Appalachian Community Histories – Craintown, Fleming County: Crains Post Office, School, Store, and Life Along KY 57
A few miles southwest of Flemingsburg, the roads of Fleming County pass through a place that never became a city, never developed a courthouse square, and never left behind the kind of business district that usually makes a community easy to find in the historical record. Yet Craintown survived in another way. Its name remained attached to the landscape, appearing in postal records, newspaper reports, directories, maps, and eventually the road itself.
For historians, Craintown presents an especially interesting problem because the community lived under two closely related names. Local people knew the place as Craintown, but when the federal government established a post office there in 1890, the office was called Crains. That distinction explains why the community can seem almost invisible in nineteenth-century records unless both names are searched.
Once Crains and Craintown are treated as the same small Fleming County community, the surviving evidence begins to tell a much fuller story.
A Community With Two Names
Kentucky place name historian Robert M. Rennick provided one of the clearest descriptions of the settlement in his study of Fleming County post offices. He identified Crains as the post office that served the small community of Craintown, placing it on present-day Kentucky Route 57 approximately four miles southwest of Flemingsburg. According to Rennick, the office operated from May 7, 1890, until June 1904 and was probably named for one or more Crain families living nearby. He suggested that the family of John L. Crain may have been particularly important in the naming.
That is an important distinction. Crains was not necessarily a separate settlement from Craintown. It was the official postal name attached to a community that already had, or soon developed, a broader local identity of its own. The research trail for the community consistently points toward Crain families, the Crains postal name, and Craintown as parts of the same local landscape.
The federal postal system often worked that way in rural Kentucky. A crossroads settlement might be known locally by one name while Washington approved another for its post office. The post office could operate from a store, farmhouse, mill, or other convenient location, and the federal name might survive in directories long after the office itself disappeared.
In Craintown’s case, both names endured.
John W. Shockley and the Opening of Crains
The man at the center of the community’s postal history was John W. Shockley. Rennick identified Shockley as the first postmaster when Crains opened on May 7, 1890.
There are clues that may allow more of his life to be reconstructed. A transcription of Fleming County’s 1856 birth register records a John W. Shockley born August 20 of that year to William H. Shockley and Eliza Dickey. The name, date, and county make him a strong candidate for the future postmaster, although the birth transcription by itself does not conclusively prove they were the same man.
Fleming County deed indexes provide another trail. They identify a transaction in Deed Book 42 in which Ann Eliza Shockley and others conveyed twenty-one acres to John W. Shockley. Another entry, in Deed Book 43, records John W. Shockley conveying twenty-one acres to Charles S. Bell. Examining the original deeds and their boundary descriptions could eventually show exactly where Shockley lived and whether his property was connected with the later postal site.
The postal records themselves offer the most promising possibility for locating Crains as it existed in 1890. The National Archives preserves the Post Office Department’s record of postmaster appointments in Microfilm M841. Those records document establishment and discontinuance dates, postmasters, appointment dates, and, after 1870, often the destination of mail when an office closed. Fleming County falls within Kentucky Roll 45.
An even more revealing federal collection is the Post Office Department’s site location reports. These were prepared to help postal officials determine where offices stood in relation to roads, streams, mail routes, railroads, and neighboring offices. Many contain hand-drawn diagrams made or annotated by local postmasters. Some even give the number of families or people expected to receive service. The National Archives cautions that these reports normally do not identify the exact building in which an office operated, but a surviving Crains report could still provide something approaching a map of the neighborhood when the office opened.
For a place as small as Craintown, a document like that could be extraordinary.
Crains Creek, Craintown, and the Rural Neighborhood
Craintown did not exist in isolation. Its history was tied to the network of roads, creeks, farms, stores, schools, and neighboring postal communities that covered rural Fleming County during the late nineteenth century.
One particularly intriguing clue appears in a historical postal manuscript discussed by the Fleming Gazette. According to the newspaper’s account, Peck’s Ridge postmaster John Borders gave a geographic description in 1893 placing his post office three miles south of “Crains’ Creek (Craintown),” three miles southeast of Hilltop, three miles west of Tilton, and two miles south of Fleming Creek.
