Appalachian Community Histories – Volga, Johnson County: The McKenzie Farmstead, Rural Life, and Paintsville Lake
Volga is easy to pass over on a map of Johnson County.
It never became a large town, never developed a courthouse square, and never grew into one of the better-known coal communities of eastern Kentucky. Its history instead belongs to the smaller branches and hollows north and west of Paintsville, where families established farms, built houses from local timber, buried generations on family land, worshiped in country churches, and depended on nearby Paintsville for many of the services that could not be found at home.
Yet Volga has left behind a better documentary record than its size might suggest. Federal preservation files, archaeological investigations, newspapers, postal records, maps, cemetery records, and the memories of the McKenzie family preserve pieces of a community that existed long before the twentieth-century name Volga became common.
At the center of that story stands the David McKenzie Log Cabin, once located on McKenzie Branch in the vicinity of Volga. The National Park Service nomination for the cabin identifies it specifically with Volga and connects the property to a family whose history in Johnson County stretched back to the county’s earliest years.
Volga’s story is therefore not simply the history of a post office. It is the history of a rural Appalachian landscape that gradually acquired a name, maintained its identity through family and community ties, and was later transformed by the construction of Paintsville Lake.
Before There Was a Volga Post Office
The surviving evidence suggests that the settlement history of the Volga area predates the Volga name by generations.
David McKenzie arrived in Johnson County during the early 1840s. According to the National Register nomination for his cabin, his name appears among Johnson County residents during the period from 1844 to 1848. He did not obtain the tract along lower Peter Cave Branch where the cabin eventually stood until 1860, but his presence in the county places the McKenzie family in the region during the years immediately after Johnson County itself was organized.
That distinction is important. A rural Appalachian community did not necessarily begin when someone opened a post office and gave the location an official name. Families could live along a creek or branch for decades while describing their homes by waterways, family names, voting precincts, neighboring communities, or the nearest established postal point.
The countryside later identified as Volga already contained farms and family networks before Volga became a postal designation.
The McKenzie property provides unusually strong evidence of that earlier landscape. It stood along Peter Cave Branch, within the broader drainage surrounding the later Volga community, where agricultural households occupied narrow bottomland and lower hillsides. Federal preservation investigators eventually considered the property important enough that its surviving log house became one of Johnson County’s most carefully documented examples of nineteenth-century rural architecture.
David McKenzie and the Peter Cave Branch Farm
David McKenzie acquired the lower Peter Cave Branch property in 1860, and construction of the earliest portion of his log house appears to have followed soon afterward.
The National Register documentation describes the structure as a rectangular, one-and-a-half-story log dwelling composed of two principal pens. The eastern section, made from poplar, was considered the older portion and was probably constructed shortly after McKenzie purchased the property. A western pen of hand-hewn yellow pine followed, producing the form of a saddlebag house, with separate rooms arranged around opposing fireplaces and chimneys.
The craftsmanship impressed preservation specialists more than a century later. The walls incorporated heavy timbers, carefully fitted corner joints, half-dovetail notching, and sandstone supports. Fine yellow clay filled spaces between the logs, and the structure originally carried a shake roof.
The house changed as the family changed. A later addition of sawmill lumber expanded the building after the Civil War, and a metal roof eventually covered older wooden shingles. Rather than remaining frozen in the form in which David McKenzie constructed it, the cabin evolved with the household occupying it.
That gradual alteration is part of what makes the house useful to understanding Volga. It was not built as a historical monument. It was a working home that generations adapted to changing needs.
According to the National Register nomination, six generations of the McKenzie family were associated with the house: David McKenzie, his son Lafayette, Lafayette’s son William H., William H.’s son Forest, Forest’s son Everett, and Everett’s daughter Ann. The federal nomination regarded the cabin as one of the finest surviving examples of log construction in the Johnson County region.
A Farmstead, Not Just a Cabin
The McKenzie residence was only one part of a larger agricultural landscape.
Kentucky archaeological investigators describe generations of McKenzies making their living from farming along Peter Cave Branch. Oral-history information indicated that the house once stood among the buildings typical of a working eastern Kentucky farm, including a smokehouse, corn crib, chicken house, barn or stable, privy, detached kitchen, and other activity areas.
