Appalachian Community Histories – Boring, Sullivan County: Citizens, Mail Routes, and a Lost Rural Post Office
Boring is one of those Appalachian communities that can be easy to overlook. It was never a large town, never became an incorporated municipality, and never developed the kind of downtown that left behind rows of commercial buildings or a courthouse square. Yet for more than twenty years in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Boring was important enough to have its own post office, its residents were recognized in the Congressional Record as the “citizens of Boring,” and the community continued appearing on maps even after its post office disappeared.
Today, the name survives in Sullivan County, not far from the corridor between the Blountville area and the southern part of the county. Modern geographic records still recognize Boring as a place, but the community seen on a present-day map is only the latest layer of a history that reaches back into the farm country of nineteenth-century Sullivan County.
The surviving evidence is scattered. That is common with small Appalachian communities whose centers were built around a post office, country store, church, mill, school, or crossroads rather than a municipal government. In Boring’s case, however, federal records, census schedules, local histories, and old maps leave enough behind to reconstruct much of its story.
Before There Was a Boring Post Office
The area that became known as Boring lay within an overwhelmingly rural Sullivan County. When Goodspeed Publishing Company described the county in 1887, during the years when Boring’s post office was operating, Sullivan remained a landscape of farms, small settlements, river valleys, roads, mills, churches, and scattered commercial centers rather than closely packed towns.
One of the most intriguing clues to the origin of the community’s name appears before the post office was established.
The 1870 federal census placed Elizabeth Boring, age forty-six, in Sullivan County’s 8th Civil District. Her household was recorded under the Blountville post office, which was natural since Boring did not yet have a postal office of its own. Elizabeth was listed with $2,500 in real estate and $800 in personal property. Younger members of the Boring household included farmers, among them eighteen-year-old William M. Boring.
That record matters because it establishes the Boring surname in the locality more than a decade before the federal government recognized Boring as a post office.
Larry L. Miller, in his study Tennessee Place-Names, also identified Elizabeth Boring as the principal person carrying the surname whom he could place in the locality in 1870. Miller suggested that Elizabeth or her family may have given the community its name. It is an attractive possibility, but the evidence does not yet prove it. No surviving record located so far states that the community was deliberately named for Elizabeth Boring or any particular member of the family.
What can be demonstrated is that the Boring name had deeper roots in the region. Gene A. Morrell’s Mountain Memories contains references to several members of the Boring family in Sullivan County history, including Peter Boring, Ruth Boring, Caleb Boring, and J. W. Boring. Morrell also associated J. W. Boring with the early Methodist community that developed around what became St. Paul Methodist Church in the Piney Flats area.
The evidence therefore points toward a local family origin for the place name, even if the exact moment when neighbors began calling the area Boring has not yet been found.
Boring Gets Its Own Post Office
In 1881, Boring became an official United States post office in Sullivan County.
That simple event tells us considerably more than might appear at first. In rural nineteenth-century Appalachia, a post office could define a community. It gave families a common mailing address, provided a recognizable name to people outside the immediate neighborhood, and often established a center around which stores, roads, farms, churches, and other local institutions could be described.
Postal histories list the Boring office as operating from 1881 until 1903.
The National Archives preserves the federal Records of Appointment of Postmasters in Record Group 28. These records can identify when offices were established and discontinued, the names and appointment dates of individual postmasters, changes in office names, and, in many cases after 1870, the post office to which mail was sent after an office closed. Sullivan County is included in the Tennessee material preserved in that federal series.
Those appointment records are especially important for the next stage of Boring research because they should allow the community’s postal history to be reconstructed postmaster by postmaster without depending on later recollections.
For the people living there in the 1880s and 1890s, however, Boring was already more than an entry in a postal register.
The “Citizens of Boring” Go to Congress
One of the best surviving pieces of evidence for Boring as a genuine community appeared in Washington in 1888.
On January 24 of that year, the Congressional Record documented a series of petitions calling for increased compensation for fourth-class postmasters. Among the Tennessee petitions were those from Clover Bottom, Vance’s Tank, Bloomingdale, and the “citizens of Boring, Sullivan County.”
