Appalachian Community Histories – Faubush, Pulaski County: From Old Harrison to a Century of Rural Community Life
In the western countryside of Pulaski County, Kentucky, the community of Faubush developed from the remnants of an earlier settlement whose ambitions had once extended well beyond the surrounding farms. Long before Faubush acquired its own post office, the nearby village of Old Harrison had become a commercial and religious center for families living between Somerset and the Russell County line. Its stores, church, mill, and other businesses served a growing agricultural population, but during the decades following the Civil War, commercial activity gradually shifted westward toward a large spring near Faubush Creek.
The establishment of the Faubush post office in 1879 gave the developing settlement an identity that would endure for more than a century. Although its postal operations eventually ended in 1992, the community’s history remains preserved in nineteenth-century local histories, federal records, early twentieth-century newspapers, cemetery inscriptions, and historical maps. These sources reveal how an earlier village gave way to a rural community sustained by agriculture, small businesses, churches, and generations of neighboring families.
John Milton Weddle and the Founding of Old Harrison
The history of Faubush is closely connected to John Milton Weddle, a Virginia-born settler who established the nearby village of Harrison during the nineteenth century. According to Kentucky place-name historian Robert M. Rennick, Weddle laid out the settlement in 1841 and named it for his son, Harrison. The village was incorporated the following year and reportedly grew to approximately 300 inhabitants, becoming an important center of commerce in western Pulaski County.
Old Harrison developed during a period when the county’s western settlements were becoming increasingly established. Families who had acquired farmland along the region’s creeks needed stores, mills, blacksmiths, and other services that would otherwise have required considerable travel. The new village provided a convenient gathering place where residents could conduct business, exchange agricultural products, attend religious services, and maintain relationships with neighboring families.
Alma Owens Tibbals, in her 1952 book A History of Pulaski County, Kentucky, identified several merchants associated with Old Harrison around the Civil War. They included Jack Weddle, Jim Weddle, Bill Logan, Christian Sievers, Hugh Frank McBeath, and Josh Taylor. Their businesses formed part of a community that also supported a saloon, blacksmith shop, tannery, mill, and Baptist church. Tibbals associated the tannery with Jim Holder and Jake Warner, preserving the names of men whose trades served the surrounding agricultural district.
Mount Pisgah Baptist Church became one of the village’s principal religious institutions. The Reverend John O. Southerland served as pastor for many years during the nineteenth century, and the congregation developed alongside the neighboring farms and commercial establishments. Old Harrison also supported a temperance society, reflecting the competing attitudes toward alcohol and religious morality that characterized many Kentucky communities during this period.
Later accounts described Harrison as a possible contender for the Pulaski County seat, although this tradition requires further investigation. Somerset had already been established as the county seat in 1801, four decades before Rennick’s documented founding date for Harrison. Without evidence of a subsequent proposal to relocate the county government, the claim is better understood as a tradition preserved in local histories rather than an established event.
The Decline of Old Harrison and the Beginning of Faubush
Although Old Harrison had become an established village by the middle of the nineteenth century, its commercial importance gradually diminished during the years following the Civil War. Rennick recorded that businesses began moving westward from the original settlement toward a large spring near the head of Pierce Branch of Faubush Creek.
The precise circumstances surrounding this movement remain uncertain. Rennick did not identify a definitive explanation for the relocation, and the surviving historical material does not establish whether changes in transportation, commercial opportunities, landownership, or other local conditions were responsible. Nevertheless, the movement of businesses toward the spring eventually produced the settlement that became known as Faubush.
One of the merchants who made this transition was Hugh Frank McBeath, who had previously operated a store in Old Harrison. On May 6, 1879, McBeath established a post office near the spring and became its first postmaster. He selected the name Faubush, which soon became the identifying name for the surrounding community.
The establishment of the post office represented an important development for residents of the countryside. Rural post offices provided access to correspondence, newspapers, commercial information, and communication with relatives living elsewhere. A postmaster who also operated a store could provide several services in one location, making the establishment a regular destination for families throughout the surrounding district.
The original Faubush post office was situated north of Pierce Branch, but its location changed during its long history. Rennick recorded that it eventually moved approximately a mile farther west to the junction of present-day Kentucky Routes 196 and 3262.
