Appalachian Community Histories – Staffordsville, Johnson County: From Frew and Rule to Paintsville Lake and Mountain Homeplace
Staffordsville sits only a few miles from Paintsville, but its history belongs to a different kind of Johnson County landscape. Rather than developing around a courthouse square, railroad yard, or large industrial operation, the community grew along Paint Creek near the mouth of Mudlick Creek, where roads, branches, farms, family homes, churches, and eventually a post office created a recognizable settlement in the narrow mountain valley.
The modern name makes Staffordsville sound as though the community began with the Stafford family, but its documented postal history reveals a more complicated story. Before Staffordsville appeared on maps, the same area was associated with the names Frew and Rule. During little more than a decade at the end of the nineteenth century, the post office serving the neighborhood opened, closed, changed names, reopened, and finally became Staffordsville.
Those changes were more than postal bookkeeping. In rural eastern Kentucky, where communities often lacked incorporated governments or sharply defined boundaries, a post office helped give a neighborhood an official identity. The name written on letters eventually appeared in directories, maps, newspapers, school records, business notices, and government documents.
By the twentieth century, Staffordsville had become a permanent Johnson County place-name.
Then the landscape changed again.
During the second half of the twentieth century, the federal Paintsville Lake project transformed the Paint Creek valley immediately above Staffordsville. Roads shifted, land entered federal ownership, cemeteries were relocated, archaeological investigations examined sites that might otherwise have disappeared, and historic buildings were saved from the reservoir area. Out of that transformation came one of Staffordsville’s best-known landmarks today, Mountain Homeplace.
The history of Staffordsville is therefore a story about more than the origins of a community name. It is about the relationship between families and waterways, rural institutions and federal projects, and the effort to preserve an older Appalachian landscape while the physical valley around it was being remade.
Before Staffordsville Was Staffordsville
The geography came first.
Paint Creek provided the main valley through this part of Johnson County, while Mudlick Creek and smaller branches opened narrow corridors into the surrounding ridges. Long before improved highways crossed eastern Kentucky, waterways helped determine where people could establish farms, build homes, travel between settlements, and find enough relatively level ground for community institutions.
This pattern was common throughout Johnson County. Historic preservation surveys later noted that the rugged terrain forced early roads into stream valleys and helped encourage the persistence of log construction and relatively self-sufficient farmsteads well into the nineteenth century. Remote homes, schools, and churches were often built from local timber because residents worked with the materials and landscape available to them.
Staffordsville eventually developed within this broader Paint Creek world. Its modern center lies near the meeting of Paint Creek and Mudlick Creek, but the historical community cannot be understood by imagining a sharply bounded town. Families lived along branches and roads extending outward from the postal center, and residents frequently moved among Staffordsville, Paintsville, Barnetts Creek, Volga, Oil Springs, Manila, and other neighboring communities for work, worship, education, trade, and family visits.
The community that later became Staffordsville was therefore already part of a settled mountain landscape before anyone wrote that name on an envelope.
Frew, Rule, and the Birth of Staffordsville
The clearest documentary beginning for Staffordsville comes through the United States postal system.
Kentucky place-name research identifies the first post office at the site as Frew, established in 1882. The name was probably connected with Johnson County judge John Frew Stewart. That office closed in 1887. A new office called Rule opened in 1888, but it survived only briefly, closing in 1889. Frew returned as the postal name that same year before the office was renamed Staffordsville in 1893.
Later accounts identify Millard F. Rule as the first postmaster associated with the 1882 office and Jessie Stafford as the postmistress connected with the 1893 adoption of the Staffordsville name. The most important surviving federal records for testing and expanding that story are the Post Office Department’s Record of Appointment of Postmasters. The National Archives explains that these records preserve establishment and discontinuance dates, changes in post-office names, postmaster names, and appointment dates. Johnson County appears on Kentucky Roll 46 of Microfilm M841.
