Appalachian History
On a narrow strip of land between the Cumberland River and Pine Mountain, the town we now call Pineville began life as Cumberland Ford. Long before anyone heard rifle fire from the heights of Cumberland Gap, this ford was a traffic jam of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Daniel Boone’s Wilderness Road crossed the river here, and Kentucky’s highway marker for the site notes that more than 100,000 settlers splashed through this shoal on their way into the interior of the state.
By the time Bell County was created in 1867 and Cumberland Ford was formally laid out as the county seat, the Civil War was already a memory. Yet the war had carved itself into the landscape around town. Earthworks still scar the ridges above Cumberland Gap. Old military roads cling to the flanks of Pine Mountain. Historical markers at Pineville and the Gap remember a campaign that turned Bell County’s ancient corridor into a front line.
This is the story of how a place long celebrated as “Gateway to the West” became, for four hard years, a gateway to war.
A Mountain Pass, A River Ford, And A Road Into Kentucky
Geography did most of the work. The alignment of Cumberland Gap with the Narrows at Pineville creates a continuous break in the Appalachian wall. For centuries, animals and Native peoples followed this path. Later writers called it the Warrior’s Path. A field guide prepared for the Kentucky Society of Professional Geologists describes how trails through the Gap connected Cherokee country in the southern mountains with the Shawnee world in the Ohio Valley, with seasonal camps and at least one prehistoric mound near today’s Pineville.
When British and American settlers began pouring west, this same corridor carried them into Kentucky. Thomas Walker’s expedition reached the vicinity in 1750. Boone’s party cut Boone Trace in 1775, and the crossing at Cumberland Ford quickly became one of the critical choke points on the Wilderness Road. Pineville’s own historic summary notes that “Cumberland Ford” was established as a settlement in 1781, at the crossing of the Cumberland River by the Wilderness Road.
By the mid nineteenth century, Cumberland Ford and the Gap were still not large population centers, but they were irreplaceable pieces of infrastructure. Whoever controlled them controlled one of the easiest routes from the southern Appalachian interior into Kentucky’s Bluegrass region, and from Kentucky northward to the Ohio River. When civil war came in 1861, both governments understood that fact.
Zollicoffer’s Line: Confederates At The Gap And The Ford, 1861
In the late summer and fall of 1861, the Confederate government tried to anchor a defensive line across southern Kentucky. Cumberland Gap was its eastern keystone. Confederate forces under Brigadier General Felix Zollicoffer pushed north out of East Tennessee through the Gap, occupied the mountain pass, and threw camps forward to the Cumberland River at Cumberland Ford, near today’s Pineville.
Modern summaries of the war in Kentucky describe this as part of the first Confederate occupation of the Gap, a position that offered access toward Barbourville and the Bluegrass while shielding East Tennessee. Local tradition, preserved in county histories and marker literature, remembers Confederate troops encamped near the ford and on the hills around town.
Official reports from the fall of 1861, printed later in the War of the Rebellion, trace Zollicoffer’s movements from East Tennessee, through the Gap, and into a position near Cumberland Ford. One Confederate correspondence collection notes units posted at “Camp Buckner, near Cumberland Ford,” a camp name that shows up again in a Tennessee soldier’s letter preserved in the state archives. Those papers describe crude shelters, poor supplies, and the uneasy work of guarding a ford that everyone knew would be contested.
While much of the fighting that autumn fell on places like Barbourville and Camp Wildcat, the line of communication that made those battles possible ran across Bell County’s soil.
“Within Two Miles Of The Gap”: Skirmish And Reconnaissance, March 1862
By early 1862, momentum in Kentucky shifted. Union victories in the western theater and along Zollicoffer’s line forced Confederates to pull back. Cumberland Gap remained stubbornly in Confederate hands, however, and Union planners in the Army of the Ohio began looking again at the old road between Cumberland Ford and the Gap.
