Appalachian Community Histories – Meally, Johnson County: From Buffalo Creek Families to a Lasting Mountain Community
Four miles southeast of Paintsville, the road follows Buffalo Creek into the hills of Johnson County, passing homes, churches, cemeteries, and branches whose names often reach farther into the past than the communities printed on modern maps. Here sits Meally, one of the many small eastern Kentucky places whose history cannot be understood by looking for a formal town charter or a traditional downtown.
Meally developed differently. Families were living along Buffalo Creek long before anyone regularly called the place Meally, and the surviving record suggests that the community name emerged comparatively late. The Kentucky Atlas places Meally on Buffalo Creek and dates the opening of its post office to 1921. Even Robert M. Rennick’s extensive research into Kentucky place names has not produced a generally accepted explanation for where the name came from. The origin remains unknown.
That uncertainty makes Meally an especially interesting Appalachian community. Its history is not simply the history of a place established in 1921. It is the much older story of Buffalo Creek, the families who occupied its narrow bottomlands and surrounding hollows, and the gradual transformation of a rural settlement into a place recognized by the federal postal system, commercial directories, mapmakers, utilities, and generations of Johnson Countians.
Before There Was a Meally
Long before Meally appeared on a postal map, Buffalo Creek was already a settled landscape. One of the most valuable surviving records is an approximately 1880 map prepared by the Kentucky Geological Survey and geologist Albert Rogers Crandall. The map covers Johnson and Morgan counties and portions of neighboring counties, and the Library of Congress describes it as a landownership map that identifies some individual residents. It provides a rare view of the region more than forty years before the Meally post office opened.
The importance of that map is not that it shows a community called Meally. Instead, it allows the historian to look at the place before the later name had taken hold. The creek, roads, landholdings, and scattered households came first. In a region where settlement traditionally followed streams and narrow valleys, a family’s location could be understood by the creek on which it lived rather than by a named village.
This is why the earliest history of Meally must also be searched under Buffalo Creek and the names of individual branches and families. Deeds, wills, marriages, court orders, land patents, and census schedules can preserve generations of community history even when the later word “Meally” does not appear. Johnson County’s surviving deed records extend back to the nineteenth century, while Kentucky’s land patent collections can be searched by watercourse as well as by individual landowner. The source material gathered for this article points particularly toward Buffalo Creek as the geographic thread connecting the pre-Meally settlement to the later postal community.
A 1911 Rand McNally map makes the transition even more noticeable. It identifies dozens of Johnson County communities, including Paintsville, Van Lear, Hager Hill, Williamsport, Boons Camp, Odds, Nippa, Manila, Sitka, Riceville, and several others. Meally is absent. The omission does not prove that no resident had ever used the name by 1911, but it does show that Meally had not yet reached the level of recognition enjoyed by many neighboring communities on one of the period’s major commercial maps.
The settlement existed. The name that would eventually identify it was still emerging.
The Post Office and the Birth of a Community Name
The decisive date came in 1921, when a post office called Meally opened in Johnson County. Postal records often provide the closest thing rural Appalachian communities have to a formal founding document. A post office gave a place a name that appeared on letters, government forms, directories, business records, newspapers, and eventually maps.
The National Archives preserves two collections that are particularly important to understanding that moment. Microfilm Publication M841, the Record of Appointment of Postmasters from 1832 to 1971, records the establishment and discontinuance of post offices, appointments of postmasters, and other administrative changes. Johnson County appears on Kentucky Roll 46. The records were arranged by state, county, and post office, making the Meally entry one of the most promising primary sources for identifying the people involved in the community’s early postal history.
A second federal collection may be even more revealing. The Post Office Department’s Reports of Site Locations, preserved as Microfilm Publication M1126, were created when offices were established, moved, or otherwise surveyed. Such reports could describe nearby roads, streams, mail routes, neighboring offices, and other geographical features. Johnson County falls within Kentucky Roll 219. If a surviving report was prepared for Meally around 1921, it could help establish exactly where the first office stood and how postal officials understood the community at the moment its name entered the federal system.
Those two federal collections were among the strongest primary sources identified in the research assembled for this article.
What remains frustratingly elusive is the reason the name “Meally” was chosen. Unlike many eastern Kentucky post offices named for a founding postmaster, a local family, a politician, or a nearby natural feature, no verified explanation has yet emerged from the accessible sources. That mystery should be preserved rather than filled with an unsupported local explanation. Future examination of the original postal appointment and site-location records, along with Robert Rennick’s handwritten research cards at Morehead State University, may yet provide an answer.
Meally Appears on the National Record
Within only a few years of the post office opening, Meally began appearing in national commercial publications.