The wording is remarkable because it gives the people themselves a collective identity.
They were not described merely as residents living near a postal stop. They were the citizens of Boring.
Fourth-class post offices were generally the smaller offices that served thousands of rural communities across the United States. Their existence was particularly important in areas where farms and homes were spread across miles of countryside. The 1888 petition placed Boring alongside other recognized Sullivan County communities whose residents depended upon these small offices and were willing to appeal to Congress over the conditions under which their postal service operated.
For a place that left relatively few written records of its own, those few words in the Congressional Record are among the strongest pieces of evidence that Boring had developed a distinct community identity by the late 1880s.
Finding Boring on the Nineteenth-Century Landscape
Determining exactly where the nineteenth-century Boring post office stood is more difficult.
Later local history provides one useful clue. In Mountain Memories, Morrell preserved information concerning Sarah E. Feathers and John M. Galloway, who married in 1865. Their home was described as being on the old Galloway Mill farm near Talley’s Ford on the Holston River, near Flourville, and near “Borings Post Office.”
The passage is valuable because it places the post office within the older geography understood by local families. People navigated Sullivan County through farms, mills, river fords, churches, and neighboring communities. Boring’s post office fit into that landscape.
At the same time, the description should not be treated as the final answer to the exact location of the postal building. Morrell was preserving later local and family material, and determining the precise post office site would require comparison with land deeds, postal site reports, and historic roads.
The National Archives holds another federal collection that may eventually solve that problem. Post Office Department reports of site locations survive for the period from 1837 to 1950. Depending on the office and year, these reports can include distances to nearby post offices, roads, rivers, railroads, mail routes, and even hand-drawn maps showing where an office stood.
For a community like Boring, such a document could be extraordinarily valuable because the post office may have operated from a store, private residence, or another building that has long since disappeared.
A Rural Community in an Age of Railroads
Boring developed during a period when railroads were changing Sullivan County and the larger Appalachian region, but the community itself remained closely tied to the rural road and postal network.
A historical index based on Rand McNally’s 1895 Business Atlas and Shippers’ Guide records Boring as a Sullivan County place with a post office but without railroad service. That distinction helps explain the character of the community. Boring was not a railroad town built around a depot, yards, hotels, warehouses, and passing trains. Its importance came from the surrounding countryside and the people who used its postal address.
That was not unusual.
Some Appalachian communities became towns because a railroad came through them. Others grew around mines, lumber operations, county seats, or industrial plants. Places such as Boring could exist for generations with much less visible infrastructure because their reason for existing was local. A post office, a nearby mill, a church, a ford, a school, and a network of farms could be enough to create a community recognized by everyone who lived there.
The fact that Boring never developed into a large town should not be confused with the idea that it was unimportant to the families who called the area home.
The Boring Post Office Closes
After roughly twenty-two years of operation, the Boring post office was discontinued in 1903.
Why it closed remains an important unanswered question.
Its disappearance came during the period when Rural Free Delivery was rapidly changing the postal geography of the United States. Beginning in the late nineteenth century and expanding quickly after 1900, rural delivery allowed mail to be carried outward from larger postal centers instead of requiring every rural neighborhood to maintain a separate office.
It would be tempting to say that Rural Free Delivery killed the Boring post office, and that may eventually prove to be correct. The surviving evidence examined so far, however, does not justify stating it as fact. Federal postal records concerning the office’s discontinuance and Sullivan County’s early rural delivery routes would need to establish the connection.
The distinction is important because a post office could close for many reasons. Routes could be reorganized, offices could be consolidated, postmasters could resign, neighboring offices could become more convenient, and improvements in transportation could make a small office unnecessary.
What is certain is that the end of the post office did not immediately mean the end of Boring.
The Name Survives the Post Office
The United States Geological Survey’s 1904 Roan Mountain topographic map continued to identify Boring among the named settlements of the region.
That is significant.
The federal postal designation had ended, but Boring still existed as a geographic place. The community name had become rooted deeply enough in local usage to survive the institution that had given it official recognition for more than two decades.
