Appalachian History
In the 1860s the old roads through Lincoln County carried more than drovers, migrants, and courthouse crowds. Armies from both sides marched the Wilderness Road, camped around Buffalo Springs, and fought sharp skirmishes in and around Stanford and Crab Orchard.
By 1860 roughly a third of Lincoln County’s people were enslaved, a proportion that made slavery central to the local economy and social order. The county itself was divided in its politics. Later summaries of the war in Lincoln County note that the northern end leaned more toward the Confederacy while the southern end tended to stay Unionist. That split would shape how neighbors chose sides when the war came up the pike.
This article focuses on the documented Civil War actions in Stanford and Crab Orchard. Those events appear in the Official Records, Dyer’s Compendium, and later battle lists as a string of raids and skirmishes rather than grand set piece battles, yet they turned Lincoln County into a contested corridor from 1862 through 1863.
Rail, Road, and a Divided County
Crab Orchard and Stanford sit on routes that mattered long before the war. The old Wilderness Road threaded through the knobs here on its way from Cumberland Gap into the Bluegrass, and by the 1860s a railroad line and the Dix River bridge near Crab Orchard gave Federal forces an important supply link toward Somerset and the Cumberland River.
The same geography that made Lincoln County a gateway for early settlers now made it a highway for armies. When Confederate and Union commanders looked at a map of Kentucky, the roads through Stanford and Crab Orchard offered a natural path between the interior Bluegrass and the mountain passes at Cumberland Gap.
At the same time, enslaved labor underpinned the local farm economy. A Kentucky Historical Society overview of Lincoln County points out that enslaved people made up about thirty two percent of the population in 1860, and that the postwar years saw efforts to recruit European immigrants to replace that coerced labor. This mix of enslaved workers, small farmers, and divided politics forms the backdrop for the military story.
Morgan’s First Kentucky Raid: Dix River Bridge and the Wagon Train, July 1862
Lincoln County’s first brush with large scale wartime violence came with Confederate cavalry under John Hunt Morgan during his first Kentucky raid. In July 1862, Morgan’s horsemen rode north from Tennessee, struck a Federal garrison at Cynthiana, then turned south toward central Kentucky with friendly crowds and hostile Union garrisons all around them.
On 20 July 1862, as they recrossed Lincoln County, Morgan’s command hit Federal logistics hard around Crab Orchard. A Kentucky National Guard history, drawing on the Official Records and state marker research, notes that his cavalry burned the Dix River bridge “above” Crab Orchard and destroyed about 120 United States wagons there and at Somerset. The text of Kentucky Historical Marker 685, titled “On Confederate Routes,” gives almost the same summary and fixes the date and place on modern US 150 just west of town.
Contemporary church and local accounts add small, vivid details. A later narrative on the Crab Orchard Baptist Church describes the sanctuary being used as a Union hospital for much of the war, with pews removed to make room for cots and several Union soldiers dying of disease and being buried in the churchyard. On the same day that Morgan’s men fired the bridge and wagons, the town church was already part of the Federal medical system, standing as both spiritual and literal triage in a county now on the front line.
Letters from early 1862 show how soldiers already judged the landscape even before Morgan’s raid. In a January letter from Crab Orchard, Union officer John A. Ritter described the country around town as “a poore part of the world,” a terse verdict on the worn out fields and hard living of the hill country.
The July 1862 raid did not lead to a set battle in Lincoln County, but it left behind burned wagons, damaged infrastructure, and a clear warning that Confederate cavalry could reach deep into Federal supply lines.
“The Battle of Crab Orchard”: September 10, 1862
Weeks later, the larger Confederate offensive into Kentucky under Gen. Braxton Bragg pushed the war back across Lincoln County. As Bragg’s army advanced from Tennessee toward a hoped for showdown in the Bluegrass, Union forces under Don Carlos Buell maneuvered to block him, and cavalry from both sides probed and fought skirmishes along the way.
On 10 September 1862, one of those clashes took place at Crab Orchard. A National Park Service battle summary based on Dyer’s Compendium lists a “Skirmish, Crab Orchard” on that date, crediting federal participation to the 2nd Indiana Cavalry.
The action faded quickly from public memory, but it did not disappear from the records. In the 1930s, when a veteran’s pension claim raised questions about his service, the U.S. War Department answered with a concise summary:
“The records on file in this office show that the Battle of Crab Orchard, Ky., took place September 10, 1862.” The letter went on to connect this small fight directly to the broader movements of Buell’s Army of the Ohio, noting that the same advance clashed with the enemy at Bardstown, Perryville, and Stanford in October. Surviving reports in the Official Records for this period are sparse, and there is no detailed narrative of the September 10 engagement, but the evidence is enough to establish it as the first recorded battle in Lincoln County itself.
