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The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was no consensus‎. Star Mississippi 19:37, 7 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Mayfield, Tennessee

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Mayfield, Tennessee (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log | edits since nomination)
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Geostub based entirely on GNIS data, which is not reliable, the only other source appears to be copying GNIS and isn't reliable either. Hut 8.5 07:36, 12 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Comment A source search shows people were born there in 1878 and 1879. The 1860 Tennessee gazetteer says it is a post office, but the categorisation in the Gazetteer is 'post office, post town, and post city' (Memphis is a post city) and there's a discussion of the postmaster there. I don't have newspaper access to search and it's difficult to search for this place, but the fact we have book records of people being born and dying there makes it quite possible it's notable under our gazetteer function. SportingFlyer T·C 16:57, 12 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
If we want to have an article about the place which claims it was a populated place then we do at least need a source which says it was a populated place, per WP:V. The burden of proof is on those who seek to retail the content. A source which describes it as a post office, or mentions of people being born there, do not support this assertion without original research. WP:V and WP:NOR are non-negotiable core content policies, they cannot be overturned through a local consensus. Hut 8.5 17:10, 12 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I think it could meet general notability guidelines. It is located at the junction of two important arterial routes: Tennessee State Route 56 leading north to Gainesboro, Tennessee (indirectly Celina, Tennessee and Kentucky) and Red Boiling Springs, Tennessee and south to Baxter, Tennessee and Interstate 40, and Tennessee State Route 290 leading east to Cookeville. As such, it could be a sort of landmark for rural road travelers. --EvergreenLAM — Preceding unsigned comment added by EvergreenLAM (talk • contribs) 07:54, 12 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  • Keep. Shown on an unidentified 1888 map at "Jackson County, Tennessee 1888 Map | Jackson county, Tennessee map, County map". Pinterest. Retrieved 2023-06-12.. Eastmain (talk • contribs) 09:27, 12 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete - Fails GNG and GEOLAND due to lack of either significant coverage or official recognition. Appearing on a map or being located at a major intersection are not part of our inclusion criteria. –dlthewave ☎ 15:15, 12 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep - while the current sourcing is definitely not enough to establish notability, I recently ran a newspaper search, and found many sources that indicate that this was a populated and legally recognized place. For example, these sources (1, 2, 3, 4, 5; there are plenty more) indicate that this community at one time had a post office. This is usually grounds for establishing legal recognition. Bneu2013 (talk) 07:53, 13 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Update - I've clipped the remaining articles (2, 3, 4, 5). Overall, not much different than the first, but does establish that this place had legal recognition. Bneu2013 (talk) 11:14, 13 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    The existence of a post office doesn't amount to legal recognition for a place. During this period postal offices in rural areas could be put in just about any convenient building, e.g. a farmhouse. It doesn't mean there was a populated place here. Hut 8.5 11:51, 13 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I'd argue the post office *is* legal recognition of a place. What it doesn't prove, and I believe this to be your main point, is that it was ever a populated place. However....forgot to sign... 78.26 (spin me / revolutions) 16:22, 19 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Judging from the tiny amount of text I get on Google Books for that source, it just contains genealogical records which mention that somebody lived there. If that's accurate then it doesn't actually say that Mayfield is a populated place, and we have to use original research to get that. Hut 8.5 17:00, 19 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
That's not original research, that's common sense. It is legally recognized. It was, at one point, a number of persons' address. It most certainly does not meet GNG, which is why moving the sentence or two to the proposed redirect target may make more sense than outright keep. What shouldn't be done is deletion. 78.26 (spin me / revolutions) 22:10, 19 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
If we want to have an article on a populated place then we do need a reliable source which says it's a populated place. Your source doesn't say that. We can't have an article based on editors' interpretations of primary sources. Hut 8.5 07:47, 20 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, - 🔥𝑰𝒍𝒍𝒖𝒔𝒊𝒐𝒏 𝑭𝒍𝒂𝒎𝒆 (𝒕𝒂𝒍𝒌)🔥 00:19, 20 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  • Delete - this place does exist -- Google Earth took me straight to it. There's "just not much there there". Google Earth is not a secondary source.
As EvergreenLAM pointed out, it is at the intersection of Tennessee State Route 56 and Tennessee State Route 290. Looking around using Google Streetview, within 200m of the intersection are: the Crabtree Siding and Supply warehouse, a Dollar General store, a convenience store, Xpress Excavating company, SonLight Church and a stop sign. There's a suburb - about a dozen houses nearby on Wade Subdivision Lane. I appreciate the article creator's efforts -- I'm just sorry I couldn't find any reliable secondary sources. I'll also note that I don't think the existence of a post office really means there was an official town. I'm open to recreating this article in the future if someone finds some interesting history in a reliable source.--A. B. (talk • contribs • global count) 01:49, 20 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep. First, per Bneu2013's excellent research showing a reasonable modicum of coverage during Mayfield's heyday. Second, nothing at WP:NPLACE would suggest that post offices (a legal status conferred by the government, and which in that time transformed the recipient into the center of social and business life for the surrounding area) are excluded from being considered "legally recognized". Third, although the closer of the recent RFC found a "weak consensus that maps alone cannot demonstrate notability" (my emphasis), we're plainly past that point now. (And the closer did find a clear consensus that routine interpretation of maps is not OR, so the many atlases showing Mayfield can likely support some basic statements.) Fourth, perusing the lamentably incomplete and paywalled archives of the Jackson County Sentinel (the Tennessee one, not the Alabama one) on GenealogyBank, I see that Mayfield was the subject of a society column -- which, while it may not indicate GNG-type notability, is certainly indicative of being a "real place" that is worth having coverage of. (On that note, it also had a telegraph office.) In sum, the underlying question of notability is whether sources exist that can support encyclopedic coverage, and we should have at least enough for a basic and useful paragraph here. My days of doing article rescue on spec are behind me, but if the article is kept please ping me and I'll be happy to take a stab at it. -- Visviva (talk) 03:33, 20 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    • post offices (a legal status conferred by the government, and which in that time transformed the recipient into the center of social and business life for the surrounding area I ask that you show consensus that this is the case. There is an old house in my family that was once a post office. The name by which it was known has no modern analogue in the surrounding community, and none of my family knew its name until we stumbled across an old genealogy book. No significant social or commercial center sprung up around it, just my ancestors' tobacco fields. Having a post office is not a "legal status" (in the US, think incorporation), as much as having a house or having a tree is. It is simply a place some people in the US Postal Service thought convenient to deliver their services to the people who lived in the general area. What you're essentially advocating is that "every place that once had a post office is notable" and essentially, by extension, all post offices are notable. I find that incredulous. Should you call the RfC or should I? -Indy beetle (talk) 06:58, 20 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
      I've seen the post office question come up in other geographic AfDs including another one this week. I find your comments about your family's post office interesting, Indy beetle. Because this is recurring, I think an RfC is needed for general use, not just this AfD, to settle this question once and for all. I encourage doing this in a more public venue -- perhaps a active Wikiproject for geography or post offices (if there are such things) or maybe at the Village Pump.
