Appalachian Community Histories – Slate Branch, Pulaski County: Farming Families, Churches, and a Rural School
In the countryside southwest of Somerset, Kentucky, the Slate Branch community developed around the relationships that sustained rural Pulaski County for generations. Families cultivated their farms, attended church, raised children, operated small businesses, and traveled between neighboring settlements such as Shafter, Delmer, and Science Hill. Although Slate Branch never became a large town, its history survives in an unusually detailed collection of early twentieth-century newspaper reports that reveal the people and institutions that gave the community its identity.
During 1920 and 1921, The Somerset Journal regularly published a column devoted to Slate Branch, recording everything from church services and marriages to farm transactions and the movements of families who had left Kentucky for opportunities elsewhere. These reports offer a particularly valuable record of ordinary rural life because they preserve the names and experiences of residents who might otherwise have disappeared from the written history of Pulaski County.
The surviving evidence identifies Slate Branch as part of a closely connected network of farming communities rather than an isolated settlement. Residents traveled to Somerset for business, visited relatives in nearby neighborhoods, and maintained relationships with family members who had established new homes in Indiana, Iowa, Illinois, and other states. Their stories reflect the larger experience of rural Kentucky during a period when traditional agricultural communities were increasingly connected to a changing national economy.
Families and Everyday Life in the Early Twentieth Century
The July 23, 1920, edition of The Somerset Journal provides an early glimpse of the Slate Branch community through its descriptions of several prominent local families. The newspaper reported that Mollie Cundiff and her elderly relative, Jim Cundiff, were both seriously ill, while Silas Cundiff had returned from Pine Village, Indiana, to visit the family. Other entries described Fox Beasley visiting his father, S. F. Ashbrook and his wife spending time with J. H. McBeath, and the Stevens family visiting the Wright household.
The newspaper’s accounts demonstrate how much of the community’s social life revolved around extended families and visits between neighboring households. Before telephones and automobiles became commonplace in every rural home, these relationships provided an important means of sharing news, helping relatives through illness, and maintaining connections between families scattered across the county.
Slate Branch residents also regularly appeared in the newspaper columns of neighboring communities. The Shafter reports, for example, recorded the activities of the Abbott, Girdler, Jones, Vaughn, and Ashbrook families, many of whom also appeared in the Slate Branch column. The overlap illustrates how closely the two communities were connected, with shared religious activities, family relationships, and everyday travel across the surrounding countryside.
These reports rarely described extraordinary events. Their historical value comes instead from documenting the ordinary experiences of people whose lives formed the foundation of the community. A visit to a neighboring farm, the return of a relative from another state, or the illness of an elderly resident was significant enough to be shared with readers throughout Pulaski County.
The Cundiff Family and the Reach of Migration
One of the most detailed surviving accounts of a Slate Branch family appeared in the October 29, 1920, edition of The Somerset Journal, following the death of James M. Cundiff. Known locally as Uncle Jimmie, Cundiff died on October 24 at the age of 82. The newspaper identified him as the son of David Cundiff and recorded the names and residences of his eight children, providing an unusually complete account of a family whose members had spread across several states.
His surviving children included Silas Cundiff of Pine Village, Indiana; Sim Cundiff of Fremont, Iowa; Rufus Cundiff of Dora, North Dakota; Samuel Cundiff of Iowa; John Cundiff of Somerset; Mary Foster of Indianapolis, Indiana; and Lola White, who lived with her father. Another son, Dr. Bill Cundiff, had already died. Following James Cundiff’s death, Silas and Sim returned to Kentucky, and funeral services were conducted by Reverend Hunter at Oak Hill Church, where Cundiff was buried in the church graveyard.
The Cundiff family illustrates how migration changed rural Pulaski County during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While some children remained close to their childhood homes, others settled hundreds of miles away, establishing lives in Midwestern communities and on the northern plains. Despite these distances, their connections with Slate Branch remained strong enough for family visits and funerals to bring them back to Kentucky.
Other Slate Branch families experienced similar movements. In October 1920, the newspaper recorded that Fred Ashbrook had returned from Arizona, where he had traveled for his health. Visitors to the Ashbrook household included relatives or acquaintances from Nebraska and Illinois. These accounts show that Slate Branch was connected to a much wider world through migration, correspondence, and the movement of family members between states.
