Appalachian Community Histories – Sherburne, Fleming County: From a Licking River Mill to a Forgotten Kentucky Town
Along the Licking River in southern Fleming County, close enough to Bath County that the community eventually spilled across the water, there was once a town with ambitions far larger than the quiet settlement that survives today. Sherburne had mills, merchants, doctors, blacksmiths, a seminary, stage traffic, fraternal organizations, and one of the strangest covered bridges ever built in Kentucky. For a time, travelers moving between Mount Sterling and Maysville passed directly through a place that seemed positioned to become one of the more important small commercial centers in northeastern Kentucky.
The river that helped create Sherburne also shaped nearly everything that happened there. Water powered its earliest industry, divided the town from the community that became known as South Sherburne, complicated travel, encouraged bridge building, and connected the place to a wider economy that stretched far beyond Fleming County.
Today much of that Sherburne is gone. Its post office has disappeared, its population has dwindled, and its famous covered suspension bridge burned in 1981. Yet the documentary record is unusually rich for such a small community. Federal postal records, Kentucky legislation, census schedules, business directories, court records, maps, and even a Civil War letter preserve pieces of a town that once expected to grow rather than disappear. The surviving sources trace Sherburne from an early mill site to an incorporated nineteenth-century town and finally to a small river community whose past is much larger than its present appearance suggests.
A Mill on the Licking River
Sherburne’s story begins before there was a town.
The settlement developed on the north side of the Licking River near the mouth of Flat Creek. Later accounts connect the site with a large tract associated with John Fowler and with Robert Andrews, who became one of the most important figures in the early history of the community. Fleming County records place members of the Andrews family in the county during the first years of the nineteenth century. An 1800 county road proceeding, for example, described a proposed road from Flemingsburg passing through the land of Robert Andrews, showing that he was already part of the county’s developing transportation landscape.
According to the historical place authority maintained by the Civil War Governors of Kentucky project, Sherburne Mills was founded by Robert Andrews in 1807. Local historical recollections collected later likewise describe Andrews building a dam and mill at the site that year. The grist mill gave farmers a place to turn grain into flour, but the industrial activity did not stop there. Over time, the milling complex was associated with sawmilling, carding, and other operations that made the river crossing a natural gathering place for the surrounding countryside.
Even the origin of the name deserves some caution. Postal historian Robert M. Rennick and several later local sources connect Sherburne with Sherburne, New York, while other traditions offer different explanations. What can be established much more securely is that the name “Sherburne Mills” was already being used officially by the federal government within a few years of the mill’s establishment.
That distinction matters. Sherburne did not begin as a courthouse town or a railroad station. It grew around work being done beside the river.
Sherburne Mills Enters the Federal Record
There is a small but important disagreement over exactly when Sherburne Mills received its post office. Postal research has given March 5, 1814, while the Civil War Governors of Kentucky place authority gives April 1, 1815. Without the original Post Office Department appointment record, either date deserves some qualification.
There is no uncertainty, however, that Sherburne Mills had a functioning post office by 1816.
The federal Register of Officers for that year lists “Sherburne Mills, Kentucky” with John Andrews as postmaster. His reported compensation was only $6.06, a reminder of how small the operation still was, but the entry places the community firmly on the national postal map more than thirty years before its incorporation as a town.
Sherburne continued appearing in federal postal records. An 1828 Post Office Department accounting listed Sherburne Mills with $21.61 in the relevant account. By the early 1840s, another federal report identified John Andrews as postmaster and recorded $107.39 in compensation and $196.94 in net proceeds. Those figures should not be mistaken for the whole economy of the settlement, but they show that postal activity had increased as Sherburne developed.
The post office also gave the settlement something that many rural mill sites never achieved: permanence. Farmers might come to Sherburne to grind grain, but people also came for mail, news, trade, and eventually professional services. The mill gave the community an economic reason to exist. The post office helped turn that mill settlement into a recognized place.
From Mill Settlement to Incorporated Town
By the 1840s, local people were thinking about Sherburne as something more than a scattering of buildings around a mill.
