Appalachian History
In the nineteenth century Bath County sat between Bluegrass farms and the eastern Kentucky mountains. The Licking River cut across its ridges. Stage roads carried travelers to a fashionable mineral resort at Mud Lick, later called Olympian Springs. Soldiers on leave soaked in the sulfur water. Families from Lexington hid there during cholera season.
When the Civil War came, that quiet county became a corridor. Supply wagons rolled west from Mount Sterling through Owingsville. Scouts slipped east toward Pound Gap. Small fights broke out over creeks, crossroads, and courthouses. No great set piece battle like Perryville took place here, but Bath County’s skirmishes show how a “small war” of raids, guerrillas, and elections unfolded in the Appalachian borderlands.
This article follows three of those flashpoints: the Mud Lick Springs and Olympian Springs front, the 1864 strike at Ragland Mills, and the courthouse fire that erased much of Bath County’s early record. Along the way we listen to official reports, governors’ mail, and frightened civilians who left their words on paper.
A County Divided
On the eve of war Bath County mixed slaveholding Bluegrass culture with mountain small farms. County histories by John Adair Richards and V. B. Young describe a place tied to Lexington by stage and to eastern Kentucky by the old Midland Trail, the road that later became U.S. 60.
Like much of Kentucky, Bath split in its loyalties. Local men joined Union outfits such as the 14th Kentucky Cavalry and 45th Kentucky Mounted Infantry. Others slipped into John Hunt Morgan’s Confederate cavalry or into the 8th Kentucky Infantry that produced Bath County native Henry Lane Stone, later author of the memoir Morgan’s Men.
The Civil War Governors of Kentucky collection preserves the anxiety of that moment. In 1861 and 1862 Bath County lawyers and officials wrote Governor Beriah Magoffin from Owingsville about militia companies, divided neighbors, and fears that “Home Guard” units might be turned on political enemies. These early letters show a community already pulled in two directions before the first shots were fired locally.
Guerrillas, Home Guards, and the Raid on Owingsville
By 1863 the official armies did not hold Bath County so much as pass through it. The real power in the countryside often lay with roving bands of partisans. Union officers called them guerrillas. Confederate sympathizers called them scouts and rangers. For civilians they were simply armed men who might knock at the door after dark.
One of the few full length civilian accounts we have comes from Mary Ellen Sudduth of Owingsville. Writing to Union general Quincy Gillmore, she described a local guerrilla leader named Thomas Greenwade and his men as a terror who threatened to hang Union families and boasted that Federal authority meant nothing in the hills around Bath and neighboring Rowan County. Her plea for protection, preserved and analyzed by Marlitta Perkins in Eastern Kentucky and the Civil War, turns abstract talk of “irregular warfare” into something bracingly personal.
The same blog reproduces an account by Bath County jailer John Miller, originally printed in the Lexington Observer and Reporter, of a February 1863 raid on Owingsville by a detachment under Confederate general Humphrey Marshall. He remembered roughly two hundred and fifty Confederates riding into town, emptying stores, seizing horses, and murdering the elder and younger Jenkins along with a paroled Union soldier named Yarber.
Official records rarely dwell on those killings. They list “operations in Bath, Powell, Estill, Clark, Montgomery, and Bourbon Counties, Ky., October 16–25, 1862” and note that Federal expeditions tried to sweep guerrillas away from the approaches to Mount Sterling, but civilians like Sudduth and Miller show how precarious life remained even when the big armies had moved on.
Camp Gill, Mud Lick Springs, and the Springs Front
Long before the war, Mud Lick Springs had been a health resort. Travel writers and physicians described multiple mineral springs, a hotel, and scattered cabins around what locals called Olympian Springs after owner Thomas Hart rebranded the property in the early 1800s. Henry Clay praised the place and early stage routes connected it to Lexington.
Virginia Hunt’s mid twentieth century manuscript history of Bath County, along with Rob Kiskaden’s synthesis “A House Divided: Bath County’s Involvement in the Civil War,” notes that Union forces turned this resort into a military camp called Camp Gill early in the conflict. Troops based there guarded the road network leading from Mount Sterling into eastern Kentucky and supported campaigns such as the 1861 Ivy Mountain expedition.
