Appalachian Community Histories – Upper Pidgeonroost, Perry County: A School, a Road, and a Community Kept on the Map
Upper Pidgeonroost sits in the historical record as one of those small Perry County places that can be easy to miss if a researcher searches only one spelling. Map and gazetteer-style sources often use Upper Pidgeonroost, while school and newspaper sources more often use Upper Pigeon Roost. Together, those spellings point to a historic community and school area in northern Perry County, connected to Pigeon Roost Road, nearby Ary and Hiner, and the Hazard North topographic quadrangle. TopoZone’s GNIS-based listing places Upper Pidgeonroost in Perry County at 37.3406418 north, 83.1625664 west, with an elevation of about 1,106 feet, and identifies it as a historical place on the Hazard North USGS map.
Perry County itself was formed in 1821 from portions of Floyd and Clay counties, and both the county and its seat, Hazard, honor Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry. The official county history page describes Perry County as an Eastern Kentucky county shaped by the Appalachian Mountains, coal, timber, small communities, and the North Fork of the Kentucky River. Its community list includes Pigeon Roost, showing that the name remained part of Perry County’s remembered geography even when the smaller “Upper” place name became harder to trace.
On the Hazard North Map
The strongest anchor for Upper Pidgeonroost is cartographic. The USGS Store lists the Hazard North, Kentucky Historical Map GeoPDF as a 7.5 by 7.5 minute quadrangle at 1:24,000 scale, with a 1972 version date, 1972 survey date, and 1979 print date. That map series matters because it fixes Upper Pidgeonroost within a federal mapping tradition rather than relying only on memory, obituary references, or modern commercial map indexes.
The location also fits the road record. The Kentucky Transportation Cabinet’s Perry County State Primary Road System lists KY 3351 as running from KY 80 north of Hiner, by way of Pigeon Roost Road, to KY 476 at Ary, a distance of 3.424 miles. That modern road description does not prove every detail of the historic settlement, but it helps place the old name within the present-day landscape between Hiner and Ary.
The School Record
Upper Pigeon Roost appears most clearly in mid-twentieth-century school records. In the July 16, 1964 issue of The Hazard Herald, a Perry County Board of Education expense notice included “Upper Pigeon Roost School” in connection with milk reimbursement. That brief line is important because it shows the name in local public school accounting during the 1960s.
A federal source confirms the school name a few years later. The May 30, 1969 Federal Register published Department of Health, Education, and Welfare school lists under the National Defense Student Loan Program. The notice concerned schools determined to have high concentrations of students from low-income families during the 1968 to 1969 school year. In the Kentucky section, “Pigeon Roost; Pigeon Roost, EL.” appeared under deletions, while the additions under Hazard included “Upper Pigeon Roost, EL.”
That pairing suggests a local school-name shift in the official record, or at least a distinction between Pigeon Roost and Upper Pigeon Roost in the state and federal school lists. It is not enough by itself to reconstruct the school’s full history, but it gives researchers a firm path forward through Perry County Board of Education records, teacher lists, school census records, consolidation files, and local newspaper notices.
Coal, Branches, and the North Fork Country
Long before the school appeared in the 1960s record, the Pigeon Roost name was tied to the land and waterways of the North Fork region. In 1918, James M. Hodge’s Kentucky Geological Survey report, Coals of the North Fork of Kentucky River in Perry and Portions of Breathitt and Knott Counties, included Pigeon-Roost Branch and Pigeon Roost Road Fork among the local branch names surveyed for coal geology.
Hodge described Pigeon-Roost Branch as a right-side branch 24 and three-fourths miles up Troublesome Creek, with the mouth at an altitude of 845 feet. The report also described coal entries and prospects in the area, including references to the Hazard coal bed and Coalstone Branch. These details do not make Upper Pidgeonroost a coal camp in the formal sense, but they do show that the Pigeon Roost name belonged to a working landscape of branches, road forks, family land, coal prospects, and creek-based settlement.
Hodge’s separate entry for Pigeon Roost Road Fork placed that feature on the right of the Lost Creek Road Fork, three-fourths of a mile up from Trace Fork, with the mouth at 1,000 feet. This is why the Pigeon Roost name needs to be handled carefully. Perry County has several similarly named branches and road references, and the safest approach is to tie each record to its quadrangle, road, creek, or school source rather than assuming every Pigeon Roost reference points to the same exact location.
A Community Hidden in Records
Upper Pidgeonroost is not the kind of place that usually leaves behind one long narrative in a county history book. Its history is scattered across maps, school notices, road descriptions, geological surveys, post office research paths, census records, land records, cemetery leads, church references, and family memory. That is common in Appalachian local history. Many communities were known first by a road, branch, school, church, cemetery, or post office, and only later by the names that appeared on maps.
The post office record is especially important for nearby place-name research, even if Upper Pidgeonroost itself should not be treated as a confirmed post office without further proof. The National Archives explains that post office site-location reports were used when establishing or changing post offices and often included county and state, land descriptions, mail routes, nearby creeks, roads, railroads, and sometimes sketch maps or population served. The same archives describe postmaster appointment records from 1832 to 1971 as records that can show establishment and discontinuance dates, name changes, postmasters, and related postal details.
Robert M. Rennick’s Perry County post office and place-name work is another important guide for this kind of research. Morehead State University describes Rennick’s Perry County post office article as a historical survey of post offices and community and place names in Perry County, while his Perry County place-name manuscript is described as a place-name source for the county. Rennick spent more than thirty years documenting Kentucky communities, post offices, geographical points, oral histories, maps, and note cards, which makes his collection one of the best secondary paths into Perry County place-name research.