Later local historical notes describe a period of optimism during the early 1840s, when residents believed Sherburne might develop into a significant manufacturing center because of the timber and other resources available in the region. A furniture factory reportedly produced furniture and agricultural equipment, including wheat fans that were sold throughout the surrounding countryside. These recollections were recorded after the fact and should be treated differently from contemporary legal records, but the broader picture of a growing community is supported by what happened next.
On February 17, 1847, the Kentucky General Assembly incorporated Sherburne. Fleming County’s own records followed that action. The county court’s Order Book H contains an entry dated June 28, 1847 concerning the “Incorporation of the Town of Sherburne,” surviving in the Fleming County Clerk’s Office. Lewis Collins, writing his nineteenth-century history of Kentucky while Sherburne was still an active town, independently recorded the same February 17 incorporation date.
The state continued legislating for Sherburne long after its original incorporation. Later acts amended the incorporation law, and in 1880 the General Assembly adopted another act specifically “for the benefit of the town of Sherburne of Fleming county.” The legislature also chartered road companies connecting Sherburne with surrounding communities, including the Sherburne and Blue Lick Turnpike Road Company in 1868 and the Sherbourne and Flat Creek Turnpike Road Company. The alternate spelling “Sherbourne” occasionally appears in official records and remains useful when searching nineteenth-century material.
Civic organizations appeared alongside municipal government. Holloway Lodge No. 153 became associated with Sherburne during the 1840s, and Sherburne Chapter No. 47 of the Royal Arch Masons followed. The presence of such organizations is another indication that residents did not view the place merely as an isolated rural mill. Sherburne had developed the institutions of an established town.
Sherburne During the Civil War
No major Civil War battle was fought at Sherburne, but the surviving records show how easily war entered the daily life of people living around the Licking River.
One particularly revealing document was written in Bath County in January 1864 by Ephraim Goodwin and Mary A. Goodwin to Kentucky governor Thomas E. Bramlette. The couple were seeking relief from a fine, but in explaining their circumstances they provided a glimpse of the war in the countryside around Sherburne.
Mary Goodwin wrote that Confederate forces had controlled the area, that her husband had been forced to hide for weeks to save his life, and that men had later taken the family’s last work horse and robbed their home. She described guerrillas coming out of the mountains at night, stealing and plundering, then escaping again. At the end of the letter, she told the governor that a response could be sent either to Owingsville in Bath County or to “Sherborn Mill Flemin Co Ky.”
That small postal instruction is valuable. It shows Sherburne Mills functioning as a communications center for people beyond the immediate Fleming County side of the river, while the rest of the letter captures the fear and economic disruption experienced by rural families during the war.
Sherburne’s nineteenth-century story was therefore not simply one of steady commercial progress. Like other Kentucky communities, it lived through a conflict in which military occupation, guerrilla activity, divided loyalties, and the taking of livestock could undo years of household labor in a single night.
The Bridge That Defined Sherburne
The structure most closely associated with Sherburne came after the Civil War.
The Licking River had always been the reason for the settlement’s location, but it was also an obstacle. Sherburne stood on the Fleming County side, while important roads and settlements continued into Bath County. Travelers moving along the Mount Sterling and Maysville corridor needed a reliable way to cross the river, especially when high water made ordinary crossings difficult.
Construction of the Sherburne Covered Suspension Bridge began in 1867 and was completed in 1868. Kentucky Historical Society Marker 1438 records a construction cost of $3,500 and identifies the bridge as an important crossing on the old stagecoach route between Mount Sterling and Maysville. The marker gives a length of 266 feet and a roadway only fourteen feet wide.
Its design made it especially unusual. The bridge combined characteristics of a wooden covered bridge with suspension engineering, and later federal National Register documentation identified Isaac Kisker as its builder or architect. When the structure was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976, federal records recognized its importance in commerce, engineering, and transportation and dated its significance to 1867 and 1868.
The bridge was privately owned during its early years and carried the traffic that Sherburne depended upon. Stagecoaches, wagons, riders, livestock, and pedestrians could move between the two sides of the river without waiting for favorable water.
