Appalachian History
Long before it was a dateline for national coverage of floods, Troublesome Creek was a narrow, twisting corridor through the central Appalachian mountains. Its headwaters meet at the Forks of Troublesome where Hindman now stands, then the creek runs west through what are today Knott and Perry counties before emptying into the North Fork of the Kentucky River near Haddix in Breathitt County.
In the 1850s and 1860s that valley was not divided by county lines the way it is now. The Forks lay in Letcher County until Knott County formed in 1884, while the lower valley fell within Perry and Breathitt. Families such as Cornett, Duke, Hays, Combs, and Everidge farmed the bottoms, ran small mills, and walked footpaths that followed every bend of the stream.
When the Civil War came, Troublesome Creek became more than a local waterway. It turned into a military route, an escape hatch, and a hiding place. Union and Confederate cavalry scouted along its banks, home guards tried to police it, and guerrillas used its twists and hollows to vanish. The Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, Dyer’s Compendium, regimental histories, and scattered diary entries leave only a thin paper trail, but taken together they let us trace several distinct wartime episodes in and around what is now Knott County.
April 1864: The Skirmish at the Mouth of Troublesome
The best documented action connected to Troublesome Creek unfolded in late April 1864 at its mouth on the North Fork of the Kentucky River. Federal chronologies list it as the “Skirmish on Troublesome Creek, Kentucky,” dated either 27 or 29 April, and place it in the long list of small fights that punctuated spring operations in eastern Kentucky.
By that point the Union’s 45th Kentucky Mounted Infantry, commanded by Colonel John Mason Brown, had spent months patrolling the eastern counties along the Virginia border. The regiment’s detailed service record notes a string of scattered engagements: Salyersville in November 1863, Pound Gap on 19 April 1864, then “Troublesome Creek April 27” followed by a clash at Morganfield on May 5 and participation in the pursuit of Confederate raider John Hunt Morgan.
According to Dyer’s Compendium and the Civil War Encyclopedia, a detachment of the 45th under Captain Adams moved down into the North Fork valley and overtook a Confederate force near the mouth of Troublesome Creek. Adams had four companies in hand, effectively a strong battalion. He attacked the Confederate camp, killed several men, captured sixteen prisoners along with twenty-four horses and twenty-eight stands of arms, then pushed up the creek in pursuit. In the running fight that followed one Confederate leader was killed and about thirty-five more men were taken.
Modern writers usually place this fight near the present community of Haddix in Breathitt County, where Troublesome empties into the North Fork. That location makes sense when you look at a map: the creek here offered a natural gateway between the main river corridor and the interior mountain valleys where small Confederate parties still tried to operate in 1864.
For the men who lived upstream, however, the skirmish was part of the same Troublesome story. Whether the prisoners came from Perry or Breathitt, or had cousins in what would later become Knott County, they moved along a road and a creek that locals understood as a single connected valley.
Guerrillas on Troublesome and Quicksand: June 1864
If the Official Records give us the federal view at the mouth of Troublesome, the Confederate side appears most clearly in the diary of Edward O. Guerrant, adjutant to General Humphrey Marshall. Guerrant’s wartime journal, later published in part as Bluegrass Confederate and preserved in manuscript at several archives, records the constant shadow of guerrilla warfare in the eastern Kentucky mountains.
On 5 June 1864 Guerrant noted that Major Chenoweth’s 13th Kentucky Cavalry (Confederate) had burned a house on Troublesome Creek while searching for a local bushwhacker. The Eastern Kentucky and the Civil War research blog, working from Guerrant’s volume 4, page 974, quotes him on this episode and on what he saw later that same day along Main Quicksand, another tributary of the North Fork: the body of William Day, identified as a deserter from Chenoweth’s command and a bushwhacker shot down in the brush.
The diary entry does not give a precise county location for the burned house. That is typical of Guerrant’s mountain notes; to him, Troublesome and Quicksand were more meaningful landmarks than shifting county lines. But the corridor he describes is the same tight North Fork watershed that links today’s Knott, Perry, and Breathitt counties. In June 1864 that corridor had turned into a patchwork of loyalties. Some men enlisted in Confederate cavalry like Chenoweth’s 13th Kentucky, some served in Union regiments or in local home-guard units, and some tried to straddle the fence as “bushwhackers,” preying on whichever side seemed weaker on a given day.
