Appalachian History
Stand on the lawn of the Casey County courthouse in Liberty and you are surrounded by memory in bronze and cast aluminum. The 1888 Romanesque Revival courthouse towers over a World War I doughboy statue and several Kentucky Historical Society markers that celebrate the First Kentucky Cavalry and its colonels Frank Wolford and Silas Adams.
Ask around town, though, and you will still hear an old refrain that “no Civil War battles were ever fought here.” Local men marched off with the First Kentucky Cavalry and other regiments, the story goes, but the war itself passed Casey County by.
The documentary record tells a more complicated story. Official reports, soldier diaries, county histories, and African American service records show that Middleburg and Liberty formed part of a contested border landscape. Union brigades camped along the Green River, Morgan’s raiders passed through what is now Grove District, guerrillas harassed farms and roads, and federal cavalry fought at least two documented skirmishes at Liberty in 1863 and 1864.
This is the story of how the war did, in fact, come to Casey County.
Casey County on the Border
In 1860 Casey County stood on a cultural and political border. Created in 1806 from parts of Lincoln, Green, and Adair Counties, it lay between the more heavily enslaved Bluegrass to the north and hill counties with fewer enslaved people to the south and east. Census figures summarized by the Notable Kentucky African Americans Database list 110 slaveholders and 582 enslaved people in Casey County on the eve of the war, along with a much smaller free Black population.
White voters generally leaned Unionist, but like much of south central Kentucky the county sat in the path of both Confederate recruiting officers and irregular bands. Later county histories remembered the era as one of “raids” and “guerillas” more than set piece battles.
When Kentucky finally sided with the Union in late 1861, Liberty and its surrounding neighborhoods became fertile ground for enlistment in the Federal army, especially in cavalry units that promised pay, mobility, and a chance to defend home ground.
“The Wild Riders” from Casey County
The regiment most closely tied to Casey County was the First Kentucky Cavalry, United States Volunteers. Frederick H. Dyer’s Compendium and the Kentucky National Guard’s Paper Trail workbook agree that the regiment mustered in on 28 October 1861, organized at Liberty, Burkesville, and Monticello, and mustered out in September 1865. Over the course of the war 344 men of the unit died, 283 of them from disease.
The Paper Trail notes that roughly one third of the regiment came from Casey County and that both of its wartime commanders, Colonels Frank Wolford and Silas Adams, claimed Casey ties. Highway markers on the courthouse lawn echo that summary, describing the First Kentucky as “efficient in battle, infantry as well as cavalry” and “unsurpassed in fighting guerrillas and scouting,” while also listing major battles from Mill Springs to Perryville, Lebanon, East Tennessee, and Sherman’s Atlanta campaign.
Eastham Tarrant’s regimental history, The Wild Riders of the First Kentucky Cavalry, turns those markers into a full narrative. He paints a picture of a hard riding unit raised in the border counties that spent much of the war chasing John Hunt Morgan, scouting mountain roads, and screening larger Union forces from surprise. Casey County provided not only men but also forage, horses, and supply posts. One highway marker summarizes this succinctly by calling Casey “home of one third of this Union regiment.”
From the very beginning, then, Casey County’s Civil War story cannot be separated from the First Kentucky Cavalry. Yet those local “wild riders” were not the only soldiers who passed through.
Ninth Corps at Middleburg, 1863
In the spring of 1863, Middleburg, Kentucky, a small Green River crossing in central Casey County, briefly became a hub of national strategy. As part of the Tullahoma and East Tennessee campaigns, the Union Ninth Corps shifted from Mississippi to Kentucky, then fanned out through the Green River valley toward Somerset and beyond.
Official Records for May and June 1863 place elements of the Ninth Corps at or near Middleburg. The brigade of Colonel Benjamin C. Christ and the Third Brigade under Colonel Daniel Leasure used the town as a waypoint and supply center. Reports from “Headquarters Third Brigade, Middleburg, Ky.” describe roads choked with mud, delays at river crossings, and constant concern over Confederate cavalry and home grown guerrilla bands in the surrounding hills.
