Appalachian Community Histories – Concord, Fleming County: The Crossroads Village Once Called Balm
A few miles north of Sherburne, along the road that is now Kentucky Route 11, there is a Fleming County place that nearly disappeared without ever quite vanishing. Concord was never a large town. It was a rural crossroads, the kind of community that depended less on city limits and government buildings than on a church, a school, country stores, nearby farms, and the roads that brought neighbors together.
For a few years around the turn of the twentieth century, even its name became uncertain. The people who knew the place as Concord could not use that name for their new post office because another Concord post office already operated in Lewis County. Threemile was proposed instead, a reference to nearby Three Mile Run, but Washington approved something entirely different. From 1899 until 1904, mail addressed to this little Fleming County crossroads went to a place called Balm.
That brief postal name lingered on maps for years after the post office closed. Eventually, however, Concord reclaimed the landscape. By the middle of the twentieth century, the United States Geological Survey was again printing Concord on its maps, while Threemile Run continued winding through the hills nearby.
The paper trail left behind is unusually revealing for such a small place, but it has to be followed under several names: Concord, Balm, Threemile, Three Mile, and Threemile Run.
Before Balm, There Was Concord
One of the most important pieces of evidence for Concord’s early history comes not from a town record or a post office document, but from an obituary.
Amanda J. Chrisman was born on July 13, 1828, and married James Porter in September 1852. When she died of pneumonia on December 30, 1887, an obituary later preserved in a Fleming County scrapbook remembered her as a longtime member of the Christian Church. More importantly for the history of Concord, the obituary stated that she had joined the church years earlier at “old Concord in this county.”
That short phrase establishes something the later postal history cannot. Concord was not created when a post office appeared in 1899. The name was already familiar in Fleming County at least by the 1880s, and the reference to “old Concord” suggests that both the name and the congregation were older still.
Exactly how far back the community can be traced remains harder to establish. The 1884 atlas of Bath and Fleming counties does not list Concord among Fleming County’s formally indexed towns and villages. Instead, the surrounding country appears within Sherburne Precinct, where individual farms, roads, residences, schools, churches, and other landmarks were scattered across a heavily rural landscape. The atlas reported 810 residents in the entire Sherburne precinct in the 1880 census, while only 177 of them lived in the town of Sherburne itself.
That is the setting in which Concord developed. It was not necessarily a town in the legal or urban sense. It was a neighborhood and crossroads where enough people lived close together to support institutions that gave the place an identity.
The 1887 obituary also helps distinguish Fleming County’s Concord from another historically important Old Concord Church south of Carlisle in neighboring Nicholas County. Both places appear in records involving Christian congregations, making careless searches especially confusing. Amanda Porter’s obituary specifically located her “old Concord” in Fleming County, tying the reference to the community north of Sherburne rather than the better-known Nicholas County site.
A Crossroads at Threemile Run
Concord’s geography explains one of the names later proposed for its post office.
Kentucky place-name historian Robert M. Rennick described Concord as a crossroads village on present-day Kentucky Route 11, approximately three miles north of Sherburne. Near the community is the head of Three Mile Run, generally written as Threemile Run on later government maps. When local residents sought postal service, Fletcher M. Hopkins proposed the name Threemile for the new office.
The name made practical sense. Small rural post offices were often named for creeks, branches, ridges, families, churches, or other landmarks familiar to the people who lived around them. Three Mile Run placed this particular settlement within its immediate landscape.
A local Fleming County history column published in 2024 preserves the same general description. It placed the old Balm post office about three miles south of Tilton, four miles southeast of Pecks Ridge, and three miles north of Sherburne.
The landscape remains recognizable on later maps. The 1952 United States Geological Survey Sherburne quadrangle shows Concord as a named settlement and Threemile Run as a nearby watercourse. The surrounding contour lines show a countryside of ridges and narrow bottoms rather than a broad town site. Individual structures were scattered around the road, exactly the sort of pattern expected from a rural crossroads community rather than an incorporated village.
