Appalachian Community Histories – Tutor Key, Johnson County: From Mingo to a Mountain Community
A few miles northeast of Paintsville, the roads and hollows around Tutor Key form one of the many small communities that can be easy to miss on a modern map of eastern Kentucky. Tutor Key has never been an incorporated city, and much of its history was recorded not through town council minutes or municipal records, but through post offices, family cemeteries, churches, newspaper notices, and the lives of people whose addresses changed even when their homes did not.
For much of its early history, the community was not called Tutor Key at all. It was known as Mingo.
Kentucky place-name researcher Robert M. Rennick traced the community’s postal history to July 3, 1897, when a post office called Mingo was established in Johnson County. According to the tradition Rennick collected, Reverend E. J. Harris proposed the name because of his connection with Mingo County, West Virginia. The post office gave a formal name to a rural settlement that already existed among the creek valleys and steep hills north of Paintsville. Rennick’s surviving research collection at Morehead State University contains more than 33,000 scanned notes and typescripts gathered during decades of work on Kentucky communities, including a separate set of notes for Johnson County.
The strongest documentary route for confirming the beginnings of Mingo remains the records of the United States Post Office Department. The federal Records of Appointment of Postmasters and Post Office Reports of Site Locations can document appointments, office names, relocations, nearby streams and roads, and changes in postal status. Those records are particularly important in a place like Tutor Key because the history of the post office and the history of the community became closely intertwined.
Mingo in the Newspaper Record
By the early twentieth century, Mingo was more than a name on a postal register. It had become the name local newspapers used when describing the people who lived in the surrounding hills.
One of the clearest surviving examples appeared in the Paintsville Herald in December 1926 after the death of Harry VanHoose. The newspaper reported that the seventy-nine-year-old VanHoose had died at his home at Mingo following an illness of several weeks. His funeral drew what the paper described as a large gathering of relatives, neighbors, and friends, with ministers Arthur Green, Guy Preston, and Warren L. Preston conducting the service.
The obituary provides a small but valuable census of the community before the Tutor Key name appeared. Fred C. VanHoose, Byron VanHoose, Bert VanHoose, and Gladys VanHoose were all identified with Mingo. The newspaper also described Harry VanHoose as a respected churchman whose family was among the largest and most influential in that part of Johnson County.
The VanHoose obituary is important because it demonstrates that Mingo remained the normal community name almost three decades after the establishment of its post office. People did not simply use the name on postal forms. They described Mingo as their home, and the Paintsville Herald expected Johnson County readers to know where it was.
The names appearing in that obituary also point toward something larger about rural Johnson County. Mingo was tied to an interconnected landscape of VanHooses, Prestons, Daniels, Wards, Castles, Stapletons, and other families whose relatives lived in neighboring communities such as Nippa, River, Thealka, Paintsville, Wittensville, and Staffordsville. The boundaries between these places were less rigid than a modern map might suggest. Family, church, work, and road connections often mattered more than official lines.
The Landscape Around Mingo
The geography helps explain the way the community developed.
Tutor Key lies within the steeply dissected terrain of Johnson County, where settlement historically followed streams, narrow bottoms, and roads squeezed between hillsides. A Kentucky Geological Survey map places Tutor Key north of Paintsville between the broader Paintsville area and communities such as Nippa, Wittensville, Thelma, and Williamsport. The surrounding geology belongs largely to formations of the Breathitt Group, the sedimentary landscape that underlies much of Kentucky’s eastern coalfield.
This was never the geography of a compact courthouse square surrounded by city blocks. The community spread through roads, branches, farms, homes, churches, and cemeteries. Baker Branch became one of the most recognizable local place names, and family burial grounds preserved names that appear repeatedly in Johnson County records.
Older topographic maps are especially useful for reconstructing this period because a 1915 map predates the Tutor Key name. Later maps show the modern community and its roads more clearly, making it possible to compare how the landscape changed as roads improved and the Mingo postal identity disappeared.
