Appalachian Community Histories – Lipps, Wise County: The Post Village Behind a Much Larger District
In the mountains of Wise County, Virginia, there are places whose names once meant far more than their modern maps suggest. Lipps is one of them.
Today Lipps survives as a small unincorporated community in the northern part of Wise County, tucked into the rugged country below the Kentucky line. A traveler could pass through the surrounding roads without realizing that the name once appeared in federal gazetteers, business directories, school records, census schedules, county court books, and maps stretching across generations.
The history becomes confusing because there were really two Lippses in the historical record. There was the small community itself, which the United States Geological Survey called a post village in 1904 and which a Virginia business directory credited with only 40 residents in 1917. Then there was Lipps Magisterial District, an enormous administrative district that included thousands of people and communities such as Coeburn, Bond Town, and eventually St. Paul.
Untangling those two places reveals something more interesting than the story of a forgotten crossroads. Lipps connects the creation of Wise County in the 1850s, the beginnings of public education after the Civil War, the growth of the coalfields, and the network of small settlements that once filled the valleys between Wise, Pound, Coeburn, and the Kentucky border.
A Name Present at the Birth of Wise County
The story of Lipps begins before the little community appeared in twentieth-century directories.
Wise County was organized in 1856 from portions of surrounding counties, and the new government immediately faced the problem of administering a sprawling mountain territory where travel could be difficult and communities were scattered through valleys and hollows. The act creating the county provided for five magisterial districts: Richmond, Gladeville, Roberson, Walker, and Lipps.
The Virginia Department of Historic Resources identifies the namesake of Lipps District as Morgan T. Lipps, the first clerk of Wise County. That placed the Lipps name among those attached to the county’s government from its beginning.
Morgan Lipps was not merely a name selected for a district and then forgotten. Records from Wise County’s first court demonstrate his direct role in organizing the new county.
On July 28, 1856, the county court met and Morgan T. Lipps served as clerk. He appointed Edward J. Culbertson as his deputy, while Andrew J. Dotson qualified as sheriff. The court also appointed Lipps, Charles F. Bond, and William H. Dean to a committee responsible for overseeing construction of the county’s new courthouse.
The proposed courthouse was a mountain government building in the most literal sense. The court ordered that it be constructed of hewn logs, thirty feet square and two stories high. Until the county could establish permanent facilities, officials conducted government from the limited buildings available around Gladeville, the community that became the present town of Wise.
Morgan Lipps remained visible in county records afterward. Surviving transcriptions of Wise County birth registers preserve certifications carrying his name as clerk during the 1860s, while the official history of the Virginia House of Delegates records that he represented Buchanan and Wise counties during the 1874 to 1875 session.
Long before Lipps became the name of a small postal community, therefore, it was already written into the political geography of Wise County.
Schools in the Lipps District
Some of the best surviving evidence for daily life in early Wise County comes not from mining records or railroad companies, but from schools.
Luther Foster Addington’s 1956 history of Wise County preserved an unusually detailed set of records from what officials called the “Lipps, or 5th School District.” Addington believed the records were particularly important because comparable documentation from the other early Wise County school districts had not survived as completely.
The first recorded meeting of the Lipps District school trustees took place on December 15, 1870, at the house of Henry Skeen. James Holbrook, Francis B. Greear, and M. T. Lipps were present. Holbrook became chairman, while Lipps served as clerk.
Their decisions offer a rare look at what building a public school system meant in a mountain county only five years after the Civil War. The trustees ordered a census of children living within the district, agreed that six schools should be established, and began planning for schoolhouses. They also proposed paying teachers $20 per month if enough money could be obtained.
Those records matter because the Lipps District was far larger than the later community carrying the same name. Children could live miles apart, separated by ridges, creeks, and roads that bore little resemblance to modern highways. Creating six schools was an attempt to make education reachable across that terrain rather than expecting every child to travel to one central building.
Decades later, the district system remained important to education in Wise County. School administration continued to vary by district, with local boards making decisions about salaries, terms, and other matters. In the early twentieth century, surviving accounts describe Lipps District schools as operating on schedules that could differ from those in Wise, Norton, Big Stone Gap, and other areas.
The result is that the Lipps name became attached not only to geography, but to generations of children, teachers, trustees, and families spread across a broad section of northern Wise County.
