Appalachian History
Clay County does not appear on lists of famous Civil War battlefields. There was no great set piece fight at Manchester, no endless lines of blue and gray charging across open fields. Instead, Clay County’s war centered on something far more basic and far more valuable than glory. It centered on salt.
From 1861 to 1865, the Goose Creek salt works near Manchester drew armies, raiders, guerrillas, politicians, and federal claims lawyers into the same narrow valley. The Official Records of the war list only a handful of actions in the county: a September 1861 expedition from Cumberland Ford to Clay County, a skirmish at Manchester on October 14 1862, and the destruction of the Goose Creek Salt Works on October 23 to 24 1862.
Those dry entries hide a richer story. Clay County’s Civil War unfolded in three overlapping dramas. The first was the rise of a salt based economy that made Goose Creek one of the most important industrial sites in eastern Kentucky. The second was the arrival of war in 1861 and 1862, when Confederate raiders and then Union columns fought over the works and finally destroyed them. The third was the long legal and political struggle, stretching into the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to decide whether the federal government owed the salt makers a dollar for what its soldiers had burned.
Salt, settlement, and power on Goose Creek
The Civil War did not create the Goose Creek salt industry. It attacked something that was already at the center of Clay County life.
By the time Clay County was formed in 1807, the first settlement in the county had grown up around the Langford Salt Works at Goose Creek. When the legislature created the county, it ordered the new courts to meet in Robert Baker’s cabin at the works until a formal town could be laid out. For several months the salt village itself served as the county seat.
Early state laws show how important the industry had become. In 1810 the Kentucky General Assembly ordered a road built from the Goose Creek salt works to Hale’s place on the Wilderness Road so that producers could reach wider markets. The Filson Club’s classic studies of Kentucky salt describe Goose Creek and nearby licks as among the state’s key producers in the early nineteenth century, with special legislative favors meant to help owners move brine and secure wood for their furnaces.
Local histories fill in the human side. Clay County’s historical society notes that families like the Langfords, Whites, Garrards, Bates, Clark, and others controlled a cluster of works along Goose Creek and its forks. The Garrards in particular built their wealth and influence on salt. Daniel Garrard established his works at Buffalo Lick in 1806, and by mid century the family’s operation near Manchester had become large enough that national reference works still know the area simply as “the Goose Creek Salt Works” or “Union Salt Works.”
That prosperity rested on coerced labor. At Goose Creek, enslaved people felled timber, fired the furnaces, hauled brine, and lived in tightly packed quarters near the wells. The Clay County Historical Society’s interpretation at the Goose Creek Salt Works Pioneer Village includes reconstructed “quarters of slaves who made the salt,” while local research notes that by 1850 the Garrard operation employed a small number of free workers but held several dozen enslaved people.
By 1860 the Garrards still produced about five thousand dollars worth of salt per year at Goose Creek, but competition from other sources had begun to nibble at their profits. The works remained valuable enough, however, that Daniel Garrard’s son Theophilus Toulmin Garrard grew up at Goose Creek, inherited both the business and the family’s political standing, and entered the Civil War as a prominent Unionist, slave owner, and future general who always referred to the salt works as home.
Neutral Kentucky, restless Clay
When the Civil War began in 1861 Kentucky tried to hold a fragile neutrality. Clay County did not.
Eastern Kentucky produced some of the state’s most outspoken Unionists. Men like Theophilus T. Garrard, whose family wealth depended on commerce with the wider national market, had little interest in breaking with the federal government. Howard Muncy’s study of Unionism in southeastern Kentucky notes that Clay County and its neighbors sent thousands of men into Union regiments, often well before the state’s political leaders abandoned neutrality.
Yet neutrality on paper did not keep either side away from Goose Creek. The salt works sat near the head of the Cumberland Gap corridor, on roads that connected the mountain country with Barbourville, London, and the main routes into central Kentucky. Both Union and Confederate commanders recognized the works as a strategic prize.
