Perry Countys Hidden Gem A Glimpse Into The Truth About The Bust That Never Was

Getting There Before Anyone Else Does

Perry County has more unrecorded history than most people walking through it realize. The real issue isn't finding it — it's knowing where to look and having the patience to verify what you actually found. I've spent years mapping and documenting these locations, and the process is equal parts bureaucracy, footwork, and learning to read a map backwards. The first thing you need to understand is that Perry County's hidden sites mostly survive because they were never developed. Flood zones, poor soil reports, and land disputes all kept people away. That means a lot of what's still standing out there is sitting on property that someone still cares about. Treat it that way.

Perry Countys Hidden Gem A Glimpse Into The Truth About The Bust That Never Was

When I first started this work, I assumed I could walk into the county clerk's office and pull up every abandoned structure from 1920. That didn't happen. What actually happens is you get a box of tax delinquency records from three different decades and a microfiche machine that hasn't been serviced since 2008. The real documentation is scattered across three different government departments that don't talk to each other. Here's the method that actually works, after roughly two years of trial and error: Start with the Perry County assessor's parcel maps. These are available online through the county GIS portal. Download the shapefiles and load them into QGIS or ArcGIS if you have access, or just use the free web viewer. Filter for parcels that have changed ownership fewer than three times in the last sixty years. Those properties are your starting point. High turnover usually means development happened. Stagnant ownership often means someone kept the old structures around.

Next cross-reference the county road department records. They maintain a database of discontinued routes and old alignments. In Perry County, at least a dozen unmarked trails and former roadbeds exist outside the current map. These abandoned right-of-ways lead to places that modern surveying simply skipped. I found three documented sites this way that didn't appear on any public record until I walked them myself. Then pull the USDA soil survey maps for the county. They're free and downloadable from WebSoilSurvey. Areas marked as prime farmland or high-risk erosion zones are where old homesteads tend to cluster. People moved to those spots in the 1800s for water access and buildable ground, then abandoned them when mechanized farming made those advantages irrelevant. Those abandoned foundation sites are still there. You just need a metal detector or a good shovel to find the hardware. One specific problem I ran into that caught me completely off guard: I spent three weekends documenting what I was certain was an intact 1840s stone cabin site near the river bottom. The foundation was visible, the floor joist scars were clear in the soil, and I even located a ceramic shard that dated correctly. Then I checked the latest FEMA flood map. The entire site sits in a Zone AE flood plain that wasn't accurately mapped until 2019. The cabin didn't collapse from age. It was flooded out during a storm surge event and the remaining debris was washed downstream. I had been reading the site as archaeological when it was actually a flood deposit. The workaround was simple but not obvious — I went back and pulled the USGS stream gauge data for the nearest monitoring station going back to 1950. The flood frequency showed a major event in 1986 and another in 2001, which aligned perfectly with the absence of any post-1950 artifacts in the soil profile. Lesson learned: always check hydrological data before declaring a site intact.

Most people miss the detail that makes or breaks these projects: aerial photography history. Perry County has no comprehensive aerial survey before 1974. The USDA Farm Service Agency maintains historical aerial photo archives that you can access through their Aerial Photography Field Office. Some of those photos are from the 1930s and early 1940s. You can see structures that have since disappeared. A side-by-side comparison of a 1938 photo and a 2024 satellite image from Google Earth will show you exactly what was lost and what survived. This step alone saves weeks of dead-end fieldwork. Another thing that isn't mentioned anywhere but matters a lot: talk to the oldest residents in the county seats. Not through formal interviews. Just be present at the hardware stores, the post offices, the diner on a Tuesday morning. The information you get from those conversations isn't found in any record. Someone will mention an old church that burned in 1962. Another will point to a creek crossing that was never documented on any map. These details become critical context when you're trying to date a structure or understand why it was abandoned. There are real limitations to this approach. The county records are inconsistent by design. Different clerks kept different formats. Some decades are missing entirely from the tax rolls. Property boundaries have shifted enough times that a GPS coordinate from 2024 may not align with the same boundary from 1960. You will hit dead ends constantly. The process also requires physical access to rural land, and a significant portion of Perry County is privately owned. Trespassing isn't worth the legal trouble, so you learn quickly to ask permission first. Most landowners are indifferent. A small fraction are hostile. Don't push it.

If your goal is purely academic and you don't need to visit sites in person, the Perry County Historical Society maintains a card catalog of structure inventories that covers most of the county. It's not complete. It predates digital mapping. But it's better than nothing and free to access during business hours. I used it as my baseline before committing to fieldwork, and it saved me from chasing at least five locations that turned out to have been demolished decades ago. The tools you actually need are minimal: a GPS unit with waypoint logging, a digital camera with geotagging enabled, a notebook with a waterproof cover, and the willingness to walk terrain that hasn't been maintained since the 1950s. You don't need ground-penetrating radar or LiDAR unless you're working with a research team. For individual documentation, those are overkill and they complicate things for no practical reason. I also want to be blunt about one thing: most of what you find won't be significant enough to warrant official recognition. The average Perry County hidden site is a collapsed chimney, a few scattered bricks, and a depression in the ground where a kitchen once sat. That's fine. The value is in the documentation itself, not in whether a historic register will ever notice it. I've logged over forty sites in five years. Maybe eight qualified for anything beyond a personal record. The rest just exist now because someone wrote them down.