Appalachian Community Histories – Unity, Boyd County: Catletts Creek, Coal, and the Post Office That Disappeared
A few miles west of Catlettsburg, Kentucky, Catletts Creek bends through the hills of Boyd County beside the road now known as Kentucky Route 168. Homes follow the narrow valley where the creek finds enough level ground between the ridges, and anyone passing through today could easily drive across the place once called Unity without realizing that the name had ever existed.
Unity survives in official geographic records, old postal research, scattered references, and local memory, but it is one of those Appalachian communities whose boundaries were never especially clear. It was not an incorporated town with surveyed streets, a city hall, or a courthouse. Instead, Unity appears to have belonged to an older rural geography in which a post office, store, school, creek, church, or cluster of families could give a place its identity. Modern geographic references place Unity roughly two miles west of Catlettsburg along Catletts Creek and Kentucky Route 168.
That makes Unity difficult to reconstruct, but it also makes the community historically valuable. Its story illustrates how a place could exist for generations without becoming a formal municipality, how a postal name might briefly give a valley a separate identity, and how that identity could gradually disappear as roads improved, post offices consolidated, schools closed, and residents increasingly used the name of a larger neighboring town.
Catletts Creek Before There Was a Unity
The community along Catletts Creek existed well before the name Unity entered the surviving postal record.
Catletts Creek takes its name from the same family associated with Catlettsburg. The creek flows toward the Ohio River near the city and today remains one of the recognizable geographic features of eastern Boyd County. Kentucky Route 168 follows much of the Catletts Creek corridor before continuing north toward Ashland and Westwood.
Nineteenth-century newspaper notices already show families living along the creek decades before the known Unity post office. Abstracts from the Catlettsburg Big Sandy Herald record, for example, the death of an elderly woman identified simply as Mrs. Peterman of Catletts Creek in October 1872. Only days later, the newspaper reported that nineteen-year-old Leroy M. Garrett had died and was buried in his family’s cemetery on Catletts Creek. These short notices offer only fragments, but they establish that Catletts Creek was already a recognized rural locality in Boyd County during the 1870s.
The landscape itself encouraged that kind of settlement. Rather than developing around a rectangular town plan, households followed the creek valley, side branches, and roads threading between the hills. Family cemeteries became permanent markers of those settlement patterns. Modern cemetery surveys still identify burial grounds around Catletts Creek and Twin Fork, including the Randall-Meredith cemetery near Twin Fork and other family burial grounds scattered through the surrounding valleys.
Unity would emerge from this older Catletts Creek world rather than replace it.
The Unity Post Office
The strongest documentary evidence for Unity as a separate named place comes from postal history.
The historical post-office dataset assembled from the work of postal historian Richard W. Helbock and later processed by historian Cameron Blevins records a Unity post office in Boyd County operating approximately from 1903 until 1925. RoadsideThoughts, drawing from that dataset, likewise identifies an office named Unity established in 1903 and discontinued in 1925, although it notes that the precise location of the post office could not be confidently determined from the geocoded data.
That uncertainty is important. The existence of the post office is much easier to document than the exact boundaries of a community called Unity.
Blevins and Helbock’s dataset grew largely from Post Office Department appointment records. The National Archives preserves those records in Microfilm Publication M841, Record of Appointment of Postmasters, 1832 to September 30, 1971. According to the National Archives, these records can include the establishment and discontinuance dates of an office, changes of name, postmasters and their appointment dates, and sometimes information about where mail was sent after an office closed.
For Unity, another federal collection may eventually provide the missing geographical evidence. Post Office Department Reports of Site Locations survive in Microfilm Publication M1126. These reports were prepared to help federal officials locate post offices in relation to creeks, roads, railroads, mail routes, and neighboring offices. Many contain hand-drawn sketches showing the approximate position of the post office. Boyd County is included on Kentucky Roll 208.
A surviving Unity site report could answer one of the community’s most important unanswered questions: where, exactly, did the Unity post office stand?
Until that record is examined, it is safer to say that Unity existed as a Boyd County postal place during the early twentieth century than to assign the post office to a particular house, store, or intersection.
Why a Post Office Mattered
In rural Appalachia, a post office could do more than deliver letters.
