Appalachian Community Histories – Hilltop, Fleming County: From a Country Post Office to Franklin Sousley and Iwo Jima
Hilltop is the kind of place that can disappear if history is measured only by incorporated towns, courthouse squares, and population tables. There was never a large business district here, no railroad depot surrounded by brick storefronts, and no municipal government keeping minutes under the community’s name. Hilltop grew instead from the older rural pattern of Fleming County, where a crossroads, a school, a church, a store, and eventually a post office could give a scattered farming neighborhood an identity of its own.
Located southwest of Flemingsburg in the countryside above the Licking River, the community appears in records under both Hill Top and Hilltop. The Kentucky Atlas places it roughly seven miles southwest of Flemingsburg and describes it as being on a hill above the river. Modern state highway records still preserve the name in Hilltop Road, KY 1347, which runs through Battle Run to KY 170 at Hilltop.
The surviving record is unusually rich for such a small place. Federal postal records, county school history, maps, legal records, newspapers, and the life of Franklin Runyon Sousley allow Hilltop to be followed from the late nineteenth century into the modern era. The community’s post office opened on March 3, 1892, and operated until April 1905, but there is evidence that the Hilltop name, or at least a district remembered by that name, may have already existed before the postal department made it official. Pasted markdown
Hilltop’s story therefore begins not with Franklin Sousley or even with its post office, but with the farms, roads, schools, and families that occupied this corner of Fleming County before most Americans had ever heard the name.
Before There Was a Hilltop Post Office
An 1884 atlas of Bath and Fleming counties offers one of the best windows into the countryside only eight years before Hilltop’s post office opened. Compiled from surveys, the atlas marked individual property owners, residences, roads, schools, churches, cemeteries, and other features. It captures a rural landscape in which community boundaries were much less definite than they appear on modern maps.
People living around what became Hilltop could be described in records as residents of Sherburne, Battle Run, Cowan, Elizaville, or simply Fleming County. Property records might identify a creek or neighboring landowner rather than a village. Mail service, schools, churches, family connections, and the condition of the roads often mattered more than an official place name.
This makes one piece of Fleming County’s school history particularly interesting. A historical account of the county’s African American schools states that Fleming County had seven Black school districts in 1883, including districts at Sherburne, Battle Run, and Elizaville. According to that same account, an eighth district was added at Hilltop in 1890. The county’s Black school census that year counted 738 children.
That date comes two years before the establishment of the Hilltop post office.
It should be approached carefully. The surviving account was compiled later, and additional Board of Education minutes, school census lists, teacher reports, or property records would help determine whether “Hilltop” was the exact contemporary district name in 1890 or terminology applied later by the historian. Even so, the record is important because it suggests that Hilltop’s history was already taking shape before federal postal officials arrived.
It also places African American families firmly within the early story of the community. Rural Black schools are easily lost from local histories because so many operated in small buildings, churches, or private dwellings and left fewer surviving records than the larger white institutions. In Hilltop’s case, the school evidence indicates that any complete history of the community must include the Black families who lived and educated their children in this part of Fleming County during the decades after emancipation. The research material for Hilltop specifically identifies the 1890 school district as one of the most promising avenues for reconstructing that community. Pasted markdown
The Post Office Gives Hilltop a Name
The clearest moment in Hilltop’s emergence as an officially recognized place came in 1892.
Robert M. Rennick, Kentucky’s influential place-name researcher, reconstructed the story from federal postal records. According to Rennick, postmaster-designate Charles Grant Callahan submitted a Post Office Department Site Location Report when the new office was proposed. Four possible names were offered: Central, Hilltop, Sylvan, and Cable.
Hilltop won.
The office officially began operating on March 3, 1892. Rennick placed it at the junction of what he identified as Kentucky Routes 57 and 170, about nine miles southwest of Flemingsburg. The post office remained in operation until April 1905.
Those dates give Hilltop a surprisingly precise documentary beginning, but the federal records tell us something more interesting than simply when the mail started moving. A rural post office was a declaration that enough people lived within reach of that crossroads to justify a regular point of communication with the rest of the country.
Letters, newspapers, business correspondence, government notices, catalogs, bills, and news from relatives traveled through such offices. Before rural mail delivery became widespread, the post office was one of the institutions that turned a collection of farms into a recognizable community.
The original Site Location Reports preserved by the National Archives were prepared for the Post Office Department’s Topographer’s Office and commonly recorded roads, streams, neighboring offices, and postal routes. The Fleming County records are preserved on Kentucky Roll 214 of National Archives Microfilm M1126.