A second federal collection can potentially reveal even more about the physical community. Post Office Department site-location reports asked local postmasters to describe nearby roads, creeks, mail routes, transportation features, and neighboring post offices. Many included sketches showing approximately where an office stood. The National Archives notes that reports connected with name changes may sometimes be filed under a later postal name, making Staffordsville, Frew, and Rule all important names when reconstructing the community’s early geography. Johnson County is included on Kentucky Roll 219 of this collection.
What emerged from those years of changing postal names was Staffordsville.
Once that name survived long enough to become familiar, it traveled far beyond the post office itself. Maps, directories, newspapers, schools, cemeteries, churches, and residents began using Staffordsville to describe a larger neighborhood.
By 1911, Rand McNally placed Staffordsville on its Johnson County map among the county’s established communities. By the late 1920s, national banking directories classified Staffordsville as a non-bank community commercially connected with Paintsville, a small detail that helps show how rural residents depended upon the nearby county seat for services while maintaining a separate community identity.
Staffordsville in the Federal Survey
One of the most remarkable surviving descriptions of early twentieth-century Staffordsville was created not by a local historian, but by federal surveyors.
During leveling work conducted between 1914 and 1916, the United States Geological Survey recorded benchmarks throughout eastern Kentucky. When surveyors reached Staffordsville, they described their surroundings with the precision necessary to relocate each point.
One benchmark stood near the road forks approximately 250 feet west of the mouth of Mudlick Creek. The survey placed it on the north bank of Paint Creek and only about 75 feet southeast of the Staffordsville post office. Another benchmark was recorded three-quarters of a mile west of the post office at a road fork and steel highway bridge over Paint Creek near Barnett Creek.
As the survey continued northwest, its notes mentioned Le Masters Branch, the residence and barn of E. G. Le Masters, Glade Branch, Fish Trap Church, Colvin Branch, road forks, fords, sandstone outcrops, and the residence of Daniel Le Masters.
Read together, these technical measurements become something close to a written map of Staffordsville before modern highways and Paintsville Lake altered the valley.
There was a post office near Paint Creek. Roads forked beside creeks and bridges. Families lived close enough to the route for surveyors to use their houses and barns as landmarks. Travelers crossed Paint Creek at bridges and fords, while smaller roads climbed toward churches, branches, farms, and neighboring settlements.
The community was not concentrated into a dense commercial district. Staffordsville stretched through the valley.
That scattered form was typical of rural eastern Kentucky. The post office gave the place its name, but roads, creeks, homes, churches, schools, cemeteries, stores, and family relationships gave it substance.
Business and Everyday Life
Newspapers begin to add people to the landscape mapped by federal surveyors.
In 1927, the Paintsville Herald reported the death of J. M. “Jimmie” Kimbleton of Staffordsville after an automobile accident near Teays Branch. Kimbleton was described as a businessman who had worked in insurance and had also been successful in the oil business. He belonged to the Masonic lodge in Paintsville and was buried at Staffordsville with Masonic ceremonies.
His story provides a glimpse of a Staffordsville that was connected closely with Paintsville without simply being absorbed by it. A resident could live and be buried at Staffordsville, conduct business in the surrounding region, belong to an organization in Paintsville, and travel increasingly by automobile along the roads connecting the rural communities to the county seat.
Other surviving newspaper material preserves the Stafford family connection.
A 1929 Paintsville Herald obituary for S. B. “Ben” Stafford described him as a Johnson County native and son of James Stafford, whose family was associated with Staffordsville. Following the funeral, burial took place in what the newspaper called the old Stafford burial ground at Staffordsville. The account is important because it demonstrates that the Stafford name remained embedded in the physical and family landscape decades after it became the official postal name.
These small newspaper records are often more revealing than formal histories for communities like Staffordsville. They show where people actually said they lived, where they were buried, what occupations they followed, which churches and lodges they attended, and how family connections linked one Johnson County community to another.
The Schoolhouse Community
Education created another center of Staffordsville life.