If the underlying 1893 description is accurately reproduced, it is valuable because it shows that Craintown was already being used as a geographic reference point only three years after the Crains post office opened. It also suggests that the Crain name may once have been attached more broadly to a creek or drainage in the neighborhood.
This was how much of rural Fleming County was understood before numbered highways and standardized street addresses. People located one another through waterways, ridges, crossroads, family farms, churches, stores, and post offices. A description such as “three miles south of Crains’ Creek” could be more meaningful to someone living there than any formal town boundary.
Craintown appears to have belonged to precisely that kind of landscape.
A Killing Between Elizaville and Crains
One of the clearest contemporary references to Crains comes from a tragic event in 1902, while the post office was still operating.
In November of that year, newspapers reported the killing of Walter Peck in Fleming County. A report carried by the Winchester Sentinel stated that Peck had attended church and was returning home when he was shot and killed “between Elizaville and Crains.” According to the account, the killer waited near a rock pile beside the pike and fired a shotgun as Peck passed. Authorities brought bloodhounds into the area, and Alvin Burgess of Tilton was arrested the following morning.
A follow-up in the Winchester Democrat reported that Burgess had been taken from Flemingsburg to the Maysville jail for safekeeping as anger over the killing spread through the neighborhood. Peck’s funeral reportedly drew a large crowd, and the murder became a major subject of conversation in Flemingsburg.
The crime itself belongs to a larger Fleming County story, but the newspaper’s wording is important for Craintown history. The writer did not need to explain where Crains was. It functioned as an ordinary geographic reference, paired naturally with Elizaville and understood well enough that readers could picture the stretch of road being described.
In 1902, Crains was not merely the bureaucratic name of a post office. It was a place.
The Post Office Closes but Crains Survives
The Crains post office lasted only about fourteen years. Rennick placed its closing in June 1904, and a later Fleming County local history account states that mail was thereafter sent through Flemingsburg.
For many rural communities, the disappearance of a post office eventually erased the postal name as well. Crains proved more persistent.
The Rand McNally Bankers’ Directory provides some of the best evidence. Its July 1916 edition included Crains among Kentucky communities without their own banking facilities and directed people there to Flemingsburg as the accessible banking point. That was roughly twelve years after the post office had closed.
The name continued appearing afterward. In January 1923, the directory again listed “Crains to Flemingsburg,” and the July edition of the same year repeated the designation.
Those listings matter because directories of this type existed to help businesses, bankers, merchants, and correspondents navigate real communities. Continuing to list Crains almost twenty years after its post office disappeared strongly suggests that the name still meant something on the ground.
The federal office was gone. The community was not.
From Crains to Craintown
By the middle of the twentieth century, Craintown had clearly won out as the name most closely attached to the settlement itself.
The 1952 United States Geological Survey map of the Elizaville quadrangle, published in 1953 at a scale of 1:24,000, explicitly labels Craintown among the small communities of the area. The same map places it within a countryside of roads, streams, cemeteries, churches, Elizaville, Ewing, and Flemingsburg Junction.
The map provides an important bridge between the postal era and the modern landscape. Crains had disappeared from active federal postal service nearly half a century earlier, yet Craintown remained substantial enough as a place name to appear on an official United States Geological Survey sheet.
Federal geographic data also preserve both names. Listings derived from the Geographic Names Information System place historical Crains Post Office and Craintown almost directly together, reinforcing Rennick’s conclusion that the postal office and community represented essentially the same locality.
The name continues on the landscape today through Craintown Road. Fleming County school transportation records still use the road name, placing Craintown within the modern network connecting the Ewing and Elizaville area with surrounding Fleming County roads.
A post office that lasted fourteen years helped preserve a community name that has lasted for generations.
The School and Store at Craintown
Postal records alone cannot describe the everyday life of a community. They tell us when mail service began and ended, but they usually say little about where children learned, where neighbors traded, or where people stopped to exchange news.
