Appalachian History
In the 1850s the Louisville and Nashville Railroad pushed south across Kentucky’s limestone barrens toward Tennessee. By 1857 its tracks reached the Green River at Munfordville, where engineer Albert Fink solved the problem of the steep-sided valley with an iron truss bridge roughly 1,800 feet long, an “engineering marvel” of its day.
When war came in 1861, that bridge turned Hart County from a quiet river town into one of the most fought-over pieces of ground in the Commonwealth. Louisville supplied Union armies operating in Tennessee and the deeper South. As historian Lowell H. Harrison notes, Kentucky saw relatively few large battles, yet lines like the Louisville and Nashville meant the state was “crucial to the military strategy of the war.”
For both blue and gray, control of the Green River crossing and the trestles at Bacon Creek meant control of Kentucky’s strategic axis between the Ohio River and Nashville. In Hart County that contest produced burned bridges, battered earthworks, and a remarkable cluster of primary sources that still let us hear the voices of Hoosier artillerists, German immigrants, Texas cavalrymen, and Hart County civilians who lived in the shadow of the bridge.
A Railroad through the Barrens
Long before the first soldiers marched into Munfordville, the river town was already defined by geography. The Green River cut a deep trench through rolling farmland, its north bank rimmed with hills and knobs. The seat of Hart County sat at the natural crossing, a place the Civil War Governors of Kentucky project describes simply as the county seat on the Green River, but one that would soon carry national weight.
The railroad magnified that importance. The National Register study of Munfordville’s historic district traces how the Louisville and Nashville line reached the town and river in the late 1850s, then straddled the Green on Fink’s towering bridge. A Kentucky Legislative Research Commission brief on “Hart County’s L&N Railroad Bridge” later summed up the wartime legacy of that structure. The bridge was hit repeatedly during the conflict, damaged and repaired several times as both armies fought over the route that fed Union campaigns in Tennessee.
Even before the first major battle nearby, federal engineers and soldiers understood that the Green River bridge could not be allowed to fall into Confederate hands. They carved a ring of fortifications into the surrounding hills, positions that would later be known as Fort Craig, the Stockade, and Fort Bruce. The Atlas to Accompany the Official Records preserves detailed plates of these works and the track curving toward the bridge, placing Munfordville squarely in the center of the Western Theater’s rail network.
Bacon Creek and the First Flames of War
The fighting for Hart County’s rails began upstream. At Bacon Creek near Bonnieville, the Louisville and Nashville crossed another steep little valley on a timber and iron bridge that quickly became a favorite target. A Kentucky Historical Society marker notes that the Bacon Creek bridge was destroyed several times; Confederate raider John Hunt Morgan burned it for a second time on December 5, 1861.
The Kentucky National Guard’s “Paper Trail of the Civil War in Kentucky” explains why that attack mattered. On December 5, 1861, Morgan burned the L&N bridge over Bacon Creek “to disrupt Federal supply lines,” slowing the advance of Union troops trying to push south from Louisville. During his famous Christmas Raid a year later, he returned to the same stretch of track and destroyed the replacement span.
Every time a bridge fell, Union repair crews and infantry followed. Confederate scouts watched the progress, and as one official report in the War of the Rebellion noted, observers near Rowlett’s Station kept close track of how many spans were finished and how many soldiers guarded them. Skirmishing flared up and down the line. Out of that back-and-forth came one of the earliest hard fights in Kentucky: the Battle of Rowlett’s Station.
Rowlett’s Station: Hoosiers, Texans, and a German Monument
On December 17, 1861, fewer than five hundred men of the 32nd Indiana Volunteer Infantry, a German American regiment, found themselves south of the Green River near the little railroad stop at Rowlett’s Station. They had crossed on a temporary span to shield crews repairing the blown bridge. Reports collected in the Official Records and modern syntheses agree that they soon faced roughly 1,300 Confederates under Brig. Gen. Thomas C. Hindman, including Terry’s Texas Rangers, Arkansas infantry, and Mississippi artillery.
