Appalachian Figures Series – The Story of Robert M. Rennick of Floyd, Kentucky
Kentucky history is often told through wars, counties, coal camps, courthouses, and political movements, but Robert M. Rennick spent much of his life proving that another path into the past ran through names. The names of creeks, post offices, ridge settlements, crossroads stores, mining camps, and lost communities preserved stories that official narratives often left behind. Rennick became one of the Commonwealth’s great interpreters of that hidden record. Over more than three decades, he traveled across Kentucky documenting the locations and histories of communities, post offices, and geographic landmarks, building an archive that would outlast him and continue serving historians, genealogists, and local researchers.
What made Rennick important was not simply that he liked unusual names or collected local lore. He treated names as historical evidence. His work joined folklore, documentary research, oral testimony, postal history, cartography, and local memory into a single method. Thomas J. Gasque later wrote that Rennick made major contributions to the study of place names, personal names, names and the law, and humorous names, though he remained best known for his statewide dictionary of Kentucky place names. That achievement mattered because Rennick did more than preserve colorful curiosities. He created a durable research foundation for understanding how Kentuckians named places, remembered landscapes, and explained community origins.
Building a Kentucky Archive
The scale of Rennick’s work becomes clearest in the collections now preserved at Morehead State University. The Robert M. Rennick Kentucky Place Name Collection brings together maps, oral histories, manuscripts, and note cards produced during his long research career. The manuscript collection alone contains more than 33,000 scanned typescripts and index cards defining the origins of community and county names across Kentucky. Some of that research eventually appeared in his books, especially Kentucky Place Names and From Red Hot to Monkey’s Eyebrow: Unusual Kentucky Place Names, but Morehead’s own description makes clear that much of the archive never made it into those published volumes.
That surviving archive helps explain why Rennick’s work still feels larger than any single book. His papers include journals, correspondence, manuscripts, and other research material, while the topographical map collection preserves hundreds of USGS maps marked with his handwritten notes about rural communities, lost post offices, and variant names. The oral history collection is equally revealing. Morehead describes it as a set of interviews Rennick conducted in the 1970s with local historians and genealogists about the origins of Kentucky community names. Those interviews mattered because they captured local knowledge at a moment when many older residents still remembered the naming of places, the rise and fall of post offices, and the older speech habits of their communities.
Method and Historical Value
Rennick’s lasting importance rests in the way he worked. He did not accept every story attached to a place name at face value. Instead, he compared oral accounts with maps, postal records, manuscript notes, and other documentary evidence. The collections preserved at Morehead show that his scholarship depended on cross-checking and accumulation. Thousands of note cards, county files, and annotated maps point to a historian who understood that names change over time, that memory can flatten chronology, and that folk explanation often needs to be tested against the written record. That disciplined method is one reason his work has held its value well beyond its original publication moment.
This approach made Rennick especially valuable for Appalachian history. In eastern Kentucky, communities have often shifted names, moved with rail lines or mining operations, lost post offices, or disappeared altogether. County boundaries changed. Company camps rose and fell. Rural settlements were known by one name locally and another name in postal or cartographic records. Rennick treated those complications not as annoyances but as the very substance of local history. His research into county place names and post offices gave later historians a way to reconstruct vanished landscapes and follow the development of communities that might otherwise survive only in scattered family memory.
Rennick and Appalachian Kentucky
For Appalachian scholars, Rennick’s work matters because so much of mountain history is place-based. A county history may mention a creek, a ridge, a hollow, or a discontinued post office as if every reader already knows it. In reality, many of those places have faded from common knowledge. Rennick’s archive helps restore that world. Morehead’s collections include county-by-county material, oral histories, and maps that preserve names tied to eastern Kentucky communities, many of them small enough to be omitted from broader state narratives. His research therefore became more than an exercise in naming. It became a recovery project for the historical geography of Kentucky, especially in regions where the paper record can be thin and where names themselves often carry the memory of settlement, labor, kinship, religion, and landscape.
That is also why Rennick belongs in any serious discussion of Appalachian documentation. The mountains have produced rich oral traditions, but oral tradition alone can be unstable when detached from physical places. Rennick anchored story to map and map to testimony. He preserved names before they vanished from living use, and in doing so he preserved a way of reading Kentucky from the ground up. His work offered a corrective to histories that focused only on major towns, major politicians, or major conflicts. In Rennick’s hands, a place name on an old map could become the starting point for a fuller history of migration, commerce, postal routes, church life, mining development, or local memory.
