Appalachian Community Histories – Buchanan, Lawrence County: A Big Sandy Community of Ferries, War, and Railroads
Buchanan sits at the mouth of Bear Creek, where the water leaves the hills of Lawrence County and enters the Big Sandy River. The river forms Kentucky’s eastern boundary here, separating Lawrence County from Wayne County, West Virginia. The hills rise quickly behind the narrow river bottom, while the Big Sandy opens a natural route north toward Catlettsburg and the Ohio River and south toward Louisa, Paintsville, Prestonsburg, and Pikeville.
That geography shaped nearly every chapter of Buchanan’s history. Before reliable roads crossed eastern Kentucky, the river carried travelers, mail, livestock, timber, merchandise, and political news. A ferry operated here when reaching the opposite bank could be part of a much longer journey through the Big Sandy Valley. Later, a railroad followed the river and redirected commerce toward a station near Bear Creek.
The modern name Buchanan tells only part of the story. During different periods, the settlement appeared in records as Mouth of Bear, Canterbury, Turman’s Ferry, Round Bottom, Rockville, and Buchanan. Each name reflected a person, business, transportation system, or landscape feature that mattered at the time. Together, those names preserve the history of a small Appalachian community repeatedly transformed by the routes passing through it. Robert M. Rennick’s survey of Lawrence County place names provides the clearest published chronology of these changes.
Mouth of Bear and the Canterbury Post Office
Long before Buchanan became the accepted community name, the place was identified by its geography. Mouth of Bear referred simply to the mouth of Bear Creek. Such descriptive names were common in the Big Sandy Valley, where residents located farms and settlements by creek mouths, river bends, forks, shoals, and bottomlands.
The establishment of a post office gave the settlement a more formal identity. According to Rennick’s research, county surveyor Reuben Canterbury, whose surname was also written Canterberry, became the first postmaster on January 14, 1830. He called the office Canterbury after himself.
A post office was more than a place to collect letters. In an isolated river community, it could become the center of local business and public life. Mail brought newspapers, government notices, legal documents, commercial information, and personal correspondence from beyond the mountains. The postmaster often operated a store, inn, ferry, mill, or other enterprise that already drew residents to the same location.
The Canterbury name did not last, but the establishment of the office marked an important transition. Mouth of Bear was no longer only a geographic description. It had become an officially recognized stop within the federal postal system.
The Rise of Turman’s Ferry
In March 1838 the post office name changed from Canterbury to Turman’s Ferry. Rennick associates the postal change with Benjamin Turman, who became postmaster and gave the office the name connected with the ferrying family. A near-contemporary account by Big Sandy Valley historian William Ely places James Turman at the center of the ferry, inn, and farm that made the location widely known.
Ely wrote that the Turman family came down from Floyd County and settled near Round Bottom around the time of the War of 1812. James Turman purchased land on the Kentucky side of the Big Sandy opposite Bloomer Bar. He opened a farm, established a ferry, and operated an inn for travelers.
The combination was well suited to the river economy. Travelers arriving at the ferry might need food, lodging, supplies, information, or a place for their animals. Farmers and stock traders could meet people moving between Louisa and Catlettsburg. River travelers could stop before continuing downstream toward the Ohio or upstream into the interior of eastern Kentucky.
Ely described James Turman as one of the best-known men on the lower Big Sandy. His income came from farming, ferrying, hotel keeping, and the sale of liquor. In early Kentucky, ferry privileges could be connected with the retailing of spirits. When that automatic privilege ended, Ely reported that Turman obtained a county license and continued selling liquor through his hotel business until the Civil War.
Although Ely wrote with the colorful language and personal judgments common to nineteenth-century county historians, his account reveals what made Turman’s Ferry important. This was not simply a boat crossing between two quiet banks. It was a farm, inn, trading place, postal stop, and gathering point positioned on one of the valley’s principal transportation corridors.
A Stop on the Big Sandy Mail Route
Federal postal notices demonstrate that Turman’s Ferry was part of a larger route through the Big Sandy Valley. In 1842 the Daily Madisonian published a government mail route running from Catlettsburg through Turman’s Ferry, Louisa, George Creek, Paint Creek, Prestonsburg, and onward to Piketon. The route covered approximately ninety-three miles and operated once each week.
That brief notice places Turman’s Ferry within a chain of communities tied together by river roads and mail service. Catlettsburg connected the valley with the Ohio River. Louisa stood at the forks of the Big Sandy. Paintsville, Prestonsburg, and Piketon carried the route deeper into the mountains.
