Appalachian Community Histories – Manila, Johnson County: From Fishtrap Church to a Post Office Named for Manila Bay
In the hills of Johnson County, Kentucky, the community of Manila carries a name that seems at first to belong almost anywhere but eastern Kentucky. Its origins reach across the Pacific Ocean to one of the most celebrated American military victories of 1898, yet the community itself grew from a much older Appalachian landscape of family farms, mountain roads, churches, branches, and scattered settlements.
Manila did not suddenly appear when its post office received a name. Families had been living in the surrounding country for generations before 1898, and one of the most important surviving pieces of that older history is Fishtrap United Baptist Church, whose congregation built a log meetinghouse in the area in 1843. The postal name came later, at a moment when news of the Spanish-American War was filling newspapers across the United States and Commodore George Dewey had become a national hero.
The result was one of Johnson County’s more unusual place names. A small community in the mountains of eastern Kentucky became permanently linked to Manila Bay in the Philippines, while the records left behind by churches, postmasters, mapmakers, newspapers, census takers, and local families preserved a history that extends much farther back than the name itself.
Before There Was a Manila
To understand Manila, it is necessary to begin before anyone in Johnson County called the place by that name.
Nineteenth-century rural eastern Kentucky was filled with settlements that did not necessarily have formal boundaries, governments, or even universally accepted names. Families commonly identified places through waterways, branches, churches, stores, mills, school districts, post offices, or the surnames of prominent landowners. A locality might exist for decades before appearing under a recognizable modern name on a federal map.
That is especially important in Manila’s case. Researchers looking for the community before 1898 can easily come away believing there was little settlement there simply because the word “Manila” does not appear. Earlier records instead have to be searched through nearby geographic names such as Paint Creek, Fishtrap, McCarty Branch, Low Gap, and the names of individual families who owned land in the surrounding valleys.
Johnson County itself had been created in 1843, the same year associated with one of the most important surviving historic structures from the Manila vicinity. As farms and households spread along the county’s creeks and branches, churches served as some of the most durable institutions binding those scattered families together.
For the area that would later be identified with Manila, Fishtrap United Baptist Church became one of those anchors.
Fishtrap United Baptist Church
The Historic American Buildings Survey documentation preserved by the Library of Congress identifies Fishtrap United Baptist Church at Paint Creek in the Manila vicinity as having been constructed in 1843. The federal survey describes it as one of the earliest log churches in Johnson County and notes both the simplicity of the building and the quality of its interior woodwork. Six Historic American Buildings Survey photographs taken in June 1978 preserve the church’s appearance before it became part of the Mountain Homeplace historical complex.
The church is important because its history demonstrates that the community surrounding modern Manila was established long before the postal name appeared.
According to historical documentation assembled for Paintsville Lake, local members cooperated in building the church, with families supplying logs for its construction. The building was later covered with weatherboard, giving the exterior seen in twentieth-century photographs while preserving the earlier log structure underneath. The research surrounding the church supports an 1843 construction date and identifies 1905 as the year weatherboarding was added.
There is a small archival complication. One National Register continuation sheet describes the Fishtrap church as being built of logs in 1905, but that date conflicts with the more detailed Historic American Buildings Survey documentation, which identifies 1843 as the original construction year. The surviving evidence therefore supports 1843 as the stronger date, with the early twentieth century representing alteration rather than original construction.
The distinction matters. If the church began in 1843, then a recognizable religious community existed in the Manila vicinity more than half a century before the Manila post office opened.
Fishtrap Church continued serving local residents deep into the twentieth century. Today the building survives at Mountain Homeplace near Paintsville Lake, where it stands as part of a collection intended to preserve nineteenth-century eastern Kentucky life. Modern accounts of the historic site identify the old church as one of its central structures.
Its preservation gives Manila something many small Appalachian communities have lost: a physical connection to the era before the community possessed the name by which it is known today.
A Name Arrives from the Philippines
The name Manila entered Johnson County history during the summer of 1898.
