Appalachian History
A crossroads county at war
Magoffin County was barely on the map when the Civil War began. Created in 1860 from parts of Johnson, Morgan, and Floyd Counties, it counted only 3,485 residents in the 1860 census. Later research for the Magoffin County Civil War monument shows that 431 local men would serve in the conflict, 308 in Union blue and 123 in Confederate gray.
The county seat on the Licking River began as Prather’s Fort and Licking Station, then became Adamsville for merchant William “Uncle Billy” Adams before finally taking the name Salyersville in honor of local politician Samuel Salyer. In the early 1860s it was, as one contemporary described it, “a one store, cross roads town, with a blacksmith shop and about 20 inhabitants.” What made the place matter was not its size but its position. Salyersville sat squarely on the Mount Sterling to Pound Gap road, the main overland route between the Bluegrass and the Virginia line. The modern US 460 follows roughly the same path.
That state road drew armies. Confederate recruiters used Licking Station as a staging point in 1861, funnelling volunteers and refugees toward Prestonsburg and on into Virginia. Union General William “Bull” Nelson’s 1861 eastern Kentucky campaign marched along the same corridor, camping at Licking Station in early November before pushing on to fight at Ivy Mountain. Confederate General Humphrey Marshall later brought thousands of men through Salyersville, making Mrs. Sarah Gardner’s farm at Licking Station a temporary headquarters more than once.
From the beginning, then, Magoffin County lived with marching columns, foraging details, and rumors of raids. The Official Records of the War of the Rebellion include scattered notations of men “captured in Magoffin County, Ky.” or “deserted in Magoffin County, Ky.” in both Union and Confederate rolls, small clues that patrols and arrests had become part of everyday life around the Licking.
Ivy Point: recruiting ground under fire, fall 1863
By 1863 the war around Salyersville had shifted from large columns to smaller scouting parties and recruiting camps. The Union 14th Kentucky Infantry, raised largely in the mountain counties, used the town and nearby Ivy Point as a base to “scout and protect east Ky,” in the wording that later appeared on a state historical marker.
On 30 October 1863, Lieutenant Colonel Orlando Brown Jr. marched about 160 men of the 14th Kentucky into the Ivy Point area. According to both the Kentucky Historical Society marker and the Kentucky National Guard’s Paper Trail of the Civil War in Kentucky, Brown’s detachment collided with Confederates near Salyersville, drove them off, and captured roughly 50 prisoners.
The victory did not make the place safe. A month later, Ivy Point became the target rather than the launching ground. In the early hours of 30 November 1863, Captain Peter Everett brought three to four hundred Confederate cavalry from the Third Battalion Kentucky Mounted Rifles into Salyersville. As one Eastern Kentucky chronicler reconstructs the attack, Everett’s scouts shot Second Lieutenant Richard Minifee Elam of Company I, 14th Kentucky, near a local store, killing him. Corporal Jilson Power was wounded soon after. Everett’s main body crossed the ford of the Licking, struck the 45th Kentucky’s nearby recruiting camp at Ivy Point, and sent raw recruits scrambling up the hillsides.
Casualty lists for the day recorded one Union officer killed, one enlisted man wounded, and nine men of the 14th Kentucky missing. The 45th Kentucky lost another man wounded and seventeen missing. Many of those “missing” were chased down and sent to Southern prison camps, where a significant number died. Later summaries in the Paper Trail and on the Ivy Point highway marker compress all of this into a few lines: one raid in October that netted Union prisoners, another in November when Everett’s Confederates captured approximately twenty five men.
For Magoffin County families, these were not abstract numbers. The same monument that lists the county’s 431 Civil War soldiers preserves dozens of surnames whose bearers fought on both sides and, in some cases, rode in the very columns that battled at Ivy Point.
Reuben Patrick and the Williams gun
Not every Magoffin County story from this period is a tale of surprise and defeat. One of the more colorful episodes centers on Captain Reuben Patrick of the 14th Kentucky Infantry, a Home Guard leader whose name clings to both local folklore and highway markers.
During 1863, Confederate troops camped near Ivyton brought with them a Williams rapid fire gun, a breech loading piece of experimental artillery. The Paper Trail, drawing on Kentucky Historical Society marker 902, records that Patrick crept into the Confederate camp while the posted guard slept, unbolted the gun from its carriage, and hid the weapon in the woods. The Confederates moved on with an empty carriage. The captured Williams gun spent many years afterward on display in Salyersville as a point of local pride.
