Appalachian Community Histories – Lick Creek, Pike County: Land Records, Old Maps, and Memory Beside Fishtrap Lake
Lick Creek is one of those Pike County places where the name begins with the land before it becomes a community. It is a stream, a hollow, a road country, a post office memory, a school place, a cemetery place, and now part of the larger Fishtrap Lake landscape. Like many Appalachian communities, it was never defined by one courthouse document or one grand event. Its history has to be pieced together from land records, post office records, old maps, geological surveys, newspaper notices, cemeteries, and the memory of families who lived along the creek.
This Lick Creek should not be confused with other Kentucky streams and communities of the same name. The Lick Creek discussed here is in Pike County, in the Fishtrap Lake and Levisa Fork country. It belongs to the eastern Kentucky mountain landscape of narrow valleys, steep ridges, coal-bearing hills, family cemeteries, and public roads that follow water because the mountains leave few other choices.
The name itself is plain and old-fashioned. A “lick” in Appalachian place naming often pointed to a mineral or salt lick, a place where animals came to the ground. Whether the exact lick that named Pike County’s Lick Creek can still be identified from surviving records is harder to prove, but the word fits the older mountain vocabulary. Before the place was a modern address or a mapped community, it was a creek known well enough for people to describe land, travel, mail, and homes by it.
The Creek Before the Community
The oldest history of Lick Creek is likely hidden in Pike County land records. Robert M. Rennick’s Pike County place-name notes point toward early land activity on Lick Creek, including references to James Robinson acquiring several tracts there by the 1840s. That does not mean Robinson was the first person to live there, and it does not mean settlement began only when his name appeared in records. It means that by the middle of the nineteenth century, Lick Creek was already a recognizable place in Pike County land description.
That is often how Appalachian communities first appear. They begin as waterways and land boundaries. A creek gave a deed its location. A branch gave a farm its identity. A ridge separated one family’s place from another’s. Over time, those descriptions hardened into community names. A person did not always say they lived in a town. They said they lived on Lick Creek.
Pike County itself was formed from Floyd County in the early nineteenth century, and the county seat at Pikeville became the legal center for deeds, marriages, court actions, and estate work. But people on Lick Creek lived at a distance from the courthouse world. Their local geography mattered first. Roads followed valleys. Farms sat in the bottoms where a house, a garden, and a small field could fit. Families worked timber, livestock, corn ground, gardens, and later coal-related labor as the county changed around them.
Land Records and Family Names
The best early sources for Lick Creek are not polished county histories. They are deed books, surveys, grants, tax lists, estate papers, and court records. If James Robinson acquired tracts on Lick Creek in the 1840s, those records may reveal neighbors, adjoining landowners, watercourses, acreage, survey calls, and older family movement. A deed might mention a fork of the creek, a ridge, a marked tree, a road, a line of another landowner, or a branch name that has now faded from public use.
For a small place like Lick Creek, these details matter. They can show how settlement moved up the creek, which families held land, and how land passed by sale, inheritance, marriage, debt, or partition. They can also show how a community formed before it had a post office or school. A cluster of related families on one creek could become a neighborhood long before mapmakers labeled it.
This is why Rennick’s place-name files are so useful. They are not the final word, but they point researchers toward the right records. In the case of Lick Creek, they suggest that the community’s history should be followed through Pike County courthouse material, postal files, and early twentieth-century local references.
The Post Office as a Community Marker
In the mountains, a post office was more than a place to receive mail. It was a sign that a community had become visible to the outside world. Letters, newspapers, government forms, store orders, pension papers, court notices, and family news moved through the mail. A post office name could fix a community name in federal records even when local people had been using it for years.
The Lick Creek post office history needs to be checked carefully through National Archives postal records. Rennick’s notes appear to preserve early twentieth-century post office and postmaster details, including names such as James M. Coleman, Perry J. Adkins, and Thomas J. Robinson. Those names should be followed into the Record of Appointment of Postmasters and the Post Office Reports of Site Locations.
Those site location reports are especially valuable for Appalachian community history. They can describe where a post office stood in relation to nearby streams, roads, railroad stations, routes, and other post offices. Some reports even include small maps. For Lick Creek, a postal location record could help show where the post office sat, how mail reached the community, and what nearby places formed its everyday world.
When a small community loses its post office, the name often remains in other ways. It may survive in road names, school names, cemetery names, church memory, family stories, and topographic maps. Lick Creek is one of those names that remained attached to the land.
School, Church, and Everyday Life
Old newspapers give small flashes of daily life on Lick Creek. A 1920 issue of The Big Sandy News noted that Miss Willie Moore, who was teaching at Lick Creek, was visiting home folks. It is a short notice, the kind of item that can be easy to overlook, but it tells us something important. Lick Creek was not only a creek or a post office. It was a school community.
