A river town that once watched steamboats and stagecoaches come and go found itself, in November 1861, at the center of a small Civil War battle with long shadows. The raid on Guyandotte and the burning that followed lasted only a few hours, but they left scars in the streetscape, in the local archive, and in the way neighbors remembered each other for generations.
A river town on the edge of two worlds
In the years before the Civil War, the village of Guyandotte stood where the Guyandotte River meets the Ohio, a natural landing place in a region where good river frontage was rare. Chartered in 1810 on land owned by Thomas Buffington, the town grew into a modest port and market center. Flatboats and then steamboats tied up along the riverfront, and stages on the James River and Kanawha Turnpike passed through on their way between western Virginia and the Ohio Valley. By mid century one of the largest flour mills between Cincinnati and Pittsburgh stood there, a reminder that Guyandotte was tied into a wider river economy rather than an isolated mountain hollow.
Cabell County itself sat in a borderland. White residents looked east toward Richmond for law and politics and north and west toward Ohio for trade and news. Enslaved people worked in households, mills, and farms, and free Black residents also lived and labored in the county, their lives closely tied to river work and town service. Historian Cicero Fain has shown how African American life in Cabell County was shaped by these crosscurrents of river commerce, slavery, and gradual urban growth, long before the railroads and Huntington arrived.
Just downriver, the experiment at Ceredo added another layer. In 1857 Massachusetts congressman Eli Thayer helped establish Ceredo as an antislavery industrial colony, meant to prove that free labor could outcompete slavery. The new town drew national attention and local suspicion. Proslavery men in the area reacted sharply, and the political divide between Ceredo and Guyandotte foreshadowed wartime tensions up and down the Ohio.
By 1860 Guyandotte was no frontier hamlet. It was a small but busy town whose residents read newspapers from Wheeling and Cincinnati, dealt in river cargoes, and debated the same sectional questions that were tearing the nation apart.
Secession, Unionism, and a town’s reputation
When Virginia voted on secession in the spring of 1861, Cabell County split. Ceredo and many rural Unionists opposed leaving the United States. Guyandotte, by contrast, became known in press coverage and later memory as the only town along the Ohio River where the majority and the delegates supported secession.
Soon after the state left the Union in April, pro Confederate citizens in Guyandotte raised the Virginia flag, held public rallies, and organized militia companies. Among the leaders was local lawyer and slaveholder Albert Gallatin Jenkins, who had just left the United States Congress to join the Confederate cause. His mounted company, known as the Border Rangers, drew heavily from young men in Cabell and Wayne Counties.
Union authorities recognized how precarious this border stretch of the Ohio had become. In May 1861 they occupied key points in the Kanawha Valley and along the river. Troops of the Second Kentucky Infantry briefly garrisoned Guyandotte that summer, forcing some residents to swear loyalty to the Union. Others quietly slipped across the river into Ohio, unwilling to live under a flag they did not support.
Newspapers took notice. The Wheeling Daily Intelligencer would later describe Guyandotte as a place where counterfeiters, horse thieves, and secessionists had long “congregated,” and where the town had earned a reputation as the “worst secession nest in that whole country.” That harsh judgment, repeated in later histories, helped fix the town’s identity in the public imagination before and after the raid.
Recruiting the Ninth (West) Virginia
In the autumn of 1861 Union authorities shifted from simply holding key points to raising more local regiments. One of the most important Unionist leaders in the region was Congressman Kellian V. Whaley, a boat builder and politician from Wayne County who had opposed secession from the start. In October he received authority to raise a new regiment, the 9th (West) Virginia Infantry, from loyal men in the Ohio River counties.
Whaley began recruiting in Union friendly Ceredo, but within a few weeks the camp moved upriver to Guyandotte. It was a provocative choice. Stationing Union troops in a town widely rumored to favor the Confederacy was meant to assert federal control over the riverfront. It also placed raw recruits in a community where many of their neighbors did not share their loyalties.