Cut off and badly outnumbered, the Hoosiers formed a hollow square in an open field. As the Rangers charged in, they were met with disciplined volleys, supported by Union batteries on the north bank. The Texans lost their commander, Col. Benjamin F. Terry, in the melee. Casualty estimates vary slightly by source, but the National Park Service and Dyer’s Compendium place total losses around 131 men, with about 40 Union and 91 Confederate casualties.
In a letter written ten days later from the new “Camp George Wood,” Hoosier artilleryman James H. Smith told a friend that he and a comrade had walked over the battlefield. “We are now at Camp George Wood right where they had their fight last week,” he wrote, after visiting graves he believed held ten Union soldiers and “about 75” Confederates. His numbers reflected rumor more than official counts, but his letter captures how quickly the battlefield became familiar ground for ordinary soldiers.
Out of the bloodshed came one of the most remarkable artifacts of the war. Within a month, Private August Bloedner of the 32nd Indiana carved a limestone monument over his comrades’ graves at Fort Willich near the bridge. The National Cemetery Administration’s history of the 32nd Indiana Infantry Monument and later research by Michael A. Peake describe the stone’s eagle, crossed cannon, and German inscription. In English, part of that inscription reads: “Here rest the first heroes of the 32nd Indiana German regiment who laid down their lives for the free Constitution.”
Today the original Bloedner Monument, considered the nation’s oldest surviving Civil War monument, resides at the Frazier History Museum in Louisville after conservation work. Its journey from a field by the Green River to a museum display mirrors Hart County’s wider story: a local fight whose meaning long ago spread far beyond the county line.
Camp Wood and Life at the Bridge
After Rowlett’s Station, the Union army dug in harder around the Green River crossing. Camp Wood grew up on the heights north of the bridge, its guns commanding both the river and the tracks. A web of soldier letters from that camp forms one of Hart County’s richest primary source collections.
On December 18, 1861, Samuel Fleming wrote from Camp Wood to a friend back home about another engagement at Green River, giving casualty figures for both sides and noting that disease carried off at least one comrade whose name he recorded. Three days later, Thomas J. Bond wrote his parents a long letter from the same camp, describing a skirmish, the wounded and dead, and news of Simon Bolivar Buckner’s occupation of Bowling Green.
Other voices added detail. A “Sabbath Day Letter from Camp Wood” by Corporal Elias H. of the 79th Pennsylvania, published and analyzed by the Lancaster at War blog, sketched the Green River bridge and surrounding hills and was reproduced in Harper’s Weekly alongside a woodcut of the scene. John W. McCleary of the 4th Indiana Battery later recalled how his guns sat “on the heights above the Green River,” covering the bridge that anchored the entire line.
Taken together and stitched to the Official Records in studies like “The Union Occupation of Munfordville, Kentucky, 1861–1865,” these letters reveal the Green River not as an anonymous point on a campaign map, but as a place where cooks worried over rations, men cursed the lack of mail, and pickets peered into the fog, expecting Hindman’s men or Morgan’s riders to appear at any moment.
Munfordville Besieged
The largest test of the Hart County defenses came nine months later. In September 1862, Confederate General Braxton Bragg led his Army of Mississippi north from Tennessee in what historians call the Confederate Heartland Offensive. As Bragg moved toward central Kentucky, he could not bypass Munfordville’s crossing.
Col. John T. Wilder commanded the Union garrison at the river. Anticipating trouble, he strengthened the old works, building Fort Craig to guard the eastern approaches and a timber stockade to cover the west, while Fort Bruce watched from the north bank.
On September 14, Confederate Brig. Gen. James R. Chalmers launched an attack against the southern forts. After heavy skirmishing and an assault that cost him dearly, Chalmers fell back. Official reports and modern analyses agree that Union casualties during this first day were low compared to the failed Confederate probes.