A teacher’s name in a newspaper opens the door to a wider history. There were children walking roads and paths to school. There were families who wanted education close enough for mountain travel. There were school trustees, local taxes, county school records, and possibly a small schoolhouse that appeared on older maps or in local memory. In communities like Lick Creek, a school was often one of the strongest public institutions. It was a place where children learned, neighbors gathered, and a scattered rural settlement became a community.
Church life is harder to reconstruct without local church minutes, cemetery surveys, and family papers, but the pattern is familiar across Pike County. Churches and meetinghouses often grew near roads, creeks, and family clusters. Cemeteries marked the hillsides. Funerals, revivals, Sunday meetings, baptisms, and cemetery decoration days gave rhythm to community life. Lick Creek’s cemetery records and grave markers are important because they preserve names that may not appear in formal histories.
The Landscape on the Map
The 1954 United States Geological Survey Lick Creek quadrangle is one of the best windows into the community before later changes around Fishtrap Lake became dominant. A topographic map does not tell stories the way a family does, but it preserves the shape of a place. It shows the way streams, roads, ridges, homes, schools, churches, cemeteries, and named features fit together.
For Lick Creek, the map matters because geography was history. The creek valley shaped settlement. The ridges shaped travel. Homes and public places appeared where the land allowed them to appear. In mountain communities, maps often explain why people lived where they lived and why roads took the long way around.
Modern road maps still show the same mountain logic. Lick Creek sits within the Fishtrap Lake side of Pike County, near the Levisa Fork, Island Creek, Grapevine Creek, Feds Creek, Card Creek, and other named waters. Kentucky Transportation Cabinet maps place Lick Creek within a larger road and stream network that includes Fishtrap Lake Wildlife Management Area. The community cannot be understood apart from these surrounding waters and roads.
Coal, Stone, and the Mountain Underfoot
The hills around Lick Creek are part of the coal-bearing geology of Pike County. Early twentieth-century Kentucky Geological Survey work on the Johns Creek, Kimper, Lick Creek, and Belfry quadrangles treated the area as part of a serious coal and geology study. Later, in 1969, the United States Geological Survey published a geologic map of the Lick Creek quadrangle.
These technical sources may seem dry, but they are important. They explain the physical world beneath community history. Coal seams, sandstone, shale, ridges, benches, slips, drainage patterns, and old mine lands all shaped how people lived and worked. The geology influenced where roads could be built, where mining could occur, where homes could stand, and how water moved through the valleys.
Coal did not always turn every hollow into a large company town, but it touched nearly every part of Pike County’s modern history. Even where farming and family land remained central, coal changed wages, roads, markets, migration, land values, and the meaning of the hills themselves. Lick Creek’s history belongs to that larger Pike County story.
A Creek in the Fishtrap Watershed
The later history of Lick Creek is tied closely to Fishtrap Lake. Fishtrap Lake was created by the impoundment of the Levisa Fork of the Big Sandy River and dedicated in 1968. The lake changed the surrounding landscape, not only by creating a flood-control reservoir, but by reshaping public access, recreation, land management, wildlife areas, and the way nearby communities were remembered.
Government records describe Fishtrap Lake as a federally managed project under the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The lake and project area brought new layers of management to old community ground. Land that had once been understood mainly through farms, creeks, cemeteries, roads, and family boundaries became part of a lake, recreation, and wildlife management landscape.
Lick Creek became one of the named access points in that modern lake geography. The Lick Creek area appears in Fishtrap Lake recreation records as a place for launching, fishing, picnicking, hiking, and public access. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers notes Lick Creek among the lake’s launch areas, and Kentucky Fish and Wildlife identifies the Lick Creek Ramp as part of Fishtrap Lake access.
That modern role should not erase the older community. Instead, it shows how the same name moved through time. Lick Creek began as a natural place name, became a settlement and post office community, appeared on school and postal records, and later became part of Fishtrap Lake’s public recreation map.
Water, Sediment, and Mining
The Lick Creek watershed also appears in water and sediment records. The USGS monitoring location known as Lick Creek at Lick Creek, Kentucky, gives the stream a precise hydrologic identity. Its listed drainage area is 6.70 square miles. That may sound like a small number, but in Appalachian terrain a few square miles can hold a great deal of history.
Streams carried more than water. They carried silt, coal dust, flood memory, road runoff, and the effects of land disturbance. A USGS fluvial sediment study of the Fishtrap and Dewey Lakes drainage basins included Lick Creek data from the 1970s. This places Lick Creek inside the environmental history of Fishtrap Lake after the dam era.
