Forgotten Appalachia Series – Hope Cottage and the Ivis Community Center of Knott County, Kentucky
If you follow Right Fork of Troublesome Creek out from Hindman, the road narrows into a string of houses, churches, and hollows that once centered on a small country post office called Ivis. For more than half a century that post office linked an out of the way community to the wider world. For a few years in the 1910s it also sheltered something new in the Knott County hills. In a rough shack known as Hope Cottage, a Boston editor named Alice Spencer Geddes Lloyd and her mother tried to turn a former mission outpost into a community center for health, education, and better farming.
The Ivis Community Center did not last long as a separate institution. Within a year or two, Lloyd and her work shifted up the creek to Caney, where the Caney Creek Community Center and eventually Alice Lloyd College took root. Yet the Ivis phase matters. It anchored her experiment in an existing mountain community, tied her story to Presbyterian mission networks and Troublseome Creek geography, and left enough traces in archives and oral history tapes that we can still glimpse what it meant to turn a loft above a post office into a reformer’s headquarters.
A village on Right Fork Troublesome
Long before Alice Lloyd arrived, Ivis was one of several small settlements along the forks of Troublesome Creek. Postal historians and local reference works place the Ivis post office on the Right Fork in the early twentieth century. It opened on March 21, 1902, with Laura A. Hammons as postmaster, first stood at the mouth of Trace Fork, then moved east twice before closing in 1956.
The U.S. Geological Survey’s place name files and historic Hindman topographic maps list Ivis as a locale, with separate entries for the Ivis Post Office and Ivis Bible School, a reminder that even an unincorporated cluster of homes could be mapped through its institutions. A county gazetteer compiled by local researchers later folded Ivis and Ivis Chapel School or Ivis Bible Church into a longer list of Knott County communities, alongside Hindman, Mallie, Leburn, and the other creeks and ridges of eastern Kentucky.
Educationally, the Hindman Settlement School already stood upstream by the time Lloyd came south. A study of Knott County’s schools for the Appalachian Rural Systemic Initiative notes that Hindman had become a recognized center for “uplift” by the 1910s. It describes Ivis as a small village just outside Hindman, one of the places where new ideas about schooling and community reform were beginning to take hold.
That geography matters. When Lloyd’s story reaches Kentucky, it does not begin in an empty valley. It begins in a creek community with its own churches, schools, and postal routes, already woven into a wider network of mission work and public education in the Troublesome Creek watershed.
Hope Cottage and the Presbyterian mission legacy
The building that would become Alice Lloyd’s first Kentucky home began as part of a Presbyterian mission. In his study of Edward Owings Guerrant and the mountain missions, historian John Akey notes that the Presbyterian Church gave Lloyd a building and a small plot of land at Ivis, near Hindman, to support her work. That structure, called Hope Cottage, stood near an abandoned meetinghouse that had been picked over for timber after the mission closed. William S. Dutton’s narrative of Lloyd’s life describes Hope Cottage as a leftover shack that found no buyers when the church divested the rest of its property, its roof sagging and its interior stripped of furnishings.
A Floyd County newspaper piece from the 1990s, summarizing this history for a new generation, put it more bluntly. When Lloyd finally reached Ivis after a long journey into the mountains, it reported, she found the shack called Hope Cottage in rough shape, left behind when Presbyterian missionaries withdrew.
Even at the time, Hope Cottage was not just a romantic cabin in the woods. It represented the remains of an earlier wave of religious and social reform. Guerrant and other Presbyterian leaders had planted churches, schools, and small institutions across eastern Kentucky in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Akey uses the Ivis building as one example of how that infrastructure could be repurposed when original mission projects faltered.
By the time Alice and her mother arrived, in other words, the path between Hindman and Ivis already carried the weight of previous efforts to combine evangelism, schooling, and “improvement.” Hope Cottage stood as a literal and symbolic foundation for whatever came next.
Alice and Ella arrive in Ivis
The “Our History” page at Alice Lloyd College, drawing on P. David Searles’s biography and campus archives, fixes Lloyd’s Kentucky arrival at 1916. It notes that eastern Kentucky was badly underserved educationally when she reached Ivis that year and that she quickly saw both the need for schools and the potential in local young people.
Searles calculates that she was about thirty nine when she came to Knott County, older than many of the field workers at Hindman or Pine Mountain Settlement School. She did not come as a typical missionary recruit. Instead she arrived as a former New England journalist with a record of suffrage activism, weakened health, and a determination to find a new place to work.
