Appalachian Community Histories – Dwale, Floyd County: Haws Fork, Hawes Ford, and a Community Name That Remained
In Floyd County, where the Levisa Fork bends through the mountains between Prestonsburg and Allen, there is a small place whose history has to be gathered from post office records, old maps, land papers, newspapers, gas lines, cemeteries, and family names. Dwale was never one of the large towns of eastern Kentucky. It was not the county seat, and it did not become a mining city with a single company name stamped across its whole story. It was something quieter and more common in the mountains, a community shaped by water, roads, kinship, work, and the records people left behind.
Dwale lies about three miles southeast of Prestonsburg, on the Levisa Fork, near the northern edge of Allen. That location explains much of its history. In the mountains, settlement followed the stream valleys. Families built where there was bottom land enough for houses, gardens, stores, roads, churches, schools, and crossings. The Levisa Fork was not only scenery. It was a path through the county. Around it grew small communities whose names sometimes appeared first in postal records before they appeared in books.
Dwale is one of those places. Its name is simple on a modern map, but its origin remains obscure. The older nearby names of Haws Fork and Hawes Ford hint at an earlier local geography, one tied to a fork, a ford, and the movement of people across water.
Haws Fork, Hawes Ford, and the Name Dwale
The story of Dwale begins most clearly with the post office record. Before the name Dwale became fixed, nearby postal names included Haws Fork and Hawes Ford. Those names feel older than Dwale because they describe a place in the language of early travel. A fork told people where water divided or met. A ford told people where a stream could be crossed. In eastern Kentucky, those names mattered because roads were often poor, bridges were limited, and watercourses served as both landmarks and travel corridors.
The Dwale post office opened in 1890. That date gives the community a firm documentary marker. A post office did more than handle letters. In many rural places, it gave a name to the neighborhood around it. It placed a community into the federal record. It connected families, stores, churches, schools, landowners, and travelers to a name that could be found by outsiders.
The National Archives postal records are among the best places to continue the search. Post Office Department site reports often asked where an office stood in relation to roads, creeks, rivers, railroads, and nearby post offices. Some reports included sketches or maps. For a small place like Dwale, those forms may be more valuable than a formal local history because they can show how people in the area described their own location at the moment the office was created or moved.
Dwale’s name has not been firmly explained by place-name authorities. That uncertainty is part of its story. Some towns carry names tied to founders, landowners, soldiers, companies, or nearby natural features. Dwale’s record leaves a quieter impression. The place is known, but the reason for its name is not.
Floyd County Records and the Missing Early Years
The search for Dwale also has to pass through the records of Floyd County itself. Floyd County was created at the turn of the nineteenth century, with Prestonsburg becoming the county seat. But anyone tracing the earliest settlement history of the area has to remember one important loss. The first courthouse burned in 1808, destroying the earliest county records.
That loss matters. It means that some of the oldest deeds, court entries, road orders, and estate records that might have helped explain early settlement around the Levisa Fork are gone. The history did not vanish completely, but the trail becomes harder. Researchers have to work through surviving county records after 1808, land patents, tax lists, later deeds, family records, census schedules, maps, and newspapers.
For Dwale, it is not enough to search only the word Dwale. Earlier records may use Haws Fork, Hawes Ford, Levisa Fork, Allen, Beaver Junction, Prestonsburg, or nearby family names. The community’s history is tied to a small geography, but the names in the records may shift across time.
Land, Water, and the Old Roads
Before Dwale was a named post office, the land around it belonged to a longer story of surveys, grants, family settlement, and county development. The Kentucky Secretary of State Land Office is one of the strongest sources for this part of the story. Kentucky land patents can show who claimed land, what watercourse was used to describe it, and how survey language placed people into the landscape.
In a mountain county, land was often described by creeks, forks, ridges, and neighbors. That makes watercourse searching important. A person looking for early Dwale history should search for Levisa Fork, Haws Fork, Hawes Ford, Allen, Beaver Junction, and nearby surnames. The word Dwale may not appear in the oldest records, but the land beneath the later community may still be traceable.
Road orders and court records can also be useful. Roads in Floyd County often followed valleys and crossings. A ford, a creek mouth, a schoolhouse, or a church could become a reference point in official records. These details may seem small, but they are often the only way to rebuild the history of a place that did not leave behind a large written narrative of its own.
What the Old Maps Show
Maps help turn Dwale from a name into a place. The old United States Geological Survey quadrangle maps are especially useful because they show roads, rail lines, streams, buildings, schools, cemeteries, and community labels. The early twentieth-century Harold quadrangle is an important map for Dwale because it places the community within the Levisa Fork landscape at a time when eastern Kentucky was changing quickly.