For residents, watershed history was never only technical. Floods damaged roads and homes. Silt affected fishing and water quality. Mining changed hillsides. Heavy rain could turn a small creek into a danger. The same stream that gave a place its name also demanded respect.
Cemeteries and Memory
Cemeteries are among the strongest records for Lick Creek. They preserve family names, birth dates, death dates, military service, kinship, and migration. Some graves may mark families that lived on the creek for generations. Others may show people who came for work, married into local families, or returned home to be buried.
Find a Grave and genealogy sites can be useful indexes, but they should be treated as starting points rather than final proof. The best evidence comes from marker photographs, death certificates, obituaries, cemetery surveys, funeral home records, military records, church records, and family Bibles. For Lick Creek, cemetery research may be one of the best ways to recover the human history behind the place name.
A Civil War pension and burial lead connected to James Cool, who reportedly died at Lick Creek in 1914, shows how one person’s record can open several paths at once. A single burial reference may lead to pension files, military service records, death records, cemetery relocation history, and family connections across Pike County. This is how small community history is often built, name by name.
What Lick Creek Teaches Us
Lick Creek matters because it shows how Appalachian history often survives outside the obvious places. It was not a county seat. It was not a large coal camp. It was not a town built around a courthouse square. Its history is quieter than that. It lives in land records, post office ledgers, topographic maps, school notices, cemeteries, geological reports, water records, and the modern public landscape of Fishtrap Lake.
The story of Lick Creek is also a reminder that small places deserve careful research. It is easy to skip over a name on a map. It is harder, and more rewarding, to ask what that name carried. Who owned land there in the 1840s? Where did the post office stand? Who taught the children? Which families filled the cemeteries? How did coal, water, roads, and Fishtrap Lake change the place?
Lick Creek is small on a map, but it is not small in meaning. It is one of the many Pike County communities where the history of Appalachia can still be read in the land. The creek gave the place its name. The people gave it memory. The records, scattered though they are, still leave enough of a trail to follow.
Sources & Further Reading
National Archives. “Post Office Reports of Site Locations, 1837–1950.” National Archives. Last reviewed June 22, 2020. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/locations-1837-1950.html
United States Postal Service. “Sources of Historical Information on Post Offices, Postal Employees, Mail Routes, and Mail Contractors.” USPS Postal History. https://about.usps.com/who/profile/history/pdf/sources-of-historical-information.pdf
United States Geological Survey. “USGS 1:24000-Scale Quadrangle for Lick Creek, KY, 1954.” USGS Historical Topographic Map Collection. https://prd-tnm.s3.amazonaws.com/StagedProducts/Maps/HistoricalTopo/PDF/KY/24000/KY_Lick%20Creek_709117_1954_24000_geo.pdf
McKay, E. J. “Geologic Map of the Lick Creek Quadrangle, Pike County, Kentucky.” U.S. Geological Survey Geologic Quadrangle Map GQ-716. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1969. https://doi.org/10.3133/gq716
United States Geological Survey. “Geologic Map of the Lick Creek Quadrangle, Pike County, Kentucky.” National Geologic Map Database. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/Prodesc/proddesc_2024.htm
Hennen, Ray V., and Walter R. Jillson. “The Geology and Coals of the Johns Creek, Kimper, Lick Creek, and Belfry Quadrangles in Pike County, Kentucky.” Kentucky Geological Survey, 1919. https://kgs.uky.edu/kgsweb/olops/pub/kgs/ser4/12_1/contents.htm
United States Geological Survey. “Lick Creek at Lick Creek, KY, Monitoring Location 03207935.” USGS Water Data for the Nation. https://waterdata.usgs.gov/monitoring-location/03207935/
Water Quality Portal. “LICK CREEK AT LICK CREEK, KY, USGS-03207935.” National Water Quality Monitoring Council, USGS, and EPA. https://www.waterqualitydata.us/provider/NWIS/USGS-KY/USGS-03207935/
Curtis, William F., Russell F. Flint, Frederick H. George, and John F. Santos. Fluvial Sediment Study of Fishtrap and Dewey Lakes Drainage Basins, Kentucky and Virginia. U.S. Geological Survey, 1978. https://pubs.usgs.gov/wri/1977/0123/report.pdf
Kentucky Legislative Research Commission. Final Report of the Special Task Force on Fishtrap Lake. Research Memorandum No. 487. Frankfort, KY: Legislative Research Commission, 1999. https://legislature.ky.gov/LRC/Publications/Research%20Memoranda/rm487.pdf