Official Records correspondence from late summer 1861 shows Confederate Brigadier General Felix K. Zollicoffer pushing north from the Cumberland Gap line and placing detachments along the approaches to eastern Kentucky towns. The National Park Service’s battle chronology for the state lists an “Expedition from Cumberland Ford to Clay County” and a skirmish at Laurel Creek in late September 1861, tied to this first Confederate offensive into the mountains.
Within days of the fight at Barbourville on September 19, Zollicoffer’s men turned their attention to Clay County’s salt.
Zollicoffer’s raid on Goose Creek
On September 27 1861 a Confederate detachment struck the Goose Creek Salt Works. According to later summaries based on Zollicoffer’s own report, the raiders loaded their wagons with two hundred barrels of salt, tore down the United States flag flying over the works, and ran up their own colors.
Zollicoffer observed that the works “belong to Lincoln men” but stated that he had the salt receipted with the expectation that the Confederate government would someday pay for it at the local price of forty cents per bushel.The raiders also scattered Home Guard units at sites like Laurel Bridge, then withdrew back toward the Cumberland Ford line once their reconnaissance in force had run its course.
This raid, and the expedition from Cumberland Ford that followed, mark the first clearly documented Civil War actions in Clay County. While there was no major battle around Manchester, the area had already become part of the same campaign that produced the early fights at Barbourville and Camp Wildcat.
For Clay Countians, the raid offered an early taste of what the war would bring. The salt that fed families and paid debts could be seized in a day. The flags over the works might change with the next column that marched down the creek.
“Skirmish at Manchester”
The period between Zollicoffer’s raid and the fall of 1862 brought more strain than set piece fighting to Clay County. Union regiments raised in the region moved on to the larger campaigns of the western theater, while the county itself experienced the familiar mountain mix of recruiting, conscription, guerrilla activity, and harassment by irregular bands and raiding parties.
The official record for the county’s next named engagement appears in the same place as Perryville. In the list of operations for the Kentucky campaign of 1862, the Official Records entry for October includes an item for October 14 1862: “Skirmish at Manchester, Ky.”
The skirmish fell during the pursuit of Confederate forces from Perryville toward London and the Cumberland Gap. Although the surviving reports are brief, they mark Manchester as a waypoint on a moving front. Union troops passing through Clay County harried retreating Confederate forces and secured important crossroads and depots. The town, which had been a sleepy seat for a salt dominated county government before the war, now saw armed columns and couriers filling its dusty streets.
The destruction of the Goose Creek salt works
Nine days after the skirmish at Manchester, Union authorities made their most consequential decision about Clay County. Rather than simply garrison the salt works, they chose to destroy them.
The chronological list at the front of Official Records, series I, volume 16, records the action in one plain line: “October 23 to 24, 1862. Destruction of Goose Creek Salt-Works, near Manchester, Ky.” The battle list on the National Park Service’s Civil War pages repeats the entry and treats it as a distinct operation of the Perryville campaign.
The narrative emerges when those official entries are compared with later federal investigations. After the war, the United States Congress considered multiple claims by “T. T. Garrard and others” for compensation for the burning of the works. To evaluate those claims, the War Department appointed Louisville lawyer William P. Thomasson to travel to Goose Creek in 1863, hear testimony, and determine the value of what Union troops had destroyed.
Thomasson’s report, reprinted in congressional documents, confirms several key details. He quotes from orders issued by Major General Don Carlos Buell in October 1862 directing that the salt works near Manchester be destroyed so that Confederate forces could not use them. He notes that Brigadier General Craft commanded the Twenty second Brigade that carried out the operation, and that Craft’s own report described the destruction of five separate salt works in the Goose Creek valley.
Those five works were:
Garrard’s works on the main fork of Goose Creek, about two miles from Manchester.
Several works on Collins Fork, three miles from town, owned by James W. Reid, the firm of White, Horton and Garrard, and other local partners.