Robert M. Rennick, whose extensive work on Kentucky place names remains one of the most important resources for understanding the state’s small communities, traced Manila’s post office to July 1, 1898. Rennick’s research identifies the Battle of Manila Bay as the inspiration for the name. His Johnson County place-name manuscript is preserved by Morehead State University as part of the Robert M. Rennick Manuscript Collection.
The timing could hardly have been more direct.
Only two months earlier, on May 1, 1898, Commodore George Dewey had led the United States Asiatic Squadron into Manila Bay during the Spanish-American War. The Naval History and Heritage Command describes Dewey’s attack as a devastating victory over the Spanish naval force in the Philippines. By the end of the fighting, the Spanish squadron had been effectively destroyed while the American force suffered remarkably little damage.
The battle immediately became national news.
Official Navy correspondence preserved from the period shows just how quickly Dewey’s victory captured the attention of Washington. On May 3, Secretary of the Navy John D. Long sent Dewey congratulations and informed him that President William McKinley highly appreciated the achievement. Dewey soon reported that American forces controlled Manila Bay and had taken possession of the naval station at Cavite.
Thousands of miles away in eastern Kentucky, that victory supplied the name for a new postal locality.
Naming a community after a current event was not unusual in nineteenth-century America. Post offices frequently supplied permanent names to places that previously had been known by branches, creeks, stores, or individual families. In Manila’s case, the choice fixed an international event into the geography of Johnson County.
The name also tells us something about how connected rural Appalachia already was to the wider country. Residents might have lived among steep hills and narrow valleys, but newspapers, postal routes, political discussion, military service, and commercial networks brought national and international events into those communities. The same war being fought in Cuba and the Philippines could leave its mark on a Kentucky post office within weeks.
The Post Office and the Making of a Community
For a scattered rural settlement, the establishment of a post office could be one of the most important steps in acquiring a lasting identity.
The records of the United States Post Office Department are particularly valuable for communities such as Manila because federal officials recorded establishments, discontinuances, postmasters, relocations, and other changes. The National Archives’ Record of Appointment of Postmasters covers the period from 1832 through 1971 and is arranged by state, county, and post office. Johnson County appears on Kentucky Roll 46, which covers counties alphabetically from Grayson through Knott.
A separate federal collection, Post Office Reports of Site Locations, survives for the period from 1837 through 1950. These reports could contain the county and state, mail routes, distances, nearby waterways and roads, surrounding post offices, and sketch maps prepared to show where an office stood. Some forms even recorded the approximate number of families or people the proposed office would serve. Johnson County falls within Kentucky Roll 219 of that series.
Such records are especially revealing in Appalachia because the post office often became the formal name attached to a place whose boundaries remained informal.
Manila was not incorporated as a town with a courthouse square, elected municipal government, or clearly surveyed limits. Instead, the postal designation provided a practical center for an area of farms and homes spread through the surrounding terrain. Letters addressed to Manila gave people a common locality even when their houses stood some distance apart.
Over time, that postal identity became the community identity.
Manila and Paintsville
A revealing glimpse of Manila’s place within the wider Johnson County economy appears in an unlikely source: a national banking directory.
The July 1910 edition of the Rand McNally Bankers Directory included a section identifying towns without their own banks and directing readers toward accessible banking points. For Manila, the listing was simple: “Manila to Paintsville.”
The entry is only a few words long, but it says a great deal.
By 1910, barely twelve years after the post office reportedly opened, Manila was established enough to appear in a national commercial directory. At the same time, residents relied on Paintsville as the nearest important financial center. The relationship reflected a pattern familiar throughout eastern Kentucky, where small postal communities maintained their own churches, stores, schools, and neighborhood identities while depending on county seats for banks, courts, larger merchants, professional services, and government business.
That relationship persisted. The January 1919 Rand McNally directory again directed Manila to Paintsville for banking services, and a 1920 edition did the same.
Manila therefore occupied a recognizable position within Johnson County’s hierarchy of communities. It was distinct enough to possess a name and post office, yet closely tied to Paintsville for services that could not be supported locally.
Manila on the Map
Historical maps provide another way to watch the community emerge.
Maps of the region made before 1898 are particularly valuable because they show the landscape before Manila became the recognized postal name. The 1886 and 1892 Prestonsburg quadrangles cover the broader area and allow researchers to examine roads, streams, settlements, and transportation routes that existed before the new name appeared.