In that sense, the bridge was more than an unusual piece of engineering. It completed the geography of the town.
Sherburne’s commercial district stood in Fleming County, but the community’s economic world extended across the Licking into Bath County. The bridge bound those two sides together.
A Town at Its Nineteenth-Century Peak
The federal census helps show how Sherburne developed after the bridge opened.
Lewis Collins reported 158 residents in the town in 1870. Ten years later, the official 1880 census counted 177 people in Sherburne itself. The wider Sherburne precinct contained 810 residents.
A population of 177 sounds tiny by modern standards, but population totals alone badly understate Sherburne’s importance to the rural countryside around it. A small nineteenth-century town could serve hundreds of farm families who lived outside its municipal boundary.
The Kentucky State Gazetteer and Business Directory for 1881 and 1882 provides one of the best surviving snapshots of Sherburne at its commercial height. It described Sherburne Mills on the Licking River in southwestern Fleming County and placed it on a daily mail and stage route between Mount Sterling and Flemingsburg.
Within the community were physicians, a carpenter, a town marshal, boot and shoe makers, milliners, several general merchants, grocers, blacksmiths, and Scott & Hurst’s saw and flour mill. The directory also named a principal of Sherburne Seminary, evidence that education had become part of the town’s institutional life.
This was not a settlement where every necessity required a long trip to Flemingsburg or Mount Sterling. A person living in or around Sherburne could visit a doctor, buy merchandise, have metalwork done, purchase shoes, send mail, arrange transportation, process agricultural products, and obtain schooling within the community.
An 1884 atlas of Bath and Fleming counties reinforces that picture. It separately mapped Sherburne and its surrounding precinct, showing roads, property lines, farms, and the relationship between the town and the river. Maps of this kind preserve what population figures cannot: the network of families and properties for which Sherburne functioned as the nearest commercial center.
Sherburne and South Sherburne
The bridge also helped create an unusual two-county identity.
Sherburne proper stood in Fleming County, but settlement extended across the river into Bath County. That southern portion was known as South Sherburne, a name that appears not merely in local tradition but in legal records.
In the 1919 Kentucky Court of Appeals case Wilson v. Smoot, the court described property owned by Elvira Smoot when she died in 1912. Her estate included a roughly seventy-five-acre farm bordering the Licking River, a residence lot in the town of Sherburne, and a half interest in a vacant lot in “the town of South Sherburne,” which the opinion explicitly said was located across the Licking River in Bath County.
The case offers a rare glimpse into the physical reality of the community after its nineteenth-century commercial peak. Sherburne was not simply a point on the Fleming County map. Families, farms, and property ownership crossed the county boundary, with the river and bridge at the center.
The same case also describes ordinary agricultural life around the town. Members of the Smoot family cultivated land, pastured livestock, and grazed cattle for market. By the early twentieth century, Sherburne’s history was increasingly tied to the farms surrounding it rather than the manufacturing ambitions that had accompanied its earlier growth.
The Slow Decline of the Town
There was no single day when Sherburne ceased to be an important town. Its decline happened gradually.
Its postal name had already changed from Sherburne Mills to simply Sherburne in 1879, symbolically separating the community from the industrial feature that had originally defined it. Postal research indicates that the Sherburne post office remained in operation until late April 1958.
The census record shows the shrinking population clearly.
Sherburne had 177 residents in 1880. By 1940 it had 150. In 1950 the official United States census counted only 100 people in the incorporated place, a one-third decline in a decade.
The reasons are best understood as a combination rather than a single catastrophe. The economic importance of the old milling operations faded. Transportation patterns changed. Automobiles made it easier for rural residents to travel to larger commercial centers. Businesses that had once depended on a daily flow of local customers became harder to sustain, while the postal system consolidated service.
What disappeared first was not necessarily the community itself, but the network of services that had made Sherburne a town in the nineteenth-century sense.
The mill settlement had become an incorporated town because surrounding farmers needed what it offered. Once those needs could increasingly be met elsewhere, incorporation and population alone could not preserve the old commercial order.
The Last Covered Suspension Bridge
One landmark survived long enough to connect modern Kentucky with Sherburne’s nineteenth-century prosperity.
