Appalachian History
Clark County never hosted a Shiloh or a Gettysburg. The war here arrived on horseback, in sudden raids, in the rumble of distant cannon, and in petitions scratched out to the governor from Winchester law offices. Cavalry columns splashed through the Kentucky River at Boonesboro, home guards drilled on the courthouse square, and a sixteen year old girl named Mattie Wheeler listened as the Battle of Richmond thundered just over the county line.
By the time the guns fell silent, roughly a thousand Clark Countians had served in blue and gray combined, a number that appears in later compilations like Armando “Al” Alfaro’s Paper Trail of the Civil War in Kentucky and A. Goff Bedford’s county history. The county’s farms, ferries, and roads had become part of a shifting front that stretched from the mountains into the heart of the Bluegrass.
A Divided Bluegrass County
Antebellum Clark County stood at the edge of what Bedford called “Land of Our Fathers,” a Bluegrass county whose original boundaries once reached deep into what later became mountain counties like Harlan, Perry, and Letcher. Hemp, corn, livestock, and enslaved labor tied Clark to the commercial world of Lexington and the Ohio River, even as old migration routes led east toward the hills.
Loyalties followed those crossed paths. The Kentucky National Guard’s summary of the county during the war notes that some one thousand men from Clark served on both sides, a pattern confirmed in cemetery rosters and family histories. The Hanson family became the county’s best known symbol of that split. A highway marker at the Hanson home site in Winchester records that five Hanson brothers went to war, some as Union officers and others as Confederates. Winchester Cemetery’s Civil War soldier list shows Col. Charles S. Hanson of the 20th Kentucky Infantry (US) buried there alongside his brother Samuel K. Hanson, a corporal in the same regiment.
Politics and public order were just as tangled. Documents in the Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition include letters and petitions created at “Winchester, Clark County, Kentucky,” in which local officials described arrests, militia organization, and contested loyalties. From the perspective of Frankfort, Clark was a swing county, its people constantly negotiating between Union occupation, Confederate raids, and the demands of both governments.
Morgan’s First Raid and Winchester, July 1862
The Civil War came dramatically into Clark County on July 19, 1862, when John Hunt Morgan’s cavalry swept across the Bluegrass during his first great Kentucky raid. Alfaro’s Paper Trail compilation notes that Morgan’s column passed through Winchester on that date and destroyed arms stored in the town before riding south toward Richmond. Contemporary Confederate accounts, including Basil W. Duke’s Morgan’s Cavalry, describe the raid’s broader goal: to disrupt Union supply lines, seize horses, and encourage Kentucky’s wavering Confederates.
Local memory filled in the details at the street level. The Clark County Civil War Driving Tour, prepared by Visit Winchester and local historians, places Morgan at Winchester and ties his passage to the social world of families like the Wheelers. At Holly Rood, an early nineteenth century brick house on the edge of town, Caroline Wheeler’s sons and sons in law ended up on opposite sides. A modern article in WinCity Voices notes that one of her sons rode with Morgan while daughters had married Union officers, making her home a microcosm of divided Clark County.
Sixteen year old Mattie Wheeler kept a wartime journal later published in the Filson Club History Quarterly. A twentieth century bibliography of Confederate women’s writings summarizes her diary as the observations of a Winchester girl who wrote about parties, hunting, and church visits while also commenting sharply on the Confederacy’s fortunes and her “hatred of mean Yankee.” Her pages offer a rare civilian view from inside a county repeatedly visited by Confederate horsemen who, in her words, filled the streets and disturbed the usual round of Bluegrass sociability.
“We Heard the Firing of Cannon”: Richmond in the Distance
Only weeks after Morgan’s men clattered through town, Clark County residents heard a far larger fight. On August 29 and 30, 1862, Union and Confederate armies collided at the Battle of Richmond in neighboring Madison County.
The Clark County driving tour uses Mattie Wheeler’s diary to capture what the battle sounded like from Winchester. She recalled hearing cannon early on Saturday morning and listening all day as the roar grew louder, only to see defeated Union troops streaming back along the roads toward the Kentucky River. D. Warren Lambert’s battle study, When the Ripe Pears Fall, supplies the statistics behind those sounds: one of the Confederacy’s most lopsided victories in the western theater, with thousands of Union soldiers captured.
For Clark Countians, Richmond proved how vulnerable the Bluegrass remained. The main battle took place just beyond the county line, but its consequences swept through Winchester streets, on toward the fords and ferries of the Kentucky River.
Cluke’s Raid and the Decision to Fortify the River
In February 1863, Confederate Col. Roy S. Cluke led roughly 750 cavalrymen north from Tennessee into eastern and central Kentucky in what became known as Cluke’s Kentucky Raid. The historical marker “Three Confederate Raids,” placed along the Clark County driving tour route, summarizes his mission as striking at Union posts and disrupting communications around the Kentucky River line. Modern narratives of the raid describe Cluke capturing Mount Sterling, gathering hundreds of prisoners, and roaming the country between the Lexington–Winchester road and the mountains.
