Appalachian History
In the early eighteen sixties Floyd County sat in a long river valley that hardly looked like a battlefield. The Levisa Fork wound past small farms, river landings, and court day in Prestonsburg. Yet the same geography that tied the county to Pike, Johnson, and Lawrence also opened a door into the heart of Kentucky. Roads and streams that carried salt, livestock, and timber now offered an invasion route for Civil War armies.
Kentucky tried to remain neutral in eighteen sixty one. That experiment collapsed almost at once. Federal troops pushed into the Bluegrass from the north while Confederate forces occupied Columbus on the Mississippi and Bowling Green on the Louisville and Nashville line. Historians Brian McKnight and John David Preston describe the Big Sandy valley as part of a wider mountain borderland, a region that neither army could hold for long and where neighbors often chose different flags.
Floyd County felt the strain immediately. Prestonsburg was a busy little town and, in the words later used on a state marker, a Confederate stronghold early in the war. Local elites with family ties in Virginia and the Bluegrass leaned to the South. At the same time, many small farmers and town professionals saw the federal government as their best hope of stability and trade.
By the winter of eighteen sixty one this divided community had already seen two regular battles and the arrival of national figures, among them Brigadier General William “Bull” Nelson and a little known Ohio colonel named James A. Garfield.
First Clash in the Valley: Ivy Mountain
The first large scale fighting connected with Floyd County came with the Big Sandy expedition of autumn eighteen sixty one. Confederate colonel John S. Williams had been recruiting across eastern Kentucky. With Captain Andrew Jackson May and other local officers he gathered a small brigade around Prestonsburg and Pikeville, trying to build a shield for Virginia and a magnet for mountain enlistments.
Federal authorities in Cincinnati and Louisville answered with Nelson. Given a mixed command of Ohio and Kentucky troops, he pushed south from the Ohio River, advancing through West Liberty and Salyersville toward the Levisa Fork. The goal was simple: drive Williams out of the valley and shut down Confederate recruiting before it could take root. Official reports show Nelson’s column as a patchwork of volunteer regiments, among them the Second, Twenty first, and Fifty ninth Ohio, Kentucky infantry, and Battery D of the First Ohio Light Artillery.
In early November Williams fell back from Prestonsburg toward Pikeville to restock ammunition. The two forces met on the narrow state road near Ivy Creek on November eight, eighteen sixty one. The bend in the road squeezed the Union column between the mountain slope and the muddy bank of the Levisa. Williams and May arranged an ambush on the ridge above the turn, where their raw recruits waited with squirrel rifles, muskets, and shotguns.
When the head of Nelson’s column reached the curve, a volley crashed down from the hillside. Nelson’s own report from “Camp Hopeless Chase, Piketon” describes a short, vicious fight up both sides of the ridge with artillery dragged by hand through the freezing mud. Colonel Williams, in his report written the following day, insisted that the engagement lasted several hours and that his small force held off a much larger enemy before slipping away toward Virginia.
The National Park Service summary of the action counts roughly two hundred ninety casualties and concludes that the Confederates were badly outnumbered. Whatever the precise totals, the outcome was clear. Nelson’s troops secured the road and entered Pikeville on November ten. Confederate units retreated across Pound Gap, and the first Confederate bid for control of the Big Sandy valley collapsed.
For Floyd Countians the meaning of Ivy Mountain was both local and regional. A Kentucky National Guard study of the war in the state locates the battle in Floyd County and calls it the first important Civil War engagement in the Big Sandy valley. The fighting itself took place on ground now split by modern county lines. Yet its supply routes ran through Prestonsburg, and the victory opened the way for a deeper federal advance into Floyd County only two months later.
Today travelers on United States twenty three near Ivel can visit a granite monument and wayside panels that mark the Ivy Mountain site and interpret the action for visitors. The marker text stresses May’s local connection and Nelson’s role in driving Confederate forces from the valley.
Garfield Marches South: The Road to Middle Creek
Ivy Mountain did not end Confederate interest in the Big Sandy country. Within weeks a new Confederate force took shape under Brigadier General Humphrey Marshall, a Kentucky politician and Mexican War veteran. From headquarters at Paintsville he tried to rebuild support among mountain counties and bring several battalions to strength. By early January eighteen sixty two he had more than two thousand men, though Preston and other scholars note that many recruits were poorly armed and only partly equipped.
Federal command now turned to James A. Garfield. Don Carlos Buell placed him over the Eighteenth Brigade and ordered him to drive Marshall out of Kentucky. Garfield’s own dispatches in the Official Records describe the hard march south from Louisa. His men trudged through bottom lands and salt works, skirmishing along Jennie’s Creek and Abbott’s Hill and living, as he wrote in one letter, on short rations while trying to keep artillery and supply wagons moving over winter roads.
Marshall gave up Paintsville in early January and fell back toward Prestonsburg. Garfield followed, probing with his own pickets. On the morning of January ten he learned that Confederate troops were shifting from Abbott’s Creek toward Middle Creek, apparently moving to strike his rear. In his after action report he later recalled that he allowed his wagon train to continue up the road while he halted and formed his command for battle.
