeon Roost property allowed twentieth-century preservationists to document the type of dwelling in which some of Boons Camp’s nineteenth-century residents actually lived.
Together, the Wells property and the Butcher-Mollett settlement show that Boons Camp did not suddenly appear when a post office opened. By the Civil War era the valleys around Greasy Creek already contained established farms, merchants, and interconnected families.
Civil War Divisions Along Greasy Creek
The Civil War touched these families directly. William Green Wells supported the Confederacy and eventually served in Confederate military organizations, while other members of the extended Wells family supported the Union. The conflict therefore reflected one of the defining realities of eastern Kentucky during the war, where political and military loyalties could divide neighbors and even relatives.
Wells enlisted in Confederate service in 1861 and later organized a local body remembered as the Greasy Creek Guards. His wartime career eventually carried him into cavalry service before the war ended in 1865. Afterward he returned to Johnson County and resumed the agricultural and commercial life that had made his Greasy Creek property important before the conflict.
His son Marcus Lindsey King Wells followed a very different path. M. L. K. Wells served on the Union side, returned after the war, married Exer Meek in 1867, and established a home near Boons Camp on Greasy Creek. A later biographical account remembered him as a schoolteacher, magistrate, surveyor, farmer, and merchant. It also associated him with John C. C. Mayo in the acquisition and development of coal properties elsewhere in the Big Sandy Valley.
In Boons Camp, as throughout much of Appalachian Kentucky, the Civil War was therefore not simply a struggle between distant armies. Its divisions passed through local families whose members returned to the same creeks, farms, churches, and roads after the fighting ended.
The Boons Camp Post Office
The clearest point at which Boons Camp became an officially recognized community came in the 1870s.
Rennick’s Kentucky place-name research dates the opening of the Boons Camp post office to May 16, 1876, with James Mollett serving as the first postmaster. The original federal appointment registers for Kentucky survive within the records of the United States Post Office Department. The National Archives identifies Johnson County within Kentucky Roll 46 of the postmaster appointment series, a collection used to trace post-office establishments, appointments, discontinuances, and changes in service.
The arrival of a post office mattered enormously to a rural nineteenth-century community. It gave the surrounding farms a common address and placed Boons Camp into national postal networks. A name that may previously have been used informally for part of Greasy Creek could now appear in letters, newspapers, marriage records, commercial directories, and government documents.
That process can be seen in surviving newspapers. By December 1904, the Big Sandy News was publishing a community item under the simple heading “Boons Camp,” reporting on the illness of F. M. Pack. Such notices may seem insignificant, but collectively they show that Boons Camp had become a recognized locality whose residents and news were familiar to readers across the Big Sandy Valley.
Merchants, Farms, and the Greasy Creek Economy
Agriculture remained central to life around Boons Camp, but the economy was never limited to farming alone. Stores established by families such as the Wellses connected rural households with larger markets, while merchants bought and sold goods that would otherwise require a difficult journey into Paintsville or another commercial center.
The career of M. L. K. Wells shows how closely farming and merchandising could overlap. His surviving biography describes him supporting a large family through both agriculture and trade, while also serving as a surveyor and public official.
Decades later, the obituary of J. W. “Josh” Daniel still described him as a longtime merchant on Greasy Creek when he died near Boons Camp in March 1936. The short newspaper notice is important because it demonstrates the persistence of the creek-based commercial economy well into the automobile era.
Boons Camp was also tied economically to Paintsville. Rand McNally’s 1920 Bankers Directory listed “Boons Camp to Paintsville,” indicating that residents of the community looked toward the county seat for banking services. Similar listings continued during the 1920s. The entry provides a small but revealing picture of Boons Camp’s place within the regional economy. It had enough identity to be listed separately in a national directory, but its residents remained dependent on Paintsville for specialized financial services.
Coal development was beginning to transform Johnson County at the same time. Federal geological and engineering investigations identified commercially valuable coal along Greasy Creek and nearby tributaries, and mining companies constructed transportation infrastructure to reach those deposits. Boons Camp never developed into the kind of concentrated company town seen at places such as Van Lear, but its residents lived within the expanding industrial economy of the Big Sandy coalfield.
