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Places named Spurlin

Overview of communities, landforms, streams, crossings, cemeteries and civic sites in the United States that carry the Spurlin (or closely related Spurling) name, with pointers to Spurlin historical markers and federal land records.

Sourcing: strong 13 government · 7 reference · 1 news · 4 genealogy

The Spurlin name appears on a small but widely scattered set of American place names, most of them rural and several now historical. This page gathers them; each has its own entry where enough verified material exists.

Populated places

The U.S. Geological Survey's Geographic Names Information System (GNIS), the federal standard for place names, lists two populated places built on the name: Spurlin in Hamilton County, Texas, and Spurlington in Taylor County, Kentucky.[1][2][3]

Spurlin, Texas, was a railroad-era ranching community laid out on the Stephenville North and South Texas Railway and is now a ghost town.[4][5][6] A 1909 newspaper report says it was named for John L. Spurlin, a merchant of Hamilton (see Spurlins of Hamilton County, Texas).[7]

Spurlington, Kentucky, was a railroad station with a post office from 1880 to 1958. It gives its name to the abandoned Spurlington Tunnel and to a USGS topographic quadrangle.[8][3] Despite its spelling, it is named for a Spurling family. The place-name scholar Robert M. Rennick wrote that the post office was named for the pioneer forebears of its first postmaster, John Spurling Sr.[9]

Natural features

GNIS lists Spurlin Mesa, a summit in Delta County, Colorado; Spurlins Hollow, a valley in Cumberland County, Kentucky; and Spurlins Creek, a stream in Muhlenberg County, Kentucky.[10][11] An irrigation ditch on the Colorado mesa, the Spurlin Mesa Lateral of the Crawford Clipper Ditch, has been evaluated as eligible for the National Register of Historic Places.[12]

Crossings

GNIS records two crossings that carry the name. Spurlin Ford is in Grayson County, Virginia. GNIS places it on the USGS Sparta West quadrangle at about 36.572° N, 81.137° W. Its name was added to GNIS in 1995 from the survey's 1:62,500-scale topographic maps.[13][14] Spurlins Ferry is a historical crossing in Garland County, Arkansas.[15]

Cemeteries

A Find a Grave cemetery search for "spurlin*" returns eight cemeteries with Spurlin in their names. They are in Garland County, Arkansas; Fentress County, Tennessee; Shelby County, Indiana; Christian County, Kentucky; and Alleghany and Cleveland counties, North Carolina.[16] The Garland County burial ground, known as Spurlin Cemetery, is in the same county as Spurlins Ferry.[17] In Cleveland County, North Carolina, the Howell-Spurlin Cemetery near Shelby holds early Howell family burials.[18] All eight are described in Spurlin cemeteries.

Civic namesakes

In Tifton, Georgia, a youth baseball field was named Jimmy Spurlin Park for longtime local official and coach James Kenneth "Jimmy" Spurlin Sr.[19] In Berryville, Arkansas, the city's community center stands at 601 Dr. Spurlin Circle.[20]

Historical markers

Nine markers and memorials transcribed in the Historical Marker Database name a Spurlin, though none of them is mainly about one. The name appears in lists of church founders, lodge officers, bank directors, early settlers and veterans.[21] They are described in Spurlin historical markers.

Several nearby spellings also appear in GNIS, such as Spurling in Montana and Spurling Point, Cove and Rock in Hancock County, Maine. They are covered separately under Spurling place names and should not be mixed up with Spurlin sites.[1][10][11] Searches of the gazetteer for "Spurl" also return several Spurlock names, such as Spurlock in Clay County, Kentucky, and Spurlockville, West Virginia. Spurlock is a different surname.[22] Outside the United States, Mount Spurling in Tasmania carries the Spurling name. In 1955 the Tasmanian Nomenclature Board gave it to a mountain near a lake that the photographer Stephen Spurling III had found and named Lake Spurling on a 1908 trek; the lake itself was renamed Lake Riengeena (see Spurling photographers of Tasmania).[23]

Research note

No property listed on the National Register of Historic Places under a Spurlin name was found while compiling this page. The Spurlin Mesa Lateral in Colorado has been found eligible for the Register but is not listed.[12] Federal land grants are a separate record from place names: the Bureau of Land Management's General Land Office records list federal land patents to Spurlins issued between 1823 and 1963, most of them for land in Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas and Louisiana before the Civil War. They are summarized in Federal land patents to Spurlins.[24][25]