Callahan’s selection of four possible names also leaves behind an unanswered question. The Kentucky Atlas suggests Hill Top was probably named for a local Hill family, but that explanation has not been conclusively established. With Central, Sylvan and Cable all competing for the same office, the reason Hilltop prevailed may be buried in postal correspondence, property records, or local family tradition. Until that evidence is found, the Hill family explanation is best treated as plausible rather than proven.
A Store, a Church, and a Rural Crossroads
Hilltop never became a town in the conventional sense. Its importance came from serving the countryside around it.
Rennick found that after the post office period, a store and Christian church continued to serve the area between Sherburne and Cowan. That brief description says much about what Hilltop had become. A post office could close, but the community did not necessarily disappear with it.
Stores in places like Hilltop were more than places to purchase flour, coffee, farm supplies, tobacco, or household necessities. They were informal newsrooms. Farmers heard about births, deaths, auctions, road conditions, crop prices, illnesses, elections, and neighborhood disputes while standing around counters or porches. Before telephones reached every farmhouse, news often traveled person to person through precisely these small centers.
Churches served a similar function. Worship mixed with funerals, weddings, revivals, children’s programs and community gatherings. The continued presence of a Hilltop Christian Church well into the modern era shows how deeply the community identity survived after the post office vanished. Later records repeatedly identify Fleming County residents as members of Hilltop Christian Church, while modern addresses continue to use the Hilltop name.
The road system preserved that identity as well. Kentucky Transportation Cabinet records officially call KY 1347 Hilltop Road and describe it as traveling through Battle Run to KY 170 at Hilltop. KYTC has also referred directly to the KY 170 bridge over Fleming Creek “at Hilltop.”
Hilltop therefore survived in the way many rural Appalachian communities survive. The post office closed, but the name remained attached to roads, farms, churches, family histories, directions and memories.
The Post Office Closes, but Hilltop Remains
Hilltop’s post office disappeared in April 1905 after just over thirteen years of operation. That could easily be mistaken for the end of the community if postal records were the only evidence consulted.
It was not.
A Kentucky newspaper published shortly after the closing referred to a “Dr. Waldrek of Hilltop, Fleming County,” demonstrating that Hilltop was still being used as a geographic identity even without its own active post office. The community had outgrown its dependence on the institution that gave it official federal recognition.
The change was part of a wider transformation in rural America. Better roads, changing postal routes, Rural Free Delivery and the increasing importance of nearby towns reduced the need for thousands of tiny country post offices. A family could receive mail without making the local post office the center of its routine.
Hilltop adapted. People increasingly used Elizaville, Ewing, Flemingsburg and other nearby postal addresses, but Hilltop continued to identify a particular landscape and the people who lived within it.
That distinction matters when reconstructing rural history. A mailing address is not always the same thing as a community. Someone could receive mail through Ewing or Elizaville and still tell neighbors that home was Hilltop.
Franklin Sousley Grows Up at Hilltop
The name Hilltop eventually traveled far beyond Fleming County because of a farm boy born there on September 19, 1925.
Franklin Runyon Sousley was the second son of Duke and Goldie Mitchell Sousley. His childhood unfolded in the rural world that had developed around Hilltop during the previous generation. The Great Depression was not an abstraction in a farming community like this one. Work began early, money was scarce, and children were expected to contribute to the household.
Ron Elliott’s study of Sousley’s life describes several losses that shaped his childhood. Franklin’s older brother Malcolm died in 1929. A younger brother, Julian, was born in 1933, and Franklin’s father died the following year. Nine-year-old Franklin and his mother were left with farm work, household responsibilities, and a young child to help raise.
Later accounts remember Franklin working around tobacco, hay, and livestock. He attended school locally before graduating in 1943. Like many rural Kentucky young people looking for wartime employment, he then went north, finding work at the Frigidaire Division of General Motors in Dayton, Ohio.
His time away from Hilltop would be brief.
Sousley entered the Marine Corps Reserve through the Selective Service System on January 5, 1944. After recruit training in San Diego, he joined Company E, 2nd Battalion, 28th Marines, 5th Marine Division. By the beginning of 1945, he was headed toward one of the most heavily fortified islands in the Pacific.
From Fleming County to Mount Suribachi
Sousley landed on Iwo Jima on February 19, 1945.
Four days later, Marines secured Mount Suribachi at the southern end of the island. A small American flag was raised first. Later that day, a larger flag was carried to the summit so it could be seen more clearly across the battlefield.
Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal captured the second raising.
Sousley was among the men in the photograph.
The image became one of the most recognizable photographs in American history, reproduced in newspapers, posters, monuments and eventually the Marine Corps War Memorial near Arlington National Cemetery. A young man from a Fleming County crossroads that had lost its own post office forty years earlier was suddenly frozen inside an image seen around the world.
Congress later specifically identified him as having been “Born in Hilltop, Kentucky” while considering legislation to name a Lexington Department of Veterans Affairs campus in his honor. The Congressional Record recounts his landing on Iwo Jima on February 19 and his participation in the larger flag raising on February 23.
Sousley did not live to see what the photograph became.
After the fighting moved north from Suribachi, he remained with his regiment. On March 21, 1945, Franklin Sousley was killed in combat. He was nineteen years old.
He was initially buried on Iwo Jima. His remains were later brought home and reinterred in Elizaville Cemetery in Fleming County.
The surviving Sousley material also brings us closer to Hilltop than monuments and military summaries can. Letters written home during the war survived, including correspondence from Iwo Jima. Copies have been preserved or reproduced through Fleming County collections and Camp Sousley, giving historians the voice of a young man whose life had stretched from a Kentucky tobacco farm to the Pacific war. Pasted markdown
Hilltop After Sousley
Sousley’s fame ensured that Hilltop would never entirely disappear from the historical record, but the community remained much more than the birthplace printed beneath a famous Marine’s name.
Generations continued to identify themselves with Hilltop. Obituaries, church records and local reporting preserve the names of families who farmed there, worshiped there, raised children there and left for work elsewhere while continuing to consider the community home.
Even the Kentucky Supreme Court used the designation in 2004. In Meade v. Ginn, the court described a 131.045-acre tract as lying in the “Hilltop community of Fleming County.” The case discussed local roads and property extending toward the North Fork of the Licking River, showing that more than a century after the postal department established Hilltop, the name remained meaningful enough to identify a specific rural district in a formal legal opinion.
That may be the clearest explanation of what Hilltop is.
It is a community rather than a municipality, a place whose boundaries are easier for longtime residents to understand than for outsiders to draw on a map.
What the Records Still Have to Tell
For all that survives, much of Hilltop’s history remains waiting in records that have rarely been used together.
The 1884 atlas can be compared with deeds and tax lists to identify the families occupying the crossroads before the post office opened. The original 1892 postal site report may establish precisely where Callahan intended the office to stand and perhaps provide clues about why Hilltop was chosen over Central, Sylvan and Cable. Postmaster appointment records can reconstruct who handled the mail during the office’s thirteen years.
County school records may tell an even more important story. The reference to an African American school district at Hilltop in 1890 deserves deeper investigation through Board of Education minutes, school censuses, deeds and teacher records. Those sources could identify children, parents, teachers and the location of the school itself.
Old Fleming County newspapers offer another layer. Births, marriages, deaths, farm sales, church meetings, school announcements and neighborhood correspondence columns can restore names and events to what otherwise appears as an empty point on a highway map.
Then there are the photographs and memories that may never have entered government archives at all. A picture of the general store, a school group, a church congregation, a tobacco cutting crew, a family standing beside a farmhouse, or a letter written from one neighbor to another could tell as much about Hilltop as an official document.
That is often how the history of small Appalachian communities has to be rebuilt, one surviving piece at a time.
Why Hilltop Matters
Hilltop’s history is not remarkable because it became a large town. It is remarkable because it did not have to.
The community grew from the countryside between older Fleming County settlements, developed a school district and rural institutions, acquired a post office in 1892, and kept its identity after that office closed in 1905. Roads and churches continued to carry its name. Families continued to call it home.
Then one of those families sent a red-haired Kentucky farm boy into the Marine Corps, and for a fraction of a second on Mount Suribachi, a camera shutter opened.
Franklin Sousley became part of national history, but the place that produced him remained what it had always been: fields, roads, churches, creeks and family farms overlooking the Licking River country.
That contrast is what makes Hilltop worth remembering.
Great events do not always begin in great cities. Sometimes they begin at a country crossroads where the post office is gone, the old store has changed, and a road sign is one of the few outward reminders that a community ever had a name.
In Fleming County, that name is Hilltop.
