Appalachian Community Histories – February, Washington County: The Lost Post Office Behind One of Tennessee’s Strangest Place Names
Some Appalachian places disappear slowly. A railroad depot closes, a school consolidates, a store goes dark, and eventually the name itself begins slipping from maps. February, Tennessee, appears to have followed an even quieter path. The small Washington County community never became a town of any great size, never developed around a major railroad station, and left behind comparatively little documentary evidence. For roughly fifteen years, however, February had something that gave countless rural communities an official identity in nineteenth century America: a United States post office.
Its name makes the place immediately memorable. February sounds as though it should have been named for the month, perhaps after an unusually cold winter or some forgotten event that happened in February. The surviving evidence points in another direction. Washington County was home to a family whose surname was spelled Febuary, and one member of that family served as postmaster at nearby Jonesborough when the February post office was established.
Even the federal government became involved in deciding how the place should be spelled. By 1901, the United States Board on Geographic Names was explicitly telling mapmakers and government offices that the Washington County place was February, not Febuary. Years after its post office disappeared, federal officials still recognized February as a village.
For a community that has nearly vanished from modern memory, those surviving postal records, maps, family records, and government reports provide pieces of a surprisingly interesting story.
A Place Called February
February was located in Washington County, in the rolling country around Jonesborough, Leesburg, and Keebler Crossroads. A modern reconstruction based on an 1895 Rand McNally atlas places February about two miles southwest of Keebler Crossroads and approximately three miles northeast of Leesburg. The same atlas evidence indicates that February possessed a post office but no railroad service in 1895.
That distinction matters. Railroads transformed many communities across southern Appalachia during the nineteenth century, creating depot towns where businesses, hotels, warehouses, and new residents gathered around the tracks. February belonged to a different kind of landscape. Its connection with the wider country came through the mail rather than the railroad.
The available postal evidence places February’s post office years between 1884 and 1899. Later records identify John J. Scott, John J. Jones, and Jacob B. Hartsell among its postmasters, with the office finally discontinued and its mail transferred to Jonesboro on July 5, 1899.
For those fifteen years, the name February entered federal postal records and became more than a local description of a neighborhood. It became an address.
When a Post Office Gave a Community Its Name
Small rural post offices were enormously important in the nineteenth century. The National Archives preserves Post Office Department appointment records that identify the creation and discontinuance of offices, their postmasters, and, particularly after 1870, where mail was redirected when an office closed. Washington County’s records are preserved within the Tennessee material of National Archives Microfilm Publication M841.
Another federal collection, the Post Office Department’s reports of site locations, preserves documents that can sometimes identify roads, streams, nearby post offices, routes, distances, and other geographic information surrounding rural postal stations. Washington County appears on Roll 562 of that collection.
These records help explain why a post office could matter so much to a place like February. The community did not need incorporation, a courthouse, or a railroad depot to appear on the national map. Once a post office existed there, correspondence moving through the federal system carried its name outward.
A farmer waiting for a letter, a merchant receiving an invoice, or a family member writing home could use February, Tennessee, as a meaningful geographic designation. In that sense, the post office helped turn a collection of farms and households into a named community.
February or Febuary?
The strangest part of February’s history is not simply its name, but the disagreement over how that name should be spelled.
Washington County records leave little doubt that Febuary, without the first “r,” was a legitimate local surname. The Washington County Department of Records Management and Archives preserves the story of Febuary Hill in Jonesborough, a house built in 1832 for Congressman John Blair. The archives specifically explains that the property later took its name from Dr. W. S. Febuary and that the name had nothing to do with the month.
Other records reinforce the point. Cemetery records from Maple Lawn Cemetery contain several members of the Febuary family, including W. S. Febuary, Joseph A. Febuary, Maria Sneyd Febuary, Eliza Keen Febuary, and others.
An 1888 pension document from Washington County even carries the name W. S. Febuary as a witness, providing contemporary evidence for exactly how the surname was written during the period when the February post office operated.
The community’s name, however, was another matter.
The United States Board on Geographic Names published its Second Report in 1901 after years of attempting to standardize confusing and competing geographic names across the country. Its decision for the Washington County place was unusually explicit: “February; P. O., Washington county, Tenn. (Not Febuary.)”
The distinction was deliberate. The local surname was Febuary, but the federal geographic name was February.
That means the spelling found in some local and genealogical records should not automatically be treated as an error. A postmaster transcription, for example, lists the office as “Febuary,” reflecting the surname spelling that was familiar in Washington County. Federal geographic authorities nevertheless decided that the place itself would officially be February.
