Appalachian History
Introduction
For most Civil War readers, names like Shiloh, Chickamauga, or Perryville come to mind before Harlan County. On official maps, this corner of the Cumberland Plateau barely registers. Yet the war reached Harlan’s hollows in very real ways.
Skirmishes flickered along Poor Fork and Clover Fork. A courthouse went up in flames. Men enrolled in a short lived but hard working local battalion. Guerrillas, home guards, and regular troops all used the same narrow gaps on their way to and from Virginia and Tennessee.
By pulling together official papers, rosters, after action reports, oral tradition, and place based folklore, we can sketch what the war actually looked like in Harlan County from 1861 to 1865.
Harlan County on the Eve of War
When the war began, Harlan was a small, sparsely populated mountain county tied more to adjacent Virginia and Tennessee than to Frankfort or Louisville. Roads followed streams. Poor Fork and Clover Fork created natural corridors toward Cumberland Gap and the Kentucky River country.
The Kentucky National Guard’s workbook The Paper Trail of the Civil War in Kentucky, 1861–1865, summarizing James S. Greene III’s entry in The Kentucky Encyclopedia, notes that the conflict brought disruption to the county. Fighting amounted mostly to minor skirmishes, and foraging parties from both sides and raids by guerrillas became part of daily life.
Census based work on people of color in Harlan suggests an extremely small enslaved population by 1860 and a modest community of free Black and multiracial residents. Unlike the Bluegrass, where slavery was central to the economy, Harlan’s households depended more on small farms, livestock, timber, and the trade that followed salt and livestock routes. That mix helps explain why its white voters leaned strongly Unionist, a point stressed by county historian Mabel Green Condon in A History of Harlan County and by Greene in his encyclopedia entry on the county.
Harlan’s geography made neutrality impossible. Cumberland Gap to the southwest and Pound Gap to the northeast allowed Confederate and Union forces to slip through the mountains, with Harlan’s streams and ridges serving as approach roads. A Kentucky Historical Society marker, quoted in the Paper Trail workbook, notes that troops from both sides passed through an area about four miles south of Cawood, using Poor Fork and Clover Fork as parallel routes that mirrored local loyalties.
Raising the Harlan County Battalion
As the war dragged into its second year, mountain Unionists pressed Frankfort to let them defend their home ground. The result in Harlan was the Harlan County Battalion, sometimes called the First Harlan County Battalion.
The unit did not enter Federal service like the Forty seventh or Forty ninth Kentucky. Instead, it was organized under Kentucky’s militia laws and mustered into state service. A congressional report on Kentucky militia pensions, drawing directly from the Adjutant General’s 1867 report, explains that the Harlan County Battalion was mustered in on 13 October 1862 and mustered out on 13 January 1863. It consisted of seven companies with 494 officers and men. Its orders placed it in eastern Kentucky along the Tennessee and Virginia borders, where it was to shield loyal people from lawless elements, prevent destruction of property, and act as an advance guard for Federal forces in the region.
The battalion’s roster, preserved in the Adjutant General’s report and transcribed on genealogical sites such as Yeahpot, reads like a who’s who of Harlan families. Major Benjamin F. Blankenship commanded. Company officers included men like Captains George W. Morgan, Ambrose Powell, Josiah B. Spurlock, and others from leading Harlan lineages such as Cornetts, Napiers, Turners, Farmers, Adamses, and many more. Many of these men would later enlist in United States Volunteer regiments such as the Forty seventh and Forty ninth Kentucky.
Documents collected in the Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition show these officers in correspondence with Frankfort about pay, supplies, and recognition. Petitions and letters associated with Blankenship and other Harlan officers underline that the battalion considered itself part of the Union cause and wanted its short but dangerous service treated on par with that of other Kentucky state troops.
Marches, Patrols, and the “Battle of Poor Fork”
The battalion’s official life lasted only three months, but it was an active three months. Transcribed daily reports, preserved in part through RootsWeb and CivilWarTalk discussions, show detachments marching from Harlan Court House, then often called Spurlock, along Poor Fork toward the high gaps on Pine Mountain. Their orders were to cut Confederate communication routes between Tennessee and the Kentucky interior, block crossings, and guard key fords and passes.
One entry describes a movement meant to stop communications between the Confederate States and Kentucky by patrolling toward the salt rich country of neighboring Perry County. That October 1862 operation brought the Harlan men into contact with one of the few large Confederate concentrations remaining in the mountains, Captain David J. Caudill’s Company B, Tenth Kentucky Mounted Rifles, stationed at Brashear’s Salt Works on Leatherwood Creek.
The battalion’s short campaign culminated in what later sources call the Battle of Poor Fork or the Battle of Leatherwood. Drawing on Blankenship’s after action report in the Adjutant General Papers and on James H. “Clabe” Jones’s Autobiography of a Mountain Union Scout, we can piece together the Harlan side of the fight.
