Appalachian Community Histories – Hargis, Johnson County: Hargis Creek, Rural Schools, and a Community Between the Hills
In the western hills of Johnson County, not far from Oil Springs and the Magoffin County line, Hargis is the kind of Appalachian community whose history is easier to find in creeks, roads, schools, cemeteries, and land records than in the records of an incorporated town. It never developed the commercial center of Paintsville or the industrial identity of Van Lear, yet the name has remained attached to this section of Johnson County for generations.
Federal geographic records recognize both Hargis as a populated place and Hargis Creek as a separate stream. Hargis is recorded at approximately 37°50′29″ north latitude and 82°58′38″ west longitude, while Hargis Creek lies nearby within the Oil Springs quadrangle. The two names belong to a landscape of narrow valleys, steep ridges, small branches, old family cemeteries, and roads that connect the community with Oil Springs, Pigeon Creek, and the surrounding countryside.
At first glance, there may appear to be little documentary history for a place this small. In reality, Hargis has left a surprisingly long trail. A reported land survey places the name Hargis Creek in Johnson County as early as 1849. A 1926 newspaper described travelers crossing the hill between Hargis and Pigeon. Another newspaper account in 1929 referred to a family cemetery in Hargis. By 1943, county school records listed Hargis School as School No. 51, and the 1954 United States Geological Survey map of the Oil Springs quadrangle placed Hargis School directly on the landscape.
Taken together, those records preserve the history of a rural Johnson County community that never needed a courthouse, railroad depot, or incorporated government to establish an identity of its own.
Hargis Creek and the Nineteenth-Century Settlement Landscape
To understand Hargis, it is necessary to begin with the creek.
Johnson County was formed during the 1840s from territory that had previously belonged to surrounding counties. The National Park Service’s historic survey of Johnson County describes the county’s nineteenth-century landscape as one of scattered farms and extended family settlements occupying a rugged region where steep wooded mountains left relatively little level land. Narrow creek bottoms provided some of the best opportunities for farming, building houses, and eventually constructing roads.
That geography explains why creeks became so important to community identity in eastern Kentucky. Families frequently settled along the same drainage for generations, and the creek name could become as meaningful as the name of a formal town. Houses, farms, schools, cemeteries, and roads followed the valleys because the ridges surrounding them sharply limited where people could build.
Hargis developed within exactly this type of landscape.
One of the earliest references yet located comes from research concerning Hairston “Austin” Litteral. A genealogical compilation citing FamilySearch records reports that Litteral had a survey made in 1849 for 400 acres on Hargis Creek in Johnson County. This reference is especially important because it demonstrates that the Hargis Creek name was already being used only a few years after Johnson County was organized.
The original survey should still be examined before every detail is treated as conclusively established. The Kentucky Secretary of State’s Land Office preserves the County Court Order patent system that governed such claims after 1835. Under that system, county courts issued warrants authorizing surveys of unappropriated land, and the completed surveys were submitted to the state Land Office as part of the patenting process. The modern database can be searched by county, watercourse, survey name, survey year, and other fields, making Hargis Creek itself one of the most promising terms for continued research.
Even with that caution, the reported 1849 record pushes the documented use of the Hargis Creek name well into the nineteenth century. Hargis was therefore not simply a modern road name or a designation added by twentieth-century mapmakers.
The Unanswered Question of the Hargis Name
One important part of the community’s story remains uncertain.
No reliable source located for this article conclusively explains why Hargis Creek received its name or identifies a particular Hargis family member as its namesake. That distinction matters because Appalachian place names were created in several different ways. Some honored early settlers, some came from landowners, churches, postmasters, or geographical descriptions, while others preserved names that had already been in local use long before they appeared in official records.
The 1849 survey provides a useful boundary for the investigation. If Hargis Creek was already recognized under that name by then, the origin almost certainly predates much of the twentieth-century history associated with the community. The best evidence may eventually come from early Johnson County deeds, surveys, tax books, court orders, or records from Floyd, Lawrence, and Morgan counties, since Johnson County was created from portions of those older jurisdictions.
Until such a record establishes the connection, assigning Hargis Creek to a particular individual would go beyond the evidence.
That uncertainty is itself part of the history. Many small Appalachian communities retained names whose original meanings were obvious to nineteenth-century residents but were never formally recorded because the people using them had no reason to explain them.
