Appalachian Community Histories – Orkney, Floyd County: The Place Name That Survived on Spewing Camp Branch
Orkney is one of those Floyd County places that can disappear if a researcher only searches one name. In the official place name record it appears as Orkney, a populated place in Floyd County. In the older trail of maps, cemetery notes, family records, and local memory, it also appears as Mouth of Spewing Camp.
That alternate name matters. It places Orkney in the world of Spewing Camp Branch, Left Beaver Creek, McDowell, Price, Hi Hat, and the many small communities whose histories were often recorded in fragments rather than in one complete town history. For Orkney, the record is not found in a courthouse narrative or a single local book. It is found in map labels, cemetery names, school photographs, newspaper notices, coal records, watershed reports, and family names that stayed attached to the hillsides.
Orkney’s story is the story of a small Floyd County place whose name survived because people kept using it, because maps recorded it, and because the landscape around Spewing Camp held enough memory to keep the community from being lost.
A Name at the Mouth of Spewing Camp
The strongest starting point for Orkney is the United States Geological Survey’s Geographic Names Information System. That official record identifies Orkney as a populated place in Floyd County, Kentucky. Just as important, the name trail also connects Orkney to the older or alternate name Mouth of Spewing Camp.
The older name is plain and geographic. It points toward the mouth of Spewing Camp, where a branch and a neighborhood met the wider world of Left Beaver Creek. In Appalachian place names, that kind of name often carried more meaning than a formal town title. A mouth, a fork, a hollow, a branch, a ridge, a school, or a family cemetery could become the way people explained where they were from.
Orkney seems to have carried both kinds of identity. It was an official place name, but it was also remembered through Spewing Camp. A person could be from Orkney, from Spewing Camp, from McDowell, or from the mouth of a branch, depending on who was asking and what record was being made.
This is why the alternate name should not be treated as a side note. For Orkney, Mouth of Spewing Camp is one of the keys to the whole historical record.
Floyd County and the Beaver Creek World
Orkney belongs to the mountain world of Floyd County, one of eastern Kentucky’s older counties. Floyd County was named for John Floyd and was created near the turn of the nineteenth century. In its earliest form, the county covered a far larger section of eastern Kentucky than the modern county does. Over time, new counties were carved from it, but Floyd County remained one of the central counties of the Big Sandy and eastern Kentucky coalfields.
The land around Orkney was shaped by water, ridge, timber, road, and coal. Spewing Camp Branch and nearby Left Beaver Creek gave people a way to describe location. McDowell, Price, Hi Hat, and other Beaver Creek communities gave the area post offices, schools, stores, churches, mines, and road connections. In a region where small settlements often depended on a nearby post office or company town, Orkney’s identity was tied closely to its neighbors.
A place like Orkney was not isolated in the sense of being alone. It was part of a chain of communities. Families moved between branches, worked at nearby mines, attended local schools, buried their dead in hillside cemeteries, and appeared in newspapers under nearby community names. That is why the Orkney record is scattered across surrounding places.
To understand Orkney, a researcher has to follow the water and the roads. Spewing Camp, Left Beaver Creek, McDowell, Price, and Hi Hat all belong in the search.
What the Maps Remember
Maps are some of the most important sources for Orkney because they preserve the names of places that never became incorporated towns. The historic United States Geological Survey McDowell quadrangle is especially important. It places Orkney in the same mapped landscape as Spewing Camp Branch and Spewing Camp School. That map evidence is one of the clearest ways to see that Orkney was not just a name in a list. It was part of a lived community landscape.
Earlier and later maps help widen the picture. Historic topographic maps of the region show roads, streams, schools, cemeteries, churches, mines, and rail or industrial features. A small community may appear on one map, vanish from another, or survive only as a road, cemetery, or branch name. That does not mean the community was unimportant. It means its public record was tied to how government mapmakers, road surveyors, school officials, and local people described the same ground.
The 1910 map showing property of the Beaver Creek Consolidated Coal Company is another valuable source. It is not a town history of Orkney, but it helps explain the larger coal and landholding world around Beaver Creek. The map shows the kind of land and mineral record that shaped Floyd County during the early twentieth century. In places like Orkney, land, coal, water, and family settlement were often bound together.
The geologic maps of the McDowell quadrangle add another layer. They show why coal mattered here. The mountains were not just scenery. They were work sites, mineral tracts, homeplaces, and sources of both opportunity and danger.
