Appalachian Community Histories – Odds, Johnson County: From Daniels Creek to a Kentucky Mountain Community
Odds sits along Daniels Creek in southeastern Johnson County, roughly twelve miles southeast of Paintsville. It has never been a large incorporated town, and anyone looking for a conventional town history will quickly discover the problem. There was no courthouse square, city council, or concentrated downtown around which the story can easily be organized. Instead, the history of Odds survives in creek names, postal records, census schedules, maps, family cemeteries, old newspapers, government surveys, and the records of people who left the hollow for work elsewhere in the eastern Kentucky coalfields.
Even the name raises questions. The community was known first through Daniels Creek, which had its own post office by the early 1890s. The name Odds appeared later, becoming the postal identity of the settlement near the end of that decade. Robert M. Rennick’s place-name research and the Kentucky Atlas preserve that postal history, but neither provides a confirmed explanation for why the unusual name “Odds” was chosen. The surviving evidence is much stronger about where the community was, who lived around it, and how its people were connected to the wider Big Sandy Valley than it is about the origin of the name itself.
Before Odds Had a Name
The settlement along Daniels Creek existed generations before anyone addressed a letter to Odds, Kentucky.
One of the clearest pieces of evidence comes from a biography of Marcus Lindsey King Wells published in Charles Kerr’s History of Kentucky in 1922. Wells had been born December 5, 1848, on his father’s old homestead near the mouth of Daniels Creek. By the time the biography appeared, the writer described the same location in relation to the “present post office hamlet of Odds.”
That single description connects two different historical landscapes. In 1848 there was no Odds post office and no community formally known by that name, but there were already established farms and families along Daniels Creek. More than seventy years later, the same landscape could be explained to readers simply by saying it was near Odds.
The Wells family was only one part of a broader population scattered through the creek valley and adjoining forks. As elsewhere in eastern Kentucky, settlement followed water and terrain. Families built along narrow bottoms where farming was possible, while branches and gaps provided routes toward neighboring communities. Roads generally followed those same natural corridors.
This was not a compact village. Daniels Creek itself was the organizing feature. A person could live some distance from the future post office and still belong to the same social community through family ties, churches, schools, cemeteries, travel, and the creek road.
That older geography explains why researchers looking for Odds must also search for Daniels Creek. Before the postal name Odds became common, the creek was often the more useful way to identify the community.
The Daniels Creek Post Office
The first clear federal identity attached to the settlement came through the mail.
Postal research places the establishment of a Daniels Creek post office in 1891. It operated until 1895. Rand McNally’s 1895 Business Atlas and Shippers’ Guide included Daniels Creek as a place with postal service but without railroad service, an important distinction in a region where the railroad was beginning to reshape older creek communities.
Daniels Creek therefore belonged to the postal network before it belonged to the railroad network. Mail could connect a mountain household with Paintsville, Louisa, Huntington, or destinations far beyond Kentucky even when reaching the nearest rail line still required travel by horseback, wagon, or foot.
The surviving United States Post Office Department records are especially valuable for communities like this. The National Archives preserves site-location reports used when post offices were created, moved, or renamed. Those reports often identify nearby creeks, roads, postal routes, neighboring offices, and sometimes include hand-drawn maps prepared by local postmasters.
Johnson County’s reports are preserved among the Kentucky records on National Archives Microfilm M1126. The National Archives also cautions that when a post office changed names, records could be filed under either the old or new name. That makes both Daniels Creek and Odds necessary search terms for reconstructing what happened during the 1890s.
From Daniels Creek to Odds
The Daniels Creek post office disappeared from postal listings in the middle of the 1890s. In 1897 another post office appeared in the same general creek community under a much more memorable name: Odds.
Exactly why that name was chosen remains uncertain.
Kentucky place-name sources state plainly that the origin of “Odds” is unknown. No surviving contemporary explanation located for this article establishes that it referred to a family, store, local expression, geographic feature, or unusual event. In a region filled with colorful community names, it is tempting to invent a story that sounds plausible, but the historical record does not presently justify one.
What can be documented is that the name took hold quickly.
A Rand McNally Kentucky map from 1911 marked Odds in southeastern Johnson County near the Martin County line. By then it had become more than the name of a postal counter. It was a recognized geographic label that publishers expected map readers to understand.
