Appalachian History
At the fork of the Levisa and Tug forks of the Big Sandy, the little town of Louisa sat closer to steamboats than to turnpikes. That geography, more than any political speech, pulled Lawrence County into the Civil War. In December 1861 Union forces under Colonel James A. Garfield moved up the Big Sandy Valley and occupied Louisa to control river traffic and supply routes into the mountains. A Kentucky Historical Society marker on the courthouse lawn still summarizes the moment: Garfield seized the river town, and Louisa became a Federal foothold at the head of navigation.
The occupation came just as Garfield prepared his Eastern Kentucky campaign against Confederate General Humphrey Marshall. Official Records and later summaries place Garfield’s brigade at Catlettsburg and Louisa, gathering Ohio and Kentucky regiments for the march toward Paintsville and the Battle of Middle Creek in January 1862. From the start, the Big Sandy war ran through Lawrence County.
“A Straggling, Unpainted Hamlet”
When the army arrived, Louisa was no bustling river city. One Ohio soldier described it that winter as “at best a straggling, unpainted hamlet” whose rough edges wartime traffic only made worse. By fall 1861 the 14th Kentucky Infantry had already raised Camp Wallace near town, named for local businessman Thomas Wallace, and houses, stores, and churches were pressed into service as hospitals and quarters.
Marlitta Perkins’ careful compilation of letters and claims shows how quickly Louisa changed. The courthouse became barracks and commissary space. The jail was turned into a guardhouse. The First United Methodist Church, a brick house on Main Street, and other buildings served as military hospitals during Garfield’s campaign and afterward. By 1863 one soldier of the 14th Kentucky complained that town was so crowded “it is a hard mater for 2 person to git a place to stay,” a reminder that behind the official reports of skirmishes lay a landscape jammed with troops, families, and refugees.
Louisa soon became headquarters for the Military District of Eastern Kentucky, with a provost marshal’s office and a steady flow of prisoners shipped downriver to larger Union prisons in Ohio. Regiments from Kentucky, Ohio, Illinois, West Virginia, and later United States Colored Troops rotated through campgrounds on the surrounding hills, turning a remote river town into a busy Federal post.
Garfield’s Campaign and Guerrilla War
Garfield’s own account in “My Campaign in East Kentucky,” published years later in the North American Review, describes his movement up the Big Sandy and his reliance on Louisa as a staging point and supply depot. His letters, preserved in the Garfield Papers, reveal a more immediate picture. In a January 5, 1862 note to Captain Bunker at Louisa, Garfield praised news that Bunker’s men had “killed or disabled” the notorious Confederate guerrilla William “Rebel Bill” Smith and captured some of his associates, instructing him to send such men away as quickly as possible.
That brief line sketches a reality the printed campaign narrative softens. Louisa was not only a base for conventional operations against Marshall. It also served as a nerve center for anti-guerrilla work along the Big Sandy, where small bands of Confederate partisans robbed, ambushed, and occasionally captured boats on the river.
Skirmish at Louisa, March 12, 1863
After Garfield’s victory at Middle Creek in January 1862, large Confederate formations withdrew from the Big Sandy Valley. The war in Lawrence County did not end. Instead, it came back in spikes.
The first came on March 12, 1863. The War Department’s Official Records list that date simply as “Skirmish at Louisa, Ky.” in the summary of principal events for operations in Tennessee and Kentucky. Regimental service records for the 14th Kentucky Infantry, which had been raised near Louisa and mustered into service in December 1861, likewise record “Louisa, March 12, 1863” among the regiment’s engagements.
Details of the fight are sparse in the published record, but contemporary county timelines and later compilers describe Confederate forces probing the Federal position and running into determined resistance from the Louisa garrison. The skirmish did not dislodge Union troops, yet it signaled that the Big Sandy front was far from quiet.
Smokey Valley and the Approach to Town
Two weeks later, the pressure returned. The Official Records list “Skirmishes near Louisa, Ky., March 25–26, 1863,” again in the chronology for the Department of the Ohio. The 39th Kentucky Mounted Infantry, a Union regiment drawn heavily from the Big Sandy region itself, includes “Near Louisa, Ky., March 25–26, 1863” in its own history.