The transition from Old Harrison to Faubush illustrates how the geographical centers of rural communities could change without the disappearance of the families and institutions that originally sustained them. Although Old Harrison gradually lost its commercial importance, its descendants, churches, and neighboring farms remained connected to the settlement that developed farther west.
The Civil War and the Garner Family
The Civil War left a documentary record of several families associated with western Pulaski County, including that of James Johnson Garner, a Union veteran whose military pension records connect the earlier settlement of Harrison with the later community of Faubush.
Garner was born on July 29, 1842, near Columbia in Adair County, Kentucky. According to the surviving pension materials, he enlisted in the Union Army near Harrison on November 5, 1861, serving as a private in Company D of the Third Kentucky Volunteer Infantry. His military service was shortened by serious illness, including pneumonia and typhoid fever, and he received a medical discharge on October 21, 1862.
The effects of his wartime illness continued long after his return to civilian life. In July 1888, Garner submitted testimony requesting an increase in his military pension, describing problems with his legs and declining health that interfered with his ability to perform manual labor. His pension records also preserve information about his wife, Tabitha E. Roy Garner, whom he had married in Pulaski County in March 1860, and their children.
An especially revealing document survives from February 1911, when United States Senator Thomas H. Paynter wrote to Garner at his Faubush address. Paynter informed the veteran that legislation had been passed increasing his pension to twenty-four dollars. The letter’s surviving envelope bears postal markings from Washington, Somerset, and Faubush, offering direct evidence of the community’s place within the national postal system.
Garner died on April 3, 1911, and his widow subsequently applied for a pension based upon his military service. Her application identified Harrison as the vicinity of his original enlistment, linking the community’s nineteenth-century history with the federal records of a family still associated with Faubush decades later.
Farming, Country Stores, and Everyday Life in the 1920s
By the early twentieth century, Faubush had become an established rural community whose economy was closely connected to agriculture and small-scale commerce. Contemporary newspaper reports provide unusually detailed evidence of the settlement’s everyday activities, recording property sales, seasonal farm work, commercial developments, medical visits, and the movements of neighboring families.
The January 21, 1921, edition of The Somerset Journal described two property sales held in Faubush on the preceding Saturday. Property belonging to Jim Burkett and Shell Molden attracted a large crowd, with the newspaper reporting that the items offered had sold for satisfactory prices. The same community column observed that local farmers were already preparing for the coming agricultural season, demonstrating the importance of farming to the settlement’s economy.
The newspaper also mentioned Claud Barker’s store, where a member of the Tarter family was employed as a clerk. Other reports referred to John McBeath, Frank Tarter, Silas Wilson, and several neighboring families whose visits and commercial activities connected the settlement with nearby communities.
A particularly interesting development appeared in the February 25, 1921, edition of the newspaper. Welba Cane had established a blacksmith shop in Faubush, providing a service that local residents evidently considered necessary. In a community where farming remained central to daily life, the blacksmith’s work could support the maintenance of agricultural equipment, wagons, horseshoes, and other necessities of rural transportation.
That same newspaper report mentioned residents traveling into neighboring Russell County, visiting relatives, conducting business, and checking on members of other households. G. A. Tarter had recently visited Russell County, while Frank Tarter had traveled into the Cumberland neighborhood. Members of the Norfleet, Halcomb, Rainwater, and Cundiff families also appeared in the community correspondence.
These accounts demonstrate the importance of personal relationships to the functioning of rural communities. The local newspaper served as a record of ordinary life, reporting matters that might otherwise have disappeared from the historical record. Illnesses, visits, commercial developments, marriages, and agricultural preparations all became part of Faubush’s documented history.
Mount Pisgah Baptist Church and Community Relationships
Religious institutions helped connect the older settlement of Harrison with the community that developed around Faubush. Mount Pisgah Baptist Church, already associated with Old Harrison during the nineteenth century, remained a recognizable institution in the surrounding countryside well into the twentieth century.
The April 16, 1920, edition of The Somerset Journal carried a Faubush community notice announcing Sunday school at Mount Pisgah at nine o’clock and inviting residents to attend. The same column reported visits involving the Tarter, Cundiff, Norfleet, and Thomas families, demonstrating how church participation and family relationships continued to support the community.