After the post office was established, the documentary landscape changes. Early twentieth-century maps begin to reflect the community’s growing geographic identity. USGS maps from 1915 and 1917 can be compared with later Oil Springs quadrangles from 1954, 1962, and 1992, allowing the development of roads, structures, schools, churches, and other features to be followed across generations. The 1962 mapping is particularly valuable because it identifies the Manila Post Office itself.
Modern USGS mapping still identifies Manila on the Oil Springs quadrangle, surrounded by the narrow roads, ridges, streams, and hollows that have always shaped settlement in this part of Johnson County.
The maps help explain why Manila never developed like a conventional town. Eastern Kentucky geography rarely encouraged settlement into neat grids. Houses followed valleys and roadways, agricultural land occupied the limited level ground, and communities often stretched along waterways rather than clustering around a central square.
In such places, the post office, church, school, general store, or road junction mattered more than a municipal boundary.
Families Behind the Place Name
The history of Manila is also the history of the families who used the name.
Newspapers provide scattered but valuable evidence of residents identifying themselves with the community. The Big Sandy News and related regional newspapers carried references to Manila residents during the early twentieth century, including a 1916 reference to Dan Davis of Manila and a 1935 notice concerning Harve Colvin of Manila, described as a World War I veteran and miner.
These small newspaper appearances are important because communities such as Manila rarely generated lengthy histories of their own. Their stories instead survive in fragments: an obituary, a marriage notice, an accident report, a school announcement, a property transfer, a church gathering, or the appointment of a postmaster.
The Johnson County Public Library’s Patricia Patton Kentucky Room preserves precisely the kinds of records needed to reconstruct that history. Its holdings include local newspapers such as the Big Sandy News and The Paintsville Herald, as well as census records, deeds, marriage certificates, birth and death records, court orders, tax records, maps, photographs, church records, cemetery information, and family histories. Many newspapers have also been digitized for searching.
Census records are another essential source, although Manila presents a challenge familiar to historians of small Appalachian communities. Residents may not always appear under “Manila” as a searchable place. They can instead be found in enumeration districts associated with neighboring areas, roads, branches, or postal addresses.
The 1900 census is particularly important because it was taken only two years after Manila’s post office was established. Census schedules from 1910 through 1950 can then be used to follow occupations, households, property ownership, family relationships, and movement across several generations.
The resulting history is unlikely to look like the history of a city. There may be no mayoral administrations to trace and few major public buildings to chronicle. Manila’s story lies instead in households and networks of kinship stretching from one branch to another.
Schools, Roads, and Everyday Life
Education offers another route into Manila’s early history.
Johnson County school census records survive for the years surrounding Manila’s emergence as a named community. These records can identify children and households that ordinary historical narratives overlook and can help establish which families lived in the vicinity during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
County court records are equally promising. Roads and bridges mattered enormously in mountain communities, where a few miles could represent a difficult journey when travel followed creek beds, ridges, and unimproved roads. Court orders concerning road maintenance, school districts, bridges, and public improvements can therefore reveal how a community was connected to the rest of the county.
Deeds and tax lists reach even farther back.
Because the word Manila is unlikely to appear in land records from the first half of the nineteenth century, researchers have to work backward from later property owners and geographic features. Kentucky Land Office patents, Johnson County deeds, tax books, probate files, and court orders can reveal who occupied the surrounding land before anyone thought to call the place Manila.
That method changes the way the community’s beginning should be understood. July 1898 marks the beginning of Manila as a postal name, not the beginning of human settlement in the area.
Fishtrap Church alone demonstrates the difference.
The Landscape Beneath Manila
The physical landscape has always played an important role in shaping settlement in this part of Johnson County.
The community lies within the Oil Springs quadrangle, an area mapped extensively by the United States Geological Survey. William F. Outerbridge’s 1967 Geologic Map of the Oil Springs Quadrangle documented the formations underlying Manila and the surrounding countryside at a scale of 1:24,000.
These federal surveys place Manila within the broader Eastern Kentucky Coal Field, where steep terrain dictated where roads, houses, farms, and communities could develop. Oil and gas exploration also formed part of the economic history of the surrounding Oil Springs region.