Perkins, drawing on letters from Confederate commander Humphrey Marshall and local tradition, reconstructs those days in greater detail. Confederate cavalry skirmished with Union pickets in Smokey Valley, on the south side of town. The next morning Marshall’s men eased forward along the road, only to round a bend and find Federal infantry and artillery drawn up on a high hill above Louisa. One Confederate account likened the position to a mountain Gibraltar, with cannon dominating river, road, and valley.
Faced with that unpromising prospect and uncertain of Union strength, Marshall broke off the advance and pulled his command back toward Blaine. The attempt to seize Louisa had failed, and the town remained firmly in Union hands.
Everyday Occupation and Local Damage
While the big events show up in indexes and unit histories, the quieter costs of occupation still echo through local paperwork. In February 1865 Judge R. F. Vinson of Lawrence County petitioned the commander of the military post at Louisa to return the public buildings to civil control. Vinson’s claim, preserved in transcription, lists bricks knocked from the courthouse walls by army wagons, broken stairs and doors, damaged columns, destroyed seating, and even the filling of the public square’s well after a horse fell in.
Trustees of the Methodist Episcopal Church filed a similar claim. They wrote that Federal forces had occupied the sanctuary for about three and a half years, using it at different times as barracks, commissary, hospital, and stable. Windows, doors, floors, altar, pulpit, and seats all vanished or lay ruined, and the walls needed replastering. None of these claims were ever paid, yet they preserve vivid testimony about how deeply the war intruded on civic and religious life in Louisa.
Expedition from Louisa to Rock House Creek, May 1864
By 1864 the character of the conflict along the Big Sandy had shifted toward constant small-unit movements and anti-guerrilla work. In the spring of that year cavalry and mounted infantry based at Louisa launched an expedition into the rugged country along Rock House Creek near the Virginia and West Virginia line.
The Official Records list “Expedition from Louisa, Ky., to, and skirmish at, Rock House Creek, W. Va., May 9–13, 1864” in the national chronology. Service summaries for units such as the 11th Michigan Cavalry and other Federal formations in eastern Kentucky show duty at Louisa, scouting operations in the surrounding counties, and participation in this expedition, which targeted Confederate horsemen and irregulars moving through the border mountains.
Though overshadowed by larger campaigns in Georgia and Virginia that spring, the Rock House Creek expedition highlights how Louisa functioned as a launch point for raids that reached far beyond Lawrence County’s lines on the map.
Fort Bishop on Town Hill
The final, most visible symbol of Louisa’s wartime role rose above town in 1864. Kentucky’s official highway marker notes that Fort Bishop, also known as Fort Gallup or Fort Hill, was completed “just as war ended in 1865” and built to defend Louisa and its river commerce.
Modern research fills in the story. The Clio entry on Fort Bishop explains that construction began on September 23, 1864 atop what is now called Tower Hill. Engineers designed an earthwork with deep encircling trenches and positions for seven guns, arranged so that Union troops could command the town, the river, and the roads that funneled into the Big Sandy Valley.
Perkins and the Eastern Kentucky and the Civil War project identify the primary labor force. A detail of forty seven soldiers from the 109th United States Colored Infantry worked on the fortifications during the summer of 1864. Their work, three quarters finished when the war ended, left a fort that never fired in a major battle but loomed over Louisa as a visible reminder of Federal power and of African American troops’ role in securing Kentucky’s eastern borderlands.
Raid of November 5, 1864
As Fort Bishop went up on the hill, Confederate partisans tried one last time to hurt Lawrence County’s war effort from below. The “Louisa in Civil War” marker records that on November 5, 1864 southern partisans raided the area, burned houses and two steamers, and looted stores before slipping away.