A surviving 1943 Johnson County teacher list identifies Alfred H. Johnson, Mae Meade Music, and Virginia Jones as teachers at Staffordsville School. The same county list included dozens of other small community schools at places such as Cuba, McKenzie Branch, Low Gap, Barnetts Creek, Oil Springs, Riceville, Long Fork, Denver, and Colvin Branch.
That list captures an educational system that has largely disappeared.
Instead of transporting students across large areas to consolidated schools, Johnson County maintained schools throughout its creek valleys and rural communities. The schoolhouse was often one of the few public buildings in a neighborhood, placing education within walking distance of families who lived along surrounding roads and branches.
The wider Paint Creek country preserves an especially important example of that system.
McKenzie Branch School, later moved to Mountain Homeplace, was the last one-room schoolhouse operating in Johnson County. It remained in use through the 1954-1955 school year. The building that survives today therefore represents something Staffordsville residents would once have recognized immediately: the small rural school serving families whose homes were scattered throughout a mountain watershed.
Churches, Families, and the Paint Creek Landscape
Churches performed a similar role in holding rural communities together.
Historic-preservation documentation for Johnson County emphasizes how religious buildings were often constructed cooperatively by families using the same log-building traditions seen in local homes. Fishtrap United Baptist Church is one of the important surviving examples from the Paint Creek region. Preservation work associated with the Paintsville Lake project ultimately helped save the building, which later became part of Mountain Homeplace.
The church remained in religious use until 1974, long after the period represented by the living-history site today. Its survival links Staffordsville not merely with an imagined nineteenth-century mountain culture, but with congregations that continued worshiping in small rural church buildings into the modern era.
Cemeteries served as another form of community memory.
Families might move away, post offices might change names, schools might consolidate, and roads might be rebuilt, but burial grounds continued tying surnames to particular hillsides and hollows. The reference in Ben Stafford’s 1929 obituary to an old Stafford burial ground demonstrates how family geography survived beside the newer postal identity.
Staffordsville was therefore constructed from overlapping landscapes. There was the postal Staffordsville, the school district, the church communities, family farms, cemeteries, creek neighborhoods, and the commercial connection with Paintsville.
No single boundary contained all of them.
Staffordsville Goes to War
The Second World War reached even the smallest Johnson County communities through the draft.
A Paintsville Herald list from April 1942 identified men by their home post-office addresses as Johnson County prepared another group for induction into the United States armed forces. Staffordsville appeared repeatedly. Among the men listed with Staffordsville addresses were Earl Glen O’Bryan, Stephen Proctor Caudill, Kedric Roberts, Johnnie Tackett Jr., and Arthur Fairchild. A later list connected Clarence Edward Tackett with Staffordsville as well.
The list is a small wartime census of the community.
It demonstrates how the post office still functioned as a geographic identifier during an era when local men entered a national military system. Staffordsville residents gathered with inductees from Paintsville, Van Lear, Oil Springs, Sitka, Barnetts Creek, Boons Camp, Riceville, Volga, and communities throughout Johnson County.
Men left the narrow valleys through Paintsville, traveled to induction centers, and from there entered a war taking place thousands of miles from Paint Creek.
At home, teachers continued working in Staffordsville School, families maintained farms and households, churches gathered congregations, and newspapers carried the names of residents into the county record.
The Federal Government Returns to Paint Creek
No twentieth-century event changed the physical surroundings of Staffordsville more dramatically than the development of Paintsville Lake.
Federal planning envisioned a dam on Paint Creek above Paintsville as part of a broader system of water management in the Big Sandy River basin. The project was designed for flood-risk reduction, water supply, low-flow augmentation, fish and wildlife enhancement, and recreation. The dam site lay on Paint Creek in Johnson County, while the reservoir extended into the mountain landscape toward Morgan County.
A project measured in engineering terms also had deeply human consequences.