A small office often operated from a general store or the home or business of a postmaster. The postal name then appeared on correspondence, government records, advertisements, newspapers, and maps. Families who might otherwise have described themselves as living “on Catletts Creek” could begin receiving mail addressed to Unity, Kentucky.
For roughly two decades, Unity therefore had something resembling an official identity.
The timing is also significant. The office appeared during a period when northeastern Kentucky was increasingly connected to regional markets and transportation systems. Nearby Catlettsburg had grown rapidly around river commerce and railroad connections, while Ashland was developing into one of eastern Kentucky’s most important industrial centers. Unity sat close enough to those cities to feel their economic influence but far enough into the creek valley to retain the character of a rural community.
The disappearance of a post office in 1925 does not necessarily mean the settlement itself vanished. Blevins warns that postal records should not be treated as direct measures of population. The expansion of Rural Free Delivery allowed fewer offices to serve wider areas and contributed to the discontinuance of thousands of small rural post offices during the early twentieth century.
Unity may therefore have lost its post office without losing its people.
What disappeared first was the federal institution that had helped make Unity a recognizable name.
Coal Beneath Catletts Creek
Modern summaries frequently describe Unity as a former coal-mining community. There is good evidence for coal working along Catletts Creek, but the surviving evidence requires a distinction between coal mining in the valley and a mine explicitly operating under the name Unity.
In 1908, the United States Geological Survey published William Clifton Phalen’s Economic Geology of the Kenova Quadrangle, Kentucky, Ohio, and West Virginia. The report provides a remarkably detailed contemporary examination of Boyd County’s mineral resources.
Phalen identified a coal seam known as the Catletts Creek coal, or Kentucky No. 4. His published geological sections included one measured at Alex Chapin’s property on Catletts Creek and another at what the survey called a “country bank” on the creek. The report explained that the seam was workable only over a relatively small portion of Boyd County and that mining from it had generally remained small in scale.
That wording matters.
A country bank was usually a small coal opening serving local or limited commercial needs rather than a massive company operation employing hundreds of miners. The USGS evidence therefore supports a picture of coal extraction woven into the Catletts Creek landscape, with openings in the hills above the valley, but it does not by itself establish that Unity developed as a large company-built coal camp.
This distinction makes the history more interesting rather than less.
Unity stood in a landscape where farming, timber, small-scale mining, transportation, and work in the nearby industrial cities could overlap. A resident might live on Catletts Creek while farming a small piece of bottomland, cutting timber, working a coal bank, traveling into Catlettsburg, or later finding employment in the expanding industrial economy around Ashland.
The community did not need rows of company houses and a major tipple to be part of the coal history of northeastern Kentucky.
The Community After the Post Office
After the Unity post office disappeared, Catletts Creek remained the stronger geographic name.
This helps explain why later records concerning the same general area frequently use Catletts Creek rather than Unity. Road records, cemetery descriptions, school photographs, legal cases, and modern addresses continue to identify Catletts Creek long after Unity largely disappears from everyday documentation.
The pattern is common among small Appalachian communities. A post-office name might flourish for twenty or thirty years, while the creek name beneath it survived for centuries.
Unity became the fading layer.
Catletts Creek remained the landscape.
The Catletts Creek School
Education provides some of the clearest evidence that a substantial rural community continued to exist along Catletts Creek during the middle twentieth century.
One widely repeated account claims that Catletts Creek School began around 1962 before later becoming Eidson Elementary. Surviving photographs, however, show that a school using the Catletts Creek name existed several years earlier.
A Boyd County historical photograph identifies a Catletts Creek School first-grade class from the 1958 to 1959 school year, while another surviving class photograph dates to approximately 1957 to 1959. The photographs show rows of children beneath the simple heading “Catletts Creek School,” providing direct visual evidence that the school name was already established before the 1960s.
This suggests that later references to a 1962 beginning probably concern a newer building, reorganization, or later version of the school rather than the beginning of education at Catletts Creek itself.
A remarkable Kentucky court case helps explain what happened next.
A Six-Dollar Dispute Over a New School
In 1963, plans for a new elementary school at Catletts Creek became the subject of litigation that reached the Kentucky Court of Appeals.