Craft reported that roughly five hundred men labored for thirty six hours to disable pumps, ruin wells, tear down furnaces, and destroy salt on hand. Later summaries based on his report and on local memory repeat those figures and add that about thirty thousand bushels of salt were destroyed along with the works.
Thomasson was not charged with judging the military wisdom of the decision. He was ordered to assign dollar values. In the case of Theophilus T. Garrard’s own works, he allowed five hundred dollars for damage to the well and machinery, forty nine dollars and sixty cents for destroyed barrels, three thousand one hundred and fifty dollars for 6,300 bushels of salt, and another five hundred dollars for deterioration of the furnace during idleness. He then added an anticipated yield of 19,200 bushels of salt for the eight months after the destruction, worth another 9,600 dollars, bringing Garrard’s total claim to 13,799 dollars and sixty cents.
Across all owners, Thomasson concluded that damage to wells, pipes, and furnaces totaled about 7,149 dollars and sixty cents, with salt destroyed valued at 15,150 dollars. This does not count the future profits he projected the works would have earned. In a county where salt had once drawn in merchants from as far away as the Ohio Valley, those figures hint at both the economic scale of Goose Creek and the devastation that followed a single federal order.
The destruction operation itself wove together loyalty and coercion in complicated ways. Later Kentucky marker texts, drawing on the official reports, note that although most of the owners were Union men, Confederate forces had repeatedly carried off salt from the works. During the demolition, loyal citizens were allowed to remove as much salt as they could haul if they would take an oath, while anything that could not be carried away was destroyed.
Clay County’s Unionist salt makers thus found their property wrecked by their own side in a calculated sacrifice. Confederate raiders had already taken what they could from Goose Creek. Union columns finished the job in order to deny the resource to the enemy altogether.
Clay County militias, guerrillas, and everyday war
Salt may have brought national attention to Clay County, but the war people experienced on the ground involved more than raids and demolition parties.
Documents collected in the Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition show how state officials tried to impose some sort of military order on the county. One entry for the “Clay County Enrolled Militia” describes it as an organization of “all eligible white men between the ages of eighteen and forty five living in Clay County, Kentucky,” reorganized by the General Assembly in March 1860. Like similar militia schemes across the state, this system sought to put every able bodied white man on paper as part of the commonwealth’s reserve forces.
In practice, many of those men were already caught between competing demands. Some joined Union regiments like the 7th Kentucky Infantry or other Federal units that passed through the region. Others drifted into Confederate service or irregular bands. Still others tried to walk a line between avoiding enlistment and avoiding trouble from whichever side currently held the courthouse.
Records from the Civil War Governors project show that county officials in Manchester struggled with law and order under these conditions. Petitions, court cases, and correspondence from Clay County complain about local feuds, cattle theft, draft resistance, and guerrilla attacks that blurred the line between politics and personal grudges. In that environment, the same salt money that had once funded stores and mansions could become one more thing worth stealing or burning.
The Garrards’ war and the road back
No figure ties together Clay County’s salt, politics, and military story more closely than Theophilus Toulmin Garrard.
Born at the Goose Creek Salt Works in 1812, Garrard grew up in a family that combined political influence with industrial wealth and slave ownership. He served in the Mexican War, returned to Clay County, and entered state politics as a legislator and senator. When the Civil War came, he raised the 7th Kentucky Infantry (United States) with a heavy recruitment base in Clay and neighboring mountain counties.
As colonel, and later as a Union brigadier general, Garrard took part in the early eastern Kentucky operations that followed Zollicoffer’s incursion, including the defense of Camp Wildcat and the broader contest for control of the mountain roads. In his later reminiscences he described Goose Creek and the salt works not only as a business but as the center of a community that had staked its fortunes on the Union.
The destruction of the salt works in October 1862 complicated that identity. Thomasson’s report and later congressional debates carefully examined the loyalty of each claimant. Witnesses testified that most of the owners, including Theophilus and his brother James, were solidly Union, though their elderly father Daniel “took no pains to conceal his southern proclivities.” The family’s property, at least for a time, had become a military asset to both sides and a legitimate target under Buell’s orders.
