Appalachian History
On the courthouse lawn at Sandy Hook, two weathered highway markers tell a story that began before Elliott County even existed. One, titled “A Masterful Retreat,” remembers a starving Union column that slipped out of Cumberland Gap in September 1862 and marched two hundred mountain miles to the Ohio River. The other points south toward the Little Sandy valley, where seven unknown soldiers lie in a small graveyard and where Union and Confederate troops traded fire during that same retreat. Together they hint at a deeper truth: the hills that became Elliott County hosted both a remarkable regular army withdrawal and one of eastern Kentucky’s most stubborn guerrilla wars.
This article traces that story from George W. Morgan’s 1862 retreat through the guerrilla campaigns of Sid and Dave Cook and into the era of postwar Regulators. It draws first on contemporary records, official reports, and wartime newspapers, then on later county histories and modern scholarship that helps place Elliott County within the contested borderland of the Central Appalachians.
Morgan’s Road out of Cumberland Gap
In June 1862 Brigadier General George W. Morgan’s Seventh Division of the Army of the Ohio seized Cumberland Gap, a rocky pass where Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia brush shoulders. Federal reports place roughly nine thousand Union soldiers in the garrison through the summer, clinging to a mountain fortress that quickly proved almost impossible to supply. Confederate forces under Carter L. Stevenson and Edmund Kirby Smith tightened a loose cordon around the Gap and stretched Federal supply lines to the breaking point.
By mid September Morgan concluded that the position could not be held. In General Orders he prepared his men for an overland retreat across the mountains to the Ohio River rather than risk surrender. The Official Records preserve his dispatches and those of his superiors, which detail the evacuation on 17 September and confirm that the column would have to march through the rough interior of eastern Kentucky with minimal cavalry and dwindling rations.
A regimental history of the First Tennessee Cavalry later described one key moment along this route. Between Hazel Green and West Liberty, the column threaded a “deep defile” called Cracker’s Neck, where Confederate troops tried to block the road. Federal infantry from Indiana and Tennessee, supported by Foster’s battery, pushed the Confederates out after what the history called a brisk engagement in broken ground. Later local historians, including James M. Prichard, identify this Cracker’s Neck with the rugged country that would become the Newfoundland community in Elliott County, placing one of the most dangerous choke points of Morgan’s escape squarely in these hills.
From there Morgan’s men moved northeast through West Liberty and into the valley of the Little Sandy. A compiled Civil War guide from the Kentucky National Guard notes that Morgan’s force began a two hundred mile march, harried the whole way by Confederate cavalry. According to that summary, drawn from Kentucky Historical Society markers, the army left the Gap on 18 June and reached Greenup on 1 October, completing the retreat in sixteen days of hard marching over mountain roads.
Skirmish at the Little Sandy and Seven Unknown Soldiers
The Paper Trail of the Civil War in Kentucky includes a short section titled “Civil War 1861–1865 in Elliott County.” It explains that most early settlers in the region leaned Southern, yet the area saw no large formal battle. Instead, both Union and Confederate forces raided, foraged, and recruited among the scattered farms. The most dramatic encounter came as Morgan’s retreating column moved down the Little Sandy. Confederate attacks somewhere along this stretch left at least seven soldiers dead. According to the same guide, their bodies were buried just south of what is now Sandy Hook, in a roadside graveyard where local memory still points to “the unknown soldiers.”
Kentucky Historical Society marker 644, “A Masterful Retreat,” summarizes the broader campaign for visitors on the courthouse lawn. It notes Morgan’s occupation of the Gap, the onset of supply problems, and the decision to retreat across the mountains to Greenup. The marker stresses that as the column passed through the Sandy Hook area, Confederate cavalry under John Hunt Morgan harassed the line of march.
A related marker, number 711, fills in the local details. Standing along Kentucky 7 south of town, it explains that roughly two miles from Sandy Hook lies the burial ground of seven unnamed soldiers killed in a late September 1862 skirmish between George W. Morgan’s retreating Federals and John Hunt Morgan’s Confederate raiders. The text notes that Confederate attacks dogged the Union column from West Liberty through the Little Sandy valley to Grayson before finally breaking off near the Ohio River.