On 21 to 23 March 1862, Colonel Samuel P. Carter led a Union brigade out of Camp Cumberland Ford for a probing operation toward the Gap. In his official report, written from “Camp Cumberland Ford,” Carter described how his column drove in Confederate pickets, advanced to within about two miles of the Gap, and spent two days skirmishing and studying the enemy fortifications. He wrote that Union skirmishers “drove the enemy from the woods to the abatis” and that his artillery opened on the mountain works with Parrott guns, yet “not one was injured or lost” on the Union side.
Inside the Gap, Confederate Colonel James E. Rains watched the same action unfold from the opposite ridge. Reporting from “Headquarters, Cumberland Gap,” he noted that Union skirmishers fired from nearby hills at daybreak while snow fell. “The Minie balls are falling within our works,” he wrote grimly, and added that one of his men had been wounded.
These reports, read together, give Bell County’s landscape a moment of sharp focus. The “Harlan road” where Rains’s men had pushed out the previous evening ran along modern approaches into the Gap. Carter’s brigade camped on ridges overlooking the Gap and then returned to Camp Cumberland Ford, the old town at the river ford that would become Pineville. For a few days in March 1862, the future county seat was the hub of a small but dangerous chess game played among snowy ridges.
Camp Cumberland Ford: Union Staging Ground On The Wilderness Road
After the March reconnaissance, Cumberland Ford became the forward base for a larger Union push against the Gap. General George W. Morgan, a Mexican War veteran and political appointee, took command of the Seventh Division of the Army of the Ohio and was ordered to clear and occupy Cumberland Gap.
Both a Kentucky National Guard compilation and the state historical marker “A Masterful Retreat” summarize what followed. From a base around Cumberland Ford, Morgan’s roughly 9,000 man command moved against the Gap in the late spring of 1862, dislodged its Confederate garrison, and occupied the pass from 18 June to 17 September.
Soldiers’ letters fill in the human details. An Ohio newspaper index notes a letter from Captain George Harn of the 16th Ohio, written from “Cumberland Ford” in April 1862, describing the camp at the ford as troops gathered for the coming campaign. Other letters by Manuel DeSilva of the same regiment, cataloged in an Ohio Civil War project, are headed “Camp Cumberland, near Cumberland Ford,” reinforcing how often that river crossing served as a staging ground.
From higher up the chain of command, Morgan’s own reports speak of the practical side of using Cumberland Ford as a base. He noted the difficulty of hauling artillery and supplies up the steep roads from the ford to the Gap, and the importance of the ford as a point where wagon roads, the river, and the Wilderness Road all met.
Even at the heights of Cumberland Gap, soldiers never entirely forgot the scenery they were passing through. Sergeant William Buchanan of the 16th Ohio, stationed at the Gap later that year, told his cousin that he wished she could see “the real Gap,” calling it “the greatest sight of scenery that you ever saw,” even as shells and shot whizzed around him. The hand drawn map of Cumberland Gap prepared for Lieutenant John P. McClelland of the 16th Ohio, now reproduced on the regiment’s website, shows Cumberland Ford and the Bell County side of the approach road as part of the same contested landscape.
Siege In The Mountains: Hunger At Cumberland Gap, Summer 1862
Cumberland Gap turned out to be much easier to occupy than to supply. Once Morgan’s division took the pass in June 1862, they discovered that the same steep, narrow roads that had long funneled settlers and traders were a nightmare for modern armies.
The National Park Service’s overview of the Civil War at Cumberland Gap notes that Union forces saw the pass as a route into East Tennessee and as a way to disrupt the Confederate rail lines and supply routes in that region. Confederates, by contrast, saw the Gap as a doorway into Kentucky and a shield for their own infrastructure. Both sides considered the position important enough to hold at considerable cost.
