Appalachian Community Histories – Redbush, Johnson County: Farms, Gas Fields, and a Community Along Laurel Creek
Along Upper Laurel Creek in northwestern Johnson County, Redbush developed far from the railroad towns and coal camps that would eventually dominate much of eastern Kentucky’s public memory. Its history was rooted first in farms, churches, wagon roads, and families who settled the narrow creek bottoms, but Redbush was never simply an isolated collection of mountain homes. By the late nineteenth century, an official historic survey later concluded, the community was competing commercially with Paintsville and other agricultural settlements in Johnson County.
The historical record of Redbush is unusually rich for a small unincorporated Appalachian community. Three historic houses preserve pieces of its nineteenth-century landscape. A 1983 Kentucky Historic Resources Inventory provides a remarkably detailed description of community life. Geological reports document the arrival of natural gas drilling during the First World War era. Kentucky court decisions reveal disputes over gas wells, pipelines, and hydrogen sulfide. Newspapers preserve the violence and danger of early oil exploration. Federal and state records trace transportation changes, while National Weather Service reports document the catastrophic flood that struck the Redbush and Flatgap area in 2015.
Taken together, these sources tell the story of a community that moved through several different economic worlds without losing its identity. Redbush began as an agricultural and religious center, watched the railroad redirect commerce elsewhere, became part of an important natural gas field, received new roads during the New Deal, and entered the modern age slowly enough that electricity did not reach the community until the late 1940s.
A Community Along Laurel Creek
The geography of Redbush shaped nearly everything that followed.
The National Park Service’s historical study of Johnson County described the county as part of the Appalachian cultural landscape of the Cumberland Plateau, where steep wooded mountains restricted agriculture largely to narrow creek and river bottoms. Those bottoms became the natural locations for farms, roads, houses, churches, stores, and eventually communities. Johnson County also possessed timber, coal, oil, and natural gas resources that would profoundly influence its economic history.
Redbush developed along Laurel Creek in this landscape. Before automobiles and paved highways connected rural Johnson County more easily to Paintsville and other towns, the creek valley provided the natural corridor through the mountains.
The most detailed surviving description of nineteenth-century Redbush comes from the 1983 Kentucky Historic Resources Inventory prepared for the Lloyd Hamilton Mott House. According to the survey, a wagon road followed the creek and connected Redbush with the rest of Johnson County. By the late nineteenth century, four merchants operated in the community, while Primitive Baptist, Enterprise Baptist, and Methodist congregations served local residents. The survey concluded that Red Bush successfully competed with Paintsville and other agricultural communities during this period.
Agriculture remained central to that economy. Hay, cane, and corn were identified as major crops, reflecting a settlement whose commercial importance was still closely connected to the surrounding farms rather than to a large industrial employer.
For a community that never became an incorporated city, that combination of merchants, churches, farms, and transportation made Redbush a meaningful rural center.
The Williams House and the Early Settlement
One of the clearest windows into early Redbush survives in a house built before Johnson County was even a decade old.
The Kentucky Historic Resources Inventory for the Williams House dates its original section to about 1842. The survey states that Harden H. Williams, a minister in the Laurel Creek area, patented and cleared the land before constructing the house. It began with a traditional log form that was later enlarged, eventually producing the larger residence documented by preservationists in 1983.
The National Park Service later used the Williams House as an important example of the architectural development of rural Johnson County. The original log pen was expanded around the turn of the twentieth century with frame additions, illustrating how Appalachian families adapted older houses rather than simply abandoning them as their households and economic circumstances changed.
The house was eventually listed in the National Register of Historic Places on January 26, 1989, with 1842 recognized as its significant year.
That date places an established household in the Redbush area only a few years after Johnson County itself was created in 1843. The Williams House therefore represents more than an old building. It is physical evidence of the farming families, ministers, landowners, and creek settlements from which the later commercial community developed.
Enterprise, Grabnickel, Sheepskin, and Red Bush
The community has not always been known by only one name.