The covered bridge remained across the Licking River for more than a century. In 1951, it received heavy steel suspension cables and additional reinforcing timbers, modifications later noted on the Kentucky historical marker. By then, automobiles had replaced the stagecoaches and wagons for which the bridge had originally been built, yet the old structure continued to occupy the same crossing.
Its historical significance was formally recognized on March 26, 1976, when the Sherburne Covered Suspension Bridge was placed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Five years later, it was gone.
On April 6, 1981, fire destroyed the bridge. The following day’s Courier-Journal reported the loss under a headline identifying it as the last suspension covered bridge in Kentucky. The former bridge remained on the National Register for several years after its destruction before being officially removed from the register on February 6, 1990.
The fire took something larger than an old crossing.
The mill that created Sherburne could no longer explain the town to a passerby. Many of the nineteenth-century businesses were already gone. The post office had been closed for more than twenty years. The covered bridge was the most visible surviving reminder that this little bend in the Licking River had once carried stagecoaches, commercial traffic, and generations of people moving between Fleming and Bath counties.
When it burned, one of Sherburne’s last great physical links to that world disappeared with it.
What Remains of Sherburne
Sherburne never completely vanished.
Its name survives on maps and in the landscape along the Licking River. The old road network still follows the geography that made the location important in the first place. Fleming County remains on one side of the river and Bath County on the other, just as they were when residents spoke of Sherburne and South Sherburne as related communities.
What has changed is the scale.
The federal register of 1816 shows John Andrews handling mail at Sherburne Mills when the settlement was still young. The Kentucky legislature incorporated Sherburne in 1847 when residents expected a future worth organizing municipal government around. The Civil War letter of 1864 shows families using the Sherburne Mills post office while guerrilla warfare disrupted the surrounding countryside. The bridge of 1867 and 1868 connected the town to one of the region’s important travel routes. The census and business directory of the 1880s reveal a community with doctors, merchants, artisans, blacksmiths, a seminary, and an active mill.
Then the records begin telling a different story. Population fell. The post office closed. Businesses disappeared. The bridge burned.
That change is what makes Sherburne worth remembering.
Small towns are easy to judge by what stands there now. A few houses, an old roadway, a marker beside the river, or an empty place where a bridge once crossed can make a community appear as though it was always small and isolated.
Sherburne’s records say otherwise.
For much of the nineteenth century, this was a working river town built around grain, timber, mail, roads, stage travel, and the needs of the farms surrounding it. Its people created institutions, incorporated their town, built roads, operated mills, established businesses, educated children, and finally constructed a bridge unusual enough to be remembered long after most of the community that supported it had disappeared.
The quiet stretch of the Licking River at Sherburne is therefore not the beginning of the story.
It is what remains after more than two centuries of it.
Sources & Further Reading
Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition. “Sherburne Mills.” Kentucky Historical Society and Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives. Accessed October 17, 2026. https://discovery.civilwargovernors.org/item?page=2.
Collins, Lewis. History of Kentucky. Rev. ed. Vol. 2. Covington, KY: Collins & Co., 1874. https://ldsgenealogy.com/KY/books/Collins-historical-sketches-of-Kentucky-History-of-Kentucky-Vol-II-part-36.htm.
Cooper, Wade. Early Fleming County Kentucky Pioneers. Ashland, KY, 1974.
Cotterill, Robert. The History of Fleming County: The First Hundred Years, 1780–1880. Unpublished manuscript. Fleming County Covered Bridge Museum, Flemingsburg, KY.
D. J. Lake & Co. An Atlas of Bath & Fleming Counties, Kentucky: From Actual Surveys. Philadelphia: D. J. Lake & Co., 1884. https://ldsgenealogy.com/books/atlasofbathflemi00djla.pdf.
Dickey, John Jay. Historical and genealogical notes concerning Sherburne and Fleming County, Kentucky. Early twentieth century.
Fischer, Dan. Condensed History of Fleming County Kentucky. 1908. Fleming County Covered Bridge Museum, Flemingsburg, KY.