Spewing Camp School and Community Life
One of the best pieces of community evidence is the photograph of Spewing Camp School from 1946. A school photograph may seem simple, but for a small place it can be one of the strongest records that a community existed as a daily social world.
A school meant children walking from nearby homes. It meant teachers, families, school events, lunch pails, books, coal stoves, muddy roads, and neighbors who knew one another across branches and hillsides. It also meant that Spewing Camp was more than a map label. It was a place where children learned, where families gathered, and where the community reproduced itself from one generation to the next.
For Orkney, Spewing Camp School matters because it ties the alternate place name to people, not just geography. It gives the researcher a visual clue that the Orkney and Spewing Camp landscape had a community life of its own.
Many Appalachian communities survive in exactly this way. A school photo, a cemetery name, and a newspaper clipping can say more than a formal town charter ever could.
Cemeteries on the Hillside
The cemetery record is another major part of Orkney’s history. Floyd County cemetery listings connect Orkney with Spewing Camp, including Orkney Cemetery, Spewing Camp Cemetery, Howell Cemetery at Spewing Camp, and burial references near Mouth of Spewing Camp.
These cemeteries help identify the family names that lived in and around the community. They also show how place names were preserved by families even when official records changed. A death certificate might say McDowell. A newspaper might say Orkney. A cemetery note might say Spewing Camp. A family story might say Mouth of Spewing Camp. Each version tells part of the truth.
In mountain communities, cemeteries often served as the most permanent local archives. Roads shifted. Schools closed. Mines opened and shut down. Post offices came and went. But the cemeteries remained on the hillsides, holding the names of people who made the place real.
For Orkney, those burial sites are not just genealogical leads. They are part of the historical structure of the community.
Coal Work and the Cost of the Mines
Orkney’s record also runs through the coal mines around McDowell and Price. Newspaper items and later historical summaries show Orkney men connected to mine labor and mine deaths. In one Floyd County Times item preserved through local history summaries, Marson Moore of Orkney was killed in a cave in at a Hamilton Coal Company mine at Price. Another report identified Elbie Gayheart of Orkney as a young man killed by a slatefall in the Edgemont Fuel Company mine at McDowell.
These names matter because they keep Orkney from becoming only a dot on a map. They show the human cost of work in the coalfields. The mines provided wages and shaped communities, but they also brought roof falls, slate falls, cave ins, black lung, widowhood, and fear that every shift might not end with a safe return home.
For families in places like Orkney, coal was not an abstract industry. It was the work that bought food, paid debts, and sent children to school. It was also the work that could take a father, son, brother, or neighbor without warning.
The coal history of Orkney should be written carefully. The available sources do not prove that Orkney was a large company town in the way some better known Floyd County coal camps were. But they do place Orkney directly inside a mining landscape. The surrounding communities, maps, mine accident reports, and geological records all point to the same conclusion. Orkney belonged to the coalfield world of Left Beaver Creek.
Newspapers, War Years, and Local Notices
The Floyd County Times is one of the best primary source paths for Orkney. Small communities often appeared in county newspapers through short notices rather than long articles. Those notices might mention visits, sickness, military service, church gatherings, mine work, deaths, marriages, property, school events, or road matters.
That kind of newspaper record can be easy to overlook. It is rarely dramatic by itself. But over time, the notices build a portrait of a community. In the 1940s, Orkney appears in local reporting connected to residents, illness, wartime life, and the everyday movement of people through Floyd County. Later notices connect the name to mining, legal matters, and family records.
The war years are especially important in Floyd County community research. During World War II, local newspapers printed the names of men entering service, families receiving news, roads and public works delayed by wartime limits, and communities adjusting to national events from the hills of eastern Kentucky. Orkney was part of that countywide story.
For a small place, even a short newspaper notice is evidence. It says the name was still being used. It says people there mattered enough to be recorded. It says Orkney had a public presence in Floyd County memory.
Roads, Branches, and Modern Traces
Modern records still preserve pieces of the Orkney and Spewing Camp landscape. Road maps, public service commission files, watershed reports, and modern geographic records continue to use names connected to Orkney, Spewing Camp, and Left Beaver Creek.
A Kentucky Public Service Commission case from the early 2000s described a communications tower site on a ridge between Left Beaver Creek and Spewing Camp Branch near Price. That kind of record may seem far removed from old community history, but it helps confirm the physical geography of the place. It shows that Spewing Camp was not only an old memory. It remained part of the official way people described land in Floyd County.
