Appalachian History
On a February night in 1865, riders splashed out of the hills and into the farms along Bolts Fork in western Boyd County. By dawn, horses were gone, homes had been stripped, and a Union cavalryman on leave lay dead near Cannonsburg. The men responsible belonged to a guerrilla band under a commander known as McClanahan, and their raid would echo all the way to the Kentucky Court of Appeals in a lawsuit styled Prichard and Bolt v. Lewis.
That winter raid was not an isolated outrage. It was the climax of years in which Boyd County lived with a peculiar kind of war. No great set-piece battle scarred Ashland or Catlettsburg. Instead, the county became a Union base on the Ohio River, a hospital town for wounded soldiers, and a patch of ground where cavalry detachments, home guards, and guerrilla bands clashed in the shadows of iron furnaces and railroad tunnels.
Boyd County on the Eve of War
Boyd County itself was new when the conflict came. The legislature carved it out of Greenup, Carter, and Lawrence Counties in 1860, bringing together river landings like Catlettsburg and the young industrial town of Ashland. Ashland grew out of Poage’s Landing and the ambitions of the Kentucky Iron, Coal and Manufacturing Company, which laid out the town in the 1850s as an iron center on the Ohio.
By 1860, river trade, furnaces like Star Furnace along Williams Creek, and the coming of the railroad linked Boyd County to markets up and down the Ohio. Those same routes soon made the county vital to Union strategy in eastern Kentucky.
Catlettsburg: Army Post on the Ohio
Catlettsburg sat at the mouth of the Big Sandy River, where the Big Sandy empties into the Ohio. That geography made it a natural military hub. During the winter of 1861 and 1862, Union forces under Colonel James A. Garfield used the town as a base while driving Confederate General Humphrey Marshall’s troops out of the Big Sandy Valley during the campaign that culminated at Middle Creek.
A Kentucky Historical Society marker at Catlettsburg captures how the wartime state understood the place. The text notes that a United States Army post at Catlettsburg protected Ohio River traffic and became a supply base and communication center for Union forces in the Big Sandy region. It also recalls that Garfield’s winter campaign cleared Confederate forces from the area, and that Kentucky troops under Colonel George W. Gallup repeated that feat in 1864.
The Federal “Paper Trail of the Civil War in Kentucky,” compiled by the state adjutant general’s office, echoes the marker’s language when it summarizes Boyd County’s role: a U.S. post at Catlettsburg guarded river traffic and served as supply and communication hub for operations across the Big Sandy.
Official army correspondence reinforces that picture. In the War of the Rebellion records, Union officers at Catlettsburg and along the Big Sandy reported on troop movements, river transports, and the chronic problem of guerrillas striking between garrisons.
Ashland’s Aldine Hotel Becomes a Hospital
Upstream at Ashland, the war transformed a landmark hotel into a place of suffering and care. The Aldine Hotel, a prominent hostelry in the young town’s commercial district, was requisitioned early in the conflict as a Union Army hospital. A city marker and local histories identify it as a government hospital used by Federal forces, tied to the commands operating out of Catlettsburg and the Eastern Kentucky Military District.
Accounts collected by local and regimental historians show Ashland’s women knitting together a rudimentary medical system on that site. Rebecca Moore Gallup, wife of Colonel George W. Gallup of the 14th Kentucky Infantry and later commander of the Eastern Kentucky District, visited the hospitals in Ashland in 1864. In one letter, she described visiting wounded men in the wards and remarked that seeing visitors “cheered him up,” a small window into the emotional world inside the Aldine.
Other women from prominent Ashland families appear in soldiers’ reminiscences as constant presences in the wards or in local aid societies that gathered food, clothing, and bandages for the sick and wounded who filled the town.
Soldiers from a Loyal County
Despite the later proliferation of Confederate imagery in local memory, Boyd County’s Civil War service was overwhelmingly Union. John David Preston’s prosopographical study Civil War Soldiers of Boyd County, Kentucky, lists 597 men who served from the county. Only 28 wore Confederate gray. The remaining 569 served in Union units, roughly a nineteen to one ratio.
Those men entered the war through a variety of regiments. The 14th Kentucky Infantry organized at Camp Wallace in Louisa and at Catlettsburg in the autumn of 1861, then served in eastern Kentucky and beyond. Company D of the 45th Kentucky Mounted Infantry drew heavily from Boyd County. Men from the county also appear in rosters of the 39th Kentucky Mounted Infantry and neighboring West Virginia units, as well as in a home guard structure that included the 22nd (Boyd County) Militia Battalion.
The militia files of the Kentucky adjutant general’s office preserve the words of Major John P. Jones of that 22nd Battalion. In August 1864, as guerrilla activity intensified, Jones warned Frankfort that “Sid Cook with 125 rebel guerrillas” was likely to visit the county and begged for enough arms and ammunition “to break up his clan.”