The July 1925 edition of the Rand McNally Bankers Directory included Meally in its list of “Accessible Banking Points to Non-Bank Towns.” Beside the community appeared a simple instruction: Meally to Paintsville. In other words, a person or business in Meally looking for the nearest recognized banking center was directed toward Paintsville.
The entry continued. Meally was again listed with Paintsville as its accessible banking point in 1926, 1928, 1930, 1931, 1932, and 1933.
These short directory entries reveal more than they first appear to. Meally had become recognizable enough to be included in a national directory intended for bankers and businesses, yet it remained economically connected to Paintsville. The arrangement reflects the relationship between many small Johnson County communities and the county seat. Residents could live, worship, farm, work, and receive mail within their own creek community while still looking toward Paintsville for banking, government, larger stores, medical care, and other services.
By the middle of the 1920s, Meally was no longer simply an unnamed section of Buffalo Creek. It had become a postal and commercial location recognized well beyond Johnson County.
Families Older Than the Name
The people associated with Meally were, of course, older than the community name itself.
A surviving transcription of Paintsville-area hospital records, for example, identifies Albert Jennings as a resident of Meally and gives his birth as July 25, 1891, in Johnson County, the son of Press Jennings and Judy Walters Jennings. The record was created long after his birth, but it illustrates an important point about the community. Someone could later be described as being “of Meally” even though he had been born thirty years before the Meally post office existed.
This pattern is essential to understanding small Appalachian communities. Postal names can be much younger than the family networks they eventually describe. The opening of a post office did not suddenly populate Buffalo Creek in 1921. Instead, it placed a new label over a much older human landscape.
Marriage records, deeds, wills, cemetery records, and census schedules are therefore necessary for reconstructing the nineteenth-century history of the area. The families who appear later with Meally mailing addresses may be traced backward into records that identify them only by Johnson County, Buffalo Creek, a voting precinct, a neighboring post office, or a particular branch.
Meally’s true beginning cannot be reduced to a single year. The year 1921 marks when the name entered the postal system, not when people first made homes there.
Buffalo Church and the Religious Geography of Meally
One of the clearest glimpses into the community during the early twentieth century comes from an obituary published in the Big Sandy News-Recorder in August 1935.
Alvene Murphy Preston, a sixty-six-year-old Meally resident and widow of the Reverend Jesse Preston, died at the hospital after an illness. Her funeral was held at the United Baptist Church at Buffalo, and she was buried in the Preston Cemetery nearby. The newspaper described her as prominent in her locality and noted that seven of her ten children survived her.
The obituary ties together several layers of local geography. The woman was identified as being from Meally, the church was identified with Buffalo, and the burial took place in a family cemetery. Those overlapping identities were normal in the mountains. A resident could belong simultaneously to a postal community, a creek neighborhood, a church congregation, and a network of family land and cemeteries.
Buffalo therefore did not disappear when Meally appeared. The older creek identity continued alongside the newer postal one.
That relationship remained visible decades later. Buffalo United Baptist Church continued to be associated with Meally, while cemeteries and branch roads preserved family and geographic names that predated modern postal boundaries. The landscape remained a patchwork of smaller places inside the larger community name.
Meally on the Mid-Century Map
By 1954, Meally had become firmly established enough to appear on the United States Geological Survey’s detailed Offutt quadrangle.
The official map was prepared at a scale of 1:24,000, fine enough to show the structure of the surrounding settlement. Modern indexing of the 1954 quadrangle identifies Meally among the named communities and also records Buffalo School, cemeteries, roads, branches, houses, wells, and the surrounding network of creeks and hollows.
The map captures the form of the community better than a population total ever could. Meally was not built around a square or a dense business district. Settlement followed the available ground along Buffalo Creek and reached into the branches extending from it. Roads and homes adapted themselves to the mountains rather than imposing a regular street grid upon them.
That pattern is one of the defining characteristics of Appalachian settlement. A community could stretch for miles along a creek while still functioning socially as one place. Church, school, post office, family cemeteries, and neighboring households provided the institutions that held it together.
The 1954 map therefore represents something of a midpoint in Meally’s recorded history. The community had moved from an unnamed nineteenth-century stretch of Buffalo Creek to a recognized postal place, and then into the precise cartographic system of the federal government.
War, Mail, and the Importance of an Address
By the Second World War, Meally also appears routinely as an address in Johnson County records and newspapers. A 1942 Local Draft Board notice reproduced from the Paintsville Herald, for example, used “Meally, Ky.” as the postal address for a local registrant. What matters historically is not the individual circumstance of that notice so much as the ordinary way the address was used. By then, writing “Meally, Kentucky” was sufficient to place a person within the county’s geography.
Postal identity mattered enormously in rural communities. It linked people to military notices, newspapers, pensions, correspondence from relatives working outside Kentucky, government agencies, catalog businesses, and the growing national consumer economy.