After the war, Theophilus T. Garrard returned to Clay County and rebuilt his business as the Union Salt Works. He spent the rest of his life farming and operating salt wells on Goose Creek, dying in 1902 in the same house where he had been born.
His heirs and fellow owners spent even longer trying to obtain compensation from the federal government.
“One of the casualties of war”: the long fight in Congress
Thomasson’s 1863 report did not end the Goose Creek story. It began a new one on paper.
During the 1870s Congress considered multiple bills “for the relief of those suffering from the destruction of the salt works near Manchester, Kentucky, pursuant to the orders of Major General Carlos Buell.” The House Committee on Claims and the Senate Committee on Claims issued reports summarizing Thomasson’s findings, the testimony of local witnesses, and the arguments for and against paying the owners.
In January 1873 President Ulysses S. Grant vetoed one such bill. In a message recorded in the Senate Journal, he argued that the destruction of the Goose Creek salt works, while “perhaps as disastrous to the rebels as would have been a victory in battle,” was nevertheless a legitimate act of war, not a taking of private property that required compensation under the Constitution. Grant warned that paying Garrard and his partners would open the National Treasury to every property owner whose buildings or goods had been destroyed by Union forces.
Congress overrode neither his veto nor his logic. Later generations of Garrards returned to court under new statutes that allowed certain war claims to be heard by the Court of Claims. A twentieth century decision again reviewed the events at Goose Creek, the values Thomasson had assigned, and the loyalty of Theophilus T. Garrard, ultimately awarding a smaller sum than first sought for the salt destroyed and damage done.
For Clay County, these legal paper trails do more than recount dollars. They preserve detailed descriptions of each salt furnace, each well, each brine pump, and how many barrels of salt stood on the ground as Union soldiers moved through the valley in October 1862. They transform a brief line in the Official Records into a rich economic and social history of one Appalachian community at war.
Memory, markers, and the landscape today
Today the most visible reminders of this history stand not in Washington’s record rooms but on the banks of Goose Creek.
At the Goose Creek Salt Works Pioneer Village near Manchester, interpretive signs and reconstructed log buildings tell visitors that “the first settlement in Clay County was at the site of the Langford Salt Works” and that the surrounding cabins include not only merchants’ stores but slave quarters and early homes of Manchester. The layout of the site, tucked between highway and creek, hints at the cramped industrial village that once handled thousands of bushels of salt each year.
Highway markers and local panels interpret the destruction of the works in 1862 as part of the Union effort to prevent Confederate access to the resource. They emphasize that most of the owners were loyal Union men, that the 22nd United States Brigade carried out the burning, and that the operation required hundreds of soldiers laboring for a day and a half to complete.
In Manchester itself, heritage projects and walking tours connect visitors to the broader Clay County Civil War story. They link the salt works to stories of Home Guard units, Union recruiting, guerrilla violence, and the lives of individual Clay Countians whose names appear in the Civil War Governors of Kentucky documents and in pension files scattered across National Archives microfilm.
Seen from Goose Creek, Clay County’s Civil War looks less like an isolated mountain backwater and more like a crossroads. Armies passed through on their way to more famous battlefields. Raiding parties seized or destroyed a commodity that fed soldiers and civilians alike. Congress and the War Department argued for decades over what it meant to burn the property of Unionist slave owners in order to weaken a rebellion they opposed.
The story of Clay County is not just the story of a skirmish at Manchester or the explosion of salt wells in 1862. It is the story of how a place built on a single resource found itself pulled into the center of national conflict, how its people chose sides, and how the struggle over that resource continued long after the smoke cleared from the furnaces on Goose Creek.