The Little Post Village of Lipps
Somewhere within that much larger district, Lipps also developed as a distinct community.
One of the clearest pieces of evidence comes from Henry Gannett’s Gazetteer of Virginia, published as a United States Geological Survey bulletin in 1904. Among hundreds of Virginia settlements, waterways, mountains, and geographic features, the federal publication gives Lipps a simple description: a post village in Wise County.
That brief entry says more than it first appears to.
A post village did not need to be large. In the rural mountains, a post office could give a scattered community an identity recognized beyond the immediate neighborhood. Mail connected farms and households to newspapers, catalogs, relatives, businesses, government offices, and the wider country. The appearance of Lipps in a federal gazetteer meant the name had achieved enough permanence to become part of the official geographic language of Virginia.
The community remained small even while industrial Wise County expanded around it.
By 1917, Hill Directory Company’s Virginia Business Directory and Gazetteer described Lipps as having a population of only 40. It placed the community three miles from a railroad, five miles from the courthouse, and identified Norton as its banking town.
The directory then did something even more valuable for local history. It recorded names.
Among those associated with Lipps were C. A. Day, Emmett Day, J. M. Day, James A. Day, George Gardner, G. F. Hill, H. W. Hill, Henry Hunsucker, Rufus Jones, E. Niece, Frederick Roberts, Henry Roberts, John Roberts, and I. F. Wampler.
For a community of 40 people, that list is almost a snapshot of a neighborhood.
The repeated Day and Roberts names suggest the importance of family networks common to small Appalachian communities, while surnames such as Hunsucker, Hill, Gardner, and Wampler appear elsewhere throughout the history of Wise County. These were communities where the distinction between a place name and a family landscape could be narrow. Creeks, hollows, schools, cemeteries, and settlements frequently acquired names from the people who lived around them.
Forty People and Thousands of People
The 1917 figure of 40 creates an immediate problem for anyone researching Lipps.
Federal census records seem to show thousands of people living there.
The explanation is that the census figures belong to Lipps District, not the post village.
In 1900 the United States Census counted 5,032 people in Lipps District. The same federal table showed only 2,826 there in 1890, meaning the district’s population had nearly doubled in a decade. Coeburn and Bond Town were included within the district totals.
By 1910 the district had reached 8,206 residents. Ten years later it contained 11,134 people, with the 1920 census specifically identifying Bond Town, Coeburn, and St. Paul as communities within Lipps District.
That growth reflected the transformation taking place across Wise County.
Railroads had entered the county in force during the closing years of the nineteenth century, providing the transportation network necessary for large-scale coal development. Mines, coke operations, railroad settlements, company towns, stores, and new communities followed. The Virginia Department of Historic Resources estimates that Wise County’s population increased approximately 400 percent during the three decades following the arrival and expansion of the major railroads and coal industry.
Lipps District participated in that boom even though the community of Lipps never became another Norton, Coeburn, Appalachia, or Big Stone Gap.
The 1917 business directory even listed a Lipps Coal Company, although its business location was given as Wise. The company name is a tantalizing reminder of how completely coal had entered the language and economy of the county by the First World War.
The district’s population declined from its 1920 peak to 9,478 by 1930. Census figures later recorded 9,921 people in 1940 and 10,653 in 1950. Those totals still represented an administrative area containing several communities, not the little settlement of Lipps.
Without that distinction, a 40-person mountain village can accidentally become an 11,000-person coal town on paper.
The World Recorded in the Lipps Ledgers
One of the most remarkable surviving collections carrying the Lipps name belongs to Jonathan E. Lipps, a Wise County general store proprietor who also served as a court clerk.
Virginia Tech’s Special Collections and University Archives preserves the Jonathan E. Lipps Account Books, covering material from 1892 through 1924. The collection contains records from his general store as well as court-related material.
Among the surviving records are daybooks from 1896 through 1904. They preserve customers’ names, dates, merchandise, and prices. Separate credit ledgers record purchases, payments, credits, and account balances, while other books preserve inventories and cash transactions.
These records should not automatically be interpreted as the account books of a store physically located in the village of Lipps. The archival description identifies Jonathan E. Lipps as a Wise County merchant, and more research would be necessary to establish the exact relationship of his business to the small settlement.
Yet the collection is invaluable for understanding the world in which places like Lipps existed.