In the summer of 1862, that cost was measured in empty bellies. As Confederate armies under Braxton Bragg and Edmund Kirby Smith surged into Kentucky, Morgan’s division found itself increasingly isolated on the mountain. Supply lines through the Kentucky interior became dangerous or impassable. The Kentucky field guide on Middlesboro and Cumberland Gap summarizes the situation bluntly: Confederate offensives “cut off their supply lines and forced them to retreat through eastern Kentucky to safety along the Ohio River.”
Diaries from men in Morgan’s command, such as Robert C. Thompson of the 30th Ohio in “Shirking No Danger,” record the miserable mix of hunger, exposure, and anxiety that set in as rations dwindled and the siege tightened. Judge Lewis D. Nicholls’s study A Masterful Retreat, built extensively from letters and memoirs, collects memories of half rations, mules eaten for meat, and soldiers too weak to carry knapsacks, even before the retreat began.
All of that suffering centered on a decision to hold a mountain pass whose northern approaches ran straight through Bell County.
“A Masterful Retreat”: From Cumberland Gap To The Ohio, September To October 1862
When Morgan finally decided he could no longer hold Cumberland Gap, he faced a terrible choice. Confederate forces had effectively encircled his position. The route north through Bell County and the mountains of eastern Kentucky, toward the Ohio River, was rough, sparsely provisioned country. Yet it was the best of several bad options.
The Kentucky Historical Society’s marker series titled “A Masterful Retreat” follows Morgan’s division as it left Cumberland Gap on 17 September 1862 with about 9,000 men, marched roughly 200 miles through the mountains, and reached Greenup on the Ohio River sixteen days later. Marker 521, located in Bell County at the Gap, emphasizes that Morgan’s column managed this feat “over mountain roads” while “despite the harassment of [Confederate] Morgan’s Raiders.”
Local and regional histories remember that the route of retreat began on the Kentucky side of the Gap, descended toward the Cumberland River, and passed through or near what would become Bell County communities before swinging north and west. Nicholls’s monograph traces that line in detail, matching soldiers’ accounts to modern roads and streams across eastern Kentucky.
For Bell County, the retreat marked the end of the first major period of Union occupation in the immediate vicinity. Confederate forces reoccupied the Gap after Morgan’s departure, but the episode burned itself into regional memory. One can trace it today by following the chain of “A Masterful Retreat” markers from Bell County north toward the Ohio, each sign marking a place where starving, mud splattered men camped or skirmished on their way out of the mountains.
Frazer’s Surrender: The Last Battle For Cumberland Gap, 1863
The Gap changed hands again in 1863. That September, Union Major General Ambrose E. Burnside launched his campaign into East Tennessee. Rather than batter straight up the old approach from Cumberland Ford, Burnside used maneuver. While part of his force demonstrated in front of the Gap, other columns marched over rough back country trails to cut off Confederate escape routes.
Inside the Gap, Confederate Brigadier General John W. Frazer commanded a garrison of around 2,300 men. Modern summaries of the Battle of Cumberland Gap describe how Burnside’s subordinates, including Brigadier General J. M. Shackelford and Colonel John F. DeCourcy, sent formal notes demanding surrender. Shackelford told Frazer that the Gap was “completely invested” and that further resistance would cause “useless and therefore cruel loss of life.”
On 9 September 1863, Frazer agreed to an unconditional surrender. American History Central and the American Battlefield Trust both emphasize that the engagement was essentially bloodless: about 2,300 Confederates were captured, with few if any casualties. A handful of men escaped over the ridges, but the Gap itself passed firmly into Union hands for the rest of the war. With the Gap secured, Burnside could maintain supply lines from Camp Nelson in central Kentucky to Knoxville, making Cumberland Gap part of a vital Union corridor through the mountains.
From Bell County’s perspective, the surrender meant the armies would still be present on the roads and hills around Pineville, but the position would no longer trade hands. The fighting front moved deeper into East Tennessee and southwest Virginia.
Bell County’s Civil War Landscape And Memory
Bell County did not witness a single large field battle on the scale of Perryville or Chickamauga. Its experience of the war was instead a series of occupations, marches, and smaller skirmishes that turned local landmarks into military objectives.