Land had to be acquired. Roads were changed. Cemeteries required attention and relocation. Farm properties that had remained in families for generations entered a federal project boundary. Archaeologists, architectural historians, and preservation officials were called into the valley because building a reservoir meant that parts of the existing cultural landscape would be permanently changed.
By 1979, a Corps of Engineers annual report stated that 257 tracts needed for the project had been acquired. Dam and appurtenant construction, which had begun under contract in November 1976, was then about 75 percent complete. The same report recorded cemetery-removal and roadwork contracts as part of the project.
The language was administrative.
For the families of Paint Creek, it described the remaking of their landscape.
The Flood Scare of 1978
The unfinished Paintsville Lake project itself became the center of a local emergency in December 1978.
Heavy rainfall sent water rising through the watershed while construction was still underway. Problems developed around the temporary works associated with the dam project, and residents downstream were evacuated as officials monitored the situation.
The Corps later reported that during the December 1978 rise, the developing project stored more than 14,000 acre-feet of water and reduced the flood stage on the Levisa Fork at Paintsville by an estimated 3.7 feet.
For residents of Staffordsville and Paintsville, the event offered an unsettling preview of how completely the massive construction project above town had changed their relationship with Paint Creek.
The permanent dam was still unfinished. The familiar creek valley had become a construction zone of earthworks, excavation, roads, federal property, and rising water.
Yet the same project would eventually become one of Staffordsville’s defining modern landmarks.
Paintsville Lake Changes the Map
The Paintsville Lake dam was completed in 1983.
The finished rock-fill structure stands about 160 feet high and 1,600 feet long. The reservoir covers approximately 1,139 surface acres and has about 57 miles of shoreline. The United States Army Corps of Engineers manages more than 13,000 acres surrounding the lake.
For visitors, those numbers describe a recreational resource.
For local history, they represent an enormous transformation.
Where families had once traveled beside Paint Creek, a reservoir now stretched through the mountains. Land that had been privately owned became part of a federal project. Old roads no longer followed exactly the same landscape. Some buildings disappeared, others were moved, and archaeological sites received attention because the physical setting around them was changing permanently.
Staffordsville, once identified most easily by its post office and creek junction, became the address associated with Paintsville Lake State Park. The modern state park lists Staffordsville as its location and promotes the lake’s steep cliffs, wooded coves, boating, fishing, camping, kayaking, and trails.
The community had entered another stage of its history.
The creek landscape that helped create Staffordsville had also created a reservoir landscape.
Saving the McKenzie Cabin
Some of the most important historical work connected with Paintsville Lake came from the effort to document what might be lost.
The David McKenzie farmstead provides an extraordinary example.
David McKenzie came to Johnson County during the nineteenth century and established a family farm along Peter Cave Branch. Preservation records indicate that the family acquired the property on which the historic cabin stood in 1860. The house developed into a substantial log dwelling and remained connected with generations of the McKenzie family. Federal preservation officials eventually described it as an exceptionally well-preserved example of Johnson County log architecture.
Archaeological investigations later allowed researchers to reconstruct details of daily life around the house.
Excavations recovered hundreds of artifacts, including ceramic fragments, nails, a pipe-bowl fragment, a marble, and a mule shoe. Archaeologists identified the locations of fence posts, a stone walkway, a detached kitchen, and other features associated with the working farmstead. Soil chemistry even helped identify areas connected with meat processing, ash disposal, and possible gardening.
These finds were ordinary things.
That is precisely what makes them valuable.
History in communities such as Staffordsville rarely survives through mansions filled with expensive objects. It survives through kitchens, smokehouses, barns, schools, churches, fence lines, gardens, tools, dishes, children’s toys, family cemeteries, and the worn paths connecting one building to another.
The McKenzie property allowed archaeology to recover pieces of that world.
Mountain Homeplace and a Valley Remembered
The Paintsville Lake project changed the landscape, but it also helped create an opportunity to preserve part of what the reservoir era threatened to erase.