The Battle of Middle Creek
The two forces collided in the hills west of the Levisa Fork, a short distance from Prestonsburg. Marshall deployed his Confederates along the ridges around the forks of Middle Creek. Garfield advanced from the north and east, with Ohio and Kentucky infantry feeling their way along the frozen slopes and a small artillery battery seeking any clear line of fire.
The fight began around midday and continued through the short winter afternoon. The Official Records and the battle summary compiled for the Civil War Sites Advisory Commission agree on broad outlines. Confederate cavalry tested the Union column at the mouth of the creek. Garfield’s brigade then pressed forward as skirmishers traded shots in the woods, and the infantry attacked the heights in repeated rushes. Reinforcements arriving late in the day on the Union left convinced Marshall that his position was no longer tenable. During the night his command withdrew toward Virginia, leaving Floyd County once again in federal hands.
Casualties at Middle Creek were modest by the standards of the larger war. The Kentucky National Guard study, following National Park Service figures, estimates ninety two total losses in the engagement, twenty seven on the Union side and sixty five for the Confederates. For Floyd County, however, the consequences were significant. The same summary notes that along with the victory at Mill Springs later that month, Middle Creek halted the Confederate offensive in eastern Kentucky and helped cement Union control of the mountain counties until the great campaigns of eighteen sixty two and eighteen sixty three.
In the years after the war Garfield’s brief winter in Floyd County loomed large in his political story. Biographers and historians, including Allan Peskin and Brian McKnight, have traced how the Middle Creek campaign introduced him to the complexities of mountain loyalty and gave him a military credential that later supported his rise to the presidency. His letters home from the Big Sandy country, collected in The Wild Life of the Army, describe not only marches and skirmishes but also the worn conditions of eastern Kentucky farms, the hospitality of Unionist families, and the unease he felt about the divided communities he was marching through.
Skirmishes on the Levisa Fork
Large set piece battles did not return to Floyd County after Middle Creek, but the war most certainly did. The river and its roads remained useful to both sides. Boat traffic on the Levisa carried supplies. Roads around Prestonsburg and the forks of Beaver Creek became natural corridors for cavalry and mounted infantry.
Frederick Dyer’s Compendium and the service record of the Thirty ninth Kentucky Mounted Infantry trace a series of small actions in and near Floyd County. The regiment’s summary lists “Skirmishes in Floyd County, December four, and near Prestonsburg, December four and five” in eighteen sixty two, followed by a skirmish at Beaver Creek in June eighteen sixty three and later fighting at the Forks of Beaver in March eighteen sixty four.
Reports printed in the Official Records under the heading “Skirmish in Floyd County, Kentucky, December four, eighteen sixty two” and “Capture of Union transports and skirmishes near Prestonsburg, Kentucky, December four and five, eighteen sixty two” suggest what these encounters looked like in practice. Confederate detachments slipped along the river and seized or destroyed federal transports. Union scouts and local home guard units responded, producing short exchanges of fire that rarely involved more than a few companies on each side but caused considerable alarm in nearby communities.
The Beaver Creek fighting of June eighteen sixty three followed a similar pattern. The Thirty ninth Kentucky, a Union regiment raised mainly from eastern Kentucky counties, patrolled the countryside against Confederate raiders and independent guerrilla bands. The regiment’s own service history records a skirmish at Beaver Creek in Floyd County on June twenty seven, along with other scattered actions during that summer and the following year.
For families along the creeks and forks, these minor engagements did not feel minor at all. Mounted men arrived at night, asking for food, horses, and information. Gunfire echoed from the hillsides, and the risk of reprisals hung over anyone suspected of helping the other side. Joseph Pritchard, writing about the region’s postwar violence, describes eastern Kentucky as a “lingering war zone” where guerrilla warfare and banditry blurred into one another well after the formal surrender at Appomattox. Floyd County, with its roads leading toward Pound Gap and the Sandy valley, was very much part of that landscape.
Neighbors in Blue and Gray
From the start, the war in Floyd County was a conflict among neighbors. The Battle of Middle Creek is still remembered locally as a place where men from the same families and hollers fought on opposite sides of the creek. The Middle Creek National Battlefield’s interpretive materials point out that Union regiments such as the Fourteenth and Twenty second Kentucky faced Confederates of the Fifth Kentucky and other units that also drew heavily from eastern counties.
Local histories compiled by Henry P. Scalf for Floyd County’s sesquicentennial and by Works Progress Administration writers in the nineteen thirties preserve stories of households split between Unionist and Confederate sons, of ministers who prayed for peace while quietly sheltering deserters, and of women who tried to keep small farms running while officers on both sides pressed them for supplies.
The Official Records and the Civil War Governors of Kentucky project add another layer to this picture. Petitions from Floyd County citizens, complaints about stolen livestock, and letters from officers in the Fourteenth and Twenty second Kentucky reveal local men negotiating the demands of generals and the needs of their own communities. Many residents appear less as committed Unionists or secessionists and more as people trying to survive a war they had little power to direct.