By early November roughly 150 new soldiers and recruits were encamped at Guyandotte. They drilled in the streets and along the riverbank but had little time to train. Official records and later accounts agree that the men were poorly prepared for combat. Whaley had a small detachment of cavalry under him but, according to later testimony, they were not used aggressively to scout the countryside.
For residents, the sight of blue uniforms in town added to existing strain. Some Unionist families welcomed the protection. Others, including many who had supported secession or simply wanted to stay out of the quarrel, resented the camp. Family letters from Guyandotte in collections such as the Smith Family Correspondence at Marshall University span these months and show how war talk mixed with everyday concerns about business, kin, and the river.
The raid of November 10, 1861
In early November Confederate commanders in the Kanawha Valley ordered a bold strike toward the Ohio. General John B. Floyd directed mounted units under Colonel John Clarkson and Colonel Jenkins to ride north through the rugged interior and fall upon Union positions near the river. Their force, drawn from elements of the 5th and 8th Virginia Cavalry, may have numbered around 700 men.
On the afternoon of Sunday, November 10, 1861, Confederate troopers approached Cabell County. Some accounts suggest that Ceredo may have been their original target. Whatever the first plan, Clarkson chose to strike Guyandotte, where the new Union regiment and its officers were exposed and where many citizens were known Confederate sympathizers.
That evening, as darkness came on and church services and Sunday routines wound down, Clarkson divided his men. One column seized the bridge over the Guyandotte River on the west side of town; another circled to enter from the east. Together they moved quickly into the streets, catching the untested Union troops off guard. The Official Records later labeled the engagement simply the “Affair at Guyandotte, Va.,” but the fighting in town did not feel minor to those involved.
Union accounts describe confusion, scattered resistance, and a brief stand near the Forest Hotel, where Whaley and a handful of men tried to rally. Some soldiers attempted to swim the river under fire and drowned. Others slipped away in the darkness. Confederate reports counted only a few killed and wounded on their side. Federal reports and later histories suggest around ten Union dead and a similar number wounded. Roughly one hundred Union soldiers and supporters were taken prisoner, a figure often given more precisely as ninety eight.
A key part of the story is what local people did. Both Union officers and Northern newspapers accused residents of cheering the Confederate entry, firing on Union soldiers from homes, and pointing out targets to Clarkson’s men. The extent of civilian participation is difficult to measure at this distance, but it clearly shaped how outsiders judged the town. Wheeling newspapers branded the attack a “St. Bartholomew’s Massacre” and insisted that Guyandotte had long been the “worst secession nest” on the river, language that helped justify what would happen next.
Captured Union soldiers, including the regimental surgeon Dr. J. H. Rouse, were gathered and marched out of town during the night. They began a journey through Confederate lines that ended in Richmond’s tobacco warehouses, later notorious as Libby Prison. After his release Rouse published a fifty six page pamphlet titled Horrible Massacre at Guyandotte, Va., and a Journey to the Rebel Capital, one of the most detailed first person Union accounts of the raid and its aftermath.
Burning Guyandotte
When the Confederates rode away with their prisoners, they left a shaken but largely intact town behind. The next day brought the destruction that would define Guyandotte’s Civil War story.
On the morning of November 11 the steamboat Boston arrived from Ceredo carrying troops of the 5th (West) Virginia Infantry and Ohio Home Guards. They had been sent after reports of the raid but reached Guyandotte too late to prevent the capture of Whaley’s camp. As the Boston tied up and the soldiers moved ashore they could see wreckage from the fight and heard stories of neighbors aiding the Confederates. Anger, grief, and a desire to make an example of the town combined in dangerous ways.
What happened next is described differently in various sources. Some accounts claim that Colonel John Zeigler of the 5th ordered the town torched in retaliation. Others suggest the burning began more spontaneously, as individual soldiers targeted homes and businesses associated with prominent secessionists and the suspected “traitors” who had fired from windows the night before. Whatever the immediate chain of command, the result was the same.