That transformation was common in rural Appalachia. A post office might originally operate from a general store, farmhouse, or other private building, but once the postal name entered letters, government documents, newspapers, maps, and directories, the name could expand to describe the surrounding community.
Odds appears to have followed exactly that pattern.
The Roads Around Odds
One of the most revealing descriptions of early twentieth-century Odds comes not from a local historian but from federal surveyors.
Between 1914 and 1916 the United States Geological Survey carried out spirit leveling across Kentucky. Surveyors measured elevations along roads, creeks, gaps, and ridges, leaving behind unusually precise descriptions of places that might otherwise have disappeared from the historical record.
Near Odds they repeatedly used the post office as their reference point.
One benchmark stood about a mile northeast of the Odds post office near the mouth of Allen Wells’s Fork on Daniels Creek. Another stood farther northeast near the divide between Daniels Creek and Little Beech Fork. Still another was placed at the top of the ridge between the watersheds near the Johnson and Martin county line.
A separate survey description located a benchmark southwest of the post office near the mouth of Dog Fork, close to a church and the road.
The measurements themselves were intended for engineers rather than historians, but the descriptions preserve the physical world of Odds with remarkable clarity. There were creek crossings, road forks, churches, fence lines, apple trees, walnut trees, ridges, stumps, and narrow routes climbing toward the county line. The community was stretched through a landscape in which a few miles could mean crossing both a watershed and a mountain ridge.
That geography shaped almost everything about life in Odds. It determined where homes could stand, where children walked to school, where churches were built, how mail traveled, and which neighboring communities could be reached most easily.
Everyday Life on Daniels Creek
Newspapers provide the human detail missing from federal maps.
On June 9, 1916, the Big Sandy News published a community column headed simply “Daniels Creek.” Its contents were ordinary, which is precisely what makes them valuable.
There would be preaching on Sunday morning. Prayer meetings were being held. Residents visited relatives and neighbors. People traveled elsewhere to shop. Others made business trips outside the creek. Visitors came and went, young people attended local gatherings, and the correspondent reported the death of a community member who was remembered as a good man loved by those who knew him.
Nothing in the column suggests a town in the conventional sense. Instead, it shows a network of households connected by religion, kinship, shopping, travel, and social visiting.
The Daniels Creek column also demonstrates something important about the relationship between the two names. Even after Odds had appeared on maps and in postal records, residents and newspaper correspondents could still understand their home primarily through the older creek name.
Odds and Daniels Creek were not necessarily competing identities. They overlapped.
A family might receive mail through Odds while describing its home as being on Daniels Creek. Later records continue to alternate between those forms, and still others use nearby Van Lear as the mailing or geographic reference point.
Odds and Paintsville
For specialized services, residents looked toward Paintsville.
Rand McNally’s January 1920 Bankers Directory listed “Odds to Paintsville” among Kentucky places without their own banks and identified Odds with the symbol used for a money order office. The entry is small, but it shows Odds occupying a recognizable place in the regional commercial system. A person living along Daniels Creek might conduct everyday exchanges close to home while relying on Paintsville for banking and other services available only at the county seat.
The directory also creates an interesting problem in reconstructing Odds’ postal chronology.
The Kentucky Atlas gives one period of operation for the Odds post office from 1897 to 1914 and another beginning around 1930 and lasting until 1948. Yet the 1920 directory still identified Odds as a money order office.
There are several possible explanations. Postal service may have changed status, a directory entry may have remained after a formal discontinuance, the operating dates preserved in later references may be approximate, or the community may have received some type of service that is not captured cleanly by a simple opening and closing date.
The surviving evidence therefore should not be forced into a certainty it does not possess. The original postmaster appointment registers and post office site reports remain the strongest records for settling the precise chronology.
What is certain is that the place-name Odds remained active during the period. Newspaper reports, family records, draft registrations, and directories continued using it.
Farming and the Coming of Coal
The early economy of Daniels Creek was rooted heavily in farming, but by the beginning of the twentieth century residents lived beside one of the fastest growing coal regions in the United States.
Records connected with local families illustrate that transition.
A World War I draft registration associated with John Porter identified his residence as Odds and his occupation as farming. By the 1930 census, however, a John Porter household in the Daniels Creek precinct listed coal mining as an occupation. Whether examined through one household or through the larger census schedules, the pattern reflects the expanding influence of coal on communities that had previously depended primarily on farms, timber, and local trades.