See also

  • Spurlin, Texas · Places mixed
    Spurlin is a ghost town in northwestern Hamilton County, Texas. It was laid out on the Stephenville North and South Texas Railway in 1908–1909 and named for its promoter, the Hamilton merchant John L. Spurlin. It had a church and a business in 1936 and had disappeared from maps by the late 1980s.
  • Spurlington, Kentucky · Places mixed
    Spurlington is a small rural community in Taylor County, Kentucky, northeast of Campbellsville. It was a railroad station with a post office from 1880 to 1958, and it is named for the Spurling family, whose John Spurling Sr. was its first postmaster.
  • Spurlington Tunnel · Places strong
    The Spurlington Tunnel is an abandoned railroad tunnel of about 1,900 feet through Muldraugh Hill near Spurlington, Kentucky. It was dug in the late 1860s and 1870s for the Lebanon–Greensburg line, which the Louisville and Nashville Railroad later operated.
  • Spurlin Mesa, Colorado · Places strong
    Spurlin Mesa is a summit listed by GNIS in Delta County, Colorado, between the towns of Hotchkiss and Crawford. An irrigation ditch across it, the Spurlin Mesa Lateral of the Crawford Clipper Ditch, dates from the 1880s and has been evaluated as eligible for the National Register of Historic Places.
  • Spurlins Hollow and Spurlins Creek, Kentucky · Places strong
    Besides Spurlington, GNIS lists two Kentucky natural features named in the possessive form 'Spurlins': Spurlins Hollow, a valley in Cumberland County, and Spurlins Creek, a stream in Muhlenberg County recorded by the place-name scholar Robert M. Rennick.
  • Spurlins Ferry and Spurlin Cemetery (Garland County, Arkansas) · Places mixed
    Garland County, Arkansas, near Hot Springs, has two Spurlin-named sites: a historical river crossing that GNIS records as Spurlins Ferry, and Spurlin Cemetery on Papas Trail, a family burial ground with about 160 Find a Grave memorials whose earliest dated burial is from about 1890. A family tradition links the cemetery's Spurlins to a James Spurlin said to have been killed at Hot Springs in the 1840s.
  • Howell-Spurlin Cemetery (Shelby, North Carolina) · Places weak
    Howell-Spurlin Cemetery is a small 19th-century family burial ground in Shelby, Cleveland County, North Carolina. Find a Grave records 16 memorials, among them John Howell (1744–1828) and five Spurlins who died between 1850 and 1890.
  • Jimmy Spurlin Park (Tifton, Georgia) · Places mixed
    Jimmy Spurlin Park is a youth baseball field in Tifton, Georgia, named for James Kenneth "Jimmy" Spurlin Sr. (1935–2006), a Tifton city commissioner, Tift County Commission chairman and longtime youth coach. Tift County lists a Spurlin field in its D. L. Lastinger Recreation Area, and tournament organizers list it as Spurlin Field.
  • Dr. Spurlin Circle (Berryville, Arkansas) · Places mixed
    Dr. Spurlin Circle is a street in Berryville, Arkansas. The city's Berryville Community Center stands there at 601 Dr. Spurlin Circle. The street honors a local Dr. Spurlin; a family of Spurlin dentists practised in Berryville from 1903, though no published source says which of them the street is named for. A later practice on North Main Street, Spurlin Family Dentistry, has been run by a dentist of another name.
  • Spurling place names (related spelling) · Places strong
    Several U.S. places carry the closely related name Spurling rather than Spurlin: a populated place in Montana, a stream in Tennessee, and a cove, point and rock around Great Cranberry Island, Maine. Spurlington, Kentucky, is also named for a Spurling family, and Tasmania has a Mount Spurling named for a photographer's 1908 discovery.
  • Spurlins of Hamilton County, Texas · History strong
    John L. Spurlin (1853–1935), a Hamilton merchant, banker and railroad promoter and a nephew of John H. Reagan, was a founding director of the Hamilton National Bank in 1890 and gave his name to the railroad town of Spurlin in northwestern Hamilton County.
  • Spurlin cemeteries · Places weak
    A roundup of burial grounds named for the Spurlin family on Find a Grave: eight Spurlin cemeteries in Arkansas, Tennessee, Indiana, Kentucky and North Carolina, plus Spurlington- and Spurling-named cemeteries and the graves of notable Spurlins.
  • Spurlin historical markers · History strong
    Nine markers and memorials transcribed in the Historical Marker Database name a Spurlin, from a Georgia church founder of 1842 and an Alabama Masonic officer of 1852 to veterans on Confederate, World War I and Vietnam War memorials.
  • Federal land patents to Spurlins · History strong
    The Bureau of Land Management's General Land Office records list 94 federal land patents to people surnamed Spurlin, issued between 1823 and 1963. Most are for land in Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas and Louisiana before the Civil War.
  • Spurling photographers of Tasmania (variant spelling) · People strong
    Four members of the Spurling family, across three generations, worked as photographers in Tasmania from the mid-19th century until 1941. Stephen Spurling II (1847–1924) ran a leading Launceston studio. His son Stephen Spurling III (1876–1962) pioneered Tasmanian wilderness photography, and Tasmania's Mount Spurling bears the family name.
  • Spurlins of Coffee County, Alabama · Genealogy mixed
    Spurlins from Houston County, Georgia, settled around Elba and New Brockton in Coffee County, Alabama, by the mid-19th century. They took up federal land patents, served in Confederate regiments and appear through a century of the Elba Clipper newspaper. The rockabilly singer Tommy Spurlin was born into the Elba family, and streets in neighbouring Covington County carry the name.
  • The Spurlin name outside the United States · Culture strong
    Spurlin is an overwhelmingly American surname today, with about 98% of bearers in the United States. The spelling is older than American settlement: English archives record Spurlins in Middlesex and Bristol between 1670 and 1717, and 18th-century leases name a field called 'Spurlins' in Hertfordshire. Outside the U.S. the related form Spurling is far more common.

