Appalachian Community Histories – Shopville, Pulaski County: Early Settlers, Historic Homes, and the Shopville Tigers
Along Flat Lick Creek, northeast of Somerset, Kentucky, the community of Shopville developed from an agricultural settlement into a country village whose blacksmith shop, businesses, churches, and schools served generations of Pulaski County families. Its recorded history reaches back to the closing years of the eighteenth century, when settlers established farms along the fertile countryside surrounding Flat Lick and Buck Creek, long before the name Shopville appeared on postal maps.
The community eventually took its name from the blacksmith shop of William Hargis, a gathering place that became important enough to give the settlement a lasting identity. By the late nineteenth century, Shopville had developed into a village with stores, a mill, wagon-making establishments, and other businesses, while its school would eventually become one of Pulaski County’s high schools. The post office, established during the final days of the Civil War, remained in operation for more than 130 years.
Unlike many Appalachian settlements whose early histories survive primarily through family tradition, Shopville has an unusually substantial documentary record. Historic houses, nineteenth-century property records, church histories, newspaper columns, school photographs, and an important Kentucky court case all preserve different aspects of its development. Together, these sources reveal the history of a community whose importance extended well beyond its size.
The James Family and the Settlement of Flat Lick
Shopville’s history begins with the agricultural settlement of the Flat Lick countryside during the late eighteenth century. According to the National Register nomination for the James-Owens House, the James family settled in the area in 1798 and subsequently became some of Pulaski County’s larger landowners. John James and his three sons established themselves as farmers, ministers, and county officials, taking advantage of land that the historic survey identified as among the county’s most productive agricultural property.
Around 1810, John James constructed a substantial two-story brick residence near what would later become Shopville. Although the original house had fallen into ruins by the time of the twentieth-century historic survey, its construction demonstrated the family’s growing prosperity during the early years of Pulaski County. The James family would leave an especially visible architectural legacy through other residences built by relatives during the following decades.
Religion also became an important institution in the surrounding countryside. Flat Lick Baptist Church was organized in January 1799, making it the county’s oldest Baptist congregation. Among its earliest members were John James, Thomas Hansford, James Fears, Elijah Barnes, and Charles Westerman. The church initially consisted of nine members but joined the Tates Creek Association during its founding year, when its membership had already increased to eighteen.
The nineteenth-century Baptist historian J. H. Spencer recorded the congregation’s remarkable early growth, noting that its membership reached 106 in 1801. The church subsequently helped establish other congregations in the surrounding region, demonstrating how religious institutions developed alongside the county’s expanding agricultural settlements. Although Flat Lick and Shopville would acquire distinct geographical identities, their early histories remained closely connected through families, churches, and the surrounding farmland.
The Historic Houses of Shopville and the Labor Behind Their Construction
The prosperity of Shopville’s early farming families remains visible in the historical documentation of several nineteenth-century houses. These buildings provide evidence of the area’s early agricultural economy, but their histories also reveal the importance of enslaved African Americans whose labor contributed to the wealth accumulated by prominent landowners.
Around 1820, Joseph Martin James, a son of John James, constructed the James-Hansford House along the route that later became Kentucky Highway 80. The one-story limestone residence featured a central passage with adjoining rooms, interior stone chimneys, and an unusual Flemish bond pattern in its stonework. The building underwent several alterations during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including the addition of a central gable around 1870 and a brick porch in the 1940s.
When the property was documented for the National Register of Historic Places in the 1980s, historians identified it as the only surviving early nineteenth-century stone house in Pulaski County. The nomination also acknowledged that the James family’s extensive wealth had been accumulated through both landownership and the ownership of enslaved people.
Another surviving reminder of the settlement’s earliest families is the James-Owens House, built around 1840 by William Owens, a relative of the James family. Constructed of brick on a stone foundation, the two-story residence incorporated Greek Revival architectural details, including distinctive window arrangements and decorative trim. Its original porch was replaced around 1920, but the historic survey found that the house retained much of its nineteenth-century architectural character.
The Evans House, located in the vicinity of Shopville along Kentucky Highway 461, tells a related story of agricultural settlement and economic inequality. The Evans family settled around Buck Creek after 1817, and Josiah Evans constructed the house around 1830. When Evans died in 1836, his estate inventory recorded extensive landholdings, substantial personal property, and 34 enslaved people. His holdings represented one of the larger estates documented in early Pulaski County records.