Churches and Religious Life at Slate Branch
Churches occupied an important place in the development and everyday life of Slate Branch. By the early twentieth century, the community supported Baptist and Nazarene religious activities, with visiting ministers holding regular appointments and special meetings that brought neighbors together.
The October 8, 1920, edition of The Somerset Journal reported that Reverend Nicely was conducting a series of meetings at the Nazarene Church. Reverend J. S. Abbott also regularly served the community, although illness occasionally prevented him from fulfilling his appointments. Other ministers, including Reverend Scott of Wilmore, traveled to Slate Branch to lead services, demonstrating the connections between rural congregations and the wider religious communities of Kentucky.
The December 24, 1920, newspaper reported another series of religious activities, including a sermon delivered by Reverend Stover at the Nazarene Church. Together, these accounts establish that organized religious life was firmly rooted in Slate Branch and that its congregations remained active throughout the year.
An important development occurred in April 1921 when the Baptist congregation reorganized its Sunday school. According to the April 8 edition of The Somerset Journal, a large gathering attended the reorganization, and John Jones was elected superintendent. The occasion represented more than a change in leadership, as Sunday schools provided rural communities with religious instruction, opportunities for education, and regular social gatherings for children and adults.
Slate Branch Baptist Church continued to serve the community throughout the twentieth century. In May 1984, the Western Recorder, a Kentucky Baptist publication, announced that William L. Dub Henderson had accepted the call to become pastor, effective May 4. A subsequent report in July identified Henderson as the congregation’s first full-time pastor, marking a significant development in its institutional history.
The church remains an identifiable part of the Slate Branch community. The Lake Cumberland Baptist Association lists Slate Branch Baptist Church at 2941 Slate Branch Road, preserving an institutional connection with the religious life documented in the newspapers more than a century earlier.
Education and the Slate Branch School
Education was another important part of community life, although the surviving newspaper accounts provide fewer details about the school than they do about the churches and individual families. One particularly valuable reference identifies Pearl Vaught as a teacher at Slate Branch during 1920, while contemporary reports describe her frequent visits to family members in Science Hill.
The December 1920 reporting identifies Vaught’s teaching position, and the October 29 newspaper records that she spent a weekend with her family in Science Hill. Her movements illustrate the close relationship between neighboring communities and the role that teachers played in rural Kentucky, where educators often maintained connections with several settlements.
The existence of a local school placed Slate Branch within the broader network of rural educational institutions that served Pulaski County before the consolidation of many smaller schools during the twentieth century. These schools provided children with access to formal instruction without requiring daily travel to Somerset or another larger community.
Additional records may survive within the historical collections maintained by Pulaski County Schools. The district retains archival materials concerning former employees and students, including information associated with one-room and two-room schools that operated before 1964. Such records could help establish the dates of the Slate Branch School’s operation, identify additional teachers, and provide information about the children who attended.
Farming, Commerce, and Property Transactions
Agriculture remained central to the Slate Branch economy during the early twentieth century. The newspaper columns regularly recorded farm sales, the purchase of livestock, and families moving between properties in the surrounding countryside. These accounts illustrate a local economy in which landownership, tenant farming, and the exchange of agricultural goods influenced everyday life.
On October 8, 1920, The Somerset Journal identified John A. Jones as a Slate Branch merchant who had traveled to Knoxville, Tennessee, to purchase merchandise for his business. Jones’s journey demonstrates how even relatively small rural communities participated in regional commercial networks, obtaining goods from larger markets and distributing them to local customers.
The newspaper later recorded that Jones purchased a span of mules from John Brown, an acquisition that reflected the continued importance of animal power in rural agriculture. Mules remained valuable for cultivating fields, hauling supplies, and transporting goods at a time when tractors and motor vehicles were beginning to transform farming in other parts of the country.
Property transactions also reveal the changing ownership of land within the community. In January 1921, James Kenney sold his farm to Bill Jones of Delmer, while Olmo Girdler moved to a farm belonging to Mattie D. Prather. Other reports recorded the movements of the Daulton and Girdler families, reflecting the regular changes in residence that occurred within the local agricultural economy.
Such transactions offer valuable starting points for tracing the development of Slate Branch through land deeds, tax records, and surviving property surveys. When combined with the contemporary newspaper accounts, these records may help reconstruct the locations of individual family farms and establish how the community’s agricultural landscape changed over successive generations.
