Appalachian Community Histories – Elizaville, Fleming County: Cholera, Civil War, Railroads, and an Iwo Jima Hero
Five miles west of Flemingsburg, along the road that is now Kentucky 32, Elizaville occupies the kind of place that can be easy to pass without realizing how much history has gathered there. The village never became a large Kentucky town, yet its surviving record reaches from pioneer settlement and nineteenth-century commerce to epidemic disease, slavery, Civil War violence, railroad expansion, two world wars, and one of the most recognizable photographs in American history.
A local history published in the Fleming Gazette in 1952 described Elizaville as a little village nestled between two hills. That description captures something about the place, but it can also make Elizaville sound more isolated than it really was. During the nineteenth century, roads connected it with Flemingsburg, Maysville, the Bluegrass, and the Ohio River trade. Hogs and horses passed through the surrounding country, merchants bought and sold goods, churches and schools attracted families from outside the village, and eventually a nearby railroad station connected the community to a much wider transportation network.
Elizaville also has an unusually rich documentary trail for a community of its size. Court books, deeds, tax lists, census schedules, legislative acts, newspapers, church records, maps, business directories, Civil War depositions, and federal historic-property records survive to tell parts of its story. Those sources do not always agree, which makes Elizaville especially interesting because its history must sometimes be reconstructed by placing later local memory beside records created much closer to the events themselves.
Was Elizaville Founded in 1819 or 1835?
Even the beginning of Elizaville presents a historical problem.
Lutie Allen Vansant Crucher’s 1952 history stated that Fleming County court records first mentioned the community on April 2, 1819, at what she described as its incorporation. According to that account, the town was named for Eliza Cochran, daughter of John Cochran, who had built the first cabin there. James Cochran, James Johnson, William Nickelson, James Alexander, and Joseph Reed were identified as the early trustees.
Other evidence suggests that 1819 was indeed the formative year for Elizaville, but probably not the year of its formal state charter. Postal historian Robert M. Rennick concluded that the Elizaville post office was probably established on March 2, 1819, with John St. Clair as postmaster, and that the town was laid out during the spring. Rennick placed the later charter in 1835. Lewis Collins, writing in his 1874 History of Kentucky, likewise placed incorporation in 1835, although he gave February 12 as the date. The research assembled for this article therefore points to a distinction between the establishment and laying out of the community in 1819 and its formal charter in 1835. The surviving Fleming County court books and the original Kentucky session laws remain the best authorities for settling the precise legal date.
Whatever date is attached to the legal charter, Elizaville had taken shape by the early nineteenth century as a recognizable Fleming County settlement. Its location placed it among farms whose residents produced livestock and crops for markets far beyond the county, and the village became a place where those rural families could find merchants, craftsmen, doctors, churches, schools, and eventually postal and railroad connections.
The Cholera Year of 1833
No early event left a darker mark on Elizaville than the cholera epidemic of 1833.
Asiatic cholera had crossed the Atlantic during a worldwide pandemic and reached Kentucky through the transportation networks that normally brought commerce and travelers. Historian Nancy D. Baird traced its advance into the state through river ports and roads, showing how communities connected to Cincinnati, Maysville, Lexington, and other trade centers were also connected to the path of the disease.
Elizaville suffered terribly. Later compilations based on Lewis Collins’s nineteenth-century history placed the death toll in Elizaville and its vicinity at twenty-one. Contemporary newspaper reports allow some of those numbers to become names. The June 27, 1833, Lexington Observer & Reporter reported the deaths of Dr. Robert Tilton and Capt. Gallagher of Elizaville. A July 25 report in the National Intelligencer named Dennis Belt and Mrs. Caywood from the vicinity, Amanda and Samuel Chora, Mary Amelia Dewey, the infant daughter of Oliver Hazard Perry Dewey, and Mrs. Jane Dewey among the Elizaville dead.
Those contemporary reports are important because later local history introduced at least one obvious chronological mistake. The 1952 Fleming Gazette article stated that Dr. Robert Tilton died of cholera in 1883. The newspaper evidence from 1833 makes clear that his death belonged to the earlier epidemic. It is a useful reminder that local histories can preserve invaluable names, stories, and community memories while still requiring comparison with records created at the time.
