Appalachian History Series – The Battle of Ivy Mountain: Eastern Kentucky’s First Clash
On a gray November afternoon it is not hard to see why Ivy Mountain became a killing ground. The old state road that once followed the Levisa Fork of the Big Sandy River was squeezed between high wooded slopes on one side and cold brown water on the other. In 1861 that road was scarcely more than a muddy trace hacked into the hillside. When Confederate Captain Andrew Jackson May and his men chose a bend near Ivy Creek for an ambush, they turned that narrow shelf of clay into the site of one of the Civil War’s first hard fights in eastern Kentucky.
What happened along that road on November 8, 1861 grew out of the struggle to control the Big Sandy Valley. It was a clash shaped by geography and by the confusion of a border state that had tried to remain neutral and then fell into war. In the letters, reports, and reminiscences left by the men who fought there, Ivy Mountain appears again and again as a place of rain, mud, and sudden close range fire.
A contested valley in a “neutral” state
In the late summer of 1861 Kentucky’s official neutrality collapsed. Confederate forces occupied Columbus on the Mississippi, Union troops answered by moving into Paducah and along the central railroads, and both sides began recruiting openly. In the Big Sandy Valley of eastern Kentucky, Colonel John S. Williams, a Mexican War veteran, raised the 5th Kentucky Infantry for the Confederacy and gathered support from men in Floyd, Pike, and surrounding counties. Powder, caps, and rifles were scarce. Ammunition had to come up poor roads from southwest Virginia.
For Union commanders in Kentucky, the Big Sandy was both a threat and an opportunity. Confederate camps there menaced the Chesapeake and Ohio connections and the Virginia border. At the same time the river valleys offered a route for Federal columns to enter the mountains and reassure Unionist communities in the headwaters. Late in September Brigadier General William “Bull” Nelson received orders to build a brigade and march into the Big Sandy country to break up Williams’s command.
Nelson’s Big Sandy Expedition
Nelson organized his force at Maysville and along the Licking and Kentucky rivers. By late October he commanded roughly fifty five hundred men. Kentucky regiments included the 14th and 16th Kentucky Infantry. Ohio furnished the 2nd, 21st, 33rd, and 59th Ohio Infantry, Battery D of the 1st Ohio Light Artillery, and troopers from the 1st Ohio Cavalry.
The Big Sandy Expedition unfolded in several stages. Nelson sent one column toward Hazel Green while another pushed toward West Liberty. After brief fights that scattered local Confederate forces, his men concentrated at Salyersville, then called Licking Station. The march from there toward Prestonsburg and Pikeville was a slog. Wagons broke down, provisions ran short, and the road along the upper Licking and then the Levisa Fork turned into a grinding succession of mud holes and steep pulls.
On paper Nelson’s advance looked overwhelming. In reality his long trains and inexperienced troops were vulnerable along the narrow mountain roads. Williams understood that vulnerability and tried to slow the Federals with small skirmishes, downed trees, and burned bridges as he fell back toward Pikeville.
Choosing the ground at Ivy Mountain
Williams could not stand for a full pitched battle. His men were poorly equipped, and he was running out of ammunition. Yet he still wanted to bloody Nelson’s column and give his own troops time to escape toward Pound Gap. He entrusted the main blocking action to Captain Andrew Jackson May and a mixed detachment of infantry and mounted men from the 5th Kentucky and local companies.
The place they chose was a hogback ridge where the old state road squeezed between the slope of Ivy Mountain and the West Levisa Fork of the Big Sandy. The road there was said to be no more than seven or eight feet wide. The river hemmed it in on one side. On the other side the hill rose sharply, broken with ledges, boulders, and laurel thickets that offered excellent cover.
Green Gevedon of Company A, 5th Kentucky later recalled watching Nelson’s column as it moved along that road “wholly ignorant of our presence.” Other Confederate accounts describe the blue ranks stretching out of sight, mud spattered but still impressive under their new uniforms.
Contemporary reports agree that May positioned roughly two hundred fifty Confederates along the hillside, perhaps a hundred feet above the road. Many carried double barreled shotguns or older muskets that were deadly at short range but not suited to longer duels. They waited while the head of Nelson’s column, including cavalry and advance infantry, rode and marched into the bend near Ivy Creek.
“The whole hillside was a sheet of fire”
The morning of November 8 came on in heavy rain. Nelson’s men had already spent days forcing artillery and wagons over bad roads. Near Ivy Mountain the mud was so deep that Battery D’s gunners had to unlimber their pieces and drag them forward in single file, with teams straining and soldiers pushing at the wheels.
Shortly after midday the Union advance guard rode into the narrows where the road bent toward Ivy Creek. Accounts differ on the exact moment, but one bugler in the 16th Kentucky remembered that the opening volley “seemed to burst from the very mountain.” An anonymous artilleryman from Battery D told readers of the Cleveland Leader that the hillside above them suddenly flamed with smoke and the air filled with buckshot and musket balls.