Fleming County, Kentucky. Death Registers, 1852–1878. Fleming County Clerk’s Office, Flemingsburg, KY. https://southerngenealogybooks.com/product/fleming-county-kentucky-deaths-1852-1878-3/.
Fleming County, Kentucky. Deed Book B, Part 2. Fleming County Clerk’s Office, Flemingsburg, KY.
Fleming County Court. Order Book B, 1800–1807. Fleming County Clerk’s Office, Flemingsburg, KY.
Fleming County Court. “Incorporation of the Town of Sherburne.” Order Book H, 1846–1853, 48. June 28, 1847. Fleming County Clerk’s Office, Flemingsburg, KY. https://www.californiaancestors.org/WordPress/wp-content/files/nugget-archive/2022_Fall_Nugget.pdf.
Goodwin, Ephraim, and Mary A. Goodwin. Letter to Governor Thomas E. Bramlette. January 13, 1864. Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition. Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives. https://discovery.civilwargovernors.org/document/KYR-0001-004-0437.
Grand Chapter of Kentucky, Royal Arch Masons. Proceedings and Historical Records of the Grand Chapter of Kentucky. Sherburne Chapter No. 47. https://storage.googleapis.com/wzukusers/user-35030068/documents/c02426f8db9d49e28cad1c3b16f5d6d1/2020%20RAM%20Proceedings%20online.pdf.
Grand Lodge of Kentucky, Free and Accepted Masons. Historical Records of Kentucky Masonic Lodges. Entries for Holloway Lodge No. 153 and L. N. Hull Lodge No. 741, Sherburne, KY. https://glky.org/wp-content/uploads/wp-ai-assistant/0/Book_of_Constitutions_2024-2025-1.pdf.
Kentucky General Assembly. “An Act for the Benefit of the Town of Sherburne of Fleming County.” Chap. 201. In Acts of the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, 149. Frankfort, KY, ca. 1880. https://books.google.com/books?id=flI4AAAAIAAJ.
Kentucky General Assembly. “An Act to Amend an Act Entitled An Act Incorporating Sherburne.” In Acts of the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, 89. Frankfort, KY, ca. 1870. https://books.google.com/books/about/Acts_of_the_General_Assembly_of_the_Comm.html?hl=en&id=vRc0AQAAMAAJ&output=html_text.
Kentucky General Assembly. “An Act to Amend an Act Incorporating Sherburne.” In Acts of the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, 556. Frankfort, KY, 1874. https://books.google.com/books?vid=OSU%3A32437123672475.
Kentucky General Assembly. “An Act to Incorporate the Sherbourne and Flat Creek Turnpike Road Company.” In Acts Passed at the Session of the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, 590. Frankfort, KY. https://books.google.com/books/about/Acts_Passed_at_the_Session_of_the_Genera.html?id=taHrBbxh9BwC.
Kentucky General Assembly. “An Act to Incorporate the Sherburne and Blue Lick Turnpike Road Company.” In Acts of the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, 404. Frankfort, KY, 1868. https://books.google.com/books/about/Acts_of_the_General_Assembly_of_the_Comm.html?hl=en&id=Ixw0AQAAMAAJ&output=html_text.
Kentucky Historical Society. “Sherburne Bridge.” Historical Marker 1438. ExploreKYHistory. Accessed October 17, 2026. https://history.ky.gov/markers/sherburne-bridge.
Morehead State University. The Flemingsburg Democrat Digital Archive, 1869–1872. ScholarWorks@Morehead State. Accessed October 17, 2026. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/flemingsburg_democrat/.
National Park Service. “Sherburne Covered Suspension Bridge.” National Register of Historic Places, Reference No. 76000882. Listed March 26, 1976. National Archives and Records Administration. https://s3.amazonaws.com/NARAprodstorage/lz/electronic-records/rg-079/NPS_WTHDRWN/FindingAid_Withdrawns.pdf.
Outerbridge, W. F. Geologic Map of the Sherburne Quadrangle, Northeastern Kentucky. Geologic Quadrangle Map GQ-854. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1970. https://pubs.usgs.gov/pp/1151e/report.pdf.