Wells Chapel and the Religious Life of Boons Camp
Among the strongest threads connecting generations of Boons Camp residents is Wells Chapel.
Family tradition preserved by Mary F. Wells Walton states that members of the Wells family provided land for the church and helped construct the building. An account published in the Wells Family Association newsletter in 1998 recalled that the first Sunday school there was held in 1887. Because that date comes through later family recollection rather than a surviving 1887 church register, it should be treated as a tradition until earlier Methodist records can confirm it.
Other evidence establishes the church’s importance more firmly. A 1942 Paintsville Herald obituary for Exer Meek Wells described her as an active member of the Old Wells Chapel at Boons Camp and stated that the chapel had been established by her brother, the Reverend Zephaniah Meek.
The same newspaper account offered a vivid glimpse of the religious culture surrounding the Wells household. Exer Wells remembered feeding visiting circuit-riding ministers who came through the neighborhood, a reminder of the era when rural Methodist congregations depended on itinerant preachers traveling from community to community. The family’s home became part residence, part gathering place, and part way station for religious travelers.
Wells Chapel therefore represented something larger than a church building. It provided continuity in a dispersed community where residents might live miles apart along separate forks and hollows. Weddings, funerals, preaching, Sunday school, and family gatherings helped bind Boons Camp together long before modern roads made regular travel easy.
Boons Camp in the Newspaper Record
By the early twentieth century, Boons Camp appears repeatedly in the regional press.
When Jacob Wells died in 1911, the Big Sandy News described him as one of Boons Camp’s prominent and respected citizens and reported that he was buried near his residence. The same year, another notice recorded the death of William Wells of “Boon Camp,” demonstrating one of several spelling variations used for the community.
These variations matter for anyone researching Boons Camp. Records may use Boons Camp, Boon Camp, Boonscamp, or Boones Camp, while older documents may identify the same families only by Greasy Creek, Pigeon Roost, or another local branch.
The newspapers also reveal the movement of people into and out of the community. An especially interesting 1934 obituary concerned Joseph Branham, an 89-year-old Boons Camp resident and Confederate veteran who had been born in Wise County, Virginia. According to the Big Sandy News-Recorder, Branham came to Johnson County after the Civil War and married into the Greasy Creek community. By the time of his death, the newspaper reported an enormous family network spread across eastern Kentucky and beyond.
Other notices record residents dying in hospitals and being returned home for burial. In 1926, E. D. Wells died of influenza at the Paintsville Hospital and was taken back to Boons Camp for burial. These brief reports show both change and continuity. Modern institutions in Paintsville were increasingly important, but family cemeteries and home communities still determined where many residents were laid to rest.
From Creek Community to Census Division
By the middle of the twentieth century, “Boons Camp” had come to represent more than the immediate settlement around the post office.
Federal Census Bureau records created a Boons Camp Division whose boundaries included Right Fork Greasy Creek Road, Buffalo Road, Kentucky Route 40, Buffalo Creek, the Levisa Fork, and the county line. That definition shows how the name had expanded into a geographic label for a substantial section of eastern Johnson County.
The 1970 federal census recorded 1,726 residents in the Boons Camp Division, compared with 1,935 in the preceding census. Those numbers should not be mistaken for the population of a compact town. They represented a much broader rural district containing homes scattered through valleys, branches, and hollows.
That wider meaning helps explain why so many people could identify themselves as being from Boons Camp even though there was never a traditional downtown. The community was defined less by municipal boundaries than by postal routes, churches, roads, family networks, creek geography, and a shared sense of place.
The Landscape That Preserved the Story
Modern maps still carry many of the same geographic names that appear in nineteenth-century records. Greasy Creek, Right Fork Greasy Creek, Pigeon Roost, Buffalo Creek, and the surrounding hollows remain visible reminders of the landscape that determined where families settled and how they traveled. Federal place-name records identify Boons Camp as a recognized Johnson County locality on the Offutt quadrangle.