Marriages, Births, and Community Celebrations
The Slate Branch newspaper columns also preserved important details about marriages, births, and family celebrations, providing evidence of how the community marked significant events in the lives of its residents.
In December 1920, the newspaper announced the marriage of Velasco Girdler and Cloa Abbott, who had traveled to Tennessee to be married. The same edition reported the birth of a daughter to the Fox Beasley family on December 17. These announcements appeared alongside reports of church services, shopping trips, and visits between neighbors, illustrating the importance of family news to the community.
Another marriage attracted attention in April 1921 when John Andy Girdler and Bernetta Brewster traveled to Tennessee for their wedding. The April 8 newspaper described the marriage as a surprise to their many friends, suggesting that the couple had not widely announced their plans before leaving Kentucky.
These accounts provide valuable genealogical evidence for descendants of the families involved. They also reveal the social relationships that connected households across Slate Branch and its neighboring settlements, where marriages frequently brought established families into closer association with one another.
Slate Branch in the Historical Record
Although the surviving newspaper columns provide a particularly detailed picture of Slate Branch during 1920 and 1921, other records can extend the community’s history beyond those years. Federal population censuses, historic maps, land deeds, and cemetery records offer additional opportunities to reconstruct its development and identify the families who lived along its roads and waterways.
The 1940 United States Census for Pulaski County includes households associated with Slate Branch Road, providing a means of tracing families who remained in the area after the period documented by the early newspaper reports. Historic United States Geological Survey maps, including the 1953 Frazer quadrangle and the Delmer quadrangle surveyed in 1961, offer further evidence of the surrounding geography, roads, and settlement patterns.
Cemetery records provide another important connection to the community’s past. Local genealogical indexes identify burial grounds associated with Slate Branch, including Slate Branch Baptist Church Cemetery and Slate Branch Community Cemetery. These records should be examined alongside original gravestones and county death records to establish family relationships and distinguish between burial locations.
The Pulaski County Public Library also provides access to digitized historic newspapers, census materials, and genealogical resources. Its newspaper archive includes later editions of The Somerset Journal and The Commonwealth, making it possible to continue tracing Slate Branch through the middle and later decades of the twentieth century.
The Legacy of Slate Branch
Slate Branch’s history is preserved less through major political events or large industrial developments than through the lives of the people who built and maintained the community. Its churches brought families together for worship and religious education, its school served children from the surrounding countryside, and its farms and small businesses sustained households whose relationships extended across Pulaski County and beyond.
The surviving newspaper accounts capture a community undergoing gradual change during the early twentieth century. Some residents remained on ancestral farms while others left for Indiana, Iowa, and more distant parts of the country, yet family connections continued to bring people back to Slate Branch for weddings, funerals, and visits. The same newspapers that recorded these movements also preserved the names of local merchants, teachers, ministers, and farmers, allowing later generations to reconstruct a history that might otherwise have been lost.
Today, the continued presence of Slate Branch Baptist Church and the survival of historical records offer lasting connections to the community’s earlier generations. Its story represents an important part of Pulaski County’s rural heritage, reminding readers that the history of Appalachia was shaped not only by its larger towns and major industries, but also by the smaller communities whose families, churches, schools, and farms formed the foundation of everyday life.