No surviving official report pinpoints the exact moment or unit involved in this Little Sandy fight, and the unknown graves remain unmarked by regimental designation. The primary evidence instead comes from these markers, compiled county histories, and the official campaign summaries that frame Morgan’s retreat as a continuous series of skirmishes. Together, they place Elliott County’s future seat at Sandy Hook squarely on the line of fire during one of the Civil War’s most impressive mountain withdrawals.
From Regular Armies to Guerrilla War
When Morgan’s worn out division finally crossed the Ohio River, regular Confederate forces withdrew from most of eastern Kentucky. The war in the hills did not end. It changed shape. Like other parts of Appalachian Kentucky, the countryside that later became Elliott County turned into a patchwork of divided families, loosely organized Home Guard companies, and small bands of irregular fighters.
Historian Brian McKnight has described this stretch of the Central Appalachians as a contested borderland, a place where neither side could spare enough men to occupy every valley but where both relied on mountain roads to move troops and supplies. In such a landscape, control often belonged to whoever was willing to ride the ridgelines at night.
Within that borderland, the interior formed by present day Elliott and Morgan Counties became a natural refuge. It lay away from railroads and major towns, yet close enough to the Ohio River and the Big Sandy that Union forces could not ignore it. This isolation, combined with deep political divisions and ready access to stock and forage, made the area attractive to guerrilla leaders who needed hideouts beyond the reach of permanent garrisons.
Sid and Dave Cook’s Guerrillas in Elliott Country
One of the most feared Confederate irregular bands in eastern Kentucky was led by brothers Algernon Sidney Lee “Sid” Cook and David “Dave” Cook. In a detailed narrative on her Eastern Kentucky and the Civil War blog, researcher Marlitta H. Perkins traces how the Cooks recruited heavily in what are now Elliott and Morgan Counties, combining disaffected local men with deserters and out of state rebels.
Perkins describes a raid on 1 August 1863 across the Laurel Creek area, now within Elliott County. There, Cook’s men targeted the farm of Unionist John Bumgardner. A mixed force of Home Guard and regular troops surprised the guerrillas. In the exchange of fire Bumgardner was killed and his son badly wounded. Contemporary court records and later pension files, as Perkins notes, preserve testimony about this attack and show how such raids blurred the line between military action and personal feud.
That autumn another fight played out closer to the old Cracker’s Neck defile. On 11 November 1863 the Fifth Ohio Independent Cavalry Battalion struck a guerrilla camp at the home of James Banner near Cracker’s Neck, identified by later writers as the Newfoundland area of present day Elliott County. The troopers scattered the band and captured Dave Cook. Perkins’s reconstruction, based on Official Records entries and local court proceedings, portrays the clash as part of a broader Union effort to break up Confederate bands that had taken shelter in the same rugged ground where Morgan’s column had once fought its way through a narrow pass.
James M. Prichard’s research into guerrilla activity along nearby Williams Creek, farther north in Carter and Boyd Counties, reinforces this picture. He shows how Cook’s company repeatedly raided more settled river counties, then withdrew into the interior of Elliott and Morgan for safety. Diaries kept by local businessmen J. Bertrand Norris and W. L. Geiger, as well as lawsuits like George W. Prichard and Alfred Bolt v. Andrew Lewis in the Kentucky Court of Appeals, refer to raiders who struck along the Little Sandy and then vanished back toward “the haunts in the heart” of what would become Elliott County.
The state’s surviving gubernatorial and adjutant general papers confirm that citizens in and around the future county pleaded for help. Petitions from communities such as Eastham’s Station and reports from officers like Major John P. Jones warned Governor Thomas E. Bramlette that Sid Cook’s men and their imitators were terrorizing Union families, stealing horses, and threatening to kill anyone who cooperated with Federal authorities.