The next day Bragg brought up the rest of his army. Outnumbered nearly four to one, Wilder was shown the full weight of Confederate columns deploying around his little command. After an overnight council of war and a formal demand for surrender, Wilder capitulated on September 17. The American Battlefield Trust summarizes the result succinctly: the Confederates captured roughly 4,000 Union soldiers at Munfordville, at a cost of about 714 casualties of their own.
In his diary, Ohio soldier Thomas Jefferson Talbot, passing through afterward, called Munfordville “a poor, dilapidated village” and recorded that rebels had destroyed the “splendid railroad bridge across Green River” before they retreated. Lieutenant Frederick N. Boyer of the 59th Illinois likewise wrote of wading the river near the town while a portion of the bridge lay wrecked above him. The Kentucky National Guard’s Paper Trail notes that in the aftermath of the battle Bragg’s men burned the Green River bridge in conjunction with their victory.
When Union forces reoccupied the area, they found thousands of prisoners moving back through their lines. Lieutenant James Bragg of the 40th Indiana recorded at nearby Cave City that “some thirty-three hundred of our men who was taken prisoners at Munfordville came in this morning,” a rough count that gives a human sense of the numbers involved.
Strategically, historians like Kent Masterson Brown and Steven D. Engle argue that Munfordville was a costly detour for Bragg’s army. It marked both a temporary high point for Confederate fortunes along Kentucky’s rail corridor and a lost opportunity to move more rapidly toward the Bluegrass before Don Carlos Buell’s Army of the Ohio caught up. Modern interpretive signs at the Battle for the Bridge Historic Preserve even describe the battle as a “high-water mark of the Confederacy in the West.”
Civilians and the Home Front
Soldiers came and went, but Hart County’s civilians had to live with the consequences. The Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition preserves scattered documents that hint at how local government functioned in a war zone: Hart County court orders from 1864, correspondence from Munfordville attorneys, and petitions that passed through the governor’s office.
Other sources show how the town’s built environment adapted to military needs. The Advisory Council on Historic Preservation notes that Munfordville’s 1835 Francis Asbury Smith House served as headquarters for both Union and Confederate officers at different times. Inns and homes near the turnpike hosted officers and wounded, while the riverbanks and fields became pastures, camps, and, at times, cemeteries.
Newspapers carried the war home in another way. Kentucky papers preserved through the Kentucky Digital Newspaper Program and Chronicling America reported on the “forward movement” of Union regiments to Munfordville and the destruction and rebuilding of bridges along the line. Confederate publications such as the Marietta Advocate carried their own stories, inflating Union losses at “the Battle of Woodsonville in Kentucky” and celebrating the death of B. F. Terry.
These official documents, diary entries, and newspaper columns do not always agree on numbers or tone, but together they illustrate how Hart County lived at the intersection of a national war and local survival.
Remembering the Battles for the Bridge
Today, Hart County’s Civil War landscape is one of the most carefully interpreted in Kentucky. The Battle for the Bridge Historic Preserve protects about 219 acres of battlefield ground, including parts of the Rowlett’s Station field, the Munfordville defenses, and the September 1862 skirmish of Woodsonville. The site’s trails and markers lean heavily on the Official Records, soldier letters, and local research like J. Barnett’s classic “Munfordville in the Civil War” to explain how the three engagements fit together.
At the center of this work stands the Hart County Historical Society and Museum, housed in the 1893 Chapline Building in downtown Munfordville. The museum maintains collections on the battles, the railroad, and local families, and serves as the starting point for walking tours that connect courthouse square to the preserved earthworks along the river.
Physical reminders of the war dot the county. Historical markers identify the Bacon Creek bridge site and the Green River crossing, summarizing in a few sentences what took whole campaigns to decide. The Bloedner Monument, although removed from its original Hart County setting for preservation, still bears the German names of the men who died for the bridge and invites visitors at the Frazier Museum to ask how a winter skirmish in Kentucky could leave such a durable mark on national memory.