Mail contractors traveled through difficult conditions. Seasonal flooding could cover sections of road and alter river crossings. Low water exposed shoals and sandbars. Winter cold could freeze smaller streams and make travel dangerous. Yet the mail route gave communities such as Turman’s Ferry a regular connection to county seats, commercial centers, and the outside world.
The appearance of Turman’s Ferry in a federal route schedule also shows how established the name had become. It was recognizable enough to serve as one of the official points between Catlettsburg and the upper valley.
Round Bottom and a Community Divided by the River
The settlement’s identity became more complicated in 1853. Rennick records that the post office was moved across the Big Sandy River and into what is now Wayne County, West Virginia. During this period it was called Round Bottom, a name associated with the broad river bottom near present-day Prichard.
The move demonstrates how closely connected the communities on opposite sides of the river were. The Big Sandy formed a political boundary, but it did not necessarily divide families, farms, trade, or daily life. Residents crossed by ferry, married across county and state lines, attended businesses on either bank, and followed roads that treated the river valley as a single region.
This history can create confusion for modern researchers. Records connected with Turman’s Ferry may appear in Lawrence County or Boyd County, Kentucky, as well as Wayne County, West Virginia. Families associated with Buchanan may be found under Round Bottom, Prichard, Bloomer Bar, Bear Creek, Rockville, or Turman’s Ferry.
The shifting post office also explains why local memory did not always follow official names. A federal office could move or be renamed, while residents continued calling the crossing Turman’s Ferry. The ferry had become a landmark independent of whatever name appeared in postal ledgers.
The Political Gathering of 1860
Turman’s Ferry reached the height of its regional prominence shortly before the Civil War. When Boyd County was created during the 1859 and 1860 legislative session, Boyd and Lawrence counties formed a legislative district. A political convention was organized to nominate a candidate for the Kentucky General Assembly, and Turman’s Ferry was selected as the meeting place.
Ely’s description of the event captures the community at its busiest. A steamboat carried a large delegation upriver from Catlettsburg. People came down from Louisa and the surrounding countryside, many traveling on horseback. Families brought baskets of food, while others planned to eat at the Turman Hotel.
The gathering illustrates the practical advantages of the location. Turman’s Ferry stood between the principal communities of the two counties and could be reached by river, road, horse, or steamboat. It provided enough space and hospitality to accommodate a substantial crowd.
For one day, the ferry became the political center of the lower Big Sandy Valley. The convention brought together residents of a newly created county and their Lawrence County neighbors at a place already familiar through mail service, trade, ferry crossings, and the Turman family’s hotel.
The Name Buchanan Arrives
In September 1861 the post office returned to the Kentucky side of the river. It was renamed Buchanan after postmaster George Buchanan.
The timing was significant. Kentucky’s attempted neutrality in the Civil War was collapsing, armed forces were moving through the Big Sandy Valley, and Louisa was becoming a Union military base. Yet the adoption of the Buchanan name did not immediately erase Turman’s Ferry. Military reports and local accounts continued using the older name because it remained the best-known description of the crossing.
This overlap is common in Appalachian community history. Official names recorded by postal departments, railroads, and mapmakers could coexist with older names used by residents. A letter might be addressed to Buchanan, while a traveler still described the place as Turman’s Ferry or Mouth of Bear.
The Civil War soon gave the old ferry name a darker meaning.
The Battle of Turman’s Ferry
On January 9, 1864, Turman’s Ferry became the scene of one of Lawrence County’s sharpest Civil War encounters.
The 39th Kentucky Mounted Infantry was a Union regiment recruited heavily from eastern Kentucky. Its official service history lists an action at Turman’s Ferry on January 9. The regiment spent much of the war guarding the Big Sandy Valley, operating from Louisa, and pursuing Confederate cavalry and guerrilla forces through eastern Kentucky and neighboring West Virginia.
A regional battlefield guide based on military records describes approximately seventy-five men of the 39th Kentucky camped in a schoolhouse near the ferry. During the night, around 150 Confederate cavalrymen under Colonel Milton J. Ferguson surrounded and attacked them.
The surprise threw the Union detachment into confusion. Some soldiers escaped without time to put on their boots and fled through snow in bitter winter temperatures. Fourteen men were reported killed or wounded, while others suffered frostbite during the retreat. Later accounts identify the Confederate attackers with Ferguson’s 16th Virginia Cavalry.
The engagement was small when compared with the enormous battles at Gettysburg, Chickamauga, or Shiloh. For the people living at Turman’s Ferry, however, it brought the war directly into their community. The schoolhouse, river crossing, nearby farms, and winter roads became part of a military landscape stretching between the Union base at Louisa and the supply and transportation center at Catlettsburg.
