Appalachian Community Histories – Zelda, Lawrence County: Coal, Railroad, Old U.S. 23, and Life Along the Big Sandy
North of Louisa, where the wooded hills of Lawrence County press close against the Big Sandy River, the name Zelda has survived through more than a century of change. It has appeared on federal maps, in geological reports, newspaper obituaries, railroad references, highway accounts, government proceedings, and the memories of families who lived along this narrow river corridor.
Zelda never became a large incorporated town. It did not develop a courthouse square or a dense commercial district. Its history is instead the history of a rural Appalachian community shaped by the river, the railroad, coal, churches, cemeteries, family settlements, and the roads connecting northern Lawrence County with Louisa, Catlettsburg, Ashland, and communities across the West Virginia line.
The surviving evidence shows that Zelda existed as a recognized place by the late nineteenth century. By the early twentieth century, it possessed a post office and appeared on federal maps. Its name was later applied to a coal bed, a railroad station, and a modern electrical generating site. The exact origin of the name remains uncertain, but the historical record reveals a community whose identity endured even as the institutions around it changed.
Zelda before it appeared on the map
Some of the earliest evidence for Zelda comes from newspaper notices written after the deaths of people born there. These accounts do not establish the exact year the community was settled, but they demonstrate that the Zelda name was already being used during the nineteenth century.
John Fortner, who died in 1954, was recorded as having been born at Zelda on December 11, 1879. He later became an employee of the Norfolk and Western Railroad, connecting the story of Zelda with the larger transportation network that followed the Big Sandy Valley. His obituary also listed relatives living in Kentucky, West Virginia, and Ohio, illustrating the family and labor migrations that regularly crossed state lines in the region.
Another early resident was Theolosis Lakin, commonly called Lasey. According to a 1902 obituary in the Big Sandy News, Lakin was born at Zelda on July 15, 1882. He died at Yatesville at nineteen years of age, and his remains were returned to a graveyard at Zelda near the old family home where he had been born and raised.
These records show that Zelda was more than a recently created postal designation. Families were already identifying it as a birthplace and home during the 1870s and 1880s. The reference to an old home place and a locally recognized graveyard suggests a settled community with family land, burial traditions, and a shared geographical identity.
The graveyard mentioned in Lakin’s obituary cannot yet be identified with certainty. It may have been a family cemetery, an early community burial ground, or a cemetery later known by another name. It should not automatically be assumed that it was the same burial ground later called Chapel Cemetery or Buchanan Chapel Cemetery. The records establish the existence of burial places at Zelda, but additional deed, death certificate, and cemetery research will be necessary to determine how those sites were related.
Zelda Post Office on the 1903 federal map
One of the clearest early records of Zelda is the United States Geological Survey’s 1903 Kenova quadrangle. Surveyed during 1900 and 1901, the map identifies the community along the Big Sandy River and marks a post office there. Depending on the surviving map edition, the location appears as either “Zelda P.O.” or with station terminology associated with Zelda.
The post office was important to a rural community. It gave residents a recognized mailing address and connected scattered households to government notices, newspapers, commercial correspondence, family letters, and the wider national postal system. A post office could also operate from a private residence or local store rather than from a building constructed solely for postal business.
The map placed Zelda within a landscape defined by the river, roads, railroad lines, streams, ridges, and neighboring settlements. It captured the community during a period when the Big Sandy Valley was being drawn more closely into regional coal and transportation networks. The name was no longer limited to local speech. It had become part of the official geography recorded by the federal government.
The surviving map does not explain why the community was called Zelda. It also does not reveal who first proposed the post office, where the office was housed, or who served as the earliest postmaster. Those answers are most likely to be found in Post Office Department appointment records, site-location reports, and Robert M. Rennick’s research into Lawrence County post offices and place names.
The coal that carried Zelda’s name
Only a few years after the federal map was published, Zelda entered the scientific record through the work of geologists studying the Kenova quadrangle. In 1908, the United States Geological Survey published Wilbur C. Phalen’s Economic Geology of the Kenova Quadrangle, Kentucky, Ohio, and West Virginia.
Phalen described a coal bed known as the Zelda coal. In Kentucky terminology, it was also called Coal No. 9. Geologists correlated it with the Upper Freeport coal found elsewhere in the Appalachian coalfields. The report included geological measurements made near Zelda, including a section examined at the coal bank of Clifton Dean.