The 1983 Mott House inventory records three alternatives associated with Red Bush: Enterprise, Grabnickel, and Sheepskin. That unusual collection of names is important because rural communities were often identified differently by churches, post offices, local families, creeks, and mapmakers. A researcher looking only for “Redbush” can therefore miss significant portions of the historical record.
Enterprise appears to have been especially important. Religious history connects the Enterprise name with the Regular Baptist movement, and historian John Sparks’s study of Appalachian Christianity identifies the Enterprise Association of Regular Baptists as having been formed in 1894. Later accounts place its organization at Enterprise, the community now known as Redbush.
The origin of the Redbush name is traditionally linked to the vegetation of the area. Robert Rennick’s place-name research, repeated in later reference works, attributes the name to small pin oaks whose leaves turned red in autumn. The modern Kentucky Atlas similarly identifies Redbush on Upper Laurel Creek and recognizes Enterprise as an earlier or alternative name.
The postal history is more complicated.
Some later summaries state that William A. Williams established the Redbush post office in 1904. Yet other evidence places postal service there earlier. An 1895 Rand McNally business atlas identifies Redbush as having a post office but no railroad, while the Kentucky Atlas gives 1890 as the opening year. Redbush also appears in a 1910 Rand McNally banking directory as a community whose banking connection was Paintsville.
Because the 1895 evidence predates the commonly repeated 1904 date, the exact postal chronology should remain an open historical question until the original Post Office Department appointment registers are examined. A temporary discontinuance, reestablishment, name change, or later administrative action could explain the conflicting dates.
What can be said confidently is that Redbush was already established enough to appear in national commercial references before the twentieth century began.
Merchants, Churches, and a Rural Commercial Center
By the closing decades of the nineteenth century, Redbush had developed the institutions that allowed a rural Appalachian community to function as a local center.
Its four merchants provided manufactured goods and supplies that surrounding farm families could not easily produce themselves. Three churches offered religious services but also served as places where families met, exchanged news, strengthened kinship ties, and formed community organizations. The wagon road along Laurel Creek connected those institutions with homes scattered through the surrounding hollows.
The importance of the churches should not be underestimated. In communities without municipal governments, large schools, newspapers, or formal civic organizations, congregations often performed much of the social work that other institutions handled in larger towns.
The continued presence of the Red Bush Enterprise Baptist tradition also links modern Redbush with that older religious landscape. A Kentucky Transportation Cabinet study of the KY 172 corridor still identified Red Bush Enterprise Baptist Church among the churches serving the area many generations later.
By the 1890s, Redbush therefore possessed the characteristics of a small but functioning commercial village. It had farms producing hay, cane, and corn, stores serving the countryside, established congregations, postal connections, substantial houses, and a road following the natural corridor of Laurel Creek.
Its future might have looked secure.
Then transportation patterns changed.
The Mott and Bond Houses
Two additional houses preserve the era when Redbush was near the height of its nineteenth-century importance.
The Lloyd Hamilton Mott House stood near the center of the community on what became Kentucky Route 172. The 1983 historic inventory dates it to 1890 and names J. Powell Ferguson as its builder. The two-story frame house was constructed with interior stone end chimneys and a two-story porch. Preservationists noted that the house originally faced the creek, an architectural detail that reveals how transportation patterns had changed. What later appeared to be the rear of the house became its practical front when the highway replaced the creek-oriented wagon landscape.
That change in orientation is a small but revealing piece of local history. The house was built when Laurel Creek and the road beside it organized community movement. Later road construction altered how residents approached the same property.
The Jeff Bond House, also on Kentucky Route 172, dates from the same general period. National Register records identify 1890 as its significant year and recognize the property for its architectural importance.
Together with the older Williams House, these properties preserve several generations of Redbush’s development. The Williams House reaches back to the 1840s, while the Bond and Mott houses reflect the late nineteenth century, when Redbush supported merchants, churches, farms, and a recognizable community center.
