Appalachian Community Histories – Red Hill, Perry County: A School, a Church, and a Cemetery Near Chavies
Red Hill is one of those Perry County places that survives best in fragments. It does not appear in the record as a town with a long written history, a post office story, or a single founding document. Instead, it comes into view through maps, cemetery records, school lists, local newspapers, and the names of families buried on the hill above Chavies.
The strongest location evidence places Red Hill in eastern Perry County, near Chavies and Krypton, on the Krypton, Kentucky topographic quadrangle. USGS historical map material and derived place records identify Red Hill as a historical populated place, while the same map neighborhood also preserves Red Hill Cemetery and Red Hill Church. The 1954 USGS Krypton quadrangle shows Red Hill and a school marking, and the 1961 Krypton quadrangle is especially important because its indexed text refers to “Red Hill Sch.”
That map evidence matters because Red Hill was not simply a surname, a road name, or a cemetery name. In the middle decades of the twentieth century, Red Hill was recognizable enough to appear as a place on government maps and as a community reference in county election notices. The University of Texas Perry-Castañeda Library notes that its Kentucky historical topographic maps were published by the U.S. Geological Survey and are public domain, making those older quadrangles some of the best primary map sources for reconstructing places like Red Hill.
The School at Red Hill
The clearest public institution tied to Red Hill was Red Hill School. A Perry County schoolhouse transcription for 1940 lists Red Hill among the county schoolhouses and names Sarah Riley and Ella White as teachers. Because that source is a transcription, the safest way to use it is as a strong lead rather than the final word. Still, it fits well with the map and newspaper record, which also place a school at Red Hill.
By 1965, Red Hill School was still recognizable as a public community landmark. In the May 20, 1965 issue of The Hazard Herald, a notice for the Perry County primary election listed the polling places for the county’s precincts. The notice named “Red Hill school” as the polling place for No. 2, Krypton, by the railroad crossing. That small item says a great deal. It shows that Red Hill School was not only a place where children had learned, but also a public building where adults gathered to vote.
In mountain communities, schools often served more than one purpose. They were classrooms, meeting places, voting houses, social centers, and landmarks in directions. Red Hill fits that pattern. The school’s appearance on maps and in the local newspaper shows that it stood at the center of a small community network tied to Chavies, Krypton, Spencer Creek, and the North Fork Kentucky River valley.
Church, Cemetery, and Family Memory
Red Hill also survives through Red Hill Church and Red Hill Cemetery. The cemetery is especially important because it holds the names of people who made the place more than a dot on a map. Find a Grave identifies Red Hill Cemetery at Chavies in Perry County and lists hundreds of memorial records there. Like all cemetery databases, it should be checked against gravestones, death certificates, obituaries, and local cemetery books, but it gives a useful starting point for family reconstruction.
A Combs family cemetery transcription gives a closer look at one part of the burial ground. The compiler wrote that Red Hill Cemetery was walked in March 2005 and that the listing included legible Combs markers from the cemetery. The same transcription makes clear that Red Hill was larger than a small family burying ground and that many additional stones were present.
This is where Red Hill becomes less a lost community and more a lived one. The cemetery connects the place to families who worked, worshiped, married, raised children, and buried their dead in the Chavies and Krypton area. Names on stones can lead into Kentucky death certificates, Perry County marriage records, census schedules, church records, obituaries, and land records. Those records are where a fuller history of Red Hill can still be built.
A North Fork Community
Red Hill belonged to the wider geography of the North Fork Kentucky River. The Water Quality Portal lists a USGS site named “North Fork Kentucky River at Chavies, KY” in Perry County, with the monitoring location near the Red Hill and Chavies area. The Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife describes the North Fork as beginning in Letcher County and flowing northwest through Whitesburg, Hazard, and Jackson before joining the South Fork at Beattyville.
That river geography helps explain why small places like Red Hill mattered. Eastern Kentucky communities often formed along creeks, forks, branch roads, rail crossings, schools, churches, and family cemeteries. Red Hill was part of that same pattern. It was near Chavies and Krypton, close to the North Fork corridor, and tied to a landscape of ridges, hollows, roads, schools, and burial grounds.