Sources & Further Reading
National Archives and Records Administration. Post Office Department Reports of Site Locations, 1837–1950. Microfilm Publication M1126, Record Group 28. Hilltop, Fleming County, Kentucky, records on Kentucky Roll 214. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/locations-1837-1950.html
National Archives and Records Administration. Record of Appointment of Postmasters, 1832–September 30, 1971. Microfilm Publication M841, Record Group 28. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/postmasters-1832-1971.html
D. J. Lake & Co. An Atlas of Bath & Fleming Counties, Kentucky: From Actual Surveys by J. M. Lathrop and J. H. Summers. Philadelphia: D. J. Lake & Co., 1884. https://archive.org/details/atlasofbathflemi00djla
Fleming County Clerk. “Records.” Fleming County, Kentucky. Accessed October 16, 2026. https://fleming.countyclerk.us/records/
Rennick, Robert M. “The Post Offices of Fleming County, Kentucky.” La Posta: A Journal of American Postal History 29, no. 2 (May 1998). https://www.lapostapub.com/Backissues/LP29-2.pdf
Rennick, Robert M. “Fleming County: Post Offices.” County Histories of Kentucky. Morehead State University, 2000. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/192/
Rennick, Robert M. “Fleming County: Place Names.” Robert M. Rennick Manuscript Collection. Morehead State University, 2016. https://network.bepress.com/explore/?facet=institution_title%3A%22Morehead+State+University%22&facet=publication_facet%3A%22Robert+M.+Rennick+Manuscript+Collection%22&q=engineering
Royse, Martha, and Robert M. Rennick. “Martha Royse Interviews, Parts 1–6, Fleming County.” Robert M. Rennick Oral History Collection. Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_oh_collection/index.5.html
Works Progress Administration and Historical Records Survey. “Fleming County: General History.” County Histories of Kentucky. Morehead State University, 1939. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/191/
Fleming Gazette. “Fleming County: 175th Anniversary Edition.” July 6, 1972. County Histories of Kentucky, Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/
Fleming Gazette. “Fleming County: Bicentennial Edition.” July 11, 1974. County Histories of Kentucky, Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/107/
University of Kentucky Libraries. “Kentucky Digital Newspapers.” Kentucky Digital Newspaper Program. Accessed October 16, 2026. The collection includes numerous historic Fleming County and Flemingsburg newspapers. https://kdnp.uky.edu/splash/kdnpcsv.html
Elbon, David C. “Hill Top, Kentucky.” Kentucky Atlas and Gazetteer. Accessed October 16, 2026. https://www.kyatlas.com/ky-hill-top.html
U.S. Geological Survey. Sherburne Quadrangle, Kentucky. 7.5-Minute Series. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1952; photorevised 1975. https://store.usgs.gov/assets/MOD/StoreFiles/PDF/Sherburne_O38083C7_geo.pdf
Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. State Primary Road System: Fleming County. Frankfort: Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. https://transportation.ky.gov/Planning/SPRS%20Maps/Fleming.pdf
Marine Corps University, Marine Corps History Division. “Private First Class Franklin Runyon Sousley.” Who’s Who in Marine Corps History. https://www.usmcu.edu/Research/Marine-Corps-History-Division/People/Whos-Who-in-Marine-Corps-History/Scannell-Upshur/
United States Congress. “Franklin R. Sousley Campus.” Congressional Record, 115th Cong., 2nd sess., February 13, 2018, H1082–H1086. Washington, DC: Government Publishing Office. https://www.govinfo.gov/link/crec/164/h/1086
Elliott, Ron. “Franklin Sousley: American Hero.” Kentucky Humanities, Fall 2010, 24–29. https://kyhumanities.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Past_issue_pdf24.pdf
Elliott, Ron. From Hilltop to Mountaintop: The Life & Legacy of One Iwo Jima Flag Raiser. Morley, MO: Dark Horse Books, 2010. https://www.acclaimpress.com/books/from-hilltop-to-mountaintop/
Camp Sousley. “About Franklin Sousley.” Accessed October 16, 2026. Includes biographical information and a reproduction of Sousley’s final letter from Iwo Jima. https://campsousley.com/franklin
Bradley, James, with Ron Powers. Flags of Our Fathers. New York: Bantam Books, 2000.
Appalachian Regional Commission. “Kentucky.” Accessed October 16, 2026. Fleming County and Bath County are among Kentucky’s 54 officially designated Appalachian counties. https://www.arc.gov/appalachian-states/kentucky/
Author Note: Hilltop is one of those small Appalachian communities whose history survives not in a single book, but across postal records, maps, newspapers, schools, family histories, and local memory. Its connection to Franklin Sousley and Iwo Jima gives the community a place in national history, but the people who built and sustained Hilltop long before 1945 deserve to be remembered as well.