It’s been a long ten years since we had a white Christmas down in northeast Kentucky. I took advantage of the serenity and beauty to hit the back roads yesterday to capture this rare event and came across this old one-room schoolhouse and residence in the forgotten community of Limeville.
Sometime after 1842, William Wilson Tong came to Greenup County 1 and located at the president-day site of Limeville where he took over operations of a lime kiln and incorporated his operation as the Greenup Lime Works. 2 The lime hearth had been managed by the Duvals family since the 1840s. By the 1870s, a small but respectable community had developed around the operations along the Ohio River where lime from the furnace was shipped by packet boats to Pittsburg and Cincinnati. 1 A one-room log structure tucked within Limeville Hollow served as the first school for the village. 2 It was later replaced with a log structure at Mt. Ebo followed by a wood-frame building closer to the river in 1909.
William Cameron opened the Duvals Landing post office in 1871, which was renamed to Greenup Lime Works on September 23, 1879, before becoming Limeville on August 2, 1888, taking the name of the nearby Maysville & Big Sandy Railroad station. 2 It was renamed to Tongs on June 20, 1894. The naming situation was finally settled by the U.S. Board on Geographic Names in 1968 when the community was again renamed to Limeville since the Tongs post office had closed in January 1958 and because the Limeville name was still used by both the railroad and by the local Methodist Church.
Sources
- History of Greenup County Kentucky. Biggs and Macoy, 1951, p. 280.
- Rennick, Robert M. “Greenup County – Place Names.” (2016). Robert M. Rennick Manuscript Collection, n.d.