For Appalachia, Munfordville and its surroundings offer a reminder that the Civil War in the mountains and uplands was not fought only in famous gaps and hollows. It was also fought over trestles, depots, and river valleys where local residents watched armies clash for control of rails that stretched far beyond their fields.
Sources & Further Reading
War Department. The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Series I, Vol. 7 and Vol. 16.
Atlas to Accompany the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, 1891–95), plates for Munfordville, Green River bridge, and the Louisville and Nashville line. Internet Archive
Bloedner, August. 32nd Indiana Infantry Monument (Bloedner Monument), inscription and history. National Cemetery Administration, “History of the 32nd Indiana Infantry Monument,” and Frazier History Museum, “Bloedner Monument.” CEM+2Wikipedia+2
Bond, Thomas J. Letter from Camp Wood, Kentucky, 21 December 1861. Western Kentucky University Manuscripts, Small Collection 3094 (TopSCHOLAR). WKU TopScholar
Fleming, Samuel. Letter from Camp Wood, Kentucky, 18 December 1861. Western Kentucky University Manuscripts, Small Collection 3095 (TopSCHOLAR). WKU TopScholar+1
Smith, James H. “1861: James H. Smith to Willard Smith,” Camp George Wood, Kentucky, 27 December 1861. Spared & Shared 23. Spared & Shared 23+1
Talbot, Thomas Jefferson. 1861–64: The Civil War Diaries of Thomas Jefferson Talbot, Co. G, 31st OVI. Spared & Shared 22. Spared & Shared 22
Boyer, Frederick Nathan. Diary, 59th Illinois Infantry, entry on crossing Green River near Munfordville. National Park Service transcription. National Park Service
McCleary, John W. Letter from Camp Wood, 2 February 1862. Spared & Shared 23. Spared & Shared 23
“A Sabbath Day Letter from Camp Wood.” Lancaster at War, with Harper’s Weekly woodcut of the Green River bridge. Lancaster At War+1
Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition, entries for “Munfordville, Kentucky,” “Hart County, Kentucky,” and related Hart County documents and orders. discovery.civilwargovernors.org+3Civil War Governors+3Civil War Governors+3
Kentucky Historical Society and Legislative Research Commission. “Kentucky’s Civil War: Hart County’s L&N Railroad Bridge,” Legislative Moment and Historical Marker #2160. Kentucky Legislature+2Kentucky Legislature+2
Kentucky Historical Society. Historical Markers for “Bacon Creek Bridge” and other Hart County Civil War sites. Kentucky History+2HMDB+2
Barnett, J. “Munfordville in the Civil War.” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 69 (1971). JSTOR
Brown, Kent Masterson. “Munfordville: The Campaign and Battle along Kentucky’s Strategic Axis.” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 97 (1999). JSTOR+1
Engle, Steven D. “Don Carlos Buell and the Campaign for the Bluegrass State.” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 96 (1998). JSTOR
Harrison, Lowell H. The Civil War in Kentucky. University Press of Kentucky, 1975 and later editions. Google Books+2CORE+2
“Munfordville Battle Facts and Summary.” American Battlefield Trust. American Battlefield Trust
“Battle of Munfordville.” National Park Service and related CWSAC materials. National Park Service+2NPS History+2
“Battle of Rowlett’s Station, KY.” Emerging Civil War, 17 December 2021. Emerging Civil War+2Wikipedia+2
The Paper Trail of the Civil War in Kentucky, 1861–1865. Kentucky National Guard Historical Foundation. KY National Guard History+2KY National Guard History+2
Battle for the Bridge Historic Preserve, official and tourism pages on the Rowlett’s Station, Munfordville, and Woodsonville battlefields. Battle for the Bridge+3Kentucky Tourism+3Munfordville Tourism+3
Advisory Council on Historic Preservation. “Munfordville, Kentucky” Preserve America community profile. ACHP+1
Clio, Historical Marker Database, and related entries on the August Bloedner/32nd Indiana Monument. Clio+2CEM+2