Roads Across the Hills Between Hargis and Pigeon
By the early twentieth century, newspapers begin to provide glimpses of ordinary movement through the Hargis countryside.
A revealing account appeared in the Paintsville Herald on November 11, 1926. Shay Spradlin of Win, Josephine Blevins of Fort Gay, West Virginia, and Minnie Skeens were traveling through the area when their automobile experienced an axle failure. According to the newspaper, they were crossing the hill between what the transcription spells “Hargus” and Pigeon when the vehicle went over the steep hillside for an estimated 150 to 200 feet. Blevins suffered injuries to her head, while Skeens injured her ankle and wrist. Both were taken to the Golden Rule Hospital in Paintsville.
The story is significant for more than the accident itself.
It places Hargis within a recognizable network of communities and mountain roads by the 1920s. People moved between Win, Hargis, Pigeon, Paint Creek, and other settlements across routes that often climbed or crossed ridges rather than following the straighter highways familiar today. The steep terrain described in the newspaper was not incidental. It shaped everyday transportation.
A later Kentucky Geological Survey report preserved another unusually specific description of this route. In documenting a geological section near Win, the surveyors described a location approximately one mile south of the community in a road cut leading from the head of Hargis Creek to the head of Pigeon Creek. The measured section recorded layers of sandstone, siltstone, shale, underclay, and several coal blooms.
Together, the newspaper and geological report show that the route across the hills was not simply a modern connection imposed on the landscape. Hargis Creek and Pigeon Creek formed neighboring valleys whose residents crossed the ridge between them long before modern highway improvements.
A Family Cemetery in Hargis
Another contemporary newspaper reference appeared only a few years later.
On April 25, 1929, the Paintsville Herald reported the death of A. J. Tackett, an elderly Johnson County resident who had been struck by an automobile near the mouth of Barnetts Creek. Tackett was taken to the Golden Rule Hospital in Paintsville, where he died from his injuries. Following funeral services, the newspaper stated that burial took place at the family cemetery in Hargis.
That single phrase is valuable evidence.
By 1929, “Hargis” required no further explanation for the newspaper’s Johnson County readers. The reporter did not describe it merely as a creek or road. Hargis functioned as a recognized locality where a family cemetery could be identified.
Cemetery records continue to associate the area with the Tackett name. Modern Johnson County cemetery indexes place a Tackett Cemetery under Hargis records, and other geographical listings identify Tackett burial grounds in the surrounding region. There are several Tackett cemeteries in Johnson County, however, so the modern cemetery listing should not automatically be assumed to be the exact family cemetery mentioned in the 1929 newspaper without comparing locations, grave markers, deeds, and family records.
The newspaper nevertheless reveals something important about the community. Hargis was not merely a transportation point. Families were living, dying, and burying generations of relatives within a landscape they considered home.
Hargis School and the Children of the Creek
Perhaps the clearest evidence of Hargis as a functioning community comes from its school.
Public education in Johnson County developed slowly during the nineteenth century. The National Park Service’s county history notes that school commissioners were being selected during the 1840s, Enterprise Academy opened at Flat Gap in 1851, and additional educational institutions later appeared at Paintsville and Oil Springs. By the twentieth century, a network of smaller rural schools served the scattered creek settlements throughout the county.
Hargis was part of that network.
A surviving Johnson County teacher list from 1943 identifies Hargis as School No. 51 and lists Luther Conley as its teacher. The surrounding entries help place the school within the educational geography of this section of the county. Little Paint was School No. 50, Pigeon was No. 52, Davis Branch was No. 53, Colvin Branch was No. 54, Barnetts Creek was No. 55, Green Valley was No. 56, and Oil Springs was No. 58.
This arrangement illustrates how rural education once followed the geography of the creeks. Instead of transporting children long distances to a consolidated school, small communities maintained local schools close enough to serve families scattered through individual valleys and branches.
Another valuable record survives in the Johnson County Board of Education’s school census for 1896 to 1910. The surviving series predates the 1943 teacher list by several decades and potentially offers a way to identify the families and children who occupied the district before the surviving evidence explicitly names Hargis School. The census was later microfilmed as Family History Library film 836797.
The strongest visual evidence comes from the United States Geological Survey.