The land itself also has a documentary trail. Robert B. Mixon’s 1965 USGS publication, Geology of the Krypton Quadrangle, Kentucky, covers the quadrangle where Red Hill appears. The USGS record identifies the work as Geologic Quadrangle 389, published in 1965 at a scale of 1:24,000. For a local history article, that geologic source is useful because it places Red Hill inside the coalfield landscape that shaped settlement, roads, work, and land use in Perry County.
The USDA soil survey for Leslie and Perry Counties adds another layer. HathiTrust identifies Raymond A. Hayes as the main author of the 1982 Soil Survey of Leslie and Perry Counties, Kentucky, published by the U.S. Department of Agriculture Soil Conservation Service and Forest Service. That kind of source helps explain the physical setting of Red Hill, including the steep land, narrow bottomlands, and soil conditions that shaped farming, roads, building sites, and cemeteries.
Perry County Context
Perry County itself was formed in 1821 from Clay and Floyd counties. The Kentucky Atlas and Gazetteer places the county in Kentucky’s Eastern Coal Field and notes that its elevation ranges from about 700 to 2,520 feet. The same source identifies Hazard as the county seat and places Perry County within the Appalachian region.
Red Hill’s history belongs inside that larger Perry County story, but it should not be swallowed by it. County histories often preserve the names of courthouses, coal companies, roads, wars, floods, and county seats, while smaller schoolhouse communities disappear into cemetery records and old maps. Red Hill is the kind of place that requires a slower method. The historian has to begin with a map, then follow the school, then follow the cemetery, then follow the families.
That method also prevents a common mistake. Red Hill should not be merged too quickly with every nearby Red Hill Road, every person with the surname Hill, or every Perry County family name that appears in the same area. The better approach is to keep the evidence tied to specific records. Red Hill School, Red Hill Church, Red Hill Cemetery, Chavies, Krypton, Right Fork Spencer Creek, and the North Fork Kentucky River form the strongest documentary cluster.
What the Records Do Not Say
The available sources do not yet give a simple origin story for Red Hill. They do not clearly say who first used the name, when the school opened, when the church was organized, or when the cemetery began. Those questions may be answerable, but they likely require Perry County Board of Education records, deed books, church minutes, death certificates, and older newspaper searches.
The absence of a single written history should not make Red Hill seem unimportant. Many Appalachian communities were never formally incorporated and never had a newspaper column or post office under their own name. Their history survived in schoolhouse lists, election notices, family cemeteries, and the memory of people who still knew where one ridge ended and another community began.
Red Hill’s documentary record is small, but it is strong enough to show a real community presence. It had a school. It had a cemetery. It had a church. It appeared on the Krypton quadrangle. It served as a polling place. It was tied to Chavies, Krypton, and the North Fork Kentucky River valley. Those facts make Red Hill part of the lived geography of Perry County.
Why Red Hill Still Matters
Red Hill matters because it represents a kind of Appalachian history that is easy to lose. It was not a county seat, a famous coal camp, or the scene of a widely remembered battle. It was a local place, known through daily use. Children went to school there. Families buried their dead there. Voters recognized the school as a polling place. Mapmakers gave it a name.
In that way, Red Hill is not just a vanished label on a topographic map. It is a reminder that Perry County history was built from hundreds of small communities, each with its own school, church, cemetery, road, branch, and family network. Some of those places grew into towns. Others faded into road names and cemetery signs. Red Hill belongs to the second group, but the record still gives it a place.