Union forces responded with a patchwork of cavalry counteroperations. The service history of the 10th Kentucky Cavalry (US) shows the regiment engaged in “operations against Cluke’s forces” from February 18 to March 5, 1863, including a skirmish at Combs Ferry on February 22. Combs Ferry sits on the Kentucky River in southern Clark County, and that date places Federal horsemen directly on the ground Cluke’s raiders were contesting.
The shock of Cluke’s raid helped push Union engineers toward a more permanent solution. A National Register of Historic Places nomination for the “Civil War fort at Boonesboro” explains that Capt. Thomas B. Brooks, chief engineer for the District of Central Kentucky, proposed a system of earthwork forts at key ferries and fords on the Kentucky River, parallel to existing defenses at railroad bridges. One of those forts rose on a ridge above Boonesboro, in southwestern Clark County.
The Fort at Boonesboro: Watching the Kentucky River
The Boonesboro fort still crowns an 11.5 acre ridge nose above a sweeping bend in the Kentucky River, roughly seven miles southwest of Winchester. The National Register documentation describes two parallel earthen parapet walls and associated ditches, the remains of an enclosed redoubt designed to withstand attack from any direction. From this high ground, a garrison could observe both the ford that gave Boonesboro its name and the ferry just upstream, then contest any Confederate attempt to cross.
Constructed in 1863, the fort formed one of three such works intended to guard major river crossings south of Lexington: Boonesboro, Clay’s Ferry, and Tates Creek. A military road scratched up the steep western face of the ridge carried men, equipment, and artillery to the site, linking the hilltop position to the wagon roads below.
The Boonesboro fort never received an official name in Union records, probably because it did not mount permanent heavy guns or host a large, standing garrison. Yet the very fact that it still exists makes it one of the most tangible Civil War sites in Clark County, a physical reminder of the Union decision to hold the Kentucky River line against future Cluke like raids.
Scott’s Raid and the Skirmish near Winchester, July 1863
Confederate horsemen returned that summer under a different commander. In late July 1863, Col. John S. Scott led elements of the 5th Louisiana Cavalry and allied units through eastern Kentucky in a raid that targeted Union outposts and supply lines. Federal reports grouped the operation as “Scott’s Raid in Eastern Kentucky,” covering activity between July 25 and August 6.
The Official Records of the War of the Rebellion include a specific entry titled “Skirmish near Winchester, Ky., July 29, 1863,” with reports by officers such as Maj. Gen. George L. Hartsuff, Col. William P. Sanders of the 5th Kentucky Cavalry, and Capt. W. P. Gall. Gall’s report places his mixed command of cavalry and mounted infantry pursuing Scott’s rear guard near Winchester and recounts a brief but sharp engagement that drove the Confederates from the field and took prisoners.
Decades later, the fight remained vivid to veterans. The Clark County driving tour cites an account published in the Winchester Sun Sentinel on February 8, 1906, in which John Creed of the 5th Kentucky Cavalry (US) recalled the skirmish as part of Scott’s raid. Creed’s reminiscence, paired with the Official Records, allows historians to reconstruct the July 29 action as a small but telling episode in Clark County’s wartime landscape: Union cavalry dashing out from Winchester, Confederate raiders darting between the Bluegrass roads and the Kentucky River crossings, and local citizens watching carefully to see whose flag flew over the courthouse that day.
Winchester on the Home Front
While cavalry skirmishes drew later attention, the daily strain of war in Clark County appears most clearly in paper trails left by ordinary residents. The Civil War Governors of Kentucky project has identified multiple documents created in Winchester during the war, including correspondence to Gov. Beriah Magoffin and later governors from local citizens, militia officers, and civil authorities.
These documents mention topics such as enforcement of local ordinances, suspected disloyalty, and the difficulties of maintaining public order in a county visited by both Union and Confederate forces. One petition from Winchester in 1864, for example, comes from local residents seeking gubernatorial action in a legal dispute, while another letter by a Winchester citizen references the town newspaper and political tensions.
On the home front, Mattie Wheeler’s diary again offers a window into how Clark Countians lived through the war. Scholars who have surveyed Kentucky women’s Civil War writings describe her as a young Bluegrass belle who chronicled dances and visits alongside news of battles, troop movements, and her own strongly Confederate views. After the war she married Leeland Hathaway, an officer in the 14th Kentucky Cavalry (CSA) whose letters and papers now reside in the University of Kentucky’s Special Collections, a reminder that the same social networks that kept Winchester society humming also linked it to Confederate service across the mountains.
Cemeteries, Markers, and the Long Memory of War
Today, Clark County’s Civil War story is written as much in stone as in ink. Winchester Cemetery maintains a compiled list of “Civil War Soldiers Buried in Winchester Cemetery,” a document available through both the cemetery’s website and genealogical hosts such as Genealogy Trails. The list names dozens of Union and Confederate veterans, along with their ranks, units, cemetery sections, and reference numbers pointing to sources like the 1890 veteran census, pension files, newspaper articles, and Confederate honor roll applications.