That plea grew out of experiences that neighbors had already begun to record in diaries and letters.
Diaries in the Williams Creek Basin
The most intimate picture of Boyd County’s wartime ordeal comes from a cluster of diaries kept near Star Furnace and along Williams Creek, in the Carter and Boyd borderlands. J. Bertrand Norris, a teenager living near Star Furnace, began recording local events as the crisis deepened. In 1863 he noted patriotic speeches, recruiting efforts, and the small frictions of war, and then wrote grimly that his friend Henry Artis had “killed a rebel,” a sign that violence had arrived in his quiet basin.
Norris’s diaries, transcribed and published through the efforts of local historians, trace a steady drumbeat of alarm. He recorded rumors of raiders closing the road to Star Furnace, nights spent on picket duty, and the disruption of mail and trade as small Confederate and guerrilla bands probed the region.
Nearby, merchant W. L. Geiger at Cannonsburg kept a diary of his own. Later historians mining his entries for “War Comes to Williams Creek” and related studies found references to raids on his store and on Charles L. Raison’s store near Cannonsburg, and to an infamous robbery of the Ashland Bank that passed directly through his world.
Star Furnace owner Robert W. Lampton added another voice. In a letter dated 8 May 1863, written in the wake of a raid on his furnace and store, Lampton lamented the plundering and concluded that the only hope for protection lay in raising troops for Kentucky service. He soon became a recruiting officer for the 40th and 45th Kentucky Mounted Infantry, turning personal loss into organized defense.
Sid Cook’s Guerrillas
The main scourge in this corner of Boyd and Carter Counties was the guerrilla band led by Algernon Sidney “Sid” Cook, sometimes called Cook’s Devils. Drawing men from present-day Elliott County and neighboring counties, Cook rode with Confederate partisan units and then shifted into more independent operations that blurred the lines between soldiering and banditry.
In April 1863, Cook and allied partisan rangers struck Grayson, then Star Furnace, burning the jail and plundering Lampton’s company store. Lampton later recalled being robbed at gunpoint, while Norris wrote of the community standing picket and fretting over rumors of further raids.
On the night of 14 August 1863, Cook’s men rode into Boyd County and targeted Cannonsburg. They robbed Raison’s store and then Geiger’s, taking cash, goods, and even personal items from a clerk. Geiger may have been singled out because he had previously hired a local man, John Gilkison of Eastham’s Station near the Princess Tunnel, to help hunt Cook down.
Later that year, Cook’s lieutenant David Cook led an even bolder operation. Before dawn on 25 September 1863, he and roughly a dozen men rode silently through Ashland’s streets, robbed the Ashland Bank, and then headed back toward their base country, stopping to rob Geiger’s store again at Cannonsburg. Newspapers like the Louisville Daily Journal and Ironton Register covered the episode, while the Eastern Kentucky Civil War blog later pieced together the timeline from those papers and scattered official reports.
David Cook himself was captured while trying to leave the state by steamboat at Greenup, escaped from confinement at Ironton, and eventually died under guard at Lexington Military Prison, a trajectory traced through newspaper reports and cemetery records.
February 1865: McClanahan’s Raid into Boyd County
By 1865, Cook’s band had been scattered, but guerrilla war had not ended. On the night of 20 February, a force of perhaps twenty five to thirty men commanded by a guerrilla leader named McClanahan crossed into Boyd County. According to later testimony, they plundered the homes of Unionist families on Bolts Fork, including the households of the Prichard and Bolt families, then rode toward Cannonsburg and into Carter County.
One legal case preserves the raid in exceptional detail. In George W. Prichard and Alfred Bolt v. Andrew Lewis, a postwar suit that reached the Kentucky Court of Appeals, affidavits describe seeing Andrew “Big Andy” Lewis in company with a band of guerrillas laden with goods said to be stolen from the tunnel store and Star Furnace. The case record also notes that during the foray the raiders killed Private John C. Hylton (or Helton) of the 2nd Kentucky Cavalry, a Boyd County man home on leave, near Cannonsburg.
As the band withdrew toward what is now Elliott County, they passed through Mount Savage and killed Braxton Stewart, another discharged Union soldier. In this single raid, the war reached directly into farmhouses, emptied stables, and left several Union veterans dead within a few miles of Ashland.
Households Under Siege
Boyd County civilians did not simply endure these raids in silence. They wrote petitions and letters to the governor in Frankfort and to military authorities, pleading for protection or seeking justice. The Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition and related collections preserve many of those voices.
One Boyd Countian, Absalom Stewart, later described how guerrilla leader James Lyons and his men robbed his home in August 1864. In a petition preserved and quoted in James M. Prichard’s study of postwar violence, Stewart remembered the raiders bursting in at night, shooting his dog as it crouched near his feet, ransacking his house, forcing him to kneel while pressing cocked pistols to his head, and threatening to kill him if he informed on them. Only his wife’s pleas, he said, saved his life.
