Appalachian Community Histories – Lamont, Perry County: Grapevine Creek, a Post Office, and a Small Community Near Krypton
Lamont has left a lighter paper trail than some of Perry County’s larger coalfield communities, but the surviving evidence is strong enough to place it clearly in the county’s eastern Kentucky landscape. Official federal water data still identifies a monitoring station as “Grapevine Creek Near Lamont, KY,” while Perry County’s own communities page and the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet’s county map both continue to recognize Lamont by name. Together, those sources place Lamont in the Grapevine Creek and Krypton area rather than as a vague or half-remembered local name.
Mid-century mapping strengthens that picture. The United States Geological Survey’s historical 1:24,000-scale Krypton quadrangles from 1954 and 1961, along with the later 2016 US Topo for the same quadrangle, provide a cartographic framework for following the community through time. Perry County’s generalized geologic map also lists Lamont among the county’s named places, showing that the name remained part of the county’s mapped landscape in official reference material.
Lamont as a Post Office Place
One of the clearest anchors for Lamont as a named community is postal history. The compiled Perry County post office list at PostalHistory.com shows Lamont operating from 1940 to 1975. A postal-history article in La Posta gives that same date span and places the Lamont post office at the mouth of Beech Fork near Davidson School. That source also makes clear that the name’s origin is not readily explained in the usual postal record trail. Even so, the existence of a Lamont post office for thirty-five years shows that Lamont was not simply a passing nickname. It was a recognized postal place.
That matters in the mountains because a post office often marked the point where a hollow or creek-side settlement became visible to the outside world. Mail routes, school references, marriage records, tax notices, store accounts, and obituary notices often followed the post office name. For Lamont, the 1940 to 1975 postal life gives historians a practical date range for searching the community in local records.
Lamont in the Pages of The Hazard Herald
For Lamont, the most important newspaper trail runs through The Hazard Herald. The Library of Congress identifies it as a Perry County weekly published from 1911 to 1975, making it one of the strongest continuous local sources for tracing smaller communities. Later Perry County titles, including The Union Messenger, The Daily Times, Hazard Herald-Voice, and The Hazard Times, survive in library holdings and provide additional paths for late twentieth-century follow-up research.
When Lamont appears in the Herald record, it appears as a lived-in place. In 1958, hospital notices listed Dorcas Napier of Lamont as discharged and Olive Estep of Lamont as admitted. That same year, a sheriff’s delinquent tax notice included a Lamont address, and a marriage-license listing identified Mima Collins as being from Lamont. These are small notices, but they matter. They show Lamont not as a map label alone, but as a community name used in the ordinary public life of Perry County.
For a place like Lamont, these routine newspaper references are exactly the kind of evidence a historian needs. They show residence, family connection, and landholding. A small community does not always survive in the archive through one dramatic event. Sometimes it survives through scattered notices that prove people there married, paid taxes, entered hospitals, and were recognized countywide by the name Lamont.
Lamont in the Eastern Kentucky Coalfield
Lamont also belongs to the larger coalfield geography of Perry County. The Kentucky Geological Survey describes Perry County as part of the Eastern Kentucky Coal Field and notes the long importance of coal mining in the county’s economy. A 1997 archaeological record titled “A Coal Mine Survey Above Grapevine Creek Near Lamont in Perry County, Kentucky” further suggests that the slopes above Lamont were being documented specifically in relation to coal-mining ground and its altered landscape.
That does not by itself prove every detail of Lamont’s origin, and it does not automatically make Lamont a classic company town on the scale of some better-documented Perry County camps. But it does place Lamont inside the same extractive landscape that shaped nearby settlements. In Perry County, communities along creeks and branch roads often gained permanence because mines, roads, schools, and post offices fixed their names in everyday use. Lamont fits that broader pattern, even if its surviving online paper trail is thinner than that of places like Krypton or Bonnyman.
Where the Deeper Lamont Story Still Hides
The deeper history of Lamont is probably still waiting in courthouse and archival records. The Perry County Clerk’s office states that it houses legal land records, marriage licenses, and notary bonds, with some records dating back to the late eighteenth century. Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives inventories confirm substantial Perry County runs for land, county, and circuit court records. The Perry County Public Library’s genealogy room also holds newspapers, microfilm, marriage and death records, cemetery guides, and other research material focused on Perry and surrounding counties.
That is important because the readily available source base still leaves parts of Lamont’s story unresolved. The place is clearly real in official mapping, postal history, and local news, but the name’s origin and the community’s earliest development are not yet laid out in one easy source. What the evidence does provide is a strong geographic core. Lamont is a real Perry County community on the Grapevine Creek side of the county, remembered in postal history, preserved in newspapers, and still legible in official geographic records.
Why Lamont Matters
Small Appalachian communities often survive in records unevenly. Larger towns left behind broader corporate files, fuller newspaper coverage, and more institutional history. Smaller places like Lamont often survive through maps, creek names, post offices, tax notices, courthouse books, and scattered community references. That can make them seem less important than they were. In reality, places like Lamont were part of the ordinary human geography of eastern Kentucky, the kind of places where families clustered, roads ended, and local identity held even when the archive remained thin.
Lamont’s history, at least in the sources now easiest to reach, is therefore a history of persistence. The name holds on in federal water data, county and state maps, postal-history compilations, and the everyday memory preserved in Perry County newspapers. That may seem modest beside the headline histories of the coalfields, but it is exactly how many Appalachian communities remain visible to us. Lamont endured because people kept using the name, and the record, however incomplete, still answers back.