Flames spread through the business district and residential streets. The Buffington Mill, pride of the town’s river commerce, burned. The Guyandotte Baptist Church, several hotels and shops, and many private homes were destroyed. The Cabell County official history and later county studies estimate that a large portion of the town went up in smoke, with Unionist property sometimes burning alongside secessionist holdings when buildings stood too close together to spare.
Amid the blaze one story of survival became central to local memory. At the Carroll family’s boarding house on Guyan Street, Mary Carroll reportedly refused to leave when Union soldiers came to burn the property. She barricaded herself and her children in the detached stone kitchen, insisting she had nowhere else to go. Faced with a woman and children surrounded by stone walls rather than wood, the soldiers withdrew and burned the barn instead. The house, today known as the Madie Carroll House, became one of the few structures in Guyandotte to survive the burning. Decades later Mary Carroll successfully petitioned the federal government for compensation for the property her family had lost in the fire.
Newspapers quickly spread word of both the raid and the destruction. The Wheeling Daily Intelligencer ran a string of articles with headlines such as “Reported Destruction of the Village of Guyandotte,” “Particulars of the Guyandotte Surprise,” and later editorials that framed the burning as overdue punishment for a disloyal town. Papers in Cincinnati, New York, and Washington carried shorter reports, often repeating numbers and phrases that came from the Wheeling coverage and official dispatches.
From farther north, Rochester abolitionist Julia Wilbur noted the news in her diary. On November 20, after copying details about the Union capture of Port Royal, she added a brief line about a “bloody fight at Guyandotte Va,” a sign that even a relatively small engagement on the Ohio frontier could echo through the wider print culture of the war.
Voices from letters, diaries, and rosters
Beyond official dispatches and sensational newspaper pieces, the story of Guyandotte also survives in more personal and bureaucratic records.
The War of the Rebellion: Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies preserves after action reports and correspondence under the heading “Affair at Guyandotte, Va.” Officers tallied the dead and wounded, listed prisoners, and complained about local disloyalty. Later volumes of the Official Records dealing with prisoners of war track the men captured at Guyandotte as they moved through Confederate prisons and were eventually exchanged or released.
Back in Cabell County, the Smith Family Correspondence, held at Marshall University, collects letters between relatives in Guyandotte and Washington County, Ohio. Spanning 1857 to 1866, the letters bridge the years before and after the raid and give a sense of how one extended family discussed local events, gossip, and the war’s disruptions.
Other collections, such as the Adolphus Debussey Civil War Letters at West Virginia University and the Cabell Wayne Historical Society holdings, contain scattered references to Guyandotte, Cabell County skirmishes, and the broader experience of living in a contested river region. These fragmentary soldier and civilian voices flesh out the bare outlines of official reports.
Future president Rutherford B. Hayes also left traces. During his Civil War service with the 23rd Ohio, Hayes wrote diary entries about operations in western Virginia and worried that Confederate cavalry might slip past Union lines toward the Ohio with “prisoners and plunder from Guyandotte,” evidence that the raid lingered in military memory long after the flames died down.
On the Union side of the river, rosters of the 9th West Virginia Infantry and related Ohio home guard units list the men who were recruited at Guyandotte, some of whom were killed, captured, or later commemorated as veterans of the “Guyandotte Massacre.” The Official Roster of the Soldiers of Ohio in the War of the Rebellion and similar compilations make it possible to trace individuals from that November night through the rest of their wartime service.
From burned town to historic neighborhood
The raid and burning did not end Guyandotte’s story, but they helped shape its trajectory. In the short term the destruction was devastating. Businesses and mills that had tied the town into the regional economy lay in ruins. Union authorities had made an example of a community they believed had harbored disloyalty, and rebuilding would be slow.