Other documents from the same collections record residents near Eastham’s Station and the Princess Tunnel asking for troops or for permission to raise local defense companies under figures like John Gilkison. Together, these petitions confirm what the diaries suggest: the front line in Boyd County often ran directly through private homes and crossroads communities rather than formal battlefields.
Aftermath and Memory on the Big Sandy
The shooting stopped in 1865, but its effects lingered for years. Newspapers such as the Big Sandy Herald of Catlettsburg and the Big Sandy News of Louisa chronicled Reconstruction politics, feuds, and the legal aftermath of wartime killings in northeastern Kentucky.
James M. Prichard’s thesis “Lingering War Zone: Post Civil War Violence in Northeastern Kentucky” demonstrates that raids, vigilante hangings, and personal vendettas linked to wartime guerrilla outfits continued to trouble the region into the later 1860s.
Public memory eventually settled on more orderly symbols. The “Civil War Army Base” marker at Catlettsburg, the “City of Ashland” marker that mentions the Aldine’s service as a hospital, and occasional ceremonies or postal covers commemorating the site, all frame Boyd County’s Civil War experience in terms of loyal service, vital river defenses, and compassionate care for wounded soldiers.
Yet the diaries, court files, and petitions tell a more complicated story. They remind us that for people along Williams Creek, Princess Tunnel, and Cannonsburg, the war often arrived as a sudden pounding of hooves in the night, a knock on the door, or the news that a son home on leave would not be coming back.
Why Boyd County’s Civil War Story Matters
Boyd County’s Civil War landscape can be easy to overlook. There were no grand battles here, no fields ringed with monuments. Instead, the county mattered because its river towns fed and communicated an entire theater of war in eastern Kentucky, and because its backcountry became a testing ground for the blurred line between soldier and outlaw.
The sources left behind let us see both sides. Official records and markers emphasize the United States post at Catlettsburg, the campaigns that cleared Confederate forces from the Big Sandy, and the overwhelming Union service of Boyd County men. Diaries, letters, and petitions reveal communities living in constant tension, loyal to the Union but exposed to repeated raids from men who knew the hollows as well as they did.
Taken together, these records show that Boyd County was not a quiet backwater in the Civil War. It was a place where national strategy, local industry, and irregular warfare met on the same riverbank.
Sources & Further Reading
Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, Series I, various volumes with correspondence from Catlettsburg, the Big Sandy Valley, and reports on guerrilla activity in northeastern Kentucky.Wikimedia Commons+2Wikimedia Commons+2
Report of the Adjutant General of the State of Kentucky, 1861–1866, and “The Paper Trail of the Civil War in Kentucky, 1861–1865,” Kentucky National Guard History Program, especially the Boyd County entry describing the U.S. post at Catlettsburg.kynghistory.ky.gov+1
“Civil War Army Base” Kentucky Historical Marker no. 643, text and context via the Kentucky Historical Society and Clio.Kentucky.gov+1
J. Bertrand Norris diaries, Star Furnace, Kentucky, 1861, 1863, and 1865, transcriptions and discussion at The Williams Creek Basin in Northeast Kentucky.loncoleman.com+2loncoleman.com+2
W. L. Geiger diary and the Lampton family letter of 8 May 1863, as cited and interpreted in James M. Prichard, “War Comes to Williams Creek,” hosted at loncoleman.com.loncoleman.com+1
Petitions and correspondence of Boyd County residents, including Absalom Stewart and citizens near Eastham’s Station and the Princess Tunnel, in the Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition and related collections.discovery.civilwargovernors.org+1
John David Preston, The Civil War in the Big Sandy Valley of Kentucky (Gateway Press, 1984; 2nd ed., Heritage Books, 2008) and Civil War Soldiers of Boyd County, Kentucky (East Kentucky Press, 2015).Google Books+1
James M. Prichard, “War Comes to Williams Creek,” The Williams Creek Basin in Northeast Kentucky, and “Lingering War Zone: Post Civil War Violence in Northeastern Kentucky” (M.A. thesis, Filson Historical Society, 2014).loncoleman.com+1
Marlitta H. Perkins, “Cook’s Guerrillas” and related posts on Eastern Kentucky and the Civil War, which synthesize newspaper accounts and official records of Sid and David Cook’s activities, including the Ashland Bank robbery.eakycivilwar.blogspot.com+2eakycivilwar.blogspot.com+2
Patrick, James W., and Charles M. Patrick, A History of Ashland, Kentucky, 1786–1954, and subsequent Ashland city histories for context on the Aldine Hotel and local industry.loncoleman.com+1