How Mingo Became Tutor Key
The strangest chapter in the community’s history is also the story behind its modern name.
Rennick’s place-name research preserves the account that postal confusion developed between Mingo in Johnson County and Wingo in Graves County in western Kentucky. With only one letter separating the two names, mail could be misdirected. By the late 1930s, a different name was sought for the Johnson County office.
According to the local account recorded by Rennick, a resident named Lon Daniels suggested “Tutor Key” after seeing the words used as the name of a shoe-polish product in a store. It was an unusual choice, but unusual community names are hardly foreign to Kentucky. What began as a practical solution to a mail problem became the permanent name of the settlement.
Historical postal data compiled by Richard W. Helbock and later processed by historian Cameron Blevins supports 1938 as the crucial year. The dataset lists the Mingo post office as operating from 1897 to 1938 and Tutor Key as beginning in 1938. Blevins cautions that these dates should be interpreted carefully because a “discontinued” office in the dataset may actually represent a major name change rather than the disappearance of postal service. That warning fits Tutor Key almost perfectly. The evidence strongly suggests not the death of one community and creation of another, but a postal renaming of the same place.
In other words, the people remained while the name on the mail changed.
When Mingo and Tutor Key Existed Together
Names rarely disappear overnight from local memory.
One of the best pieces of evidence for the transition appeared in the Big Sandy News on January 1, 1943, in the obituary of Samuel Stapleton. Stapleton had moved away and worked as a Chesapeake & Ohio Railway freight clerk at Richardson, but the newspaper described him as having been born at Mingo, Kentucky. In the same obituary, his sister, Mrs. John Travis, was listed as a resident of Tutor Key.
The obituary therefore preserves both names in a single family record. Mingo described the place as it had been known when Samuel Stapleton was born, while Tutor Key described the same community as it was known by 1943.
This is a small detail, but it captures how Appalachian place names survive. A federal agency could change the post office designation, but families who had spent decades saying Mingo did not suddenly erase the word from memory. For older residents, Mingo remained a birthplace and a point of reference even after Tutor Key appeared on envelopes and newspaper addresses.
By 1940, however, the newer name was clearly established enough to appear in institutional records. Kentucky Free Will Baptist material from that year listed Reverend James Prince of Tutor Key among Johnson County ministers, demonstrating that the new postal identity had entered church records only a short time after the change.
The VanHoose Family and Public Life
Few families appear more frequently in the documentary history of Mingo and Tutor Key than the VanHooses.
The 1926 death of Harry VanHoose connected several members of the family directly to Mingo. Less than two decades later, the Big Sandy News reported the death of Fred C. VanHoose of Tutor Key. The newspaper described him as a prominent farmer and former Kentucky state senator, illustrating that residents of a small rural Johnson County community could play a role in public affairs far beyond their immediate hollow.
Political connections to Tutor Key continued.
Official Kentucky election returns from November 5, 1963, identified Wendell VanHoose of Tutor Key as the Republican candidate for Kentucky’s 25th State Senate District. The official tally recorded 13,401 votes for VanHoose and 10,097 for Russell J. Dobyns of Louisa. The record does more than document an election. It places the words “Tutor Key, Ky.” directly in a state government document and shows how firmly the community’s newer name had become established by the middle of the twentieth century.
Tutor Key was small, but it was not isolated from the political, religious, and economic life of the Big Sandy Valley.
Church Life at Baker Branch
Churches provided another center of community identity.
Baker Branch Free Will Baptist Church became closely associated with Tutor Key and appears repeatedly in local records. Kentucky’s Free Will Baptist organization continues to identify the congregation with Tutor Key, while older newspaper material helps carry its history backward into the twentieth century.
When James Akers of Tutor Key died in 1974, the Paintsville Herald described him as a retired miner and member of Chandlersville Masonic Lodge No. 858. His funeral was held at Baker Branch Freewill Baptist Church at Tutor Key before burial in the Jesse Daniels Cemetery at River.
