Wingo, Kentucky: The Station That Kept Its Name

Nine miles south of Mayfield in Graves County sits Wingo, a town that wears its founder's name to this day. The land was first settled in eighteen twenty-five by a young man named Jerman Wingo, barely eighteen years old, who put down roots at a bend in the road that locals called Point Curve. Nearly three decades later, in eighteen fifty-four, the New Orleans and Ohio Railroad, a predecessor of the Illinois Central, laid track through the area and established a depot stop they called Wingo's Station in recognition of the family that owned the ground.

The post office followed in eighteen sixty-two, incorporating arrived in eighteen seventy-two, and in eighteen eighty-two the railroad's formality was dropped and the town became simply Wingo. Small but durable, it remains the second-largest community in Graves County after Mayfield, a quiet testament to one teenage settler's choice of ground.