Environmental records also carry the name forward. Kentucky water quality materials identify Spewing Camp Branch and discuss mining related impacts in the watershed. This later record belongs to the legacy of coal. The same mountains that held the mines also held the runoff, refuse, hollow fills, and stream changes that followed.
The history of Orkney is therefore not only about settlement and memory. It is also about land use and what coal left behind.
Why Orkney Matters
Orkney matters because places like it make up much of Appalachian history. The famous stories of Floyd County often center on larger towns, major coal camps, labor conflicts, disasters, political figures, musicians, writers, and countywide events. But between those better known stories were communities like Orkney, where history happened in smaller records.
A child standing in front of Spewing Camp School in 1946 was part of Appalachian history. A miner from Orkney walking into a mine at McDowell or Price was part of Appalachian history. A family burying a loved one on a hillside cemetery at Spewing Camp was part of Appalachian history. A road map preserving the name Orkney was part of Appalachian history.
The work of local history is to keep those names from fading. Orkney may never have had the public profile of Prestonsburg, Wheelwright, Wayland, McDowell, or Martin. But it had people, homes, roads, schools, cemeteries, mines, and memory.
Its history survives because the records still point back to it.
The Place That Survived Under Two Names
Orkney’s story is also a reminder that Appalachian researchers have to search sideways. A community may be hidden under an alternate name, a branch name, a cemetery name, a school name, a road name, or a nearby post office. For Orkney, the important search terms include Orkney, Mouth of Spewing Camp, Spewing Camp, Spewing Camp Branch, McDowell, Price, Left Beaver Creek, and nearby family surnames.
That is how the place comes back into view.
In the end, Orkney was not simply a name on a map. It was a small Floyd County community tied to the mouth of Spewing Camp, the hills of Left Beaver Creek, the coalfields around McDowell and Price, and the families who kept its name alive. Its history is scattered, but it is not gone.
It remains in the records, waiting for someone to follow the branch.
Sources and Further Reading
United States Geological Survey. “Orkney.” Geographic Names Information System. Accessed June 15, 2026. https://edits.nationalmap.gov/apps/gaz-domestic/public/summary/508757
Rennick, Robert M. “Floyd County – Place Names.” Robert M. Rennick Manuscript Collection, Morehead State University, 2016. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_ms_collection/63/
Rennick, Robert M. Kentucky Place Names. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984. Reference description through Kentucky Historical Society. https://history.ky.gov/kentucky-ancestors/where-in-kentucky-is
Morehead State University. “Robert M. Rennick Manuscript Collection.” ScholarWorks at Morehead State University. Accessed June 15, 2026. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_ms_collection/
Morehead State University. “Robert M. Rennick Oral History Collection.” ScholarWorks at Morehead State University. Accessed June 15, 2026. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_oh_collection/
Morehead State University. “Robert M. Rennick Topographical Maps Collection.” ScholarWorks at Morehead State University. Accessed June 15, 2026. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_maps_all/
United States Geological Survey. McDowell Quadrangle, Kentucky, 1954. Historic Topographic Map Collection. https://prd-tnm.s3.amazonaws.com/StagedProducts/Maps/HistoricalTopo/PDF/KY/24000/KY_Mc%20Dowell_803773_1954_24000_geo.pdf
Beaver Creek Consolidated Coal Company, and F. W. Gesling. Map Showing Property of Beaver Creek Consolidated Coal Co. in Floyd, Knott and Magoffin Counties, Kentucky. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, 1910. https://www.loc.gov/item/2012586605/
Rice, Charles L. Geologic Map of the McDowell Quadrangle, Floyd and Pike Counties, Kentucky. U.S. Geological Survey Geologic Quadrangle 732, 1968. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/gq732
Conley, T. J. Spatial Database of the McDowell Quadrangle, Floyd and Pike Counties, Kentucky. Kentucky Geological Survey Map and Chart Series 12, 2004. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/Prodesc/proddesc_69481.htm