Historic buildings from the surrounding region were moved and assembled near the lake as part of Mountain Homeplace. Among them were the McKenzie Cabin, McKenzie Branch School, Fishtrap United Baptist Church, and other structures representing the architecture and working life of nineteenth-century eastern Kentucky.
The effort grew through cooperation between local leaders and the United States Army Corps of Engineers. Corps documentation described the historic-area project as a partnership intended to preserve important elements of Paintsville Lake’s cultural legacy, with the cabin, church, and one-room schoolhouse forming the core of the developing historical complex.
Mountain Homeplace now interprets rural Appalachian farm life through buildings, agriculture, crafts, and demonstrations. The McKenzie Cabin dates principally from the nineteenth century, while the LeMaster Cabin preserved there has been described as an even older wooden structure dating to the 1830s. McKenzie Branch School represents the one-room education system that survived in Johnson County into the 1950s, and Fishtrap Church represents the small rural congregations that bound communities together for generations.
There is a certain historical irony in Mountain Homeplace.
A twentieth-century federal reservoir project helped displace an older cultural landscape, yet the same period of construction generated archaeological excavations, architectural surveys, preservation records, oral histories, National Register nominations, and ultimately a historical site where pieces of that landscape could survive.
The lake covered part of the old world.
The Homeplace preserved part of its memory.
Staffordsville Between Two Landscapes
Modern Staffordsville stands between those two histories.
One is the old Paint Creek landscape of post offices, family farms, creek roads, one-room schools, churches, cemeteries, small businesses, bridges, and houses sitting close to the water because the mountains left few other places to build.
The other is the landscape created by Paintsville Lake, with the dam, recreation areas, state park, federal property, trails, boat ramps, wooded shoreline, and Mountain Homeplace.
Both belong to Staffordsville.
The community’s history did not end when the reservoir filled. Paintsville Lake simply became another layer added to everything that came before it.
Someone traveling through Staffordsville today can move from modern roads to the lake in minutes. A visitor can stand beside a reservoir completed in 1983 and then walk through buildings representing the nineteenth-century Paint Creek country that preceded it.
Few places make the transformation of Appalachian Kentucky so visible.
Why Staffordsville Matters
Staffordsville demonstrates why small Appalachian communities deserve histories of their own.
Nothing about its early development required a courthouse, railroad depot, company headquarters, or incorporated government. A settlement grew because families occupied the Paint Creek valley and surrounding branches. A post office gave their neighborhood an official name. Schools educated children. Churches organized congregations. Cemeteries anchored families to the land. Roads connected the community with Paintsville and the wider region.
The postal name changed from Frew to Rule, back to Frew, and finally to Staffordsville, but the people continued building lives along the same creeks.
Federal surveyors arrived and left measurements describing the roads and bridges they encountered. Newspapers recorded businessmen, funerals, teachers, soldiers, and ordinary residents. Decades later, another branch of the federal government arrived with a project large enough to alter the valley itself.
Paintsville Lake changed Staffordsville, but it also caused historians, archaeologists, engineers, preservationists, and local residents to look carefully at what had existed before the water rose.
Because they did, pieces of the older Paint Creek world remain unusually well documented.
The McKenzie Cabin survives. The schoolhouse survives. Fishtrap Church survives. Archaeological reports preserve farmyards and buildings that no longer stand in their original settings. Government records preserve the old roads and creek crossings. Newspaper pages preserve names that might otherwise have disappeared.
Staffordsville is therefore more than the community beside Paintsville Lake.
Before the lake, before the state park, and even before the name Staffordsville, people were already making a home where Mudlick Creek met Paint Creek.
The names changed.
The valley changed.
But the history remained.
