Appalachian History
“Bloody Breathitt” Before It Had A Name
On a cold November day in 1864, about twenty Kentucky militiamen rode along the Middle Fork of the Kentucky River in Breathitt County. Somewhere near the water, they met a band of twenty five mounted Confederates under a young lieutenant named Jerry W. South Jr. Within minutes, one militiaman was dead and six more were mortally wounded. The Confederates vanished up the creek, leaving the survivors to carry the wounded back through the mountains. A few days later, South himself would be shot and captured on a Breathitt County stream called Holly Creek.
Later generations remembered Breathitt County for its feuds and courthouse gunfights, which earned the county the grim nickname “Bloody Breathitt.” Modern scholarship argues that the habits of violence that haunted the county well into the twentieth century did not start with those feuds. They grew out of a Civil War fought as much in hollows, ferries, and home places as on battlefields, and in Breathitt that war looked less like ordered lines of blue and gray and more like an extended season of raids, reprisals, and guerrilla skirmishes.
This article looks at the best documented Civil War actions in and around Breathitt County. Some were formal skirmishes reported in the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion. Others appeared in brief newspaper paragraphs, pension files, and county memoirs. Together they sketch a picture of a mountain county where the war never quite stayed within the lines of conventional history.
A Mountain County On A Divided Border
Antebellum maps show Breathitt County as a highland district centered on the “Three Forks” region where the North, Middle, and South Forks of the Kentucky River converge. Little towns like Jackson, Crockettsville, Noble, and Clayhole cling to the streams. Troublesome Creek flows down from what is now Knott County to meet the North Fork near the present community of Haddix.
Breathitt had relatively few enslaved people compared to the Bluegrass counties, yet its white residents were divided in their politics and loyalties. Some families had kin and commercial ties to Unionist strongholds in the upper Kentucky River valley and to federalist politicians in Frankfort. Others leaned toward the Confederacy, sent sons into southern regiments, or at least sympathized with them when Union forces occupied the state. Historians of the region argue that this mix of divided neighborhoods, weak state authority, and difficult terrain made eastern Kentucky a natural home for guerrilla warfare and local vendettas.
In that context, even seemingly minor clashes take on outsized importance. For Breathitt, the documentary trail begins not in the county seat of Jackson, but far downriver and far to the west.
Haddix’s Ferry And The River War
In the summer of 1864 Union commanders in western Kentucky worried about Confederate guerrillas firing on boats and harassing Unionist citizens along the Tennessee River. To deal with the problem, Major John H. Peck of the 132nd Illinois Infantry led an expedition by steamboat from Paducah to a place known in the official paperwork as Haddix’s Ferry, with a mixed force of Illinois infantry and the 8th United States Colored Heavy Artillery.
The 8th United States Colored Heavy Artillery was the first African American heavy artillery regiment raised in Kentucky. Organized at Paducah in 1864, it performed garrison duty there through the end of the war and earned a reputation for stubborn defense during the Confederate attack on Fort Anderson that spring. Its official service summary records “Expedition from Paducah, Ky., to Haddix Ferry July 26–27, 1864” and a “Skirmish near Haddix Ferry August 27, 1864.”
Peck’s report in the Official Records describes moving up the Tennessee River, landing near Haddix’s Ferry, and pursuing a band of guerrillas inland, killing some, wounding others, and bringing prisoners back to Paducah. The campaign books for that volume summarize the event simply as “Expedition from Paducah to Haddix’s Ferry, Ky., and skirmish.”
Modern reference works and Civil War battlefield lists place this Haddix’s Ferry on the Tennessee River below Aurora in Marshall County and class the expedition and skirmish as part of a wider pattern of river operations in western Kentucky.
So why mention it in a history of Breathitt County. Partly because this is one of the few actions where “Haddix’s Ferry” appears by name in Civil War records, and later genealogists and enthusiasts sometimes assumed the river site must be connected to the later community of Haddix on the North Fork of the Kentucky River near Jackson. The better documented evidence ties the Civil War fighting at Haddix’s Ferry to western Kentucky. Yet for families in Breathitt County who later took the Haddix name into local landmarks like the Haddix Hotel in Jackson, the overlap of names hints at how a national war and a local landscape could blur together in memory.
In Breathitt itself, the war would come more directly in the form of mounted guerrillas and state militia companies hunting one another through the forks of the Kentucky.
Guerrillas On The Middle Fork
The most clearly documented Civil War action inside Breathitt County took place on the Middle Fork of the Kentucky River near the end of 1864.
A report first printed in the Louisville Journal and later reprinted in other papers told readers about a “desperate and bloody encounter” between state militia and a band of Confederate guerrillas in Breathitt County on 7 November 1864.