Kentucky Route 40 eventually became the principal modern road through the community, replacing the older world in which farms and stores were connected by narrower creek roads and paths. Yet the settlement pattern is still recognizable. Houses remain strung through hollows rather than gathered around a courthouse square.
The post office remains one of the clearest expressions of that continuity. The United States Postal Service still identifies a Boons Camp Post Office on Kentucky Route 40 using ZIP code 41204, continuing a postal identity that Rennick traced back to 1876.
Why Boons Camp Matters
Boons Camp is easy to overlook if Appalachian history is searched only through incorporated towns, major coal companies, courthouses, or famous battles. Its history survives in a different form.
It survives in the 1857 movement of the Wells family onto Greasy Creek, in a dovetail-notched log house built on Pigeon Roost around 1865, in a post office that gave a dispersed settlement a common name, and in Wells Chapel, where generations worshiped and buried their dead. It appears in newspaper columns reporting sickness, deaths, visitors, merchants, ministers, and veterans. It appears in census maps that eventually used the name Boons Camp for an entire division of Johnson County.
Even the Daniel Boone tradition fits that larger pattern. Whether Boone can ultimately be documented at the exact modern site or not, the story reflects how local people connected their community to the much older frontier history of the Big Sandy region. The stronger documentary record begins later, with the families who cleared farms, built stores and cabins, organized churches, carried mail, and turned the branches of Greasy Creek into a permanent community.
Boons Camp was never a large town in the conventional sense. That is precisely why its history matters. Much of Appalachia was built in places like this, communities without city limits or courthouse squares where a creek, a chapel, a post office, and a handful of deeply rooted families were enough to create a place that could endure for generations.
Sources & Further Reading
United States Post Office Department. Record of Appointment of Postmasters, 1832–September 30, 1971. National Archives Microfilm Publication M841, Record Group 28, Records of the Post Office Department. Kentucky, Roll 46. National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/postmasters-1832-1971.html
United States Postal Service. “Postmaster Finder FAQ.” USPS Historian, Postal History. https://about.usps.com/who/profile/history/postmaster-finder/postmaster-finder-faq.htm
Kentucky Heritage Council. “Ben Mollett Cabin/John Webb House, Site Jo-33.” Kentucky Historic Resources Inventory. National Register/NPGallery, National Park Service. https://npgallery.nps.gov/GetAsset/08f970df-2790-4dfa-97bb-c51021c17e4e
Ely, William. The Big Sandy Valley: A History of the People and Country from the Earliest Settlement to the Present Time. Catlettsburg, KY: Central Methodist, 1887. Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/24020324/ Library of Congress
Rennick, Robert M. Kentucky Place Names. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984. https://books.google.com/books?id=ivUTAAAAYAAJ Google Books
Wells, John Britton, III. The Wells Family of Kentucky’s Big Sandy Valley. Revised ed. Wells Family Association, 2020. https://wellsancestry.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Wells-History-Book-revised-2020.pdf
Walton, Mary F. Wells. “The Wells Chapel-Boons-Camp.” Wells Family Association Newsletter, Spring 1998. https://wellsancestry.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/31-WELLS-FAMILY-NEWSLETTER-SPRING-1998.pdf
Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives. County Court Records Inventory: Land and Related Records. Frankfort: Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives. https://kdla.ky.gov/Archives-and-Reference/Documents/Inventory_Land_Records.pdf
Johnson County Public Library. “Patricia Patton Kentucky Room and Local History Collections.” Paintsville, Kentucky. https://johnsoncountypubliclibrary.org/using-your-library/
Johnson County Public Library and Advantage Preservation. Digital Archives of Johnson County, Kentucky. https://johnson.advantage-preservation.com/
U.S. Census Bureau. Kentucky: County Subdivisions and Enumeration District Descriptions, including Boons Camp Division, Johnson County. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Commerce. https://www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/12110770ch2.pdf