Diaries and letters from rank and file soldiers add texture to those terse dispatches. Captain Samuel H. Doten of the 29th Massachusetts kept a detailed journal during the march. On 5 May 1863 he recorded that after a night march over what he called “the Knob,” his regiment “came up with the rest of our division at Middleburg,” crossed the Green River, and encamped after a rough, hilly road that left the men wet, hungry, and exhausted.
Christopher Columbus Lobingier of the 100th Pennsylvania “Roundheads” wrote a diary that includes several entries from Middleburg. He described the Ninth Corps’ camp there as a place of routine drills, picket duty, and Sunday services, but also as a community unsettled by rumors of guerrillas and the ever present possibility of raid.
Letters from members of the 36th Massachusetts and the 20th Michigan, preserved in the Peirce family papers and in a Spared & Shared collection, mention prayer meetings, temperance lectures, and a Fourth of July celebration in the Middleburg camp. For the soldiers of the Ninth Corps, Middleburg was not a battlefield but a brief home, a river town that mingled soldiers with civilians and made Casey County part of the long road between Fredericksburg and Vicksburg.
Guerrillas, Morgan’s Raiders, and the Grove District
While regular Union forces camped at Middleburg, Casey County residents lived with another, less orderly face of the war. Confederate raids and local guerrilla bands moved through the county’s ridges and creeks.
Unpublished county histories by W. M. Watkins, later quoted in the Casey County News and genealogical compilations, describe a dramatic raid by Morgan’s men through what he called the Grove District. Watkins wrote that “the most exciting history of Casey County centers around the raid of Morgan’s men during the Civil War and the building of the Green River Railroad,” a memory echoed in later retellings.
Leasure’s Middleburg dispatches in the Official Records fit this picture. From his headquarters at Middleburg in May 1863 he reported to superiors that the surrounding territory was plagued by small bands who robbed Unionist merchants, stole horses, and intimidated civilians. Taken together, these sources suggest that Casey County sat on a corridor that mattered to both Morgan’s seasoned raiders and smaller bands of irregulars.
The First Kentucky Cavalry, raised in part from those same neighborhoods, spent much of 1862 and 1863 running down Morgan and his lieutenants. Dyer’s summary of the regiment’s service lists familiar Kentucky locations such as Camp Dick Robinson, Mill Springs, and the pursuit of Bragg’s army, but it also emphasizes long stretches of anti guerrilla duty in central Kentucky and along the Cumberland River.
“Skirmish at Liberty, Ky.”
If Middleburg represented the war’s encampment, Liberty represented its flash point. For decades local histories repeated the claim that no battles took place in Casey County, only recruiting and marching. A 1970s county bicentennial booklet, for example, insisted that there were “no records of Civil War skirmishes in the county” even while celebrating the county’s contribution to Union manpower.
Modern researchers have begun to challenge that claim. One crucial piece of evidence comes from an unlikely place: the federal summary of an Ohio cavalry battalion. The National Park Service’s official “Battle Unit Details” for the 5th Independent Battalion, Ohio Cavalry, a six month unit raised in 1863, states that after organizing in Ohio the battalion moved into the District of Eastern Kentucky, where it spent its term “engaged in scouting and raiding guerrillas,” including a skirmish in Morgan County on 6 October 1863 and a skirmish “at Liberty, Ky., October 12, 1863.”
This notation is brief, but it is significant. Dyer’s chronological lists and other compiled battle indexes treat “Liberty, Ky.” and “West Liberty, Ky.” as separate entries, with “West Liberty” always labelled as such. The decision of the NPS editors to call the 5th Ohio battalion’s October 12 fight simply “Liberty, Ky.” strongly suggests that they meant Liberty in Casey County, not West Liberty in Morgan County.
A short biography of Private Williard Smith Latham of Company A, 5th Independent Battalion, reinforces this reading. It describes the battalion’s deployment to eastern Kentucky and notes that Latham “saw service during skirmishes against Confederate raiders in Morgan County, Ky., and near the town of Liberty, Ky.” The author adds that Latham was mustered out with the unit in February 1864.
