Appalachian Community Histories – Printer, Floyd County: John Printer Meade, Postal History, and the Beaver Creek Coalfield
Printer sits in Floyd County as one of those eastern Kentucky places whose name is small on the map but deep in the record. It is not a courthouse town, not a city, and not one of the better known coal camps that usually draw the first attention of historians. Yet Printer has the kind of paper trail that often preserves an Appalachian community better than memory alone. Its name appears in postal records, on maps, in cemetery transcriptions, in county histories, in coalfield records, and in the legal and newspaper record of Floyd County.
The story of Printer is not one single event. It is a place shaped by mail, family names, roads, coal land, churches, graves, and the working life of the Beaver Creek region. To understand Printer, the best starting point is not a legend, but a post office.
Floyd County and the Country Around Printer
Floyd County was created at the end of the eighteenth century and became effective in 1800. Like much of the upper Big Sandy country, its early public record was shaped by distance, rough travel, courthouse business, and family settlement along creeks and branches. The county’s first courthouse burned in 1808, which destroyed early records and left later researchers with gaps that cannot always be filled.
Printer belongs to the eastern Kentucky coalfield landscape. The surrounding country is cut by ridges, narrow valleys, small streams, and roads that follow the land rather than conquer it. Modern road maps place Printer along Kentucky Route 122 in the same broader corridor of Floyd County communities that includes places such as Harold, Dana, Honaker, Drift, Martin, and McDowell.
That geography matters. In Floyd County, many communities were not built around a courthouse square or a wide main street. They grew from a store, a school, a church, a mine, a branch road, a railroad siding, a family cluster, or a post office. Printer’s strongest surviving identity comes from that last source.
The Post Office That Made Printer Official
The post office record gives Printer its clearest public beginning. The Floyd County post office compilation used by local researchers lists Printer as established on May 26, 1909. That date places the name in the early twentieth century, when the Beaver Creek region was entering a period of major change tied to coal development, transportation, and population growth.
A post office did more than move letters. In rural Appalachia, it gave a community a recognized name. It connected scattered households to the outside world. It placed a name into government records, postal directories, maps, newspapers, and family correspondence. A person could live on a branch or up a hollow, but the mailing address often became the public name of the place.
Printer’s postal identity has lasted. The modern Printer Post Office remains part of the United States Postal Service system in ZIP code 41655. That continuity is important because many small Kentucky post offices disappeared over time. Some were absorbed into nearby towns. Others closed when roads improved or population shifted. Printer remained a postal place, which helped keep its name alive.
The Name Trail and John Printer Meade
The most important lead for Printer’s name points to John Printer Meade. The Meade Cemetery transcription for Printer, Floyd County, Kentucky, lists John Printer Meade, born in 1848 and died in 1939, and identifies him as the namesake for Printer, Kentucky. His wife, Sarah Rhodes Meade, is listed there as well, placing the Meade family directly in the local memory of the community.
That cemetery note is a strong local clue, but it should be handled carefully. Place-name history often comes down through a mixture of family tradition, post office applications, local memory, and later historical writing. The name Printer may have been preserved through John Printer Meade’s personal name, family presence, landholding, or local reputation, but the full proof would require checking the original postal application, deeds, death records, and Robert M. Rennick’s place-name notes.
Still, the trail is compelling. John Printer Meade lived long enough to see Floyd County change from a largely rural mountain county into a coalfield county tied to mining, rail, and wider markets. If the community took its name from him, then Printer is one of many Appalachian places where a personal name became a public landmark.
Maps, Coal Land, and the Beaver Creek Region
Maps help show Printer as part of a larger regional story. A 1910 map showing the property of the Beaver Creek Consolidated Coal Company in Floyd, Knott, and Magoffin counties is one of the best early twentieth century map sources for the area. It is a cadastral map, meaning it focuses on property lines, ownership, company names, and land boundaries. For a place like Printer, such a map is valuable because it shows the coal and land world that surrounded small communities in the Beaver Creek country.