The 1954 Oil Springs topographic quadrangle, published in 1955, labels Hargis School among a remarkable collection of small rural schools scattered across western Johnson County. The same map includes Pigeon School, Little Paint School, Davis Branch School, Green Valley School, Low Gap School, and others.
The map captures an educational landscape that would increasingly disappear as school consolidation, improved roads, and motorized transportation changed rural Kentucky. Hargis School was more than a building. For the families living nearby, it would have been one of the principal institutions through which children encountered people beyond their immediate households.
The Mountains Beneath Hargis
The physical landscape surrounding Hargis also has a documented history.
The National Park Service described Johnson County as a region dominated by steep wooded slopes interrupted by narrow creek bottoms, while identifying timber, coal, natural gas, and oil as resources that heavily influenced the county’s economy.
Hargis sits within that geological world.
The Kentucky Geological Survey’s measured section near the road between Hargis Creek and Pigeon Creek documented repeated layers of sandstone, shale, siltstone, underclay, and coal. Among the named coal horizons in the section were deposits associated with formations such as Fire Clay, Van Lear, and Campbell Creek.
The United States Geological Survey later published William F. Outerbridge’s Geologic Map of the Oil Springs Quadrangle, Eastern Kentucky in 1967, providing an authoritative federal geological survey of the region containing Hargis.
The geology affected much more than mining. Resistant sandstone created ridges, waterways cut narrow valleys between them, and families concentrated houses and farmland wherever flatter ground was available. Roads often followed creeks until they were forced to cross a ridge, exactly as the 1926 Paintsville Herald account described between Hargis and Pigeon.
In this part of Appalachia, geology and community history cannot easily be separated. The mountains determined where families could farm, where schools could stand, and how neighbors reached one another.
Hargis on the Map
By the middle of the twentieth century, government mapping provides increasingly detailed evidence for the Hargis landscape.
The 1954 Oil Springs quadrangle records Hargis School and the drainage associated with Hargis, while later maps increasingly identify Hargis itself as a populated place. Modern United States Geological Survey mapping continues to label Hargis alongside communities and features such as Oil Springs, Barnetts Creek, Pigeon Creek, Potato Knob, and Paintsville Lake.
Federal geographic records separately classify Hargis as a populated place and Hargis Creek as a stream. That distinction is important. The creek gave structure to the landscape, while Hargis became the name of the human community associated with it.
Government records also preserve the continuing importance of the local road network. Census Bureau documentation for the Oil Springs Division specifically uses Hargis Creek Road as part of the division boundary, along with Pigeon Creek Road and Kentucky Route 1409.
The modern road system has improved the connection between these valleys, but its geography still follows patterns that would have been familiar to earlier generations. Roads remain tied to the creeks and the limited passages through the surrounding hills.
From a Rural Creek Community to Modern Hargis
Hargis never needed to become an incorporated town in order to survive as a community name.
Unlike places whose histories can be reconstructed through city council minutes, business districts, railroad depots, and post office appointments, Hargis survives through smaller pieces of evidence. A nineteenth-century land survey places the name on a creek. Newspapers show people crossing the hill toward Pigeon and burying family members in Hargis. School records establish an educational institution serving the community. Geological reports describe the road and the rock beneath it. Federal maps eventually fix both Hargis and Hargis Creek on the official landscape.
That type of documentary trail is common in rural Appalachia. Community boundaries were often understood locally rather than surveyed formally. One family might say it lived on Hargis Creek, another might give Oil Springs as a mailing address, and another might identify with Pigeon or Little Paint even though all lived within only a few miles of one another.
The available evidence also leaves room for much more research. Johnson County deed books, tax records, nineteenth-century court orders, the 1896 to 1910 school census, census schedules, and the county’s digitized newspapers may eventually make it possible to identify the households associated with Hargis generation by generation. Those sources may also settle the most basic unanswered question: who, if anyone, gave Hargis Creek its name. The surviving research material specifically points toward land, school, newspaper, census, and map records as the best path for reconstructing the community in greater detail.
Remembering Hargis
The history of Hargis demonstrates why small Appalachian communities deserve the same careful attention given to larger towns.
There was no single moment when Hargis suddenly appeared. Its history developed gradually through settlement along a creek, land ownership, mountain roads, family cemeteries, and a rural school. The name was already associated with the landscape by the middle of the nineteenth century, remained familiar enough for newspaper reporters to use without explanation during the 1920s, and became firmly documented through school and federal mapping records in the decades that followed.