Rennick, Robert M. “Kentucky Post Offices.” La Posta: A Journal of American Postal History 29, no. 2 (May 1998). https://www.lapostapub.com/Backissues/LP29-2.pdf.
Royse, Martha Harlan. “Communities of Fleming County.” Manuscript. Morehead State University, Morehead, KY.
R. L. Polk & Co. Kentucky State Gazetteer and Business Directory, 1881–1882. Vol. 3. Detroit: R. L. Polk & Co., 1881. https://ldsgenealogy.com/KY/books/Kentucky-state-gazetteer-and-business-directory-1881-1882-Vol-III-pt-2-part-12.htm.
United States. Official Register of the United States. Washington, DC, 1818. Sherburne Mills entry for John Andrews. https://reason.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/1818-Blue-Book-compressed.pdf.
United States. Register of Officers and Agents, Civil, Military, and Naval, in the Service of the United States. Washington, DC, 1816. Sherburne Mills entry for John Andrews. https://ibiblio.org/pha/USN/Registers/NavyRegister1816.pdf.
United States Bureau of the Census. Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930. Fleming County, Kentucky, Enumeration District 35-1, Sherburne Town. National Archives Microfilm Publication T626, roll 744. https://www.us-census.org/states/kentucky/teams/Fleming1930-T626-744.htm.
United States Bureau of the Census. 1950 Census of Population: Kentucky. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1950. https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1950/pc-08/pc-8-16.pdf.
United States Census Office. Statistics of the Population of the United States at the Tenth Census, June 1, 1880. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1883.
United States Census Office. Ninth Census of the United States, 1870. Fleming County, Kentucky, Sherburne District and Town of Sherburne. https://accessgenealogy.com/kentucky/fleming-county-kentucky-census-records.htm.
United States Congress. American State Papers: Post Office Department. Washington, DC, 1828. Sherburne Mills postal records. https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/llscd/llsp027/llsp027.pdf.
United States Geological Survey. Sherburne, Kentucky, 7.5-Minute Quadrangle. Surveyed 1952; published 1953. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey. https://pastmaps.com/explore/us/kentucky/fleming-county/1950s.
United States Post Office Department. Report of Postmaster Compensation and Net Proceeds. Sherburne Mills entry for John Andrews. Washington, DC, early 1840s. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GOVPUB-CS1-8d380dea383005f5e9ca98602a54a3e5/pdf/GOVPUB-CS1-8d380dea383005f5e9ca98602a54a3e5-2.pdf.
United States Post Office Department. Report of Postmasters and Postal Receipts. Sherburne Mills entries for Charles B. Pearce and Allen Embry. Washington, DC. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GOVPUB-CS1-7c2b5977716715b58ab9265ff082b03a/pdf/GOVPUB-CS1-7c2b5977716715b58ab9265ff082b03a-2.pdf.
United States Post Office Department. Report of Postmasters and Postal Receipts. Sherburne Mills entry for Allen Embry. Washington, DC. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GOVPUB-CS1-511c3e6960ca70bec6e2625e2f96b84a/pdf/GOVPUB-CS1-511c3e6960ca70bec6e2625e2f96b84a-2.pdf.
Wilson v. Smoot, 186 Ky. 194, 216 S.W. 129 (Ky. Ct. App. 1919). https://openjurist.org/186/ky/194/wilson-v-smoot-7233381.
Williams, C. S., comp. Williams’ Cincinnati Directory, Including a Post-Office Directory for 1861–62. Cincinnati, 1861. https://apps.cincinnatilibrary.org/citydirectory/WilliamsHamiltonDirectory_1861-1862.pdf.
“Last Suspension Covered Bridge in the State Is Destroyed by Fire.” Courier-Journal (Louisville, KY), April 7, 1981, B1.
Author Note: Sherburne is one of those Kentucky communities whose quiet appearance today hides a surprisingly rich past of mills, merchants, stagecoaches, and river travel. I hope this history helps preserve the story of the people, businesses, and remarkable covered suspension bridge that once made this Licking River town an important local center.