Perryville to London: Stanford and Crab Orchard in October 1862
The best documented combat around Stanford and Crab Orchard came one month later, as Union forces pursued Bragg’s army after the Battle of Perryville on 8 October 1862. Dyer’s Compendium and derived battle lists treat the ten day pursuit from Perryville to London as a single operation with a chain of skirmishes along the way. For Lincoln County, that chain includes three separate actions: skirmishes at Stanford and on Crab Orchard Road on 14 October, and a skirmish at Crab Orchard on 15 October.
Modern battle indexes that synthesize the Official Records present the sequence clearly. One widely used compilation shows: “October 14, 1862, Skirmish at Stanford,” “Skirmish on Crab Orchard Road,” and “October 15, 1862, Skirmish at Crab Orchard,” all grouped under the header “Union Forces Pursue Confederate Forces from Perryville to London.”
Federal unit histories fill in how these concise entries played out on the ground. The National Park Service’s regimental summary for the 75th Illinois Infantry, for example, lists their service as “Pursuit of Bragg into Kentucky October 1–16, 1862. Battle of Perryville, Ky., October 8. Action at Stanford, Ky., October 14. March to Nashville, Tenn., October 16–November 7.” Similar summaries for other Midwestern regiments place them on the roads through Stanford and Crab Orchard in mid October, marching hard and skirmishing with Confederate rear guards.
A Confederate perspective comes from cavalry commander Joseph Wheeler, whose report of his October operations, preserved in the Official Records, lists “Skirmishes at Lancaster and on Crab Orchard Road, Ky., October 14” and “Skirmishes at Crab Orchard and Barren Mound, Ky., October 15.” This confirms that Confederate horsemen were fighting delaying actions along the very roads that tied Stanford to Crab Orchard and on toward the mountains.
On the Union side, company level diaries add human texture. In his 1862 diary, Lt. James Bragg of the 40th Indiana recorded marching on a “Thursday 23rd” from camp three miles from Crab Orchard and “on through Stanford where we had the skirmish,” before moving on toward Hustonville. The date suggests that the men of the 40th Indiana remembered the Stanford clash as a touchstone in their hard march south.
Local memory preserves another striking detail. A modern article from the Interior Journal and the Kentucky Historical Society, built around identifying two unknown Civil War graves at Crab Orchard, quotes an 1862 letter from a Union soldier who claimed that when Federal troops entered Stanford on 14 October they captured thirty six prisoners, twenty of them taken from hospitals. That remark fits well with a sudden occupation of a town whose streets and homes had been serving Confederate wounded and stragglers.
The pursuit ended as Bragg’s army slipped through the mountain gaps toward East Tennessee. For Lincoln County, however, those October days left behind dead and wounded soldiers, damaged farms, and the first wave of graves that would later be gathered around the Crab Orchard Confederate Monument.
Scott’s Raid and the 1863 Skirmish at Stanford
The war did not leave Lincoln County alone after 1862. The next summer, Confederate Col. John S. Scott led a cavalry raid across eastern Kentucky, probing toward the Bluegrass and threatening Federal communications. Dyer’s tables and later battle lists mark a sequence of fights on 29–31 July 1863 at Winchester, Irvine, Lancaster, Paint Lick Bridge, and Stanford.
The Official Records index for Series I, Volume 23, summarizes this as “July 25–August 6, 1863, Eastern Kentucky, Scott’s Raid,” and includes an entry “Stanford, Ky., skirmish at, July 31, 1863.” Those same compilations identify Col. William P. Sanders of the 5th Kentucky Cavalry as one of the Federal officers reporting on the raid and Scott of the 5th Louisiana Cavalry as his Confederate counterpart.
The July 31 skirmish at Stanford receives only a single line in most regimental histories, yet taken together with the 1862 actions it shows how often Lincoln County roads saw hostile scouts and raiders. By the middle of the war, the name “Stanford” in the Official Records appears less as a quiet county seat and more as a recurring waypoint in reports about cavalry movements, depots, and marching orders.
“Camp Near Stanford”: Soldier Voices From Lincoln County
If the Official Records give us the skeleton of dates and places for these small battles, the letters and diaries of common soldiers put flesh on the bones. Over and over, those documents bear the simple heading “Camp near Stanford, Ky.”
On 8 April 1863, Union surgeon Dr. John Shrady wrote from a camp near Stanford to his mother in New York. He described his health and the misery of the Kentucky countryside, then reflected that “this rebellion has disorganized society and what a field there will be left for missionaries when peace dawns once more.” For Shrady, Lincoln County was not just a battleground. It was a sign of how deeply the war had shaken civilian life.