Why Concord Became Balm
When Fletcher M. Hopkins and his neighbors attempted to establish their post office, they encountered a problem that had nothing to do with Fleming County.
Another Kentucky community named Concord already had an operating post office in Lewis County. The Post Office Department would not authorize a second Kentucky office under the same name. Hopkins therefore proposed Threemile, drawing on the nearby stream, but that name was not ultimately adopted either.
Instead, the Post Office Department authorized Balm.
The Balm post office opened on April 7, 1899. Hopkins served as its only postmaster, and according to Rennick, the office remained in operation until the middle of July 1904. Independent postal-history listings likewise record Balm in Fleming County from 1899 through 1904.
Why officials settled on Balm is unknown.
Rennick suggested that the name might have carried a biblical association, perhaps recalling the “balm of Gilead,” but he presented that only as a possibility. No surviving evidence located so far establishes who actually proposed Balm or why it was accepted over Threemile.
For five years, however, Balm became an official part of Fleming County’s geography. A letter sent to the community had to recognize a name that local residents had apparently never needed before the federal government required one.
That makes Balm a particularly interesting example of how Appalachian place names could develop. Concord was the local identity. Threemile was a practical proposed postal name. Balm was the official postal designation. All three referred, in one way or another, to the same small community.
The Balm Years, 1899 to 1904
A rural post office could be enormously important at the turn of the twentieth century even when the settlement surrounding it contained little that would be recognized as a town today.
Mail brought newspapers, farm information, business correspondence, advertisements, catalogs, letters from relatives who had moved away, political material, pension correspondence, and government notices. For a farming neighborhood, obtaining an office gave the community a more direct connection with the wider world.
Rennick’s description indicates that Concord had more than a post office. He recorded a local school and several stores as part of the old village, as well as Concord Church.
Unfortunately, the evidence currently available does not identify all of those businesses or tell us exactly where the Balm post office operated. Small country post offices were frequently associated with a merchant or a postmaster’s property, but without the original Post Office Department site-location application or a contemporary deed, newspaper advertisement, or photograph, it would be unsafe to assume where Hopkins kept the mail.
Those original federal records offer one of the best remaining opportunities for expanding the story. Post Office Department site-location reports commonly recorded roads, creeks, neighboring post offices, mail routes, and distances, sometimes with simple maps drawn by the postmaster or applicant. The Fleming County Balm records therefore may preserve details about the community that disappeared from later maps and local memory. The surviving source trail specifically points to those postal records as a priority for further research.
What is certain is that Balm’s official life was short. By the summer of 1904, its post office had closed.
The community did not.
Balm Refuses to Disappear
Closing the post office should have ended Balm as an official postal destination, but something curious happened. The name continued appearing in geographical and commercial references.
A 1911 Rand McNally map of Fleming County still labels Balm among such communities as Sherburne, Tilton, Pecks Ridge, Battle Run, Hillsboro, and Flemingsburg. Seven years had passed since the post office closed, yet mapmakers still considered Balm important enough to print.
The name survived even longer in commercial directories.
Rand McNally’s 1913 Bankers’ Directory listed Balm and directed users to Sharpsburg as its accessible banking point. In January 1919, another edition listed “Balm to Flemingsburg,” indicating that people consulting a nationwide financial directory were still expected to recognize Balm as a Kentucky locality fifteen years after the post office disappeared.
Remarkably, a 1924 edition continued to list Balm, directing it to Flemingsburg.
This does not necessarily mean residents had abandoned the name Concord. Historical maps and directories often retained obsolete postal names long after local usage changed. What it does show is that the five-year postal experiment left a surprisingly durable mark on the printed geography of Fleming County.
For at least two decades after Hopkins’s post office closed, someone looking at certain national maps or directories could reasonably believe the community was still called Balm.
Concord Returns to the Map
By the middle of the twentieth century, the old local name had clearly won.
The United States Geological Survey’s Sherburne quadrangle, portraying conditions in 1952 and published in 1953, labels the settlement Concord. Balm is gone. Threemile Run, however, remains clearly marked nearby.