His obituary reveals how several strands of Johnson County life crossed in a single person. Akers belonged to a Tutor Key household, had worked in mining, belonged to a Masonic lodge associated with another rural community, worshiped within the Free Will Baptist tradition, and was buried in a cemetery at River.
That kind of movement between communities was ordinary in Johnson County. Tutor Key was one part of a network rather than a self-contained settlement.
Churches such as Baker Branch also preserved community continuity when other institutions disappeared. A rural post office might close, stores might change ownership, and younger generations might leave for Ohio or other industrial destinations, but congregations, cemeteries, and family names continued tying people to the same hills.
Farmers, Miners, and a Changing Mountain Economy
The surviving records suggest that Tutor Key never had one single economic identity.
Fred C. VanHoose was remembered as a prominent farmer. James Akers was remembered as a retired miner. Other residents appear in newspapers, census schedules, deeds, tax books, and vital records without the community ever becoming a single-industry company town like Van Lear.
That distinction matters.
Tutor Key developed within the coalfield, and mining shaped the broader economy in which its residents lived, but farms, small-scale landholding, churches, road work, public employment, and jobs outside the immediate community remained important. The proximity of Paintsville connected residents with the county seat while the surrounding hollows maintained a distinctly rural character.
The history of Tutor Key is therefore less about a single mine, factory, railroad station, or famous event than about continuity. Families stayed on the same branches through changes in transportation, employment, postal service, and community names.
Roads Replaced Some of the Old Boundaries
As twentieth-century transportation improved, the meaning of distance changed throughout Johnson County.
Modern Kentucky transportation records identify Kentucky Route 581 as Tutor Key Road and connect the community into the larger road system north of Paintsville. State highway maps place Tutor Key among a cluster of communities that includes River, Nippa, Wittensville, Thelma, Staffordsville, and Paintsville.
Road improvement weakened some of the isolation that had helped small post offices flourish during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. When residents could travel more easily to Paintsville and mail could be handled through larger distribution networks, maintaining a separate federal office in every mountain community became less necessary.
The post office that had helped create Mingo’s documentary identity in 1897 eventually faced the same fate as hundreds of other small rural offices.
The End of the Tutor Key Post Office
On October 15, 2011, the United States Postal Service officially discontinued the Tutor Key Post Office.
Unlike the name change of 1938, this time the office itself closed. Yet the Postal Service deliberately preserved the community name. Its official Postal Bulletin directed that ZIP Code 41263 be retained and that residents could continue using “Tutor Key KY 41263” as the last line of their address. Administrative responsibility shifted to Paintsville, but Tutor Key remained a recognized place name.
The decision completed a remarkable postal cycle.
The community had entered the federal record as Mingo in 1897. A postal problem helped turn Mingo into Tutor Key in 1938. More than seventy years later, the Tutor Key post office disappeared, but the Postal Service preserved the name that the earlier postal system had helped create.
The post office was gone. Tutor Key was not.
Remembering Mingo Beneath Tutor Key
The most interesting part of Tutor Key’s history may be the survival of two identities on the same landscape.
Mingo belongs to the older layer. It appears in the postal history, in the Paintsville Herald, in family obituaries, and in memories of people born before the late 1930s. Tutor Key belongs to the later layer, appearing in church directories, government records, election returns, highway maps, addresses, and the ZIP Code that survived the closing of the post office.
Neither name is meaningless.
Mingo tells the story of a rural settlement entering the national postal network at the end of the nineteenth century. Tutor Key tells the story of how something as ordinary as misdirected mail could permanently rename a Kentucky community. Together they reveal how Appalachian places acquire identities from families, churches, roads, government agencies, stores, and sometimes simple chance.
There was no single dramatic day when Mingo vanished.
Older residents continued carrying it in their memories. Newspapers used it when describing where people had been born. Cemeteries preserved the families who had lived there before the change. Tutor Key gradually took its place on envelopes, maps, election returns, road signs, and eventually the ZIP Code.