Dutton’s Stay On, Stranger gives one of the most vivid period descriptions. He writes that when the Lloyds first reached Ivis they found that the “post office” amounted to a loft in a small cabin and that letters for the community were kept in a box under the postmistress’s bed. In that same account, the Hope Cottage shack becomes their residence and headquarters, its tiny rooms soon divided between living space and what we would now call program space.
Contemporary notices confirm that Lloyd chose to lean into the “Hope Cottage” name. A 1916 issue of the Cambridge Chronicle, reporting on a new appeal for relief work in the Kentucky mountains, refers to “Hope Cottage, Ivis, Knott County, Kentucky,” making clear that she framed the place as both a home and a mission base for friends in Massachusetts.
Building the Ivis Community Center
From the first months, Lloyd’s work at Ivis took on a shape that would recur at Caney Creek. The official history published by the college sums it up this way. Her initial efforts at what she called the Ivis Community Center focused on basic health care, teaching, and modest improvements in farm practice for families in the surrounding hollows.
That description fits the broader pattern of Appalachian settlement work. Reformers often began with simple clinics and “clean up” campaigns, added classes in reading, sewing, and Bible study, and then experimented with better seeds or garden layouts. For Lloyd and her mother, Hope Cottage became a place where villagers might come for a bandage, for help writing a letter, or for evening lessons held in cramped rooms lit by kerosene lamps.
Later institutional histories and donor profiles remember that period as the first “community center experiment.” A mid 2000s “Nonprofit Spotlight” on Alice Lloyd College, for example, points back to her earliest efforts at Ivis and emphasizes that she first tried to meet needs in health, schooling, and agriculture before there was any talk of a junior college. The Chatlos Foundation’s profile of the college repeats the same arc, tracing the work from Hope Cottage and Ivis into the valley of Caney Creek.
Searles’s A College for Appalachia, based heavily on the University of Kentucky’s Alice Lloyd–Caney Creek Community Center Papers, fills in some of the details behind that later shorthand. He follows Lloyd’s letters and reports as she describes visiting homes on Right Fork Troublesome, tending sick children, trying to convince families to boil water, and inviting young people to short term classes at the cottage. Those records, housed in the Special Collections Research Center in Lexington, remain the key primary source for understanding Ivis as more than a prelude to Caney Creek.
From Ivis to Caney Creek
Within a year, shifting geography and local relationships pulled the center of gravity away from Ivis. As the college’s own history explains, a farmer named Abisha Johnson urged Lloyd to move into the narrower hollow of Caney Creek and offered land there for a school. In 1917 she and her mother relocated, founding the Caney Creek Community Center and eventually organizing it as a nonprofit that still exists today.
That move did not erase Ivis from the story. In fact, early outside coverage of the Caney Creek work still read the new campus through the lens of the old community center. In February 1923, the Manassas Journal in Virginia told readers that “Pippapass” in Knott County was now the headquarters of the Caney Creek Community Center, which it said had been organized seven years earlier by “Alice Spencer Geddes-Lloyd, a Boston newspaper woman.” The date and phrasing suggest that journalists and clubwomen continued to think of the Ivis phase as the true starting point, even after the post office and community center shifted up the creek.
Later college publications echoed that continuity. A 2012 issue of Pippa’s Song, the alumni and donor magazine, described the Caney Creek Community Center as the umbrella organization for both the college and the June Buchanan School and traced its founding back roughly ninety five years to Lloyd and her mother. That same article praised the Center as a “beacon of hope and learning” for mountain residents, language that applied as much to Hope Cottage and the Ivis Community Center as to the brick buildings now strung along Caney Creek.
Mapping Ivis in memory and on the ground
Today Ivis survives in at least three overlapping ways. One is on the land itself. USGS maps and commercial topo reprints still mark Ivis, Ivis Bible School, and the former post office site along Right Fork Troublesome Creek, placing them in relation to Hindman Settlement School, Pippa Passes, Mallie, and the other small places of the valley. A local gazetteer compiled by the Knott County Historical and Genealogical Society helps new readers tie those labels to specific churches and schools, including Ivis Chapel and Ivis Bible Church.