For residents whose homes might lie up a small branch several miles from a larger commercial center, the local post office was one of the institutions connecting the mountains to the wider country.
Roads and Utilities Change the Community
Meally remained a recognizable service area even as the automobile, improved highways, electrification, natural gas, and modern communications changed everyday life in Johnson County.
Kentucky Public Service Commission records provide an unexpected window into this later history. A 1996 filing by Johnson County Gas Company described its underground facilities as serving Van Lear, Meally, Hager Hill, and East Point. A later gas tariff continued to list Meally among the communities served by the company.
Electrical records tell a similar story. In a proceeding opened in 2021, Kentucky Power and Big Sandy Rural Electric Cooperative addressed the transfer of four customer accounts on Prestons Branch Road in the Meally area. The Public Service Commission’s 2022 final order explicitly referred to the “Meally area of Johnson County” and described the customers as being east of Paintsville.
The documents are modern, but historically they demonstrate something important. More than a century after the post office opened, Meally continued to function as more than an old name on a map. Government agencies and utility companies still used it to describe a recognizable section of Johnson County.
The Mystery of the Name Remains
The most tempting question about Meally is also the one the surviving accessible evidence does not yet answer.
Why Meally?
Kentucky place-name historian Robert M. Rennick spent more than thirty years researching communities, post offices, and geographical names across the Commonwealth. Morehead State University now preserves more than 33,000 scanned typescripts and research cards from his work, including a specific Johnson County place-name collection. Much of that material was never included in his published books.
The Kentucky Atlas nevertheless continues to describe the source of the Meally name as unknown.
That should not be regarded as a failure of the history. Sometimes uncertainty is part of the history.
The best possibility for resolving the question may still lie in the federal Post Office Department files created around 1921, Rennick’s unpublished notes, or an overlooked issue of the Paintsville Herald. Morehead State University’s surviving newspaper collection runs from May 1915 through March 1927, placing it directly across the years before and after the establishment of Meally’s post office, although numerous issues are missing.
The source research for Meally points particularly toward those postal records, the newspaper archive, the 1880 landownership map, census schedules, county deeds, and Rennick’s unpublished materials as the strongest path toward future discoveries.
Why the History of Meally Matters
There was no single day when Buffalo Creek suddenly became a community.
Families settled the land, built homes, traveled the creek roads, buried relatives on hillsides, attended churches, married into neighboring families, and looked toward Paintsville for commerce and government. Only later did one portion of that landscape acquire a name that could be stamped on an envelope.
The opening of the Meally post office in 1921 brought that name into the national system. Within a few years, commercial directories recognized it. Newspapers used it to identify residents. Federal maps placed it on the landscape. Churches, cemeteries, schools, roads, and family connections gave the name local meaning. Utilities and government agencies continued using it long after the era when the rural post office was the center of community communication.
Meally’s history is therefore larger than the mystery of who named it.
It is a history of how Appalachian communities formed before they were formally named, how creeks and families defined places before maps did, and how something as ordinary as a post office could turn a stretch of mountain road into a community recognized across generations.
Today, Buffalo Creek still runs through the same hills southeast of Paintsville. The roads are better, the mail travels differently, and many of the institutions that shaped rural life have changed. Yet the name that entered the postal record in 1921 remains.
Meally endured.
Sources & Further Reading
National Archives and Records Administration. Record of Appointment of Postmasters, 1832–September 30, 1971. Microfilm Publication M841, Record Group 28. Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/postmasters-1832-1971.html
United States Post Office Department. Post Office Reports of Site Locations, 1837–1950. Microfilm Publication M1126, Record Group 28. Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/locations-1837-1950.html
Morehead State University. “Paintsville Herald Archive, 1915–1927.” ScholarWorks at Morehead State. Accessed October 2, 2026. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/paintsville_herald/
Paintsville Herald. Digital Archives of Johnson County, Kentucky. Accessed October 2, 2026. https://johnson.advantage-preservation.com/
Rand McNally and Company. Rand McNally Bankers Directory: Accessible Banking Points to Non-Bank Towns. January 1926. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1926. FRASER, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/rand-mcnally-bankers-directory-105/january-1926-598588/content/fulltext/rmbd_192601_12_accessiblebanking
Rand McNally and Company. Rand McNally Bankers Directory: Accessible Banking Points to Non-Bank Towns. July 1927. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1927. FRASER, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/rand-mcnally-bankers-directory-105/july-1927-598442/content/fulltext/rmbd_192707_14_accessiblebanking