A general store ledger can preserve what traditional histories overlook. Instead of governors, railroad presidents, and coal operators, its pages contain people buying ordinary goods, carrying debts, receiving credits, settling accounts, and participating in the small-scale economy of the mountains. Names that might otherwise appear only once in a census can reappear as customers whose purchases reveal something about their daily lives.
The collection even includes a county court ledger recording cases and clerk fees, along with a lumber-company ledger associated with a Wise County business operated by C. P. Addington. Together, these records provide a window into commerce, law, timber, credit, and household consumption during the years when Wise County was undergoing enormous economic change.
Lipps on the Map
Lipps did not disappear after the postal era.
Historical maps continued to record the community through the twentieth century. The United States Geological Survey’s Flat Gap quadrangle, surveyed in 1955 and published in 1956, identifies Lipps among the settlements of that part of Wise County. The same landscape contained places such as Flat Gap, Gilley, Big Laurel, and Dixiana, along with a network of branches, creeks, schools, churches, cemeteries, and mountain roads.
Those maps help explain why communities like Lipps can be difficult to understand through population statistics alone. Settlement in this part of Appalachia rarely followed the compact pattern of a courthouse square surrounded by neatly defined town limits. Families lived along roads and waterways that twisted through narrow valleys, while schools, stores, churches, post offices, and cemeteries became the anchors by which people described where they lived.
The name Lipps therefore represented a place even when there was no incorporated town government or dense commercial center.
Its geography also placed it close to the Kentucky borderlands. Mountains and political boundaries separated Wise County from neighboring Letcher County, Kentucky, on paper, but family, commercial, and transportation connections throughout this region rarely stopped neatly at the state line.
When the District Was Bigger Than the Community
By the middle of the twentieth century, the difference between Lipps the community and Lipps the district had become enormous.
National Archives records for the 1950 census divided Lipps Magisterial District into several enumeration districts. Bond Town had its own enumeration district. Coeburn had another. St. Paul had another, while rural territory surrounding those incorporated communities remained within Lipps District.
A person identified in a census, birth certificate, death record, or legal document as living in “Lipps” might therefore have lived nowhere near the tiny settlement marked Lipps on a topographic map.
Birth records preserved from Wise County demonstrate the problem particularly well. Records identify births in Lipps District at places including Dwina, Virginia City, St. Paul, and other communities. Lipps in such a record was an administrative designation, not necessarily the birthplace that a modern researcher might locate by searching for the community of Lipps itself.
For genealogists and local historians, that distinction can change an entire family story.
It also explains how a place with only 40 residents in one early twentieth-century source could simultaneously lend its name to one of Wise County’s major governmental divisions.
What Remains of Lipps
Lipps never became a major incorporated coal town. It did not grow a downtown comparable to Norton, become a railroad center like Appalachia, or develop the monumental company architecture associated with places such as Stonega.
Its historical importance is quieter.
Lipps preserves the story of the smaller places that existed between the famous coal camps and incorporated towns. Its name reaches back to Morgan T. Lipps and the organization of Wise County government in 1856. It appears in the records of early public schools after the Civil War. It became a federally recognized post village. In 1917 it was still small enough that a statewide business directory could list many of the residents associated with it individually.
At the same time, the larger Lipps District grew into an administrative region containing more than 11,000 people at the height of the coal boom.
The two histories became intertwined. One Lipps was a little mountain community. The other was a vast district containing towns, mines, farms, schools, businesses, and thousands of residents.
Both deserve to be remembered.
Perhaps that is what makes Lipps representative of so many Appalachian places. A name on an old map may look insignificant until the records are opened. Then the courthouse books, school minutes, census pages, store ledgers, directories, and topographic maps begin putting people back into the landscape.
Lipps was never one of Wise County’s largest towns.
It did not have to be.
Its history was written across a much larger piece of the mountains.
