Appalachian Community Histories – East Point, Johnson County: From Blockhouse Bottom to Mills, Mail, and Modern Roads.
South of Paintsville, where the Levisa Fork of the Big Sandy River winds toward the Floyd County line, East Point can look like one of the many small communities scattered along the river valleys of eastern Kentucky. Houses follow the roads and bottoms, the mountains rise quickly behind them, and the boundary between one community and another is not always obvious to someone passing through.
The historical record tells a different story.
Long before East Point appeared in nineteenth-century directories, the land around it was connected to one of the oldest and most debated settlement traditions in the Big Sandy Valley. The names Harman Station and Blockhouse Bottom became attached to an early frontier stockade, while families such as the Auxiers, Hagers, Greers, Conleys, and others established farms and businesses along the river. By the late nineteenth century, East Point had its own post office, stores, mills, tradesmen, physician, minister, and daily mail.
Its history therefore stretches across several versions of eastern Kentucky. There is the frontier East Point preserved in family tradition, the agricultural and river community visible in nineteenth-century records, and the twentieth-century settlement documented by federal surveys, maps, schools, roads, and aerial photographs.
Understanding East Point means following all three.
Harman Station and Blockhouse Bottom
The best known story attached to East Point begins before Kentucky became a state.
Kentucky Historical Marker 736 identifies Harman Station, about five miles south of Paintsville, as what it calls the first settlement in eastern Kentucky. According to the traditional account, Matthias Harman and a party of hunters from Virginia built a stockade near the river in 1787. Native resistance forced the party to abandon the position the following year, and the blockhouse was burned. Harman and other settlers returned in 1789 and rebuilt the post at the place remembered as Blockhouse Bottom.
That version of events was developed most extensively by historian William Elsey Connelley in his 1910 book Eastern Kentucky Papers: The Founding of Harman’s Station. Connelley described a fortified settlement in the Big Sandy Valley surrounded by cleared ground so that attackers could not approach unseen. A small stream near the fort supplied water, while the blockhouse itself became the center of a settlement remembered as Harman’s Station. Connelley’s book even included an illustration of Blockhouse Bottom and devoted much of its opening section to the settlement.
The importance of Harman Station in eastern Kentucky memory became tied to more than the fort itself. The settlement became part of the Jennie Wiley captivity story, later family histories, accounts of warfare between settlers and Native peoples, and the larger narrative of permanent settlement moving into the upper Big Sandy Valley.
Yet Connelley himself warned readers about one of the central problems facing anyone studying early eastern Kentucky. Much of the region’s pioneer history had survived through tradition rather than contemporary written documentation. He gathered testimony from people who had known older generations and preserved stories that might otherwise have disappeared, but that also meant his account was written more than a century after the events it described.
That distinction matters at East Point.
A Frontier Story That Is Still Being Debated
Later researchers have questioned whether the traditional Harman Station story places every event in exactly the right location.
Research published by the Pike County Historical Society points to Loyal Land Company surveys connected to grants 19078 and 19079 and argues that Mathias Harman, Daniel Harman, Charles Skaggs, and Henry Skaggs were working farther up the Louisa Fork in 1787. The researchers identify a settlement on Harmans Bottom in what later became Pike County and note that surviving documents do not demonstrate that Harman owned land near present-day East Point at that early date. They also draw upon an 1834 copy of an older survey and sworn depositions taken in 1836.
That does not make the Blockhouse Bottom tradition meaningless, nor does it prove that Harman and his associates had no presence near East Point. It does mean that the historical marker, Connelley’s narrative, family tradition, and surviving land records should not automatically be treated as though they are all describing the same documented event.
The safest conclusion is also the most historically interesting one. Blockhouse Bottom unquestionably became one of the central places in the historical memory of early Big Sandy settlement, while documentary evidence suggests that the movements of Harman and the other long hunters were more complicated than later retellings sometimes implied.