Baird later used particularly severe language to describe the destruction at Elizaville. The village was not literally erased, because its continued existence is well documented, but the number of deaths in such a small settlement must have made the epidemic feel catastrophic to those who survived it. Families lost children, spouses, neighbors, and physicians within a frighteningly short period. Yet Elizaville recovered, and within only a few years the town was again expanding its commercial connections.
Tanyards, Hogs, Horses, and the New Orleans Market
The Elizaville remembered from the middle decades of the nineteenth century was not simply a cluster of houses. It contained craftsmen and merchants whose work connected Fleming County agriculture with distant markets.
According to the 1952 local history, early merchants included Green and Wesley Parker and Henry Warrick. A major change came in 1835 when Henry and Richard M. Bishop settled in Elizaville. The brothers operated a tanyard, traded horses and hogs, maintained a large stable, and packed pork for shipment to the New Orleans market. Richard Bishop entered the pork-shipping business with his brother and eventually moved to Cincinnati, where he became a successful wholesale merchant. He later served as mayor of Cincinnati and, from 1878 to 1880, governor of Ohio.
Other trades reveal the practical economy of the village. John Aikman worked as a blacksmith and became locally known for the Aikman turning plow. Oliver Hazard Perry Dewey arrived in 1831 and operated a shoemaker’s shop. Dwight Baldwin, who spent time in Elizaville during the 1840s, later moved into the musical instrument business in Cincinnati and became associated with the Baldwin piano enterprise. These stories show how a small Fleming County community could serve as an early station in lives that later reached much larger cities.
Roads were central to all of it. In 1836, the Kentucky General Assembly incorporated the Elizaville and Mayslick Turnpike Road Company, placing Elizaville within the growing system of improved roads that tied interior Kentucky communities to regional markets. Later legislation concerned roads between Elizaville and Flemingsburg and, eventually, between the old village and the railroad station that developed nearby. The legislature’s repeated attention to these roads is evidence that Elizaville mattered not merely as a collection of homes, but as a point through which people, livestock, merchandise, and mail moved.
Churches, Slavery, and Community Life
Religion occupied a central place in nineteenth-century Elizaville, and one of the community’s most important surviving buildings is the Elizaville Presbyterian Church.
The congregation was organized in 1852 by forty-six people who withdrew from the Presbyterian church at Flemingsburg. Rev. James L. Lapsley became its first minister. A church was constructed in 1854, but a storm destroyed it in 1860. The congregation erected the present building in 1861 at a new site several hundred yards from the first. Dr. Henry M. Scudder became pastor in 1858 and remained connected with Elizaville for more than fifty years, an exceptionally long ministry. The building’s historical and architectural importance eventually led to its listing in the National Register of Historic Places.
The church also preserves physical evidence of a harder part of Elizaville’s history. Its National Register nomination documents a surviving gallery that was originally used for enslaved Black worshipers, along with a separate entrance on the east side of the building. Several plain wooden pews in the gallery were believed to have survived from the original 1854 church. The arrangement is an architectural reminder that slavery was not an abstract institution existing somewhere outside the village. The racial order of antebellum Kentucky was incorporated into the physical space in which Elizaville residents worshiped.
Another important congregation emerged from the religious changes associated with Alexander Campbell and the Restoration movement. Local history records a split at Bethel in 1846, after which Campbell’s followers worshiped temporarily at the Willow Dell schoolhouse. A new church was constructed in Elizaville in 1847, with John I. Rogers serving as its first minister.
The surviving churches are therefore more than landmarks. They represent the religious disagreements, social structures, family networks, and changing ideas that passed through Fleming County during the nineteenth century.
Elizaville Becomes a Center of Education
Elizaville also developed a reputation for schooling that seems remarkable for a village of its size.
Local history remembers an early private school and a teacher named Meadows who offered mathematics, trigonometry, surveying, and related subjects during the 1850s. During the 1860s, Julia May, a graduate of Mount Holyoke Seminary in Massachusetts, established a school that initially met in the basement of the Presbyterian Church. The enterprise became successful enough that her sister Sarah came to assist her. Rather than offering only elementary instruction, the school developed a higher curriculum that included Latin, French, advanced mathematics, and physics. Students reportedly came from elsewhere in Fleming County and boarded in Elizaville in order to attend.