That collection of structures reveals more about nineteenth and early twentieth-century Volga than the cabin alone.
A farm household needed places to store corn, preserve meat, shelter animals, cook, repair equipment, keep gardens, dispose of waste, and perform dozens of tasks that rarely entered written records. In communities without a dense commercial center, much of daily life took place within these family farmsteads.
The landscape of Volga would therefore have appeared less like a conventional town and more like a network of households connected by branches, paths, roads, churches, kinship, and eventually postal routes.
This helps explain why reconstructing the history of communities such as Volga requires looking beyond conventional town histories. There may never have been a concentrated downtown to photograph, but there was still a community.
The Volga Name Enters the Record
The available postal compilation created from the work of postal historian Richard Helbock and historian Cameron Blevins places the establishment of a Volga post office in 1905. That date should be understood as the beginning of the documented postal identity rather than the founding of settlement in the area.
Blevins and Helbock’s database was constructed in large part from the United States Post Office Department’s records of postmaster appointments. The researchers caution that historical post offices could move between homes or stores, temporarily close, reopen, or change names, making the original federal appointment and site-location reports the best evidence for establishing precise details about individual offices.
For Volga, however, 1905 provides an important dividing line.
Once a post office carried the Volga name, that name could appear more consistently on correspondence, government documents, directories, maps, military records, newspaper notices, and addresses. A place that had previously been described through branches and family settlements now possessed a geographic identity recognizable outside Johnson County.
The National Archives preserves two record series particularly important for tracing that history. Records of postmaster appointments document the establishment and administration of post offices, while site-location reports often contain sketches, roads, waterways, nearby offices, and information about the population an office expected to serve. Johnson County appears within the Kentucky rolls of those federal postal collections.
Volga Appears on the Map
By 1911, Volga had become established enough as a place name to appear on a Rand McNally map of Johnson County.
The map placed Volga among the many small communities surrounding Paintsville, alongside places such as Redbush, Staffordsville, Nippa, Whitehouse, Winifred, Elna, and Oil Springs.
For a place like Volga, that appearance matters.
Maps often preserved the geography of rural communities that possessed few substantial public buildings. The name represented more than a point on a sheet of paper. It marked a collection of families and roads significant enough that travelers, businesses, postal officials, and mapmakers needed to know where the community was.
By the 1920s, Volga’s connection to Paintsville was also being recorded in national commercial publications.
The January 1926 edition of the Rand McNally Bankers Directory listed Volga among Kentucky communities without their own banking facilities and directed Volga to Paintsville as its accessible banking point. The July edition repeated the same relationship.
Those brief directory entries reveal something important about life in rural Johnson County. Volga possessed an identity of its own, but Paintsville served as its commercial center.
Residents could live in Volga, farm there, receive mail there, worship nearby, and identify themselves with the community while still traveling into Paintsville when they needed banking, larger stores, professional services, government offices, or transportation connections.
Families Made the Community
Newspaper notices help restore the people behind the Volga name.
In 1927, the Paintsville Herald published a death notice for Madge Mae Williams, daughter of W. P. and Mary Vaughan Williams. The notice stated that she had been born at Volga on October 20, 1904, a date that falls immediately before the reported establishment of the Volga post office.
That small detail provides another reminder that the community preceded its formal postal identity.
Other records repeatedly connect the McKenzie, Picklesimer, Prater, Dixon, Vaughan, Williams, and neighboring families to the area. Family cemeteries became some of the most durable features of the Volga landscape, surviving changes in roads, residences, postal service, and land use.
One of those burial grounds, the Abraham Adam Picklesimer Cemetery, remains identified with Volga. FamilySearch associates the cemetery with members of several long-established local families, including McKenzies and Picklesimers.
In a rural Appalachian community, these cemeteries were more than burial sites. They were physical records of settlement.
A row of family gravestones could preserve evidence of who lived along a branch long after a farmhouse disappeared. Generations buried on the same hillside testified to the continuity of families who considered that landscape home.