Memory, Monuments, and Coal
The war did more than send troops through Floyd County. It drew national attention to what lay beneath its hills. The Kentucky National Guard study notes that engineers traveling with the armies recognized the vast bituminous coal seams exposed along cut banks and river bluffs. Their reports helped introduce northern industrialists to the Big Sandy coalfield, setting the stage for twentieth century mining and the transformations that followed.
Public memory of the fighting has taken shape slowly. The Ivy Mountain obelisk and historical markers along United States twenty three and Kentucky routes around Prestonsburg interpret the battles for travelers. The “Eastern Kentucky’s Civil War Battles and Skirmishes” marker near town lists engagements from Ivy Mountain and Middle Creek through later skirmishes involving the Thirty ninth Kentucky, reminding visitors that national armies once fought over these quiet hills.
Middle Creek National Battlefield, established on ground that was long used as pasture and timberland, now offers walking trails, a driving tour, and regular reenactments. Interpretive signs discuss not only Garfield and Marshall but also the divided families and the long shadow of the war in Floyd County.
In that sense the county’s Civil War story reaches far beyond dates on a marker. It tells how a small Appalachian community became a strategic crossroads, how its people navigated invasion, occupation, and guerrilla violence, and how the memory of those years still shapes local identity in the age of coal and its aftermath.
Sources and 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 four. Reports of Brigadier General William Nelson from “Camp Hopeless Chase, Piketon, Kentucky, November ten, eighteen sixty one” and Colonel John S. Williams from Piketon, November nine, eighteen sixty one, on the Battle of Ivy Mountain. Digital facsimiles are available through HathiTrust and the Portal to Texas History.Wikimedia Commons+1
United States War Department, The War of the Rebellion, Series I, Volume seven. Reports of Colonel James A. Garfield on operations from Louisa to Paintsville and Prestonsburg and on the Battle of Middle Creek, including his dispatch from “Camp at Martin’s Mill, on Beaver Creek, Floyd County, Kentucky, January fourteen, eighteen sixty two,” along with Brigadier General Humphrey Marshall’s Confederate reports.Wikimedia Commons+1
United States War Department, The War of the Rebellion, Series I, Volume twenty, part two. Entries titled “Skirmish in Floyd County, Kentucky, December four, eighteen sixty two” and “Capture of Union transports and skirmishes near Prestonsburg, Kentucky, December four and five, eighteen sixty two,” along with later volumes that document skirmishes at Beaver Creek and the Forks of Beaver involving the Thirty ninth Kentucky.Carolana+1
Frederick D. Williams, editor, The Wild Life of the Army: Civil War Letters of James A. Garfield (East Lansing, Michigan State University Press, nineteen sixty four). Garfield’s letters from the Big Sandy campaign, especially the sequence covering late eighteen sixty one and early eighteen sixty two, offer a candid view of marching, supply problems, and the Middle Creek battle.UA DSpace+1
Chaplain John H. Bayless, letter from “Ivy Mountain, Big Sandy, Floyd County, Kentucky,” originally printed in the Maysville Eagle and reprinted in the Louisville Daily Courier, November twenty eight, eighteen sixty one. The full text is available in Dan Masters’ transcription “Ambushed at Ivy Mountain” and gives a vivid Union eye witness account of the battle.dan-masters-civil-war.blogspot.com+1
“Civil War eighteen sixty one to eighteen sixty five in Floyd County” and battle summaries for Ivy Mountain and Middle Creek in The Paper Trail of the Civil War in Kentucky, Kentucky National Guard, which compile National Park Service Civil War Sites Advisory Commission data and county level historical notes.KY National Guard History+1
Brian D. McKnight, Contested Borderland: The Civil War in Appalachian Kentucky and Virginia (Lexington, University Press of Kentucky, two thousand six), and John David Preston, The Civil War in the Big Sandy Valley of Kentucky, second edition (Baltimore, Gateway Press, two thousand eight). Together these works form the core secondary scholarship on the Big Sandy campaigns and the social history of the war in Floyd, Pike, Johnson, and Lawrence counties.HistoryNet+1
Allan Peskin, “The Hero of the Sandy Valley: James A. Garfield’s Kentucky Campaign of eighteen sixty one–eighteen sixty two,” Ohio History seventy two, numbers one and two (nineteen sixty three). Peskin’s two part article remains essential for understanding how Ivy Mountain and Middle Creek shaped Garfield’s public career.Ohio Civil War+1
Henry P. Scalf, “Historic Floyd,” in Floyd County Sesquicentennial, eighteen hundred to nineteen fifty (Prestonsburg, nineteen fifty), and Works Progress Administration, “Floyd County – History” (nineteen thirty nine). These local histories preserve community memory of the war years, divided loyalties, and the early recognition of coal resources in the county.KY National Guard History+1
Middle Creek National Battlefield official site and Kentucky Tourism’s “Civil War History” page for Prestonsburg, which provide visitor guides, driving tours, and interpretive essays on the Middle Creek battle and the Ivy Mountain site.militaryhistoryonline.com+1