Appalachian Community Histories – Tenmile, Perry County: Tenmile Creek Road, Family Cemeteries, and a Community Kept in the Record
In Perry County, history often follows water. Roads, schools, cemeteries, farms, and family names gather along the creeks, even where no courthouse square or railroad depot ever stood. Tenmile, also written Ten Mile, is one of those places. It has a thinner paper trail than Hazard, Chavies, or Lost Creek, but it has not disappeared from the record. Perry County’s own community list still includes Ten Mile, and the county road index preserves the name through Tenmile Creek Road and three Tenmile Creek cemetery roads.
Tenmile belongs to the kind of Appalachian geography that can be missed if a researcher only searches for incorporated towns or post offices. It is better understood as a creek community, a neighborhood tied to Tenmile Creek, KY 15, nearby Lost Creek, and the surrounding names of Engle, Chavies, Dice, Rockhouse, and Haddix. The official county list places Ten Mile among Perry County’s communities, while modern road records give the practical route to Tenmile Creek Road from KY 15.
Perry County and the Creek Country
Perry County was formed in 1821 from parts of Floyd and Clay Counties, and both the county name and the county seat of Hazard honor Oliver Hazard Perry. That county-level story is often told through coal, timber, courthouse life, and the growth of Hazard, but many of Perry County’s smaller communities grew along creek branches that tied families to roads, schools, churches, cemeteries, and coal prospects. Tenmile fits that pattern.
The strongest early printed source for placing Tenmile in its older geographic setting is James M. Hodge’s coal survey work on the North Fork of the Kentucky River. In his 1918 volume, Hodge treated Lost Creek and its nearby branches as part of a wider coal and settlement landscape. His table of contents placed Ten Mile Creek near Lost Creek, Collins Branch, Low Gap Branch, Fifteen Mile Creek, Sixteen Mile Creek, Rock Fork, and Laurel Fork, showing that Tenmile belonged to a named creek system rather than to a single town-center story.
Hodge described Ten Mile Creek as being on the right, about one and a half miles above Cockerel Fork, and gave the altitude at its mouth as 815 feet. That small detail matters because it anchors Tenmile in the physical language of the early coal surveyors: creek mouths, forks, coal beds, benches, gaps, and local openings. In a place where local names could shift between Tenmile and Ten Mile, the creek itself became the most stable historical marker.
Coal Surveyors and a Thin Paper Trail
Tenmile’s coal-era record is not the same as the record of a large company town. Hodge noted coal near the mouth of Ten Mile Creek and referred to the Fire-clay coal and Haddix coal in the surrounding area, but he also reported that no satisfactory coal had been found on Ten Mile Creek itself, with earlier openings having fallen in. That description does not make Tenmile unimportant. Instead, it shows that Tenmile sat inside the coal country without becoming one of its better documented industrial centers.
This helps explain why Tenmile is harder to research than some Perry County places. Large mines, rail stations, and post offices often left thick trails in newspapers, state reports, postal records, payrolls, and company documents. A creek community like Tenmile left a different kind of record. It appears through roads, maps, cemetery names, land records, family surnames, and nearby communities rather than through one central institution. That kind of history requires following overlapping clues instead of relying on one complete town history.
Tenmile on Modern Roads and Official Maps
The Kentucky Transportation Cabinet’s State Primary Road System map for Perry County labels Tenmile Creek Road as TENMILE CRK RD. The same official map places the road within the larger network of northern Perry County roads, near other local names such as Engle, Chavies, Dice, and Rockhouse-area roads. That map evidence is important because it shows that Tenmile remains part of the county’s official transportation geography.
Perry County’s road index gives an even more local picture. It lists Tenmile Creek Road by directions from KY 15 and also lists Tenmile Creek Cemetery, Tenmile Creek East Cemetery, and Tenmile Creek West Cemetery. In small Appalachian communities, cemetery roads often preserve community geography as clearly as schoolhouses or churches once did. They show where families gathered, where kinship networks remained visible, and where the name of a creek continued to matter across generations.