Coal did not require a mine to be located directly in Odds to change Odds.
Men could leave Daniels Creek for employment at Van Lear, Auxier, Pike County, or farther into the Tug Valley while maintaining family connections and burial traditions at home. By the 1930s the federal census itself used “Daniels Creek Precinct,” showing that the older creek identity remained important even as the regional economy changed around it.
One tragic example demonstrates how far those labor connections could extend.
From Odds to the Marietta Mine
On February 7, 1922, an explosion tore through the Marietta Mine at Pinson Fork in Pike County. Nine miners died.
The official investigation was prepared by Kentucky Department of Mines engineer L. D. Tracy. The mine employed about fifty men and produced roughly two hundred tons of coal per day. It was a relatively small operation in the Pond Creek coalfield, where narrow valleys were increasingly filled with mines, tram roads, railroad branches, company houses, and stores.
Among the dead were Frank Collins and Joe Burchfield.
Records reproduced alongside the state investigation identify Collins, about thirty-two years old, as having been born at Odds. His body was returned there for burial. Seventeen-year-old Joe Burchfield was likewise identified with Odds and was also returned home for burial.
Their deaths connect this small Johnson County settlement directly to the larger industrial history of eastern Kentucky. Odds supplied workers to mines beyond its own creek valley, and when those workers died, the bodies came back across the mountains to the home community.
Coal employment could pull residents outward, but family cemeteries and kinship ties repeatedly pulled them home again.
The Wells and Harmon Killings
The event that placed Odds most dramatically into regional newspapers occurred just before Christmas in 1919.
On December 23, Martin Wells and Dolie Clifford Harmon were killed in the Daniels Creek area near Odds. The story demonstrates not only the violence that could accompany law enforcement in isolated mountain communities but also the difficulty newspapers faced in reporting events from distant hollows.
The first account reaching the Big Sandy News was wrong.
Its December 26 report stated that Wells had been shot by Harmon and that Wells had then shot Harmon. The report described Wells as recently returned from military service and said the disturbance involved concern among alleged deserters in the neighborhood. Wells’s body was reportedly placed in a schoolhouse while the badly wounded Harmon was also taken there.
The newspaper corrected the story in its next issue. The January 2, 1920 account said that Wells and Harmon had instead been killed by brothers Isaac and Hebe Kirk. According to that version, Wells and Harmon had arrested one of the brothers and were taking him toward Paintsville when the other brother appeared. Wells was shot and killed, and Harmon was fatally wounded when he returned. The Kirks escaped.
Later reporting connected the episode with accusations of moonshining and military desertion, and authorities searched the Daniels Creek country for the brothers. Stories about rewards, armed posses, and the pursuit spread into newspapers outside Johnson County.
The killings should not define Odds. They were one violent episode in a community history extending across generations. Yet the changing newspaper reports are historically useful because they show how isolated the upper creek country could still be in 1919. Accurate information did not travel instantly. A report could reach a newspaper just before press time, be printed incorrectly, and require another week before the fuller story reached readers.
The Post Office Returns
By about 1930, postal references again clearly place an Odds post office in operation.
Its reappearance came during a period when the Daniels Creek community was increasingly connected with Van Lear, Paintsville, and the surrounding coal economy. Roads improved, automobiles became more common, and the older world in which a rural post office could serve as one of the principal institutions of a mountain settlement gradually changed.
Family and census records from the period still preserve both names. Some residents were identified with Odds, some with Daniels Creek, and others with Van Lear. The boundaries between those labels were never as rigid as modern ZIP code maps might suggest.
The Odds post office continued until 1948 according to Kentucky postal histories. Its disappearance did not mean that the community disappeared. It meant that one of the institutions that had helped give the settlement a national address was no longer necessary in the same form.
That distinction matters throughout Appalachian history. Closing a post office can make a place appear to vanish from federal records even when families continue living along the same road for generations.
Schools, Cemeteries, and Daniels Creek After the Post Office
Maps prepared after the postal era continued to preserve the Daniels Creek landscape.
The United States Geological Survey’s mid-twentieth-century mapping of the Offutt area recorded the creeks, roads, schools, ridges, and other features surrounding Odds. Upper Daniels Creek School appeared among the local landmarks, preserving another institution around which children and families organized their lives.