Hargis School is gone from the educational system that once scattered small classrooms throughout Johnson County, but the community name remains. Hargis Creek still drains the same hills. Roads still connect the valley with Pigeon Creek, Oil Springs, and the surrounding communities. Modern maps continue to recognize Hargis as a populated place.
What survives is not the history of a town that rose and fell. It is the history of a place that never needed to become a town at all.
For generations, Hargis existed because families knew where it began, children attended its school, travelers crossed its hills, people buried relatives in its ground, and the creek carried its name through the mountains of Johnson County.
Sources & Further Reading
Kentucky Secretary of State, Land Office. “County Court Order Patents.” Frankfort, KY: Kentucky Secretary of State. Includes the state patent system under which nineteenth-century Johnson County land surveys and grants can be traced by county, watercourse, survey name, and year. https://www.sos.ky.gov/land/non-military/patents/ccorders/Pages/default.aspx
Johnson County Clerk. “Legal Records Department.” Paintsville, KY: Johnson County Clerk. Deeds, mortgages, wills, marriages, liens, tax records, and older microfilmed records useful for reconstructing property ownership along Hargis Creek. Johnson County Clerk https://johnson.countyclerk.us/records/
Johnson County Board of Education. School Census, 1896–1910. Johnson County, KY. Family History Library microfilm 836797. Useful for identifying children and families living within the rural school districts that preceded or included Hargis School. https://www.werelate.org/wiki/Source%3AJohnson%2C_Kentucky%2C_United_States._School_Census%2C_1896-1910
Johnson County, Kentucky. “1943 Teacher List.” Johnson County KYGenWeb. Hargis appears as School No. 51 with Luther Conley as teacher, between Little Paint and Pigeon in the county school listing. KYGenWeb https://kygenweb.net/johnson/43teachers.htm
Johnson County, Kentucky. “Early Education in Johnson County.” Johnson County KYGenWeb. Based in part on Mitchel Hall’s county history and accompanied by surviving school census and teacher materials. KYGenWeb https://kygenweb.net/johnson/EDU.htm
Paintsville Herald. “Party in Auto Accident on Paint Creek.” November 11, 1926. Contemporary account of travelers crossing the hill between Hargis, rendered “Hargus” in the transcription, and Pigeon. https://kygenweb.net/johnson/Autos.htm
Paintsville Herald. “Man Killed When Hit By Auto Sunday.” April 25, 1929. Reports the death of A. J. Tackett and his burial at the family cemetery in Hargis. KYGenWeb https://kygenweb.net/johnson/Autos.htm
Morehead State University, Camden-Carroll Library. “Paintsville Herald Archive.” ScholarWorks@Morehead State. Digitized original issues from 1915 through 1927, with gaps, providing an important primary-source newspaper collection for early twentieth-century Johnson County. Morehead State Digital Archives https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/paintsville_herald/
Digital Archives of Johnson County Kentucky. Paintsville Herald, Big Sandy News, Paintsville Herald News, and related Johnson County newspapers. The collection contains tens of thousands of digitized pages and is particularly useful for searching “Hargis,” “Hargis Creek,” and “Hargis School.” Johnson County Archives https://johnson.advantage-preservation.com/
United States Geological Survey. Oil Springs Quadrangle, Kentucky. 7.5-minute topographic series. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey. Historic and modern editions document the Hargis landscape, roads, waterways, schools, cemeteries, and surrounding communities. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/topoview/
United States Geological Survey. Oil Springs Quadrangle, Kentucky. US Topo, 2010. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey. The map explicitly identifies Hargis as a populated place within the Oil Springs quadrangle. Tennessee Map Service https://prd-tnm.s3.amazonaws.com/StagedProducts/Maps/USTopo/PDF/KY/KY_Oil_Springs_20100331_TM_geo.pdf
Outerbridge, William F. Geologic Map of the Oil Springs Quadrangle, Eastern Kentucky. Geologic Quadrangle Map GQ-586. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1967. https://doi.org/10.3133/gq586. USGS Publications https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/gq586
Kentucky Geological Survey. Geological report containing the “Win Section,” including a measured section along the road leading from the head of Hargis Creek to the head of Pigeon Creek. Lexington: University of Kentucky, Kentucky Geological Survey. https://kgs.uky.edu/kgsweb/olops/pub/kgs/KGS9B13r.pdf