Sources & Further Reading
United States Post Office Department. Record of Appointment of Postmasters, 1832–September 30, 1971. Microfilm Publication M841, Record Group 28. Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration. Johnson County, Kentucky, appears on Roll 46. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/postmasters-1832-1971.html
United States Post Office Department. Post Office Department Reports of Site Locations, 1837–1950. Microfilm Publication M1126, Record Group 28. Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration. Johnson County, Kentucky, appears on Roll 219. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/locations-1837-1950.html
United States Geological Survey. Spirit Leveling in Kentucky, 1914 to 1916. Bulletin 673. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1918. https://pubs.usgs.gov/bul/0673/report.pdf
United States Army Corps of Engineers. Final Environmental Statement: Paintsville Lake, Paint Creek, Big Sandy River Basin, Kentucky. April 30, 1971. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Final_environmental_statement-_Paintsville_Lake,_Paint_Creek,_Big_Sandy_River_Basin,_Kentucky_-_USACE-p16021coll7-10744.pdf
United States Army Corps of Engineers. Paintsville Lake Dam Construction, Operation, Paint Creek, Big Sandy River Basin: Environmental Impact Statement. Huntington, WV: Huntington District, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 1972. https://books.google.com/books/about/Paintsville_Lake_Dam_Construction_Operat.html?id=BSo0AQAAMAAJ
United States Army Corps of Engineers. Annual Report on Civil Works Activities of the Chief of Engineers for Fiscal Year 1979. Washington, DC: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 1979. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4b/U.S._Army_Corps_of_Engineers_annual_report_on_Civil_Works_activities_of_the_Chief_of_Engineers_for_FY_1979%2C_volume_II%2C_field_reports_-_USACE-p16021coll6-603.pdf
United States Army Corps of Engineers. Paintsville Lake Master Plan. Huntington District, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/91/Paintsville_Lake_master_plan_-_USACE-p16021coll7-24884.pdf
United States Army Corps of Engineers, Louisville District. “Paintsville Lake.” Accessed October 3, 2026. https://www.lrd.usace.army.mil/Submit-ArticleCS/Recreation/Article/3632174/paintsville-lake/
Lady, Lynn. “David McKenzie Log Cabin.” National Register of Historic Places Inventory Nomination Form. Huntington, WV: Huntington District, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 1982. https://npgallery.nps.gov/GetAsset/1cff200b-5013-43c7-89f4-2eab1cbe4ac9
Powell, Helen. Multiple Resources of Johnson County, Kentucky. National Register of Historic Places Multiple Property Documentation, 1988. Washington, DC: National Park Service. https://npgallery.nps.gov/NRHP/GetAsset/NRHP/64000234_text
Carlisle, Ronald C. An Architectural Study of Some Folk Structures in the Area of the Paintsville Lake Dam, Johnson and Morgan Counties, Kentucky. 1982. National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution. https://sova.si.edu/record/naa.1976-028/
Dexter, Richard W. Archeological Survey and Testing in the Proposed Paintsville Reservoir in Johnson and Morgan Counties, Kentucky. 1974. https://openlibrary.org/authors/OL14958727A/Richard_W._Dexter
National Park Service. Archeological and Historic Data Recovery Program. 1976. https://www.nps.gov/orgs/1187/upload/1976a_508.pdf
Kentucky Archaeological Survey. “McKenzie Cabin, Site 15Jo67.” Discover Kentucky Archaeology. Lexington: University of Kentucky. Accessed October 3, 2026. https://archaeology.ky.gov/Find-a-Site/Pages/McKenzie-Cabin.aspx
McBride, Kim A., et al. Archaeological Investigations at the McKenzie Farmstead (15Jo67): A Multiple Component Occupation in Johnson County, Kentucky. Archaeological Report No. 334. Lexington: University of Kentucky, 1994. https://archaeology.ky.gov/Learn-More/Documents/Mississippi%20Period%20Chapter%20The%20Archaeology%20of%20Kentucky%20An%20update%20Volume%202.pdf
United States Geological Survey. Paintsville Quadrangle, Kentucky. 1917. https://mocat.library.unt.edu/catalog/282-ch586
United States Geological Survey. Paintsville, Kentucky, 7.5-Minute Historical Topographic Map. 1962. https://store.usgs.gov/product/864472