The Paper Trail of the Civil War in Kentucky, a Kentucky National Guard publication that compiles events by county, repeats that summary and situates the Louisa raid in a wider pattern of 1864 guerrilla actions across the Commonwealth. The burning of steamers on the Big Sandy was more than a dramatic flourish. With roads in poor condition, boat traffic remained the cheapest way to haul coal, timber, and supplies. Destroying riverboats struck at both the army and the local economy.
Surrender on the Hill
News of Lee’s surrender in Virginia reached the Big Sandy Valley in April 1865. Confederate forces in eastern Kentucky, notably Colonel Henry Giltner’s brigade, trickled into Union posts to accept paroles. Perkins notes that while most of Giltner’s men surrendered at Mount Sterling on April 30, 1865, remnants of his command and other scattered Confederate soldiers made their way to Louisa and surrendered to the United States provost marshal there.
By then Fort Bishop stood nearly complete, its seven guns mounted above a town whose public buildings had been battered by years of military use. Within months the trenches and magazines stood quiet. Civilians reclaimed the courthouse and church, and Louisa slid from “district headquarters” back toward small river town.
Lawrence County’s War Without a Battle
Lawrence County never hosted a Middle Creek or Perryville scale battle. Instead it endured something equally important and often harder to trace: years of occupation, repeated skirmishes, and a steadily tightening Federal grip backed by artillery on the hill.
Official summaries and regimental histories preserve the bare bones of that story through entries for “Skirmish at Louisa,” “Skirmishes near Louisa,” and “Expedition from Louisa to Rock House Creek.” Local sources, from Garfield’s letters to Judge Vinson’s damage claims, fill in the lived experience of a courthouse square turned barracks and a church turned hospital and stable.
Walk the streets of Louisa today and you can still trace the outline. The courthouse lawn holds the “Louisa in Civil War” marker. Town Hill, now called Tower Hill, still bears the eroded earthworks of Fort Bishop, with views down toward the junction of the Big Sandy forks. Between them stretches a town that once was, in the words of a weary Ohio soldier, a straggling hamlet suddenly drawn into a continental war.
Seen from that hilltop, Lawrence County’s Civil War was less about grand charges and more about control of river, road, and community. It was a war of patrols, raids, and paperwork. Yet it shaped the county’s landscape and memory in ways still visible beneath the grass and courthouse brick.
Sources & Further Reading
Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, Series I, Vol. 23, Part I, Summary of Principal Events and reports, entries for “Skirmish at Louisa, Ky., March 12, 1863” and “Skirmishes near Louisa, Ky., March 25–26, 1863.” Civil War+1
Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, Series I, Vol. 39, Part I, Summary of Principal Events, entry for “Expedition from Louisa, Ky., to, and skirmish at, Rock House Creek, W. Va., May 9–13, 1864.” Civil War Index+1
Kentucky Historical Society and Kentucky Transportation Cabinet, Highway Marker 547, “Louisa in Civil War,” and Marker 632, “Fort Bishop,” compiled in the Kentucky Historical Marker Database and The Paper Trail of the Civil War in Kentucky, 1861–1865. Kentucky.gov+1
James A. Garfield, “My Campaign in East Kentucky,” North American Review 143, no. 361 (December 1886), 525–535, and James A. Garfield Papers, Library of Congress, especially correspondence from December 1861 to January 1862 relating to Big Sandy operations. JSTOR+1
Marlitta H. Perkins, “Louisa During the Civil War,” Eastern Kentucky and the Civil War (blog, 2010), and related posts on Rebel Bill Smith, Union burials in Louisa, and Fort Bishop, transcribing soldier letters, damage claims, and local directories. Eaky Civil War+1
National Park Service, Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System, entries for 14th Kentucky Infantry and 39th Kentucky Mounted Infantry, documenting service at Louisa and near Louisa in March 1863 and later operations in eastern Kentucky. National Park Service+1
Fort Bishop entry, Clio, including description of earthworks on Tower Hill, naming, and context within Union defenses in eastern Kentucky. Clio+1
Lawrence County Government, “History” page, summarizing the occupation of Louisa by Garfield in December 1861 and the construction of Fort Bishop before war’s end. Lawrence County