Guerrant’s brief comment on a house fire and a dead deserter hints at the broader pattern. On Troublesome Creek, as in many Appalachian valleys, the war often came not as a pitched battle with flags and formations, but as the sudden thunder of hooves in a dooryard and the smell of a neighbor’s cabin burning.
Home Guards at the Three Forks: December 1864
By the winter of 1864 the Union authorities tried to clamp down on guerrilla activity in the eastern counties through a network of state-troop and home-guard units. One of the most important in this region was the Three Forks Battalion, Kentucky State Troops, named for the three forks of the Kentucky River.
A later chronology of the battalion’s operations, compiled from reports and local tradition, records a brief entry for 22 December 1864: “Skirmish on Troublesome Creek in Perry Co. Ky. Lost one horse and one Rebel killed and gun captured.”
The description is matter-of-fact, yet it reveals several things. First, Union state troops were still patrolling Troublesome Creek late in the war, trying to suppress Confederate bands and protect loyalist families. Second, the language shows how the conflict had blurred. The entry speaks of “Rebels,” not regular Confederate soldiers, and of a single horse lost. That sounds less like a formal engagement and more like a sudden clash with a small party of mounted men, perhaps much like the guerrillas who haunted Guerrant’s diary.
For families along Troublesome, though, even a one-horse skirmish could leave deep marks. A dead rider on the riverbank meant a son or cousin who did not come home, a weapon confiscated meant one less firearm to protect a household against the next raid.
A Skirmish at the Forks of Troublesome
Local memory adds at least one more Civil War episode within the Troublesome valley, one that never made it into the Official Records. Knott County histories compiled by the Knott Historical Society and KYGenWeb recount a tradition of “a Civil War skirmish” that took place at the Forks of Troublesome, around Cornett’s Mill, the cluster of buildings that would later become Hindman. Researchers note that details such as the exact date, units, and casualties are still being “constantly uncovered.”
The Forks lay on land associated with early settler Samuel Cornett, who held a large tract below the junction of the Left and Right Forks and operated a gristmill there until his death in 1860. Other early residents included Peyton Duke and Anderson Hays. Later accounts describe Hays as a former Confederate captain who settled a short distance upstream on what came to be known as Hays Creek.
When men from families like these chose sides, they carried the war right into their home valley. A skirmish at the Forks might have been as small as a few dozen men trading shots near the mill, a raid on a storehouse, or an ambush on a passing scout. The lack of an official report suggests that, in army terms, the fight was minor. For the people who told and retold the story, it mattered enough that Hindman’s early twentieth-century local histories preserved it as part of the town’s origin story.
Troublesome as a Military Road
Several wider campaigns also brushed along Troublesome Creek. Historical markers for “Eastern Kentucky’s Civil War Battles and Skirmishes, 1863–1864,” together with modern National Park Service studies, note that Confederate raider John Hunt Morgan came through Pound Gap, followed Troublesome Creek down toward the North Fork, and then swung north to strike at Mt. Sterling and other Bluegrass targets.
This route helps explain why units like the 45th Kentucky Mounted Infantry and the Three Forks Battalion paid such close attention to the valley. Troublesome offered an indirect but sheltered path for cavalry. A raiding column could slip over the Virginia border, move through Letcher County, drop into the Troublesome drainage, and then emerge onto larger roads along the North Fork and beyond. For federal officers who looked at the war through maps and telegraph reports, keeping this corridor under some measure of control was part of protecting central Kentucky from further incursions.
For residents of the valley, however, outside raids and counter-raids blended with local feuds. Men who had ridden with Confederate companies or Union scouts carried their grievances into postwar politics. When Knott County was finally carved out in 1884 and Hindman became the county seat, later sources remembered that early elections and courthouse fights often followed lines laid down during the war years.
From Cornett’s Mill to Hindman Settlement School
In the decades after Appomattox, Troublesome Creek’s reputation shifted from war corridor to educational experiment. The Forks of Troublesome took the name Hindman in the 1880s, and around the turn of the twentieth century the community attracted a new kind of outsider.
Beginning in 1899 reformers Katherine Pettit and May Stone spent several summers running settlement-style camps in eastern Kentucky before founding Hindman Settlement School at the Forks in 1902. Their diaries and letters, now preserved in the Hindman Settlement School Collection and in published form, record conversations with older residents who still carried memories of the war and of the rough reconstruction that followed.