All three eventually became part of the Johnson County historic-preservation effort that resulted in National Register listings in 1989.
Their survival matters because much of Redbush’s older commercial landscape did not survive the twentieth century nearly as visibly.
The Railroad That Passed Redbush By
The change that most clearly divided old Redbush from twentieth-century Redbush was the arrival of the railroad elsewhere in Johnson County.
Rail transportation transformed eastern Kentucky during the opening decades of the twentieth century. Coal companies needed reliable ways to move enormous quantities of coal out of the mountains, while merchants and residents benefited from faster access to regional and national markets.
Paintsville received passenger rail service in 1904 and benefited from the commercial investment that followed. John C. C. Mayo and other businessmen were simultaneously promoting eastern Kentucky’s mineral resources to outside capital. Between 1911 and 1918, Consolidation Coal Company developed the massive Van Lear operation east of Paintsville, creating a company town with mines, stores, water, electricity, and direct rail connections.
Redbush stood outside that new transportation network.
The National Park Service’s Johnson County study states directly that Red Bush and nearby Flat Gap were bypassed by the railroad and gradually lost their commercial centers. The Mott House inventory gives about 1910 as the period when the bypass began Red Bush’s decline.
The process was probably gradual rather than sudden. A merchant did not necessarily close the day railroad tracks reached another valley, and families did not abandon their farms simply because Paintsville was growing. What changed was the direction in which commerce flowed.
Businesses located along the railroad could receive goods more cheaply and reach larger markets. Coal communities connected directly to the line attracted workers, investment, stores, and new infrastructure. Older agricultural settlements dependent upon wagon roads could continue to exist, but their position within the regional economy weakened.
Redbush survived, but it no longer competed with Paintsville in the way the nineteenth-century community once had.
Ironically, the next major industry to enter Redbush did not need a railroad to carry its product.
It used pipelines.
The Red Bush and Flat Gap Gas Fields
Natural gas gave Redbush a new role in eastern Kentucky’s industrial economy.
In 1922, Kentucky geologist Willard Rouse Jillson published The Conservation of Natural Gas in Kentucky, a detailed contemporary study of the state’s developing gas industry. Jillson treated the Red Bush and Flat Gap gas fields together, describing them as twin fields in northwestern Johnson County extending into Lawrence County.
Laurel Creek crossed the producing area, while the main lines of the Kentucky Pipe Line Company and Central Kentucky Natural Gas Company lay several miles to the south. Wells tapped primarily the Berea sand, with additional production from the Weir formation.
Development moved quickly.
Jillson reported that the first well was drilled in the fall of 1917. It produced an open flow of approximately 500,000 cubic feet of gas and registered rock pressure of about 230 pounds.
By the summer of 1918, four wells were producing a combined open flow of approximately 2.25 million cubic feet. The largest produced about 900,000 cubic feet, while the smallest produced approximately 300,000.
A contract for the gas was arranged in July 1918. A pipeline was constructed to connect the field with the Central Kentucky Natural Gas Company’s main line, and deliveries began that December. Jillson reported in 1922 that the field was still supplying gas to the main lines.
The timing is remarkable.
Only a few years after the railroad bypass had weakened Redbush’s old commercial position, underground resources tied the community to a completely different transportation network. Natural gas did not have to be loaded onto wagons or trains at Redbush. Pipelines carried it out of the field and into a regional distribution system.
The community that the railroad had passed could still participate in the expanding energy economy beneath its own hills.
Danger in the Oil and Gas Fields
Energy development brought money and opportunity, but it also introduced dangers that could be sudden and horrific.
In January 1924, the Big Sandy News reported an explosion near Red Bush that killed Elmer Claypool and James Sexton while the two men were preparing to shoot an oil well.