John J. Dickey took over an educational effort in September 1867 with eighteen pupils. By the end of the school year, the number had risen to eighty. Willow Dell Academy soon became another important local school, further establishing Elizaville as a place where education could draw people into the community rather than simply serving children who already lived there.
These schools fit a wider pattern visible throughout Elizaville’s history. The village was small in population, but its influence depended on the countryside around it. Churches, stores, doctors, mills, schools, and transportation services made it a center for families living on farms beyond the town itself.
The Battle of Elizaville
The Civil War introduced a different kind of traffic to Fleming County. Kentucky remained in the Union, but loyalties inside the state were divided, and communities across the region produced men who served on both sides. Elizaville developed its own story of wartime violence, remembered locally as the Battle of Elizaville.
The fullest surviving narrative located for this article comes from the 1952 history by Lutie Allen Vansant Crucher, written about ninety years after the event. According to that account, Capt. G. W. Jackson, an Elizaville native, was recruiting men for the Confederate Army. On September 17, 1862, Jackson and a party of Confederate recruits entered Elizaville before moving toward Maysville. Around forty Unionist refugees and Home Guards under John Blair were approaching from the other direction.
The account places the encounter near Mud Lick. After Union men opened fire on Jackson’s advance guard, Jackson reportedly ordered his recruits to dismount and fight. Intermittent firing continued for about ten minutes before the Confederates withdrew. Casualties were said to have been light. One particularly vivid piece of local memory concerned a boy, James Cochran, who supposedly took shelter beneath the Mud Lick bridge until the firing stopped.
There is reason to be cautious with the details. Crucher’s article calls September 17, 1862, a Saturday, but that date actually fell on a Wednesday. No contemporary military report located for this article independently confirms every element of the later story. That does not prove that the encounter never happened. Small fights involving Home Guards, irregulars, recruits, and local armed parties often left a much thinner official record than major engagements. It does mean that the Battle of Elizaville should be presented as a locally preserved Civil War encounter whose precise date, participants, and details deserve further work in contemporary newspapers, military records, and Fleming County court material.
Other primary records show how close wartime tension came to everyday life around Elizaville. In depositions taken in 1864, witnesses described an incident from late August or early September 1863 on the Flemingsburg and Elizaville Pike. J. A. Jackson recalled traveling home from circuit court when an argument developed near Isaac Darnall’s property and a toll gate. Oliver H. Dewey appears in the associated records as a local justice of the peace. These documents do not prove the later Battle of Elizaville story, but they place recognizable Elizaville residents, courts, roads, disputes, and weapons within the unsettled environment of wartime Fleming County.
When the Railroad Changed Elizaville
By the years after the Civil War, the railroad was rearranging the geography of Fleming County.
Lewis Collins described Elizaville in 1874 as lying five miles west of Flemingsburg and about one mile from Elizaville Station on the railroad. He credited the town with two churches, several businesses and shops, and a population of 180 in the 1870 census. Collins also noted that Elizaville Station and nearby railroad settlements were new places growing rapidly.
That one-mile separation mattered. For decades, Elizaville had grown around roads, farms, churches, and the old village center. Railroad transportation created a second focal point nearby. Kentucky lawmakers responded in 1872 with legislation for the benefit of the Elizaville and Elizaville Station Turnpike Road Company, demonstrating how important the connection between the old town and the new transportation corridor had become.
Elizaville was not simply bypassed and forgotten. Instead, the village adapted. Road and rail existed together, and the commercial directory published a decade later shows a community that remained busy despite its small population.
Elizaville in 1881
Few documents bring nineteenth-century Elizaville to life more effectively than the Kentucky State Gazetteer and Business Directory for 1881-1882.
The directory called Elizaville a post village and railroad station with a population of about 200. It reported two churches, a school, a steam-powered planing mill, Adams Express service, and daily mail. J. T. Cassidy served as postmaster while also operating as an undertaker and general merchant.
The names and occupations make the town feel almost visible. L. B. Abny, A. J. O’Bannon, and J. N. Proctor practiced medicine. John Akeman, J. S. Frank, and James A. Pratt worked as blacksmiths. R. C. Grimes, Babbitt and Daugherty, the McIntire brothers, and others operated stores. J. D. Liter kept a hotel, S. G. Lundy made harness, Jacob Joicky repaired and made shoes, A. G. Slicer operated a flour mill, J. W. Slicer served as railroad and express agent, W. H. Stewart sold dry goods, and John White worked as a wagon maker. Carpenters, undertakers, ministers, millers, craftsmen, physicians, and merchants all served a town officially credited with only about two hundred residents.
