Awe, Kentucky

Awe, Kentucky
Unincorporated community
Awe Location in Kentucky Awe Location in the United States
Coordinates: 38°25′17″N 83°20′40″W
Country	United States
State	Kentucky
County	Lewis
Elevation	922 ft (281 m)
Time zone	UTC-5 (Eastern (EST))
• Summer (DST)	UTC-4 (EST)
GNIS feature ID	507430

Awe, KY is an unincorporated community in Lewis County, Kentucky, United States. The Awe post office is closed. The area is best known for AMERICAN CHESTNUTS and laid back Appalachia life.

The AWE Post Office The post office at AWE was established on May 20, 1898. It's first Postmaster was Anthony Wayne Everman. It is believed that the post office got its name from his initials, A. W. E. The Awe Post Office was located some five miles up Straight Fork of Kinney. In 1902 John F. Stander mote office one mile further up Straight Fork, to the mouth of Blue Ridge Fork, 16.5 miles south of Vanceburg. Here the office continued to operate through October 1935.

According to Anthony W. Everman, 3/17/1898, this property for the post office would be 7 mi. SW of the Mouth of Laurel post office, 7.5 mi. E of the Trotter PO, 8 mi. NW of the Head of Grassy PO, on the E side of Straight Fork. On 9/15/1902, John F. Stander petitioned for a site change one mi. SW to a point on the side of Straight Fork, 5 mi SE of Kinniconick PO. In this vicinity shortly after the Civil War, some German missionaries who had bought this land on Straight Fork planned a town they would call St. Mary's, but it never came about.

The Stander family was among them. (Talley, "A Trip Down Kinniconick." Lewis County Herald) Beulah Faye Hamm Lykins, a long time school teacher and counselor in the Lewis County Public School System, in an interview dated 6/20/1977, is quoted as saying, "I don't know the precise location except that it was in the Lower Kinney section, in the Grassy - Laurel community. The name is all but forgotten by contemporary Lewis Countians. There is nothing there now..."

She continued, "According to tradition, this man was taking care of the mail and he ... didn't want it anymore and he was tired of it and couldn't get rid of it and said he just one day just sacked it all up in a sack and took it to the nearest store ... and they asked him what he had and he said he had the Post Office and he didn't want it any more. I don't know how they disposed of it, but they didn't have any Post Office anymore."

The unusual name once inspired newspaperman J. S. Mavity to write: "Straight Fork ... dashes its water against the rocks and crags down a narrow valley probably 50 yards wide from hill to hill, and he who has looked upward through the tops of the tall spruce, pine, and hemlock endeavoring to see the sun at any time except noonday may feel the solemn awe which probably gave the post office its name. " (Book -P.11) Mavity knew that the first Postmaster was Anthony Wayne Everman, yet he waxed poetic in a May 19, 1922, letter to William Gladstone Steel of Medford, Oregon in a reply to the latter's request for information on Lewis County post offices and communities. The original letter is in the National Archives. He gave the Postmaster's name as Edington, that of another area family.