Tenmile Creek Road also appears in modern state road funding records. Kentucky’s Local Assistance Road Program schedule for fiscal years 2026 through 2028 includes a Perry County project to resurface Tenmile Creek Road, listed as route CR-1359Q4, with a project cost of $99,000. That may seem like a small road entry, but for local history it is another proof of continuity. Tenmile is not only a memory in old surveys. It is still a named place in the public infrastructure of Perry County.
Cemeteries, Families, and the Courthouse Trail
For Tenmile, the courthouse trail may be as important as the printed history trail. The Perry County Clerk’s Records Center states that the office indexes and houses legal land records, marriage licenses, and notary bonds, with some records dating as far back as the late 1700s. Those records are the best place to pursue the deeper story of Tenmile Creek land, family settlement, cemetery parcels, easements, and transfers between generations.
Later land records can also be searched through Perry County’s online land-record system. The county clerk’s page explains that eCCLIX allows registered users to view or print online documents from home or office. For Tenmile research, that makes it possible to connect present-day road and parcel names with older deeds, plats, mortgages, and family property chains.
FamilySearch adds another path into the older record. Its catalog lists Perry County land records from 1821 to 1964 and marriage records from 1821 to 1963 as microfilm of original records from the Perry County courthouse. Probate records can also be useful because wills, bonds, inventories, and estate papers often identify heirs, neighbors, land descriptions, creek names, and family relationships that do not appear in ordinary county histories.
Family names connected to the Tenmile research trail should be checked carefully through deeds, cemetery evidence, death certificates, marriage bonds, probate files, and newspaper notices. Names such as Grigsby, Smith, Napier, Campbell, Engle, Combs, and Haddix appear as useful leads for the surrounding Tenmile, Engle, Chavies, Lost Creek, and Haddix-area geography, but each family connection needs to be verified against primary records before it is treated as settled history.
Newspapers and Small-Place History
The Hazard Herald is one of the strongest newspaper sources for Tenmile and the surrounding communities. The Library of Congress identifies The Hazard Herald as a Hazard, Kentucky newspaper that began in 1911 and continued until 1975, with available digitized issues through Chronicling America and related newspaper collections. Because Tenmile was not a major town, the most useful newspaper references may appear under alternate spellings or nearby places rather than under Tenmile alone.
Searches should use Tenmile, Ten Mile, Tenmile Creek, Ten Mile Creek, Engle, Chavies, Lost Creek, Rockhouse Fork, Hollybush Branch, and family surnames. Small communities often appear in obituaries, school notes, court notices, road work items, church announcements, tax sales, marriage notices, and brief local correspondence. A single newspaper mention may not tell the whole story, but many small mentions can rebuild the community’s outline over time.
Robert M. Rennick’s Kentucky place-name work is also valuable for this kind of research. Morehead State University’s collections identify Rennick’s Perry County post office and place-name manuscripts as historical surveys of Perry County communities, post offices, and local names. For Tenmile, Rennick’s work is especially useful for connecting the creek community to surrounding postal and neighborhood names, even when Tenmile itself does not appear as a major post-office town.
Why Tenmile Matters
Tenmile’s history is not dramatic in the way a courthouse fire, a railroad boom, or a large mine disaster can be dramatic. Its importance is quieter. It represents the kind of Appalachian place where the record is scattered across maps, road indexes, cemeteries, deeds, coal reports, and family memory. It reminds us that not every community became a town, and not every community needed a post office or a company store to leave a mark.
The name survived because people kept using it. It survived in Tenmile Creek, Tenmile Creek Road, Tenmile Creek Cemetery, Tenmile Creek East Cemetery, and Tenmile Creek West Cemetery. It survived in official maps and road projects. It survived because families buried their dead there, traveled that road, owned land along that creek, and described the place by the water and hills around them.