On 18 October 1862, Blankenship led a detachment of roughly forty men from Companies A and B out of Harlan. Captains Morgan and Powell commanded the company level elements, and Clabe Jones scouted ahead through the woods. After bivouacking along Poor Fork, the column crossed into Perry County and moved down toward Leatherwood. Near Brashear’s Salt Works on 19 October, they ran headlong into Caudill’s men guarding the kettles.
Accounts agree that the fight was brief but intense. The Harlan County men surprised or at least disrupted the Confederate position, traded volleys for several minutes, and left several of Caudill’s men dead or wounded, including Caudill himself. One Harlan soldier later died of his wounds. The Union detachment did not have strength to hold the saltworks permanently, but its sudden strike damaged Confederate operations there and contributed to wider Federal efforts to push Humphrey Marshall’s forces out of eastern Kentucky after the battle of Perryville.
Today, Leatherwood is remembered as Perry County’s largest Civil War engagement. For Harlan, it represents the moment when its home guards stepped out of purely defensive service and carried the war into a neighboring county.
Harlan on the Union Military Map
Even after the battalion mustered out, Harlan County remained on the Union Army’s radar as a troublesome but important corner of the Department of Kentucky.
The Official Records of the War of the Rebellion contain a February 1865 directive from Brigadier General E. H. Hobson’s headquarters in Lexington ordering a detachment of the Twelfth Ohio Cavalry to escort a paymaster to Cumberland Gap and then remain on duty at Barbourville. Once that mission ended, the cavalry company was to operate with the home guards and militia under Lieutenant Colonel Ridgell in Harlan County and to be supplied from outside so that the men would not live off the country.
The letter is short, but it confirms several things. By early 1865 Harlan still had organized home guard or militia forces under a field grade officer. Federal commanders considered those locals part of a broader security system for the Gap and surrounding counties. There was concern about protecting civilians from depredation by soldiers on both sides, which explains the explicit order to bring rations and forage instead of foraging in Harlan.
That same volume of the Official Records and related studies by historians such as Brian D. McKnight in Contested Borderland: The Civil War in Appalachian Kentucky and Virginia frame Harlan as one small piece of a long, unstable frontier that ran from Pound Gap to Cumberland Gap and beyond. Union garrisons, Confederate raiders, and locally raised bands constantly tested each other along that border.
“Courthouse Burned”: Retaliation in 1863
Perhaps the single most famous Civil War event in Harlan County is the burning of the county courthouse.
The Paper Trail workbook reproduces a Kentucky Historical Society marker that explains the context. Across Kentucky, twenty two county courthouses burned during the war, nineteen of them in the final fifteen months. Twelve were destroyed by Confederate forces, eight by guerrillas, and two by Union accidents.
Harlan’s courthouse, at Harlan Court House or Spurlock, went up in flames in October 1863. The marker text connects the burning specifically to a tit for tat cycle of retaliation. Confederate or sympathetic forces burned the Harlan courthouse as reprisal for the earlier burning of the Lee County, Virginia courthouse across the line. Local records were largely saved by moving them to a nearby clerk’s office.
County histories and later scholarship treat the courthouse burning as a classic example of how the Civil War in Kentucky blurred the line between battlefront and home front. Scott D. Lucas’s article “‘Indignities, Wrongs, and Outrages’: Military and Guerrilla Incursions on Kentucky’s Civil War Home Front” and J. M. Rhyne’s dissertation A Forgotten Shade of Blue place incidents like Harlan’s burning alongside other attacks on civil infrastructure. Both argue that courthouse fires were meant to intimidate communities and erase legal authority rather than simply destroy buildings.
In Harlan memory, the exact perpetrators are sometimes disputed. Some traditions point a finger at formal Confederate troops, others at irregulars and local guerrillas, and still others at mixed bands of outlaws who used wartime rhetoric to cloak personal feuds. That uncertainty itself is typical of guerrilla war.
Guerrillas, “Devil Jim” Turner, and Outlawry
The line between soldier, guerrilla, and outlaw was particularly thin in mountain counties. Harlan’s most notorious figure in this regard is James Brittain “Devil Jim” Turner.
Genealogical syntheses draw on service records, court cases, and family papers to reconstruct Turner’s career. They show him briefly enlisted in the Forty ninth Kentucky Infantry (United States) before he deserted, then turning up in postwar sources as the head of a violent gang blamed for killings and raids across the Harlan region. An 1873 letter by Narcissus Middleton, quoted in these accounts, complains bitterly about Turner’s band and describes murders and mutilations that shocked even hardened mountain communities. Later court records and prison files trace him through arrests, a sentence in Kentucky, and an eventual move to the Pacific Northwest.
Alessandro Portelli’s oral history collection They Say in Harlan County shows how Turner’s story blurred into legend. Interviewees recount tales of Turner as a bad man figure whose Civil War era violence bled into Reconstruction and beyond. Some blame him for the courthouse burning or other wartime atrocities. Others place him more firmly in the postwar era, part of a shift from organized guerrilla bands to free roaming outlaws.