Historian Willard Rouse Jillson repeated the established version in his work on the early Big Sandy Valley, placing the blockhouse about half a mile below the mouth of Johns Creek and connecting the site to the Harman party. William Ely’s nineteenth-century history also preserved extensive information from families who lived in and around East Point.
The disagreement is not a weakness in East Point’s history. It is part of that history. Few small Appalachian communities have an eighteenth-century settlement story that can be compared against land surveys, court depositions, nineteenth-century family testimony, published regional histories, and twentieth-century historical markers.
The Families of Blockhouse Bottom
Whatever questions remain about the precise location of the earliest Harman settlement, families established themselves permanently around Blockhouse Bottom and the East Point area during the generations that followed.
The Auxier family became particularly important.
A Kentucky Sons of the American Revolution publication records Revolutionary War veteran Samuel Auxier as settling with his wife at Blockhouse Bottom in 1793. He died in 1800 and was buried in the Auxier Cemetery. The Auxier name remained deeply connected to the area for generations afterward.
By the time William Ely prepared The Big Sandy Valley in the 1880s, he was receiving information directly from Major John B. Auxier of East Point. Ely wrote that Auxier supplied material from his own experiences and from information passed down by his father and members of the Hager family. The passage is valuable because it shows how closely East Point’s nineteenth-century residents remained connected to the community’s pioneer memory.
The Hagers, Greers, Conleys, and other families likewise became part of the landscape around East Point. Their names appear repeatedly in land records, cemeteries, newspapers, business directories, and later federal surveys.
What had once been remembered as a vulnerable frontier outpost became a settled river bottom of farms, family properties, mills, and roads.
East Point Gets a Name
The name East Point became more firmly attached to the community during the nineteenth century.
Postal research assembled by Kentucky place-name historian Robert M. Rennick places the establishment of the East Point post office on February 6, 1871. The office was originally considered to be in Floyd County and was later transferred to Johnson County in 1877. That movement makes sense when viewed against East Point’s location close to the county line and helps explain why historical records for the community can appear under both counties.
The post office was important for more than mail. In rural nineteenth-century Kentucky, a post office gave a scattered settlement an official name that could appear in government records, directories, newspapers, maps, and commercial documents.
By the beginning of the 1880s, East Point was unmistakably a recognized community.
The Kentucky State Gazetteer and Business Directory for 1881 and 1882 described East Point as being on the Big Sandy River in southern Johnson County, six miles southeast of Paintsville. Louisa was listed as the nearest railroad approach, while goods intended for East Point were supposed to be shipped along the Big Sandy River. The community received daily mail, and William J. Conley served as postmaster.
That short description reveals how East Point functioned before modern highways transformed the valley. The river was not scenery. It was transportation.
Railroad connections had not yet reached the community directly, so the Levisa Fork remained part of the commercial network tying East Point to the outside world.
East Point in 1881
The most revealing part of the 1881 to 1882 gazetteer is not the description of East Point’s location. It is the list of people working there.
John B. Auxier operated a flour mill. H. J. Auxier worked in lumber. Auxier and Conley and Auxier and Hyder were listed in the sorghum business. Blackburn and Greer made wagons. Austin T. Davis, John S. Kelly, John Richmond, and another Auxier operated general stores.
Isaac Goble practiced medicine. William H. Greer served as a justice of the peace.
The Hager family appeared repeatedly. H. D. Hager was a shoemaker. The Reverend J. H. Hager was a Methodist minister, while a J. H. Hager also operated a saw and flour mill. W. T. Hager worked as a cooper, making and repairing the wooden barrels and containers that remained essential to nineteenth-century agriculture and commerce.
Taken together, those occupations show a community that was far more economically varied than the word “settlement” might suggest.
East Point had people who could grind grain, saw lumber, make wagons, repair shoes, manufacture barrels, process sorghum, sell household necessities, provide medical care, conduct religious services, administer local justice, and move mail every day.
The list also shows how deeply family names shaped the local economy. Auxiers, Hagers, Greers, and Conleys were not simply residents. They operated businesses and institutions that helped hold the community together.