The Wadsworth brothers of Tennessee left a long letter from “Camp near Stanford Ky” that narrates a hard march to reinforce Colonel Frank Wolford, a prominent Kentucky cavalryman who often operated in this region. Their account mentions the strain of forced marches, the difficulty of supplying horses, and the way local roads and farm lanes became military arteries overnight.
Ohio soldier William McKnight wrote multiple letters to his wife Samaria from “Camp Near Stanford, Ky.” in February and May 1863, describing picket duty and the uneasy calm between raids. In one Eastern Kentucky University letter from an unknown soldier to “Mattie,” the writer complains of long marches, aching feet, and failing health, and notes that he is sending home a bottle of water from a spring near Crab Orchard so she can “sample” the taste of the country he is marching through.
Together these letters confirm what the battle lists only hint at. Lincoln County was not just crossed once or twice by armies. It hosted long running encampments, hospitals, and patrol lines. Its springs, hills, and little towns became part of the private geography of men from Ohio, Indiana, Tennessee, and beyond.
Crab Orchard Cemetery, Buffalo Springs, and the Landscape of Memory
Today the most visible reminder of Lincoln County’s Civil War years stands on Crab Orchard Hill. There, in the Crab Orchard Cemetery, a ten foot white marble obelisk rises above a ring of twenty one small headstones. Those graves hold Confederate soldiers from Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, and Texas who were killed in skirmishes in Lincoln and adjoining counties.
The monument was erected in the early 1870s and was later listed on the National Register of Historic Places as part of the “Civil War Monuments in Kentucky” submission. Its south face bears the inscription beginning “Here off duty till the last reveille, rest the Southern soldiers, few in number, who were slain in this and in adjoining counties during the War of Secession,” a consciously poetic attempt to honor men buried “among strangers” whose graves had originally been scattered.
A modern tourism site for Lincoln County summarizes the spot succinctly: “Twenty one Confederate soldiers from Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, and Texas are buried atop Crab Orchard Hill surrounding the marble Confederate Monument.”
Union graves are there as well, though their stories are sometimes harder to trace. In 2018, Lincoln County’s Property Valuation Administrator and the Kentucky Historical Society worked together to identify two unknown Civil War graves in the same cemetery, marked only “Dr. JCB” and “JMR.” Service records revealed that both men were Union soldiers killed at Crab Orchard on 14 October 1862, six days after Perryville. Their resting place at the base of the Confederate monument captures, in stone, the tangled reality of a border county.
A few miles away at Stanford, Buffalo Springs Cemetery preserves another layer of Civil War memory. Local tourism materials note that the first Kentucky courthouse was built on this site in 1783 and that during the Civil War the grounds served as a Confederate encampment. Today, headstones there mark veterans of both sides, linking the war years to a longer county history that reaches back to the pioneer era.
From Slave County to Free Town: Boneyville and the Aftermath of War
The fighting in Lincoln County unfolded in a society built on slavery. A Civil War era bill of sale from January 1865 in Lincoln County records the purchase of an enslaved person even as Union armies were driving deep into the Confederacy. Emancipation came late in Kentucky, and its arrival reshaped the county as profoundly as any raid or skirmish.
One of the clearest local expressions of that change is the postwar community of Boneyville, a few miles southwest of Stanford. Kentucky Historical Marker 2268 and the ExploreKYHistory project describe Boneyville as an “emancipation” or “free town” founded in 1867 by Napoleon Bonaparte “Boney” Hays, a formerly enslaved man who had served in the 12th United States Colored Heavy Artillery. Hays returned from service at Camp Nelson, purchased land from his former owner’s family, and helped anchor a rural Black community where church, school, and land ownership symbolized a new kind of freedom.
That postwar story cannot be separated from the wartime traffic through Stanford and Crab Orchard. United States Colored Troops trained only a day’s march away at Camp Nelson. Slaveholding farmers in Lincoln County watched enslaved men leave for Union camps, while Confederate veterans returned to a county where their former neighbors now claimed new rights. The skirmishes along the Crab Orchard Road were part of a larger struggle over what kind of place Lincoln County would become.
Why the Stanford and Crab Orchard Actions Matter
On a map of the Civil War, the names “Stanford” and “Crab Orchard” appear as small entries in indexes and compendia. Yet when we trace those entries across the Official Records, marker texts, diaries, and local histories, a fuller picture emerges.