How to Keep Researching Upper Pidgeonroost
The best next step is to treat Upper Pidgeonroost as a school-centered and map-centered historic place, then build outward. The 1950 census can help identify families, roads, schools, and nearby households if the right enumeration district is found. The National Archives explains that 1950 enumeration district maps show roads, waterways, political jurisdictions, large properties, and district boundaries, and that the maps are available through the National Archives Catalog.
Land records are another path. The Perry County Clerk states that the office indexes and houses legal land records, marriage licenses, notary bonds, and related records, with some records dating back to the late 1700s. Deeds, road references, school property transfers, family land descriptions, and easements may preserve the names Pigeon Roost, Upper Pigeon Roost, Ary, Hiner, Dwarf, Tub, or nearby branches in ways that maps alone cannot.
The Hazard Herald should also be searched beyond the 1964 school reimbursement notice. School lunch notices, teacher appointments, school consolidation notices, obituaries, church events, road work, flood reports, sports mentions, and community columns may preserve the everyday life of Upper Pigeon Roost better than formal histories do. The name may appear under several spellings, so a careful search should include Upper Pidgeonroost, Upper Pigeon Roost, Pigeon Roost, Pigeonroost, Pigeonroost Road, Ary, Hiner, Dwarf, Tub, and nearby branch names.
Why Upper Pidgeonroost Matters
Upper Pidgeonroost matters because it shows how Appalachian places can survive in fragments. A federal map fixes one spelling. A county school notice preserves another. A geological survey records the branch and road-fork landscape beneath the community. A modern road listing keeps Pigeon Roost Road alive between Hiner and Ary. Together, those records tell the story of a place that may not have had a large town center, but still had a name, a school, roads, families, and a place in Perry County memory.
For historians, Upper Pidgeonroost is a reminder that small communities often have to be rebuilt from the edges inward. The story begins with a coordinate on the Hazard North quadrangle, but it does not end there. It continues in the school records, the old newspaper columns, the courthouse ledgers, the census maps, the cemeteries, and the memories of people who still know where Pigeon Roost Road bends through the hills.
Sources & Further Reading
United States Geological Survey. “Upper Pidgeonroost.” Geographic Names Information System, The National Map. https://edits.nationalmap.gov/apps/gaz-domestic/public/search/names/511101
TopoZone. “Upper Pidgeonroost (Historical) Topo Map in Perry County KY.” TopoZone. https://www.topozone.com/kentucky/perry-ky/city/upper-pidgeonroost-historical/
United States Geological Survey. “Hazard North, KY Historical Map GeoPDF 7.” USGS Store. https://store.usgs.gov/product/864078
United States Geological Survey. “KY Hazard North 803602 1954 24000 Geo PDF.” Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:KY_Hazard_North_803602_1954_24000_geo.pdf
United States Geological Survey. “KY Hazard North 708844 1992 24000 Geo PDF.” Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:KY_Hazard_North_708844_1992_24000_geo.pdf
United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Office of Education. “National Defense Student Loan Program: List of Schools Determined To Have a High Concentration of Students From Low-Income Families.” Federal Register 34, no. 104, May 30, 1969. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-1969-05-30/pdf/FR-1969-05-30.pdf
The Hazard Herald. “Perry County Board of Education Expense Notice.” July 16, 1964. https://archive.org/download/kd9gq6qz2b2r/kd9gq6qz2b2r_text.pdf
Hodge, James M. Coals of the North Fork of Kentucky River in Perry and Portions of Breathitt and Knott Counties. Frankfort, KY: Kentucky Geological Survey, 1918. https://archive.org/details/coalsofnorthfork00hodgrich
Kentucky Geological Survey. “Perry County Geology.” University of Kentucky. https://kgs.uky.edu/kgsweb/download/gwatlas/gwcounty/perry/PERRYGEO.pdf
Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. “Perry County State Primary Road System.” July 1, 2025. https://transportation.ky.gov/Planning/State%20Primary%20Road%20System%20Lists/Perry.pdf
National Archives. “Post Office Reports of Site Locations, 1837–1950.” National Archives. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/locations-1837-1950.html
National Archives. “Appointment of Postmasters, 1832 to September 30, 1971.” National Archives. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/postmasters-1832-1971.html
National Archives. “Enumeration District Maps.” National Archives. https://www.archives.gov/research/census/1950/ed-maps
National Archives. “1950 Census Records.” National Archives. https://1950census.archives.gov/
Perry County Clerk. “Records Center.” Perry County Clerk. https://perry.countyclerk.us/records-center/
Perry County Public Library. “Databases.” Perry County Public Library. https://www.perrycountylibrary.org/home/databases/
Rennick, Robert M. “Perry County, Post Offices.” County Histories of Kentucky. Morehead State University, 2000. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/273/
Rennick, Robert M. “Perry County, Place Names.” Robert M. Rennick Manuscript Collection. Morehead State University, 2016. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_ms_collection/121/
Perry County Fiscal Court. “About Perry County.” Perry County, Kentucky. https://perrycountyky.gov/about-perry-county/
United States Census Bureau. “Perry County, Kentucky.” QuickFacts. https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/perrycountykentucky/PST045224
Author Note: Upper Pidgeonroost is the kind of Perry County place that shows how much history can survive in a school name, a road, and a map label. I like these smaller community histories because they help keep mountain places from disappearing completely from the record.