Samoylovka

Samoylovka grew beside the Tersa, amid the wooded river valleys of the forest-steppe. Ukrainian settlers founded the sloboda in the middle of the eighteenth century. Local tradition remembers the dense oak woods that lined the river when they arrived; timber cut there was used to build an early church. The village joined other communities spreading along the Tersa, where cultivators made homes among the streams and woods of the southern frontier.