In Fosson v. Fiscal Court of Boyd County, the court stated directly that the Boyd County Board of Education had determined that it was necessary to construct an elementary school at Catletts Creek. An architect prepared plans, the county advertised for construction bids, and contractors competed for the project.
The dispute came down to only six dollars and forty days.
W. B. Fosson & Sons submitted a base bid of $249,745 and estimated that construction would take 220 working days. W. D. Johnson submitted a bid of $249,751, only six dollars higher, but promised completion in 180 working days. The Board of Education recommended Johnson, and the Boyd County Fiscal Court awarded him the contract. Fosson sued, arguing that the lower bid should have received the work.
The Kentucky Court of Appeals upheld the county’s decision. The judges concluded that the forty-day difference in completion time was sufficient for officials to consider Johnson’s bid the better overall offer despite its being six dollars more expensive.
For the legal profession, the case became a dispute about public contracting.
For the history of Unity and Catletts Creek, it preserves something more tangible. It documents a community important enough in 1963 for Boyd County to invest roughly a quarter-million dollars in a new elementary school.
From Catletts Creek to Eidson
By the 1966 to 1967 school year, Boyd County school records list Eidson Elementary among the district’s established elementary schools.
The district’s official history explains that Boyd County was then in a long period of rural-school consolidation. Smaller schools disappeared as children were transferred into larger elementary schools. England Hill Elementary eventually closed, and its students were divided between the newer Eidson Elementary and Cooper Elementary.
The evidence therefore suggests a sequence more complicated than the simplified claim that Catletts Creek School simply opened in 1962 and later changed its name.
An older Catletts Creek School clearly existed by the late 1950s. A new elementary school at Catletts Creek was under construction in 1963. By the middle of the decade, Eidson Elementary was operating within the Boyd County system. The precise administrative date when the Catletts Creek name gave way to Eidson still deserves confirmation through school-board minutes, but the broader transformation is clear.
The school became the institutional center of a community whose older postal identity had already disappeared.
The School Outlives Unity
By the late twentieth century, Unity had largely ceased functioning as an everyday postal identity, but the school continued to anchor families living along Catletts Creek.
Boyd County’s educational landscape changed dramatically during these decades as consolidation reduced the number of neighborhood and rural schools. The district history records another major change in 1993, when the former Catlettsburg junior-high facility was converted into Catlettsburg Elementary.
Later summaries associate the closing of Eidson Elementary with that reorganization and the transfer of students to Catlettsburg Elementary. The general sequence fits the documented district-wide consolidation, although school-board records would provide the best evidence for the exact closure date and student reassignment.
By then, the gravitational pull of Catlettsburg had grown stronger.
The old Unity post office had been gone for generations. The school that preserved the identity of the Catletts Creek neighborhood was disappearing as well.
What Remains of Unity
Unity survives today more as a historical place name than as a clearly bounded community.
The United States Geological Survey’s geographic-name tradition preserves the name, while modern references locate the old community along Catletts Creek west of Catlettsburg. The surrounding road network still follows the same valleys and streams that shaped settlement generations ago. Family cemeteries remain in the hills. Catletts Creek still flows toward the Ohio. Kentucky Route 168 continues through the corridor.
Yet people searching modern maps for a town center marked Unity may find little to suggest what once existed there.
That is partly because Unity may never have possessed the kind of center later generations expect a town to have.
Its center might have been a post office inside someone’s store.
Later it might have been the school.
For another family it might have been a church, cemetery, coal opening, road junction, or cluster of relatives living along the creek.
When those institutions disappeared or changed names, Unity faded with them.
Why Unity Matters
The history of Unity is not a story of a booming Appalachian city that suddenly vanished. It is the quieter history of how rural places were created and forgotten.
The community existed within a much older Catletts Creek settlement. A post office gave the name Unity federal recognition in the early twentieth century. Coal was worked in the surrounding hills, although the surviving USGS evidence points toward relatively small operations rather than proving the existence of a large Unity company town. When the post office disappeared, residents remained. Schools continued educating children along the creek. A new elementary building became important enough to produce a Kentucky appellate court case in 1963. Eventually even that institution was absorbed into a more centralized school system.