United States Geological Survey. Paintsville Quadrangle, Kentucky. 1992. https://prd-tnm.s3.amazonaws.com/StagedProducts/Maps/HistoricalTopo/PDF/KY/24000/KY_Paintsville_709486_1992_24000_geo.pdf
Outerbridge, William F. Geologic Map of the Paintsville Quadrangle, Johnson and Floyd Counties, Kentucky. Geologic Quadrangle Map GQ-495. Washington, DC: United States Geological Survey, 1966. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/gq495
Hauser, Robert E. Geology and Mineral Resources of the Paintsville Quadrangle, Kentucky. Bulletin 13. Lexington: Kentucky Geological Survey, 1953. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/Prodesc/proddesc_72553.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
National Archives and Records Administration. “Census Records.” Accessed October 3, 2026. https://www.archives.gov/research/census
Johnson County Clerk. “Records.” Johnson County, Kentucky. Accessed October 3, 2026. https://johnson.countyclerk.us/records/
Paintsville Herald. Digital Archives of Johnson County Kentucky. Johnson County Public Library and Advantage Preservation. Accessed October 3, 2026. https://johnson.advantage-preservation.com/
Paintsville Herald Archive. Camden-Carroll Library, Morehead State University. Accessed October 3, 2026. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/paintsville_herald/
Rennick, Robert M. Robert M. Rennick Manuscript Collection. Camden-Carroll Library, Morehead State University. Accessed October 3, 2026. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_ms_collection/
Rennick, Robert M. Kentucky Place Names. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984. https://www.kentuckypress.com/9780813101798/kentucky-place-names/
Rennick, Robert M. Interview with Arthur Pope. January 10, 1971. Robert M. Rennick Oral History Collection, Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_oh_collection/224/
Kentucky Oral History Commission. Kentucky Oral History Commission Public Catalog. Frankfort: Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives, 2024. https://pass-the-word.s3.amazonaws.com/static_files/Public_Catalogs/2024_OH_Public_Catalog.pdf
Works Progress Administration and Historical Records Survey. “Johnson County: General History,” “Johnson County: Facts,” and “Johnson County: Miscellaneous.” County Histories of Kentucky Collection. Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/index.3.html
Hall, Mitchel. Johnson County, Kentucky: A History of the County and Genealogy of Its People Up to the Year 1927. 2 vols. Louisville: Standard Press, 1928. https://southernhistoricalpress.com/product/johnson-county-kentucky-a-history-of-the-county-and-genealogy-of-its-people-up-to-the-year-1927/
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
Johnson County Historical and Genealogical Society. Johnson County, Kentucky: Families and History. Johnson County Historical and Genealogical Society, 2001. https://heritagebooks.com/products/101-j1756
Johnson County, Kentucky. “About Johnson County.” Accessed October 3, 2026. https://www.johnsoncoky.com/home/about-johnson-county
Kentucky Atlas and Gazetteer. “Staffordsville, Kentucky.” Accessed October 3, 2026. https://www.kyatlas.com/ky-staffordsville.html
Witt, Kathy. “Pioneering Spirit Lives at Mountain HomePlace.” Kentucky Living, June 5, 2023. https://www.kentuckyliving.com/lifestyle/pioneering-spirit-lives-at-mountain-homeplace
American Battlefield Trust. “Mountain Homeplace.” Accessed October 3, 2026. https://www.battlefields.org/visit/heritage-sites/mountain-homeplace
Kentucky Department of Parks. “Paintsville Lake State Park.” Accessed October 3, 2026. https://parks.ky.gov/explore/paintsville-lake-state-park-7824
Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. Johnson County Highway Map. Frankfort: Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. https://transportation.ky.gov/Planning/Maps/johnson_cmap.pdf
Author Note: Staffordsville’s history survives in postal records, federal surveys, newspapers, archaeological work, and the buildings preserved around Paintsville Lake. I hope this article helps preserve the story of a Johnson County community whose landscape changed dramatically while its older history remained visible.