Yet Manila itself remained primarily a rural community rather than developing into one of eastern Kentucky’s major industrial centers. That distinction is important. Coal, oil, timber, and later highway construction transformed Johnson County as a whole, but many smaller communities retained identities built more around families, churches, schools, post offices, and nearby roads than around a single large industrial operation.
The persistence of the Manila name reflects that kind of community continuity.
Fishtrap Church and the Preservation of Memory
One of the most remarkable parts of Manila’s history is that its oldest major landmark survived.
By the late twentieth century, historians and preservationists recognized Fishtrap United Baptist Church as an unusually important example of early Johnson County architecture. The Historic American Buildings Survey documented the structure photographically in 1978, preserving views of its exterior and interior as part of a national architectural record.
The church was eventually moved as part of the historical preservation work associated with Paintsville Lake and Mountain Homeplace. Rather than disappearing like so many rural churches and schools, it became part of a larger effort to interpret nineteenth-century Appalachian life.
Its relocation changed the building’s physical setting, but it also helped guarantee its survival.
For Manila, the church serves as a reminder that the community’s deepest history cannot be measured only from the opening of its post office. By the time Americans were celebrating Dewey’s victory at Manila Bay in 1898, generations of Johnson Countians had already worshiped in the Fishtrap church, traveled the surrounding roads, farmed land along nearby waterways, married into neighboring families, and buried their dead in the hills.
The name changed. The community beneath it was much older.
A Kentucky Manila
There is something fitting about Manila’s history being preserved in fragments.
One fragment comes from an 1843 church. Another comes from an 1898 post office. Others appear on topographic maps, in census schedules, newspaper notices, banking directories, deed books, tax records, and the pages of Robert M. Rennick’s place-name research.
Together they show how an Appalachian community could acquire an identity without ever becoming a conventional town.
The Manila known today grew from the geography of Johnson County, but its name came from an event on the other side of the world. On May 1, 1898, American warships entered Manila Bay. Two months later, according to Rennick’s research, Manila entered Kentucky’s postal geography.
That unusual connection gives the community a memorable name, but the Battle of Manila Bay is only the opening line of its story. The deeper history belongs to Paint Creek and Fishtrap, to the families who supplied logs for a church in 1843, to postmasters sorting letters for scattered mountain households, to residents traveling to Paintsville for banking and county business, and to generations who continued using Manila as the name of home.
For a place that never became a large town, Manila left a surprisingly rich documentary trail.
Its history reminds us that Appalachian communities do not have to be large to possess long, complicated pasts. Sometimes the story of a place can be found in a church wall, a postal ledger, a few words in a banking directory, and a name carried from a naval battle half a world away.
Sources & Further Reading
National Archives and Records Administration. Post Office Reports of Site Locations, 1837–1950. Microfilm Publication M1126, Records of the Post Office Department, Record Group 28. Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/locations-1837-1950.html National Archives
National Archives and Records Administration. Record of Appointment of Postmasters, 1832–September 30, 1971. Microfilm Publication M841, Records of the Post Office Department, Record Group 28. Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/postmasters-1832-1971.html National Archives
Historic American Buildings Survey. “Fishtrap United Baptist Church, Paint Creek, Manila, Johnson County, KY.” HABS KY-135. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. Photographed June 1978. https://www.loc.gov/resource/hhh.ky0038.photos/ The Library of Congress
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Huntington District. Paintsville Lake Master Plan and Integrated Environmental Assessment. Huntington, WV: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 2023. https://usace.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p16021coll7/id/24884 Wikimedia Commons
National Park Service. Multiple Resources of Johnson County, Kentucky. National Register of Historic Places Multiple Property Documentation. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of the Interior. https://npgallery.nps.gov/NRHP/GetAsset/NRHP/64000234_text
Rennick, Robert M. “Johnson County – Place Names.” Robert M. Rennick Manuscript Collection, no. 84. Morehead State University, 2016. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_ms_collection/84/ Morehead State Digital Archives
Rennick, Robert M. Kentucky Place Names. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984.