Joseph A. Febuary and the Mystery of the Name
Later place name references have repeated a story that February was named for a local postal official named February or Febuary. There is good evidence that a postal official with exactly that surname was operating nearby at almost exactly the right time.
Joseph A. Febuary served as postmaster at Jonesboro before and during the establishment of the February office.
A history of Jonesborough postal service published in 1972 lists Joseph A. Febuary as taking office on December 22, 1881. He remained in that position until Felix W. Ernest succeeded him in July 1885.
More importantly, Joseph’s appointment is confirmed by a contemporary newspaper.
On January 22, 1884, the Savannah Morning News published a Washington dispatch reporting actions taken by the United States Senate. Among the confirmations was “Joseph A. Febuary as Postmaster at Jonesboro, Tenn.”
That report appeared during the same year in which February’s rural post office is recorded as beginning operation.
The timing is difficult to ignore. Joseph A. Febuary was the postmaster of Jonesborough in 1884, the February post office appeared in Washington County in 1884, and later writers connected the community’s name with a local postal official bearing that surname.
Still, the evidence should not be stretched farther than it goes.
No document located so far directly states that Joseph A. Febuary personally named the February post office. Armond and Winifred Moyer’s The Origins of Unusual Place-Names later attributed the name to a local postal official, but until an establishment application, Post Office Department site report, newspaper notice, or similar contemporary document is found, the precise naming story should remain a strong possibility rather than an established fact. The surviving evidence establishes the Febuary family’s presence and Joseph’s postal career much more firmly than it establishes who selected the community’s name.
The Postmasters of February
The surviving online transcription of Washington County postmaster records does not provide a complete list from the office’s first year, but it does preserve several of the people who handled February’s mail during its later existence.
John J. Scott was appointed on July 12, 1889. John J. Jones followed on September 29, 1893. Jacob B. Hartsell became postmaster on March 20, 1895. Finally, the record states that service was transferred to Jonesboro on July 5, 1899.
Those names are important because postmasters in small communities were often among the most visible links between rural residents and the outside world. The post office might be small, but the responsibilities attached to it connected the neighborhood to county government, newspapers, businesses, relatives, and national events.
Jacob B. Hartsell is especially promising for future research because Washington County archival collections contain court and county records associated with him. The surviving research inventory identifies an 1885 to 1886 circuit court case involving Hartsell, years before his appointment as February’s postmaster. Following those records into deeds, taxes, and road proceedings could eventually help determine where the post office stood and what kind of establishment housed it.
For now, the postmasters provide something equally valuable. They put human names into the history of a place that otherwise survives mostly as a label on old records.
February on the Postal Map
February was not isolated simply because it lacked a railroad station.
The Post Office Department maintained an enormous network of rural mail routes linking communities throughout Tennessee. A federal post route map prepared for Kentucky and Tennessee in 1887 showed operating post offices, distances between offices, railroad lines, towns, physical features, and the frequency and type of mail service. Because February’s post office was operating by that year, the map belongs to the most valuable surviving sources for reconstructing the community’s place within the regional postal network.
Later maps continued that work. Federal publications record another Kentucky and Tennessee post route map in operation in June 1897, only two years before February’s office disappeared.
The geographic pattern that emerges places February within a dense landscape of small Washington County communities rather than somewhere truly remote. Jonesborough lay nearby as the county’s principal town. Leesburg stood a few miles to the southwest. Keebler Crossroads was only about two miles to the northeast. Other communities, crossroads, churches, farms, and post offices dotted the surrounding countryside.
February was small, but it belonged to an active rural network.
Life Without a Railroad
An 1895 atlas is particularly revealing because it reportedly identifies February as possessing a post office while lacking railroad service.
That simple distinction says much about what February probably was.
This was not Johnson City, which grew rapidly with railroad connections and industrial development. It was not even Jonesborough, with its courthouse, newspapers, businesses, churches, and long history as a regional center. February appears instead to have been one of the small rural communities whose identity depended on families, roads, churches, neighboring farms, and a postal station.
Mail connected those residents with the larger world. Newspapers could arrive carrying political debates from Nashville, Knoxville, Washington, and beyond. Letters linked families separated by migration. Business correspondence moved between farms, merchants, and markets. Government notices reached residents who otherwise lived miles from the county seat.
The post office itself therefore deserves to be understood as more than a minor federal convenience. For places like February, it was part of the infrastructure that made a community visible.