Longer term forces also shifted the region’s center of gravity. In the 1870s the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway pushed west and chose a new terminus just across the Guyandotte River. The resulting city of Huntington grew rapidly, drawing commerce and population away from the older river town. Guyandotte was eventually annexed and became one of Huntington’s historic neighborhoods rather than an independent municipality.
Yet pieces of the earlier landscape survive. The Carroll House, preserved as the Madie Carroll House museum, stands among a cluster of historic structures and markers that make up today’s Guyandotte Historic District. National Register of Historic Places nominations for the Carroll House, the Zachary Taylor Wellington House, and the wider district draw on deeds, maps, and early county histories to reconstruct the village as it appeared before the fires of 1861.
Modern Sanborn fire insurance maps for Huntington, including the Guyandotte area, show how the built environment changed in the decades after annexation and give clues about which parcels were rebuilt and which remained vacant long after the war.
Today interpretive markers from the West Virginia Civil War Trails program line Guyan Street and the grounds around the Carroll House. Signs titled “Raid on Guyandotte” and “Burning of Guyandotte” summarize the events of November 10 and 11 and list the number of Union prisoners captured. Annual Guyandotte Civil War Days reenactments bring visitors into the neighborhood, where costumed participants retrace the raid and the burning through streets that still follow the lines laid out in 1810.
Why the Battle of Guyandotte matters
The events at Guyandotte were small compared to the great battles that would follow in Virginia and Tennessee. No armies of tens of thousands clashed there, and the casualty lists fit on a single newspaper column. Yet the raid and burning illuminate several themes central to Appalachian and Ohio River history.
First, they show how a border community could be both deeply connected and deeply divided. Guyandotte’s economic life depended on river trade that linked it to northern cities, even as a significant portion of its white residents identified with the slaveholding South. The town’s reputation as a “hot bed of secession” grew out of these contradictions and out of the choices its people made when war came.
Second, Guyandotte illustrates how the Civil War in Appalachia often blurred the line between battlefront and homefront. The same streets that saw Sunday worship and market days became, for a few hours, a battlefield. Neighbors were accused of firing from their own windows. Federal retaliation targeted shops and houses as much as soldiers. For civilians, the war arrived not only as marching columns but as fire in the alleys and rumors carried on the river.
Third, the town’s fate points to the long tail of Civil War memory. For decades former soldiers and civilians argued over whether the burning was justified, how many locals had betrayed the Union recruits, and what should be remembered as a “massacre” and what as an “affair.” Pamphlets like Dr. Rouse’s Horrible Massacre at Guyandotte Va., county histories by writers such as George Selden Wallace, and modern scholarship by historians like Joe Geiger and Cicero Fain all wrestle with those questions, drawing on many of the primary sources listed below.
Finally, the survival of places like the Madie Carroll House and the creation of the Guyandotte Historic District remind us that the landscape itself is an archive. A visitor standing today on Guyan Street can read plaques, walk the short distance from riverfront to Carroll House, and imagine how quickly the sound of church bells and steamboat whistles once gave way to gunfire and shouts. In that sense the Battle of Guyandotte is not only a story of 1861 but a continuing part of how one Appalachian river town understands itself.
Sources & Further Reading
Rouse, J. H.. Horrible massacre at Guyandotte, Va. and a journey to the Rebel capital: With a description of prison life in a tobacco warehouse at Richmond. Bethesda, MD: University Publications of America, c1992. https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/665381.
United States War Department. The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. Series I. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1880–1901. https://www.loc.gov/item/03003452/.
Ohio. Roster Commission. Official roster of the soldiers of the State of Ohio in the War of the Rebellion, 1861–1866, and in the War with Mexico, 1846–1848. 12 vols. Akron, OH: Werner Co., 1886–1895. https://archive.org/details/officialrosterof08ohio.
“9th West Virginia Infantry.” West Virginia in the Civil War. Accessed February 9, 2026. https://wvcivilwar.com/union-regiments/9th-west-virginia-infantry/.