After Appomattox: McClanahan, Horton, and a Lingering War
Even after the main Confederate armies surrendered in the spring of 1865, parts of eastern Kentucky remained at war in everything but name. Perkins’s essay “1865 – Not Necessarily the End of the Civil War” points out that Kentucky veterans who returned to Johnson, Lawrence, Morgan, and Elliott Counties came home to burned farms, empty corncribs, and neighbors who had chosen the opposite side. Many guerrillas and deserters simply kept riding with new justifications.
Perkins highlights the activities of Captain William Horton’s company of the Tenth Kentucky Cavalry (Confederate), which in April 1865 hunted Unionists in what is now Elliott County, killing cousins Hugh and James Boggs while they worked near the mouth of Colliers Creek. Such killings underscored how thin the line was between wartime bushwhacking and postwar vendetta.
Official Records volume 43 includes a brief but telling reference to another band rooted in the same region. Prichard notes that a group of former Cook guerrillas under Cornelius “Neal” McClanahan remained active in the Elliott and Morgan County hills into 1865, long after most formal Confederate units in the state had surrendered. Federal officers catalogued their raids alongside those of better known irregulars, a sign that the area’s reputation for lawlessness was becoming statewide.
The sense that the war had not truly ended fed a wave of vigilante activity across northeastern Kentucky. In a 2014 paper for the Filson Historical Society, Prichard describes how self styled Regulators emerged in Carter, Rowan, Elliott, and Lawrence Counties between roughly 1878 and 1880. These groups claimed to be restoring order against thieves and former guerrillas, but contemporary newspapers like the Cincinnati Enquirer and the Chicago Daily Telegraph painted a darker picture. Reporters described anonymous bands whipping accused criminals, issuing proclamations, and sometimes killing targets who had never seen the inside of a courtroom.
Prichard notes that state pardon records list several Elliott County men who received clemency after Regulator violence, evidence that the movement had deep roots in the county’s wartime experience. Many of the same families who had sheltered or suffered under guerrillas now found their sons and nephews drawn into extralegal “companies” that operated with the same tactics under a different name.
Perkins’s 2012 article adds another layer by tracing the career of former Confederate guerrilla Peter Livingston. Shortly after the war he bought land at Cracker’s Neck, the old defile above the Little Sandy that had already seen Morgan’s retreat and Cook’s raids. Livingston cleared fields, opened a store, and built a reputation as a genial businessman. Behind the scenes, Perkins writes, he quietly turned Cracker’s Neck into a rendezvous for thieves and counterfeiters who used the same cliffs and hollows that guerrillas had favored, driving stolen horses and cattle through Elliott County toward markets across the Ohio.
By the late 1870s, as Locals organized against Livingston’s gang and similar outfits, the familiar pattern reappeared: ambushes along lonely roads, midnight rides, and anonymous threats. In some valleys, neighbors openly admitted that grudges rooted in the 1860s still shaped who trusted whom into the early twentieth century.
Remembering Elliott County’s Civil War
Because Elliott County was not formed until 1869, most Civil War era documents list its residents under Carter, Lawrence, or Morgan Counties. Modern researchers must therefore do some careful geographic translation. County histories and genealogical compilations have done much of that work.
The two volume History of Elliott County, Kentucky, compiled in the 1980s and early 1990s, gathers local recollections, cemetery transcriptions, and veteran sketches, including accounts of the seven unknown soldiers south of Sandy Hook. The earlier centennial booklet Historical Highlights of Elliott County, 1869–1969 preserves community memories of the Civil War years and the county’s early decades, including tales of guerrillas and Regulators that might not appear in official files.
Genealogists can supplement these narratives with specialized tools. LDSGenealogy’s Elliott County page aggregates links to “Early Elliott County, Kentucky Records,” the county history volumes, and related sources that help trace families across the 1860 and 1870 censuses as the county boundaries changed. A separate study by John A. Stegall of Elliott County’s Union Civil War veterans in 1890, preserved in the USGenWeb archives and related collections, shows which former soldiers had settled in post offices such as Newfoundland, Sandy Hook, and Laurel Creek by the end of the century.