The End of the February Post Office
On July 5, 1899, February’s postal independence ended.
The Washington County postmaster transcription records that mail service was transferred to Jonesboro.
The closing did not necessarily mean that everyone moved away or that the neighborhood immediately ceased to exist. In fact, federal geographic evidence suggests precisely the opposite.
In 1901, two years after the post office closed, the United States Board on Geographic Names still recognized February when it standardized the spelling of the place. Even more significantly, the United States Geographic Board’s 1916 report identified February as a village in Washington County and again rejected the spelling Febuary. The settlement therefore survived in federal geographic usage well beyond the life of its post office.
That distinction helps explain how Appalachian communities disappear.
A post office could close without destroying the community. Families remained. Roads remained. Churches, farms, cemeteries, and neighborhood identities might endure for decades. What disappeared first was often the institution that placed the name on maps, postal guides, and government records.
Without that institution, a place became easier for later generations to overlook.
What Happened to February?
There was probably no single moment when February disappeared.
Instead, its history seems to have faded in stages. The post office closed in 1899. Mail shifted to Jonesborough. Nearby communities and improved transportation gradually reduced the importance of tiny rural postal stations. The name lingered long enough to remain in federal geographic records into the twentieth century, but February never developed into an incorporated town or important commercial center.
Eventually, its unusual name became more famous than the community itself.
Modern gazetteers still preserve February as a historical Washington County place, allowing researchers to locate it approximately among Leesburg, Keebler Crossroads, Jonesborough, Bowmantown, and other communities. Yet the exact location of the original post office deserves further investigation. Post Office Department site reports, deeds belonging to its postmasters, tax books, road petitions, and contemporary issues of the Herald and Tribune may eventually narrow the site to a particular property or crossroads. The National Archives confirms that surviving postal site reports can contain precisely the kind of geographic information needed for such a search.
February therefore remains one of those rare historical communities where the basic outline is known but much of the intimate story is still waiting in the records.
Why February Matters
It would be easy to treat February as little more than an odd place name.
Doing so would miss the larger story.
Across Appalachia, thousands of communities existed without incorporation, city halls, or substantial commercial districts. Some clustered around mines or timber camps. Others grew around churches, crossroads, mills, stores, railroad stops, or post offices. Their names meant something to the people who lived there even when they meant very little to outsiders.
February belonged to that world.
For fifteen years its post office placed the community within the federal postal system. Its postmasters connected rural Washington Countians with the wider country. The nearby Febuary family left enough records to explain why the community’s peculiar name may have emerged, even though the precise naming story remains unresolved. Then federal officials stepped in and preserved another curious detail, insisting that the place should be written February even while the local family continued to spell its surname Febuary.
That single missing letter separates a surname from a community and creates one of the more unusual historical puzzles in Washington County.
February may no longer have a post office, railroad stop, or busy commercial center announcing its presence. What remains is scattered among postal records, old maps, newspapers, cemeteries, archives, and the names of people such as Joseph A. Febuary, John J. Scott, John J. Jones, and Jacob B. Hartsell.
For a place that nearly vanished, that paper trail is enough to bring February back onto the map.