According to that account, Lieutenant Jerry W. South Jr. led about twenty five Confederate guerrillas or “recruits” who struck a party of twenty Kentucky state militia on the Middle Fork. The guerrillas apparently surprised the militiamen, killed one on the spot, and wounded six others so badly that they were not expected to live. South’s party then rode out of Breathitt County, raided the town of Proctor in neighboring Owsley County, and moved on to Compton in Wolfe County before turning back toward the Breathitt hills.
The story did not end there. Captain J. A. Stamper, commanding a company of militia in the region, gathered his men and set off in pursuit. Over the next several days his command chased South’s raiders through the mountains, catching up with them first near Compton and then in the rough country where Wolfe, Owsley, and Breathitt meet. The chase finally ended on Holly Creek in Breathitt County.
Holly Creek, 11 November 1864
Two separate sources, written in different times and places, record what happened at Holly Creek.
A wartime “Calendar of Events for 1864,” later incorporated into Collins’s Historical Sketches of Kentucky, noted that Kentucky militia defeated “a party of Confederate recruits under Lieut. Jerry W. South, jr., wounding and taking prisoner the latter, on Holly creek, Breathitt co.”
Decades later, the official Military History of Kentucky prepared by the Kentucky National Guard summarized the same event with slightly different wording and a slightly garbled name. It reported that on Holly Creek in Breathitt County on 11 November a party of Confederate recruits under Lieutenant J. W. Smith Jr. encountered Captain J. A. Stamper’s company of home guards and that the Confederate officer was seriously wounded and captured. Most scholars agree that “Smith” here is a mistaken rendering of South.
Taken together, the newspaper story and the militia chronicle confirm that a real, documented skirmish took place on Holly Creek in Breathitt County on 11 November 1864, ending with the wounding and capture of Lieutenant Jerry South.
For residents of Breathitt, this kind of fight was far more typical than the grand battles commemorated on battlefield parks. Two dozen mounted men, state militia rather than regulars, clashed with a similarly sized band of Confederate recruits in a narrow valley. The immediate stakes were local control and personal survival. The long term result was another entry in a growing list of men who had to answer for their Civil War actions in the years that followed.
State Troops, Home Guards, And The Three Forks Battalion
By 1864 Kentucky’s regular volunteer regiments were stretched thin by service outside the state. To protect the home front and combat guerrillas, the legislature authorized the governor to organize Kentucky State Troops, locally raised units often called home guards.
One of the most important of these forces in the upper Kentucky River region was the Three Forks Battalion. The Civil War Governors of Kentucky project describes it as a state troops battalion raised under the 1864 act, headquartered at Booneville, and assigned to the “extreme southeastern portion of the state.” It served from 1864 until July 1865 under Major Elisha B. Treadway.
The battalion’s companies drew heavily from Owsley, Breathitt, Perry, and neighboring counties. In April 1864, for example, a company of about forty local men at Booneville drove off a reported force of roughly seventy five pro Confederate guerrillas, an early sign of how intense the fighting could become between home guards and irregulars. Later chronologies of the Three Forks Battalion, based on Adjutant General’s reports and newspaper letters, feature repeated references to chasing guerrilla parties through Harlan, Perry, Breathitt, and Letcher Counties. In one postwar report, Treadway admitted that even after extended operations they had not yet put down all the guerrillas in those mountain counties.
For people on the ground, these home guards were both shield and sword. As T. R. C. Hutton notes in his study of the county, no group better captured Kentucky’s disjointed Civil War experience than the home guards, a term that evolved into what one contemporary called an epithet for brutality toward civilians.
In Breathitt County, that brutality showed up in burned homes and nighttime killings that did not always make it into official war records.
Killings At Home: Noble, Davis, South, Hollon, And Others
The best single window into Breathitt’s wartime killings is a long letter printed in the Weekly Kentucky Yeoman on 7 January 1879. The writer, concerned that official histories had overlooked what happened in the mountains, listed a grim roll of men killed in Breathitt County during the war and its immediate aftermath and stressed that “all these were private citizens when killed.” Later county historians have repeatedly mined that list to reconstruct local casualties and to connect names on stones to specific incidents along the forks of the Kentucky.
Modern compilations of Civil War events in eastern Kentucky link many of those deaths to George Washington Noble, a Breathitt Countian who survived the war and later wrote an autobiographical religious treatise titled Behold He Cometh in the Clouds. Noble’s story, published in 1912, mixes theology, local lore, and detailed recollections of wartime raids and killings in Breathitt and surrounding counties and it has become a key source for genealogists tracing family stories from the era.