Kentucky Geological Survey. “KGS Interactive Map Services.” University of Kentucky. Accessed June 15, 2026. https://kygs.uky.edu/maps/
Kentucky Geological Survey. “Groundwater Resources of Floyd County, Kentucky: Mined-Out Areas.” University of Kentucky. Accessed June 15, 2026. https://www.uky.edu/KGS/water/library/gwatlas/Floyd/Minedout.htm
Kentucky Geological Survey. “Known Coal Mined Out Areas / Historical Mines.” KGSGeoPortal. Accessed June 15, 2026. https://kgs.uky.edu/kgsmap/KGSGeoPortal/KGSPortalLink.asp
Kentucky Division of Water. Beaver Creek, Newcombe Creek and Ice Dam Creek Watersheds, Floyd County, Kentucky. Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet. https://eec.ky.gov/Environmental-Protection/Water/Reports/Reports/NPS0105-BigSandy.pdf
Kentucky Public Service Commission. “Case No. 2000-002, Appalachian Cellular LLC d/b/a Appalachian Wireless.” Order, April 11, 2000. https://psc.ky.gov/PSCSCF/2000%20cases/2000-00002/PSC_Order_041100.pdf
Kentucky Public Service Commission. “Appalachian Wireless Application, Case No. 2000-002.” January 27, 2000. https://psc.ky.gov/PSCSCF/2000%20cases/2000-00002/Appalachian%20Wireless_Application_012700.pdf
KYGenWeb. “Floyd County Towns & Cities – Place Names.” Accessed June 15, 2026. https://kygenweb.net/floyd/county/list-towns-cities.html
KYGenWeb. “Floyd County KY Genealogy and Family History.” Accessed June 15, 2026. https://kygenweb.net/floyd/
Rennick, Robert M. “Floyd County, KY Post Offices.” Floyd County Historical and Genealogical Society, RootsWeb transcription. Accessed June 15, 2026. https://sites.rootsweb.com/~kyfchgs/postoffice.html
National Archives. “Post Office Reports of Site Locations, 1837-1950.” Accessed June 15, 2026. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/locations-1837-1950.html
KYGenWeb. “Floyd County Photo Album.” Spewing Camp School, 1946. Accessed June 15, 2026. https://kygenweb.net/floyd/photos/photo-pages/photopage-04.html
KYGenWeb. “Orkney Cemetery, Orkney, McDowell.” Accessed June 15, 2026. https://kygenweb.net/floyd/records/cemeteries/floyd-co/orkneycemorkneymcdowell.html
Find a Grave. “Spewing Camp Cemetery.” McDowell, Floyd County, Kentucky. Accessed June 15, 2026. https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/1961755/spewing-camp-cemetery
KYGenWeb. “Howell Cemetery, Spewing Camp.” Accessed June 15, 2026. https://kygenweb.net/floyd/records/cemeteries/floyd-co/howell-cemetery-spewing-camp.html
KYGenWeb. “Anderson Cemetery, McDowell.” Accessed June 15, 2026. https://kygenweb.net/floyd/records/cemeteries/floyd-co/anderson-cemetery-mcdowell.html
RootsWeb. “Additional Burial Sites.” Floyd County, Kentucky. Accessed June 15, 2026. https://sites.rootsweb.com/~kyfloyd/cemeteries/additional_sites.htm
KYGenWeb. “Our Yesterdays 1950s.” Floyd County History. Accessed June 15, 2026. https://kygenweb.net/floyd/county/floyd-co-history/floyd-co-history-1950s.html
KYGenWeb. “Our Yesterdays 1960s.” Floyd County History. Accessed June 15, 2026. https://kygenweb.net/floyd/county/floyd-co-history/floyd-co-history-1960s.html
Floyd County Public Library. “Floyd County History Collection.” Accessed June 15, 2026. https://www.fclib.org/floyd-county-history-collection/
Floyd County Public Library. “The Floyd County Times Digital Archive.” Accessed June 15, 2026. https://fclib.org/Floyd%20County%20Times/
FamilySearch. “Floyd County, Kentucky Genealogy.” Accessed June 15, 2026. https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Floyd_County%2C_Kentucky_Genealogy
Auxier, James. Floyd County. Morehead State University ScholarWorks, Kentucky County Histories. Accessed June 15, 2026. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1192&context=kentucky_county_histories
ExploreKYHistory. “County Named, 1799.” Kentucky Historical Society. Accessed June 15, 2026. https://explorekyhistory.ky.gov/items/show/477
Black in Appalachia. “Floyd County, Kentucky.” Accessed June 15, 2026. https://www.blackinappalachia.org/floyd-county-ky
Author Note: Some Appalachian communities survive less through one complete town history and more through maps, cemetery names, school photographs, and newspaper traces. I wrote this piece to help preserve Orkney and Mouth of Spewing Camp as part of Floyd County’s larger mountain record.