That makes Tutor Key more than an unusual name on a Johnson County map. Beneath it remains another community, Mingo, whose people, churches, farms, and family networks provided the foundation for the place that followed.
To understand Tutor Key, it helps to remember that for the first four decades of its documented postal history, Tutor Key did not yet exist by that name.
It was Mingo.
Sources & Further Reading
National Archives and Records Administration. Record of Appointment of Postmasters, 1832–September 30, 1971. Microfilm Publication M841. Record Group 28, Records of the Post Office Department. Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/postmasters-1832-1971.html
National Archives and Records Administration. Post Office Department Reports of Site Locations, 1837–1950. Microfilm Publication M1126. Record Group 28, Records of the Post Office Department. Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/locations-1837-1950.html
Rennick, Robert M. “Johnson County – Place Names.” Robert M. Rennick Manuscript Collection. Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_ms_collection/84/
Rennick, Robert M. Kentucky Place Names. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Kentucky_Place_Names/azPttlmsv24C
Rennick, Robert M. The Post Offices of Kentucky’s Big Sandy Valley: A Survey of the 341 Post Offices of Floyd, Johnson, Magoffin, and Martin Counties. 2002. https://history.ky.gov/kentucky-ancestors/where-in-kentucky-is
Rennick, Robert M. Robert M. Rennick Oral History Collection. Morehead State University. Accessed October 2, 2026. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_oh_collection/
Pope, Arthur. Interview by Robert M. Rennick. Johnson County, Kentucky, January 10, 1971. Robert M. Rennick Oral History Collection. Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_oh_collection/225/
Swain, Goldie. Interviews by Robert M. Rennick. Johnson and Martin Counties, Kentucky, 1972. Robert M. Rennick Oral History Collection. Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_oh_collection/index.7.html
Blevins, Cameron, and Richard W. Helbock. US Post Offices. Historical GIS Dataset. Accessed October 2, 2026. https://cblevins.github.io/us-post-offices/data-biography/
United States Postal Service. Postal Bulletin, no. 22325. December 1, 2011. https://about.usps.com/postal-bulletin/2011/pb22325/pdf/pb22325.pdf
Paintsville Herald. “Harry VanHoose.” December 16, 1926. Transcription available through Johnson County KYGenWeb. https://kygenweb.net/johnson/HaVanhooseOb.htm
Big Sandy News. “Samuel Stapleton.” January 1, 1943. Transcription available through Lawrence County Kentucky Genealogical and Historical Society. https://lckghs.com/index.php/en/obituaries?id=415&layout=edit
Big Sandy News. “Fred C. VanHoose.” June 16, 1944. Transcription available through Lawrence County Kentucky Genealogical and Historical Society. https://lckghs.com/index.php/en/2-uncategorised/416-obit-1944
Paintsville Herald. “James Akers.” July 17, 1974. Transcription available through Lawrence County Kentucky Genealogical and Historical Society. https://lckghs.com/index.php/en/cemeteries/lawrence-county?id=229
Johnson County Public Library. Digital Archives of Johnson County, Kentucky. Advantage Archives. Accessed October 2, 2026. https://johnson.advantage-preservation.com/
Morehead State University. Paintsville Herald Archive, 1915–1927. Camden-Carroll Library, ScholarWorks. Accessed October 2, 2026. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/paintsville_herald/
University of Kentucky Libraries. Kentucky Digital Newspaper Program. Lexington: University of Kentucky. Accessed October 2, 2026. https://kdnp.uky.edu/splash/kdnpcsv.html
Kentucky State Board of Elections. Official Returns, General Election, November 5, 1963. Frankfort: Commonwealth of Kentucky, 1963. https://elect.ky.gov/results/1973-1979/Documents/1963.pdf
Kentucky Free Will Baptist. “Johnson County.” Accessed October 2, 2026. https://kyfwb.org/johnson-county/
Kentucky Free Will Baptist. Kentucky Free Will Baptist Records, 1940. 1940. https://onemag.org/kentucky/1940Kentucky.pdf
United States Census Bureau. Fourteenth Census of the United States, 1920: Population Schedules, Johnson County, Kentucky. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1920. https://www.archives.gov/research/census/1920
