LAKEVILLE, Ky. -- A stream bubbles from the hollow, past tobacco barns, corn patches and well-kept houses. Blanketed during a recent snow, the place looked like a picture postcard of Appalachia.
It's a pretty place with a dirty name.
The map identifies it as Patton Fork. Locals call it "Nigger Fork."
The hollow is one of two in rural Magoffin County with the racial slur in their names. The other, "Negro Branch," actually appears that way on state maps -- but it is widely referred to in the same manner as Patton Fork.
A group of citizens is working to change that. However, the group's efforts have not been greeted with unanimous approval.
Patton Fork resident Betty McCarty, who is white, told county officials that the road was named in honor of a well-respected black midwife. The emancipated slave and some of her descendants are buried in a cemetery there.
"Colored Mary was a well-liked person," McCarty wrote in a letter to the weekly Salyersville Independent. "Back then, the name 'nigger' was used when people could not pronounce or think of the word negro."
McCarty suggested naming the road C. Mary Hollow, "if 'nigger' or negro offends anyone." But Magistrate Kenneth Auxier said others have suggested the road sign use the slur or nothing at all.
"I've been told that," he said. "They'll probably tear the sign down."
The county chapter of the Kentucky Local Governance Project found the names while doing a road inventory to prepare for an enhanced 911 system. When signs are installed on the county's roads next spring, the Rev. Ewell Sammons says there "will be no more 'n' roads."
"I'm not a real big fan of being politically correct," said Sammons, a United Methodist minister and coordinator of the project. "But I can't think of any good reason to leave a name like that."
Of Magoffin County's 13,077 residents, just eight are black, according to the State Data Center at the University of Louisville. But Judge-Executive Charles "Doc" Hardin said the size of a minority group is no excuse for insulting it.
"We're from eastern Kentucky," he said. "We understand what it feels like to have negative things said about us. I identify with African-Americans."
Similar situations have surfaced in other eastern Kentucky counties.
The Kentucky Human Rights Commission got Knox County officials to change the names of two roads last year. Years ago, the slur was ended as a name for a hollow in Sammons' native Martin County.
Sammons said eastern Kentuckians have become inured to racism because there just aren't many blacks around. Magoffin County resident James "Nigger" Howard, so nicknamed because of his dark complexion, is listed that way on the ballot whenever he runs for public office.
"It's a silent racism," Sammons said.
He said he grew up in a household where racial slurs weren't tolerated. His convictions were strengthened by his experiences working with a grocery store chain in Washington, D.C., during the civil rights marches and demonstrations of 1968.
"If eastern Kentuckians could only see, we share a lot in common with African-Americans -- their struggle for their culture and their roots," said Sammons, who once sued a county to get the road up to a black church paved.
"We're a minority of our own, in a way," said Tracy Fletcher, a secretary at Salyersville Elementary School who is creating a computer database of the road system.
Patton Fork residents circulated a petition to keep the other name. Cheryl Harper signed the petition but said she doesn't want to offend anybody.
"I won't say 'Nigger Fork,"' she said. "If they don't take offense of 'negro,' then I don't mind if they say it. I want to be right about what I'm saying."
Ike Thomas, owner of Garry's Pharmacy in downtown Salyersville, said he has experienced little racism as a black since moving to the area from Pennsylvania in 1969. But he thinks the days of slur names for roads are past.
"I feel that the names probably should be changed to get updated to the '90s way of thinking," he said. "They're really not anything a community should be proud of, no matter how they were intended."