This was not yet the coalfield landscape that would transform nearby places during the twentieth century. It was still largely a river, farm, timber, milling, and small-trade economy.
Between Paintsville and the Coalfields
East Point’s location eventually placed it beside another great transformation in eastern Kentucky.
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, railroads and coal development moved deeper into the Big Sandy Valley. Nearby communities such as Auxier developed around railroad and mining activity, while Paintsville grew as a commercial center. East Point remained close enough to both that its residents increasingly lived within a regional economy rather than one based primarily on their immediate river bottom.
Yet East Point retained its own identity.
A 1951 Kentucky Court of Appeals decision casually referred to East Point as a “village lying outside of Paintsville.” The case involved Norman Johnson, a truck driver who lived there, and the wording is useful because the court had no reason to romanticize or explain the community. East Point was simply a recognized place whose name required no further clarification.
Federal records from the same era provide an even more detailed picture.
William E. Price’s 1956 United States Geological Survey study of the Prestonsburg quadrangle recorded numerous water wells around the East Point post office. The survey identified residents including E. M. Conley, Myrtle Boyd, Naomi Greer, G. L. Ramey, S. M. Music, Tobe Auxier, John Price, Ernest Hunt, J. K. DeLong, Charles McKenzie, J. L. Music, and others.
One well belonged to the East Point school and stood about one hundred feet southwest of the post office. Other wells were measured by their distance from the same post office, effectively allowing the federal survey to sketch the settlement one household at a time.
Those names are especially striking beside the 1881 directory. Auxier, Conley, Greer, Music, and other familiar Big Sandy surnames were still part of East Point generations later.
A Community Across County Lines
East Point’s geography can make the historical record confusing.
Although it is normally identified with Johnson County, the community lies close enough to Floyd County that federal census geography sometimes crossed the modern mental boundary between the two. A 1940 census enumeration district description included an “East Point (part)” within Floyd County.
The postal history tells a similar story. East Point’s post office was initially recorded in Floyd County before being associated with Johnson County.
For anyone researching families from East Point, that means Johnson County records are only part of the search. Census schedules, deeds, marriage records, tax books, court records, cemetery records, and newspapers from Floyd County can also contain people who considered themselves residents of East Point.
The county line did not necessarily divide the community as sharply as a modern map might suggest.
Seeing East Point Change From the Air
By the middle of the twentieth century, East Point entered a different kind of historical record.
A Kentucky environmental study cataloged a remarkable sequence of aerial photographs covering the community. United States Geological Survey photographs survive from 1951, 1961, 1970, and 1975. A United States Department of Agriculture image followed in 1983, with additional USGS imagery in 1988 and 1995. Later federal aerial photography continued in 2008, 2012, and 2016.
Those photographs allow the history of East Point to be read directly from the landscape.
Fields shrink or disappear. Roads change. New houses appear. River bottoms that once supported farms and mills become divided by modern development. Transportation corridors grow wider. The relationship between East Point, Paintsville, Auxier, and the Floyd County line becomes easier to understand with each passing decade.
Historic maps do much the same thing. An 1895 Johnson County map was sparse enough that East Point was one of only a handful of places identified in the county, alongside Paintsville, Redbush, Barnetts Creek, and Ward City.
For a place that never became an incorporated city, appearing so consistently in postal records, business directories, maps, federal surveys, court cases, newspapers, and census geography is significant.
East Point endured because it remained useful as a name.
What Happened to the Old East Point?
Modern development has made the nineteenth-century community harder to see.
The wagon makers, cooper, sorghum operations, river shipping system, and local flour mills disappeared as technology and transportation changed. Automobiles reduced dependence on small neighborhood commercial centers. Larger stores and services became accessible in Paintsville and Prestonsburg. Coal employment and other industries tied residents to a much wider regional economy.
The Big Sandy River that once functioned as a commercial highway became less central to everyday transportation.
Yet older East Point survives beneath that newer landscape.