A fire in 1870 damaged the Evans residence and resulted in substantial alterations, including a reconstructed roof and Gothic Revival details. Despite those changes, the house survived as an important architectural reminder of the farming communities that existed before Shopville developed into a recognized village. The original 1836 probate inventory, together with surviving deeds and tax lists, offers a particularly important opportunity to investigate the lives of the enslaved people recorded in the Evans estate, whose individual experiences are largely absent from later architectural histories.
William Hargis and the Blacksmith Shop That Named a Village
Although settlement in the Flat Lick countryside began during the eighteenth century, Shopville’s distinct identity emerged during the nineteenth century around a local blacksmith shop operated by William Hargis.
Kentucky place-name historian Robert M. Rennick identified Hargis as Shopville’s first postmaster and attributed the community’s name to his blacksmith shop, which had become a popular gathering place for area residents. Such establishments performed a practical role in agricultural communities, where farmers depended upon blacksmiths for repairing tools, shoeing horses, and maintaining equipment, but Hargis’s shop also provided a recognizable center for people living across the surrounding countryside.
On April 8, 1865, during the final days of the Civil War, Shopville received its post office. The establishment of postal service gave the community an official identity that would appear in government directories and on maps for generations. An 1870 federal postal directory subsequently listed Shopville among Pulaski County’s recognized post offices, alongside Somerset, Valley Oak, Cains Store, and other settlements.
Rennick located the historical sites associated with Shopville along Kentucky Highway 80, approximately two and a half road miles west of Buck Creek and immediately east of the former Flat Lick post office. His research suggests that the community’s commercial identity developed within an older agricultural landscape rather than replacing the earlier Flat Lick settlement.
The blacksmith shop’s importance is especially apparent in the survival of the community’s name. While the ownership and operation of individual businesses changed over the following decades, Shopville remained the designation by which residents and postal authorities identified this part of northeastern Pulaski County.
Stores, Mills, and the Growth of a Country Village
By the 1880s, Shopville had developed into considerably more than a postal stop serving scattered agricultural households. Rennick’s research describes an established village that supported stores, a mill, a cooperage, wagon works, and additional businesses, reflecting the commercial needs of a surrounding countryside that remained heavily dependent upon farming.
Each of these establishments served a different purpose within the local economy. General stores connected rural families to manufactured goods and markets beyond the county, while milling facilities processed agricultural products. Cooperages produced wooden barrels and other containers, and wagon makers provided transportation equipment essential to a community where the movement of crops, livestock, and merchandise depended heavily upon roads and horse-drawn vehicles.
Shopville’s location along the road connecting Somerset with the eastern portion of Pulaski County contributed to its development. The neighboring settlements of Flat Lick, Valley Oak, Drum, and Buck Creek formed part of a wider network of farms, churches, businesses, and postal communities whose residents maintained connections through trade and family relationships.
A 1911 Rand McNally map of Pulaski County included Shopville among the county’s established settlements, providing a contemporary geographical record of the village during the early twentieth century. Later United States Geological Survey maps, including the 1952 Shopville quadrangle, preserve additional evidence of the roads, waterways, and buildings that shaped the community’s physical development.
Shopville in the Local Newspapers: Families, Churches, and Everyday Life
While land records and historic buildings document Shopville’s earliest development, the local newspapers preserve a more personal account of the community during the twentieth century. Their accounts of church attendance, family visits, travel, marriages, deaths, and neighborhood activities reveal a settlement maintained by closely connected families whose relationships frequently extended well beyond Pulaski County.
A particularly informative example appeared in the May 21, 1920, edition of The Somerset Journal. Its Shopville community column recorded visits involving members of the Whittaker, Hansford, James, Randall, Hargis, Sears, and other families, offering a remarkable snapshot of everyday life during the period.
The newspaper reported that Pleasant Drum Sunday School had experienced a large attendance, while relatives and neighbors continued their regular visits throughout the community. Perry James of Berea had recently returned to the area, Rome Randall had gone to Indiana, and several households had welcomed visiting relatives or relocated within the countryside.
Such reports illustrate the extent to which Shopville’s social life remained connected to churches and family networks. They also show that residents maintained relationships with communities outside Kentucky, an important reminder that even relatively small Appalachian settlements were never entirely isolated from the broader country.