This happened throughout Appalachia. A postal office might disappear while the community around it continued for another century. In other places, the opposite happened, with the postal name eventually vanishing while a church, cemetery, creek, road, or family name preserved the memory of the old settlement.
Boring belongs to the first group. The community survived on maps after 1903, and the name remained attached to the Sullivan County landscape long after residents had to send and receive their mail through other offices.
Twentieth-century government maps provide another route for following the transformation of the surrounding countryside. The Tennessee State Highway Department’s 1938 General Highway and Transportation Map of Sullivan County, prepared using field information gathered in 1937, preserves the network of roads, communities, schools, churches, waterways, and other features that existed before later development substantially changed parts of the county.
Those maps are particularly valuable when studying small communities because modern highways and development can hide the older relationships between farms, river crossings, schools, mills, and country roads.
The Problem With Writing the History of Small Places
Boring illustrates one of the problems historians encounter throughout Appalachia.
Large cities leave records everywhere. They have city councils, newspapers, tax rolls, directories, businesses, schools, photographs, police departments, and public buildings. A small farming community might leave almost none of those things.
Its history instead has to be assembled from fragments.
For Boring, one fragment is the 1870 census household of Elizabeth Boring. Another is the creation of a post office in 1881. Another appears in the Congressional Record when the citizens of Boring joined other East Tennessee communities in petitioning over postal compensation. Still another survives in a family history describing a farm near Borings Post Office. Old government maps provide another layer.
None of those records tells the entire story by itself.
Together, they demonstrate that Boring was not merely a name printed on a map. It was a community understood by the people who lived there, a postal address recognized by the federal government, and a place sufficiently established that its residents could be described collectively before Congress.
What Still Remains to Be Found
There is considerably more of Boring’s history waiting in archival records.
Sullivan County deed indexes and deed books may identify exactly where members of the Boring family owned land and whether the post office operated on or near one of their properties. Tax books beginning in the 1870s could follow those holdings through the years immediately before and after creation of the post office. Probate records could establish family relationships and property transfers.
Federal postal appointment records should identify the people who served as Boring’s postmasters. Post Office Department site reports may locate the office itself. Newspapers from Bristol and surrounding Sullivan County communities could contain post office notices, marriages, deaths, advertisements, road news, and ordinary mentions of residents receiving mail at Boring.
Even a surviving envelope with a Boring, Tennessee postmark would add something meaningful to the story. It would provide a physical artifact from a federal office that disappeared more than a century ago.
Boring is therefore not a community whose history has been exhausted. It is one whose history has only been partially reconstructed.
Why Boring Still Matters
The most interesting thing about Boring is not its unusual name.
Its real importance is what the community represents.
Across Appalachia are hundreds of places that were once clearly understood by the people living around them but never became incorporated towns. Some were postal communities. Others were mining camps, mill settlements, crossroads, farming neighborhoods, or clusters of families surrounding a church and school.
Their histories are often overlooked because modern maps encourage us to think in terms of cities and official boundaries.
Nineteenth-century residents did not necessarily see their world that way.
A person could be a citizen of Boring without there being a mayor of Boring, a town council, or a legally defined municipal boundary. The community existed because its residents recognized it, their neighbors recognized it, the postal system recognized it, mapmakers recognized it, and, for at least one moment in 1888, the United States Congress recognized it.
More than a century after the post office closed, the name remains.
That may be the best evidence of all that Boring was never simply a postal entry. It was one of the many small communities that made up the human geography of Sullivan County, and its survival on the landscape offers a reminder of how much Appalachian history can be hidden behind a single place name.