A 2024 Fleming Gazette local history column adds two important pieces to the Craintown story. In discussing Crains and Craintown, the writer stated that the community once had both a school and a store. The same account repeated that the Crains post office was established in 1890 with John Shockley as its first postmaster, closed in 1904, and was named for the Crain family.
The school and store are especially significant because institutions like these were often what made a rural settlement a community rather than simply a collection of farms.
The store could have served as a place to purchase flour, coffee, tools, cloth, tobacco, and other necessities without making the longer trip into Flemingsburg. It might also have been where neighbors heard local news, arranged trades, collected letters, or learned who was sick, married, dead, or moving away.
Whether the Crains post office actually operated inside that store remains unproven. Rural post offices frequently did operate from stores, but the surviving evidence located so far does not establish that arrangement for Craintown. The National Archives specifically warns that its postal site reports generally identify geographic locations rather than the buildings housing the offices.
The school is another unfinished piece of the story. Original school registers, Fleming County Board of Education minutes, property deeds, or newspaper reports may eventually reveal where it stood, who taught there, and which Craintown families sent their children through its doors.
For now, the local historical account establishes the tradition, while the search for the original records remains open.
The Crain Families Behind the Name
Rennick believed the postal name referred to one or more Crain families living in the neighborhood and specifically raised the possibility of John L. Crain’s family.
There was certainly a Crain presence in Fleming County before the post office opened. Nineteenth-century county records contain the surname, and local birth, marriage, tax, census, deed, and probate records offer the possibility of tracing those families parcel by parcel.
The remaining question is not whether Crains was associated with the Crain name. The historical evidence is strong on that point. The harder question is exactly which Crain household gave its name to the community and why.
Perhaps one family owned the farm around which the settlement developed. Perhaps a Crain family lived near an important crossroads or creek. Perhaps the name “Crain’s” began informally among neighbors long before the Post Office Department transformed it into the official one-word name Crains.
The answer may be waiting in deeds and tax books rather than in a published history.
That is often how the history of very small Appalachian communities survives. The story is scattered across documents created for entirely different purposes.
A Place That Refused to Disappear
Craintown never needed incorporated limits or a courthouse square to become a real place.
Its history appears in a postmaster’s appointment, in family land records, in the geographic directions of neighboring post offices, in a newspaper account of a killing along a lonely pike, in banking directories directing residents toward Flemingsburg, and finally in twentieth-century federal maps that restored the community name Craintown to the printed landscape.
The names changed according to who was writing them. Washington used Crains. Local people remembered Craintown. An 1893 description reportedly used Crains’ Creek and Craintown almost interchangeably. Business directories continued calling the locality Crains after the post office was gone. By 1952, the United States Geological Survey clearly labeled it Craintown.
All of those records describe the same small part of Fleming County.
There is still much to recover. The original Crains postal site papers may contain a sketch of the neighborhood in 1890. Deeds could place John W. Shockley’s land on the ground. Tax lists and censuses could reconstruct the households surrounding the post office. School records might identify generations of Craintown children, while business and property records may reveal who operated the store remembered in local history.
Yet even before those documents are fully assembled, the surviving evidence tells us something important. Craintown did not disappear when the mail stopped coming under the name Crains in 1904.
The people who lived there continued using the place. Businesses continued recognizing it. Mapmakers continued recording it. Eventually the road itself carried its name.
For a community that never grew large, that endurance may be the most revealing part of its history.