Churches and Community Life
Religious institutions also helped hold together communities whose residents were spread across miles of valleys and hills.
Records of the Kentucky Methodist Conference identify Cannons Chapel as part of the Johnson County Parish and list its lay leadership with a Volga address.
The reference is brief, but it places Volga within the organized religious life of the county.
Country churches served purposes extending beyond Sunday worship. They hosted funerals, revivals, meetings, meals, and community gatherings. They connected scattered households that might otherwise encounter one another mainly through family visits, schools, work, or trips into Paintsville.
Other denominations also appear repeatedly in the lives of Volga families. Newspaper and genealogical records connect residents with United Baptist congregations in the surrounding countryside, demonstrating that Volga participated in the broader religious culture of rural Johnson County rather than existing as an isolated settlement.
Volga and the Second World War
The Second World War brought the Volga name into another set of government and newspaper records.
In March 1942, a Johnson County list of registrants included Kendric Blanton of Volga. The following month, another published induction list included Milton Picklesimer of Volga among men preparing for military service.
These are small entries in the enormous story of American mobilization, but at the community level they carry considerable meaning.
Nearly every eastern Kentucky community watched young men leave for training camps, military bases, and battlefields. Their addresses in registration and induction notices preserved communities that were often too small to generate extensive written histories of their own.
Volga was one of them.
The community’s appearance in these records demonstrates that decades after the post office placed the name on the map, residents still used Volga as an identifiable home address.
Paintsville Lake Comes to the Valley
The most dramatic physical change in the Volga area came through the federal Paintsville Lake project.
Planning for the reservoir brought the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers into valleys where families had lived for generations. Land acquisition, construction, environmental review, archaeological investigation, and the relocation or preservation of historic properties changed the relationship between people and the landscape.
For the McKenzie family, that process placed their old log house directly within a federal preservation story.
A 1975 Paintsville Lake Environmental Assessment examined the McKenzie property, and preservation documentation later described the cabin as possessing regional significance. By the time the National Register nomination was prepared in 1982, ownership of the property was listed with the Huntington District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
The project also generated rare first-person documentation.
Everett McKenzie wrote about the historic cabin in a September 9, 1976 letter published in the Licking Valley Courier. Four years later, historian Lynn Lady interviewed him for the Huntington District of the Corps of Engineers. Both sources were important enough to be cited in the federal National Register file.
Through those records, a federal construction project unintentionally preserved memories that might otherwise have disappeared with the farmstead.
Saving the McKenzie Cabin
In 1982, the David McKenzie Log Cabin was entered into the National Register of Historic Places.
Preservation officials emphasized both its connection to early Johnson County settlement and the quality of its construction. The nomination described the cabin as an unusually well-preserved example of regional log architecture, particularly noting its workmanship and notching.
Its survival represented something larger than one family’s house.
Across eastern Kentucky, nineteenth-century log dwellings disappeared through fire, abandonment, replacement, road construction, mining, reservoir projects, weather, and simple decay. Buildings once common enough to seem ordinary gradually became rare.
The McKenzie house survived long enough for historians, architects, archaeologists, and descendants to document it.
The cabin ultimately left its original setting, but it was not destroyed. It was relocated to the Mountain Homeplace Historic Area near Paintsville, where it could continue to represent the type of farm life once common throughout the valleys surrounding Volga.
Archaeology in the Backyard
Before the house was relocated, archaeologists had another opportunity to study the McKenzie farmstead.
In 1993, the University of Kentucky’s Program for Cultural Resource Assessment excavated areas around the house. The resulting work became part of a larger archaeological study of the property known as site 15Jo67. The formal investigation was published the following year as Archaeological Investigations at the McKenzie Farmstead (15Jo67): A Multiple Component Occupation in Johnson County, Kentucky.
The archaeological discoveries were not treasure in the conventional sense.
Investigators recovered 738 artifacts. Nearly two-thirds consisted of machine-cut or wire nails, many associated with buildings that had once stood behind the house. Ceramic fragments represented broken plates, cups, saucers, and crocks. Archaeologists also found a pipe-bowl fragment, a marble, and a mule shoe.