Sources & Further Reading
United States Bureau of the Census. Ninth Census of the United States, 1870: Sullivan County, Tennessee, 8th Civil District. Population Schedule 1. National Archives Microfilm Publication M593. https://www.archives.gov/research/census/1870
United States Congress. Congressional Record. 50th Cong., 1st sess., January 24, 1888, 645. Includes the petition of the “citizens of Boring, Sullivan County.” https://www.congress.gov/50/crecb/1888/01/24/GPO-CRECB-1888-pt1-v19-28-1.pdf
United States Post Office Department. Record of Appointment of Postmasters, 1832–September 30, 1971. National Archives Microfilm Publication M841, roll 120, Tennessee, Montgomery–Wilson Counties. Record Group 28, National Archives. 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. National Archives Microfilm Publication M1126, roll 562, Tennessee, Tipton–Washington Counties. Record Group 28, National Archives. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/locations-1837-1950.html
National Archives and Records Administration. “Post Office Records.” Record Group 28, Records of the Post Office Department. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices
Taylor, Oliver. Historic Sullivan: A History of Sullivan County, Tennessee, with Brief Biographies of the Makers of History. Bristol, TN: King Printing Company, 1909. Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/09025291/
Goodspeed Publishing Company. History of Tennessee from the Earliest Time to the Present: Sullivan County. Nashville and Chicago: Goodspeed Publishing Company, 1887, 912–921. TNGenWeb Project. https://www.tngennet.org/records/sullivan/history/goodspeed/index.html
Goodspeed Publishing Company. “Sullivan County Biographical Sketches, Surnames A–H.” In History of Tennessee from the Earliest Time to the Present, 1300–1307. Nashville and Chicago: Goodspeed Publishing Company, 1887. https://www.tngenweb.org/goodspeed/sullivan/bios-1.html
Goodspeed Publishing Company. “Sullivan County Biographical Sketches, Surnames J–T.” In History of Tennessee from the Earliest Time to the Present, 1307–1312. Nashville and Chicago: Goodspeed Publishing Company, 1887. https://tngenweb.org/goodspeed/sullivan/bios-2.html
Morrell, Gene A. Mountain Memories. Originally published as a weekly column in the Sullivan County News, December 1977–January 1979. Compiled edition, 2014. Sullivan County TNGenWeb. https://tngenweb.org/sullivan/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Mountain-Memories-by-Gene-Morrell.pdf
Miller, Larry L. Tennessee Place-Names. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. https://books.google.com/books/about/Tennessee_Place_Names.html?id=zOzPQYkkbaAC
Tennessee State Highway Department and United States Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Public Roads. General Highway and Transportation Map, Sullivan County, Tennessee. 1938. Archives of Appalachia, East Tennessee State University. https://dc.etsu.edu/rare-maps/137/
Tennessee Department of Highways, Research and Planning Division, and United States Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration. General Highway Map, Sullivan County, Tennessee. 1969. Archives of Appalachia, East Tennessee State University. https://dc.etsu.edu/rare-maps/136/
Bristol News. Bristol, Virginia and Tennessee. Historical issues. Library of Congress, Chronicling America. The newspaper provides contemporary coverage of Sullivan County during the period immediately preceding and overlapping the establishment of Boring’s post office. https://www.loc.gov/item/sn85026955/
Sullivan County TNGenWeb. “1870 Census, Sullivan County, Tennessee.” TNGenWeb Project. Useful for locating Boring households before establishment of the post office. https://tngenweb.org/sullivan/1870-census-sullivan-county-tennessee/
Sullivan County TNGenWeb. “Records & Resources.” Includes census collections, newspapers, Sullivan County family material, historical records, and Gene Morrell’s Mountain Memories. https://tngenweb.org/sullivan/records-resources/
Cemetery Survey Team of Northeast Tennessee. “Borings Chapel Cemetery.” Washington County TNGenWeb, 2004. Includes records concerning Dr. Isaac Newton Boring, Nancy Ann Boring, the Boring family, census references, marriage information, and the establishment of Boring’s Chapel. https://tngenweb.org/washington/records-data/cemeteries/cemeteries-of-washington-county-tennessee/borings-chapel-cemetery/
Jim Forte Postal History. “Sullivan County, Tennessee Post Offices.” PostalHistory.com. Lists Boring as a Sullivan County post office operating from 1881 to 1903. https://www.postalhistory.com/postoffices.asp?county=Sullivan&state=TN&task=display
Author Note: Small communities such as Boring rarely left behind a single history telling their story, so their past has to be rebuilt from census schedules, postal records, maps, newspapers, and family documents. I hope this article helps preserve the identity of one more Sullivan County community whose name survived long after its post office disappeared.