The Kentucky National Guard’s Paper Trail of the Civil War in Kentucky sums up the county’s wartime story in only a few sentences, but those sentences are telling. The Bell County section notes that “during the Civil War, Cumberland Gap was held alternately by Union and CSA armies” and that Union forces under General George W. Morgan occupied it from 18 June to 17 September 1862, before retreating with 9,000 men “200 miles in 16 days” to Greenup while harassed by Confederate cavalry. The same entry cites Ron D. Bryant’s Bell County article in The Kentucky Encyclopedia, which stresses the strategic value of the Gap and Cumberland Ford.
Local historians like Henry Harvey Fuson, in his History of Bell County, Kentucky, take a longer view. Fuson titled one of his early chapters “Bell County the Gateway to the West” and devoted another to “The Cumberland Ford Settlement,” underlining how the ford and the Gap shaped everything from migration patterns to the placement of the county seat. Robert William Brock Jr.’s serialized history of Pineville in the Pineville Sun likewise reminds readers that the town, originally Cumberland Ford, was “the second passageway to the West” and that its narrow floodplain between river and mountain has always made it a chokepoint.
Twentieth century markers and interpretive projects have reinforced that memory. The “Cumberland Ford” highway marker calls the ford “one of the most important points on the Wilderness Road” and notes that during the Civil War it was “occupied by both Union and CSA troops because of its strategic location.” Another marker titled “Invasion and Retreat,” placed in Pineville, ties the town into the route of Kirby Smith’s 1862 Confederate invasion and subsequent withdrawal.
In the early twenty first century, the Kentucky Geological Survey’s field guide on Middlesboro and Cumberland Gap brought scientists, historians, and local citizens together to recognize the wider region as a “Distinguished Geologic Site,” with essays on settlement, the Civil War history of the Gap, and the iron industry. The National Park Service continues to interpret the Civil War story at Cumberland Gap National Historical Park, where visitors can walk restored sections of the Wilderness Road and stand in reconstructed or preserved earthworks above the Gap, looking north toward Bell County.
Today, when you stand in downtown Pineville or at the courthouse lawn where the Cumberland Ford marker now resides, it can be hard to imagine those streets choked with wagons, artillery teams, and columns of infantry. Yet the county’s rivers, gaps, and passes are still there. The same geography that pulled Daniel Boone through the Narrows also drew Felix Zollicoffer, George W. Morgan, John Hunt Morgan, and Ambrose Burnside into its orbit. Bell County’s Civil War story is, at heart, the story of a landscape too strategically important to ignore.
Sources And Further Reading
War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Series I, vols. 4, 7, 10, 16, and 30. Reports and correspondence on operations in eastern Kentucky and East Tennessee, including Zollicoffer’s 1861 occupation of Cumberland Gap and Cumberland Ford, Carter’s March 1862 reconnaissance, Morgan’s 1862 occupation and evacuation, and the 1863 surrender of the Gap. Portions of Carter’s and Rains’s reports are transcribed with full OR citations on the Northeast Tennessee Civil War Project and discussed in online forums devoted to the Cumberland Gap campaigns. KY National Guard History+2Northeast Tennessee Civil War+2
“Civil War 1861 to 1865 in Bell County,” in John M. Trowbridge, compiler, The Paper Trail of the Civil War in Kentucky, 1861–1865 (Frankfort: Kentucky National Guard). County-by-county compilation that summarizes Bell County’s wartime experience, emphasizing the alternating Confederate and Union occupations of Cumberland Gap and George W. Morgan’s September 1862 retreat to the Ohio River; based heavily on Kentucky Historical Society markers and Ron D. Bryant’s entry in The Kentucky Encyclopedia. KY National Guard History