The attack also demonstrated the continued importance of the crossing. Control of the Big Sandy corridor depended on more than holding Louisa. Patrols, detachments, messengers, and supply movements had to pass through vulnerable places such as Turman’s Ferry, where the river, roads, and surrounding hills created opportunities for ambush.
After the War
The war weakened the old ferry-centered economy. James Turman died several years after the conflict, although members of the family continued living on portions of the homestead. The crossing remained a familiar landmark, but new transportation patterns were beginning to draw commerce elsewhere.
Writing in 1887, Ely looked back on Turman’s Ferry as the most prominent location on the Big Sandy between Louisa and the river’s mouth for approximately twenty-five years before 1864. By the time he wrote, very little traffic crossed at the old ferry.
Trade had shifted toward Rockville, nearby railroad points, Whitens Creek, Lockwood Station, and businesses around Round Bottom. The change was not simply the decline of one family or ferry. It reflected a larger transformation taking place throughout Appalachia as railroads began replacing rivers, ferries, and wagon roads as the fastest means of moving people and goods.
Rockville and the Coming of the Railroad
The Chattaroi Railway Company was incorporated by the Kentucky General Assembly in 1873, with its charter amended in 1878. Its purpose was to open the lower Big Sandy Valley to more dependable transportation and carry coal, timber, agricultural goods, passengers, and other freight toward the Ohio River.
The railroad reached the area around Bear Creek in 1880. Its station was called Rockville, reportedly after a rocky feature near the creek mouth and depot. For a time, the settlement’s post office was Buchanan while the railway station and surrounding business center were known as Rockville.
The railroad changed the rhythm of community life. A ferry waited for travelers who arrived individually or in small groups. A station drew scheduled trains, freight shipments, mail sacks, merchants, livestock, and passengers. Businesses had reason to locate closer to the tracks, while residents could ship goods without depending entirely on river conditions.
The Chattaroi encountered financial problems and eventually entered receivership. Its property passed through successor companies and ultimately became part of the Chesapeake and Ohio system that developed extensive rail operations in eastern Kentucky and West Virginia. The line beside the Big Sandy became one piece of the industrial network that carried Appalachian coal and timber to distant markets.
Life in Rockville
William Ely’s history offers glimpses of Rockville during the railroad period. He mentioned merchants, physicians, teachers, steamboatmen, farmers, and members of several established Big Sandy families connected with the community.
Joseph F. Hatton operated as a merchant at Rockville. M. T. Burriss was remembered as one of the valley’s old-time teachers. Allen Hatton, who lived with relatives at Rockville in his later years, had worked as a steamboatman and reportedly piloted the first steamer to travel above Louisa in 1843.
Ely also identified professional and family connections extending beyond the immediate settlement. Physicians practiced near the mouth of Bear Creek, Prichard family members lived close to Rockville, and merchants maintained relationships with communities up and down the Sandy.
These references show that Rockville was not merely a depot surrounded by a few houses. It was a small commercial community tied to farms, family networks, river navigation, education, medicine, and the railroad. Its residents participated in the wider economy of the lower Big Sandy Valley while maintaining connections across the river and county lines.
When Rockville Became Buchanan
In 1891 the names of the post office, railroad station, and community were brought together under Buchanan. By then, Rennick described a settlement containing several lumber and livestock operations, stores, a hotel, a flour mill, and a wagon-making business.
Each enterprise reflected the surrounding landscape. Timber came from the hills and creek valleys. Livestock grazed on farms and river bottoms. A flour mill processed locally grown grain. Wagon makers served farmers, merchants, and travelers who still depended on roads even after the railroad arrived. Stores supplied families who might otherwise have traveled to Louisa or Catlettsburg.
The community’s economy therefore rested on both old and new forms of transportation. Wagons carried products from farms and hollows to the station. Trains moved them farther down the valley. River travel remained useful, and the old ferry name survived in memory even as Rockville disappeared from ordinary use.
The adoption of Buchanan did not create a new community from nothing. It gathered several generations of local history under one lasting name.
The Big Sandy News and Community Memory
Beginning in 1885, the Big Sandy News of Louisa became one of the most important records of life in Lawrence County. Its surviving issues contain community correspondence, school reports, church gatherings, deaths, marriages, business notices, railroad accidents, floods, elections, and visits between neighboring families.
Buchanan appeared not only as a postal address but as part of the county’s social network. Reports connected Buchanan residents with Bear Creek, Prichard, Catlettsburg, Louisa, and other communities on both sides of the river. Even brief notices about Sunday schools, family visits, illness, or travel help reconstruct daily life that formal histories often overlook.