Drawing on Noble, the Adjutant General’s reports, and the 1879 letter, the “Eastern Kentucky Mountains 1861–1865” project reconstructs a partial roster of Breathitt casualties. Among the better known cases are the killing of George Washington Noble on Barge Branch in October 1862 by Captain Bill Strong’s men of the 14th Kentucky Cavalry, the deaths of Robert Pleasant Davis and Andrew Jackson South at Davis’s house on the South Fork of Quicksand Creek in January 1865, and the killing of Ambrose Hollon a few weeks later, all at the hands of home guards or Unionist guerrillas.
These deaths, like the Middle Fork and Holly Creek fights, took place in out of the way hollows and creek bottoms. Several of the men were rumored to have Confederate ties or to have harbored southern partisans, but the surviving sources usually present them as local citizens rather than uniformed soldiers. Genealogists tracking these stories through Noble’s book, pension files, and family records find that the scars persisted long after the last shot was fired. Families remembered not only that their ancestor had been killed, but who had commanded the squad that did it and which side those officers had served.
“Pete Everett Burnt My House”
In addition to the killings, Breathitt Countians also lived with the loss of homes and property. One of the most vivid recollections comes from William Landsaw Hurst, a Jackson merchant whose life story was recorded in a nineteenth century biographical sketch and in the late nineteenth century diaries of Rev. John Jay Dickey.
Hurst recalled that during the war “Pete Everett burnt my house where the Haddix Hotel now stands” in Jackson. After that, he said, he did not return to Breathitt to live once the war began. Eastern Kentucky Civil War researchers date the burning of Hurst’s house to the war years and attribute it to Captain Pete Everett’s Unionist command, which treated Hurst as a southern sympathizer.
Hurst’s burned home later became the site of the Haddix Hotel, a boarding house that served railroad workers and travelers in early twentieth century Jackson. The physical landscape thus carried layered memories: a wartime act of arson by a Union captain, a postwar business that helped fuel Jackson’s boom years, and later a decaying building that symbolized the county’s economic decline. All of those stories were linked in local tradition to the same patch of ground.
Breathitt’s War In A Wider Appalachian Context
Breathitt County’s Civil War story does not stand alone. Historians who study the mountain South emphasize that wartime violence in places like eastern Kentucky, southwestern Virginia, and East Tennessee took distinctive forms. Rather than a single front line, the region saw overlapping conflicts between Union and Confederate regulars, state troops, home guards, and independent guerrilla bands.
Brian McKnight’s Contested Borderland describes eastern Kentucky as a zone where the reach of both governments was thin and loyalty often shifted from hollow to hollow. James Pritchard’s work on postwar violence in northeastern Kentucky shows how former guerrillas and home guards carried their grudges into Reconstruction and beyond. Both studies reinforce the notion that mountain counties like Breathitt remained “lingering war zones” long after formal surrender.
T. R. C. Hutton’s Bloody Breathitt brings that larger scholarship home, arguing that the violence which later made Breathitt famous for feuds emerged from Civil War era struggles over land, politics, and local authority. The book follows former Union and Confederate officers as they repurposed wartime networks into courthouse factions, local machine politics, and sometimes outright gang warfare. A recent wave of reviews and interviews with Hutton emphasizes how his work challenges the stereotype of eastern Kentucky violence as “purely” family feud, instead tying it back to the organized and semi organized violence of the 1860s.
Seen this way, the skirmish on Holly Creek and the killings on Barge Branch and Quicksand were not isolated incidents. They were part of a longer story in which the forms of violence that the Civil War made temporarily acceptable became, in some communities, a permanent part of political and family life.
Remembering A Local Civil War
Unlike Perry County’s Battle of Leatherwood or Laurel County’s Camp Wildcat, Breathitt County has no large, named battlefield park to mark its Civil War experience. No national map of major engagements lists Jackson, the Three Forks, or the Middle Fork as key sites in 1862 or 1863.
Yet the sources we do have show that the war came to Breathitt in other ways. It arrived in the form of state militia companies headquartered at Booneville and patrolling the hollows, guerrilla parties under men like Jerry South, home guards under captains such as J. A. Stamper and Bill Strong, and civilians who found themselves forced to choose sides when riders appeared at their door.
For local historians and family researchers, primary sources like the Official Records, the 1864 calendar of events, the Louisville Journal report on the Middle Fork fight, the Weekly Kentucky Yeoman letter of 1879, George Washington Noble’s autobiography, and the John Jay Dickey diaries offer a starting point for tracing particular ancestors and localities. At the same time, modern works by Hutton, McKnight, Pritchard, and others help place Breathitt’s story inside the wider history of the Appalachian borderland.