The map captures Concord at an important moment. Rather than depicting a compact town, it shows buildings strung along the road and scattered into the surrounding countryside. The setting helps explain why the community could lose its school, stores, and post office without entirely disappearing. Concord was never dependent on municipal boundaries. Its identity rested on a particular crossroads and the families and institutions around it.
Later United States Geological Survey mapping has continued to recognize Concord. Modern maps also preserve Threemile Run and roads carrying the Concord name, keeping pieces of the older geography visible even after most of the commercial village faded away.
The Library of Congress geographic classification system likewise distinguishes Concord in Fleming County from the communities of the same name in Lewis and Pendleton counties, a modern echo of the naming problem that prevented Fleming County’s post office from being called Concord in 1899.
The School, Stores, and Church
Rennick’s account offers one of the saddest but most revealing descriptions of the old village. By the late twentieth century, he wrote, the school and several stores were gone, leaving Concord Church as the principal surviving institution associated with the former crossroads.
That pattern occurred throughout rural Kentucky. Schools were consolidated. Better roads allowed residents to shop in larger towns. Rural free delivery reduced the need for hundreds of tiny post offices. Automobiles made a trip to Flemingsburg or another commercial center far easier than it had been when farmers depended on horses and wagons.
One institution could survive such changes more easily than the others. A church was not merely a service point. It carried family history, marriages, funerals, revivals, burial traditions, and generations of community memory.
The surviving 1887 obituary of Amanda Porter suggests that the Concord congregation was already part of that identity before Balm ever appeared. By the time the postal name vanished, the church had already seen the community through a much longer span of history.
That makes the church one of the most promising avenues for future research. If membership books, church minutes, cemetery records, deeds, Sunday school material, photographs, or anniversary histories survive, they may push Concord’s documented history deeper into the nineteenth century and identify families who formed the core of the neighborhood.
A Village Hidden in the Records
Concord’s history illustrates one of the difficulties of researching small Appalachian communities.
There may never have been a mayor, a town council, or incorporation papers. Census takers could record residents under a precinct rather than under Concord. Land deeds might describe farms by creeks and neighboring owners without mentioning the village. Newspapers might refer to Concord, Balm, Three Mile, or simply a person’s farm. Maps could use one name while residents used another.
Taken separately, those records can make the community appear almost invisible.
Put together, they tell a different story.
An 1887 obituary remembers “old Concord.” An 1899 post office application produces Balm. A postal historian identifies Fletcher M. Hopkins and Threemile. A 1911 map continues printing Balm. Bankers’ directories preserve the name into the 1920s. A federal topographic map in 1952 restores Concord and places it beside Threemile Run.
Across those documents, the community disappears and reappears depending on which name the researcher happens to search.
That is also why local scrapbooks, church papers, cemetery inscriptions, deeds, tax books, and family collections matter so much. The Fleming County Covered Bridge Museum’s preservation of the Amanda Porter clipping rescued a small piece of Concord’s history that might otherwise have vanished completely. The same museum collection includes old scrapbooks and even store journals in which customer names and purchases can sometimes still be read.
For a place as small as Concord, records like those may ultimately tell more than any formal county history.
Why Concord Matters
It would be easy to drive through Concord today and see only a rural place name.
That would miss most of the story.
Concord represents hundreds of Appalachian crossroads communities whose importance was measured not by population or incorporated boundaries but by the people who depended on them. A school educated neighborhood children. Stores supplied farm families. A church gathered generations for worship and funerals. For five years a post office called Balm connected the settlement to the national mail system.
Then those institutions began disappearing.
Yet the oldest name endured.
Balm survived in maps and directories for years, but Concord ultimately returned. Threemile Run still carries the geographical clue Fletcher Hopkins wanted to place on the post office in 1899. The old postal name now survives mainly in historical records, while Concord remains printed on modern maps.
Perhaps that is the most fitting ending for a community that was never really founded by the Post Office Department in the first place. Washington could rename the mail stop, mapmakers could repeat the new name, and commercial directories could preserve it long after the office closed. But the people and landscape had already known the place as Concord.