United States Census Bureau. Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1930: Population Schedules, Johnson County, Kentucky. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1930. https://www.archives.gov/research/census/1930
United States Census Bureau. Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940: Population Schedules, Johnson County, Kentucky. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1940. https://www.archives.gov/research/census/1940
United States Census Bureau. 1950 Census of Population, Johnson County, Kentucky. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Commerce, 1950. https://www.archives.gov/research/census/1950
Johnson County Public Library. “Using Your Library: Patricia Patton Kentucky Room.” Accessed October 2, 2026. https://johnsoncountypubliclibrary.org/using-your-library/
United States Geological Survey. Paintsville, Kentucky. 1:48,000 topographic map. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1915. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:KY_Paintsville_804270_1915_48000_geo.pdf
United States Geological Survey. Paintsville, Kentucky. Historical Topographic Map Collection. Accessed October 2, 2026. https://pastmaps.com/map/paintsville-johnson-county-ky-usgs-topo-1915
Kentucky Geological Survey. Johnson County Geology. Lexington: University of Kentucky. https://kgs.uky.edu/kgsweb/download/gwatlas/gwcounty/johnson/JOHNSONGEO.pdf
Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. Department of Highways Map and Transportation Records for Johnson County, Kentucky. Frankfort: Commonwealth of Kentucky. https://transportation.ky.gov/Construction-Procurement/Proposals/101-JOHNSON-07-2324.pdf
United States Geological Survey. “Geographic Names Information System.” Accessed October 2, 2026. https://edits.nationalmap.gov/apps/gaz-domestic/public/search/names
Works Progress Administration. “Johnson County – General History.” In County Histories of Kentucky. Morehead State University, 1936–1939. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/
Works Progress Administration. “Johnson County – Facts.” In County Histories of Kentucky. Morehead State University, 1936–1939. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/
Works Progress Administration. “Johnson County – Miscellaneous.” In County Histories of Kentucky. Morehead State University, 1936–1939. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/
Hall, Mitchel. Johnson County, Kentucky: A History of the County, and Genealogy of Its People Up to the Year 1927. Louisville: Standard Press, 1928. https://search.worldcat.org/title/53052874
Oyler, Merton Dale. Neighborhood Standing and Population Changes in Johnson and Robertson Counties, Kentucky. Lexington: Kentucky Agricultural Experiment Station, University of Kentucky, 1948. https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/browse?type=lcsubc&key=Johnson%20County%20%28Ky.%29%20–%20History
Spaulding, Irving A., and Howard W. Beers. Mobility and Fertility Rates of Rural Families in Robertson and Johnson Counties, Kentucky, 1918–1941. Lexington: Kentucky Agricultural Experiment Station, University of Kentucky, 1943. https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/browse?type=lcsubc&key=Johnson%20County%20%28Ky.%29%20–%20History
Connelley, William Elsey. Eastern Kentucky Papers: The Founding of Harman’s Station, with an Account of the Indian Captivity of Mrs. Jennie Wiley and the Exploration and Settlement of the Big Sandy Valley in the Virginias and Kentucky. New York: Torch Press, 1910. https://archive.org/search?query=William+Elsey+Connelley+Eastern+Kentucky+Papers
Morehead State University. Robert M. Rennick Topographical Maps Collection. Camden-Carroll Library, ScholarWorks. Accessed October 2, 2026. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_maps_all/
LDS Genealogy. “Tutor Key, Johnson County, Kentucky Genealogy.” Accessed October 2, 2026. https://ldsgenealogy.com/KY/Tutor-Key.htm
Author Note: Tutor Key’s history is a reminder that the names of Appalachian communities can change even while the families, churches, roads, and memories connecting people to a place remain. I hope readers with photographs, documents, church records, or family memories of old Mingo and Tutor Key will help preserve more of this Johnson County story.