Tenmile is part of Perry County’s larger Lost Creek country, a landscape shaped by coal geology, mountain roads, family settlement, and creek-based identity. Its paper trail may be thin, but it is not empty. For Appalachian history, places like Tenmile matter because they show how much of the region’s past lives outside the big towns, in the named hollows and creek roads where ordinary life left its deepest marks.
Sources & Further Reading
Perry County, Kentucky. “Communities.” Perry County, Kentucky. Accessed May 18, 2026. https://perrycounty.ky.gov/things-to-do/Pages/Communities.aspx
Perry County, Kentucky. “Road Index.” Perry County, Kentucky. Accessed May 18, 2026. https://perrycounty.ky.gov/Pages/Road-Index.aspx
Perry County, Kentucky. “About Perry County.” Perry County, Kentucky. Accessed May 18, 2026. https://perrycountyky.gov/about-perry-county/
Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. “State Primary Road System: Perry County, Kentucky.” Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. Accessed May 18, 2026. https://transportation.ky.gov/Planning/SPRS%20Maps/Perry.pdf
Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. “Perry County State Primary Road System Lists.” Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. Accessed May 18, 2026. https://transportation.ky.gov/Planning/State%20Primary%20Road%20System%20Lists/Perry.pdf
Kentucky General Assembly. “Local Assistance Road Program, FY2026, FY2027, FY2028.” 2026 Regular Session, HJR 76. Accessed May 18, 2026. https://apps.legislature.ky.gov/record/26rs/budget/HJ76/orig_bill.pdf
United States Geological Survey. “Geographic Names Information System.” U.S. Geological Survey. Accessed May 18, 2026. https://www.usgs.gov/tools/geographic-names-information-system-gnis
United States Geological Survey. “Download GNIS Data.” U.S. Geological Survey. Accessed May 18, 2026. https://www.usgs.gov/us-board-on-geographic-names/download-gnis-data
United States Geological Survey. “topoView.” National Geologic Map Database. Accessed May 18, 2026. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/topoview/
United States Geological Survey. “US Topo 7.5-Minute Map for Haddix, Kentucky.” U.S. Geological Survey. Accessed May 18, 2026. https://prd-tnm.s3.amazonaws.com/StagedProducts/Maps/USTopo/PDF/KY/KY_Haddix_20100331_TM_geo.pdf
Mixon, Robert B. “Geologic Map of the Haddix Quadrangle, Eastern Kentucky.” U.S. Geological Survey Geologic Quadrangle 447, 1965. Accessed May 18, 2026. https://www.usgs.gov/publications/geologic-map-haddix-quadrangle-eastern-kentucky
Hodge, James M. Coals of the North Fork of Kentucky River in Perry and Portions of Breathitt and Knott Counties. Frankfort, KY: The State Journal Company, 1918. Accessed May 18, 2026. https://archive.org/details/coalsofnorthfork00hodgrich
Hodge, James M. Report on the Coals of the Three Forks of the Kentucky River: Beginning at Troublesome Creek on North Fork; at Beginning Branch on Middle Fork; at Sexton Creek on South Fork; and Extending to the Heads of the Respective Forks. Louisville, KY: Continental Printing Company, 1910. Accessed May 18, 2026. https://archive.org/details/reportoncoalsoft00hodgrich
Hodge, James M. Report on the Coals of the Three Forks of the Kentucky River. Google Books. Accessed May 18, 2026. https://books.google.com/books/about/Report_on_the_Coals_of_the_Three_Forks_o.html?id=ZxZGAQAAMAAJ
Perry County Clerk. “Records Center.” Perry County Clerk’s Office. Accessed May 18, 2026. https://perry.countyclerk.us/records-center/
Perry County Clerk. “Online Land Records.” Perry County Clerk’s Office. Accessed May 18, 2026. https://perry.countyclerk.us/records-center/online-land-records/
FamilySearch. “Land Records, 1821–1964: Perry County, Kentucky.” FamilySearch Catalog. Accessed May 18, 2026. https://www.familysearch.org/en/search/catalog/190103