      In the meantime, I continue to support deletion of this article. --A. B. (talk • contribs • global count) 15:20, 20 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
      There was a discussion about it here a few years ago. Hut 8.5 16:51, 20 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    • It was only 1/4 of the points that I raised, but I feel that I didn't choose my words as well as I might have on the post office notability question, so I'll give it another go. Even I would not argue that all post offices throughout space and time are presumptively notable. For example, my own urban branch post office is -- to borrow NPLACE's terminology -- more like an irrigation district than a town. Its existence is a technical artifact of the postal distribution system. It is not, AFAIK, "notable" by any relevant standard -- which is another way of saying that an article about it would provide little if any value to the reader.
      But by the same token, recognizing that NPLACE stands for the proposition that "places" run along a spectrum of articleworthiness (from incorporated towns to irrigation districts) that is largely distinct from the GNG, I will raise the following points in favor of considering fourth-class post offices of the rural 19th- and early 20th-century US to be much more toward the "town" end of the spectrum than the "irrigation district" end:
      • Historians have frequently opined on the centrality of rural post offices to their communities in the pre-RFD period. In The American Mail: Enlarger of the Common Life (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1972, pp. 295-96), Wayne E. Fuller writes of the "prestige" of rural post offices and quotes a 19th-century political observer who observed that "[t]he post-offices of the county were the head centers of the community". In Fuller's earlier work RFD (Indiana Univ. Press, 1964, p. 85) he writes that "in rural communities few people were more important than the local postmasters. The very life of their communities pulsated beneath their fingertips". A more recent historian, David Henkin, in The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2006, p. 64) writes that "[p]ost offices were, above all, paradigmatic sites of public life" and notes that in small towns "the post might be the only point of regular contact with the outside world and the only visible embodiment of government authority."
      • Of course, one might fairly question whether these postal historians might be overstating the significance of post offices, just as AFD participants are prone to exaggerate the value of deletion. But it is not only postal historians who have observed the community-defining importance of these institutions. In John Mack Faragher's canonical study of an open-country community (Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie, Yale Univ. Press, 1986, p. 176), as Faragher traces the different trajectories of two towns platted during the same feverish period in the 1830s, he quotes approvingly from a 19th-century chronicler of the area who wrote that a community without a post office "of course could not flourish, for what place without mail privileges could ever exist?"
    • For these reasons, I believe that in general, post offices of this particular historical period are worthy of articles because even if the information we can provide on them is relatively sparse, the information is still of encyclopedic value and represents crucial encyclopedic background knowledge for understanding the time and place.
      Finally, returning to the specific post-office community at issue in this AFD, I would contend that (for all of the reasons laid out by myself and others above), regardless of one's opinion about 19th-century fourth-class rural US post offices in general, at least this one -- demonstrably a place that people considered themselves to be "from", not merely where they got their mail -- is of sufficient encyclopedic value to merit an article. Ultimately Wikipedia should include this place for the same reason that contemporary reference works found it worth including: to leave it out would be to leave out important encyclopedic knowledge for understanding the time and place. -- Visviva (talk) 01:29, 21 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete. Even if it was a valid designated populated place, what purpose does it serve being a standalone when the vanishingly little content that exists to support it can just be contained in a parent article. That the only designation it has is as a post office makes it even clearer that there is no guideline-based reason to retain it. Redirection can occur after deletion. JoelleJay (talk) 22:18, 20 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I can't figure out two things about this argument. First, I've shown that it was more than a post office. I agree that it could fit into a parent article, but what's the advantage of deletion as opposed to merge and redirection? How does is deletion, in any way, more useful to someone who may seek information about the location because they saw mention of it in an old newspaper, or saw a letter addressed to someone with a Mayfield, TN address? 78.26 (spin me / revolutions) 00:33, 21 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
It's fine to redirect, I just don't see why the history would need to be retained or what could even be merged from it. And I don't see how Mayfield is proven to be anything beyond a post office. It's listed as a birthplace of a few people in a book an amateur genealogist wrote about her own ancestors and "published" through a tiny Mormon vanity publisher/distributor...to extrapolate its designation from such a primary self-published source would be OR. JoelleJay (talk) 04:11, 21 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Relisting comment: I don't see a consensus here yet. My instinct is to Merge and redirect these geo articles but there is a solid group of editors here arguing to Keep this article so I'll extend the discussion for another week or until another closer sees a consensus.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Liz Read! Talk! 00:29, 27 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.
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