Walk along the North Fork near Haddix, where Troublesome Creek flows in, and the water seems far removed from the old quarrels of 1864. The names on the mailboxes and the ridges around you still echo the families, officers, and guerrillas whose choices made “Bloody Breathitt” part of the larger tale of the American Civil War.
Sources & Further Reading
War of the Rebellion: Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Series I, Volume 39, Part 1, especially the report of Maj. John H. Peck on the “Expedition from Paducah to Haddix Ferry, Ky., July 26–27, 1864,” and related correspondence on river operations and guerrilla suppression in Kentucky. CivilWar.com+1
U. S. War Department, Report of the Adjutant General of the State of Kentucky (multi volume, 1861–1865), for rosters of units such as the 14th Kentucky Cavalry (U.S.), Confederate regiments raised from Breathitt, and casualty notes later mined by local chronologies. Geocities+1
“Militia defeat a party of Confederate recruits under Lieut. Jerry W. South, jr., wounding and taking prisoner the latter, on Holly creek, Breathitt Co.,” entry in a contemporary “Calendar of Events, 1864.” Cincinnati Digital Library
Louisville Journal report on the November 7, 1864 attack by Jerry South’s guerrillas on state militia at the Middle Fork of the Kentucky River, reprinted in the Philadelphia Inquirer and preserved through later transcriptions. eakycivilwar.blogspot.com+1
Letter printed in the Weekly Kentucky Yeoman (Frankfort), 7 January 1879, cataloguing wartime and postwar killings in Breathitt County and stressing that “all these were private citizens when killed,” widely cited in modern Eastern Kentucky Civil War chronologies. eakycivilwar.blogspot.com+1
George Washington Noble, Behold He Cometh in the Clouds: A Religious Treatise from Inspiration and Illumination (Louisville, 1912), whose autobiographical passages describe wartime events in Breathitt and neighboring counties that later genealogists tied to specific killings. Google Books+2Find a Grave+2
William L. Hurst biographical sketch and related excerpts in the John Jay Dickey diaries, recounting that “Pete Everett burnt my house where the Haddix Hotel now stands” in Jackson, Breathitt County. RootsWeb+2eakycivilwar.blogspot.com+2
“Three Forks Battalion” entry in the Civil War Governors of Kentucky project, and the Adjutant General’s discussion of “State Troops Proper,” both of which summarize the formation and deployment of the Kentucky State Troops in the Three Forks region. eakycivilwar.blogspot.com+3From The Page+3test.discovery.civilwargovernors.org+3
House Divided Project and MyGenealogyHound map reproductions of Breathitt County in 1857 and 1905, useful for locating Civil War era place names such as Troublesome, Lost Creek, Quicksand, and Jackson.
National Park Service battle unit history for the 8th U. S. Colored Heavy Artillery, noting garrison duty at Paducah, the expedition from Paducah to Haddix Ferry, and the skirmish near Haddix Ferry, July and August 1864. National Park Service+2General Staff+2
Dyer’s Compendium of the War of the Rebellion and modern compilations of Kentucky Civil War engagements that list “Expedition from Paducah to Haddix Ferry” and “Skirmish near Haddix Ferry” among 1864 operations. Carolana+1
“Eastern Kentucky and the Civil War” blog and related county chronologies, which aggregate material on the Middle Fork fight, the Holly Creek skirmish, the killings of George Washington Noble, Robert Pleasant Davis, Andrew Jackson South, Ambrose Hollon, and the burning of William L. Hurst’s house. eakycivilwar.blogspot.com+4eakycivilwar.blogspot.com+4eakycivilwar.blogspot.com+4
T. R. C. Hutton, Bloody Breathitt: Politics and Violence in the Appalachian South (University Press of Kentucky, 2013) and subsequent interviews and reviews, which trace the county’s violent reputation from the Civil War era through the early twentieth century. The University Press of Kentucky+2ResearchGate+2
Brian D. McKnight, Contested Borderland: The Civil War in Appalachian Kentucky and Virginia (University Press of Kentucky, 2006), for broader context on guerrilla warfare and divided loyalties in the mountain border region. Internet Archive+1
James M. Pritchard, “Lingering War Zone: Post Civil War Violence in Northeastern Kentucky” (M.A. thesis, 2014), which connects wartime guerrilla fighting and home guard activity to Reconstruction era violence in counties including Breathitt. The Filson Historical Society+1
Essays on the Civil War era in Appalachia published through the Essential Civil War Curriculum project, which situate eastern Kentucky within a wider pattern of guerrilla warfare, home guard activity, and localized conflicts across the southern mountains. Essential Civil War Curriculum+1