One 1917 issue, for example, included Buchanan and Bear Creek figures in reporting on a district Sunday school event. Such notices may appear minor, but together they show the institutions that held the community together after the ferry and railroad eras had changed.
The newspaper is also valuable because the name Buchanan alone does not retrieve every relevant article. Researchers must search Turman’s Ferry, Turmans Ferry, Rockville, Mouth of Bear, Bear Creek, Round Bottom, and family surnames associated with the settlement. The community’s history is scattered across all of them.
The Closing of the Post Office
Buchanan’s post office remained part of local life into the twentieth century. Rennick records that it closed in 1976.
The closure ended an institution whose history reached back to Reuben Canterbury’s appointment in 1830. During those 146 years, the office had been renamed, moved across a state boundary, returned to Kentucky, associated with a ferry, overshadowed by a railroad station, and finally reunited with the community under the Buchanan name.
The end of the post office did not erase the settlement, but it marked another shift in rural life. Improved highways, automobiles, centralized mail routes, and changing population patterns reduced the need for small community offices. Buchanan became increasingly identified as an unincorporated place rather than a separate postal center.
A History Preserved Under Many Names
Buchanan’s history is difficult to see when viewed under only one name. Canterbury preserves the arrival of the federal post. Turman’s Ferry recalls a family business that made the crossing a regional landmark. Round Bottom points across the river toward present-day Prichard and the shared history of Kentucky and West Virginia. Rockville represents the arrival of the railroad. Buchanan reflects the postmaster whose name eventually became permanent.
The changes reveal how Appalachian communities developed. They were not always founded at a single moment, named once, and left unchanged. They grew around creek mouths, ferries, stores, inns, post offices, mills, schools, and railroad stations. When transportation shifted, the center of local activity could shift with it.
Buchanan also demonstrates why community history cannot be confined to modern boundaries. Its story crosses Lawrence and Boyd counties in Kentucky and Wayne County in West Virginia. It belongs to the Big Sandy River as much as to any one courthouse.
The old ferry no longer dominates travel between Louisa and Catlettsburg. The Turman Hotel, the Rockville station, and many early businesses have disappeared from the landscape or survive only in records. Yet the mouth of Bear Creek remains where it has always been, opening into the Big Sandy beneath the hills of Lawrence County.
There, beneath the permanent name Buchanan, the older communities of Canterbury, Turman’s Ferry, Round Bottom, and Rockville remain part of the same place.
Sources & Further Reading
National Archives and Records Administration. “Appointment of Postmasters, 1789–1832.” Microfilm Publication M1131, Records of the Post Office Department, Record Group 28. Accessed July 19, 2026. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/postmasters-1789-1832.html
National Archives and Records Administration. “Appointment of Postmasters, 1832–September 30, 1971.” Microfilm Publication M841, Records of the Post Office Department, Record Group 28. Accessed July 19, 2026. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/postmasters-1832-1971.html
National Archives and Records Administration. “Post Office Reports of Site Locations, 1837–1950.” Microfilm Publication M1126, Records of the Post Office Department, Record Group 28. Accessed July 19, 2026. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/locations-1837-1950.html
National Archives and Records Administration. “Records of the Post Office Department.” Record Group 28. Accessed July 19, 2026. https://www.archives.gov/research/guide-fed-records/groups/028.html
National Archives and Records Administration. “Letters Sent by the Postmaster General, 1789–1836.” Microfilm Publication M601, Records of the Post Office Department, Record Group 28. Accessed July 19, 2026. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/postmaster-letters-1789-1836.html
United States Postal Service. “Postal History Research Sources.” Accessed July 19, 2026. https://about.usps.com/who/profile/history/research-sources.htm
United States War Department. The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. Series 1. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1880–1901. Accessed July 19, 2026. https://collections.library.cornell.edu/moa_new/waro.html
National Park Service. “39th Regiment, Kentucky Infantry.” Civil War Soldiers and Sailors Database. Accessed July 19, 2026. https://www.nps.gov/civilwar/search-battle-units-detail.htm?battleUnitCode=UKY0039RI
Dyer, Frederick H. A Compendium of the War of the Rebellion. Des Moines, IA: Dyer Publishing Company, 1908. https://archive.org/details/compendiumofwarr03dyer
Hall, Brian, and Robert M. Baker. “The Battle of Turman’s Ferry, January 9th, 1864.” Accessed July 19, 2026. https://www.oocities.org/rmbaker66/turmans.html