On 20 July 1862 Morgan’s cavalry burned a railroad bridge and a Federal wagon train within sight of Crab Orchard’s churches and farms. In September a cavalry clash the War Department later called the “Battle of Crab Orchard” signaled the start of Bragg’s great Kentucky campaign. One month after that, the streets and roads of Stanford and Crab Orchard echoed to the sound of pursuing armies, skirmishing in town and along the road toward the mountains. A year later, Scott’s raiders fought another skirmish at Stanford while Union soldiers in nearby camps wrote home about the disordered society around them.
The men who fell in those fights were eventually gathered around a marble column on Crab Orchard Hill. The enslaved people whose labor fed both armies’ horses saw the war end in their legal freedom, and some of them went on to found towns like Boneyville. The country doctor, the cavalryman from Indiana, the Ohio private who sent his wife a bottle of Crab Orchard water, and the unknown Federal dead beneath the Confederate monument all testify that Lincoln County was more than a line in a battle table.
For Appalachian and Kentucky history, the Stanford and Crab Orchard actions remind us that the Civil War was fought not only at Antietam and Gettysburg but also at country crossroads, courthouse squares, and little springs along roads that had carried settlers west a lifetime earlier.
Sources and Further Reading
Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Series I, Volume 16, Parts 1 and 2. Operations in Kentucky and Tennessee, June to November 1862, including the Perryville campaign and the pursuit from Perryville to London with references to the October skirmishes at Stanford, Crab Orchard Road, and Crab Orchard.
Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Series I, Volume 23, Part 1. Operations in Kentucky, Indiana, and Tennessee, June to October 1863. The index entry for “Stanford, Ky., skirmish at, July 31, 1863” appears under “Eastern Kentucky, Scott’s Raid.”The Portal to Texas History
Atlas to Accompany the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. Plates identifying Crab Orchard and Stanford on campaign maps of central Kentucky.Internet Archive
Frederick H. Dyer, A Compendium of the War of the Rebellion (1908). Kentucky section under “Pursuit of Bragg into Kentucky” with separate entries for Stanford, Crab Orchard Road, and Crab Orchard in October 1862, and for Scott’s 1863 raid. Summarized in modern battle lists such as the Carolana compilation.Carolana+1
U.S. War Department letters in the U.S. Congressional Serial Set, particularly a 1930s reply stating that “the Battle of Crab Orchard, Ky., took place September 10, 1862” and linking Stanford on 14 October to the advance of the Army of the Ohio.GovInfo+1
National Park Service Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System entries for units such as the 75th Illinois Infantry and related Midwestern regiments, which list the “Action at Stanford, Ky., October 14” as part of the pursuit after Perryville.National Park Service+1
“Scott’s Raid (CSA) in Eastern Kentucky” and related entries in battle lists that draw on the Official Records to identify the July 31, 1863 skirmish at Stanford with Col. John S. Scott’s cavalry raid and Federal forces under Col. William P. Sanders.Carolana
Lt. James Bragg, 40th Indiana Infantry, 1862 diary, as transcribed in the Spared & Shared project, entry for “Thursday 23rd” describing the march from camp near Crab Orchard “through Stanford where we had the skirmish.”Spared & Shared 22
Armando Alfaro, The Paper Trail of the Civil War in Kentucky 1861–1865 (Kentucky National Guard). Section “Civil War 1861–1865 in Lincoln County” summarizing Morgan’s burning of the Dix River bridge and wagon trains, the organization of the 10th Kentucky Cavalry at Crab Orchard, and the Crab Orchard Confederate Monument.Ky National Guard History+1
Kentucky Historical Society and Kentucky Historical Marker Program, especially Marker 685 “On Confederate Routes” at Crab Orchard and Marker 2268 “Boneyville,” both with companion essays on the ExploreKYHistory site.Kentucky Historical Society+3Kentucky Historical Society+3Explore Kentucky History+3
ExploreKYHistory entry “Lincoln County,” outlining the county’s reliance on enslaved labor and postwar immigration efforts.Explore Kentucky History+1
John Shrady letters from “Camp near Stanford, Ky.” in the American Civil War Collection, University of Tennessee, Knoxville.Digital Collections+1
Wadsworth Brothers correspondence in the Tennessee State Library and Archives, including a long letter from “Camp near Stanford Ky” describing marches to reinforce Colonel Wolford.SOS TN Government Files
William McKnight letters from “Camp Near Stanford, Ky.” preserved in the Ohio University digital archives, published as Do They Miss Me at Home?: The Civil War Letters of William McKnight.OhioLINK Media Library
Eastern Kentucky University Civil War Collection, letter from an unknown soldier near Stanford to “Mattie,” including mention of water from a spring near Crab Orchard.EKU Special Collections