Appalachian Community Histories – Sizerock, Leslie County: Bullskin Creek, a Mountain Post Office
Sizerock is one of those Leslie County places that comes into focus slowly. It does not dominate the county’s history the way Hyden does, and it never grew into a large town with a courthouse square or long newspaper trail. Instead, its history survives in the kinds of records that so often preserve Appalachian communities best: post office appointments, creek names on official maps, school photographs, and oral history catalogs. Modern official mapping still labels both Sizerock and Bullskin Creek, and the 1953 Big Creek quadrangle shows the community in the steep, branch-cut terrain that shaped daily life there.
The strongest early federal anchor for Sizerock is its post office. USPS explains that for offices before 1971, the main sources for postmaster and office-history data are National Archives microfilm publications including M841, the Record of Appointment of Postmasters, 1832 to September 30, 1971, and that an office’s establishment date generally follows the appointment of its first postmaster. Search snippets tied to Robert M. Rennick’s Leslie County post office survey and later postal-history writing agree that Sizerock’s office was established on November 25, 1927, with Kelly Collins as first postmaster, and that the community name came from a “large slanted and bald rock, as big as a house, just feet away.”
That 1927 date should be read as the moment Sizerock becomes especially clear in federal records, not necessarily the first moment people lived there. In places like this, settlement usually runs deeper than the surviving place-name paperwork. The earlier history of the neighborhood has to be reconstructed through courthouse-origin records such as Leslie County deeds, commissioner’s reports dividing land, sheriff’s tax-sale reports, circuit court order books, and marriage bonds, all of which are cataloged by FamilySearch from original records or courthouse microfilm tied to Hyden. In other words, Sizerock almost certainly existed as lived space before it fully emerged as a named postal community.
The Post Office That Fixed the Name
Once the post office existed, Sizerock became much easier to trace. Rennick’s survey indicates that in 1964 the office became a rural branch of Hyden. Yet the name did not disappear. USPS still lists SIZEROCK, KY 41762-9998 at 5951 Bullskin Road, which means the old community name remains active in the postal landscape even after the independent office changed status. That kind of survival matters in eastern Kentucky, where the disappearance of a formal post office often marked the beginning of a place fading from outside notice. Sizerock did not entirely fade.
The name itself is revealing. Many Appalachian communities were named for families, topography, streams, or some striking local landmark. Sizerock appears to belong to that older mountain naming tradition in which the land gave the community its identity. Rennick and later postal-history writing connect the name to the prominent rock formation near the office. That makes Sizerock a place-name rooted not in abstraction but in physical sight, the kind of name a neighbor could point to rather than merely spell.
Sizerock in Federal Geography
By 1940, Sizerock was legible enough that the federal census used it as a point in describing Leslie County’s enumeration geography. The National Archives item for Leslie County’s 1940 enumeration district descriptions places Sizerock in ED 66-1 and describes that district through a route running by Thousandsticks, Confluence, Frontier Nursing Service, and Sizerock. That wording is useful because it shows how the federal government understood this section of Leslie County, not as an isolated single settlement but as a chain of mountain communities and institutions linked by roads, ridges, and service routes.
The maps reinforce that picture. The official Leslie County map issued by the Kentucky Geological Survey labels Sizerock among a cluster of small communities and also identifies Bullskin Creek in the same county landscape. The older Big Creek quadrangle likewise places Sizerock within a narrow-bottom, branch-and-hollow environment. These are not incidental details. They explain why places like Sizerock tended to center on creek travel, neighborhood schools, local stores, and postal points instead of on dense downtown development. Geography was not just the setting for Sizerock’s history. Geography was one of the main reasons the community took the shape it did.
School, Post Office, and Everyday Life
For a small mountain community, Sizerock has a surprisingly vivid visual record. The Kentucky Historical Society preserves a ca. 1940-1941 photograph identified as “Sizerock P.O. & Postmaster,” with the caption naming John Barnes at the post office. That image alone gives Sizerock something many rural places never receive in the archive, a named face tied directly to the place’s most important institution. The post office was where mail arrived, news circulated, families connected to the outside world, and the community’s official identity was fixed on envelopes and records.
The same visual record shows that Sizerock was far more than a postal stop. Kentucky Historical Society holdings also include “Sizerock School & Children,” dated ca. 1940-1941, and a “Sewing class at Sizerock” from the Robert Burns Stone collection. Together, those items show a community with children, instruction, routine, and organized social life. In a place like Sizerock, school was not simply education in the abstract. It was one of the few stable public centers of neighborhood life, a place where local identity was reproduced from one generation to the next.
Another Kentucky Historical Society image, “Essie Barnes,” describes a young girl holding the day-old son of the Sizerock postmaster. That kind of catalog detail may seem small, but small details are often what make mountain communities legible to later generations. Here, the post office is not a faceless institution. It is bound to a household, a porch, children, and kin. The community’s civic life and family life sat close together, as they often did in rural Appalachia.
Frontier Nursing Service and Local Memory
Sizerock also appears within the orbit of the Frontier Nursing Service. The post office and school photographs are cataloged with Frontier Nursing Service connections, the 1940 federal enumeration description places Sizerock in the same district frame as Frontier Nursing Service, and in 1978 Nancy Barnes was interviewed at Sizerock for the Frontier Nursing Service oral history project. The catalog for that interview links it to Sizerock and to subjects including social life and customs. Taken together, these traces suggest that Sizerock belongs not only to postal history or place-name history, but also to the broader story of health care, women’s work, and community survival in remote Leslie County.
