Although I often employ my smartphone to help me navigate unfamiliar places, when exploring Kentucky, I prefer to stick to my paper atlas…where miles of roads unfurl enticingly, place names dotted here and there. Which is how I ended up on the Kentucky/Tennessee line yesterday, searching for the community of Bugtussle.
Section of the 1931 15-minute topographic map of Red Boiling Springs, TN/KY, showing Bugtussle.
Apparently it was a doodlebug that inspired this hamlet’s name. According to Robert Rennick’s Kentucky Place Names, the name sprang from the practice of traveling wheat thrashers journeying from farm to farm to thresh wheat. The workers slept in haylofts in barns during their rotations in the community, and “the thrashers …stayed so long that it was said the bugs got so large that they would tussle in the hay.”
Well. I guess I’ve heard stranger origin theories?
Yikes! This is a doodlebug, or an ant-lion.
Jed Clampett of The Beverly Hillbillies was from Bug Tussle, Tennessee, which the show invented. But two other real Bugtussles exist in Texas and Alabama.
The only thing I found bearing the name of Bugtussle (besides road signs and mailboxes).
Bugtussle is a rural community that never boasted its own post office, and an old store bearing the Bugtussle General Store is all I discovered to mark the spot. There are many barns about, but I refrained from checking out their haylofts.
It was lovely afternoon for a drive along Kentucky’s back roads, and for visiting a community named for bugs.