Whether every story attached to Devil Jim is literally true is less important than what those stories reveal. For Harlan people, the Civil War was remembered not merely as blue versus gray but as a time when law and order collapsed, neighbors changed sides, and men like Turner exploited the confusion.
Rebel Rock and Landscapes of Memory
Harlan’s Civil War memory clings to specific landmarks. One of the most striking is Rebel Rock, a jagged stone outcrop above the old Laden Trail on Pine Mountain.
Local tourism material explains that the rock takes its name from a Civil War tale. In the story, a Confederate soldier fleeing Union pursuers climbs the rock to escape. In one version the Federals force him off the height to his death. In another he leaps, survives the fall with minor injuries, and disappears into the woods.
There is no known official report that matches this incident cleanly, and the legend has since become entangled with much later tragedies on Pine Mountain. Rebel Rock’s name still anchors it in the Civil War era and reminds visitors that these ridges once served as lookouts, bushwhacker perches, and hiding places.
Other place names preserve similar hints. The Paper Trail workbook notes a marker along Poor Fork near Cawood that describes how Union forces tended to travel that route while Confederates favored Clover Fork, each side using the stream that best matched its local support. Post office histories confirm that the wartime county seat’s mail was addressed to “Harlan Court House” and for a time “Spurlock,” which underlines how the same settlement could be known by different names in military reports, postal records, and local speech.
Harlan’s Civil War in Retrospect
Looking back from the twenty first century, Harlan’s Civil War experience fits awkwardly into neat categories. There were no massive set piece battles inside the county lines, but Harlan was not untouched.
Primary sources show that a locally raised battalion briefly played an aggressive role in state defense, marching over Pine Mountain to fight at Leatherwood and patrolling the border with Virginia. Federal orders explicitly tie Harlan’s home guards into wider Union strategy in early 1865. A county courthouse was burned in retaliation for events in neighboring Lee County, Virginia, as part of a statewide pattern of attacks on civic buildings. Ongoing raids, foraging, and guerrilla incidents blurred the line between war and crime.
Oral history and local lore fill in the rest. There are tales of Devil Jim Turner, the ghost haunted heights of Rebel Rock, the half remembered details of the courthouse fire, and family stories of ancestors who served in the Harlan County Battalion or in Union and Confederate regiments.
Together, these sources suggest that for Harlan County, the Civil War was less a single dramatic event and more a drawn out period of insecurity. The war arrived in the form of patrols on the roads, men slipping through the gaps by night, and courthouses and saltworks that suddenly became targets.
For descendants today, the rosters and letters preserved in archives, the markers along the highways, and the stories told on front porches all offer ways to reconnect with that complicated past.
Sources & Further Reading
Kentucky National Guard, The Paper Trail of the Civil War in Kentucky, 1861–1865 (special ed., compiled by Col. Armando “Al” Alfaro). Overview of county-by-county Civil War activity, highway markers, and courthouse burnings. kynghistory.ky.gov+1
Mabel Green Condon, A History of Harlan County (Nashville: Parthenon Press, 1962). Standard county history with sections on the war years and the courthouse fire.
James S. Greene III, “Harlan County,” in John E. Kleber, ed., The Kentucky Encyclopedia (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992). Short reference entry on Harlan’s economy and Civil War loyalties.
Report of the Adjutant General of the State of Kentucky, Vol. 2 (Frankfort, 1867). Includes the Harlan County Battalion’s organization, strength, and dates of service; basis for later summaries of the unit. eakycivilwar.blogspot.com+1
Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition (CWGK), Kentucky Historical Society. Online collection of letters and petitions involving Harlan County officers and citizens. civilwargovernors.org+1
Brian D. McKnight, Contested Borderland: The Civil War in Appalachian Kentucky and Virginia (University Press of Kentucky, 2006). Puts Harlan within the wider Cumberland Gap–Pound Gap war zone. UKnowledge+1
Alessandro Portelli, They Say in Harlan County: An Oral History (Oxford University Press, 2011). Oral histories that preserve stories about Civil War–era violence, outlawry, and place-based memory in Harlan. Google Books+1
Scott D. Lucas, “‘Indignities, Wrongs, and Outrages’: Military and Guerrilla Incursions on Kentucky’s Civil War Home Front,” Filson Club History Quarterly 73 (1999). Analysis of guerrilla and military violence against Kentucky communities.
J. M. Rhyne, A Forgotten Shade of Blue (Ph.D. diss., University of Cincinnati, 2007). On Kentucky Unionism and guerrilla war; useful comparative context for Harlan’s skirmishes and home guards.
Kentucky Historical Society Civil War highway markers (esp. “Civil War Routes” and “Courthouse Burned,” Harlan County). Concise marker texts on troop movements along Poor and Clover Fork and the 1863 courthouse burning. FlipHTML5
NKAA / other census-based compilations on Harlan County people of color, 1860–1870 (University of Kentucky Libraries). Used for enslaved and free Black population figures.