That contrast explains much about Elizaville. Its importance cannot be measured by population alone. A doctor might treat families miles away. A blacksmith served farmers arriving by road. A merchant drew customers from the surrounding countryside. The hotel served travelers, the railroad agent handled goods and passengers, and the postmaster connected local households with the country beyond Fleming County.
The 1884 atlas of Bath and Fleming Counties reinforces that picture, mapping Elizaville, nearby landowners, roads, waterways, farms, and businesses at a moment when the village was deeply integrated into the agricultural economy surrounding it. The town was small, but it was anything but disconnected.
From the First World War to Iwo Jima
Elizaville’s cemeteries carry the community’s story into the twentieth century.
One of those graves belongs to Pvt. Ambers Sapp. During the First World War, Sapp was serving in France when, on August 17, 1918, near Frapelle, he moved forward under enemy fire to destroy wire entanglements. He was killed while carrying out the work and received the Distinguished Service Cross posthumously for extraordinary heroism. He was returned to Fleming County and buried in Elizaville Cemetery.
A generation later, another young Fleming Countian became connected with one of the defining images of the Second World War.
Franklin Runyon Sousley was born in Fleming County on September 19, 1925. He entered the Marine Corps Reserve in January 1944 and trained as an automatic rifleman with Company E, 2nd Battalion, 28th Marines, 5th Marine Division. On February 19, 1945, Sousley landed with his unit on Iwo Jima. Four days later, he was among the Marines photographed by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal as they raised the American flag on Mount Suribachi.
Sousley did not live to see how famous the photograph would become. After the fighting moved north from Suribachi, he continued with his regiment toward the northern end of the island. On March 21, 1945, he was killed during combat around Kitano Point. His body was initially buried on Iwo Jima. In 1948, his remains were returned to Kentucky and reinterred in Elizaville Cemetery.
The official identification of some of the men in Rosenthal’s photograph has changed as Marine Corps investigations examined additional photographic evidence, but Sousley’s presence in the famous second flag raising remains established. From a Fleming County community whose nineteenth-century residents had once driven livestock to distant markets and waited for news at a village post office, one of its sons had become part of an image seen around the world.
What Elizaville’s History Reveals
Elizaville never needed to become a city to accumulate an extraordinary history.
Its story begins with pioneer cabins, land, roads, and a village taking shape around 1819. It includes the terrifying summer of 1833, when cholera carried away neighbors and entire branches of families. It moves through tanyards, livestock trading, blacksmith shops, shoemakers, turnpikes, churches, slavery, schools, Civil War division, and the arrival of the railroad. By the 1880s, a community of only a few hundred people supported doctors, merchants, mills, craftsmen, a hotel, churches, a school, daily mail, and railroad service.
The twentieth century carried Elizaville into larger national histories once again. Ambers Sapp died beneath enemy fire in France. Franklin Sousley crossed the Pacific and climbed Mount Suribachi before dying less than a month later. Both eventually came home to the same Fleming County cemetery.
Perhaps the most important lesson in Elizaville’s history is that small places are rarely truly isolated. Roads carried its livestock toward southern markets. Cholera followed transportation routes into the village. Religious movements crossed state lines and reshaped its churches. The Civil War brought national division to Mud Lick and the Elizaville Pike. Railroads changed where commerce moved. World wars carried young men from Fleming County to France and the Pacific.
Today Elizaville may appear quiet beside the traffic passing through western Fleming County, but its surviving records tell a different story. For more than two centuries, this little village between the hills has repeatedly found itself connected to events far larger than its population would suggest.
