Appalachian History
On paper, Lewis County looked like a quiet corner of the upper South. Vanceburg sat on the Kentucky bank of the Ohio River, opposite free soil in Ohio, with steep hills behind it and river trade in front. In 1861 the town counted only about two hundred people, but its population had nearly quadrupled over the previous decade as newcomers from Pennsylvania, New York, and Massachusetts drifted downriver and settled there.
Those newcomers brought their politics with them. By the time the Civil War opened, Lewis County was a Union stronghold in a slaveholding state that never seceded. Later surveys would describe the county as “intensely loyal to the Union,” noting that no large set piece battles were fought there, even as it lost more than one hundred men in blue. The fighting in Lewis County came instead in the form of nighttime intimidation, small skirmishes, and a single officially recorded raid on the county seat.
Shaw’s Window and the Price of Unionism
The first “unpleasant scene,” as one later historian called it, came long before the famous raid. On the evening of September 1 1861, Francis L. Shaw sat in his Vanceburg home with his wife Mahala, their two children, and other family members when a group of men approached the house. One of them, Henry Pell, tried to lure Shaw downtown on a flimsy errand. Shaw, a known Union man, suspected trouble and refused.
Hours later stones thumped against his house, then a shotgun blast shattered the window. Pellets and broken glass tore into the room where Shaw’s children slept. When neighbors rushed in, they found heavy rocks on the floor and shot embedded in the wall and bedstead near a child’s head. The attackers scattered, but searchers soon discovered Pell and two companions nearby. Shaw swore out a complaint. Witnesses testified that Pell had called him “a damned Lincolnite and a damned abolitionist” and intended to do him harm.
Despite the testimony, the local police judge cleared Pell of wrongdoing, calling no key witnesses and later losing the papers. Within months Shaw moved his family to Fleming County and enlisted in the 24th Kentucky Infantry. His story, preserved in later reconstructions of the court records, captures the atmosphere in early war Vanceburg. Even in a largely Union county, allegiance to the old flag could bring gunfire through your window.
Home Guards in a Borderland
Events like the Shaw attack were part of a wider pattern in Kentucky. As both sides courted the state, guerrilla bands and partisan companies raided farms, stole horses, and threatened voters. In response, state officials and Federal commanders leaned on a patchwork of home guards and Kentucky State Troops, raised under state law but often operating alongside United States forces.
A late nineteenth century Congressional report on pensions for Kentucky militia and State Troops described how battalions in places like Harlan, the Three Forks country, and the Sandy Valley were organized to protect loyal people and property, and at times to serve as an advance guard for regular Union forces. Lewis County men appear in those same militia records and in the Adjutant General’s reports, serving both in local defense units and in regular infantry and cavalry regiments from across the commonwealth.
The Attack on Vanceburg, October 29 1864
The only Civil War engagement in Lewis County formally recorded in the Official Records came late in the war, during the heated presidential contest between Abraham Lincoln and George B. McClellan. In the small hours of October 29 1864, Colonel John P. Williams of the Confederate army crossed into the county with roughly forty men and moved on Vanceburg.
Lieutenant Colonel Lewis M. Clark of the 45th Kentucky Mounted Infantry was there with a handful of troops. In his official report, written from Vanceburg two days later, he recalled that on the morning of the 29th instant Williams, with forty men, attacked Vanceburg at about four o’clock. Clark gathered what citizens he could, advanced out from town, and met the raiders about a mile and a half away. After a short skirmish, Williams’s men broke off and retreated, driving off the best horses in the county as they went.
Home guards from nearby Carter County, under Captain Underwood, took up the chase, trailing the raiders toward Fleming County and Fox Creek. Clark reported that the band had boasted that they intended the country should vote for McClellan, and that Lewis County’s Union men feared a second raid timed with the election.
Clark’s letter pleaded with higher command to send either Federal troops or guns and ammunition to arm the home guards. He stressed that Lewis County had already sent over nine hundred men into the army of the Union and would give Lincoln a large majority in November if voters could safely reach the polls. The War Department preserved that letter in Series I, Volume 39 of the Official Records, where it appears under the heading “Attack on Vanceburg, Ky., October 29, 1864.”
For the county, this predawn raid was both a brush with open war and a blunt reminder that national politics could arrive in the mountains in the form of armed men on horseback.
“The Mountains Are All Right”
Clark’s insistence that Lewis County would back Lincoln was not idle boasting. Six months earlier, Albert G. Hodges, editor of the Frankfort Commonwealth and a close observer of Kentucky politics, had written directly to the president about the situation in the state. In that April 22 1864 letter, Hodges quoted a friend in Lewis County:
“Our meeting was large, every District being represented, and unanimous for Abraham. I tell you that the mountains are all right.”
The phrase “the mountains are all right” has become one of the best one line summaries of Unionism in eastern Kentucky. In a state often described as bitterly divided, Hodges’s correspondent held up Lewis County as proof that the hill country could pull strongly for the Union ticket.