Local memory provides a striking echo. A history of Clear Fork Baptist Church, shared in a congregational Facebook group, recounts a Civil War “skirmish at the courthouse” in Liberty in which troops exchanged fire around the public square and the church figure prominently as part of the landscape. The denominational writer did not name the units involved, but the story of gunfire at the courthouse fits the 5th Ohio’s brief notice of an October 1863 skirmish in the county seat.
No detailed after action report survives, at least in published form. The evidence we do have, however, points in a consistent direction. An Ohio cavalry battalion known for hunting guerrillas in eastern Kentucky lists Liberty, Kentucky as a named skirmish site in October 1863. A soldier’s biography independently remembers fighting “near the town of Liberty.” A local church history remembers a courthouse fight without dates or unit names. Taken together, they strongly suggest that Liberty saw real Civil War combat, even if on a small scale.
A Second Fight: Liberty in 1864
The 5th Ohio battalion’s skirmish was not the last time Liberty appeared in the war record. A summary of the Fourth Kentucky Cavalry, another Union regiment, lists its 1864 operations through Kentucky and East Tennessee. While most of the entries involve well known raids and actions around Cynthiana, La Fayette, and East Tennessee, the unit history includes a simple line: “Skirmish, Liberty, KY – June 17, 1864.”
Again the record is bare, but its presence in a regiment’s official service chronology is difficult to dismiss. In back to back years, then, federal cavalry units fighting guerrillas and screening larger campaigns reported skirmishes at Liberty.
Even without full narratives, these entries change how we read Casey County’s war experience. Liberty was not merely the hometown on a roster or the place colonels came back to after the fighting. It was a point that Confederate raiders and Union cavalry both considered worth holding or disrupting, a county seat where gunfire was heard around the courthouse square at least twice.
African American Casey Countians and the War
Casey County’s Civil War story also includes Black residents whose experiences are easy to miss in traditional county histories. The Notable Kentucky African Americans Database identifies roughly thirty three men who gave Casey County as their birthplace when they enlisted in United States Colored Troops regiments.
Some of these men had left Kentucky before the war and enlisted elsewhere. Others likely escaped slavery in the state and made their way to Union recruiting stations. Their compiled service records and pension applications show them serving in regiments such as the 12th and 117th US Colored Infantry and various heavy artillery units.
Back home, the 1860 census figures on enslaved and free Black residents remind us that the war’s outcome had enormous stakes in Casey County. Freedom would mean not only the end of forced labor but also the potential for military service, pensions, and the right to settle where they chose. Those connections come into focus when we place USCT records alongside the courthouse monuments and cavalry markers that dominate the public square today.
Remembering the War in Stone and Story
Walk the courthouse lawn in Liberty today and you can read most of Casey County’s Civil War memory in a single glance. The “First Kentucky Cavalry” and “1st Ky. Cav. Continued” markers summarize the regiment’s statewide service and highlight the county’s role in recruiting troops. A separate marker honors Colonel Silas Adams, a Casey native who rose to command the regiment and later served in Congress before returning home to be buried in local soil.
What the markers do not mention are the Ninth Corps camps along the Green River, the rumors of Morgan’s men in the Grove District, the courthouse skirmish remembered in church history, or the documented Liberty fights of 1863 and 1864. They say nothing about the Black men born in Casey County who wore Union blue in segregated USCT units and whose names appear in records far from Liberty.
Local writers have begun to fill some of these gaps. The Kentucky National Guard’s Paper Trail workbook, county genealogy pages, and a detailed Civil War history on KyGenWeb all highlight the First Kentucky Cavalry’s Casey roots and challenge the old claim that “no Civil War skirmishes” occurred in the county. At the same time, popular histories still often emphasize enlistment totals and famous colonels rather than the ways the war touched ordinary farms, churches, and crossroads.
Why Casey County’s Civil War Story Matters
At first glance, Casey County’s Civil War history might seem small next to battles like Perryville or the sieges of Vicksburg and Atlanta. No brigades charged across open fields here under national headlines.