Printer also appears in later map trails. Floyd County road maps, USGS topographic maps, and geologic quadrangle maps show the community in relation to roads, valleys, ridges, and neighboring settlements. The USGS Harold quadrangle is especially useful because Printer falls within that mapped area. These maps remind us that Printer’s history cannot be separated from the physical land. Coal seams, creek bottoms, transportation routes, and narrow buildable ground all shaped where people lived and how communities formed.
The coalfield did not erase older family settlement. It layered new economic life over it. Families who had lived in the area before large scale mining found themselves connected to company land, coal employment, stores, schools, and new traffic through the valleys. Printer’s history fits that larger Floyd County pattern.
Families, Cemeteries, and Local Memory
For many Appalachian communities, cemeteries are among the most reliable local archives. They preserve names that may not appear in county histories or printed books. In Printer, the Meade Cemetery is especially important because of its connection to the name-origin trail. Names such as Meade, Rhodes, Spurlock, Tackett, Hamilton, and other Floyd County families form part of the broader research path for understanding who lived in and around the community.
Census records can add another layer. The 1910, 1920, 1930, 1940, and 1950 federal census schedules can help reconstruct Printer-area households, occupations, and family clusters. In a coalfield community, those records often show miners, farmers, laborers, merchants, railroad workers, homemakers, children, boarders, and extended kin living near one another. They can also show how quickly an area changed after a post office was established.
County clerk records are another key source. Deeds, marriage records, probate files, and court orders may help connect Printer’s families to specific land, roads, and kinship networks. Because Floyd County’s earliest courthouse records were lost in the 1808 fire, the later nineteenth and twentieth century records become even more important.
Printer in the Newspaper Record
The Floyd County Times and related local newspaper collections are essential for tracing Printer after its postal establishment. Small community mentions can be easy to overlook, but they often contain the everyday history that larger records miss. Obituaries, marriage notices, church notes, school reports, land notices, crime reports, advertisements, and local columns can all place Printer residents into the public life of Floyd County.
Newspaper research also helps separate local history from later memory. A cemetery transcription may preserve a family tradition. A post office list may preserve an official date. A newspaper may show how the name was used by people at the time. Together, these sources can turn a small map name into a lived community.
A Printer Name in a Wider Floyd County Tragedy
Printer also appears in the record of one of Floyd County’s darkest public tragedies. In October 1981, a shooting at Mountain Auto-Truck Parts Store in Allen, Kentucky, left five men dead and others wounded. The Kentucky Supreme Court opinion in Bevins v. Commonwealth later described the case, the victims, the charges, and the legal proceedings. Contemporary wire service reporting identified William “Okie” Bevins as a retired miner from Printer.
The event did not take place in Printer, but Printer became part of the public record because of Bevins’s residence. For a local history article, this should be mentioned with care. It is not the whole story of Printer, and it should not define the community. Still, the case shows how even a small place can enter state and national news through the life of one resident.
Redhawk and the Modern Coalfield
Printer’s more recent history also remains tied to coal. Modern mine records and Department of Labor materials connected to Redhawk #1 Mine in Floyd County show that the area continued to be part of the working coalfield long after the early twentieth century boom years. Federal mine records, inspection reports, and mine safety documents are useful for understanding this later chapter.
These records are not the same as the older company maps, but they belong to the same long story. Printer’s history begins in the public record with a post office, but its setting is coal country. The community’s modern identity has continued to sit between family memory, postal continuity, road maps, and mining records.
Why Printer Still Matters
Printer matters because it represents the kind of Appalachian place that can disappear from broad histories if researchers only look for incorporated towns, famous mines, major battles, or courthouse events. Its history has to be gathered from smaller records. A post office date. A cemetery transcription. A name in a county map. A place-name file. A legal opinion. A newspaper column. A mine record. A family line.
That kind of history is slow, but it is also honest. It shows how communities were held together by names, mail routes, kinship, work, and memory. Printer may be small, but it is not empty. Its name carries a trace of John Printer Meade, a postal beginning in 1909, a place in the Beaver Creek coalfield, and a continuing identity in Floyd County.
In Appalachian history, the small places are often where the records become most personal. Printer is one of those places. It is a reminder that a community does not have to be large to be worth preserving. Sometimes a name on a post office wall is enough to keep a place in history.