A map does not tell everything, but it can show what written records hide. It can show that Dwale was connected to nearby Allen and Prestonsburg by the valley route. It can show how closely communities sat along the Levisa Fork. It can show the kind of geography that shaped daily life, with steep hills rising quickly from narrow bottoms.
Later maps can show the changes brought by improved roads, gas facilities, bridges, schools, and settlement growth. When used alongside deeds, census records, and newspapers, the maps help reveal Dwale as a living community rather than a single dot on a page.
A Community in the Eastern Kentucky Coal Field
Dwale belongs to the mountainous Eastern Kentucky Coal Field, a region of dissected hills, narrow valleys, and communities built along streams. The elevation around Dwale is about 650 feet, low compared to the surrounding ridges, which helps explain why the valley became a place of settlement and movement.
The coal field shaped Floyd County, but Dwale’s story should not be reduced only to coal. Like many places in the Big Sandy region, it was affected by the larger industrial landscape around it. Coal, timber, railroads, roads, gas lines, and service work all shaped the county. Dwale appears in that broader world as a small community located along a useful corridor.
Geological sources also show the name Dwale in a different way. The word appears in regional geologic literature as part of the naming of a shale member in eastern Kentucky coal-field studies. That does not explain the community’s name, but it shows that Dwale became important enough as a locality to enter scientific usage.
Gas Lines and Twentieth-Century Work
One of the strongest twentieth-century newspaper references to Dwale comes from the natural gas industry. In 1941, a new Kentucky-West Virginia Gas pumping plant at Dwale went into operation. A ten-inch line was reported as part of the connection between the Dwale and Maytown compressor stations.
That single notice opens a larger window into the community. Dwale was not only a rural neighborhood on the Levisa Fork. It was part of a working energy landscape. The gas industry needed stations, lines, laborers, roads, and maintenance. Later references to pipeline work from the Dwale compressor station toward upper Johns Creek show the community’s place in a wider network of industrial movement through Floyd County.
For a small community, these references matter. They show that Dwale’s history was tied to work that reached beyond the immediate neighborhood. People may have known it as a home place, a school place, a cemetery place, or a family place, but companies and newspapers also knew it as a point on a gas system.
Schools, Cemeteries, Families, and the Local Record
The deeper history of Dwale is likely waiting in local records more than in state histories. The Floyd County Times is one of the richest sources for this work. It can be searched for school references, tax notices, land transfers, road improvements, flood reports, obituaries, reunions, church events, utility work, and local disputes.
Search terms should include Dwale, Allen-Dwale, Dwale school, Dwale Cemetery, Beaver Junction, Levisa Fork, Haws Fork, Hawes Ford, and family names connected to the area. A single obituary may identify several generations. A tax notice may preserve a land boundary. A school article may name teachers and students. A flood story may show where people lived and how the community responded to disaster.
Cemetery records can also help, especially when used carefully. Find a Grave and similar websites can point researchers toward Dwale Community Cemetery, Dwale Cemetery No. 2, and nearby family burial grounds, but user-submitted cemetery data should be checked against death certificates, obituaries, funeral home records, church books, and stones when possible.
Dwale as a Census Place
Modern Census records treat Dwale as a census designated place rather than an incorporated city. That distinction matters. A census designated place is a statistical area used to describe a named community that does not have its own city government. In other words, Dwale is counted by the Census because it is a real named place, even though its identity is not the same as a municipality.
This fits the history of many Appalachian communities. They may not have mayors, city halls, or formal town boundaries, but they have names, roads, cemeteries, churches, memories, and people who know where one place ends and another begins. Dwale’s public identity is held together by geography, recordkeeping, and local memory.
Why Dwale Matters
Dwale’s story is the kind of history that can be easy to overlook. It is not built around a famous battle, a large company town, or a single nationally known figure. Its importance is quieter. It shows how small Appalachian communities entered the record through post offices, maps, land grants, roads, schools, gas lines, cemeteries, and newspapers.
The mystery of the name remains. Haws Fork and Hawes Ford tell us something about an older landscape of water and crossings. Dwale tells us something else, that a place can become real in the lives of people even when the origin of its name is uncertain.
To write Dwale’s history is to work from fragments. A post office date. A map label. A gas plant notice. A courthouse fire. A cemetery stone. A school mention. A land patent. A family name in an old newspaper. Put together, those fragments show a Floyd County community rooted in the Levisa Fork valley and tied to the wider story of eastern Kentucky.