The use of Zelda’s name for the coal bed demonstrates that the community had become an important geographical reference point for federal surveyors. Geologists commonly identified coal seams by local names, nearby settlements, mines, landowners, or geographical features. Once recorded in a federal bulletin, the Zelda name became part of the formal geological vocabulary used to describe northern Lawrence County.
The report documented coal exposures and prospects near the community, but it does not by itself prove that Zelda developed into a large company-owned mining town. Its coal history appears to have been smaller and more dispersed than that of major industrial centers such as Benham, Lynch, Jenkins, or Wheelwright. Mining near Zelda could involve local banks, prospect openings, small operations, and landowners leasing mineral rights rather than one dominant company controlling an entire town.
Even so, coal became inseparable from the community’s historical identity. The name Zelda was attached not only to homes and a post office but also to the mineral resources lying beneath the surrounding hills.
Zelda Station and the railroad corridor
The Big Sandy River provided the original natural route through northern Lawrence County, but the railroad transformed travel, commerce, and employment along the valley. By 1930, at least one contemporary newspaper account referred to the area as “Zelda Station.” The report concerned the drowning of Ella A. Crank about one mile below the station. Although tragic, the wording preserved evidence that Zelda was recognized as a transportation point rather than merely as a collection of isolated homes.
John Fortner’s career provides another connection between Zelda and the railroad. Born in the community in 1879, he later worked for the Norfolk and Western Railroad. His life reflected a pattern familiar throughout Appalachia, where railroad employment allowed workers from rural communities to travel, relocate, and remain connected to a broader industrial region.
The railroad’s importance reached beyond passenger travel. Rail lines carried coal, timber, manufactured goods, mail, equipment, and agricultural products. They linked Lawrence County with Huntington, Kenova, Ashland, Portsmouth, and larger national markets. For communities such as Zelda, proximity to a station or rail line could determine how quickly people, freight, and information moved.
The station designation may also explain why Zelda continued to appear in records even after its post office disappeared. A postal office could close, relocate, or lose its official designation, but the railroad name and local understanding of the place might remain for generations.
Families, churches, and burial grounds
Much of Zelda’s history survives through church and cemetery references. These institutions often served as the most permanent gathering places in rural Appalachian communities. A church could function as a place of worship, a social center, a meeting hall, and the setting for funerals that brought extended families home from several states.
Buchanan Chapel appears repeatedly in records connected with Zelda. The chapel and its cemetery served families living in and around the community, although the precise boundaries between Zelda, Buchanan, and neighboring rural districts were not always sharply defined.
The 1902 burial of Lasey Lakin in a graveyard at Zelda shows that a recognized burial place existed near his old family home by the beginning of the twentieth century. Later records refer more specifically to Buchanan Chapel and Chapel Cemetery. These may represent different burial grounds, changing names for related places, or separate cemeteries serving overlapping communities.
The uncertainty is itself part of the historical problem. Rural cemeteries were not always incorporated, formally mapped, or consistently named. One newspaper might identify a burial ground by the church, another by the family that donated the land, and another simply by the nearest community.
Death certificates, funeral home records, church minutes, property deeds, cemetery surveys, and interviews with older residents could clarify these relationships. Such records may also identify the locations of schoolhouses, stores, homes, and former roads that no longer appear clearly on modern maps.
A Bulgarian miner makes his home at Zelda
One of the most revealing individual stories associated with Zelda is that of Steven Majorosky. His obituary recorded that he was born in Bulgaria on February 11, 1880. He became a coal miner and lived at Benham in Harlan County before moving to Zelda around 1940.
Majorosky died suddenly near his Zelda home in March 1950. His funeral was conducted at Buchanan Chapel, and he was buried in Chapel Cemetery.
His life connects Zelda to the international history of Appalachian coal mining. Coal companies recruited or employed workers from many parts of Europe, and immigrant miners established homes in eastern Kentucky, southern West Virginia, southwestern Virginia, and neighboring coal regions. Some remained in large company towns, while others later moved to smaller communities.
Majorosky’s journey from Bulgaria to Benham and then to Zelda suggests that the community participated in a much larger movement of workers through the Appalachian coalfields. By the time of his death, he had become sufficiently connected to Zelda for his funeral and burial to take place there.