Claypool worked as an oil-well shooter for the Kentucky Glycerine Company, while Sexton was a field agent for oil operator F. E. White. Because the two men were alone at the well when the explosion occurred, witnesses could not say precisely what happened. People familiar with the work believed they may have been thawing explosive material or loading a tube used to shoot the well. A witness from a nearby Williams residence saw the bodies thrown into the air by the blast.
The accident illustrates the dangerous methods used in early petroleum development. Before hydraulic fracturing became the familiar method of stimulating wells, drillers sometimes lowered explosives into a borehole and detonated them to fracture the surrounding rock and increase production. Handling nitroglycerin and related materials made the occupation exceptionally hazardous.
The Redbush field also generated disputes that eventually reached Kentucky’s highest court.
In McNabb v. Central Kentucky Natural Gas Company, decided in 1938, the Kentucky Court of Appeals examined a contract involving two gas wells near Red Bush. The Central Kentucky Natural Gas Company had agreed in 1925 to purchase gas from the wells while its Red Bush compressor plant remained in operation. One well was later disconnected after testing indicated that its gas contained excessive sulfur. The case provides direct evidence of a compressor plant, gathering lines, producing wells, contracts, and the technical problems encountered in the Redbush gas field.
A second case, Red Bush Production Co. v. Hayes, reached the Court of Appeals in 1939.
Mrs. Missouri Hayes had sued the Red Bush Production Company after harmful gases escaped from its transportation line near her residence. The court record states that the company began pumping a small amount of hydrogen sulfide into its line during the fall of 1936. Witnesses described the strong odor associated with the gas. Hayes received a $750 judgment, and the company was restrained from blowing its pipeline in a manner that caused substantial injury to her or her property. The appellate court affirmed the judgment.
Those court cases transform the gas field from geological statistics into lived history. Wells and pipelines crossed farms. Companies negotiated with landowners. Gas quality affected customers as far away as Lexington, Winchester, and Mount Sterling. Industrial operations could also expose families living near the lines to unpleasant and potentially harmful emissions.
Redbush was no longer simply connected to an agricultural marketplace. By the 1920s and 1930s, it was tied directly into Kentucky’s growing regional energy network.
WPA Roads and the Arrival of Electricity
Despite the gas moving beneath the community, modernization above ground came more slowly.
The 1983 Mott House survey records that Works Progress Administration road projects reached Red Bush in 1933 and 1934. The broader National Register study of Johnson County similarly notes that New Deal programs constructed badly needed roads and schools while providing employment during the Great Depression.
Road improvements changed rural communities throughout Appalachia. Better roads reduced dependence on wagons, shortened travel time to county seats and commercial centers, improved access to schools and medical care, and gradually made automobiles practical in places where earlier roads had followed creek beds and narrow mountain paths.
Electricity arrived even later.
According to the same historic survey, Red Bush received electrical service in 1948 or 1949.
The date provides a striking comparison with Paintsville, where the National Park Service study reports that electricity was already available by 1908. Redbush residents therefore experienced one of the central technological transformations of American life roughly four decades after people in the county seat.
That contrast reveals the uneven nature of modernization in eastern Kentucky. Natural gas from the Redbush area could enter a pipeline network serving distant consumers while some of the families living near those producing fields still waited decades for electrical service in their own homes.
Billy Adams and the Music Beyond Redbush
One Redbush child born during that period eventually carried a piece of the community into American popular music.
Willie Murray “Billy” Adams was born in Redbush on March 6, 1940. Music historian David Jeffries’s biography for AllMusic identifies Redbush as Adams’s birthplace and describes his childhood in a large Johnson County family whose father worked in the Van Lear coal mines. Adams listened to country and hillbilly music on the radio before developing into a rockabilly singer, guitarist, and songwriter.
He later became known for recordings including “Rock, Pretty Mama” and eventually recorded material associated with Sun Records. Modern Sun-related releases continue to identify him with Redbush, Kentucky.
His story connects Redbush with another transformation occurring across twentieth-century Appalachia. Radio carried outside music into isolated valleys, while young Appalachian musicians carried mountain, country, blues, gospel, and rock influences back out into a rapidly changing national culture.