Sources & Further Reading
National Archives and Records Administration. “Post Office Reports of Site Locations, 1837–1950.” National Archives. Accessed June 13, 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. National Archives. Accessed June 13, 2026. https://www.archives.gov/research/guide-fed-records/groups/028.html
United States Postal Service. “Sources of Historical Information on Post Offices, Postal Employees, Mail Routes, and Mail Contractors.” Publication 119. Accessed June 13, 2026. https://about.usps.com/who/profile/history/pdf/sources-of-historical-information.pdf
Kentucky Atlas and Gazetteer. “Dwale, Kentucky.” Accessed June 13, 2026. https://www.kyatlas.com/ky-dwale.html
KYGenWeb. “Floyd County, Kentucky Post Offices.” Accessed June 13, 2026. https://sites.rootsweb.com/~kyfchgs/postoffice.html
Floyd County Library. “Floyd County History Collection.” Accessed June 13, 2026. https://www.fclib.org/floyd-county-history-collection/
Floyd County Times. “The Floyd County Times Archive.” Newspapers.com. Accessed June 13, 2026. https://www.newspapers.com/paper/floyd-county-times/5040/
KYGenWeb. “Our Yesterdays, 1940s, Floyd County.” Accessed June 13, 2026. https://kygenweb.net/floyd/county/floyd-co-history/floyd-co-history-1940s.html
KYGenWeb. “Our Yesterdays, 1960s, Floyd County.” Accessed June 13, 2026. https://kygenweb.net/floyd/county/floyd-co-history/floyd-co-history-1960s.html
Kentucky Secretary of State. “Patent Series Overview.” Kentucky Land Office. Accessed June 13, 2026. https://sos.ky.gov/land/non-military/patents/Pages/default.aspx
Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives. “Fundamentals of Researching Kentucky Land Patents.” Accessed June 13, 2026. https://kdla.ky.gov/Library-Support/Library-Staff-Development/Documents/Webinar-Attachments/Fundamentals%20of%20Researching%20KY%20Land%20Patents.pdf
United States Census Bureau. “QuickFacts: Floyd County, Kentucky.” Accessed June 13, 2026. https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/floydcountykentucky/PST045225
United States Geological Survey. “Geologic Map of the Harold Quadrangle, Floyd County, Kentucky.” USGS Publications Warehouse. Accessed June 13, 2026. https://www.usgs.gov/publications/geologic-map-harold-quadrangle-floyd-county-kentucky
Rice, Charles L. Geologic Map of the Harold Quadrangle, Floyd County, Kentucky. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1965. https://www.usgs.gov/publications/geologic-map-harold-quadrangle-floyd-county-kentucky
Englund, Henry L. Geologic Map of the Prestonsburg Quadrangle, Floyd and Johnson Counties, Kentucky. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1967. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/Prodesc/proddesc_2887.htm
Rice, Charles L. Geologic Map of the Martin Quadrangle, Floyd County, Kentucky. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1966. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/Prodesc/proddesc_3006.htm
U.S. Geological Survey. “USGS Historical Topographic Map Collection.” Accessed June 13, 2026. https://www.usgs.gov/programs/national-geospatial-program/historical-topographic-map-collection
Kentucky Geological Survey. “Floyd County, Kentucky.” University of Kentucky. Accessed June 13, 2026. https://kgs.uky.edu/kgsweb/olops/pub/kgs/mc178_12.pdf
Kentucky Geographic Names Information System. “Ky Geographic Names Information System.” Kentucky Geoportal. Accessed June 13, 2026. https://opengisdata.ky.gov/datasets/ky-geographic-names-information-system-gnis
Rennick, Robert M. Kentucky Place Names. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984. https://www.kentuckypress.com/9780813126316/kentucky-place-names/
FamilySearch. “Floyd County, Kentucky Genealogy.” FamilySearch Research Wiki. Accessed June 13, 2026. https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Floyd_County,_Kentucky_Genealogy
Find a Grave. “Cemeteries in Dwale, Kentucky.” Accessed June 13, 2026. https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery-browse/USA/Kentucky/Floyd-County/Dwale?id=city_50804
ExploreKYHistory. “Floyd County.” Accessed June 13, 2026. https://explorekyhistory.ky.gov/
Morehead State University. “Stuart S. Sprague Photograph Collection.” ScholarWorks at Morehead State. Accessed June 13, 2026. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/sprague_photo_collection/
Author Note: Dwale’s history is scattered through maps, post office files, courthouse records, newspapers, and family memory rather than one single source. This article is meant to give readers a starting place for understanding the community and continuing the search in local records.