Another Faubush notice mentioned Zula Weddle, Frank Tarter, Wyatt Norfleet, and other residents whose surnames had appeared in the area’s earlier history. Their presence in the newspaper provides evidence of the continuity between nineteenth-century settlement and twentieth-century community life.
Local cemeteries provide another means of tracing these connections. Burial grounds associated with the Weddle family, Cooks Chapel Methodist Church, New Pleasant Point Baptist Church, and other neighboring settlements preserve evidence of the families who lived throughout the Faubush countryside. Gravestones, cemetery registers, and surviving church documents offer opportunities to reconstruct family relationships and identify individuals who otherwise received little attention in published histories.
The Harrison Voting Precinct and the Geography of Faubush
Faubush’s historical identity extended beyond its stores and post office. By the early twentieth century, the surrounding countryside was also incorporated into Pulaski County’s system of voting precincts and local government.
A description published in The Somerset Journal on September 24, 1920, identified the boundaries of Harrison Precinct No. 18. The precinct extended through a substantial portion of western Pulaski County, with its boundaries following roads, farms, creeks, and portions of neighboring county lines.
The description referred to Faubush Creek, Woods Creek, Wolf Creek, the Columbia Road, the Jamestown Road, and the farms of several local residents. Among the named landowners were members of the Norfleet, Tarter, Johnson, Burton, and Compton families. The designated voting place was near Faubush, demonstrating the community’s continuing importance as a gathering point for the surrounding district.
Such descriptions are particularly valuable because they preserve historical geographical information that may no longer appear on modern maps. Roads could be rerouted, farms divided among descendants, and local place names gradually abandoned, but the published precinct boundaries provide a record of how residents and county officials understood the landscape in 1920.
Historical Maps and the Closing of the Faubush Post Office
The twentieth-century geography of Faubush is preserved in several United States Geological Survey topographic maps. The government’s 1954 Faubush quadrangle provides a detailed historical record of the surrounding landscape, including roads, waterways, relief, and the dispersed rural settlement pattern characteristic of western Pulaski County.
The later 1973 edition offers another reference point for examining changes in the community and surrounding countryside. Together, these maps provide evidence of the physical landscape during the decades when rural transportation, agricultural practices, and access to neighboring commercial centers were continuing to evolve.
The post office remained an important connection between Faubush and the wider region throughout much of the twentieth century. However, the spread of automobile transportation, improved highways, and changes in the organization of rural postal services altered the importance of small post offices across Kentucky.
Faubush’s postal operations were suspended on October 2, 1992, ending a history that had begun with Hugh Frank McBeath’s establishment of the original office in May 1879. Rennick’s research preserves the establishment and closing dates, as well as the movement of the office from its original location beside the spring to the later site along Kentucky Routes 196 and 3262.
The suspension of the post office did not erase the historical identity of Faubush. Its name continues to identify the surrounding countryside, while historical maps, cemetery records, family histories, and surviving newspaper accounts preserve the development of the community.
Remembering Faubush and Old Harrison
The history of Faubush is inseparable from the history of Old Harrison, the nineteenth-century village whose businesses, religious institutions, and families helped establish the community that followed. John Milton Weddle’s settlement had once supported a substantial local commercial center, but the movement of businesses toward Faubush Creek gradually transferred that role to another location.
Hugh Frank McBeath’s establishment of the Faubush post office in 1879 formalized this transition, creating a postal identity that survived for more than a century. The surviving records of the Garner family, the community correspondence published in The Somerset Journal, and the descriptions of the Harrison voting precinct document the settlement’s participation in the wider history of Pulaski County.
Although relatively little of Old Harrison’s original built environment appears to have survived, the history of both communities remains recoverable through their documentary records. County deeds, federal pension applications, newspaper correspondence, historical maps, and local cemeteries preserve the lives of the merchants, farmers, ministers, soldiers, and families who shaped western Pulaski County.
Faubush’s history is therefore more than the story of a former post office. It is the story of a community that emerged from an earlier village, adapted to changing economic and geographical circumstances, and maintained its identity through the relationships of the families who continued to call the surrounding countryside home.