A second is in institutional archives. The Alice Lloyd–Caney Creek Community Center Papers at the University of Kentucky document the years when the Ivis Community Center and Caney Creek Community Center overlapped, preserving correspondence, reports, and clippings from roughly 1915 to 1923. On campus in Pippa Passes, the McGaw Library’s Appalachian Collection and archives hold the handwritten “History of the Caney Creek Community Center” that Lloyd composed in the 1950s and a rich photographic collection that occasionally reaches back to the Ivis years.
Fundraising networks created their own paper trails. The Kansas City Browning Society Records at the State Historical Society of Missouri, assembled by a Midwestern literary club that adopted Caney Creek as a cause, include files of Caney Creek Community Center newsletters, correspondence with Alice Lloyd College, and other materials that retell the origin story starting with Ivis and Hope Cottage for a donor audience.
The third way Ivis persists is in recorded memory. Beginning in 1970, the Appalachian Oral History Project linked Alice Lloyd College, Lees Junior College, Emory and Henry College, and Appalachian State University in a four school consortium to collect taped interviews about life in Central Appalachia. The McGaw Library’s Appalachian Oral History Collection now includes more than two thousand tapes, many recorded in eastern Kentucky communities like those along Troublesome Creek. Some interviewees remembered Alice Lloyd, the move from Ivis to Caney, or the way people in the Ivis area talked about Hope Cottage long after the center moved. Others simply described farm work, church life, and schooling on creeks that fed into the same network as Ivis and Pippa Passes.
Taken together, those maps, papers, and tapes make it possible to treat Ivis not just as a footnote in the story of a college but as a community in its own right and as a testing ground for a particular idea of “uplift.”
Why the Ivis experiment matters
For many years, published accounts of Alice Lloyd’s work treated Ivis as a brief prologue. Time magazine’s 1940 feature on the Caney Creek school, Jerry Davis’s Miracle on Caney Creek, and Dutton’s Stay On, Stranger all concentrate on Pippa Passes and the later junior college. When they mention Ivis, it is usually as a rustic first chapter that sets up the move to a more picturesque valley.
Searles’s A College for Appalachia and the more recent Kentucky Humanities Chautauqua script on Alice Lloyd invite us to see that opening chapter differently. By returning to the UK papers and institutional archives, they show that the Ivis Community Center was where Lloyd first tried to knit together health campaigns, experimental schooling, and small scale agricultural reform. Hope Cottage was where she learned how hard it could be to translate New England reform ideals into the everyday routines of a Troublesome Creek community and where she began to rely on local allies rather than outside supervisors.
In that sense, the Ivis Community Center represents the moment when a former Cambridge newspaperwoman stopped simply writing about reform and started trying to live it among her neighbors. Without that test ground on Right Fork Troublesome, there would have been no Purpose Road, no Caney Creek Community Center, and no later work college on the hillside at Pippa Passes.
For historians and family researchers, the lesson is clear. To understand how mountain institutions take shape, it is not enough to visit the surviving campus or read the polished donor histories. You have to walk back down the creek, find the site of a long closed post office, and then follow the paper and tape trail through county gazetteers, mission board records, and oral history projects. Along the way, you find places like Ivis, where the story of Appalachian education turns on a sagging roof, a small cottage, and a stubborn conviction that the leaders really are here.