Sources & Further Reading
Gannett, Henry. The Gazetteer of Virginia. U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 232. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1904. USGS Publication Warehouse
Hill Directory Company. Virginia Business Directory and Gazetteer, 1917. Vol. 2. Richmond: Hill Directory Company, 1917. The Wise County listings identify Lipps as a community of 40 residents and also list the Lipps Coal Company. 1917 Virginia Business Directory, Wise County section
Wise County Court. Order Book. July 28, 1856. Transcribed in Virginia Appalachian Notes, vol. 15, no. 1. This record documents Morgan T. Lipps serving as clerk during the county’s first court session. Virginia Room digital copy
Virginia House of Delegates. “Morgan T. Lipps, Buchanan and Wise.” House of Delegates History. Richmond: Virginia House of Delegates. Virginia House History database
United States Census Office. Twelfth Census of the United States, Taken in the Year 1900: Population. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1901. The tables provide the early twentieth-century population of Lipps District and distinguish the district from the small village. U.S. Census Bureau historical report
United States Bureau of the Census. Fourteenth Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1920: Population. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1921. Useful for the population and incorporated communities within Lipps Magisterial District during the coal boom. 1920 Census population report
United States Bureau of the Census. Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930. Population. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1932. The report records 9,478 residents in Lipps District. 1930 Census Virginia population report
National Archives and Records Administration. “1940 Census Enumeration District Descriptions, Virginia, Wise County, ED 98-13 through ED 98-18.” 1940. These descriptions identify Bond Town, Coeburn, St. Paul, Banner, Herald, and Toms Creek within portions of Lipps Magisterial District. NARA image and description
National Archives and Records Administration. 1950 Census of Population: Wise County, Virginia. 1950. Enumeration districts 98-22 through 98-25 identify Bond Town, Coeburn, St. Paul, and surrounding territory as parts of Lipps Magisterial District. 1950 Census Wise County records
Virginia Tech Special Collections and University Archives. Jonathan E. Lipps Account Books, 1892–1924. Ms-1940-016. Blacksburg, VA: Virginia Tech. Jonathan E. Lipps collection record
Virginia Tech Special Collections and University Archives. “Customer Account Ledgers, 1900–1903.” Box 6, Folder 1, Jonathan E. Lipps Account Books, Ms-1940-016. Blacksburg, VA: Virginia Tech. Virginia Tech archival description
Addington, Luther Foster. The Story of Wise County, Virginia. Wise, VA: Centennial Committee and School Board of Wise County, Virginia, 1956. Particularly valuable for the history of Lipps District and the surviving 1870 school trustee records. Digitized edition
Virginia Department of Historic Resources. Wise County, Virginia, City of Norton, Historic Architectural Survey. Richmond: Virginia Department of Historic Resources, 1995. The survey identifies Lipps as one of Wise County’s original magisterial districts and Morgan T. Lipps as its namesake. Virginia DHR survey
U.S. Geological Survey. Flat Gap, Virginia-Kentucky. 1:24,000. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1935. Historical topographic map covering the Lipps area and surrounding mountain landscape. USGS historical map record
U.S. Geological Survey. Flat Gap, Virginia-Kentucky. 1:24,000. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1955. A particularly useful later map for tracing Lipps and surrounding roads, settlements, streams, and terrain. USGS historical map collection
U.S. Geological Survey. “topoView.” National Geologic Map Database. Historical Topographic Map Collection. This is the best federal portal for comparing multiple editions of the Flat Gap and surrounding quadrangles. USGS topoView
United States Congress. Congressional Record. 84th Cong., 2nd sess., June 12, 1956. The Wise County centennial remarks describe the county’s 1856 creation from portions of Lee, Scott, and Russell counties. GovInfo Congressional Record PDF
Library of Congress. The Big Stone Gap Post (Big Stone Gap, Wise County, Va.), 1892–1928. Chronicling America. Washington, DC: Library of Congress. A strong searchable primary newspaper source for Wise County during Lipps’s postal and coal-era history. Library of Congress newspaper archive
Library of Virginia. “Virginia Newspaper Bibliography: Wise County.” Richmond: Library of Virginia. Includes Wise News, Wise County Herald, Norton Free Press, and other newspapers useful for additional Lipps research. Library of Virginia Wise County newspaper bibliography
Wise County Historical Society. “Wise County Historical Society.” Wise, Virginia. Its collections include census research, photographs, death records, obituaries, family files, and other local materials relevant to Lipps and Lipps District. Wise County Historical Society
Author Note: Lipps is the kind of Appalachian place that can almost disappear behind the larger communities surrounding it, yet its name reaches back to the founding of Wise County itself. I wanted to separate the tiny post village from the much larger Lipps District so that the people and history of both could be understood on their own terms.