Sources & Further Reading
United States Board on Geographic Names. Second Report of the United States Board on Geographic Names, 1890–1899. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1901. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Second_report_of_the_United_States_Board_on_geographic_names._1890-1899_%28IA_reportofunsecond00unitrich%29.pdf
United States Geographic Board. Fourth Report of the United States Geographic Board, 1890 to 1916. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1916. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4b/Fourth_report_of_the_United_States_Geographic_Board%2C_1890_to_1916_%28IA_fourthreportofun00unitiala%29.pdf
United States Post Office Department. Record of Appointment of Postmasters, 1832–September 30, 1971. National Archives Microfilm Publication M841, Tennessee, Roll 120. National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/postmasters-1832-1971.html
United States Post Office Department. Post Office Department Reports of Site Locations, 1837–1950. National Archives Microfilm Publication M1126, Roll 562. National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/locations-1837-1950.html
United States Post Office Department. Post Route Map of the States of Kentucky and Tennessee with Parts of Adjacent States Showing Post Offices with the Intermediate Distances and Mail Routes in Operation on the 1st of February, 1887. Record Group 28, Regional Maps, Folder 22. National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/publications/finding-aids/maps/ky.html
United States Post Office Department. United States Official Postal Guide. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1884–1899. Digitized issues include annual guides and monthly supplements for the years in which the February post office operated. https://archive.org/details/unitedstatesoff1894v1unit
Tennessee State Library and Archives. “Tennessee Place Names and Post Offices.” Tennessee Secretary of State. Accessed September 12, 2026. https://sharetngov.tnsosfiles.com/tsla/history/places/postoff.htm
United States Postal Service. Publication 119: Sources of Historical Information on Post Offices, Postal Employees, Mail Routes, and Mail Contractors. Washington, DC: United States Postal Service, 2022. https://about.usps.com/publications/pub119.pdf
Frazier, D. R. Tennessee Postoffices and Postmaster Appointments, 1789–1984. Dover, TN: D. R. Frazier, 1984. https://search.worldcat.org/title/Tennessee-postoffices-and-postmaster-appointments-1789-1984/oclc/12714987
“Postmasters of Washington County, TN.” Genealogy Trails History Group. Accessed September 12, 2026. https://genealogytrails.com/tenn/washington/postmasters.html
Washington County TNGenWeb. “Post Offices of Washington County.” Accessed September 12, 2026. https://tngenweb.org/washington/records-data/post-offices-of-washington-county/
Savannah Morning News. “Washington News.” January 22, 1884. Georgia Historic Newspapers, Digital Library of Georgia. https://gahistoricnewspapers.galileo.usg.edu/lccn/sn82015137/1884-01-22/ed-1/seq-1/ocr/
Washington County Department of Records Management and Archives. “February Hill.” Washington County, Tennessee. Accessed September 12, 2026. https://wctnarchives.org/outside-the-archiveshttpswctnarchives-files-wordpress-com201703sam_10271-jpgw680/february-hill/
Washington County Department of Records Management and Archives. Circuit Court Records, 1880–1889. Washington County, Tennessee. See particularly Hartsell, Jacob B. v. Jacob H. Francis, 1885–1886, Box 207. https://wctnarchives.org/
Washington County Department of Records Management and Archives. County Clerk Records, Record Group 5. Washington County, Tennessee. See Box 30, Folder 18, records concerning Jacob B. Hartsell. https://wctnarchives.org/
University of Tennessee Libraries, Betsey B. Creekmore Special Collections and University Archives. Fink and Dulaney Papers, 1779–1989. MS-2018. Knoxville: University of Tennessee. https://scout.lib.utk.edu/repositories/2/resources/5217
University of Tennessee Libraries, Betsey B. Creekmore Special Collections and University Archives. “Washington County Assorted Documents, 1820–1915.” Fink and Dulaney Papers, MS-2018, Box 2, Folder 39. https://scout.lib.utk.edu/repositories/2/archival_objects/48242
Washington County Department of Records Management and Archives. Washington County Marriage Records. Jonesborough, Tennessee. Records include members of the Febuary family during the nineteenth century. https://wctnarchives.org/
Washington County TNGenWeb. “Union Church of Christ Cemetery.” Cemeteries of Washington County, Tennessee. Accessed September 12, 2026. https://tngenweb.org/washington/records-data/cemeteries/cemeteries-of-washington-county-tennessee/cemeteries-of-washington-county-tennessee-u-v-w-x-y-z/union-church-of-christ-cemtery2/
Moyer, Armond, and Winifred Moyer. The Origins of Unusual Place-Names. Emmaus, PA: Keystone Publishing Associates, 1958. https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Origins_of_Unusual_Place_names.html?id=f4cIAQAAMAAJ
Watauga Association of Genealogists, Upper East Tennessee. Bulletin. Jonesborough, TN: Watauga Association of Genealogists. Search cumulative indexes for February, Febuary, Hartsell, Scott, and Jones. https://wagsnetn.org/watauga-association-of-genealogists-bulletin/
Watauga Association of Genealogists. History of Washington County, Tennessee, 1988. Jonesborough, TN: Watauga Association of Genealogists, 1988. https://wagsnetn.org/
Cox, Margaret, et al. History of Washington County, Tennessee. Johnson City, TN: Overmountain Press, 2001. https://www.worldcat.org/
Fink, Paul M. Jonesborough: The First Century of Tennessee’s First Town, 1776–1876. Johnson City, TN: Overmountain Press, 1989. https://www.worldcat.org/
Author Note: Small communities such as February are some of the easiest places in Appalachian history to lose because their stories often survive only in postal records, maps, family names, and scattered local documents. Preserving those fragments helps restore communities that once meant something very real to the families who called them home.