Taken together, Hodges’s letter and Clark’s field report sketch a county deeply engaged with national politics. Unionism in Lewis County was not an abstract sentiment. It was expressed in mass meetings, enlistments, and in the determination to hold a fair presidential election in the shadow of guerrilla raids.
Counting the Cost: 107 Names
Loyalty carried a price. A late twentieth century summary in The Paper Trail of the Civil War in Kentucky noted that Lewis County lost 107 men who served in the Union army, and that in 1884 a monument was raised on the courthouse lawn to their memory. The same passage, drawing on O. G. Ragan’s 1912 History of Lewis County and on Kentucky Historical Society marker files, echoed the language that the memorial was the only Union monument south of the Mason–Dixon line erected by public subscription outside a cemetery.
Modern archaeological and historical surveys echo those figures. State heritage documents on Lewis County and the Union Monument repeat the tally of 107 Union dead and stress that the county remained intensely loyal to the Union.
Those one hundred seven names span a wide range of units and theaters. Service records and Adjutant General rosters show Lewis County men in Kentucky infantry and cavalry regiments that fought from the Cumberland Gap to the Atlanta campaign, as well as in local militia and enrolled home guard companies that never left the state but still came under fire from raiders and guerrillas.
The Limestone Soldier on the Courthouse Lawn
In 1884, almost two decades after Appomattox, the people of Lewis County turned their loyalty into stone. On the courthouse lawn in Vanceburg they erected a towering limestone monument paid for entirely by local subscription. The structure rises roughly thirty to thirty four feet, with a five foot base, an eight piece pedestal, and a life sized Union infantryman in a winter greatcoat and kepi standing guard at the top.
One face of the pedestal carries perhaps the most blunt inscription of any Civil War monument in Kentucky.
“The war for the Union was right, everlastingly right; and the war against the Union was wrong, forever wrong.”
Below that judgment are the names of the 107 Lewis County soldiers who died in Union service, along with the battles where they fell. The Kentucky Historical Society’s Highway Marker 215, “Union Memorial,” emphasizes that the monument was erected by the citizens of the county to commemorate the bravery and patriotism of those men.
Today heritage guides, local tourism sites, and even quick fact sheets about Kentucky still point to the Vanceburg monument as a regional landmark. They repeat the basic facts: built in 1884, raised by public donations, and dedicated to Union dead in a county that remained firmly on the Federal side.
A Union Monument in a Confederate Memory State
When the National Park Service reviewed Civil War monuments in Kentucky for the National Register of Historic Places in the 1990s, it identified sixty one structures. The great majority honored Confederate soldiers or couched their inscriptions in neutral language that avoided taking sides.
Vanceburg’s monument was a striking exception. It not only listed Union dead by name, it declared the Union cause everlastingly right at a time when many white Kentuckians were embracing Lost Cause narratives and erecting Confederate statues on their courthouse squares.
In that sense, the limestone soldier in Vanceburg links the wartime experiences recorded in Clark’s Official Records report and Hodges’s political correspondence with the later struggle over how the war would be remembered. Lewis County rejected the fashionable ambiguity of the late nineteenth century and chose an inscription that left no doubt where it stood.
Beyond the Monument: Skirmishes and Microhistory
The Official Records list only one Lewis County engagement by name, yet the broader border region saw other small actions and raids that touched the county. Eastern Kentucky and the Civil War, a long running research blog, has reconstructed a skirmish at Landsdowne Hall near the Lewis and Carter County line, where Kentucky troops clashed with guerrillas in the kind of fast moving, small scale combat rarely dignified with a battlefield marker.
The same blog’s detailed account of the Francis Shaw incident shows how much can be recovered from scattered court papers and sworn statements. These microhistories remind us that for many mountain families the war arrived not as grand battles, but as knocks on the door at night, gunshots in the dark, and hurried enlistments into state regiments or United States service.
Researching Lewis County’s Civil War Story Today
For family historians and local researchers, Lewis County’s Civil War story is unusually well documented for a rural Appalachian county. The Lewis County, Kentucky Genealogy page on the FamilySearch Wiki links directly to statewide Civil War service records for both Union and Confederate soldiers and to digitized copies of the Kentucky Adjutant General’s multi volume reports, which list soldiers by regiment and often by county of residence.
Additional military material, including enrolled militia records and county level order books from the 1860s, appears in online indexes of Kentucky military records and can be accessed through archives and subscription sites.
Newspapers are another rich source. LDSGenealogy’s Lewis County newspapers guide shows that the Vanceburg Courier for 1884, the Vanceburg Sun, and the Lewis County Herald are available on microfilm or through newspaper databases. These later papers cover the dedication of the Union monument, veterans’ reunions, obituaries, and anniversaries that kept the memory of 1861 to 1865 alive on the courthouse lawn and in local print.