Official Records volumes for late 1862 and early 1863 fold Bath County into a wide belt of operations aimed at suppressing raids, protecting wagon trains, and watching mountain passes. Union commanders understood that if Confederate raiders could move freely from the Big Sandy or Pound Gap region down the Licking River corridor, they could threaten both Lexington and the vital depots at Mount Sterling.
The springs themselves, with their boarding houses and barns, made a convenient encampment. Soldiers bivouacked in cabins once used by summer visitors, and local memory preserves stories of uniforms drying on porches where fashionable Lexingtonians had once taken the air. Out of that unlikely setting came Bath County’s best remembered Civil War action.
Everett’s Kentucky Raid and the Battle of Mud Lick Springs
In June 1863 a Confederate column under Captain Peter M. Everett rode into eastern Kentucky on what official Union reports call “Everett’s raid into Eastern Kentucky.” The summary of that expedition in the War of the Rebellion notes a sequence of fights between June 13 and June 23, including a skirmish near Mud Lick Springs in Bath County, skirmishing at Howard’s Mills, and a clash at Triplett’s Bridge in Rowan County.
Kiskaden’s article “The Battle of Mud Lick Springs: Bath County’s Civil War Battlefield,” building on Virginia Hunt and local oral tradition, fills in the Bath County part of that story. On June 11 Everett’s men fought a component of the 14th Kentucky Cavalry near Slate Creek on the Bath–Montgomery county line. After several hours of fighting they pushed the Federals back toward Mount Sterling, then turned east toward Preston and Mud Lick.
At Mud Lick Springs Major R. T. Williams of the 14th Kentucky Cavalry had about thirty men camped around the resort. Early accounts and later recollections agree that Everett approached with something like three hundred troopers. They rode along what is now Old State Road, close enough that one Preston resident later remembered cleaning chickens for dinner as the column filed past, a soldier calling back that she should have the birds ready when they returned.
Williams’s detachment had little warning. On June 15 Everett’s force struck the camp. The fight appears to have been short and violent. Kiskaden, drawing on Hunt’s 1947 notes and newspaper coverage in the Louisville Daily Journal, reports that eleven Union soldiers were killed, twelve captured, and five wounded, while several cabins and outbuildings at the resort burned.
The Official Records focus on what happened next. Everett’s command, loaded with prisoners and spoils, moved toward Rowan County. There, at Triplett’s Bridge on June 16, they collided with Colonel John F. De Courcy’s Federals, who killed several men and captured more than one hundred prisoners, bringing Everett’s raid to a bloody end and winning a congratulatory dispatch from Brigadier General Samuel Sturgis.
Today a state historical marker on Kentucky 36, across from the old Mud Lick store, is the only widely recognized battlefield marker in Bath County. It briefly notes a Civil War cavalry battle fought there and gives a date in October 1864, a reminder of how public memory sometimes blurs the lines between different skirmishes around the same landscape.
Ragland Mills and the Guerrilla War of 1864
If Mud Lick Springs shows Bath County’s connection to named raids and formal reports, Ragland Mills shows the quieter side of a guerrilla war that never made the big histories.
Ragland Mills sat on the east end of the county near the border with what is now Menifee County, a small community tied to oil and timber as well as the Licking River. Kiskaden describes it as a place of sawmills, oil wells, and river landings. The entire site now lies beneath the waters of Cave Run Lake.
On January 10, 1864, Colonel John M. Brown of the 45th Kentucky Mounted Infantry, stationed at Mount Sterling, sent a twelve man detachment under Lieutenant Robert Wilson into Bath County “on reconnoitering service.” Captain William P. Anderson, assistant adjutant general, reported that the party heard of roughly thirty five guerrillas encamped at Ragland Mills. At dawn on January 13 Wilson’s men surprised the camp. According to Anderson, they killed at least one enemy fighter and captured fifteen prisoners without losing a man, though they did lose a horse.