Yet when we zoom in on Middleburg and Liberty, we see most of the war’s central themes in miniature. There is a community divided yet largely Unionist, supplying a disproportionate share of cavalrymen. There are enslaved families whose lives are transformed by the presence of Union camps and the possibility of enlistment. There are guerrillas and raiders who move along back roads and creek crossings, blurring the line between battlefield and home front. There are small scale skirmishes that never made it into school textbooks but sent men home wounded or traumatized all the same.
For genealogists, Middleburg’s camp and Liberty’s courthouse square offer a starting point for tracking ancestors who passed through as soldiers, refugees, or laborers. For Casey County residents today, the record that survives in official reports, diaries, church histories, and markers on the courthouse lawn invites a richer conversation than the old “no battles here” refrain.
The Civil War did come to Casey County. It came in the form of Ninth Corps columns slogging into Middleburg in the rain. It came in the form of Morgan’s raiders and small bands of bushwhackers. It came in the form of Ohio and Kentucky troopers trading shots around the Liberty courthouse, and in the quiet decisions of enslaved men and women who seized the chance to claim freedom and, in some cases, military service. Recognizing that history is one more way of honoring the people who lived it.
Sources & Further Reading
The official Union and Confederate reports in The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, especially Series I, volumes covering the Tullahoma and East Tennessee campaigns, contain dispatches from “Headquarters Third Brigade, Middleburg, Ky.” that describe guerrilla activity and troop movements in Casey County.Vdoc+1 Frederick H. Dyer’s A Compendium of the War of the Rebellion and the National Park Service “Battle Unit Details” pages provide unit overviews and battle lists for the First Kentucky Cavalry and the 5th Independent Battalion, Ohio Cavalry, including the skirmish at Liberty on 12 October 1863.Ky National Guard History+1
Eastham Tarrant’s The Wild Riders of the First Kentucky Cavalry and related regimental summaries expand on these official notes with anecdotes drawn from veterans’ recollections, including operations in and around Casey County.Internet Archive+1 A brief service history of the Fourth Kentucky Cavalry records a second “Skirmish, Liberty, KY – June 17, 1864.”Research OnLine+1
The 1863 diary of Christopher Columbus Lobingier of the 100th Pennsylvania (Roundheads), transcribed on the Spared & Shared website, includes entries from Middleburg that describe daily camp life, religious meetings, and concerns over guerrilla threats.Spared & Shared 22 Captain Samuel H. Doten’s journal from the 29th Massachusetts, also transcribed at Spared & Shared, vividly narrates the regiment’s march over “the Knob” to Middleburg and across the Green River in May 1863.Spared & Shared 23
Letters from the Peirce family collection of the 36th Massachusetts Infantry, preserved in a University of Mary Washington digital project, and the correspondence of Dwight H. Brewer of the 20th Michigan on Spared & Shared, add further glimpses of Middleburg as a religious and social center for Ninth Corps soldiers.Peirce Letters Collection+1
Casey County Civil War overviews in the Kentucky National Guard’s Paper Trail of the Civil War in Kentucky and in the Kentucky Historical Society marker texts outline the county’s role as home to a large share of the First Kentucky Cavalry and summarize major campaigns in which Casey Countians served.Ky National Guard History+1 W. M. Watkins’s “History of Grove District,” first printed in the Casey County News in 1937 and later reprinted on genealogical sites, preserves community memories of Morgan’s raid and other Civil War era events.Genealogy Trails+1
The Clear Fork Baptist Church history, shared in a local church Facebook group, recounts a “Civil War skirmish at the courthouse” in Liberty, a story that lines up suggestively with the 5th Ohio battalion’s official notice of a skirmish at Liberty in October 1863.KygenWeb+1
Entries in the Notable Kentucky African Americans Database on “Casey County (KY) Enslaved, Free Blacks, and Free Citizens of Color” and on US Colored Troops soldiers born in Casey County provide demographic context and pointers to USCT service and pension records.NKAA+2KyUSCT+2