Post stains marked former fences and structures. A stone walkway once led toward the smokehouse. Archaeologists located evidence of a detached nineteenth-century kitchen through structural traces and the marks left in the soil by water running from a roof without gutters.
Even chemical analysis of the soil contributed to the story.
Elevated salts helped identify an area associated with meat processing near the smokehouse. Potassium concentrations suggested places where ashes had been dumped, while phosphate levels indicated organic refuse or gardening activity.
These discoveries reconstructed the invisible parts of daily life.
The archaeological record showed where people cooked, preserved meat, discarded ashes, walked through the yard, maintained fences, worked with animals, and disposed of household material. Together, those traces transformed the McKenzie property from an old cabin into a working Appalachian farmstead.
The End of One Landscape and the Preservation of Another
Paintsville Lake changed the surrounding countryside permanently.
Road patterns shifted. Federal land ownership expanded. Some older homes and activity areas disappeared. Places once known primarily to families who had lived along particular branches became associated with recreation, flood control, historic preservation, and public land.
Yet the lake project also produced an enormous body of historical information.
Environmental assessments documented old properties. Architects recorded traditional buildings. Archaeologists excavated sites. Oral historians interviewed residents. Preservation specialists prepared National Register nominations. Federal agencies photographed places that were changing or disappearing.
For Volga, those records are especially valuable because the community never produced the kind of municipal archive that would survive from a larger town.
Instead, its history remains scattered through the records created by families, churches, newspapers, post offices, cemeteries, archaeologists, mapmakers, and government agencies.
Volga After the Post Office Era
The disappearance of a rural post office did not necessarily mean the disappearance of the community it once served.
Postal historian Cameron Blevins notes that twentieth-century changes such as Rural Free Delivery caused thousands of small post offices to close or consolidate because individual carriers could serve much larger areas. A post office closure could therefore reflect changing postal technology rather than the abandonment of a settlement.
Volga continued to function as a geographic identity long after the period when a tiny local post office defined the community.
Family cemeteries retained the name. Obituaries continued identifying residents as being from Volga. Roads and branches carried generations of familiar names. The McKenzie property continued to be described as being in the Volga vicinity when federal preservation officials documented it.
Even into the twenty-first century, funeral and burial records still use Volga as a recognizable place. In 2023, the obituary of James Willis Prater identified him as a Volga resident and listed his burial at the Picklesimer-Prater Cemetery there.
More than a century after Volga appeared on early twentieth-century maps, the name remained attached to people and land.
What Remains of Volga
The historical landscape of Volga cannot be understood by searching for a vanished downtown.
Its landmarks are more subtle.
They are the branches where families farmed, the cemetery hillsides where generations were buried, the church records carrying Volga addresses, the old roads leading toward Paintsville, and the archaeological traces left beneath farmyards.
Most importantly, one of Volga’s greatest surviving artifacts is no longer standing where David McKenzie built it.
The McKenzie Cabin survives because preservationists moved it rather than allowing it to disappear as the surrounding landscape changed. At Mountain Homeplace, the structure represents a broader Appalachian past, but its particular history belongs to the Peter Cave Branch and Volga countryside.
Its logs were cut for one Johnson County family. Its fireplaces warmed generations who lived there. Its yard once contained the smokehouse, kitchen, crib, fences, animals, gardens, and pathways of a working farm.
That is Volga history.
Why Volga Matters
Small Appalachian communities are often difficult to write about because they rarely leave behind one convenient collection of records.
Volga demonstrates why they are still worth recovering.
Long before the name appeared on a twentieth-century map, families were creating farms along the branches that would later be identified with the community. The establishment of a post office gave that scattered settlement a more permanent name. Maps and commercial directories then connected Volga to the wider world, while newspapers, churches, cemeteries, and military records preserved the people who called it home.
The Paintsville Lake project eventually transformed portions of the landscape, but it also prompted historians and archaeologists to record pieces of Volga’s past in extraordinary detail.