The documents leave questions unanswered. The first Unity postmaster has yet to be firmly tied here to the landscape. The exact site of the post office remains uncertain. The origin of the name Unity has not been established. The relationship between the postal community and individual Catletts Creek coal operations needs additional research.
Those gaps are part of the story.
Across Appalachia, hundreds of places lived somewhere between a family settlement and a town. They appeared in postal guides, newspapers, school records, deeds, maps, and memories before slipping back into the names of larger communities around them.
Unity was one of those places.
Its post office is gone. Its school is gone. The old name is rarely heard.
Catletts Creek, however, continues through the hills of Boyd County, carrying the geography of the community long after Unity itself nearly disappeared.
Sources & Further Reading
Blevins, Cameron. “US Post Offices Data Biography.” US Post Offices. March 31, 2021. https://cblevins.github.io/us-post-offices/data-biography/
Blevins, Cameron, and Richard W. Helbock. US Post Offices. Spatial-historical dataset of United States post offices, 1639–2000. Harvard Dataverse and University of Colorado Denver. https://cblevins.github.io/us-post-offices/
Boyd County Clerk. “Search Records Online.” Accessed September 29, 2026. https://boyd.kycountyclerk.us/search-records-online/
Boyd County Public Library. “About the Databases.” Genealogy Department. Accessed September 29, 2026. https://db.thebookplace.org/about-the-databases/
Boyd County Public Library. “Genealogy and Local History.” Accessed September 29, 2026. https://www.thebookplace.org/index.php/research-learn/genealogy-local-history
Boyd County Public Schools. “History of BCPS.” Accessed September 29, 2026. https://www.boyd.kyschools.us/district/district-information/history-of-bcps
Ely, William. The Big Sandy Valley: A History of the People and Country from the Earliest Settlement to the Present Time. Catlettsburg, KY: Central Methodist, 1887. Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/24020324/
Fosson v. Fiscal Court of Boyd County, 369 S.W.2d 108 (Ky. Ct. App. 1963). https://law.justia.com/cases/kentucky/court-of-appeals/1963/369-s-w-2d-108-1.html
Kentucky Library Research Collections. “Boyd County.” Industrial Reports for Kentucky Counties. Western Kentucky University, TopSCHOLAR. Accessed September 29, 2026. https://digitalcommons.wku.edu/boyd_cty/
Kentucky Library Research Collections. “Industrial Resources: Boyd County–Ashland & Catlettsburg.” 1966. Boyd County Industrial Reports for Kentucky Counties. Western Kentucky University, TopSCHOLAR. https://digitalcommons.wku.edu/boyd_cty/21/
Kentucky Library Research Collections. “Industrial Resources: Boyd County–Catlettsburg.” 1955. Boyd County Industrial Reports for Kentucky Counties. Western Kentucky University, TopSCHOLAR. https://digitalcommons.wku.edu/boyd_cty/9/
Phalen, William Clifton. Economic Geology of the Kenova Quadrangle, Kentucky, Ohio, and West Virginia. Bulletin 349. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1908. United States Geological Survey. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/b349
Rennick, Robert M. “Boyd County: Place Names.” Robert M. Rennick Manuscript Collection. Morehead State University. 2016. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_ms_collection/36/
RoadsideThoughts. “Unity (Boyd County, Kentucky).” Accessed September 29, 2026. https://roadsidethoughts.com/ky/unity-xx-boyd-profile.htm
United States Post Office Department. Post Office Department Reports of Site Locations, 1837–1950. Microfilm Publication M1126. Record Group 28, Records of the Post Office Department. National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/locations-1837-1950.html
United States Post Office Department. Record of Appointment of Postmasters, 1832–September 30, 1971. Microfilm Publication M841. Record Group 28, Records of the Post Office Department. National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/postmasters-1832-1971.html
University of Kentucky Libraries. “Kentucky Digital Newspaper Program.” Kentucky Digital Newspaper Program. Accessed September 29, 2026. https://kentuckynewspapers.org/program/
Author Note: Unity is the kind of Appalachian community that can nearly disappear from the written record even while families continue living on the same land. This article attempts to preserve what can presently be documented while leaving room for postal records, photographs, family papers, and local memories to fill the remaining gaps.