That first blast killed several Union soldiers and wounded more than a dozen. Panic rippled down the column as horses reared, wagons jammed together, and men tried to scramble off the exposed road. For a moment the Confederates appeared to have trapped Nelson’s lead units.
Nelson himself rode forward, shouting orders. In at least one account he climbed onto a prominent rock near the road and told his men that if the enemy could not hit him they could not hit anyone. The bravado was characteristic. More important tactically was his decision to send Ohio infantry up both sides of the hollow to work around May’s position.
Companies from the 2nd and 21st Ohio scrambled up the wet slope, using trees and rocks for cover. Below them Battery D’s guns were dragged into position near the mouth of Ivy Creek, where they could lob shells into the Confederate rifle pits. The fight devolved into a series of short rushes, with Union soldiers clinging to the hillside and Confederates firing until their smoothbores fouled and their ammunition pouches emptied.
By mid afternoon the pressure on May’s men became too great. The 21st Ohio reached the crest and, according to one later account, sent boulders tumbling down on Confederate positions. May’s line broke. Men slid and ran down the back of the ridge, abandoning the Ivy Mountain road and retreating toward Pikeville.
Pursuit through mud and high water
Nelson reported that his brigade held the field by late afternoon and counted the cost in dead and wounded along the road and hillside. He estimated his losses at six killed and two dozen or more wounded, figures that appear in his official report from Camp Hopeless Chase near Piketon on November 10. Confederate reports from Colonel Williams and later writers speak of ten killed, around fifteen wounded, and roughly fifty captured or missing from May’s command, though some later compilers raise those totals.
Nelson tried to follow up his victory, but the same flooded creeks and torn up roads that had favored May’s ambush now slowed the Union pursuit. A burned bridge at Coldwater Creek forced another delay while pioneers improvised a crossing. By the time Nelson pushed on, Williams had already pulled most of his force back through Pikeville and onto the road toward Pound Gap, leaving a rear guard to cover the retreat. On November 9 a flanking column under Colonel Joshua W. Sill came in from the north and reached Pikeville first, meeting Nelson’s main force as it slogged down the valley.
From Pound Gap, Williams reported that his “half armed, barefooted” men had faced not only superior numbers but also better equipment and supplies. Some Northern newspapers turned his complaint into a triumphal story about plucky Union volunteers routing a sizeable Confederate army. Others, more skeptical, warned that a single expedition into the mountains would not settle anything. The Cincinnati Gazette compared the campaign to a traveling show that could be undone in a week by mounted guerrillas.
Numbers, reports, and memory
Modern summaries still wrestle with the numbers at Ivy Mountain. The National Park Service battle overview accepts six Union dead and roughly twenty four wounded, with perhaps ten Confederate killed and fifteen wounded, plus several dozen prisoners. The Big Sandy Expedition entry compiled from official records and later studies offers a higher Confederate total and counts captured and missing men separately.
Much of the detailed reconstruction we have today comes from the official reports printed in The War of the Rebellion, especially Nelson’s, Sill’s, and Williams’s dispatches, and from regimental histories like S. S. Canfield’s History of the 21st Regiment Ohio Volunteer Infantry, which devotes a chapter to the march into eastern Kentucky and the action at Ivy Mountain.
In the mid twentieth century historian Henry P. Scalf pulled together these scattered accounts in his article “The Battle of Ivy Mountain” for the Register of the Kentucky Historical Society and later in his book Kentucky’s Last Frontier. Scalf compared the narratives in the Official Records, local traditions, and early newspaper coverage to work out where Sill’s flanking column likely moved, where May’s men were posted, and how the terrain shaped the fight.
Later scholars such as John David Preston in The Civil War in the Big Sandy Valley of Kentucky and Brian McKnight in Contested Borderland have placed Ivy Mountain within the longer arc of war in the Big Sandy region and along the Kentucky Virginia line. They emphasize that the November 1861 campaign did not end Confederate influence in eastern Kentucky. Rather, it opened a cycle of advances and withdrawals that would continue into the following year.
Local voices have added texture to that framework. The Pike County Historical Society’s digital project “Wholly Ignorant of Our Presence” pulls together Confederate reminiscences like Green Gevedon’s, Union letters from infantrymen and artillerymen, and later family histories to show how Ivy Mountain was remembered in Pike County homes. Dan Masters’s essay on the “guns of Ivy Mountain” uses artillery letters and Ohio records to reconstruct how Battery D struggled to get its guns into action on a road that seemed determined to swallow them.