Through the McKenzie farmstead, it is possible to move beyond names and dates and see something of how residents actually lived. They built with poplar and yellow pine, cooked in detached kitchens, smoked meat near the house, kept barns and corn cribs, maintained gardens, walked stone paths through their yards, worshiped in country churches, traveled to Paintsville for business, sent sons into military service, and buried family members on the hillsides overlooking their homes.
Volga was never a large city and never needed to be one.
Its importance lies in what it preserves about the thousands of small Appalachian communities that were built around family, land, waterways, and memory rather than courthouse squares or factory streets.
The name on the map may have appeared in the twentieth century, but the history beneath it runs much deeper.
Sources & Further Reading
Lady, Lynn. “David McKenzie Log Cabin.” National Register of Historic Places Inventory Nomination Form. Huntington, WV: Huntington District, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, February 12, 1982. This is the most important single source for the McKenzie family, cabin, Peter Cave Branch, and Volga vicinity. NPGallery https://npgallery.nps.gov/GetAsset/1cff200b-5013-43c7-89f4-2eab1cbe4ac9
McKenzie, Everett. “Corps Wants to Buy Historic Old Cabin in the Paint Creek Valley.” Licking Valley Courier, September 9, 1976, letter column. Cited in the National Register documentation as a firsthand McKenzie family source. NPGallery https://npgallery.nps.gov/GetAsset/1cff200b-5013-43c7-89f4-2eab1cbe4ac9
McKenzie, Everett. Oral interview by Lynn Lady, August 5, 1980. Prepared for the Huntington District, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The interview is specifically identified in the National Register file and should be treated as an important oral primary source. NPGallery https://npgallery.nps.gov/GetAsset/1cff200b-5013-43c7-89f4-2eab1cbe4ac9
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Huntington District. Paintsville Lake Environmental Assessment. Huntington, WV: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 1975. The National Register nomination identifies this federal study as an earlier survey of the McKenzie property. NPGallery https://npgallery.nps.gov/GetAsset/1cff200b-5013-43c7-89f4-2eab1cbe4ac9
Carlisle, Ronald C. An Architectural Study of Some Folk Structures in the Area of the Paintsville Lake Dam, Johnson and Morgan Counties, Kentucky. Draft report submitted to the Huntington District, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, August 27, 1982. National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution. SOVA https://sova.si.edu/record/naa-1976-028
McBride, Kim A., Daniel B. Davis, A. Gwynn Henderson, Joseph W. McCarthy III, David E. Rotenizer, and M. Margaret Scarry. Archaeological Investigations at the McKenzie Farmstead (15Jo67): A Multiple Component Occupation in Johnson County, Kentucky. Archaeological Report No. 334. Lexington: Program for Cultural Resource Assessment, Department of Anthropology, University of Kentucky, 1994. University of Oklahoma https://ou.edu/content/dam/archsurvey/docs/archsur-archaeology-of-kentucky-an-update-volume-1.pdf.pdf
Kentucky Archaeological Survey. “McKenzie Cabin.” Discover Kentucky Archaeology. Accessed October 2, 2026. This official state summary gives the archaeological findings from site 15Jo67, including the 738 recovered artifacts and evidence of farm outbuildings and activity areas. Kentucky Archaeology https://archaeology.ky.gov/Find-a-Site/Pages/McKenzie-Cabin.aspx
Rennick, Robert M. The Post Offices of Kentucky’s Big Sandy Valley: A Survey of the 341 Post Offices of Floyd, Johnson, Magoffin & Martin Counties. Lake Grove, OR: The Depot, 2002. This is one of the strongest specialized sources to consult for Volga’s postal history. WorldCat https://search.worldcat.org/title/51958021
Rennick, Robert M. Kentucky Place Names. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984. The Kentucky Historical Society identifies this as Rennick’s statewide place-name reference. Kentucky History https://history.ky.gov/kentucky-ancestors/where-in-kentucky-is
Hall, Mitchel. Johnson County, Kentucky: A History of the County, and Genealogy of Its People Up to the Year 1927. 2 vols. Louisville: Standard Press, 1928. The National Register nomination itself used Hall for early McKenzie and Johnson County settlement information. NPGallery https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/browse?c=x&key=Johnson+County+%28Ky.%29+–+History&type=lcsubc
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://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/browse?c=x&key=Johnson+County+%28Ky.%29+–+History&type=lcsubc