FamilySearch. “Marriage Records, 1821–1963: Perry County, Kentucky.” FamilySearch Catalog. Accessed May 18, 2026. https://www.familysearch.org/en/search/catalog/189956
FamilySearch. “Will Books, Volumes 1–2, 1901–1964: Perry County, Kentucky.” FamilySearch Catalog. Accessed May 18, 2026. https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/190009
FamilySearch. “Kentucky, Probate Records, 1727–1990.” FamilySearch. Accessed May 18, 2026. https://www.familysearch.org/en/search/collection/1875188
FamilySearch. “Perry County, Kentucky Genealogy.” FamilySearch Research Wiki. Accessed May 18, 2026. https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Perry_County%2C_Kentucky_Genealogy
Library of Congress. “The Hazard Herald.” Chronicling America. Accessed May 18, 2026. https://www.loc.gov/item/sn85052003/
Library of Congress. “The Hazard Herald (Hazard, Ky.), January 25, 1929.” Chronicling America. Accessed May 18, 2026. https://www.loc.gov/item/sn85052003/1929-01-25/ed-1/
The Hazard Herald. “The Hazard Herald: 1958-06-09.” Internet Archive, Kentucky Digital Newspaper Program. Accessed May 18, 2026. https://archive.org/details/kd9cn6xw4g1h
Perry County Public Library. “Databases.” Perry County Public Library. Accessed May 18, 2026. https://www.perrycountylibrary.org/home/databases/
Rennick, Robert M. “Perry County: Post Offices.” Morehead State University ScholarWorks, 2000. Accessed May 18, 2026. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/273/
Rennick, Robert M. “Perry County: Place Names.” Robert M. Rennick Manuscript Collection, Morehead State University, 2016. Accessed May 18, 2026. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_ms_collection/121/
Rennick, Robert M. “Kentucky River Post Offices.” Robert M. Rennick Manuscript Collection, Morehead State University, 2003. Accessed May 18, 2026. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_ms_collection/159/
Morehead State University. “Robert M. Rennick Kentucky Place Name Collection.” ScholarWorks. Accessed May 18, 2026. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/robert_rennick_collection/
Morehead State University. “Robert M. Rennick Manuscript Collection.” ScholarWorks. Accessed May 18, 2026. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_ms_collection/
Morehead State University. “Robert M. Rennick Topographical Maps Collection.” ScholarWorks. Accessed May 18, 2026. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_maps_all/
LDSGenealogy. “Perry County, KY Newspapers and Obituaries.” LDSGenealogy.com. Accessed May 18, 2026. https://ldsgenealogy.com/KY/Perry-County-Newspapers-and-Obituaries.htm
KYGenWeb. “Perry County, Kentucky.” KYGenWeb. Accessed May 18, 2026. https://kygenweb.net/perry/
Find a Grave. “Grigsby-Smith Cemetery.” Find a Grave. Accessed May 18, 2026. https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/2493577/grigsby-smith-cemetery
Find a Grave. “Old Grigsby Cemetery.” Find a Grave. Accessed May 18, 2026. https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/2494186/old-grigsby-cemetery
AnyplaceAmerica. “Tenmile Creek Topo Map in Perry County, Kentucky.” AnyplaceAmerica.com. Accessed May 18, 2026. https://www.anyplaceamerica.com/directory/ky/perry-county-21193/streams/tenmile-creek-515891/
TopoZone. “Topo Map of Streams in Perry County, Kentucky.” TopoZone. Accessed May 18, 2026. https://www.topozone.com/kentucky/perry-ky/stream/
Author Note: Places like Tenmile remind me that Appalachian history is often kept in road names, cemeteries, creek branches, and courthouse records rather than in one complete town history. I hope this piece helps readers see how even a thin paper trail can still preserve a community’s place in Perry County memory.