Modern battle lists compiled from the Official Records and National Park Service summaries describe the engagement simply as “Skirmish at Ragland Mills, Bath County, Ky., January 13, 1864,” with a detachment of the 45th Kentucky Mounted Infantry striking Confederate guerrillas. Kiskaden’s retelling, based on local tradition, notes that about a third of the guerrilla band was captured and that the rest scattered into the woods and ravines that now lie under impounded water.
The Ragland Mills report is short. It mentions no grand strategy. Yet it reveals how Union officers saw their job late in the war: small detachments riding out from garrisons such as Mount Sterling to knock down camps of irregulars, secure forage, and reassure loyal residents that someone was in charge.
Courthouse Fire and Late War Violence
Bath County’s most visible Civil War scar sits on the public square in Owingsville. Kentucky as a whole lost twenty two county courthouses during the conflict, most to Confederate raids or guerrilla arson. Bath’s courthouse burned in March 1864 while occupied by Union troops, making it one of the rare losses attributed to accident.
Kiskaden, citing local tradition and Virginia Hunt’s narrative, recounts that on March 21 Federal soldiers used the two story wood frame courthouse as temporary barracks. It was a cold night. The men stoked the coal stove hot as they settled in. When news came that Confederate horsemen were on the move toward Owingsville, the soldiers rushed out to meet them. In the confusion the overheated stove overturned. Flames caught the building, and by the time the troops marched back, the courthouse was gone.
The fire destroyed many early county records. Land titles, court cases, and marriage bonds from the first half of the nineteenth century vanished. For genealogists and local historians that accidental blaze has been as destructive as any deliberate burning.
The fighting did not end there. Official summaries list an “operations in Eastern Kentucky, July 25–29, 1864” that included Bath County and note a “Skirmish in Bath County, Ky., March 26” involving the 185th Ohio Infantry during its brief late war duty. Taken together with the guerrilla strikes and foraging expeditions that never made the summary tables, they suggest a countryside where the sound of gunfire never quite faded until the spring of 1865.
After the Guns: Courts, Elections, and Monuments
When the shooting stopped, Bath County still had to untangle the legal and political aftermath. A December 1865 order of the Bath County Court, preserved in the Civil War Governors of Kentucky project, shows local officials trying to re establish routine governance even as they acknowledged that wartime loyalties continued to shape who held office and how juries were chosen.
Other CWGK documents highlight violence that lingered into Reconstruction. On December 23, 1865, Bath County judge Thomas B. Hamilton wrote Governor Thomas Bramlette about the murder of George A. Trumbo and asked the state to offer a reward for the capture of suspects Jesse and David Underwood, framing the killing within a larger pattern of postwar disorder.
In May 1865, circuit clerk V. B. Young wrote fellow judge Richard A. Apperson in neighboring Mount Sterling about Bath County cases and the problem of enforcing law in a community where former Confederates, Union veterans, and suspected guerrillas now had to share the same courtrooms.
Politics remained hot. Rob Kiskaden has traced Bath County’s contested 1865 election, including the Olympian Springs precinct, through legislative journals and depositions that describe intimidation at the polls and arguments over who counted as a loyal voter. In that dispute we see how the same resorts and crossroads that had hosted soldiers now became battlegrounds for who would control postwar Kentucky.
By the early twentieth century a different kind of memory took shape. The United Daughters of the Confederacy chapter in Bath County raised a Confederate monument in the Owingsville Cemetery in 1907, part of a wave of seventy five such memorials across Kentucky. Local history blogs and National Register nominations note that the monument lists Bath County Confederates who died in the war and that it has become a focal point for debates over how the county remembers a deeply divided past.
More recent projects, such as the Bath County Oral History initiative and the work of writers like Virginia Hunt, Marlitta Perkins, and Rob Kiskaden, have tried to balance those commemorations with stories of Unionists such as James L. Sudduth and with civilian voices like Mary Ellen Sudduth, whose letters remind us that loyalty in Bath County could mean living with a target on one’s back.