Adams was born only a few years after the gas-company disputes reached Kentucky’s courts and less than a decade before electricity finally arrived in Redbush. His life therefore emerged from the same transitional world documented in the community’s historic records.
The 2015 Redbush and Flatgap Flood
On July 13, 2015, the geography that had shaped Redbush for generations became deadly.
Several rounds of thunderstorms moved across eastern Kentucky on July 13 and 14. The National Weather Service in Jackson later identified the Flatgap and Redbush communities as the hardest-hit area during the first round of flash flooding.
Water surged through Big Mudlick Creek and Ramey Branch late on July 13. Four people died, and emergency crews conducted more than fifty swift-water rescues. The National Weather Service reported that entire double-wide mobile homes were carried downstream and forced beneath bridges. More than 150 homes were destroyed, while as many as 500 were affected to some degree.
There was no rain gauge directly inside the hardest-hit area, but radar estimates indicated that approximately three inches of rain fell in an hour, with brief rainfall rates reaching six or seven inches per hour.
The catastrophe demonstrated the same geographical reality that had shaped Redbush since its settlement.
Families had built along creeks because those bottoms offered level ground, farmland, transportation routes, and access through otherwise steep mountains. Roads followed the same valleys because there were few practical alternatives. Houses, churches, and businesses naturally clustered near streams.
For generations, that landscape made community possible.
Under extreme rainfall, it also concentrated tremendous quantities of water into the same narrow places where people lived.
The 2015 flood became one of the most destructive events in the modern history of the Redbush and Flatgap area, adding another chapter to a community history already deeply shaped by land, water, transportation, and natural resources.
What Remains of Historic Redbush
Redbush never became a major railroad town or a large coal-company community, and that is precisely what makes its history valuable.
Its surviving records show another version of Appalachian development.
The Williams House recalls the first generations of families who patented and cleared land along Laurel Creek. The Mott and Bond houses preserve the period when Redbush had merchants, churches, productive farms, and enough commercial activity to compete with other Johnson County settlements.
The community’s unusual collection of names, including Enterprise, Grabnickel, Sheepskin, Red Bush, and Redbush, preserves traces of a time when local identity could change depending upon whether a person was speaking about a church, post office, creek settlement, or neighborhood.
The railroad bypass demonstrates how transportation could reorder an Appalachian county. Paintsville and the developing coal towns gained direct access to rail markets, while Redbush gradually lost the commercial position it had held during the nineteenth century.
Yet the community did not simply fade away.
The discovery of natural gas placed Redbush within another industrial network. Wells drilled beginning in 1917 fed pipelines rather than railroad cars. The 1924 explosion exposed the dangers faced by workers. Court cases during the 1930s reveal compressor plants, sulfurous wells, pipeline disputes, and residents living alongside an expanding energy industry.
WPA roads brought another transformation during the Depression. Electricity arrived after World War II. Billy Adams carried the name of his birthplace into rockabilly history. Then, in 2015, catastrophic flooding reminded residents that the creeks and hollows shaping community life could still determine its fate.
For a small place in northwestern Johnson County, Redbush has left an exceptionally broad documentary trail.
Its history is written in old houses and wagon roads, Baptist congregations and family farms, geological surveys and gas contracts, court opinions and newspaper reports, New Deal improvements and flood records. Together they preserve the story of a community that survived the rise and decline of different economic systems without surrendering its place on the map.
Redbush did not need to become a city to matter.
Its story shows how change reached rural Appalachia one road, one well, one pipeline, one electric line, and one generation at a time.