What Ivy Mountain meant
At the time, Ivy Mountain was hailed in the Northern press as an important victory. It proved that a determined Union brigade could take the war into the remote valleys of eastern Kentucky and push back Confederate recruiters. It gave encouragement to Unionists in Floyd, Pike, and neighboring counties who saw Nelson’s column as a sign that the federal government would not abandon them. It also strengthened the hand of Union leaders in Louisville who wanted to show Washington that Kentucky could be held without massive outside intervention.
Yet the battle did not settle the Big Sandy Valley. Within weeks Confederate General Humphrey Marshall was organizing a new force in the region. By early January 1862 Federal commanders found themselves planning another mountain campaign, this time under Colonel James A. Garfield, that would lead to the battle of Middle Creek north of Prestonsburg. Ivy Mountain, in hindsight, appears as the opening act in a longer struggle for control of eastern Kentucky’s roads, fords, and loyalties.
For the men who were there, the memory often came back to physical details. Nelson’s report dwelt on the rain, the mud, and the steepness of the hills. Williams remembered half clothed men shivering in miserable camps as they watched for the next Federal advance. Bugler Thomas Atwood, Green Gevedon, and the anonymous artilleryman all wrote about the shock of that first volley in the narrows and the strange combination of fear and exhilaration as they scrambled up or down the slope. In those personal accounts Ivy Mountain was not simply a small notch in a campaign map. It was the place where war arrived in earnest in the Big Sandy country.
Ivy Mountain today
The ground where Nelson’s brigade fought its way past May’s ambush has changed. The modern highway cuts a wider shelf into the hillside, and the river has been straightened and engineered in places. The Civil War Sites Advisory Commission classifies Ivy Mountain as a severely fragmented battlefield, one where modern development has left only remnants of the original landscape.
Even so, the site has not been forgotten. A state historical marker near Ivel reminds travelers that this was the “first important Civil War engagement in the Big Sandy Valley.” The National Park Service’s battle summary and the American Battlefield Protection Program’s technical studies list Ivy Mountain under the code KY003 and tie it to the broader story of campaigns across Kentucky. Entries on Clio and ExploreKYHistory collect photographs of the monument, short narratives of the fight, and references for those who want to dig deeper.
Most importantly, local institutions have made it easier for readers far from the Levisa Fork to hear the voices of the people who fought and suffered there. The Pike County Historical Society and its partners have scanned letters, reminiscences, and court records that show how the Big Sandy campaigns crossed into everyday life. When you read those documents alongside the official reports and the work of historians, Ivy Mountain emerges as more than a small skirmish early in the war. It becomes the moment when one remote eastern Kentucky road stepped into the center of a nationwide conflict.
Sources & Further Reading
United States War Department. The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. Series I, Vol. 4. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1880–1901. Reports of Brig. Gen. William Nelson, Col. Joshua W. Sill, and Col. John S. Williams on the Big Sandy Expedition and Ivy Mountain. The Portal to Texas History, University of North Texas Libraries. https://texashistory.unt.edu Wikipedia
Scalf, Henry P. “The Battle of Ivy Mountain.” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 56 (January 1958). Available via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org Wikipedia
Scalf, Henry P. Kentucky’s Last Frontier. Pikeville, KY: Pikeville College Press, 1972. Arkansas Studies Institute Digital Collections. https://arstudies.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/biblio/id/16771/ AR Studies+1
Preston, John David. The Civil War in the Big Sandy Valley of Kentucky. Baltimore: Gateway Press, 1984; expanded 2nd ed., Heritage Books, 2008. Google Books record at https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Civil_War_in_the_Big_Sandy_Valley_of.html?id=7o1vGQAACAAJ Google Books+1
McKnight, Brian D. Contested Borderland: The Civil War in Appalachian Kentucky and Virginia. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006. Publisher site: https://kentuckypress.com
Perry, Robert. Jack May’s War: Colonel Andrew Jackson May and the Civil War in Eastern Kentucky, Eastern Tennessee, and Southwest Virginia. Johnson City, TN: Overmountain Press, 1998. Listed in Kentucky Civil War books bibliography at https://www.oocities.org/kentuckycivilwar/Kentuckybooks.htm Wikipedia+1
Speed, Thomas. The Union Cause in Kentucky, 1860–1865. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1907. Google Books. https://books.google.com
Noe, Kenneth W., and Shannon H. Wilson, eds. The Civil War in Appalachia: Collected Essays. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997. Publisher information at https://utpress.org
United States War Department. Annual Report of the Adjutant General of the State of Kentucky for the years 1861–1865. Frankfort: John B. Major, 1860s. Digitized volumes at Internet Archive. https://archive.org