Why Bath County’s Civil War Still Matters
Bath County never hosted a battle on the scale of Shiloh or Chickamauga. Its Civil War story is instead one of raids, burned buildings, skirmishes at country mills, and politics that kept the war alive long after Appomattox.
Mud Lick Springs and Olympian Springs show how a fashionable resort could become a military target, a place where the same cabins once rented to summer visitors went up in flames during a five minute cavalry fight. Ragland Mills reminds us that a dozen men riding out at dawn could change the balance of power in a valley and, a century later, leave their battlefield beneath a lake. The courthouse fire in Owingsville illustrates how a moment’s mistake could erase decades of legal memory and leave future generations piecing the past together from fragments.
Taken together, Bath County’s experiences echo a broader Kentucky story. Officially neutral, the Commonwealth became a chessboard of railroads, rivers, and saltworks where Union and Confederate forces played out campaigns that rarely make popular histories. For the people who lived between those lines, the war was less about big names and more about which flag rode down Main Street that week.
Standing today at the Olympian Springs marker or on the courthouse square, it is easy to miss the traces. Yet the letters in governors’ files, the terse reports in the Official Records, the memoirs of men like Henry Lane Stone, and the painstaking work of local historians let us hear the echoes of hooves on the pike and the crack of carbines along the Licking. Bath County’s Civil War does not just belong to national history. It belongs to the hills and hollows that still hold its memory.
Sources & Further Reading
War of the Rebellion: Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Series I, vols. 16, 23, 32, and 40. Full text via the Portal to Texas History: https://texashistory.unt.edu/explore/collections/WARR/ The Portal to Texas History
Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition (CWGK), Kentucky Historical Society. Bath County documents and transcripts online at: https://civilwargovernors.org civilwargovernors.org+2history.ky.gov+2
Marlitta H. Perkins, “Civil War in Bath County from a Civilian Perspective” and “The Life and Death of James L. Sudduth,” Eastern Kentucky and the Civil War blog:
https://eakycivilwar.blogspot.com/2022/01/civil-war-in-bath-county-from-civilian.html
https://eakycivilwar.blogspot.com/2022/04/the-life-and-death-of-james-l-sudduth.htmleakycivilwar.blogspot.com+2eakycivilwar.blogspot.com+2
Rob Kiskaden, “A House Divided: Bath County’s Involvement in the Civil War,” My Hometown: Historical Tales of Owingsville and Bath County’s Past:
https://myhometownblog.blogspot.com/2014/10/a-house-divided-bath-countys.htmlmyhometownblog.blogspot.com+1
Rob Kiskaden, “The Battle of Mud Lick Springs: Bath County’s Civil War Battlefield,” Around Town online magazine:
https://aroundtown-news.wixsite.com/newspaper/single-post/2017/05/10/the-battle-of-mud-lick-springs-bath-county-s-civil-war-battlefield aroundtown-news.wixsite.com
Henry Lane Stone, Morgan’s Men: A Narrative of Personal Experiences (Louisville, 1919). Full text at Documenting the American South:
https://www.docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/stone/menu.html Documenting the American South+1
John Adair Richards, An Illustrated History of Bath County, Kentucky (1961); Virginia Hunt, A History of the Civil War in Bath County (Bath County Memorial Library); and Armando Alfaro, The Paper Trail of the Civil War in Kentucky, 1861–65. See Kiskaden’s “A House Divided” for discussion and citations:
https://myhometownblog.blogspot.com/2014/10/a-house-divided-bath-countys.htmlmyhometownblog.blogspot.com+1
Thomas W. Parsons, Incidents and Experiences in the Life of Thomas W. Parsons, from 1826 to 1900, ed. Frank Furlong Mathias (University Press of Kentucky, 1975). Publisher and catalog info at:
https://openlibrary.org/works/OL20303857W/Incidents_and_Experiences_in_the_Life_of_Thomas_W_Parsons_from_1826_to_1900 ebay.com+1