Rand McNally and Company. Rand McNally Bankers Directory: Accessible Banking Points to Non-Bank Towns. January 1930. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1930. FRASER, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/rand-mcnally-bankers-directory-105/january-1930-598548/content/fulltext/rmbd_193001_13_accessiblebanking
Rand McNally and Company. Rand McNally Bankers Directory: Accessible Banking Points to Non-Bank Towns. July 1930. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1930. FRASER, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/rand-mcnally-bankers-directory-105/july-1930-598549/content/fulltext/rmbd_193007_13_accessiblebanking
Rand McNally and Company. Rand McNally Bankers Directory: Accessible Banking Points to Non-Bank Towns. July 1931. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1931. FRASER, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/rand-mcnally-bankers-directory-105/july-1931-598415/content/fulltext/rmbd_193107_14_accessiblebanking
Crandall, A. R., and Kentucky Geological Survey. Map of Morgan and Johnson Counties and Parts of Magoffin, Floyd and Martin. Ca. 1880. Washington, DC: Library of Congress Geography and Map Division. https://www.loc.gov/item/2006629764/
U.S. Geological Survey. Offutt, Kentucky. 7.5-minute quadrangle, 1:24,000. 1954. Reston, VA: U.S. Geological Survey. https://store.usgs.gov/product/864436
U.S. Census Bureau. Fourteenth Census of the United States, 1920: Population Schedules, Johnson County, Kentucky. National Archives Microfilm Publication T625. Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/research/census/publications-microfilm-catalogs-census/1920/part-01.html
U.S. Census Bureau. Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1930: Population Schedules, Johnson County, Kentucky. Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/research/census/1930/finding-aids
U.S. Census Bureau. Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940: Population Schedules, Johnson County, Kentucky. Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/research/census/1940
U.S. Census Bureau. Seventeenth Census of the United States, 1950: Population Schedules, Johnson County, Kentucky. Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration. https://1950census.archives.gov/
Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives. County Records Inventory. Frankfort: Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives. https://kdla.ky.gov/Archives-and-Reference/Documents/Inventory_County_Records.pdf
Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives. “Research Guides.” Frankfort: Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives. Accessed October 2, 2026. https://kdla.ky.gov/Archives-and-Reference/Pages/Research-Guides.aspx
Kentucky Secretary of State, Land Office. “County Court Order Patent Series.” Frankfort: Commonwealth of Kentucky. Accessed October 2, 2026. https://www.sos.ky.gov/land/non-military/patents/ccorders/Pages/default.aspx
Big Sandy News. Louisa, Kentucky. 1885–1929. Chronicling America, Library of Congress. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83004226/
Works Progress Administration and Historical Records Survey. “Johnson County: General History.” County Histories of Kentucky. Morehead State University, Camden-Carroll Library. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/index.3.html
Works Progress Administration. “Johnson County: Facts.” County Histories of Kentucky. Morehead State University, Camden-Carroll Library. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/index.3.html
Works Progress Administration. “Johnson County: Miscellaneous.” County Histories of Kentucky. Morehead State University, Camden-Carroll Library. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/index.3.html
Rennick, Robert M. “Johnson County: Place Names.” Robert M. Rennick Manuscript Collection. Morehead State University. Published online November 28, 2016. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_ms_collection/84/
Rennick, Robert M. Kentucky Place Names. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/robert_rennick_collection/
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: Morehead State University.
Rennick, Robert M. “Arthur Pope Interview, Johnson County, Kentucky.” Robert M. Rennick Oral History Collection. Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_oh_collection/index.8.html
Hall, 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, Kentucky: History and Families. Paducah, KY: Turner Publishing Company, 2001. https://turnerpublishing.com/products/johnson-co-ky
Kentucky Atlas and Gazetteer. “Meally.” Accessed October 2, 2026. https://www.kyatlas.com/ky-meally.html
Johnson County KYGenWeb. “Johnson County Kentucky Place Names.” Accessed October 2, 2026. https://kygenweb.net/johnson/JoCoPlaces.htm
Johnson County KYGenWeb. “Paintsville Johnson Co. Ky.” Accessed October 2, 2026. https://kygenweb.net/johnson/R1.htm
Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. “Printable Maps.” Frankfort: Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. Accessed October 2, 2026. https://transportation.ky.gov/Pages/Printable-Maps.aspx
Kentucky Public Service Commission. Application of Kentucky Frontier Gas, LLC. Case No. 2008-00394. Frankfort: Kentucky Public Service Commission, 2008. https://psc.ky.gov/pscscf/2008%20cases/2008-00394/kyfrontiergas_application1_092408.pdf
Blevins, Cameron, and Richard W. Helbock. US Post Offices. Historical GIS dataset. Stanford University. Accessed October 2, 2026. https://cblevins.github.io/us-post-offices/
Author Note: Meally’s history survives across postal records, maps, newspapers, county documents, and the memories of families who lived along Buffalo Creek. If you have photographs, family records, church documents, post office material, or stories connected to Meally, I would be glad to hear from you and help preserve them.