Another glimpse into Shopville’s history appeared in the January 7, 1921, edition of The Somerset Journal. The newspaper reported the death of Oscar Randall, who had been killed in Montana when a loaded wagon passed over his body. His remains were returned to Kentucky, and funeral services were conducted at the home of his father-in-law, Rome Randall, before burial in the Sears graveyard near Shopville.
Randall’s death and burial demonstrate how family connections extended across considerable distances, while his return to the community for burial reflected the continuing importance of ancestral homes and local cemeteries. The same newspaper issue reported visits from relatives living in Ohio and elsewhere, further illustrating the relationship between Shopville and the growing number of Pulaski County families whose lives carried them beyond their home communities.
From the Early Schoolhouse to Shopville’s Consolidated School
Education eventually became one of Shopville’s most enduring contributions to northeastern Pulaski County. The community maintained a school during the early twentieth century, and surviving class photographs preserve images of students and teachers from 1907 and 1910, long before the construction of the larger school buildings associated with later generations.
The school’s importance is especially visible in the January 1921 newspaper reports, which described closing exercises held at Shopville School on January 1. A large crowd attended the program presented by teacher Linda Buchanan and her pupils, suggesting that school activities had already become important gatherings for families throughout the surrounding countryside.
As Kentucky’s educational system developed, rural school districts increasingly turned toward consolidation, replacing smaller neighborhood schoolhouses with larger facilities serving wider geographical areas. In Pulaski County, this process was already underway before the middle of the twentieth century, and Shopville became an important institution within the county’s changing educational system.
The school’s significance appears in a 1942 Kentucky Court of Appeals decision, Hines v. Pulaski County Board of Education. The case involved elementary students assigned to different schools and a dispute over whether the county was required to provide transportation to Shopville’s consolidated school.
According to the court’s opinion, the Pulaski County Board of Education had abolished its school subdistricts in 1935 but continued using their former boundaries to determine student enrollment. A subsequent decision in 1941 assigned children living in the former Burdine Valley district to Burdine Valley School while directing students from other areas to Shopville.
One student, who had attended Shopville for several years, was informed that he would no longer receive free transportation because he lived in the Burdine Valley attendance area. However, when he attempted to enroll at Burdine Valley, the school refused him admission, partly because of overcrowding. The dispute ultimately reached Kentucky’s highest court at the time, which ruled that the county had an obligation either to provide an appropriate school within reasonable walking distance or to furnish transportation to an assigned school.
The case provides an unusually detailed account of the challenges facing rural families as school consolidation expanded. Shopville’s educational history was part of a larger struggle over transportation, accessibility, and the responsibility of county governments to provide public education to children living across widely scattered agricultural communities.
The Shopville Tigers and the School That Brought Generations Together
By the middle of the twentieth century, Shopville’s school had developed into one of the community’s defining institutions. An earlier school building and a detached gymnasium had been constructed around 1930, establishing a campus that would continue serving local students for decades.
In 1959, a new elementary school was constructed on the site of the earlier building, which was demolished. The older gymnasium was retained and continued to serve the school and surrounding community, preserving an important physical connection between the original campus and the new educational facilities.
The new school reflected the educational priorities of postwar Kentucky, when improved roads, expanding transportation networks, and changing population patterns encouraged counties to develop larger consolidated schools. Its original design consisted of a comparatively simple, one-story building that could be expanded as enrollment and educational requirements changed. Additional construction followed in 1963 and 1975, with further expansions and renovations in later decades.
Shopville’s high school and athletic programs also became important parts of local identity. The Shopville Tigers represented the community in school athletics, and surviving photographs provide a direct record of the students, coaches, and cheerleaders who participated in those activities.
A photograph from the 1963–1964 school year, preserved in the Pulaski County Historical Society Photo Collection, identifies Coach Jim Andy Sears and Assistant Coach Howard Minton alongside team members including Jim Price, Boyce Cook, David Cothron, Steve Burton, Conrad Whitaker, Harvey Phelps, Gary Hines, Larry Hansford, Murrell Phelps, and James Taylor. The photograph also preserves the names of cheerleaders Linda Snell, Sharon Snell, Connie Bales, and Margaret Phelps, together with team managers Ben Mink and Noel Hargis.
Other surviving photographs document the school’s graduating classes during the 1950s and 1960s. A particularly detailed photograph of the 1968 graduating class identifies more than thirty students, including members of the Barnes, DeBord, Hargis, Mize, Phelps, Sears, Whitaker, and Whitson families.