Finally, modern studies such as Ron D. Bryant’s Paper Trail of the Civil War in Kentucky and the Kentucky Historical Society’s ExploreKYHistory essays on the Union Memorial synthesize these scattered sources into concise county level profiles, always returning to the central fact that Lewis County stood firmly with the Union in a deeply divided border state.
Why Lewis County’s Civil War Story Matters
Lewis County’s experience offers a mountain sized counterpoint to simple North versus South storytelling. Here was a slaveholding Kentucky county whose voters rallied behind Lincoln, whose sons filled Union ranks, and whose citizens later raised a monument that declared the Federal cause everlastingly right in carved stone.
The county’s one recorded raid, the attack on Vanceburg in October 1864, reminds us that national elections and guerrilla warfare could collide on the same dark hillside road. The Shaw family’s shattered window makes clear that taking a stand for the Union in a border community was dangerous long before any monument rose on the courthouse lawn.
For Appalachia, Lewis County offers a case study in how loyalty, violence, and memory played out along the Ohio River border. The limestone soldier in Vanceburg does more than list names. It speaks a moral judgment that grew out of real sacrifices in a small mountain county, and in doing so it preserves a rare, unapologetic Union voice in Kentucky’s Civil War landscape.
Sources & Further Reading
Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Series I, Vol. 39, Part 1, “Attack on Vanceburg, Ky., October 29, 1864,” in The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies(Washington: Government Printing Office, 1892). Digitized at the University of North Texas Portal to Texas History: Series I, Volume 39, Part 1, and indexed through Cornell’s Making of America and HathiTrust collections.The Portal to Texas History+1
Atlas to Accompany the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1891–1895). Available as a full digital facsimile via Internet Archive: Atlas to Accompany the Official Records. Internet Archive
Albert G. Hodges to Abraham Lincoln, April 22, 1864, Abraham Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress. A reliable transcript is hosted by Dickinson College’s House Divided Project: “Albert G. Hodges to Abraham Lincoln, April 22, 1864”. House Divided
“Union Monument in Vanceburg,” National Register of Historic Places nomination and related documentation, National Park Service. See the summary entry at Wikipedia, “Union Monument in Vanceburg”, and the full NRHP file via NPGallery: Union Monument, Lewis County, Kentucky. Wikipedia+1
Kentucky Historical Society, Highway Marker 215, “Union Memorial,” with text and marker data at KHS’s marker database: Union Memorial. For interpretive context see Tim Talbott’s ExploreKYHistory essay: “Union Memorial”. Kentucky Historical Society+1
Ron D. Bryant, The Paper Trail of the Civil War in Kentucky 1861–1865 (Kentucky National Guard History Program, n.d.). Available as a state produced PDF: The Paper Trail of the Civil War in Kentucky 1861–1865. Ky National Guard History
O. G. Ragan, History of Lewis County, Kentucky (Cincinnati: Jennings & Graham, 1912). Digitized with searchable text at Internet Archive: History of Lewis County, Kentucky. Internet Archive+1
Marlitta H. Perkins, “An Unpleasant Scene … Vanceburg in the Fall of 1861,” Eastern Kentucky and the Civil War (19 February 2013). Accessible at: An Unpleasant Scene … Vanceburg in the Fall of 1861. Eaky Civil War
Marlitta H. Perkins, “Skirmish at Landsdowne Hall,” Eastern Kentucky and the Civil War (16 October 2011). Available at: Skirmish at Landsdowne Hall. Eaky Civil War
“Pensions for Militia and State Troops,” Eastern Kentucky and the Civil War (16 July 2013), reproducing and discussing the U.S. House Committee on Invalid Pensions report on H.R. 7554 (52nd Congress). Online at: Pensions for Militia and State Troops. Eaky Civil War
“Lewis County, Kentucky Genealogy,” FamilySearch Wiki, which consolidates links to state level Civil War service records, Adjutant General reports, and local records: Lewis County, Kentucky Genealogy. FamilySearch
“Lewis County KY Newspapers and Obituaries” and related Vanceburg titles, LDSGenealogy.com, listing microfilm and online holdings for the Vanceburg Courier, Vanceburg Sun, and Lewis County Herald: Lewis County KY Newspapers and Obituaries. LDS Genealogy
“Lewis County, Kentucky,” county overview in Wikipedia, which notes the Union monument and summarizes the county’s Unionist identity in a border state: Lewis County, Kentucky. Wikipedia
City of Vanceburg, “Union Monument” and related heritage pages describing the courthouse lawn memorial and its dedication to Lewis County’s Union dead: Union Monument – City of Vanceburg. City of Vanceburg+1
National War Memorial Registry, “Vanceburg Union Memorial,” listing the monument’s basic details, location, and dedication: Vanceburg Union Memorial. National War Memorial Registry