Preston, John David. The Civil War in the Big Sandy Valley of Kentucky. Baltimore: Gateway Press, 1984. https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Civil_War_in_the_Big_Sandy_Valley_of.html?id=7o1vGQAACAAJ
Preston, John David. Civil War Soldiers of the Big Sandy Valley of Kentucky. Bowie, MD: Heritage Books, 2022. https://books.google.com/books/about/Civil_War_Soldiers_of_the_Big_Sandy_Vall.html?id=TKUnzwEACAAJ
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. https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcmassbookdig.bigsandyvalleyhi02elyw/
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. Internet Archive edition. https://archive.org/details/bigsandyvalleyhi02elyw
Rennick, Robert M. “Lawrence County: Post Offices and Place Names.” County Histories of Kentucky. Morehead State University, 2000. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/244/
Rennick, Robert M. “Lawrence County: Place Names.” Robert M. Rennick Manuscript Collection. Morehead State University, 2016. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_ms_collection/90/
Kentucky Historical Society. “Finding Kentucky Place Names in Family History Research.” Kentucky Ancestors. Accessed July 19, 2026. https://history.ky.gov/kentucky-ancestors/where-in-kentucky-is
Works Progress Administration. “Lawrence County: Brief History.” County Histories of Kentucky. Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/349/
Works Progress Administration and Historical Records Survey. “Lawrence County: General History.” 1939. County Histories of Kentucky. Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/245/
Sprague, Stuart S., and Alice Lloyd College. “Lawrence County: First Passenger Train on Chatteroi Railroad.” Stuart S. Sprague Photograph Collection, Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/sprague_photo_collection/242/
Kentucky General Assembly. Acts Passed at the Session of the General Assembly for the Commonwealth of Kentucky. “An Act to Incorporate the Chattaroi Railway Company.” Frankfort, KY, 1873. https://books.google.com/books/about/Acts_Passed_at_the_Session_of_the_Genera.html?id=gkpNAQAAMAAJ
Kentucky General Assembly. Acts Passed at the Session of the General Assembly for the Commonwealth of Kentucky. “An Act to Amend an Act Entitled an Act to Incorporate the Chattaroi Railway Company.” Frankfort, KY, 1878. https://books.google.com/books/about/Acts_Passed_at_the_Session_of_the_Genera.html?id=dDlNAQAAMAAJ
Kentucky Legislative Research Commission. “Acts of the Kentucky General Assembly.” Accessed July 19, 2026. https://legislature.ky.gov/Law/Pages/KyActs.aspx
Library of Congress. “The Big Sandy News, Louisa, Kentucky, 1885–1929.” Chronicling America. Accessed July 19, 2026. https://www.loc.gov/chroniclingamerica/lccn/sn83004226/issues/
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Lawrence County Public Library. “Big Sandy News Digital Collection.” Accessed July 19, 2026. https://lcplky.org/news_announcements/big-sandy-news-digital-collection/
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Lawrence County Public Library. “Lawrence County Digital Yearbook Collection.” Accessed July 19, 2026. https://lcplky.org/genealogy/lawrence-county-digital-yearbook-collection/
Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives. “Kentucky County Records Inventory.” Frankfort, KY. Accessed July 19, 2026. https://kdla.ky.gov/Archives-and-Reference/Documents/County%20Records.pdf
Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives. “Research Guides.” Accessed July 19, 2026. https://kdla.ky.gov/Archives-and-Reference/Pages/Research-Guides.aspx
Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives. “Requesting Records from the Kentucky State Archives.” Accessed July 19, 2026. https://kdla.ky.gov/Archives-and-Reference/Pages/Records-Requests.aspx
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Lawrence County, Kentucky. Tax Books, 1822–1875. FamilySearch Catalog. Accessed July 19, 2026. https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/156053
Elswick, Elizabeth Burgess, comp. Marriage Register of Lawrence County, Kentucky, 1822–1880. FamilySearch Catalog. Accessed July 19, 2026. https://www.familysearch.org/en/search/catalog/681367
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Sharps, J. A. Geologic Map of the Fallsburg Quadrangle, Kentucky–West Virginia, and the Prichard Quadrangle in Kentucky. Washington, DC: United States Geological Survey, 1967. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/gq584
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Lawrence County Government. “History of Lawrence County.” Accessed July 19, 2026. https://lawrencecountyky.gov/history/
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Appalachian Regional Commission. “Kentucky.” Accessed July 19, 2026. https://www.arc.gov/appalachian-states/kentucky/
Appalachian Regional Commission. “Appalachian Counties Served by ARC.” Accessed July 19, 2026. https://www.arc.gov/appalachian-counties-served-by-arc/
Author Note: Buchanan’s story shows how one small Big Sandy community could change names while remaining rooted in the same river landscape. Its ferry, post office, Civil War encounter, and railroad station connect local memory to the wider history of eastern Kentucky.