These images preserve more than school activities. They document the continuation of family names that had appeared in Shopville’s newspapers and historical records for generations, illustrating how the school became a place where the community’s agricultural heritage, social relationships, and changing educational opportunities intersected.
The Changing Landscape of Shopville
During the twentieth century, Shopville experienced many of the changes that transformed rural communities throughout southeastern Kentucky. Improved highways and motor vehicles altered the relationship between small villages and larger commercial centers, while school consolidation changed the geographical boundaries of the communities served by individual educational institutions.
The closure of Shopville’s post office in July 1997 marked the end of an institution that had operated since April 1865. For more than 132 years, the post office had maintained the community’s official presence in federal postal records, connecting its nineteenth-century origins with the closing years of the twentieth century.
Nevertheless, the disappearance of the post office did not mean the disappearance of Shopville. The community continued to be identified with its surrounding farms, neighborhoods, and educational institutions, while the surviving historic houses and former school facilities preserved tangible connections to earlier generations.
The importance of that educational heritage received renewed attention through the preparation of Shopville Elementary School’s National Register nomination in 2024. The study documented the 1959 school building, its subsequent expansions, and the neighboring gymnasium dating to approximately 1930. It recognized the property as an important example of Kentucky’s postwar school construction and rural consolidation movement, emphasizing the building’s continuing educational use and its role in serving the surrounding community.
The neighboring Flat Lick countryside also retains an important historical identity. The National Register documentation of the James-Owens, James-Hansford, and Evans houses preserves evidence of the farms, architectural traditions, and family histories that preceded Shopville’s establishment as a distinct postal community. Together with the older Baptist congregation and the historical records preserved by Pulaski County’s institutions, these properties provide a substantial foundation for understanding the settlement’s development.
Why Shopville’s History Matters
Shopville’s history illustrates how a small Appalachian community could develop around institutions that served the practical and social needs of an agricultural population. The earliest settlers established farms and churches along Flat Lick Creek, and their descendants helped shape the surrounding countryside through agriculture, commerce, and local government. The wealth accumulated by some of those families also depended upon enslaved labor, an essential part of the community’s early history that survives in property records and estate inventories.
William Hargis’s blacksmith shop eventually gave the settlement a distinctive name, while the establishment of its post office in 1865 connected the community to the developing communications network of the United States. By the late nineteenth century, Shopville’s businesses had transformed it into a recognizable country village whose stores, mills, and workshops served farms throughout northeastern Pulaski County.
During the twentieth century, the school became an enduring expression of community identity. Its teachers educated generations of children, its athletic teams carried the Shopville name into competitions beyond the village, and its buildings reflected the changing expectations and opportunities of rural public education.
Much of this history survives in seemingly ordinary records, including newspaper announcements, class photographs, postal directories, court decisions, and the architectural surveys of old family homes. Read together, they preserve the experiences of a community that developed through the work, relationships, and institutions of generations of Pulaski County residents.
Shopville’s story is therefore not simply the history of a blacksmith shop or a vanished post office. It is the history of an agricultural settlement that became a village, a commercial crossroads that developed an enduring educational identity, and a community whose surviving records continue to connect the present-day landscape with more than two centuries of northeastern Pulaski County history.
Sources & Further Reading
Cunningham, Wes, and Michael Langmyer. “Shopville Elementary School.” National Register of Historic Places Registration Form. Kentucky Heritage Council, October 2024. https://heritage.ky.gov/historic-places/national-register/Documents/School%2C%20Pulaski%20County%2C%20Shopville%20Elementary%20School%2C%20final.pdf.
Kentucky Historical Society. “Digital Collections.” Kentucky Historical Society. https://kyhistory.com/digital/.
Kentucky KYGenWeb Project. “Pulaski County, Kentucky: School Daze.” Includes historic Shopville School photographs from 1907 and 1910. https://kygenweb.net/pulaski/school/.
Hines v. Pulaski County Board of Education, 292 Ky. 100, 166 S.W.2d 37 (1942). https://app.midpage.ai/document/hines-v-pulaski-county-board-3453538.
National Park Service. “Evans House (PU-66).” National Register of Historic Places Inventory Nomination Form. Pulaski County Multiple Resource Area, Kentucky. https://npgallery.nps.gov/GetAsset/b819c65c-290a-4327-b031-460b327e50b2.