Historian Jess Stoddart’s Challenge and Change in Appalachia uses those diaries to show how the school’s teachers walked past Civil War graves on their way to class and listened to stories of old guerrilla bands and courthouse feuds that traced back to Troublesome’s divided loyalties.
Over time, Hindman Settlement School became famous for its work in education, crafts, and traditional music. Yet the physical setting never changed. Students and staff crossed footbridges over the same creek where bushwhackers once hid, and floodwaters still swept through the bottoms in bad years, reminding everyone that the land itself carried a long memory.
Legacy and Living Memory
Today most visitors encounter Troublesome Creek through images of disaster or of quiet mountain beauty. News photographs of the devastating 2022 floods showed cars and houses tossed into the creek at Hindman, while tourism and conservation materials highlight the valley’s scenery and its role in the story of Hindman Settlement School.
The Civil War episodes along Troublesome Creek are easy to overlook. None matches the scale of nearby battles like Middle Creek or Leatherwood. No single fight there reshaped a campaign. Instead, the record shows a chain of small, scattered actions: a sharp skirmish at the mouth of the creek where a Union detachment captured a wagon-train of men, horses, and rifles; a burned house and a dead bushwhacker noted in a Confederate officer’s diary; a December clash where a state-troop patrol lost a horse and killed “one Rebel”; a locally remembered skirmish at the Forks near Cornett’s Mill.
Taken together, those fragments reveal how a seemingly out-of-the-way Appalachian valley experienced the war. Troublesome Creek was both a conduit and a refuge. It carried raiders and scouts between more famous places, yet it also sheltered families who suffered burned homes, divided loyalties, and the long echo of political feuds.
For Knott County and its neighbors, remembering those episodes means recognizing that the Civil War was not just a distant story of big armies. It was also something that happened on familiar ground: along a stony creek where children now skip rocks, beneath the hills that rise above Hindman and the Forks of Troublesome.
Sources & Further Reading
War of the Rebellion: Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Series I, Vol. 32, Part I, Chap. XLIV, including reports on “Skirmish on Troublesome Creek, Ky.”
Frederick H. Dyer, A Compendium of the War of the Rebellion (1908), entries for 45th Kentucky Mounted Infantry and eastern Kentucky operations.
“45th Kentucky Mounted Infantry Regiment,” Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System and related summaries of detailed service.Wikipedia
“Troublesome Creek, Kentucky, April 27, 1864,” Civil War Encyclopedia, campaign and battle entry based on the Official Records.Civil War Encyclopedia+1
Appalachian Mountain Civil War Timeline, entry for “Apr. 27, 1864 Skirmish on Troublesome Creek, KY,” with sources list pointing to OR, Dyer, and Guerrant.Oocities
“Three Forks Battalion – Chronology,” USGenNet / Geocities mirror of operations of the Three Forks Battalion, Kentucky State Troops, including the 22 December 1864 skirmish on Troublesome Creek in Perry County.Geocities.ws+1
Edward O. Guerrant, wartime diary, Vol. 4 (manuscript); excerpts quoted in Bluegrass Confederate: The Headquarters Diary of Edward O. Guerrant, ed. William C. Davis, and on the “Eastern Kentucky and the Civil War” research blog.Eaky Civil War+1
“The Forks of Troublesome,” and “Troublesome Creek (North Fork Kentucky River tributary),” entries in Wikipedia, with references to Henry P. Scalf’s Kentucky’s Last Frontier and Robert Rennick’s work on eastern Kentucky place-names.Wikipedia+2Wikipedia+2
Knott County local histories and genealogy resources hosted by KYGenWeb and RootsWeb, including discussions of Cornett’s Mill, early landholders, and the traditional Civil War skirmish at the Forks of Troublesome.Invalid URL+1
Jess Stoddart, Challenge and Change in Appalachia: The Story of Hindman Settlement School (University Press of Kentucky, 2002); and Pettit-Stone diaries and correspondence in the Hindman Settlement School Collection, Berea College Special Collections.The University Press of Kentucky+2Berea College Archives+2
Historic marker “Eastern Kentucky’s Civil War Battles and Skirmishes, 1863–1864,” and related National Park Service studies describing John Hunt Morgan’s route through Pound Gap and down Troublesome Creek.HMDB+1