Oyler, Merton Dale. Neighborhood Standing and Population Changes in Johnson and Robertson Counties, Kentucky. Lexington: Kentucky Agricultural Experiment Station, University of Kentucky, 1948. Useful for broader rural-community and demographic context surrounding places such as Volga. Online Books Page https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/browse?c=x&key=Johnson+County+%28Ky.%29+–+Population&type=lcsubc
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. Online Books Page https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/browse?c=x&key=Johnson+County+%28Ky.%29+–+Population&type=lcsubc
U.S. Post Office Department. Record of Appointment of Postmasters, 1832–1971. National Archives Microfilm Publication M841. Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration. This is the federal record series to use for Volga’s establishment, postmasters, and discontinuance. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/postmasters-1832-1971.html
U.S. Post Office Department. Post Office Reports of Site Locations, 1837–1950. National Archives Microfilm Publication M1126. Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration. These records can help locate the Volga office in relation to roads, streams, neighboring offices, and postal routes. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/locations-1837-1950.html
Blevins, Cameron, and Richard W. Helbock. US Post Offices. Historical geographic database of American post offices. Stanford University Spatial History Project. Useful as a finding aid for Volga’s reported 1905 postal establishment, but the federal appointment records should remain the final authority. RoadsideThoughts https://cblevins.github.io/us-post-offices/data-biography/
Rand McNally & Company. Kentucky. Chicago: Rand McNally & Company, 1911. The Johnson County portion identifies Volga as an established place name by 1911. RoadsideThoughts https://www.mygenealogyhound.com/maps/kentucky-maps/KY-Johnson-County-Kentucky-1911-Rand-McNally-map-Paintsville-Auxier-Staffordsville.html
Rand McNally & Company. Rand McNally Bankers Directory. January 1926. Chicago: Rand McNally & Company, 1926. The directory’s accessible-banking listings connect Volga commercially with Paintsville. https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/rand-mcnally-bankers-directory-105/january-1926-598588/content/fulltext/rmbd_192601_12_accessiblebanking
U.S. Geological Survey. “Historical Topographic Map Collection: topoView.” Reston, VA: U.S. Geological Survey. Historical quadrangles can help reconstruct Volga-area roads, structures, streams, and settlement patterns over time. https://www.usgs.gov/tools/topoview
U.S. Geological Survey. “Geographic Names Information System.” Reston, VA: U.S. Geological Survey. Useful for the federal geographic record for Volga and other named features surrounding the community. https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/what-geographic-names-information-system-gnis
Kentucky Secretary of State, Land Office. “Land Office.” Frankfort, KY. Patent records can be used to push the land history of the Volga and Paint Creek area earlier than the McKenzie farmstead. https://www.sos.ky.gov/land/Pages/default.aspx
Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives. “Research Guides and County Records.” Frankfort, KY. Johnson County deeds, surveys, tax records, wills, and other surviving courthouse material provide primary evidence for landowners and families surrounding Volga. https://kdla.ky.gov/Archives-and-Reference/Pages/Research-Guides.aspx
Johnson County Public Library. “Local History and Genealogy Resources.” Paintsville, KY. The Patricia Patton Kentucky Room contains newspapers, maps, photographs, family materials, and other local sources that could add details unavailable in federal collections. https://johnsoncountypubliclibrary.org/using-your-library/
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Huntington District. Paintsville Lake Water Control Manual. Huntington, WV: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The Corps identifies the lake as primarily in Johnson County, extending into Morgan County, with a small amount of flowage-easement land in Magoffin County. Water Data https://water.usace.army.mil/cda/documents/wc/2242/PAINTSVILLE_WCM_REDACTED.pdf
Author Note: Volga’s history survives through family farms, postal records, archaeological evidence, cemeteries, newspapers, and the memories preserved during the creation of Paintsville Lake. If you have photographs, family documents, church records, maps, or stories connected to Volga, I welcome material that can help preserve and expand this community’s history.