We study formation the issue of the adverbs of place in the Old Russian language in historical aspect. The material for the research is the contexts with adverbs of place, extracted by the method of continuous sampling from the published Old Russian writing monuments. To identify the way of derived adverbs origin and to establish its initial derivational structure, as the main ones in the work there are used derivative and morphemic analyzes in a synchronous environment, as well as elements of contextual analysis, which made possible to identify and clarify the dependence of lexical meaning of the adverb on the context. We establish that the leading way of forming the adverbs of place in the Old Russian language was the prefix; the role of the generating base was played by the primary polysemous adverb, which, because of the meaning of derivative formant, was formed into a new monosemous adverb. We conclude that the reconstruction of real history of the adverbs is possible only on the basis of comparing contexts in connection with each other, on the basis of a derivative analysis of the structure of adverbs in a synchronous cut and on the basis of identifying derivative types of the adverbs in diachrony and synchronicity.