National Park Service. “James-Hansford House (PU-62).” National Register of Historic Places Inventory Nomination Form. Pulaski County Multiple Resource Area, Kentucky. https://npgallery.nps.gov/GetAsset/8b314ecc-aaf6-40c8-ac2a-ef72131263c7.
National Park Service. “James-Owens House (PU-60).” National Register of Historic Places Inventory Nomination Form. Pulaski County Multiple Resource Area, Kentucky. https://npgallery.nps.gov/GetAsset/696e8e18-a6f1-4002-a842-648ea9dee351.
National Park Service. “Pending List, March 8, 2025.” National Register of Historic Places. Includes Shopville Elementary School. https://www.nps.gov/subjects/nationalregister/pending-list-2025-03-08.htm.
Pulaski County Clerk. “Land Records.” Pulaski County, Kentucky. https://pulaski.kycountyclerk.us/land-records/.
Pulaski County Historical Society. “Shopville Graduation, 1968.” Photograph. Pulaski County Historical Society Photo Collection, digitized by Pulaski County Public Library. https://www.flickr.com/photos/pcplphotos/53443195762/.
Pulaski County Historical Society. “Shopville School Building.” Historic photograph. Pulaski County Public Library Photographic Archives. https://www.flickr.com/photos/pcplphotos/53444441724/.
Pulaski County Historical Society. “Shopville Tigers, 1963–1964.” Photograph. Pulaski County Historical Society Photo Collection, digitized by Pulaski County Public Library. https://www.flickr.com/photos/pcplphotos/53455294978/.
Pulaski County Public Library. “Digital Archives of the Pulaski County Public Library.” Includes county court records, tax lists, wills, marriage bonds, census records, and historical newspapers. https://pulaskilibrary.advantage-preservation.com/.
Rand McNally. “Pulaski County, Kentucky.” Map, 1911. Reproduced by My Genealogy Hound. https://mygenealogyhound.com/maps/kentucky-maps/KY-Pulaski-County-Kentucky-1911-Rand-McNally-map-Somerset-Burnside-Science-Hill.html.
Rennick, Robert M. “Pulaski County: Post Offices.” County Histories of Kentucky, no. 388. Morehead State University, 2000. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/388/.
Slaughter, Jim. “Shopville High School Groups, 1950–1951.” Photograph. Jim Slaughter Photography Collection, Pulaski County Public Library. https://www.flickr.com/photos/pcplphotos/53662300313/.
The Somerset Journal. “Shopville.” May 21, 1920. Transcribed by the Pulaski County KYGenWeb Project. https://kygenweb.net/pulaski/news/5_21_1920.htm.
The Somerset Journal. Community news, including Shopville School closing exercises and the burial of Oscar Randall. January 7, 1921, 3. Transcribed by the Pulaski County KYGenWeb Project. https://kygenweb.net/pulaski/news/1_1921/1_7_1921_3.htm.
Spencer, J. H. A History of Kentucky Baptists: From 1769 to 1885, Including More Than 800 Biographical Sketches. Vol. 1. Cincinnati: J. R. Baumes, 1885, 415–17. https://ldsgenealogy.com/KY/books/A-history-of-Kentucky-Baptists-From-1769-to-1885-including-more-than-800-biographical-sketches-Vol-I-part-38.htm.
United States Geological Survey. Shopville, Kentucky. 7.5-minute topographic quadrangle, 1952. USGS Historical Topographic Map Collection. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/topoview/viewer/.
United States Post Office Department. List of Post Offices in the United States, Arranged Alphabetically, Revised and Corrected to September 1, 1870. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1870, 275–80. Kentucky section transcribed by KYGenWeb. https://kygenweb.net/allky/counties/post-offices-1870.html.
Works Progress Administration and Historical Records Survey. “Pulaski County.” 1936. County Histories of Kentucky, no. 56. Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/56/.
Works Progress Administration. “Pulaski County: Post Offices & Place Names.” Historical research dated 1939, preserved with Robert M. Rennick’s place-name research. County Histories of Kentucky, no. 284. Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/284/.
Author Note: Shopville’s history reminds us that the stories of Appalachian communities are preserved not only in historic buildings, but also in the schools, churches, and everyday lives of their residents. I hope this account encourages readers to preserve family photographs, local records, and personal memories that can help future generations understand Shopville’s past.