The driving tour brochure notes that efforts to identify all Civil War veterans in Winchester Cemetery continue and credits early twentieth century newspaper lists from the Winchester Democrat, Winchester Sun Sentinel, and Winchester Sun as important starting points. Those papers published rosters of soldiers buried there in 1902, 1904, and 1921, threads that modern researchers have woven into a more complete roll of the county’s Civil War dead.
Highway markers around Winchester tie specific sites to wartime stories. One sign near the cemetery summarizes the Hanson brothers’ service for both Union and Confederacy, using their family as an emblem of Kentucky’s divided loyalties. Other markers mention John Hunt Morgan, Cluke’s Kentucky Raid, and the Civil War fort at Boonesboro, turning the county’s roads into a kind of outdoor archive.
For genealogists, these lists and markers provide starting points to trace Clark County soldiers into broader record sets like the National Park Service’s Civil War Soldiers and Sailors database or compiled service records held at the state and federal level. For local residents, they serve as a reminder that the men who rode with Morgan, Scott, and Cluke, or who guarded the Boonesboro fort, came home to lie beneath familiar hills.
Clark County’s Place in Kentucky’s Civil War
Taken together, these sources sketch a portrait of Clark County as a crossroads county in a crossroads state. Its citizens heard the guns at Richmond, watched Morgan’s and Scott’s riders pass through, felt the disruptions of Cluke’s raid, and lived under the shadow of earthworks above the Kentucky River. Diaries and letters like Mattie Wheeler’s and the correspondence preserved by the Civil War Governors of Kentucky project capture the war’s intimate social and political tensions. Official reports, cemetery rolls, and highway markers trace the movement of armies and the long afterlife of memory.
Clark County never saw a great set piece battle, yet the war’s currents flowed constantly through its fields and towns. To walk the Boonesboro fort ridgeline, visit Winchester Cemetery, or stand on the courthouse square where home guards once drilled is to see how a small Bluegrass county experienced the Civil War as a series of raids, rumors, and reckonings along the Kentucky River.
Sources & Further Reading
War of the Rebellion: Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Series I, especially Vol. 23, Part 1, for reports by George L. Hartsuff, William P. Sanders, John S. Scott, and W. P. Gall on operations in eastern Kentucky and the “Skirmish near Winchester, Ky., July 29, 1863.” Civil War
“Journal of Mattie Wheeler: A Blue Grass Belle Reports on the Civil War,” ed. Frances L. S. Dugan, Filson Club History Quarterly 29 (1955): 118–144, discussed in later bibliographies of Civil War diaries. JSTOR+1
Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition, documents created at Winchester, Clark County, Kentucky, including correspondence and petitions dated between 1861 and 1865. Civil War Governors+1
“Civil War Soldiers Buried in Winchester Cemetery,” compiled roster hosted by Winchester Cemetery and Genealogy Trails, with references to newspaper lists, census schedules, and pension files. Genealogy Trails+1
National Park Service, “Civil War Fort at Boonesboro,” National Register of Historic Places nomination (2003), describing the fort’s construction in 1863 and its role guarding the Boonesboro ford and ferry on the Kentucky River. NPGallery
Clark County Civil War Driving Tour, Visit Winchester / Clark County Tourism Commission, brochure integrating battle narratives, diary excerpts, and site descriptions for locations like Holly Rood, John Creed’s grave, the Boonesboro fort, and Winchester Cemetery. Visit Winchester+2Visit Winchester+2
Armando “Al” Alfaro, The Paper Trail of the Civil War in Kentucky, 1861–1865, Kentucky National Guard History program, including a Clark County summary that notes approximately 1,000 local men in both armies and Morgan’s 1862 raid through Winchester. Ky National Guard History+1
Kathryn Owen, Civil War Days in Clark County, Kentucky (Winchester, 1963), Old Graveyards of Clark County, Kentucky (Polyanthos, 1975), and related work on county homes and landmarks, frequently cited in National Register nominations and local compilations. JSTOR+1
A. Goff Bedford, Land of Our Fathers: History of Clark County, Kentucky, Volume 1 (1958), a foundational county history that situates Clark’s Civil War experience within its broader settlement and institutional development. familysearch.org+1
Bennett H. Young, Confederate Wizards of the Saddle (1914), which includes an account of Cluke’s Kentucky Raid and places Clark County’s raids in the wider pattern of Confederate cavalry operations. Log College Press+1
Historical markers documented by the Historical Marker Database and ExploreKYHistory, including “Three Confederate Raids,” “Defending the Kentucky River,” and “Hanson Home Site,” which interpret Cluke’s raid, the Boonesboro fort, and the Hanson family’s divided service. HMDB+2HMDB+2