Union Regiments of Kentucky. Louisville: Kentucky Adjutant General’s Office, 1897. Digitized and indexed through LDSGenealogy. https://ldsgenealogy.com
Canfield, S. S. History of the Twenty-First Regiment, Ohio Volunteer Infantry, in the War of the Rebellion. Toledo, OH: Vrooman, Anderson & Bateman, 1893. Internet Archive. https://archive.org Internet Archive
Ohio Civil War Central. “21st Ohio Volunteer Infantry” and related unit entries for the 2nd, 33rd, and 59th Ohio Infantry and Battery D, 1st Ohio Light Artillery. Ohio Civil War Central. https://www.ohiocivilwarcentral.com Internet Archive
Pike County Historical Society. “Wholly Ignorant of Our Presence.” Pike County Historical Society, 2021. Narrative of the Ivy Mountain ambush with transcribed Confederate and Union accounts. https://pikecountykyhistoricalsociety.com/wholly-ignorant-of-our-presence/ Pike County Historical Society
Masters, Dan. “Guns of Ivy Mountain.” Dan Masters’ Civil War Chronicles, February 16, 2021. https://dan-masters-civil-war.blogspot.com/2021/02/guns-of-ivy-mountain.html Dan Masters’ Civil War Chronicles
“Kentucky’s Last Frontier.” Bibliographic record for Henry P. Scalf’s book. Arkansas Studies Institute, Arkansas Humanities Council. https://arstudies.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/biblio/id/16771/ AR Studies+1
“Big Sandy Expedition.” Wikipedia. Includes campaign narrative and a bibliography with key works on Ivy Mountain and the Big Sandy Valley. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Sandy_Expedition Wikipedia
National Park Service. “Battle Detail: Ivy Mountain (KY003).” Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System. National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior. https://www.nps.gov/civilwar/search-battles-detail.htm?battleCode=ky003 Grokipedia
CWSAC (Civil War Sites Advisory Commission). CWSAC Report Update – Kentucky. National Park Service, American Battlefield Protection Program. Statewide overview including Ivy Mountain engagement summary. PDF linked from NPS Battlefield Protection pages. https://www.nps.gov/abpp
Crawford-Lackey, Katie. “Battle of Ivy Mountain.” ExploreKYHistory. Kentucky Historical Society. https://explorekyhistory.ky.gov/items/show/475 Explore Kentucky History
Kentucky Historical Society. “Battle of Ivy Mountain.” Historical Marker No. 164, marker text and location details. https://history.ky.gov/markers/battle-of-ivy-mountain Kentucky Historical Society+1
Historical Marker Database. “Battle of Ivy Mountain.” HMdb.org entry with photographs and text of Kentucky Historical Marker 164 and related plaques. https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=146055 Open Plaques
American Battlefield Trust. “Ivy Mountain.” Battlefield overview and visitor information. American Battlefield Trust. https://www.battlefields.org
Kentucky National Guard. The Paper Trail of the Civil War in Kentucky, 1861–1865. Kentucky National Guard History Program. PDF guide to Kentucky Civil War engagements, including Ivy Mountain. Available via https://kynghistory.ky.gov Geocities
“Beginning of the War in Kentucky.” Scientific American, New Series 5 (October 5, 1861). Reprinted and cited in later scholarship on early Kentucky campaigns. Access via Scientific American archives. https://www.scientificamerican.com Wikipedia
Cincinnati Commercial. Cincinnati, Ohio. Coverage of Nelson’s Big Sandy Expedition and Ivy Mountain, especially the issue of November 14, 1861. Accessed via Chronicling America, Library of Congress. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov
Cincinnati Gazette. Cincinnati, Ohio. Issues of November 16 and 18, 1861, on the Big Sandy campaign and Ivy Mountain. Chronicling America, Library of Congress. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov
Covington Journal. Covington, Kentucky. Issues of September 21 and November 9, 1861, on eastern Kentucky affairs and the Big Sandy. Chronicling America, Library of Congress. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov
New York Times. New York, New York. Coverage of Kentucky neutrality and the Big Sandy Expedition, especially issues dated September 28 and November 4, 8, 17, 22, 25, and 26, 1861. https://www.nytimes.com
Tri-Weekly Kentucky Yeoman. Frankfort, Kentucky. Issue of November 21, 1861, with summary of Ivy Mountain and the Big Sandy campaign. Chronicling America, Library of Congress. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov
Paris Western Citizen. Paris, Kentucky. Issue of November 1, 1861, on early eastern Kentucky operations. Chronicling America, Library of Congress. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov
Philadelphia Press. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Issues of October 29 and November 22, 1861, on Kentucky and the Ivy Mountain fighting. Chronicling America, Library of Congress. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov
Weekly Gazette and Free Press. Janesville, Wisconsin. Issue of November 22, 1861, reprinting reports from the Ivy Mountain engagement. Chronicling America, Library of Congress. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov
Author Note: As a historian from the Kentucky mountains, I keep coming back to the early campaigns that brought the Civil War into valleys like the Big Sandy. I hope this piece helps you picture Ivy Mountain not just as a line in a report but as a real place where neighbors met in battle.