Letters from Camp Buckner and Camp Cumberland Ford by Captain George Harn, Manuel DeSilva, and other soldiers of the 16th Ohio Volunteer Infantry, preserved in Civil War newspaper digitization projects and manuscript collections in Ohio and Kentucky. These letters document daily life in camp, the road network between the ford and the Gap, and the regiment’s view of the mountain front. MKWE+1
Sergeant William Buchanan’s 1862 letter from Cumberland Gap, published on the Spared & Shared 23 site. Buchanan vividly describes the scenery of the Gap and mentions his hand-drawn maps, one of which survives in digital form alongside the transcript. Spared & Shared 23+1
Robert C. Thompson, Shirking No Danger: The Civil War Diary of Robert C. Thompson (Huntington, WV: Marshall University Libraries, 2006). Diary of a Confederate officer whose entries include duty at Cumberland Gap and the retreat across eastern Kentucky, edited and annotated with contextual notes and maps through Marshall’s digital collections. Marshall Digital Scholar+1
“Map of Cumberland Gap,” prepared for Lieutenant John P. McClelland of the 16th Ohio and reproduced on the 16th Ohio Volunteer Infantry website. This manuscript-style map shows fortifications, roads, and the relationship of the Gap to Cumberland Ford and surrounding terrain. MKWE+1
Atlas to Accompany the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. Plates illustrating Morgan’s 1862 operations around Cumberland Gap and Cumberland Ford, available via the Library of Congress and other digital libraries, provide visual context for the positions described in the Official Records. American Battlefield Trust+1
Historical Marker #1426, “Cumberland Ford,” and marker #521, “A Masterful Retreat,” together with related entries on the ExploreKYHistory site and the Historical Marker Database (HMdb). These public-history treatments summarize the ford’s strategic role, Morgan’s retreat, and the markers’ modern locations, and they link to further reading on Bell County’s Civil War landscape. HMDB+3Explore Kentucky History+3HMDB+3
Henry Harvey Fuson, History of Bell County, Kentucky (2 vols.). Classic local history that treats Bell County as a “Gateway to the West,” with chapters on the Cumberland Ford settlement and on Cumberland Gap’s place in state history; digitized by the Bell County Public Library District and KyGenWeb. Bell County Public Library District+1
Lewis D. Nicholls, A Masterful Retreat: The Story of the 7th Division’s Retreat Across Eastern Kentucky Sept. 17 to Oct. 3, 1862. Detailed narrative of George W. Morgan’s retreat from Cumberland Gap to the Ohio River, richly documented with letters, reports, and maps; a key modern account of the “masterful retreat” commemorated in Bell County markers. Amazon+2WVRHC+2
Kent Masterson Brown and others, works on the Kentucky Campaign of 1862, especially Brown’s The Civil War in Kentucky: Battle for the Bluegrass State. These studies place Morgan’s occupation of Cumberland Gap and his retreat in the broader context of the 1862 campaign that culminated in the battles of Richmond and Perryville. Civil War Books and Authors+1
Kentucky Geological Survey and Kentucky Society of Professional Geologists, Geologic Impacts on the History and Development of Middlesboro, Kentucky (2003 field guide). Includes William M. Andrews Jr.’s essay “Civil War History of the Cumberland Gap,” which ties the campaigns at the Gap to the region’s geology, transportation routes, and topography. Kentucky Geological Survey+2studylib.net+2
National Park Service, Cumberland Gap National Historical Park interpretive materials, including the brochure Civil War at Cumberland Gap and the online feature “Civil War Comes to Cumberland Gap.” These resources offer accessible summaries of the Gap’s four changes of control, key commanders, and the strategic logic behind holding—or abandoning—the pass. NPS History+2National Park Service+2
Ron D. Bryant, “Bell County,” in The Kentucky Encyclopedia (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992). Concise scholarly overview of Bell County’s Civil War era that highlights Cumberland Gap and Cumberland Ford as central to the county’s wartime experience; widely used in later compilations such as the Kentucky National Guard’s Paper Trail of the Civil War in Kentucky. KY National Guard History+1