Sources & Further Reading
Powell, Helen. Kentucky Historic Resources Inventory: Lloyd Hamilton Mott House, Site Jo-57. Johnson County Historic Sites Survey Committee and Kentucky Heritage Council, 1983. National Park Service, National Register of Historic Places Collection. https://npgallery.nps.gov/GetAsset/076fb7bc-dab1-4b51-957e-8a5c3c44712f/
National Park Service. Multiple Resources of Johnson County, Kentucky. National Register of Historic Places Multiple Property Documentation Form, 1988. https://npgallery.nps.gov/NRHP/GetAsset/NRHP/64000234_text
Powell, Helen. Kentucky Historic Resources Inventory: Williams House, Site Jo-52. Johnson County Historic Sites Survey Committee and Kentucky Heritage Council, 1983. National Park Service. https://npgallery.nps.gov/GetAsset/c973a179-f75b-45c6-9e54-6d0602ecb6e4
National Park Service. “Williams House.” National Register Information System No. 88003173. Listed January 26, 1989. https://npgallery.nps.gov/AssetDetail/NRIS/88003173 NPGallery
Powell, Helen. Kentucky Historic Resources Inventory: Jeff Bond House. Johnson County Historic Sites Survey Committee and Kentucky Heritage Council, 1983. National Park Service. https://npgallery.nps.gov/AssetDetail/NRIS/88003174
National Park Service. “Lloyd Hamilton Mott House.” National Register Information System No. 88003175. Red Bush, Johnson County, Kentucky. https://npgallery.nps.gov/AssetDetail/NRIS/88003175
Jillson, Willard Rouse. The Conservation of Natural Gas in Kentucky. Louisville, KY: J. P. Morton & Company, 1922. Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/22003966/ The Library of Congress
Jillson, Willard Rouse. The Oil and Gas Resources of Kentucky. Frankfort: Kentucky Geological Survey, 1919.
McNabb et al. v. Central Kentucky Natural Gas Co. et al., 272 Ky. 112, 113 S.W.2d 470 (Ky. Ct. App. 1938). https://case-law.vlex.com/vid/mcnabb-v-central-kentucky-902331239
Red Bush Production Co. v. Hayes, 277 Ky. 284, 126 S.W.2d 453 (Ky. Ct. App. 1939). https://case-law.vlex.com/vid/red-bush-production-co-902291565
“Two Men Killed in Explosion Near Red Bush.” Big Sandy News, January 25, 1924. Transcription preserved by the Lawrence County Kentucky Genealogical and Historical Society. https://lckghs.com/index.php/en/2-uncategorised/458-obit-1924
National Archives and Records Administration. Record of Appointment of Postmasters, 1832–September 30, 1971. Microfilm Publication M841. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices
National Archives and Records Administration. Reports of Site Locations, 1837–1955. Post Office Department, Microfilm Publication M1126. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/locations-1837-1950.html
Rand McNally and Company. Business Atlas and Shippers’ Guide. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1895. Redbush, Kentucky, entry. https://roadsidethoughts.com/ky/redbush-xx-johnson-mentions.htm
Rand McNally and Company. “Johnson County, Kentucky.” Map, 1911. https://www.mygenealogyhound.com/maps/kentucky-maps/KY-Johnson-County-Kentucky-1911-Rand-McNally-map-Paintsville-Auxier-Staffordsville.html
Rand McNally and Company. Rand McNally Bankers Directory. July 1925. Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, FRASER. https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/rand-mcnally-bankers-directory-105/july-1925-598587/content/fulltext/rmbd_192507_13_accessiblebankingpoints
Rand McNally and Company. Rand McNally Bankers Directory. July 1926. Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, FRASER. https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/rand-mcnally-bankers-directory-105/july-1926-598589/content/fulltext/rmbd_192607_11_accessiblebankingpoints
Rice, Charles L. Geologic Map of the Redbush Quadrangle, Eastern Kentucky. Geologic Quadrangle Map GQ-708. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1968. https://www.usgs.gov/publications/geologic-map-redbush-quadrangle-eastern-kentucky USGS
U.S. Geological Survey. Redbush Quadrangle, Kentucky. 7.5-minute topographic map. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1954.