Legacy
Rennick’s legacy survives not only in his books but in the research infrastructure he left behind. Morehead State University’s Rennick collections now make available the papers, manuscript files, oral histories, and map materials that undergirded his scholarship. That matters because it lets later researchers move beyond citation and back into the evidence itself. Scholars can see the raw note cards, the local testimony, the county files, and the annotated maps that shaped his conclusions. In that sense, Rennick remains active in Kentucky history long after his death. His archive still invites correction, expansion, and rediscovery, which is the mark of serious historical work rather than merely antiquarian collecting.
Robert M. Rennick understood that names are never just labels. They are historical deposits. They hold clues about who settled a place, who claimed it, who remembered it, who renamed it, and who was forgotten when the name changed. For Kentucky, and especially for Appalachian Kentucky, that insight was invaluable. Rennick helped preserve a statewide geography of memory. He made it possible for later historians to recover communities that no longer appear clearly on the map but still matter deeply in the record of the state.
Sources & Further Reading
Rennick, Robert M. Kentucky Place Names. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984. https://www.kentuckypress.com/9780813101798/kentucky-place-names/
Rennick, Robert M. From Red Hot to Monkey’s Eyebrow: Unusual Kentucky Place Names. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997. https://www.kentuckypress.com/9780813109312/from-red-hot-to-monkeys-eyebrow/
Rennick, Robert M. “Floyd County – Place Names.” Robert M. Rennick Manuscript Collection, Morehead State University, 2016. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_ms_collection/63/
Rennick, Robert M. Kentucky River Post Offices. Manuscript, 2003. Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1159&context=rennick_ms_collection
Rennick, Robert M. Northeastern Kentucky Post Offices. Manuscript, 2002. Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1158&context=rennick_ms_collection
Rennick, Robert M. Kentucky Place Name Pronunciations. Manuscript, 1987. Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1160&context=rennick_ms_collection
Gasque, Thomas J. “Robert M. Rennick, 1932–2010.” Names 62, no. 4 (2014): 239–240. https://ans-names.pitt.edu/ans/article/download/2027/2026/4099
Ward, Karla. “Robert Rennick Obituary.” Lexington Herald-Leader, August 10, 2010. https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/kentucky/name/robert-rennick-obituary?pid=144597043
“Rennick, Robert M(orris) 1932-.” Contemporary Authors, via Encyclopedia.com. https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/rennick-robert-morris-1932
Morehead State University. “Robert M. Rennick Kentucky Place Name Collection.” ScholarWorks at Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/robert_rennick_collection/
Morehead State University. “Robert M. Rennick Manuscript Collection.” ScholarWorks at Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_ms_collection/
Morehead State University. “Robert M. Rennick Oral History Collection.” ScholarWorks at Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_oh_collection/
Morehead State University. “Robert M. Rennick Topographical Maps Collection.” ScholarWorks at Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_maps_all/
Morehead State University. “Robert M. Rennick Papers.” Finding aid, Camden-Carroll Library, Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1064&context=manuscripts_fa
Western Kentucky University. “Rennick, Robert M., 1932–2010 (SC 3419).” TopSCHOLAR, Department of Library Special Collections. https://digitalcommons.wku.edu/dlsc_mss_fin_aid/4670/
Best, Bill, and Robert M. Rennick. “Bill Best Interview – Part 3 (Appalachian Studies at Berea College).” Oral history, November 15, 1970. Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_oh_collection/168/
Cornett, Terry, and Robert M. Rennick. “Terry Cornett Interview – Part 2 (Letcher County).” Oral history, December 24, 1977. Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_oh_collection/313/
Reed, Rufus, and Robert M. Rennick. “Rufus Reed Interview Part 2 (Martin County).” Oral history, July 4, 1971. Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_oh_collection/207/
Montgomery, Thomas “Bud,” and Robert M. Rennick. “Thomas ‘Bud’ Montgomery Interview – Part 1 (Floyd County).” Oral history, July 18, 1971. Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_oh_collection/188/
Author Note: As a historian working in Appalachia, I am drawn to figures like Robert M. Rennick who preserved the names smaller places carried across generations. I hope this piece helps readers see how hollows, creeks, post offices, and community names can serve as an archive of mountain memory.