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, Volume 4 and Volume 16. Entries and reports on the expedition from Cumberland Ford to Clay County, the skirmish at Manchester, and the destruction of the Goose Creek Salt Works.The Portal to Texas History+1
United States War Department. The War of the Rebellion, Series I, Volume 52, Part 2. Confederate correspondence from the Department of East Tennessee referencing companies posted at “Goose Creek Salt-Works, near Manchester.”The Portal to Texas History+1
U.S. Congress, House Committee on Claims. “T. T. Garrard and Others.” Serial Set reports summarizing William P. Thomasson’s investigation into the value of the Goose Creek salt works destroyed by order of Major General Don Carlos Buell, including detailed schedules of wells, furnaces, and salt destroyed.GovInfo+1
“The Congressional Globe” and Journal of the Senate of the United States, Forty second Congress. Debates and President Ulysses S. Grant’s veto message concerning bills “for the relief of those suffering from the destruction of the salt works near Manchester, Kentucky.”UNT Digital Library+1
Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition and FromThePage entries on the “Clay County Enrolled Militia” and other Clay County documents, describing the enrolled militia as all eligible white men ages eighteen to forty five and preserving petitions and legal cases from Manchester during the war.From the Page+2FromThePage+2
Kentucky historical markers and interpretive materials, including “Goose Creek Salt Works” marker text and the Clay County Civil War activity panel at Manchester, summarizing the 1862 destruction and the earlier Confederate raid on the works.Ky National Guard History+1
Clark, Thomas D. “Salt, a Factor in the Settlement of Kentucky.” Filson Club History Quarterly 12 (1938). Classic study of the salt industry’s role in frontier Kentucky, with legislative references to the Goose Creek works and the state funded road from the works to the Wilderness Road.The Filson Historical Society+1
Smith, John F. “The Salt Making Industry of Clay County, Kentucky.” Filson Club History Quarterly 1 (April 1927). Reconstructs the Goose Creek industry using account books such as the “Book of Accounts, Goose Creek Salt Works, 1806 to 1810.”The Filson Historical Society+1
“Archaeology of Kentucky: An Update, Volume 2.” Kentucky Heritage Council. Notes that in the early antebellum period the Goose Creek Salt Works in Clay County was the only significant salt producer for its region and discusses enslaved and immigrant labor at industrial sites.Kentucky Archaeology
Clay County Historical Society, “History” and “Historic Goose Creek Salt Works Pioneer Village.” Online essays outlining the rise of the Langford, White, and Garrard works, the use of enslaved labor at Goose Creek, and the reconstruction of the salt village as a heritage site.Clay Families+2Clay Families+2
“Garrard, Kentucky.” Entry in a modern reference work summarizing the history of the Goose Creek or Union Salt Works, including antebellum production values, slave ownership, and the Civil War destruction of the works.Wikipedia+1
Muncy, Howard. “A Forgotten Shade of Blue: Support for the Union and the Constitutional Republic in Southeastern Kentucky during the Civil War Era.” M.A. thesis, University of Louisville, 2020. Discusses Unionism in Clay County and the strategic significance of the salt economy.ThinkIR+1
Brown, Kent Masterson. The Civil War in Kentucky: Battle for the Bluegrass State. Places the Barbourville, Camp Wildcat, and Goose Creek corridor within the wider Kentucky campaigns of 1861 and 1862.Pike County Historical Society+1
“Theophilus T. Garrard.” Biographical entries in The Kentucky Encyclopedia and related summaries, including “Theophilus T. Garrard in His Own Words.” Detail Garrard’s birth and death at the Goose Creek Salt Works, his service as a Union general, and his postwar rebuilding of the Union Salt Works.Wikipedia+2Oocities+2
Regimental histories and web summaries of the 7th Kentucky Infantry (United States) and related units, which trace recruitment in Clay County and the regiment’s role in the eastern Kentucky campaigns.American Civil War High Command+2YeahPot+2
“Salt Works of Eastern Kentucky,” eakycivilwar.blogspot.com. A concise narrative of eastern Kentucky salt works, Zollicoffer’s 1861 raid on Goose Creek, and the Confederate seizure of thousands of bushels of salt during the 1862 invasion.Eaky Civil War+1