Slaughters, Kentucky: Won in a Card Game

Webster County was formed in July eighteen sixty, carved out of parts of Henderson, Hopkins, and Union Counties. The following year a small community here was incorporated, and local tradition holds that a man named Gustavus Slaughter won the right to name the town and its post office by winning a card game in eighteen fifty-five. The post office was registered as Slaughtersville in January eighteen fifty-six, and the community kept that name through its eighteen sixty-one incorporation and well into the twentieth century.

In nineteen sixty-seven the Board on Geographic Names finally dropped the longer form and standardized to simply Slaughters. It remains one of Webster County's smallest cities, sitting along what is now a CSX rail line that still uses a siding named for the town.