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. “Fishtrap Lake.” Huntington District, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. https://www.lrd.usace.army.mil/Submit-ArticleCS/Recreation/Article/3632169/fishtrap-lake/
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. “Fishtrap Lake.” Corps Lakes Gateway. https://corpslakes.erdc.dren.mil/visitors/projects.cfm?ID=H105900
Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources. “Lick Creek Ramp.” Fish and Wildlife Boating and Fishing Access Sites. https://app.fw.ky.gov/fisheries/accesssitedetail.aspx?asid=498
Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources. “Fishtrap Lake Wildlife Management Area.” Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources. https://fw.ky.gov/More/Documents/FishtrapLakeWMA_All.pdf
Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. “Pike County, Kentucky County Road Series Map.” Frankfort, KY: Kentucky Transportation Cabinet, 2005. https://transportation.ky.gov/Planning/Maps/Pike_cmap.pdf
Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. “Pike County.” State Primary Road System Map. Frankfort, KY: Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. https://transportation.ky.gov/Planning/SPRS%20Maps/Pike.pdf
FamilySearch. “Pike County, Kentucky Genealogy.” FamilySearch Research Wiki. https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Pike_County%2C_Kentucky_Genealogy
FamilySearch. “Deeds, 1820–1902; Index, 1820–1970.” FamilySearch Catalog, Pike County, Kentucky. https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/111955
Kentucky Secretary of State. “Kentucky Land Office.” Office of the Kentucky Secretary of State. https://sos.ky.gov/land/Pages/default.aspx
Kentucky Secretary of State. “Non-Military Registers and Land Records.” Office of the Kentucky Secretary of State. https://sos.ky.gov/land/non-military/Pages/default.aspx
Pike County Clerk. “Pike County Clerk.” Kentucky County Clerks. https://kentuckycountyclerks.com/pike/
Rennick, Robert M. “Pike County.” Robert M. Rennick Manuscript Collection, Morehead State University ScholarWorks. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/context/rennick_ms_collection/article/1122/viewcontent/Pike_3x5.pdf
The Big Sandy News. “Hiram Mead Dead.” June 30, 1916. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/download/xt7vt43hzs40/xt7vt43hzs40_text.pdf
The Big Sandy News. “Miss Willie Moore Who Is Teaching at Lick Creek.” November 26, 1920. Library of Congress. https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ndnp/kyu/batch_kyu_flamingo_ver01/data/sn83004226/0020219588A/1920112601/0101.pdf
Library of Congress. “Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers.” Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/collections/chronicling-america/
TopoZone. “Lick Creek Topo Map in Pike County KY.” TopoZone. https://www.topozone.com/kentucky/pike-ky/stream/lick-creek-104/
TopoQuest. “Mountain View Church, KY.” TopoQuest. https://topoquest.com/place/kentucky/church/mountain-view-church/2337463
United States Geological Survey. “Geographic Names Information System: Lick Creek.” The National Map. https://edits.nationalmap.gov/apps/gaz-domestic/public/summary/496312
Pike County Historical Society. “The Forgotten.” Pike County Historical Society. https://pikecountykyhistoricalsociety.com/the-forgotten/
Pike County Historical Society. 150 Years: Pike County, Kentucky, 1822–1972. Pikeville, KY: Pike County Historical Society, 1972. https://archive.org/details/150yearspikecoun01pike
May, Eldon J., and Ruthie May, eds. Pike County, Kentucky, 1821–1980: Historical Papers. Vol. 4. Pikeville, KY: Pike County Historical Society, 1980. https://archive.org/details/pikecountykentuc04maye
Pike County Historical Society. Pike County, Kentucky, 1821–1983: Historical Papers. Vol. 5. Pikeville, KY: Pike County Historical Society, 1983. https://archive.org/details/pikecountykentuc05pike
Find a Grave. “Lick Creek Cemetery.” Find a Grave. https://www.findagrave.com/
USGenWeb Archives. “Pike County, Kentucky Archives.” USGenWeb Archives. https://sites.rootsweb.com/~usgenweb/ky/pike/
Kentucky Historical Society. “Cemeteries in Kentucky Database.” Kentucky Historical Society Digital Collections. https://www.kyhistory.com/digital/collection/LIB/id/412/
Lander, Art. “Art Lander’s Outdoors: Pike County’s Fishtrap Lake Offers Surprising Potential and Quality Fishing.” Northern Kentucky Tribune, January 29, 2021. https://nkytribune.com/2021/01/art-landers-outdoors-pike-countys-fishtrap-lake-offers-surprising-potential-and-quality-fishing/
Author Note: Lick Creek is the kind of community that shows how much Appalachian history survives in small records. If readers have school memories, church records, cemetery photographs, post office stories, or family documents tied to Lick Creek, those pieces could help preserve a fuller account.