United States Census Bureau. Federal Population Census Schedules for Johnson County, Kentucky, 1850–1950. Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration. These schedules can be used with land and school records to reconstruct households living around Hargis Creek across generations. https://www.archives.gov/research/census
United States Census Bureau. 1950 Census Enumeration District Maps: Johnson County, Kentucky. Record Group 29, National Archives and Records Administration. Useful for geographically connecting census households with Hargis, Oil Springs, Pigeon Creek, and surrounding roads and waterways. https://catalog.archives.gov/
Johnson County Public Library. “Local History and Genealogy.” Patricia Patton Kentucky Room, Paintsville, KY. Holdings include maps, photographs, family charts, county histories, newspapers, deeds, census records, court orders, marriage records, and other local materials. Johnson County Public Library https://johnsoncountypubliclibrary.org/using-your-library/
Powell, Helen. Multiple Resources of Johnson County, Kentucky. National Register of Historic Places Multiple Property Documentation. Washington, DC: National Park Service, 1988. A major source for Johnson County settlement patterns, architecture, transportation, schools, mineral development, and rural history. NPGallery https://npgallery.nps.gov/NRHP/GetAsset/NRHP/64000234_text
Hall, Mitchel. Johnson County, Kentucky: A History of the County and Genealogy of Its People Up to the Year 1927. 2 vols. Louisville, KY: Standard Press, 1928. A foundational county history for early settlement, education, families, government, landholding, and nineteenth-century Johnson County.
Wells, J. K. A Short History of Paintsville and Johnson County. Paintsville, KY: Paintsville Herald, 1962. A useful local history for placing Hargis within the broader development of Johnson County. https://openlibrary.org/works/OL4329279W/A_short_history_of_Paintsville_and_Johnson_County
Rennick, Robert M. Kentucky Place Names. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984. A standard reference for Kentucky community names, locations, and place-name origins. The Kentucky Historical Society identifies it as one of the state’s major place-name resources. Kentucky History
Rennick, Robert M. The Post Offices of Kentucky’s Big Sandy Valley: A Survey of the 341 Post Offices of Floyd, Johnson, Magoffin & Martin Counties. Lake Grove, OR, 2002. Particularly useful for determining how Hargis residents received mail and which nearby postal communities served the area. Kentucky History
Ely, William. The Big Sandy Valley: A History of the People and Country from the Earliest Settlement to the Present Time. Catlettsburg, KY: Central Methodist, 1887. An important nineteenth-century regional history for the broader Big Sandy settlement context.
Jillson, Willard Rouse. The Big Sandy Valley: A Regional History Prior to the Year 1850. Louisville, KY: John P. Morton & Co., 1923. Useful for early settlement, transportation, resources, and the regional environment in which Hargis Creek developed.
Crowe-Carraco, Carol. The Big Sandy Valley. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1979. A scholarly regional history useful for placing rural Johnson County settlements within the larger development of the Big Sandy Valley.
Scalf, Henry P. Kentucky’s Last Frontier. Pikeville, KY, 1966. A frequently cited history of the settlement and development of eastern Kentucky and the Big Sandy region.
Spaulding, Irving A., and Howard W. Beers. Mobility and Fertility Rates of Rural Families in Robertson and Johnson Counties, Kentucky, 1918–1941. Lexington: Kentucky Agricultural Experiment Station, University of Kentucky, 1943. Useful for understanding population movement and family life in rural Johnson County during the period when Hargis School was active.
Oyler, Merton Dale. Neighborhood Standing and Population Changes in Johnson and Robertson Counties, Kentucky. Lexington: Kentucky Agricultural Experiment Station, University of Kentucky, 1948. Useful for twentieth-century rural community structure, migration, and population change.
Wells, Charles C. Vital Statistics of Johnson County, Kentucky, 1843–1904. A compiled research source bringing together early births, deaths, marriages, tax material, military records, and other county information. Individual entries should be checked against the original records when possible.
Author Note: Hargis survives in land records, school lists, newspapers, cemeteries, maps, and the memories of families who have lived along Hargis Creek for generations. If you have photographs, school records, family documents, cemetery information, or stories connected to Hargis, I would be grateful to hear from you.