Sources & Further Reading
Rennick, Robert M. “Sixteen Post Offices in Western Pulaski County.” La Posta: A Journal of American Postal History 38, no. 4 (September 2007). https://www.lapostapub.com/Backissues/LP38-4.pdf
Rennick, Robert M. “Pulaski County: Post Offices.” County Histories of Kentucky, no. 388. Morehead State University, 2000. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/388/
Rennick, Robert M. “Pulaski County: Place Names.” Robert M. Rennick Manuscript Collection, no. 123. Morehead State University, 2016. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_ms_collection/123/
Tibbals, Alma Owens. A History of Pulaski County, Kentucky. Somerset, KY: Grace Owens Moore, 1952. https://books.google.com/books?id=hUh4D_2eUFMC
Works Progress Administration and Robert M. Rennick. “Pulaski County: Post Offices & Place Names.” County Histories of Kentucky, no. 284. Morehead State University. Cataloged as 1939. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/284/
The Somerset Journal. “Faubush.” April 16, 1920. Transcribed by Pulaski County KYGenWeb. https://kygenweb.net/pulaski/news/4_16_1920.htm
The Somerset Journal. “Harrison Precinct No. 18.” September 24, 1920. Transcribed by Pulaski County KYGenWeb. https://kygenweb.net/pulaski/news/9_24_1920.htm
The Somerset Journal. “Faubush.” January 21, 1921. Transcribed by Pulaski County KYGenWeb. https://kygenweb.net/pulaski/news/1_1921/1_21_1921_2.htm
The Somerset Journal. “Faubush.” January 28, 1921. Transcribed by Pulaski County KYGenWeb. https://kygenweb.net/pulaski/news/1_1921/1_28_1921_2.htm
The Somerset Journal. “Faubush.” February 25, 1921. Transcribed by Pulaski County KYGenWeb. https://kygenweb.net/pulaski/news/2_21/2_25_1921_2.htm
United States Army. “Civil War Pension Records of James Johnson Garner, Company D, Third Kentucky Volunteer Infantry.” Includes pension applications, military discharge information, and correspondence dated 1888–1911. Transcribed by Pulaski County KYGenWeb. https://kygenweb.net/pulaski/war/jamesgarnerpension.htm
United States Geological Survey. Faubush, Kentucky. 7.5-minute topographic quadrangle. Scale 1:24,000. 1954. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:KY_Faubush_708647_1954_24000_geo.pdf
United States Geological Survey. Faubush, Kentucky. 7.5-minute topographic quadrangle. Scale 1:24,000. Surveyed 1973, published 1974. https://pastmaps.com/map/faubush-pulaski-county-ky-usgs-topo-1973-p1974
Morehead State University. Robert M. Rennick Topographical Maps Collection. Morehead, KY: Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_maps_o-s/index.4.html
Pulaski County Public Library. Digital Archives of the Pulaski County Public Library. Historical newspapers, census records, court records, deeds, and tax lists. Somerset, KY. https://pulaskilibrary.advantage-preservation.com/
Kentucky Historical Society. Kentucky Newspapers on Microfilm: Counties Nelson–Robertson. Frankfort: Kentucky Historical Society. Includes historical Somerset newspapers from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. https://www.kyhistory.com/digital/api/collection/LIB/id/1469/download
Kentucky Secretary of State. Kentucky Land Office. Historical land grants, surveys, patents, and related records. Frankfort: Commonwealth of Kentucky. https://www.sos.ky.gov/land/Pages/default.aspx
Pulaski County KYGenWeb. “Pulaski County, Kentucky, Cemeteries.” Cemetery records and genealogical transcriptions. https://kygenweb.net/pulaski/cemetery/cemeteries.html
FamilySearch. “Weedle and Tarter Families of Pulaski County, Kentucky.” Digitized family and local-history material, including text from Alma Owens Tibbals’s county history. https://www.familysearch.org/en/memories/memory/14704707/Weedle%2Band%2BTarter%2Bfamilies%2Bof%2BPulaski%2BCounty%2BKentucky
Pulaski County KYGenWeb. “Gose and Weddle Family Research.” Genealogical research and transcriptions of family records relating to western Pulaski County. https://kygenweb.net/pulaski/fams/gose_fam.htm
Author Note: The history of Faubush reminds us that even the smallest Appalachian communities have stories preserved in old newspapers, family records, and the places their residents left behind. If your family has connections to Faubush or Old Harrison, I encourage you to share photographs, documents, or memories that can help preserve this part of Pulaski County’s history.