References

  1. ↑ ↑ USGS National Map Gazetteer (GNIS) — geonames MapServer layer 3 (Populated Places), query for names containing 'Spurlin' — Official federal names data: feature ID, class, state, county, coordinates Government
  2. ↑ Spurlin (Feature ID 1379106) — USGS Geographic Names Information System Government
  3. ↑ ↑ Spurlington (Feature ID 504189) — USGS Geographic Names Information System — Primary map "Spurlington" Government
  4. ↑ Spurlin, TX — Handbook of Texas Online (Claudia Hazlewood; TSHA) Reference
  5. ↑ Spurlin, Texas — Wikipedia Reference
  6. ↑ Stephenville North and South Texas Railway — Wikipedia Reference
  7. ↑ "A Town Built in Forty Days" — The Washington Herald, 5 March 1909, p. 3 (Chronicling America, Library of Congress) News
  8. ↑ Spurlington, Kentucky — Kentucky Atlas & Gazetteer (kyatlas.com) Reference
  9. ↑ Robert M. Rennick, "Place Names Beginning with the Letter S" — Robert M. Rennick Manuscript Collection, Morehead State University — Draft Spurlington entry; PDF read via Internet Archive snapshot, 2024-11-15 Reference
  10. ↑ ↑ USGS National Map Gazetteer (GNIS) — geonames MapServer layer 5 (Landforms), query for names containing 'Spurlin' — Official federal names data: feature ID, class, state, county, coordinates Government
  11. ↑ ↑ USGS National Map Gazetteer (GNIS) — geonames MapServer layer 6 (Streams (Mouth)), query for names containing 'Spurlin' — Official federal names data: feature ID, class, state, county, coordinates Government
  12. ↑ ↑ Crawford Clipper Ditch Company: Level II Historic Resource Documentation of the Crawford Clipper Ditch—Spurlin Mesa Lateral (5DT1811.6), Delta County, Colorado — Metcalf Archaeological Consultants for the Bureau of Reclamation and partners (2019) Government
  13. ↑ Spurlin Ford (Feature ID 1501258) — USGS Geographic Names Information System — Crossing, Grayson County, Virginia; primary map "Sparta West"; entered 1 June 1995 Government
  14. ↑ USGS National Map Gazetteer (GNIS) — geonames MapServer layer 10 (Crossings), query for names containing 'Spurlin' — Official federal names data Government
  15. ↑ Spurlins Ferry (historical) (Feature ID 64356) — USGS Geographic Names Information System — Crossing, Garland County; primary map "Lake Catherine" Government
  16. ↑ Cemetery search for "spurlin*" — Find a Grave — 8 matching locations (September 2026) Genealogy
  17. ↑ Spurlin Cemetery — Garland County, Arkansas — ArkansasGravestones.org Genealogy
  18. ↑ Howell-Spurlin Cemetery in Shelby, North Carolina — Find a Grave Genealogy
  19. ↑ James Kenneth "Jimmy" Spurlin, Sr. — Obituary, Bowen-Donaldson Home for Funerals (CurrentObituary.com) Genealogy
  20. ↑ Berryville Community Center — City of Berryville, Arkansas Government
  21. ↑ Entries containing the word «spurlin» — Historical Marker Database — 9 entries, Sept. 2026; search includes inflectional forms Reference
  22. ↑ USGS National Map Gazetteer (GNIS) — geonames MapServer layer 3 (Populated Places), query for names containing 'Spurl' — Returns Spurlin, Spurling, Spurlington and Spurlock names Government
  23. ↑ Spurling, Stephen (1876–1962) — Obituaries Australia (Christine Burgess), National Centre of Biography, Australian National University — Stephen III: career, expeditions, Lake Spurling and Mount Spurling, sale to Kodak, death Reference
  24. ↑ GLO Records search: patents, name "Spurlin", results 1–100 — Bureau of Land Management — 101 results, read Sept. 2026; each card gives patentee, date, state, county, document type and accession number Government
  25. ↑ GLO Records search: patents, name "Spurlin", result 101 — Bureau of Land Management — page 2 of the same search Government

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Last reviewed 2026-09-24.