Sources & Further Reading
Fleming County Clerk. “Records.” Fleming County, Kentucky. Accessed October 16, 2026. https://fleming.countyclerk.us/records/
Fleming County, Kentucky. “1856 Fleming County Kentucky Births.” KYGenWeb. Accessed October 16, 2026. https://kygenweb.net/fleming/flembirths1856.html
Fleming Gazette. “Fleming County Local History and Historic Post Offices.” July 10, 2024. https://kynewsgroup.com/tfg071024.pdf
Fleming Gazette. “Fleming County Local History and Historic Post Offices.” August 21, 2024. https://kynewsgroup.com/tfg082124.pdf
KYGenWeb. “Fleming County Deed Indexes and Images.” Accessed October 16, 2026. https://kygenweb.net/carter/deeds/fleming_county/1_fleming_county.html
KYGenWeb. “Fleming County Microfilmed Resources.” Accessed October 16, 2026. https://kygenweb.net/fleming/flemldsdocs.html
National Archives and Records Administration. Record of Appointment of Postmasters, 1832–September 30, 1971. Microfilm Publication M841, Roll 45, Kentucky, Casey through Graves Counties. Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/postmasters-1832-1971.html
National Archives and Records Administration. Reports of Site Locations, 1837–1950. Record Group 28, Records of the Post Office Department, Microfilm Publication M1126. Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/locations-1837-1950.html
Rand McNally and Company. Rand McNally Bankers Directory. January 1920. Chicago: Rand McNally and Company, 1920. FRASER, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/rand-mcnally-bankers-directory-105/january-1920-579676/content/fulltext/rmbd_192001_14_towns
Rand McNally and Company. Rand McNally Bankers Directory. January 1922. Chicago: Rand McNally and Company, 1922. FRASER, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/rand-mcnally-bankers-directory-105/january-1922-598437/content/fulltext/rmbd_192201_14_lisoftownswithoutbanks
Rand McNally and Company. Rand McNally Bankers Directory. January 1923. Chicago: Rand McNally and Company, 1923. FRASER, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/rand-mcnally-bankers-directory-105/january-1923-598439/content/fulltext/rmbd_192301_14_listoftownswithoutbanks
Rand McNally and Company. Rand McNally Bankers Directory. July 1923. Chicago: Rand McNally and Company, 1923. FRASER, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/rand-mcnally-bankers-directory-105/july-1923-598440/content/fulltext/rmbd_192307_14_accessiblebankingpointstonon-banktowns
Rennick, Robert M. “Fleming County—Post Offices.” County Histories of Kentucky. Morehead State University, 2000. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/192/
Rennick, Robert M. “The Post Offices of Fleming County, Kentucky.” La Posta: A Journal of American Postal History, May 1998. https://www.lapostapub.com/Backissues/LP29-2.pdf
United States Census Office. Seventh Census of the United States, 1850: Fleming County, Kentucky. Washington, DC: United States Census Office, 1850. Transcription hosted by KYGenWeb. https://kygenweb.net/fleming/1850flem450.html
United States Geological Survey. Elizaville, Kentucky. 7.5-Minute Series Topographic Quadrangle. Surveyed 1952; published 1953. Reston, VA: United States Geological Survey. https://pastmaps.com/map/elizaville-fleming-county-ky-usgs-topo-1952-p1953
United States Postal Service. “Additional Resources: Postal History.” Accessed October 16, 2026. https://about.usps.com/who/profile/history/research-sources.htm
United States Postal Service. Sources of Historical Information on Post Offices, Postal Employees, Mail Routes, and Mail Contractors. Publication 119. Washington, DC: United States Postal Service, 2004. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GOVPUB-P-PURL-LPS68358/pdf/GOVPUB-P-PURL-LPS68358.pdf
Winchester Democrat. “For Safe Keeping.” November 21, 1902. Transcription in Clark County Public Library historical newspaper collection. https://www.clarkbooks.org/_files/ugd/07c490_78800ae5dc24405cb1513ecf1166075e.pdf
Winchester Sentinel. “A Kentuckian Assassinated While Returning from Church.” November 19, 1902. Transcription in Clark County Public Library historical newspaper collection. https://www.clarkbooks.org/_files/ugd/07c490_78800ae5dc24405cb1513ecf1166075e.pdf
Works Progress Administration and Historical Records Survey. “Fleming County—General History.” 1939. County Histories of Kentucky. Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/191/
Author Note: Craintown is one of those small Fleming County communities whose history survives in pieces rather than in a single written account. I hope this article helps preserve the story of the Crains post office, the families around it, and the school and store that once helped define the community.