Julia Wilbur. Julia Wilbur Diaries, 1860–1866. Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation, River Campus Libraries, University of Rochester. Accessed February 9, 2026. https://rbscp.lib.rochester.edu.
Rutherford B. Hayes. Diaries and Letters of Rutherford B. Hayes. Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library & Museums, Fremont, OH. Accessed February 9, 2026. https://www.rbhayes.org.
“Smith Family Correspondence, 1857–1866.” Manuscript collection, Marshall University Special Collections, Huntington, WV. Accessed February 9, 2026. https://mds.marshall.edu.
“Cabell-Wayne Historical Society Collection, 1880–1973 (0099).” Finding aid, Special Collections, Marshall University, Huntington, WV. Accessed February 9, 2026. https://mds.marshall.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1083&context=sc_finding_aids.
Sanborn Map Company. Sanborn Map Company Fire Insurance Maps for West Virginia (Huntington and vicinity). Collection A&M 1307, West Virginia and Regional History Center, West Virginia University Libraries, Morgantown. Accessed February 9, 2026. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/4608.
Sanborn Map Company. Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps Collection. Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Accessed February 9, 2026. https://www.loc.gov/collections/sanborn-maps/.
“Raid on Guyandotte” and “Burning of Guyandotte” historical markers. West Virginia Civil War Trails and Historical Marker Database. Accessed February 9, 2026. https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=73634 and https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=73641.
“Battle of Guyandotte.” Clio: Your Guide to History. Entry by Joe Geiger Jr.. Accessed February 9, 2026. https://theclio.com/entry/6651.
Geiger, Joe, Jr. Disorder on the Border: Civil Warfare in Cabell and Wayne Counties, West Virginia, 1856–1870. Charleston, WV: 35th Star Publishing, 2020. https://wvcivilwar.com/books/disorder-on-the-border-civil-warfare-in-cabell-and-wayne-counties-west-virginia-1856-1870/.
Geiger, Joe, Jr. “Battle of Guyandotte.” e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. West Virginia Humanities Council. First published 2010; updated 2014. Accessed February 9, 2026. https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/articles/2418.
Fain, Cicero M. Fain III. Black Huntington: An Appalachian Story. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019. https://textbooks.lib.wvu.edu/wvhistory/files/pdf/08_wv_history_reader_fain.pdf.
Fain, Cicero M., III. “Race, River, and the Railroad: Black Huntington and the Making of an Appalachian Community.” In West Virginia History: A Reader, West Virginia University open textbook edition. Morgantown: West Virginia University, 2011. https://textbooks.lib.wvu.edu/wvhistory/files/pdf/08_wv_history_reader_fain.pdf.
George Selden Wallace. Cabell County Annals and Families. Richmond: Garrett & Massie, 1935. https://www.familysearch.org/library/books/records/item/508676-cabell-county-annals-and-families.
Wallace, George Selden. Huntington Through Seventy-Five Years. Huntington, WV: George Selden Wallace, 1947. https://archive.org/details/huntingtonthroug00wall.
James E. Casto. Cabell County. Images of America. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2006. https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/cabell-county_james-e-casto/12024887/.
“Cabell County.” e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. West Virginia Humanities Council. Accessed February 9, 2026. https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/entries/757.
“Sanborn Map Company Fire Insurance Maps for West Virginia, A&M 1307.” Bibliographic citation in 14th Street West Historic District, National Register of Historic Places Nomination Form. West Virginia State Historic Preservation Office. Accessed February 9, 2026. https://wvculture.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/WV_CabellCo_14thStreetWestHistoricDistrict_form.pdf.
Author Note: As a historian working in the central Appalachian borderlands, I am drawn to towns where national conflicts crash into local streets. I hope this piece helps you see Guyandotte not only as a burned river town in 1861 but as a window into Civil War loyalties, retaliation, and memory along the Ohio River.