It survives in Blockhouse Bottom, in cemeteries where generations of local families were buried, in the Auxier and Hager stories recorded by nineteenth-century historians, in the Harman Station marker beside the highway, and in the pages of a business directory that recorded a community of mills, shops, farms, craftsmen, and merchants.
It also survives in something as ordinary as a federal well survey. When government geologists measured distances from the East Point post office during the twentieth century, they were using a community center whose origins stretched back generations.
Why East Point Matters
East Point is easy to overlook precisely because it never became a large town.
There was no courthouse square around which its history could be organized and no municipal government preserving generations of town records. Instead, its history is scattered across land surveys, family papers, postal records, newspapers, cemeteries, business directories, federal maps, court cases, and oral tradition.
That scattered record tells an unusually long story.
At Blockhouse Bottom, the history reaches into the violent and uncertain settlement era of the late eighteenth century. By the nineteenth century, Auxiers, Hagers, Greers, Conleys, and other families had created a permanent agricultural and commercial community. In 1881 East Point could support mills, merchants, craftsmen, a physician, a minister, and daily postal service. By the middle of the twentieth century, federal geologists were mapping its school, post office, homes, and wells. Aerial photographs then captured the transformation of those same river bottoms as highways and modern development reshaped the valley.
Even the disagreements surrounding Harman Station add something important to the story. Appalachian history is strongest when local tradition and surviving documents are allowed to speak alongside one another. The old stories should not be discarded simply because they are difficult to prove, but neither should tradition replace evidence when eighteenth-century surveys and court testimony tell a more complicated story.
East Point offers both.
Along the Levisa Fork south of Paintsville, the modern community occupies a landscape layered with more than two centuries of memory. Behind today’s roads and houses lies Blockhouse Bottom, behind Blockhouse Bottom lies the contested story of Harman Station, and beyond the legend are generations of families who turned a river bottom into a community that kept its name.
Sources & Further Reading
R. L. Polk & Co. Kentucky State Gazetteer and Business Directory, 1881–1882. Vol. 3, pt. 1. Detroit: R. L. Polk & Co., 1881. “East Point.” Digital copy
Connelley, William Elsey. Eastern Kentucky Papers: The Founding of Harman’s Station, with an Account of the Indian Captivity of Mrs. Jennie Wiley and the Exploration and Settlement of the Big Sandy Valley in the Virginias and Kentucky. New York: Torch Press, 1910. Library of Congress
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. Library of Congress
Rennick, Robert M. “Johnson County – Place Names.” Robert M. Rennick Manuscript Collection. Morehead State University. 2016. Morehead State University ScholarWorks
Rennick, Robert M. Kentucky Place Names. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984. University Press of Kentucky
Kentucky Historical Society. “Harman Station.” Kentucky Historical Marker No. 736. Accessed September 29, 2026. Kentucky Historical Society
Pike County Historical Society. “The 235 Year Correction: Mathias Harman and His First Settlement.” Accessed September 29, 2026. Pike County Historical Society
Jillson, Willard Rouse. “John Graham of Virginia and Kentucky, 1765–1835: A Chronology.” Filson Club History Quarterly 13, no. 2 (1939). Filson Historical Society
The Big Sandy News. Louisa, KY, 1885–1929. Chronicling America, Library of Congress. Chronicling America collection
Johnson County Public Library. “Digital Newspaper Archive.” Paintsville, KY. Accessed September 29, 2026. Johnson County Digital Newspaper Archive
Johnson County Public Library. “Patricia Patton Kentucky Room and Local History Collections.” Paintsville, KY. Accessed September 29, 2026. Johnson County Public Library
Johnson County Clerk. “Legal Records.” Paintsville, KY. Accessed September 29, 2026. Johnson County Clerk records
Marshall, Robert Bradford. Spirit Leveling in Kentucky, 1914 to 1916, Inclusive. U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 673. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1918. U.S. Geological Survey