Sources & Further Reading
University of Kentucky Libraries Special Collections Research Center. Alice Lloyd–Caney Creek Community Center Papers, 1915–1972. Finding aid. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky. http://exploreuk.uky.edu/catalog/xt7mgq6r127r/guide
Lloyd, Alice Spencer Geddes. History of the Caney Creek Community Center. Unpublished typescript, 1955. Alice Lloyd College Archives, McGaw Library and Learning Center, Pippa Passes, Kentucky. https://alc.edu/academics/mcgaw-library-and-learning-center/
Caney Creek Community Center. Newsletters, circular letters, and fundraising appeals, ca. 1917–1950s. Alice Lloyd College Archives, McGaw Library and Learning Center, Pippa Passes, Kentucky; and Kansas City Browning Society Records, The State Historical Society of Missouri Research Center–Kansas City. https://files.shsmo.org/manuscripts/kansas-city/K0003.pdf
Kansas City Browning Society. Kansas City Browning Society Records (K0003), 1927–1988. Manuscript collection. The State Historical Society of Missouri Research Center–Kansas City. https://files.shsmo.org/manuscripts/kansas-city/K0003.pdf
“‘Pippapass Is Headquarters of the Caney Creek Community Center’.” Manassas Journal (Manassas, Virginia), February 2, 1923. Prince William County digital newspaper archive. https://eservice.pwcgov.org/library/digitallibrary/News-Archive/MJ-1923-1924/MJ_1923_0202.pdf
National Agricultural Library Special Collections. “Appalachian Oral History Project Collection, 1970–1977 (MS0316).” Finding aid. https://archivesspace.nal.usda.gov/repositories/4/resources/782
Appalachian Oral History Project. Appalachian Oral History Project: Union Catalog. Beltsville, MD: National Agricultural Library, 1977. https://books.google.com/books?id=SWgsAAAAYAAJ
McGaw Library and Learning Center, Alice Lloyd College. “Appalachian Oral History Collection.” Appalachian Special Collections, Pippa Passes, Kentucky. https://lfarchives.weebly.com/appalachian-oral-history-collection.html
Rennick, Robert M. “Knott County – Post Offices.” County Histories of Kentucky series. Morehead, KY: Morehead State University, ca. 2000. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1235&context=kentucky_county_histories
TopoQuest. “Ivis, KY.” USGS place-name database entry showing Ivis, Ivis Bible School, and Ivis Post Office (historical), Knott County, Kentucky. https://topoquest.com/map.php?cross=on&datum=nad83&lat=37.30843&lon=-82.93016&zoom=4
TopoQuest. “Mallie, KY – Nearby Features Including Ivis Bible School and Ivis Post Office (historical).” https://topoquest.com/place-detail.php?id=497472
Dutton, William S. Stay On, Stranger! New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1954. PDF reprint, Alice Lloyd College. https://www.alc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Stay_On_Stranger_.pdf
Kentucky Humanities. “Stay On, Stranger: Alice Lloyd and the Purpose Road.” Kentucky Humanities magazine, Fall 2023. https://www.kyhumanities.org
Rural Schools Collaborative. “AFE Scholars Program and Kentucky Chautauqua Present ‘Alice Lloyd: Stay On, Stranger’.” News release, February 17, 2022. https://www.ruralschoolscollaborative.org
Searles, P. David. A College for Appalachia: Alice Lloyd on Caney Creek. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995. https://www.kentuckypress.com/9780813108568/a-college-for-appalachia
Davis, Jerry C. Miracle on Caney Creek: June Buchanan Joins Alice Lloyd in a Crusade to Educate Kentucky Mountain Leaders. Louisville: Thoroughbred Press for Caney Creek Community Center, 1982. https://apmtbooks.com/products/miracle-on-caney-creek-by-jerry-c-davis
“Alice Spencer Geddes Lloyd.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Spencer_Geddes_Lloyd
“The Forks of Troublesome.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forks_of_Troublesome
Alice Lloyd College. “Our History.” Alice Lloyd College, Pippa Passes, Kentucky. https://alc.edu/about-us/our-history/
Alice Lloyd College. “The Purpose Road.” Alice Lloyd College, Pippa Passes, Kentucky. https://alc.edu/about-us/the-purpose-road/
Alice Lloyd College. “A Legacy of Service.” Alice Lloyd College, Pippa Passes, Kentucky. https://alc.edu/give-to-alc/a-legacy-of-service/
ExploreKYHistory, Kentucky Historical Society. “Kentucky Historical Marker 653: Alice Lloyd College.” https://explorekyhistory.ky.gov
Philanthropy News Digest. “Nonprofit Spotlight: Alice Lloyd College.” Philanthropy News Digest. https://philanthropynewsdigest.org
The Chatlos Foundation. “Alice Lloyd College.” Grant profile. The Chatlos Foundation. https://www.chatlos.org
Horsch, Elizabeth. “Knott County Final Report.” In ARSI Book (Appalachian Rural Systemic Initiative). Inverness Research, Inc. https://inverness-research.org
Chisom, Brian Thomas. “The Influence of Private Colleges on Appalachian Identity: A Descriptive Case Study.” PhD diss., Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 2014. https://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu
Knott County Historical and Genealogical Society. “Knott County Gazetteer.” RootsWeb. https://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~kyknot2/
“Alice Spencer (Geddes) Lloyd (1876–1962).” WikiTree. https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Spencer-3093
“Education: School in Caney Valley.” Time, April 8, 1940. http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,763521,00.html
Author Note: I am always aware that today’s campus grew out of a much smaller experiment down the road at Ivis. I hope this piece helps you see that early community center as a living place in Knott County’s story, not just a footnote in college history.