Patrick appears again in the Eastern Kentucky and the Civil War timeline. On 22 to 28 February 1864 he led a detachment of the 14th Kentucky Infantry that rounded up “15 guerillas and horse thieves,” and on 4 April he and seventeen men were dispatched from Paintsville to watch the Magoffin County border.
These episodes, woven from official reports and local memory, show how the war in Magoffin County had become a mesh of scouting parties, partisan bands, and small scale skirmishes long before the larger fight that would make “Half Mountain” a name remembered far beyond Puncheon Creek.
Clay’s raid and Gallup’s pursuit
In April 1864, the conflict that had simmered around Salyersville for years boiled over. Confederate Colonel Ezekiel F. Clay brought his regiment of Kentucky mounted rifles north on a raid, part of a larger Confederate effort to disrupt Union control in eastern Kentucky.
On 13 April, Clay struck at the Union post in Paintsville. There Colonel George W. Gallup commanded a mixed force that included at least five companies of the 14th Kentucky Infantry and several mounted companies of the 39th Kentucky Mounted Infantry under Colonel David Mims. Despite being attacked by what one source estimates as roughly six hundred Confederates, Gallup’s garrison held firm.
Clay pulled his worn out men and horses away from Paintsville and moved up the Big Sandy watershed toward Magoffin County. In his official report, preserved in the War of the Rebellion records and quoted in later regimental histories, Gallup told his superior, Brigadier General E. H. Hobson, “I pursued the enemy to Half Mountain, Licking River, 13 miles above Salyersville,” a few words that set the scene for what came next.
According to the Eastern Kentucky and the Civil War research, Gallup gathered his companies and followed Clay along Jenny’s Creek, then down Gun Creek, angling toward the high ridge of Little Half Mountain that separates the valleys feeding Puncheon Creek.
Clay, believing he had disengaged successfully, moved only about three miles on the morning of 14 April, shifted his command into the meadows along Puncheon Creek, and ordered the men to rest. Four companies went out on scout, others scattered on foraging details, and the majority stretched out to sleep among the trees. Gallup was much closer than Clay realized.
The Battle of Half Mountain, 14 April 1864
Late that afternoon, Union and Confederate forces collided in the largest engagement ever fought in Magoffin County.
Working from a combination of his official report and later histories, we can follow Gallup’s maneuver. At Brushy Fork he divided his column. One detachment under Lieutenant Colonel Orlando Brown advanced along the ridge of Little Half Mountain, while Gallup led the rest of his men down another branch toward the mouth of Puncheon Creek. A persistent local tradition, recorded in both encyclopedic entries and the local “Battle of Puncheon” narrative, credits a young woman from Puncheon, Liza Whitaker, with guiding the Union troops over the rough country.
Around three in the afternoon Gallup’s advance struck Clay’s camp from front and rear at once. Many Confederates were still half awake, their horses unsaddled. For three to five hours the fight surged back and forth along Puncheon Creek, the Confederates digging in among the timber and boulders while Union infantry and mounted men pressed them from two directions.
At some point in the struggle Colonel Clay was hit in the face by a pistol ball that entered near the bridge of his nose and passed beneath his right eye, blinding him on that side. His men eventually pulled back up Puncheon Creek through Rough and Tough Gap into Floyd County, some slipping away over the divide to Salt Lick Branch. A nearby log house became an improvised infirmary. Local memory held that bloodstains from wounded men remained on its floorboards until the building was torn down generations later.
Gallup’s own report, printed in the Official Records, claimed that his command killed or mortally wounded about twenty five Confederates, captured fifty prisoners, and seized more than a hundred horses, two hundred saddles, and roughly two hundred stands of arms, all at the cost of four Union men wounded, one seriously. Later interpretations, including the Kentucky Historical Society’s Royalton highway marker, round those figures upward to “60 casualties and 60 men, 200 horses, 400 saddles and 300 small arms taken,” but they rely on Gallup’s numbers as their base.
However one parses the statistics, the result was clear. Clay’s raiding force left eastern Kentucky battered, its colonel badly wounded and captured, its mounts and equipment scattered among Union regiments. The Battle of Salyersville, or Battle of Half Mountain, had ended as a decisive Union victory.