Sources and Further Reading
United States Geological Survey. Krypton, KY. 1:24,000-scale topographic quadrangle. 1954. https://prd-tnm.s3.amazonaws.com/StagedProducts/Maps/HistoricalTopo/PDF/KY/24000/KY_Krypton_709036_1954_24000_geo.pdf
United States Geological Survey. Krypton, KY. 1:24,000-scale topographic quadrangle. 1961. https://prd-tnm.s3.amazonaws.com/StagedProducts/Maps/HistoricalTopo/PDF/KY/24000/KY_Krypton_709037_1961_24000_geo.pdf
United States Geological Survey. Krypton, KY. US Topo map. 2016. https://prd-tnm.s3.amazonaws.com/StagedProducts/Maps/USTopo/PDF/KY/KY_Krypton_20160425_TM_geo.pdf
United States Geological Survey. “Monitoring Location Grapevine Creek Near Lamont, KY, USGS-03277700.” USGS Water Data for the Nation. https://waterdata.usgs.gov/monitoring-location/03277700/
United States Geological Survey. “GRAPEVINE CREEK NEAR LAMONT, KY.” Water Quality Portal. https://www.waterqualitydata.us/provider/NWIS/USGS-KY/USGS-03277700/
Perry County, Kentucky. “Communities.” https://perrycounty.ky.gov/things-to-do/Pages/Communities.aspx
Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. State Primary Road System: Perry County, Kentucky. https://transportation.ky.gov/Planning/SPRS%20Maps/Perry.pdf
PostalHistory.com. “Perry County, Kentucky Post Offices.” https://www.postalhistory.com/postoffices.asp?county=Perry&pagenum=4&searchtext=&state=ky&task=display
Library of Congress. The Hazard Herald (Hazard, Ky.), 1911-1975. https://www.loc.gov/item/sn85052003/
Library of Congress. The Daily Times (Hazard, Ky.). https://www.loc.gov/chroniclingamerica/lccn/sn89058453/
Library of Congress. Hazard Herald-Voice (Hazard, Ky.), 1984-current. https://www.loc.gov/chroniclingamerica/lccn/sn85052004/holdings/
Library of Congress. The Hazard Times (Hazard, Ky.), 1985-current. https://www.loc.gov/chroniclingamerica/lccn/sn85009266/
Library of Congress. The Union Messenger (Hazard, Ky.), 1946-19??. https://www.loc.gov/item/sn89058452/
The Hazard Herald (Hazard, KY), March 10, 1958. https://archive.org/stream/kd9833mw2f06/kd9833mw2f06_djvu.txt
The Hazard Herald (Hazard, KY), April 14, 1958. https://archive.org/stream/kd9s17sn0f1s/kd9s17sn0f1s_djvu.txt
The Hazard Herald (Hazard, KY), April 28, 1958. https://archive.org/download/kd9r20rr232h/kd9r20rr232h_text.pdf
The Hazard Herald (Hazard, KY), June 26, 1958. https://archive.org/download/kd90g3gx4552/kd90g3gx4552_text.pdf
The Hazard Herald (Hazard, KY), July 3, 1958. https://archive.org/stream/kd9ns0ks6w6g/kd9ns0ks6w6g_djvu.txt
The Hazard Herald (Hazard, KY), March 22, 1965. https://archive.org/download/kd90r9m32p12/kd90r9m32p12_text.pdf
Perry County Clerk. “Records Center.” https://perry.countyclerk.us/records-center/
Perry County Clerk. “Online Land Records.” https://perry.countyclerk.us/records-center/online-land-records/
Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives. Inventory of Land Records. https://kdla.ky.gov/Archives-and-Reference/Documents/Inventory_Land_Records.pdf
Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives. County Records. https://kdla.ky.gov/Archives-and-Reference/Documents/County%20Records.pdf
Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives. Circuit Court Inventory. https://kdla.ky.gov/Archives-and-Reference/Documents/CircuitCourtInventory.pdf
Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives. Kentucky Land Records Research Guide. https://kdla.ky.gov/Archives-and-Reference/Documents/ResearchGuide-Kentucky_Land_Records.pdf
Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives. Kentucky Court Records Research Guide. https://kdla.ky.gov/Archives-and-Reference/Documents/ResearchGuide-Kentucky_Court_Records.pdf
Kentucky Geological Survey. Perry County, Kentucky. Map and Chart 164, Series XII. https://kgs.uky.edu/kgsweb/olops/pub/kgs/mc164_12.pdf
Kentucky Geological Survey. Perry County Geology. https://kgs.uky.edu/kgsweb/download/gwatlas/gwcounty/perry/PERRYGEO.pdf
The Digital Archaeological Record. “Lamont.” https://core.tdar.org/browse/geographic-keyword/45367/lamont
Perry County Public Library. “Genealogy.” https://perrycountypl.org/genealogy/
Perry County Public Library. “Services.” https://www.perrycountylibrary.org/home/services/
FamilySearch. “Perry County, Kentucky Genealogy.” https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Perry_County%2C_Kentucky_Genealogy
FamilySearch. “Land Records, 1821-1964, Perry County, Kentucky.” https://www.familysearch.org/en/search/catalog/190103
Perry County KYGenWeb. “Perry County, Kentucky.” https://kygenweb.net/perry/
Perry County KYGenWeb. “Cities, Towns & Maps.” https://kygenweb.net/perry/citiestowns.htm
Author Note: I wanted to write about Lamont because small Perry County communities often survive only in scattered maps, newspapers, and courthouse records. Even when the paper trail is thin, places like Lamont still deserve to be remembered as part of the county’s lived history.