Cemeteries provide an even longer continuity.
Death records, obituaries, and family histories repeatedly refer to burials at Odds, on Daniels Creek, or in named family cemeteries in the area. Those burial grounds are especially important because postal names can disappear and schoolhouses can be demolished, but family cemeteries often remain in the same hollows for generations.
The community’s geography also survives in modern federal records. Daniels Creek remains an officially recognized stream, and even a later United States Geological Survey water monitoring station carried the designation “Daniels Creek near Odds, KY.” Long after the post office closed, the federal government was still using both names together.
A Community With More Than One Name
The history of Odds demonstrates why small Appalachian communities can be difficult to research if historians rely on only one place-name.
Someone searching exclusively for “Odds” would miss much of the nineteenth-century story because the community was still understood as Daniels Creek. Someone searching only for Daniels Creek could overlook postal records, maps, military registrations, death certificates, and newspaper stories filed under Odds. Later sources might identify the same families with Van Lear.
All three names can lead into the same network of people and places.
That fluid geography was normal in the mountains. A person’s identity could be tied simultaneously to a creek, a post office, a voting precinct, a nearby coal town, and a county. None of those descriptions necessarily contradicted the others.
The older name may ultimately be the more durable one. Daniels Creek was there before the Odds post office opened, remained in local usage while Odds existed, and survived after the post office closed.
Why Odds Matters
Odds is exactly the kind of community that can disappear from written history without actually disappearing from the landscape.
Its story begins before its unusual name appeared. Families were already farming along Daniels Creek by the middle of the nineteenth century. A Daniels Creek post office gave the settlement a federal identity in 1891, and the name Odds followed near the end of the decade. Federal surveyors then mapped a world of creek roads, churches, forks, ridges, and gaps surrounding the post office.
Newspaper correspondents recorded preaching, prayer meetings, visitors, shopping trips, deaths, and ordinary neighborhood life. The Big Sandy News carried the violent story of Wells and Harmon, while national directories connected Odds economically to Paintsville. Census and family records show residents moving between agriculture and coal mining. The deaths of Frank Collins and Joe Burchfield at the Marietta Mine demonstrate how men from Odds became part of the larger Appalachian coal economy even when the mines themselves were miles away.
Then the post office disappeared.
The community did not.
Daniels Creek continued flowing past the old farms and cemeteries. Roads followed many of the same hollows described by federal surveyors generations earlier. Families continued using Odds and Daniels Creek as geographic references long after the postal counter closed.
That persistence is what makes Odds important.
Appalachian history was not created only in county seats, company towns, famous mining camps, or places large enough to incorporate. Much of it unfolded in communities exactly like this one, where a creek served as the main road through history and where a post office, schoolhouse, church, cemetery, and network of families were enough to give a place an identity.
Odds may be a small name on an old Johnson County map, but the records surrounding Daniels Creek reveal something much larger. They show how a rural mountain settlement could change names, send workers into the coalfields, remain connected to Paintsville, survive the loss of its post office, and continue existing through the landscape and the people who called the creek home.
Sources & Further Reading
U.S. Post Office Department. Post Office Department Reports of Site Locations, 1837–1950. National Archives Microfilm Publication M1126. Record Group 28, Records of the Post Office Department. Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/locations-1837-1950.html
U.S. Post Office Department. Record of Appointment of Postmasters, 1832–September 30, 1971. National Archives Microfilm Publication M841. Record Group 28. Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/postmasters-1832-1971.html
National Archives and Records Administration. “Post Office Records.” Record Group 28, Records of the Post Office Department. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices
Marshall, Robert Bradford. Spirit Leveling in Kentucky, 1914 to 1916, Inclusive. U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 673. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1918. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/b673
Marshall, Robert Bradford. Results of Spirit Leveling in Kentucky, 1898 to 1913, Inclusive. U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 554. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1914. https://www.usgs.gov/publications/results-spirit-leveling-kentucky-1898-1913-inclusive
U.S. Geological Survey. Offutt, Kentucky. 7.5-Minute Topographic Quadrangle. 1954.