In the end, that was the name that stayed.
Sources & Further Reading
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
Rennick, Robert M. “Fleming County – Post Offices.” County Histories of Kentucky, no. 192. Morehead State University, 2000. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/192/
Rennick, Robert M. “Kentucky Gateway-Buffalo Trace Area Post Offices.” Robert M. Rennick Manuscript Collection, no. 161. Morehead State University, 1997. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_ms_collection/161/
Morehead State University. “Kentucky Place Names: Robert M. Rennick Manuscript Collection.” Camden-Carroll Library. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_ms_collection/
National Archives and Records Administration. “Post Office Reports of Site Locations, 1837–1950.” Records of the Post Office Department, Record Group 28, Microfilm Publication M1126. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/locations-1837-1950.html
National Archives and Records Administration. “Appointment of Postmasters, 1832–September 30, 1971.” Records of the Post Office Department, Record Group 28, Microfilm Publication M841. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/postmasters-1832-1971.html
National Archives and Records Administration. “Record Group 28: Records of the Post Office Department.” https://www.archives.gov/research/african-americans/record-groups/rg-028-post-office
Lathrop, J. M., and J. H. Summers. An Atlas of Bath & Fleming Counties, Ky.: From Actual Surveys. Philadelphia: D. J. Lake & Co., 1884. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:An_atlas_of_Bath_%26_Fleming_Counties%2C_Ky._-_from_actual_surveys_by_J._M._Lathrop_and_J._H.Summers(IA_atlasofbathflemi00djla).pdf
United States Geological Survey. Sherburne Quadrangle, Kentucky. 1:24,000. Surveyed 1952, published 1953. https://pastmaps.com/map/sherburne-fleming-county-ky-usgs-topo-1952-p1953
Rand McNally and Company. “Fleming County, Kentucky.” Map from the 1911 Rand McNally Kentucky map. Reproduced by My Genealogy Hound. https://mygenealogyhound.com/maps/kentucky-maps/KY-Fleming-County-Kentucky-1911-Rand-McNally-map-Flemingsburg-Hillsboro-Elizaville.html
Rand McNally and Company. Rand McNally Bankers’ Directory. July 1924. “List of Towns Without Banks.” FRASER, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/rand-mcnally-bankers-directory-105/july-1924-604219/content/fulltext/rmbd_192407_14_accessiblebankingpoints
Works Progress Administration and Historical Records Survey. “Fleming County – General History.” County Histories of Kentucky, no. 191. 1939. Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/191/
Fleming Gazette. “Fleming County – Bicentennial Edition.” July 11, 1974. County Histories of Kentucky, no. 107. Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/107/
Fleming County Clerk. “Records.” Fleming County, Kentucky. https://fleming.countyclerk.us/records/
Fleming County Public Library. “Genealogy Collection.” Flemingsburg, Kentucky. https://www.flemingcountypubliclibrary.org/genealogy-collection
KYGenWeb. “Churches in Fleming County.” Fleming County, Kentucky. Includes Concord Church. https://kygenweb.net/fleming/churches.htm
KYGenWeb. “Cemeteries.” Fleming County, Kentucky. Includes Concord Cemetery. https://kygenweb.net/fleming/cemeteries.htm
KYGenWeb. “Fleming County Microfilmed Resources.” Fleming County, Kentucky. https://kygenweb.net/fleming/flemldsdocs.html
“Amanda J. Chrisman Porter Obituary.” Undated nineteenth-century newspaper clipping preserved in a Fleming County Covered Bridge Museum scrapbook. Porter died December 30, 1887. Reproduced in The Flemingsburg Gazette, February 8, 2023. https://kynewsgroup.com/tfg020823.pdf
Author Note: Concord is the kind of small Appalachian place whose history survives in postal records, maps, church references, and scraps of local memory rather than in a single town history. I hope this article helps preserve the story of the crossroads, the Balm post office, and the people who continued to know the place as Concord.