U.S. Census Bureau. 1970 Census of Population: Kentucky. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Commerce, 1970. https://www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/1970a_ky-01.pdf
Rand McNally and Company. Rand McNally Bankers Directory, January 1920. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1920. Federal Reserve Archival System for Economic Research. https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/rand-mcnally-bankers-directory-105/january-1920-579676/content/fulltext/rmbd_192001_14_towns
Big Sandy News. “Boons Camp.” December 9, 1904. Transcription preserved through WikiTree. https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Pack-1259
Big Sandy News. Obituary of Jacob Wells. January 20, 1911. Lawrence County Kentucky Genealogical and Historical Society transcription. https://www.lckghs.com/index.php/en/obituaries/2-uncategorised/546-obit-1911
Big Sandy News. Obituary of William Wells. November 10, 1911. Lawrence County Kentucky Genealogical and Historical Society transcription. https://www.lckghs.com/index.php/en/obituaries/2-uncategorised/546-obit-1911
Big Sandy News. Obituary of E. D. Wells. February 19, 1926. Lawrence County Kentucky Genealogical and Historical Society transcription. https://lckghs.com/index.php/en/2-uncategorised/457-obit-1925
Big Sandy News-Recorder. Obituary of Joseph Branham. October 1934. Lawrence County Kentucky Genealogical and Historical Society transcription. https://lckghs.com/index.php/en/obituaries?id=378&layout=edit Lckghs
Big Sandy News. Obituary of J. W. “Josh” Daniel. April 3, 1936. Lawrence County Kentucky Genealogical and Historical Society transcription. https://www.lckghs.com/index.php/en/obituaries/2-uncategorised/380-obit-1936
Paintsville Herald. Obituary of Exer Wells. July 16, 1942. Transcription, Johnson County KYGenWeb. https://kygenweb.net/johnson/ExWells.htm
Big Sandy News. Funeral notice concerning Wells Chapel Methodist Church and burial at Boons Camp. June 28, 1951. Lawrence County Kentucky Genealogical and Historical Society transcription. https://lckghs.com/index.php/en/obituaries?id=423&layout=edit
Johnson County KYGenWeb. “M. L. K. Wells.” Biographical and genealogical materials concerning Marcus Lindsey King Wells and the Greasy Creek community. https://kygenweb.net/johnson/MLKWellsOb.htm
Johnson County KYGenWeb. “Johnson County Places.” Geographic Names Information System material for Boons Camp and surrounding Johnson County localities. https://kygenweb.net/johnson/JoCoPlaces.htm
Johnson County KYGenWeb. “Johnson County Court Records.” Guide to county court orders, deeds, marriages, mortgages, vital records, and other surviving county materials. https://kygenweb.net/johnson/court.htm
Johnson County KYGenWeb. “Johnson County Research Resources.” Guide to cemetery records, histories, genealogical collections, and local records. https://kygenweb.net/johnson/look.htm
Kentucky Historical Society. “Harman Station.” Kentucky Historical Marker 736, Johnson County, Kentucky. https://history.ky.gov/markers/harman-station Kentucky Historical Society
Johnson County, Kentucky. “History of Johnson County.” Johnson County Fiscal Court. https://www.johnsoncoky.com/home/about-johnson-county Johnson County
United States Geological Survey. Historical Topographic Maps of the Boons Camp and Offutt Area, Johnson County, Kentucky. USGS Historical Topographic Map Collection. https://www.usgs.gov/programs/national-geospatial-program/historical-topographic-maps-preserving-past
United States Census Bureau. United States Federal Census Population Schedules for Johnson County, Kentucky, 1850–1950. Washington, DC: U.S. Census Bureau and National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/research/census
Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives. Johnson County Tax Assessment Books, Deeds, Surveys, Wills, and Related County Records. Frankfort: Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives. https://kdla.ky.gov/Archives-and-Reference/Pages/default.aspx
Author Note: Boons Camp is the kind of Appalachian community whose history survives more clearly in creek names, family records, churches, postal records, and old newspapers than in municipal records. I have treated the Daniel Boone naming tradition cautiously because later place-name scholarship preserves the story, but I have not found an eighteenth-century source placing Boone at the exact modern Boons Camp site.