Regional histories round out the picture. John David Preston’s The Civil War in the Big Sandy Valley of Kentucky situates Elliott County within a wider theater of raids and counter raids along the Ohio and its tributaries. Brian McKnight’s Contested Borderland explains why places like Cracker’s Neck, Laurel Creek, and Williams Creek became enduring guerrilla haunts. Together with primary sources and local memory, these works confirm what Prichard later called Elliott County’s role as a “guerrilla haven” whose wartime scars shaped its early reputation for decades.
Why Elliott County’s Civil War Story Matters
Today visitors pass the courthouse in Sandy Hook on their way to Grayson Lake or the Little Sandy’s fishing holes, often without realizing that a national story of military strategy and irregular warfare played out along these same ridges. The markers titled “A Masterful Retreat” and “Skirmish Here” are more than roadside curiosities. They point to a landscape where regular armies briefly marched and where, for years afterward, small bands of men used steep hollows and narrow gaps to wage their own private wars.
Elliott County’s experience reminds us that the Civil War in Appalachia did not consist solely of famous battles. It unfolded in farmyards like John Bumgardner’s on Laurel Creek, in hidden camps above Cracker’s Neck, and in the anonymous graves of soldiers whose names have been forgotten but whose presence still lingers in local memory. It also shows how wartime guerrilla networks flowed into postwar violence, giving rise to Regulators and outlaws who kept parts of northeastern Kentucky on edge long after Appomattox.
For descendants of those who lived through the 1860s, tracing these stories through official records, diaries, county histories, and genealogical sources offers more than a list of skirmishes. It reveals how one quiet corner of the Appalachian foothills became, in the words of modern scholars, a lingering war zone where loyalty was contested, justice was improvised in the saddle, and the echoes of Morgan’s retreat and Cook’s raids carried far into the next century.
Sources and Further Reading
Primary wartime material for this article includes the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, especially reports concerning the Cumberland Gap and operations in eastern Kentucky in 1862 and 1863, along with regimental histories such as William R. Carter’s History of the First Regiment of Tennessee Volunteer Cavalry. These are supplemented by petitions, court cases, and gubernatorial correspondence preserved in the Kentucky state archives and cited by James M. Prichard and Marlitta H. Perkins. OSU eHistory+2Academia+2
For Elliott County specifically, the Kentucky National Guard’s compilation The Paper Trail of the Civil War in Kentucky, 1861–1865, along with Kentucky Historical Society markers 644 (“A Masterful Retreat”) and 711 (“Skirmish Here / Confederate Raids and Invasions and a Federal Retreat, in Kentucky”), provides a concise overview of Morgan’s retreat and the Little Sandy skirmish and points to local histories that preserve the story of the seven unknown soldiers south of Sandy Hook. KY National Guard History+1
Marlitta H. Perkins’s blog Eastern Kentucky and the Civil War, particularly the essays “Cook’s Guerrillas” and “1865 – Not Necessarily the End of the Civil War,” offers carefully documented syntheses of guerrilla operations in and around present day Elliott County and traces the postwar careers of figures such as Peter Livingston. Eaky Civil War+1
James M. Prichard’s work, including “War Comes to Williams Creek” and “A Lingering War Zone: Post–Civil War Violence in Northeastern Kentucky,” connects Elliott County’s wartime guerrilla activity to later Regulator violence and relies heavily on diaries, newspapers, and legal records from the region. The Filson Historical Society+1
County and genealogical references include The History of Elliott County, Kentucky; Historical Highlights of Elliott County, 1869–1969; John A. Stegall’s study of Elliott County’s Union veterans; and the Elliott County page on LDSGenealogy, all of which help tie specific families and communities to the campaigns and guerrilla conflicts described above. Regional context is drawn from John David Preston’s The Civil War in the Big Sandy Valley of Kentucky and Brian D. McKnight’s Contested Borderland: The Civil War in Appalachian Kentucky and Virginia. Internet Archive+4Cincinnati Public Library+4Internet Archive+4