Rennick, Robert M. The Post Offices of Kentucky’s Big Sandy Valley: A Survey of the 341 Post Offices of Floyd, Johnson, Magoffin, and Martin Counties. Morehead, KY: Robert M. Rennick.
Morehead State University. Robert M. Rennick Kentucky Place Name Collection. Camden-Carroll Library, Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/robert_rennick_collection/ Morehead State Digital Archives
Morehead State University. Robert M. Rennick Manuscript Collection. Camden-Carroll Library, Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_ms_collection/ Morehead State Digital Archives
Morehead State University. Robert M. Rennick Oral History Collection. Camden-Carroll Library, Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_oh_collection/ Morehead State Digital Archives
Works Progress Administration and Historical Records Survey. “Johnson County – General History.” County Histories of Kentucky. Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/index.3.html Morehead State Digital Archives
Works Progress Administration. “Johnson County – Facts.” County Histories of Kentucky. Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/index.3.html Morehead State Digital Archives
Works Progress Administration. “Johnson County – Miscellaneous.” County Histories of Kentucky. Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/index.3.html Morehead State Digital Archives
Morehead State University. County Histories of Kentucky. Camden-Carroll Library. Collection of Federal Writers’ Project surveys, manuscripts, oral histories, and county materials, primarily 1936–1939. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/ Morehead State Digital Archives
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. Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/24020324/ The Library of Congress
Hall, C. Mitchel. Johnson County, Kentucky: A History of the County, and Genealogy of Its People Up to the Year 1927. 2 vols. Louisville: Standard Press, 1928.
Johnson County Historical Society. Historic Sites of Paintsville and Johnson County, Kentucky. Paintsville, KY: Johnson County Historical Society, 1985. https://heritagebooks.com/products/101-j2471 Heritage Books, Inc.
Johnson County Historical and Genealogical Society. Johnson County, Kentucky: Families and History. Paducah, KY: Turner Publishing Company, 2001. https://heritagebooks.com/products/101-j1756 Heritage Books, Inc.
Baker, J. A. Geology and Ground-Water Resources of the Paintsville Area, Kentucky. U.S. Geological Survey Water-Supply Paper 1257. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1955. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/wsp1257 USGS Publications
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://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/gq586
U.S. Geological Survey. Prestonsburg Quadrangle, Kentucky. Topographic map, 1886.
U.S. Geological Survey. Prestonsburg Quadrangle, Kentucky. Topographic map, 1892.
U.S. Geological Survey. Paintsville Quadrangle, Kentucky. Topographic map, 1915.
U.S. Geological Survey. Paintsville Quadrangle, Kentucky. Topographic map, 1917.
U.S. Geological Survey. Oil Springs Quadrangle, Kentucky. Topographic map, 1954, published 1955.
U.S. Geological Survey. Oil Springs Quadrangle, Kentucky. Topographic map, 1962, published 1964.
Rand McNally and Company. Bankers Directory. Chicago: Rand McNally, January 1910. Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, FRASER. https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/
Kentucky Secretary of State. “Kentucky Land Office.” Frankfort: Commonwealth of Kentucky. https://www.sos.ky.gov/land/Pages/default.aspx
Johnson County Public Library. “Local History and Genealogy Resources.” Patricia Patton Kentucky Room, Paintsville, Kentucky. https://johnsoncountypubliclibrary.org/using-your-library/
U.S. Census Bureau. Twelfth Census of the United States, 1900: Johnson County, Kentucky. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1900.
U.S. Census Bureau. Thirteenth Census of the United States, 1910: Johnson County, Kentucky. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1910.
U.S. Census Bureau. Fourteenth Census of the United States, 1920: Johnson County, Kentucky. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1920.
U.S. Census Bureau. Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1930: Johnson County, Kentucky. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1930.
U.S. Census Bureau. Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940: Johnson County, Kentucky. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1940.
U.S. Census Bureau. Seventeenth Census of the United States, 1950: Johnson County, Kentucky. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1950.
Author Note: If you have photographs, family records, post office material, church documents, or memories connected to Manila or Fishtrap, I would be glad to hear from you. Small pieces of local history can help preserve a fuller record of this Johnson County community for future readers.