U.S. Geological Survey. Redbush Quadrangle, Kentucky. 7.5-minute topographic map. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1962. https://store.usgs.gov/
National Centers for Environmental Information. “Flash Flood, Johnson County, Kentucky, July 13, 2015.” Storm Events Database. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/stormevents/eventdetails.jsp?id=584092
National Weather Service, Jackson, Kentucky. Top Ten Weather Events of the 2010–2019 Decade. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. https://www.weather.gov/media/jkl/Top10_2010-2019_Decade.pdf
Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. KY 172 Corridor Study: Final Report. Frankfort: Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. https://transportation.ky.gov/Planning/Planning%20Studies%20and%20Reports/12-171%20-%20KY%20172%20Corridor%20Study%20-%20Final%20Report.pdf
Kentucky Heritage Council. Ida Lee Willis Memorial Foundation Historic Preservation Awards Winners, 1979–2024. Frankfort: Kentucky Heritage Council. https://heritage.ky.gov/education-and-outreach/Documents/Ida%20Lee%20Willis%20Memorial%20Awards%20Winners%201979-2024.pdf
Kentucky Secretary of State. “Kentucky Land Office.” Frankfort: Commonwealth of Kentucky. https://www.sos.ky.gov/land/Pages/default.aspx
Johnson County Clerk. “Online Land Records.” Paintsville, KY: Johnson County Clerk. https://johnson.countyclerk.us/online-land-records/
Johnson County Clerk. “Records Department.” Paintsville, KY: Johnson County Clerk. https://johnson.countyclerk.us/records/
Johnson County Public Library. “Patricia Patton Kentucky Room.” Paintsville, KY: Johnson County Public Library. https://johnsoncountypubliclibrary.org/using-your-library/
Johnson County Digital Archives. Historic Newspapers of Johnson County, Kentucky. Advantage Preservation. https://johnson.advantage-preservation.com/
National Archives and Records Administration. “Census Records.” Washington, DC: National Archives. https://www.archives.gov/research/census
Webb, Don, and Neva VanHoose Forrest. Red Bush and Flat Gap. Cincinnati, OH: Self-published, n.d. WorldCat. https://search.worldcat.org/title/Red-Bush-and-Flat-Gap/oclc/1346866892 WorldCat
Pelfry, David. History of Red Bush, Kentucky. Unpublished local history cited in the 1983 Kentucky Historic Resources Inventory for the Lloyd Hamilton Mott House. Copy or present repository not yet located.
Hall, C. Mitchel. Johnson County, Kentucky: A History of the County, and Genealogy of Its People Up to the Year 1927. Louisville: Standard Printing Company, 1928. https://search.worldcat.org/title/johnson-county-kentucky-a-history-of-the-county-and-genealogy-of-its-people-up-to-the-year-1927/oclc/3567643
Wells, J. K. A Short History of Paintsville and Johnson County. Paintsville, KY: Paintsville Herald, 1962. https://openlibrary.org/works/OL4329279W/A_short_history_of_Paintsville_and_Johnson_County
Rennick, Robert M. Kentucky Place Names. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984. https://www.kentuckypress.com/9780813101798/kentucky-place-names/ The University Press of Kentucky
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. Lake Grove, OR, 2002. Kentucky Historical Society. https://history.ky.gov/kentucky-ancestors/where-in-kentucky-is Kentucky History
Kentucky Atlas and Gazetteer. “Redbush, Kentucky.” https://www.kyatlas.com/ky-redbush.html
Kentucky GenWeb. “Johnson County Education and School Records.” https://kygenweb.net/johnson/EDU.htm
Kentucky GenWeb. “Johnson County Court Records.” https://kygenweb.net/johnson/court.htm
Author Note: Redbush has left behind an unusually rich record for a small mountain community, from nineteenth-century houses and churches to natural gas development and the devastating flood of 2015. If you have photographs, family records, church documents, or memories connected to Redbush, Enterprise, Grabnickel, or Sheepskin, I would be glad to hear from you.