Sources & Further Reading
Kentucky. Acts Passed at the Session of the General Assembly for the Commonwealth of Kentucky. Frankfort, KY, 1835. https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Kentucky_Acts_Passed_at_the_Session_of_the_General?id=dCc4AAAAIAAJ
Kentucky General Assembly. “An Act to Incorporate the Elizaville and Mayslick Turnpike Road Company.” In Acts Passed at the Session of the General Assembly for the Commonwealth of Kentucky. Frankfort, KY, 1836. https://books.google.com/books?id=fE9NAQAAMAAJ
Kentucky General Assembly. Amendment to the charter of the Flemingsburg and Elizaville Turnpike Road Company. In Acts of the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, 1859–1860. https://books.google.com/books?id=sThNAQAAMAAJ
Kentucky General Assembly. “An Act in Relation to the Town of Elizaville in Fleming County.” In Acts of the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, 1870, 430. https://books.google.com/books?id=2mMyAAAAIAAJ
Kentucky General Assembly. “An Act for the Benefit of the Elizaville and Elizaville Station Turnpike Road Company.” In Acts of the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Kentucky. Frankfort, KY, 1872. https://books.google.com/books?id=nxs0AQAAMAAJ
Kentucky General Assembly. Amendment to the charter of the Flemingsburg and Elizaville Turnpike. In Acts of the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, 1884. https://books.google.com/books?id=kV4yAAAAIAAJ
Fleming County Court. Court Order Books, 1798–1866. Fleming County, Kentucky. Finding aid via LDS Genealogy. https://ldsgenealogy.com/KY/Fleming-County-Court-Records.htm
Fleming County Clerk. Deed Books and Grantor and Grantee Indexes, 1798–1962. Flemingsburg, KY. Finding aid via Fleming County KYGenWeb. https://kygenweb.net/fleming/flemldsdocs.html
Fleming County. Tax Assessment Books, 1798–1875. Fleming County, Kentucky. Finding aid via LDS Genealogy. https://ldsgenealogy.com/KY/Fleming-County-Tax-Records.htm
Fleming County. Wills and Probate Records, 1798–1966. Fleming County, Kentucky. Finding aid via LDS Genealogy. https://ldsgenealogy.com/KY/Fleming-County-Probate-Records.htm
Fleming County. Marriage Bonds and Marriage Records, 1798–1951. Fleming County, Kentucky. Finding aid via LDS Genealogy. https://ldsgenealogy.com/KY/Fleming-County-Marriage-Records.htm
Fleming County. Birth, Marriage, and Death Records, 1852–1908. Fleming County, Kentucky. Finding aid via LDS Genealogy. https://ldsgenealogy.com/KY/Fleming-County-Death-Records.htm
United States Census Bureau. United States Federal Census Schedules for Fleming County, Kentucky, 1810–1950. Access information via the USGenWeb Census Project. https://www.us-census.org/states/kentucky/f-ky.htm
United States Census Bureau. 1870 United States Census, Elizaville District, Fleming County, Kentucky. https://accessgenealogy.com/kentucky/fleming-county-kentucky-census-records.htm
United States Census Office. Slave Schedules for Fleming County, Kentucky, 1850 and 1860. Access information via the USGenWeb Census Project. https://www.us-census.org/states/kentucky/f-ky.htm
Lexington Observer & Reporter. “Cholera Deaths in Fleming County.” June 27, 1833. Transcription via Fleming County KYGenWeb. https://kygenweb.net/fleming/choleradeaths.htm
National Intelligencer. Reports of cholera deaths in Fleming County and Elizaville, Kentucky. July 25, 1833. Transcription via Genealogy Trails. https://www.genealogytrails.com/ken/fleming/1833_cholera.html
Kentucky State Gazetteer and Business Directory. Vol. 3. 1881–1882. Elizaville entry. https://ldsgenealogy.com/KY/books/Kentucky-state-gazetteer-and-business-directory-1881-1882-Vol-III-pt-1-part-18.htm
Kentucky State Gazetteer and Business Directory. 1883–1884. Elizaville entry. https://fromthepage.com/khs/civil-war-governors-of-kentucky/article/32201967
Kentucky Business Directory. 1854. Elizaville and Fleming County entries. https://genealogytrails.com/ken/so_ky_bus_directory_1854.html
United States Post Office Department. Post-Office Directory of the United States. Washington, DC, 1866. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/aa/Books_from_the_Library_of_Congress_%28IA_postofficedirect00dist%29.pdf