His story also cautions against treating small rural communities as isolated or culturally uniform. Even a place without a large commercial center could become home to people whose lives had crossed oceans, state lines, coal camps, and mountain counties.
Old U.S. 23 and the changing road through Zelda
During the twentieth century, the highway gradually replaced the river and railroad as the most visible transportation route through the Big Sandy Valley. U.S. Route 23 became one of eastern Kentucky’s most important north and south corridors, passing through Lawrence County and connecting communities along the river.
Road construction also changed Zelda’s physical landscape. A 1987 newspaper report concerning the death of Roy Church described an older road near Zelda that had been abandoned after the new U.S. 23 was constructed. The location was described as approximately ten miles north of Louisa.
The report reveals how highway realignment could reshape a community. Homes and businesses once facing a heavily traveled road might suddenly stand beside an older route used mainly by residents. A new highway could shorten travel time and improve regional access, but it could also divert traffic away from local gathering places.
For Zelda, the construction of the newer U.S. 23 alignment appears to have separated part of the older community landscape from the main transportation corridor. The former road remained part of local memory, but motorists passing through northern Lawrence County increasingly experienced Zelda from the newer highway.
This type of change occurred across Appalachia. Roads were widened, straightened, relocated, and sometimes cut through hillsides that earlier residents had traveled around. Communities remained, but the ways people approached them changed. Old roads became side roads, forgotten stretches, or paths leading to family homes and cemeteries.
From the Zelda coal to the Zelda generating site
The Zelda name continued to possess industrial significance into the twenty-first century. Kentucky Public Service Commission records identify a natural gas generating property in Lawrence County as the Zelda site.
According to the commission’s proceedings, Riverside Generating Company acquired the land in 2000. The Zelda site consisted of three natural gas-fired generating units, each with a nameplate capacity of 195.5 megawatts. An adjacent property was identified as the Foothills site, and both were connected with the nearby Baker Switchyard.
The development represented a new chapter in the community’s energy history. In the early twentieth century, federal geologists had investigated the Zelda coal beneath the hills. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the name was attached to natural gas-fired electrical generation.
The two industries were technologically different, but both reflected Zelda’s location within an important transportation and energy corridor. The river valley offered space for rail lines, highways, utility connections, industrial access, and the movement of fuel and equipment.
The generating site also ensured that Zelda remained visible in modern government and engineering records. Even as the old post office, station, and earlier road faded from daily use, the community name continued to appear in official documents.
Louise Lambert and the beginning of Lawrence County’s festival
Zelda also contributed to Lawrence County history through the work of Louise Lambert. According to Lawrence County’s official history, Lambert developed the idea that became the Lawrence County Potato Festival.
Lambert shared her proposal with county leaders and with Roseanne Burchett of the Big Sandy News. The county approved the event, and Lambert became its director. The inaugural Potato Festival was held in September 1987. The event was later renamed Septemberfest, with the first festival under that name taking place in September 1990.
The festival became one of Lawrence County’s most recognizable public celebrations. Although centered in Louisa, its origin was tied directly to a woman from Zelda. Lambert’s contribution demonstrates how residents of smaller communities influenced the cultural life of the entire county.
Her story also broadens Zelda’s history beyond mining, transportation, and industry. The community produced people who organized events, built civic traditions, and imagined ways of bringing Lawrence County residents together.
The unanswered question of Zelda’s name
The origin of Zelda’s name remains one of the most intriguing unanswered questions in the community’s history. No dependable digitized primary source located so far establishes whether the place was named for a local woman, a postal official, a landowner’s relative, a literary reference, or another source.
It would be tempting to create a story around the name, especially because Zelda became a familiar feminine name during the nineteenth century. Without documentary evidence, however, such an explanation would be speculation.
Robert M. Rennick’s Lawrence County: Post Offices and Place Names, published in 2000, is the strongest focused secondary source for further investigation. Rennick devoted decades to documenting Kentucky community names, post offices, and local naming traditions. His Lawrence County work surveys the county’s communities and postal history and may preserve information drawn from postal records or local correspondence that is not readily available elsewhere.
The most promising primary records are held within the historical files of the United States Post Office Department. National Archives Microfilm Publication M841 contains postmaster appointments after 1832, arranged by state, county, and post office. These records can provide appointment dates and may establish when Zelda’s post office opened or closed.