That is part of what makes Sizerock so valuable as a historical subject. It sits at the meeting point of several Appalachian stories at once. It is a place-name story, because the rock itself seems to have given the neighborhood its name. It is a postal story, because the 1927 office fixed that name in federal paperwork. It is a school story, because the surviving photographs show children and instruction. And it is part of the Frontier Nursing Service world, where isolated mountain communities were connected by caregiving networks that left their own paper trail and visual archive.
Why Sizerock Still Matters
Sizerock matters for the same reason so many small Appalachian communities matter. Places like this often survive only in fragments. A postmaster appointment. A creek name on a map. A school photograph. An oral history catalog entry. A census district description. But when those fragments are brought together, they reveal a real community on Bullskin Creek, one that entered the clearest surviving federal record in 1927, remained visible in school and nursing-related materials around 1940, and still survives in postal and official map language today.
Sizerock’s history is modest in scale, but that is exactly why it deserves attention. Leslie County was not made only by county seats and major roads. It was made by branch communities like Sizerock, places where families built lives in narrow hollows, where schools and post offices stitched neighborhoods together, and where a local landmark could become the name by which generations knew home.
Sources & Further Reading
Barnes, Nancy. Interview with Nancy Barnes, September 12, 1978. Frontier Nursing Service Oral History Project, Nunn Center for Oral History. Accessed March 28, 2026. https://nunncenter.net/ohms-spokedb/render.php?cachefile=1979oh023_fns024_ohm.xml
Department of the Interior, 11th Decennial Census Office, 3rd Division – Geography. “1940 Census Enumeration District Descriptions – Kentucky – Leslie County – ED 66-1, ED 66-2, ED 66-3.” National Archives, via Wikimedia Commons. Accessed March 28, 2026. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1940_Census_Enumeration_District_Descriptions_-_Kentucky_-_Leslie_County_-_ED_66-1%2C_ED_66-2%2C_ED_66-3_-_NARA_-_5862859.jpg
Kentucky Historical Society. “Essie Barnes.” Digital Collections. Accessed March 28, 2026. https://www.kyhistory.com/digital/collection/PH/id/12719/
Kentucky Historical Society. “Sewing Class at Sizerock.” Digital Collections. Accessed March 28, 2026. https://kyhistory.com/digital/collection/PH/id/7353/rec/82
Kentucky Historical Society. “Sizerock P.O. & Postmaster.” Digital Collections. Accessed March 28, 2026. https://www.kyhistory.com/digital/collection/PH/id/12690/
Kentucky Historical Society. “Sizerock School & Children.” Digital Collections. Accessed March 28, 2026. https://www.kyhistory.com/digital/collection/PH/id/12654/
Kentucky Geological Survey. Leslie County, Kentucky. Map and Chart 174. Lexington: University of Kentucky, 2007. Accessed March 28, 2026. https://kgs.uky.edu/kgsweb/olops/pub/kgs/mc174_12.pdf
Leslie County (Kentucky). Circuit Court. Order Books, 1878-1941. FamilySearch Catalog. Accessed March 28, 2026. https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/34377
Leslie County (Kentucky). County Court. Order Books, 1873-1956. FamilySearch Catalog. Accessed March 28, 2026. https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/34396
Leslie County (Kentucky). Deeds, 1879-1916; Indexes, 1879-1931. FamilySearch Catalog. Accessed March 28, 2026. https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/42637
Leslie County (Kentucky). Marriage Bonds, 1884-1911. FamilySearch Catalog. Accessed March 28, 2026. https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/626661
Leslie County (Kentucky). Reports of Commissioner’s Division of Lands, 1881-1913. FamilySearch Catalog. Accessed March 28, 2026. https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/788357
Leslie County (Kentucky). Sheriff’s Report of Land Sold for Taxes, 1895-1935. FamilySearch Catalog. Accessed March 28, 2026. https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/788317
Meschter, D. Y. “Post Offices on Bullskin Creek.” La Posta: A Journal of American Postal History, 2004. Accessed March 28, 2026. https://www.lapostapub.com/Backissues/LP35-2.pdf
Rennick, Robert M. Leslie County – Post Offices & Place Names. Morehead State University, 1978. Accessed March 28, 2026. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/context/kentucky_county_histories/article/1243/viewcontent/Leslie_PostOffices.pdf
United States Geological Survey. Big Creek Quadrangle, Kentucky. 1953. Accessed March 28, 2026. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/73/KY_Big_Creek_803330_1953_24000_geo.pdf
United States Geological Survey. “Sizerock.” Geographic Names Information System, Feature ID 515448. Accessed March 28, 2026. https://edits.nationalmap.gov/apps/gaz-domestic/public/gaz-record/515448
United States Postal Service. “Postmaster Finder FAQs.” Accessed March 28, 2026. https://about.usps.com/who/profile/history/postmaster-finder/postmaster-finder-faq.htm
United States Postal Service. “SIZEROCK.” USPS Locations. Accessed March 28, 2026. https://tools.usps.com/locations/details/1436338
Works Progress Administration and Historical Records Survey. “Leslie County – General History.” 1939. Accessed March 28, 2026. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/240/
Author Note: Sizerock is the kind of Appalachian place I love researching because its history survives in scattered records that only begin to speak when you put them together. Small communities like this can look quiet on paper, but they often hold some of the richest local stories in the mountains.