Aftermath: garrisons, raids, and divided loyalties
The Half Mountain fight did not end Magoffin County’s wartime troubles. Two days later, on 16 April 1864, there was another skirmish at Salyersville. Between 16 and 19 April Colonel C. J. True’s 40th Kentucky Infantry and the 11th Michigan Cavalry moved into the town as reinforcements, turning it into a forward base for the continuing pursuit of John Hunt Morgan and other Confederate raiders.
Burbridge’s command route for the later Saltville expedition in September 1864 ran through Salyersville. Union reports placed two companies of the 14th Kentucky garrisoned there in December, “quietly holding the town,” but January 1865 saw yet another scouting expedition hit by guerrillas in or near Salyersville.
The Kentucky adjutant general’s compiled Confederate records and later genealogical work show how deeply the conflict reached into local families. Individual service entries note men “captured in Magoffin County, Ky.” or “deserted in Magoffin County, Ky.” The same surnames line up on both sides of the Magoffin County Civil War monument in Salyersville’s “Legends in Blue and Gray” memorial, where 308 Union and 123 Confederate soldiers appear together on a single stone wall.
Even incidents that seem like side notes, such as Captain Patrick’s capture of the Williams rapid fire gun or the arrest of “guerillas and horse thieves,” point to a county where formal armies and irregular bands blurred together and where loyalty to nation often competed with loyalty to kin and neighborhood.
Memory along the Licking
Today Magoffin County’s Civil War story is written into the landscape as much as it is into books. At Royalton, the “Civil War Action” marker summarizes Gallup’s pursuit from Paintsville to the Puncheon and Half Mountain area, recounting Clay’s wounding and the capture of horses, saddles, and small arms.
In Salyersville, the “Ivy Point Skirmishes” marker reminds passersby that before Half Mountain there were two hard fights in the fall of 1863: Brown’s October stand that netted fifty prisoners and Everett’s November raid that carried off twenty five men from a recruiting camp. Nearby, another marker tells the story of Reuben Patrick’s midnight removal of the Williams gun, a prank that became part of local legend.
The “Legends in Blue and Gray” monument anchors these scattered plaques. Standing before its lists of names, one sees Magoffin County’s Civil War not as a single battle but as years of marching, skirmishing, and divided households along a mountain road that armies could not ignore.
Half Mountain and Ivy Point together form the heart of that story. Ivy Point shows Magoffin County caught between scouting parties, recruiting details, and surprise raids. Half Mountain shows the same hills suddenly thrust into a larger operational drama, where official reports and casualty lists link a remote creek to decisions made in district headquarters and in Washington itself.
For Appalachian history, Magoffin County’s experience is a reminder that some of the war’s most intense struggles played out far from the famous battlefields, along narrow roads and small rivers where a “one store, cross roads town” could become a strategic prize.
Sources & Further Reading
Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, Series I, Vol. 32, Part III, including Col. George W. Gallup’s April 1864 report from “Half Mountain, Licking River, 13 miles above Salyersville.” Freepages Rootweb+1
Report of the Adjutant General of the State of Kentucky, Vol. 2 (Frankfort, 1866), Confederate and Union service entries noting capture and desertion in Magoffin County. Internet Archive+1
Al Alfaro, The Paper Trail of the Civil War in Kentucky, 1861-1865, “Civil War 1861-1865 in Magoffin County,” incorporating Kentucky Historical Society highway markers 566, 901, and 902 for Half Mountain, Ivy Point, and the Williams gun. FlipHTML5
Marlitta H. Perkins, “Events in Magoffin County During the Civil War,” Eastern Kentucky and the Civil War (blog), November 10, 2011, a chronologically arranged compilation of Magoffin County actions tied to the Official Records and regimental histories. Eaky Civil War+2Eaky Civil War+2
“Ivy Point Skirmishes,” “Civil War Action,” and “Legends in Blue and Gray” entries in the Historical Marker Database and related Kentucky Historical Society marker files, for summaries of the 1863 and 1864 engagements and the county war memorial. HMDB
“Battle of Salyersville,” Wikipedia and Kiddle encyclopedia entries, for synthesized overviews of the Half Mountain engagement and its commanders and casualty estimates. Wikipedia+2Kiddle+2
“Civil War 1861-1865 in Magoffin County” and related entries in regional brochures and online summaries of eastern Kentucky battles and skirmishes, including Eastern Kentucky Civil War battle lists and Middle Creek National Battlefield materials. Middle Creek+2Oocities+2