Microfilm Publication M1126 contains post office site-location reports from 1837 to 1950. Such reports may describe nearby rivers, creeks, roads, rail stations, postal routes, and neighboring offices. Many include hand-drawn maps. If the Zelda report survives, it may reveal where the office stood and could possibly provide clues concerning its establishment.
Until those records are examined, the responsible conclusion is that the source of Zelda’s name remains uncertain.
Why Zelda’s story matters
Zelda’s history was not defined by one famous battle, one nationally known individual, or one enormous industrial complex. Its importance comes from the layers of ordinary Appalachian life preserved within its records.
The community appears in the birthplaces of nineteenth-century residents, the graveyards where families returned their dead, a federal post office map, geological observations, railroad employment, a station name, a church, a Bulgarian miner’s journey, the relocation of U.S. 23, an electrical generating site, and the vision of the woman who helped create Lawrence County’s annual festival.
Together, these fragments reveal how small communities endure. Institutions may disappear. A post office can close, a railroad station can fall out of use, a road can be bypassed, and coal workings can become overgrown. The place itself can still survive through family memory, maps, cemeteries, churches, government records, and the language people use to describe where they live.
Zelda remains part of Lawrence County’s historical landscape because its name continued to carry meaning. It identified a home place, a burial place, a coal bed, a transportation point, an industrial property, and a community along the Big Sandy River.
Its full story has not yet been recovered. Deeds, census schedules, postmaster appointments, death certificates, school records, church documents, oral histories, and cemetery surveys may eventually reveal more about its first families, its post office, its station, and the origin of its distinctive name.
What is already known shows that Zelda was never merely a label printed on a map. It was a place where people were born, worked, worshiped, traveled, died, and were carried home for burial. That human history gives the community its lasting place in the story of Lawrence County and Appalachian Kentucky.
Sources & Further Reading
United States Geological Survey. Kenova Quadrangle, Kentucky-West Virginia-Ohio. 1:125,000. Washington, DC: United States Geological Survey, 1903. https://prd-tnm.s3.amazonaws.com/StagedProducts/Maps/HistoricalTopo/PDF/KY/125000/KY_Kenova_803665_1903_125000_geo.pdf
Phalen, William Clifton. Economic Geology of the Kenova Quadrangle, Kentucky, Ohio, and West Virginia. United States Geological Survey Bulletin 349. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1908. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/b349
Phalen, William Clifton. Kenova Folio, Kentucky-West Virginia-Ohio. Geologic Atlas of the United States, Folio 184. Washington, DC: United States Geological Survey, 1912. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/gf184
United States Geological Survey. “Historical Topographic Maps: Preserving the Past.” Accessed July 19, 2026. https://www.usgs.gov/programs/national-geospatial-program/historical-topographic-maps-preserving-past
United States Geological Survey. “Geographic Names Information System: Zelda, Kentucky.” Accessed July 19, 2026. https://edits.nationalmap.gov/apps/gaz-domestic/public/summary/509426
Procter, John R., and Kentucky Geological Survey. Preliminary Map of Kentucky. Frankfort: Kentucky Geological Survey, 1891. Library of Congress Geography and Map Division. https://www.loc.gov/item/98688487/
Library of Congress. The Big Sandy News, Louisa, Kentucky, 1885–1929. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Accessed July 19, 2026. https://www.loc.gov/item/sn83004226/
Library of Congress. Big Sandy News-Recorder, Louisa, Kentucky, 1929–1935. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Accessed July 19, 2026. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85052056/
Lawrence County Public Library. “Big Sandy News Digital Collection.” Accessed July 19, 2026. https://lcplky.org/news_announcements/big-sandy-news-digital-collection/
Lawrence County Public Library. “Genealogy.” Accessed July 19, 2026. https://lcplky.org/genealogy/
Rennick, Robert M. “Lawrence County: Post Offices and Place Names.” County Histories of Kentucky. Morehead State University, 2000. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/244/
Morehead State University. “Robert M. Rennick Kentucky Place Name Collection.” Accessed July 19, 2026. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/robert_rennick_collection/