Price, William E., Jr. Geology and Ground-Water Resources of the Prestonsburg Quadrangle, Kentucky. U.S. Geological Survey Water-Supply Paper 1359. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1956. U.S. Geological Survey
United States Geological Survey. Prestonsburg Quadrangle, Kentucky. 1:62,500. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1918. Historic USGS map
Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. KY 3 Corridor Study: Auxier, KY, Floyd and Johnson Counties. Frankfort: Kentucky Transportation Cabinet, 2023. Kentucky Transportation Cabinet report
Thoroughbred Engineering. Johnson County Build-Ready Site: Phase I Environmental Site Assessment. Prepared for Johnson County Fiscal Court. May 14, 2020. Kentucky Cabinet for Economic Development copy
National Archives and Records Administration. “Post Office Reports of Site Locations, 1837–1950.” Records of the Post Office Department, Record Group 28. Accessed September 29, 2026. National Archives
National Archives and Records Administration. Post Office Department Reports of Site Locations, 1837–1950. Microfilm Publication M1126. Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration. NARA Microfilm Publication M1126
Morehead State University. “Robert M. Rennick Oral History Collection.” Morehead, KY: Morehead State University. Accessed September 29, 2026. Rennick Oral History Collection
Morehead State University. “Robert M. Rennick Topographical Maps Collection.” Morehead, KY: Morehead State University. Accessed September 29, 2026. Rennick Topographical Maps Collection
Pike County Historical Society. “History of the Burris Family.” Accessed September 29, 2026. Pike County Historical Society
Genealogy Trails History Group. “Blair, Music, Highway, and Other Johnson County Cemeteries.” East Kentucky Cemeteries. Vol. 9. Accessed September 29, 2026. Genealogy Trails
Kentucky Heritage Council. Historic resource survey records for the East Point, Harman Station, and Auxier area. Frankfort, KY: Kentucky Heritage Council. Referenced in Kentucky Transportation Cabinet, KY 3 Corridor Study: Auxier, KY, Floyd and Johnson Counties, 2023. KY 3 Corridor Study
Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives. Johnson County court, land, tax, marriage, probate, and governmental records. Frankfort, KY: Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives. Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives
United States Bureau of the Census. Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940. Floyd County, Kentucky, Enumeration District descriptions and population schedules. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Commerce, 1940.
United States Census Bureau. Federal population census schedules for Johnson and Floyd Counties, Kentucky, 1850–1950. Washington, DC: United States Government.
Johnson County, Kentucky. Deed Books and Deed Indexes. Johnson County Clerk’s Office, Paintsville, KY.
Johnson County, Kentucky. Court Order Books. Johnson County Clerk’s Office and Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives.
Johnson County, Kentucky. Marriage Bonds and Marriage Registers. Johnson County Clerk’s Office, Paintsville, KY.
Johnson County, Kentucky. Wills, Inventories, Appraisements, and Probate Records. Johnson County Clerk’s Office, Paintsville, KY.
Johnson County, Kentucky. Tax Books. Johnson County Clerk’s Office and Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives.
Johnson County, Kentucky. School Census Records, 1896–1910. Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives, Frankfort, KY.
Kentucky. Vital Statistics Records for Johnson County, 1852–1900. Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives, Frankfort, KY.
Kentucky Office of Vital Statistics. Death Certificates, 1911 onward. Frankfort, KY.
United States Geological Survey. Historic aerial photographs of East Point, Johnson County, Kentucky, 1951, 1961, 1970, 1975, 1988, and 1995.
United States Department of Agriculture. Historic aerial photograph of East Point, Johnson County, Kentucky, 1983.
Federal Writers’ Project. Kentucky: A Guide to the Bluegrass State. American Guide Series. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1939.
Author Note: East Point’s history is unusually layered for a small community, reaching from the disputed Harman Station tradition to a well-documented nineteenth-century settlement along the Levisa Fork. In telling its story, I have tried to preserve local memory while distinguishing it from the surviving land, postal, business, and government records.