Big Sandy News. “Daniels Creek.” June 9, 1916. Library of Congress. https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ndnp/kyu/batch_kyu_flamingo_ver01/data/sn83004226/00202195878/1916060901/0876.pdf
Big Sandy News. “Wells and Harmon Killed by Kirk Brothers at Odds.” January 2, 1920.
Rand McNally and Company. Rand McNally Bankers Directory. January 1925. Chicago: Rand McNally and Company. Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, FRASER. The directory lists “Odds to Paintsville,” providing unusually useful evidence for the community’s commercial and postal identity during the 1920s. FRASER FRASER edition
Rand McNally and Company. Rand McNally Bankers Directory. July 1926. Chicago: Rand McNally and Company. Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, FRASER. FRASER FRASER edition
Rand McNally and Company. Rand McNally Bankers Directory. January 1930. Chicago: Rand McNally and Company. Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, FRASER. FRASER FRASER edition
Rand McNally and Company. Rand McNally Bankers Directory. July 1933. Chicago: Rand McNally and Company. Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, FRASER. FRASER FRASER edition
Rennick, Robert M. “Johnson County – Place Names.” Robert M. Rennick Manuscript Collection, no. 84. Morehead State University Special Collections and Archives. Morehead State Digital Archives 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 & Martin Counties.
Rennick, Robert M., and Goldie Swain. “Goldie Swain Interview, Part 2: Johnson & Martin Counties.” May 21, 1971. Robert M. Rennick Oral History Collection, Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_oh_collection/166/
Rennick, Robert M., and Goldie Swain. “Goldie Swain Interview, Part 4: Johnson & Martin Counties.” May 6, 1972. Robert M. Rennick Oral History Collection, Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_oh_collection/164/
Kentucky Atlas and Gazetteer. “Odds, Kentucky.” Accessed October 2, 2026. https://www.kyatlas.com/ky-odds.html
Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives. Land Records Inventory. Frankfort: Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives. Johnson County holdings include deeds, tax books, wills, and surveys that can document Daniels Creek before the Odds postal era. Kentucky Libraries and Archives KDLA Research Guides
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.
Wells, J. K. A Short History of Paintsville and Johnson County. Paintsville, KY: Paintsville Herald, 1962. Open Library Open Library edition
National Park Service. Multiple Resources of Johnson County, Kentucky. National Register of Historic Places Multiple Property Documentation, 1988. NPGallery National Park Service documentation
Johnson County Historical Society. Historic Sites of Paintsville and Johnson County, Kentucky. Paintsville, KY: Johnson County Historical Society, 1985.
Johnson County Historical and Genealogical Society. Johnson County, Kentucky: Families and History. Paducah, KY: Turner Publishing Company, 2001.
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 Press, 1887.
Jillson, Willard Rouse. The Big Sandy Valley of Kentucky. Frankfort, KY, 1923.
Crowe-Carraco, Carol. The Big Sandy. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1979.
Scalf, Henry P. Kentucky’s Last Frontier. Pikeville, KY: Pikeville College Press, 1966.
Spaulding, Irving A., and Howard W. Beers. Mobility and Fertility Rates of Rural Families in Robertson and Johnson Counties, Kentucky, 1918–1941. Kentucky Agricultural Experiment Station Bulletin 451. Lexington: University of Kentucky, 1943.
Oyler, Merton Dale. Neighborhood Standing and Population Changes in Johnson and Robertson Counties, Kentucky. Lexington: Kentucky Agricultural Experiment Station, 1948.
Tracy, L. D. “Report on Marietta Mine Explosion, Pinson Fork, Kentucky.” Kentucky Department of Mines, 1922. Reproduced by the Pike County Historical Society. https://pikecountykyhistoricalsociety.com/the-marrietta-mine-explosion/
Blevins, Cameron, and Richard W. Helbock. US Post Offices. Historical dataset based principally on U.S. Post Office Department appointment records. https://cblevins.github.io/us-post-offices/data-biography/
U.S. Geological Survey. “Daniels Creek near Odds, Kentucky, Station 03211690.” National Water Information System. https://www.waterqualitydata.us/provider/NWIS/USGS-KY/USGS-03211690/
Author Note: The history of Odds cannot be separated from Daniels Creek, the older name that appears throughout the community’s postal, family, and geographic records. I hope this article helps preserve the story of a small Johnson County community whose history survives in maps, newspapers, cemeteries, and the families who called the creek home.