United States Post Office Department. Report listing William H. Darnall as postmaster at Elizaville, Fleming County, Kentucky. Washington, DC. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GOVPUB-CS1-511c3e6960ca70bec6e2625e2f96b84a/pdf/GOVPUB-CS1-511c3e6960ca70bec6e2625e2f96b84a-2.pdf
Lathrop, J. M., and J. H. Summers. An Atlas of Bath & Fleming Counties, Kentucky: From Actual Surveys. 1884. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:An_atlas_of_Bath_%26_Fleming_Counties,_Ky._-_from_actual_surveys_by_J._M._Lathrop_and_J._H._Summers_%28IA_atlasofbathflemi00djla%29.pdf
Collins, Lewis. History of Kentucky. Rev. ed. 1874. Fleming County section. https://ldsgenealogy.com/KY/books/Collins-historical-sketches-of-Kentucky-History-of-Kentucky-Vol-II-part-36.htm
Hammonds, W. W. Deposition, November 25, 1864. Office of Governor Thomas E. Bramlette. Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition. https://discovery.civilwargovernors.org/document/KYR-0001-004-1306
Jackson, J. A. Deposition, November 28, 1864. Office of Governor Thomas E. Bramlette. Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition. https://test.discovery.civilwargovernors.org/document/KYR-0001-004-1305
National Park Service. National Register of Historic Places Inventory Nomination Form: Elizaville Presbyterian Church. NRIS 77000616. 1977. https://npgallery.nps.gov/AssetDetail/NRIS/77000616
National Park Service. National Register of Historic Places Nomination: Franklin R. Sousley Birthplace. NRIS 74000870. https://npgallery.nps.gov/AssetDetail/NRIS/74000870
Kentucky Historical Society. “Iwo Jima Hero.” Historical Marker 855. Elizaville Cemetery, Fleming County, Kentucky. https://history.ky.gov/markers/iwo-jima-hero
Kentucky Historical Society. “Private Ambers Sapp.” Historical Marker 2257. Elizaville Cemetery, Fleming County, Kentucky. https://history.ky.gov/markers/private-ambers-sapp
McDowell, Robert C. Geologic Map of the Elizaville Quadrangle, Fleming and Mason Counties, Kentucky. Geologic Quadrangle Map GQ-893. U.S. Geological Survey, 1971. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/gq893
United States Geological Survey. Elizaville Quadrangle, Kentucky. 7.5-Minute Topographic Map. 1952. https://store.usgs.gov/filter-products?country=US®ion=KY
Baird, Nancy D. “Asiatic Cholera’s First Visit to Kentucky: A Study in Panic and Fear.” Filson Club History Quarterly 48, no. 3. https://filsonhistorical.org/wp-content/uploads/publicationpdfs/48-3-3_Asiatic-Choleras-First-Visit-to-Kentucky-A-Study-in-Panic-and-Fear_Baird-Nancy-D..pdf
Crucher, Lutie Allen Vansant. “History of Elizaville.” Fleming Gazette, February 7, 1952. https://kygenweb.net/fleming/elizavillehistory.htm
Rennick, Robert M. Fleming County postal history. La Posta: A Journal of American Postal History 29, no. 2. https://www.lapostapub.com/Backissues/LP29-2.pdf
Rennick, Robert M. Kentucky Place Names. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1987. https://www.valeorine.com/reference/elizaville
Cotterill, Robert Spencer. History of Fleming County, Kentucky: The First One Hundred Years, 1780–1880. https://books.google.com/books?id=11KhSwAACAAJ
Works Progress Administration and Historical Records Survey. “Fleming County: General History.” 1939. Morehead State University ScholarWorks. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/191/
Cooper, Wade. Early Fleming County Kentucky Pioneers: Historical Facts. 1974. https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?tn=Early+Fleming+County+Kentucky+Pioneers
Kentucky Heritage Commission. Survey of Historic Sites in Kentucky: Fleming County. Frankfort, KY: Kentucky Heritage Commission, 1978. https://npgallery.nps.gov/NRHP/GetAsset/NRHP/64500245_text
University of Kentucky Libraries. Kentucky Digital Newspaper Program. Lexington: University of Kentucky. https://kdnp.uky.edu/
Fleming County Public Library. “Genealogy Collection.” Flemingsburg, KY. https://www.flemingcountypubliclibrary.org/genealogy-collection
Fleming County Clerk. “Public Records.” Flemingsburg, KY. https://fleming.countyclerk.us/records/
Author Note: Elizaville is a reminder that even a small Appalachian community can leave behind a remarkably deep historical record. I hope this article helps preserve the people, places, tragedies, and accomplishments that made this Fleming County village part of a much larger American story.