Sources & Further Reading
U.S. Geological Survey. Krypton, Kentucky, 7.5 Minute Topographic Quadrangle. 1954. Historical Topographic Map Collection. https://prd-tnm.s3.amazonaws.com/StagedProducts/Maps/HistoricalTopo/PDF/KY/24000/KY_Krypton_709036_1954_24000_geo.pdf
U.S. Geological Survey. Krypton, Kentucky, 7.5 Minute Topographic Quadrangle. 1961. Historical Topographic Map Collection. https://prd-tnm.s3.amazonaws.com/StagedProducts/Maps/HistoricalTopo/PDF/KY/24000/KY_Krypton_709037_1961_24000_geo.pdf
U.S. Geological Survey. “Historical Topographic Maps, Preserving the Past.” National Geospatial Program. https://www.usgs.gov/programs/national-geospatial-program/historical-topographic-maps-preserving-past
University of Texas Libraries, Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection. “Kentucky Historical Topographic Maps.” https://maps.lib.utexas.edu/maps/topo/kentucky/
Kentucky Open GIS. “Legacy USGS Topographic Maps with Hillshade for Kentucky.” https://opengisdata.ky.gov/maps/75f29547797749d39dc850582d5e8b82
Kentucky Open GIS. “Ky Geographic Names Information System (GNIS).” https://opengisdata.ky.gov/datasets/ky-geographic-names-information-system-gnis
U.S. Geological Survey. US Topo 7.5-Minute Map for Krypton, KY. 2013. https://prd-tnm.s3.amazonaws.com/StagedProducts/Maps/USTopo/PDF/KY/KY_Krypton_20130318_TM_geo.pdf
The Hazard Herald. “Primary Election Polls Open From 6 to 5.” May 20, 1965. https://archive.org/download/kd9dv1cj8g5s/kd9dv1cj8g5s_text.pdf
RootsWeb. “Perry County Schoolhouses, 1940.” https://sites.rootsweb.com/~kyperry3/schoolhouses1940.html
Find a Grave. “Red Hill Cemetery, Chavies, Perry County, Kentucky.” https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/75691/red-hill-cemetery
RootsWeb. “Red Hill Cemetery, Chavies, Perry Co., Ky.” https://sites.rootsweb.com/~kyperry3/Red_Hill_Cem_Chavies.html
Combs &c. Families of Perry County, Kentucky. “Combs &c. Cemeteries of Perry Co., Kentucky.” https://combs-families.org/combs/records/ky/perry/cemeteries.htm
LDSGenealogy. “Perry County, Kentucky Cemetery Records.” https://ldsgenealogy.com/KY/Perry-County-Cemetery-Records.htm
FamilySearch Wiki. “Perry County, Kentucky Genealogy.” Updated February 1, 2026. https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Perry_County%2C_Kentucky_Genealogy
Kentucky Atlas and Gazetteer. “Perry County, Kentucky.” https://kyatlas.com/21193d.html
Water Quality Portal. “North Fork Kentucky River at Chavies, KY, USGS-03277690.” https://www.waterqualitydata.us/provider/NWIS/USGS-KY/USGS-03277690/
Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources. “North Fork Kentucky River.” https://fw.ky.gov/Fish/Pages/NF-Kentucky-River.aspx
Mixon, Robert B. Geology of the Krypton Quadrangle, Kentucky. U.S. Geological Survey Geologic Quadrangle 389. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Geological Survey, 1965. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/gq389
Morris, L. G., J. A. Patton, J. Hesley, and J. R. Lambert. Spatial Database of the Krypton Quadrangle, Kentucky. Kentucky Geological Survey, Series 12, Digitally Vectorized Geologic Quadrangle Data DVGQ-389. Adapted from Robert B. Mixon, 1965. https://kgs.uky.edu/kgsweb/olops/pub/kgs/mc164_12.pdf
Hayes, Raymond A. Soil Survey of Leslie and Perry Counties, Kentucky. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Soil Conservation Service and Forest Service, 1982. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/102284299
Kentucky Geological Survey. “Search for Kentucky Geologic and Lithologic Descriptions.” https://kgs.uky.edu/kgsmap/KGSLitho/lithoSearch.asp
Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet. “Mine Mapping.” https://eec.ky.gov/Natural-Resources/Mining/Mine-Safety/safety-inspections-and-licensing/Pages/mine-mapping.aspx
R. L. Polk & Co. Kentucky State Gazetteer and Business Directory. Detroit: R. L. Polk & Co. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100734511
Author Note: Red Hill is the kind of Perry County place that reminds us how much Appalachian history survives in school lists, cemetery stones, old maps, and local memory. I wrote this as a starting point for readers who may know the families, roads, and church history better than the written record does.