Sources & Further Reading
United States Postal Service. “Postmaster Finder.” Accessed June 14, 2026. https://about.usps.com/who/profile/history/postmaster-finder/
United States Postal Service. “Post Offices by County.” Postmaster Finder. Accessed June 14, 2026. https://about.usps.com/who/profile/history/postmaster-finder/post-offices-by-county.htm
National Archives. “Post Office Reports of Site Locations, 1837–1950.” Accessed June 14, 2026. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/locations-1837-1950.html
KYGenWeb. “Floyd County, Kentucky Post Offices.” Accessed June 14, 2026. https://sites.rootsweb.com/~kyfchgs/postoffice.html
United States Geological Survey. “Geographic Names Information System.” Accessed June 14, 2026. https://www.usgs.gov/tools/geographic-names-information-system-gnis
United States Geological Survey. “Download GNIS Data.” Accessed June 14, 2026. https://www.usgs.gov/us-board-on-geographic-names/download-gnis-data
Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. “Floyd County, Kentucky State Primary Road System Map.” Last revised December 2024. https://transportation.ky.gov/Planning/SPRS%20Maps/Floyd.pdf
KYGenWeb. “Floyd County in Maps.” Accessed June 14, 2026. https://kygenweb.net/floyd/county/maps/index.html
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.” 1910. Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/2012586605/
Rennick, Robert M. “Floyd County – Place Names.” Robert M. Rennick Manuscript Collection, Morehead State University, 2016. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_ms_collection/63/
Morehead State University. “Robert M. Rennick Kentucky Place Name Collection.” ScholarWorks. Accessed June 14, 2026. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/robert_rennick_collection/
Morehead State University. “Robert M. Rennick Oral History Collection.” ScholarWorks. Accessed June 14, 2026. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_oh_collection/
Morehead State University. “County Histories of Kentucky.” ScholarWorks. Accessed June 14, 2026. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/
KYGenWeb. “Meade Cemetery, Printer, Floyd County, Kentucky.” Accessed June 14, 2026. https://kygenweb.net/floyd/records/cemeteries/floyd-co/meade-cemetery-printer.html
FamilySearch. “Floyd County, Kentucky Genealogy.” Accessed June 14, 2026. https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Floyd_County%2C_Kentucky_Genealogy
Kleber, John E., ed. The Kentucky Encyclopedia. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992. https://www.kyenc.org/
Rennick, Robert M. Kentucky Place Names. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984. https://www.kentuckypress.com/9780813126319/kentucky-place-names/
Moyer, Armond, and Winifred Moyer. The Origins of Unusual Place-Names. Keystone Publishing Associates, 1958. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001874571
Turner Publishing Company. History of Floyd County, Kentucky, 1800–1992. Paducah, KY: Turner Publishing Company, 1992. https://www.turnerpublishing.com/books/detail/history-of-floyd-county-kentucky-1800-1992
Kentucky Atlas and Gazetteer. “Floyd County, Kentucky.” Accessed June 14, 2026. https://www.kyatlas.com/21071.html
Kentucky Supreme Court. Bevins v. Commonwealth, 712 S.W.2d 932. 1986. https://law.justia.com/cases/kentucky/supreme-court/1986/84-sc-770-mr-1.html
United Press International. “Retired miner charged in Kentucky shooting.” October 1981. UPI Archives. https://www.upi.com/Archives/
United States Mine Safety and Health Administration. “Mine Data Retrieval System.” Accessed June 14, 2026. https://www.msha.gov/mine-data-retrieval-system
United States Department of Labor. “MSHA Impact Inspections.” Accessed June 14, 2026. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/msha/news-media/press-releases
Global Energy Monitor. “Redhawk No. 1 Mine.” Accessed June 14, 2026. https://www.gem.wiki/Redhawk_No._1_Mine
Author Note: Small Appalachian communities are often preserved through post offices, cemetery stones, family memory, and courthouse records rather than grand monuments. I hope this article helps keep Printer’s name and Floyd County story visible for future readers and researchers.