Sources & Further Reading
The Somerset Journal. “Slate Branch.” July 23, 1920. Pulaski County KYGenWeb. https://kygenweb.net/pulaski/news/7_23_1920.htm
The Somerset Journal. “Slate Branch.” July 30, 1920. Pulaski County KYGenWeb. https://kygenweb.net/pulaski/news/7_30_1920.htm
The Somerset Journal. “Slate Branch.” September 17, 1920. Pulaski County KYGenWeb. https://kygenweb.net/pulaski/news/9_17_1920.htm
The Somerset Journal. “Slate Branch.” October 8, 1920. Pulaski County KYGenWeb. https://kygenweb.net/pulaski/news/10_8_1920.htm
The Somerset Journal. “Pisgah.” October 15, 1920. Pulaski County KYGenWeb. https://kygenweb.net/pulaski/news/10_15_1920.htm
The Somerset Journal. “Slate Branch.” October 29, 1920. Pulaski County KYGenWeb. https://kygenweb.net/pulaski/news/10_29_1920.htm
The Somerset Journal. “Slate Branch.” November 26, 1920. Pulaski County KYGenWeb. https://kygenweb.net/pulaski/news/11_26_1920.htm
The Somerset Journal. “Slate Branch” and “McKinney.” December 24, 1920. Pulaski County KYGenWeb. https://kygenweb.net/pulaski/news/12_24_1920_2.htm
The Somerset Journal. “Slate Branch.” January 28, 1921. Pulaski County KYGenWeb. https://kygenweb.net/pulaski/news/1_1921/1_28_1921.htm
The Somerset Journal. “Slate Branch.” February 11, 1921. Pulaski County KYGenWeb. https://kygenweb.net/pulaski/news/2_21/2_11_1921_4.htm
The Somerset Journal. “Slate Branch.” February 18, 1921. Pulaski County KYGenWeb. https://kygenweb.net/pulaski/news/2_21/2_18_1921_3.htm
The Somerset Journal. “Slate Branch.” April 8, 1921. Pulaski County KYGenWeb. https://kygenweb.net/pulaski/news/4_21/4_8_1921.htm
The Somerset Journal. “Editorial: Pulaski County and Her Problems.” February 20, 1920. Pulaski County KYGenWeb. https://kygenweb.net/pulaski/news/2_20_1920.htm
The Somerset Journal. “Editorials.” July 30, 1920. Contemporary discussion of migration and agricultural labor in Pulaski County. Pulaski County KYGenWeb. https://kygenweb.net/pulaski/news/7_30_1920.htm
Western Recorder. May 15 and July 24, 1984. Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives. Digital collection containing the reported notices concerning Slate Branch Baptist Church’s pastoral leadership. The individual notices should be checked in the issue scans. https://sbhla.org/digital-resources/western-recorder/
Lake Cumberland Baptist Association. “Our Churches.” Church directory containing Slate Branch Baptist Church. https://lakecumberlandbaptist.org/our-churches/
United States Bureau of the Census. Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940: Population Schedules. Pulaski County, Kentucky. Record Group 29, National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/research/census/1940
United States Geological Survey. Frazer Quadrangle, Kentucky. 1:24,000. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1953. https://prd-tnm.s3.amazonaws.com/StagedProducts/Maps/HistoricalTopo/PDF/KY/24000/KY_Frazer_803543_1953_24000_geo.pdf
United States Geological Survey. “topoView: Historical Topographic Maps.” Collection for researching historical maps of Slate Branch, Shafter, Delmer, and neighboring Pulaski County communities. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/topoview/
Pulaski County Public Library. “Digital Resources.” Somerset, KY. Historical newspaper collections and local genealogical research resources. https://pulaskilibrary.com/digital-resources/
Pulaski County Public Library. Digital Archives of the Pulaski County Public Library. Digitized local newspapers, including later editions of The Somerset Journal and The Commonwealth. https://pulaskilibrary.advantage-preservation.com/
Pulaski County Schools. “Records Request Procedures.” Historical school and employee records, including requests concerning former one-room and two-room schools. https://www.pulaski.net/community/records-request-procedures-2-392-1
Pulaski County Clerk. “Land Records.” Somerset, KY. Historical deeds, wills, marriage licenses, mortgages, and other county records. https://pulaski.kycountyclerk.us/land-records/
Kentucky Secretary of State. “Kentucky Land Office.” Frankfort, KY. Historical land patents, surveys, and early property records. https://www.sos.ky.gov/land/Pages/default.aspx
Kentucky Historical Society. “Digital Collections.” Frankfort, KY. Archival manuscripts, photographs, maps, genealogical materials, and historical publications. https://history.ky.gov/explore/catalog-research-tools/digital-collections
Pulaski County KYGenWeb. “Pulaski County Cemeteries.” Cemetery index identifying Slate Branch Church Cemetery and other local burial grounds. https://kygenweb.net/pulaski/cemetery/cemeteries.html
Tibbals, Alma Owens. A History of Pulaski County, Kentucky. Somerset, KY: Moore, 1952. https://books.google.com/books?id=hUh4D_2eUFMC
Author Note: Slate Branch’s surviving newspaper accounts remind us that the history of Appalachia can be found in the everyday lives of its families, teachers, merchants, and congregations. I hope this article helps preserve the names and stories of a Pulaski County community whose history deserves to remain accessible to future generations.