Morehead State University. “Kenova.” Robert M. Rennick Topographical Maps Collection. Map originally published by the United States Geological Survey, 1903. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_maps_all/893/
National Archives and Records Administration. “Post Office Records.” Includes Record of Appointment of Postmasters, 1832–September 30, 1971, Microfilm Publication M841, and post office site-location reports. Accessed July 19, 2026. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices
Kentucky Geological Survey. Lawrence County, Kentucky. Lexington: University of Kentucky, Kentucky Geological Survey. Accessed July 19, 2026. https://kgs.uky.edu/kgsweb/olops/pub/kgs/mc177_12.pdf
Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. State Primary Road System: Lawrence County. Frankfort: Kentucky Transportation Cabinet, 2025. https://transportation.ky.gov/Planning/State%20Primary%20Road%20System%20Lists/Lawrence.pdf
Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. “Printable Maps.” Accessed July 19, 2026. https://transportation.ky.gov/Pages/Printable-Maps.aspx
Kentucky Public Service Commission. “Case Filings for Case No. 2017-00472: Riverside Generating Company, LLC v. Kentucky Power Company.” Accessed July 19, 2026. https://psc.ky.gov/Case/ViewCaseFilings/2017-00472
Kentucky Public Service Commission. Order, Riverside Generating Company, LLC v. Kentucky Power Company. Case No. 2017-00472. May 14, 2019. https://psc.ky.gov/PSCSCF/2017%20cases/2017-00472/20190514_PSC_ORDER.pdf
Lawrence County, Kentucky. “History.” Accessed July 19, 2026. https://lawrencecountyky.gov/history/
Lawrence County Septemberfest. “About.” Accessed July 19, 2026. https://septemberfestlouisa.com/about
Kentucky Secretary of State. “Kentucky Land Office.” Accessed July 19, 2026. https://www.sos.ky.gov/land/Pages/default.aspx
Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives. “Visiting the Archives.” Accessed July 19, 2026. https://kdla.ky.gov/Archives-and-Reference/Pages/Visiting-the-Archives.aspx
Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives. Inventory of County Land Records Available at the Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives. Frankfort: Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives. https://kdla.ky.gov/Archives-and-Reference/Documents/Inventory_Land_Records.pdf
Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives. “Indexes to Kentucky Births, Marriages, and Deaths.” Accessed July 19, 2026. https://kdla.ky.gov/Archives-and-Reference/Pages/Indexes-Births-Marriages-Deaths.aspx
Lawrence County Court. Tax Books, 1822–1875. FamilySearch Catalog. Accessed July 19, 2026. https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/156053
Lawrence County Court. Wills, 1821–1914. FamilySearch Catalog. Accessed July 19, 2026. https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/129660
FamilySearch. “Lawrence County, Kentucky Genealogy.” Last modified May 19, 2026. https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Lawrence_County%2C_Kentucky_Genealogy
Kentucky Historical Society. “County Named, 1821.” Kentucky Historical Marker Database. Accessed July 19, 2026. https://history.ky.gov/markers/county-named-1821-2
Lawrence County Kentucky Genealogical and Historical Society. “Obituary of Theolosis ‘Lasey’ Lakin.” Transcribed from the Big Sandy News, 1902. Accessed July 19, 2026. https://lckghs.com/index.php/en/obituaries/2-uncategorised/537-obit-1902
Lawrence County Kentucky Genealogical and Historical Society. “Obituary of Steven Majorosky.” Transcribed from the Big Sandy News, March 16, 1950. Accessed July 19, 2026. https://www.lckghs.com/index.php/en/obituaries/2-uncategorised/422-obit-1950
Lawrence County Kentucky Genealogical and Historical Society. “Obituary of John Fortner.” Transcribed from the Big Sandy News, January 21, 1954. Accessed July 19, 2026. https://lckghs.com/index.php/en/obituaries/2-uncategorised/426-obit-1954
Lawrence County Kentucky Genealogical and Historical Society. “Roy Church and the Abandoned Section of U.S. Route 23 Near Zelda.” Newspaper transcription, 1987. Accessed July 19, 2026. https://lckghs.com/index.php/2-uncategorised/461-obit-1987
Appalachian Regional Commission. Appalachian County Map. Washington, DC: Appalachian Regional Commission. Accessed July 19, 2026. https://www.arc.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Appalachian-County-Map-1.pdf
Author Note: Zelda’s history survives in scattered maps, geological reports, newspaper notices, church records, and the memories of Lawrence County families. I hope this article helps preserve the community’s story while encouraging readers to share photographs, documents, and local knowledge that can fill the remaining gaps.