Appalachian History
A Warfield Skirmish on the Tug Fork
On the riverbank at Warfield, where Kentucky looks across the Tug Fork into West Virginia, a green highway marker compresses a complicated Civil War story into a few sentences. It tells of “a plundering, burning, Confederate detached force” under Col. Vincent A. Witcher that raided the countryside in the fall of 1864, seized horses and cattle, then paused to cook barbecue until Home Guards from Louisa struck from a nearby hill and opened fire. After a brief exchange, both sides pulled back.
Today that skirmish feels almost like a footnote beside the famous campaigns in the Bluegrass and along the Cumberland. Yet for what is now Martin County, the Warfield fight distilled everything that made the Tug Fork valley so volatile. It was a border zone where riverboats carried coal and salt instead of regiments, guerrillas knew every bend of the river, and local Home Guards tried to defend their own front yards in a war that rarely sent full armies their way.
Salt, Coal, and a Borderland Town
Long before anyone called the place Martin County, Warfield grew up as a company town in a piece of Virginia that had become Kentucky only a few generations earlier. In the early 1850s George Rogers Clark Floyd and John Warfield of Virginia developed a coal, salt, and lumber settlement on the Tug Fork, roughly sixty miles above Catlettsburg. From here, flatboats and small steamers carried barrels of salt and coal down the Big Sandy toward the Ohio River.
Floyd was no ordinary investor. He belonged to one of Virginia’s political dynasties and would go on to serve as secretary of war in the Buchanan administration. In March 1857 he deeded the entire Warfield property, about fifteen thousand acres, to his brother John B. Floyd. Four years later that same John Floyd accepted a commission as a Confederate brigadier general and took charge of the “Virginia State Line,” a home guard style force on the Confederate side. With war coming, production at Warfield’s salt works shut down and Floyd left agents behind to manage his investment while he went to the front.
The outbreak of the Civil War flipped the fate of the property. In January 1862, George R. C. Floyd’s Warfield holdings were auctioned at a sheriff’s sale and purchased by two Union officers, Col. Laban T. Moore and Col. George W. Gallup, along with Cincinnati investor Joseph Tromstine. Their deeds, recorded in Lawrence County’s books, meant that a vast coal and salt estate belonging to a Confederate general now lay firmly in Union hands. Marlitta H. Perkins, writing from those deed books, notes that the works remained out of Confederate control throughout the war and only returned to Floyd family connections in the late 1860s when the Warfield Coal and Salt Company conveyed the property to Sallie B. Floyd through trustee Robert W. Hughes.
While the furnaces went cold, the hills did not go quiet. Contemporary observers and later local historians remembered that Warfield’s coal mines became hiding places during the conflict, shelters for civilians and probably for partisans who wanted to escape the notice of passing raiders. The reverse side of the Kentucky highway marker, which commemorates Warfield as Martin County’s first seat in 1870, repeats the detail that “coal mines [were] used through [the] Civil War as hiding place against marauding by enemy.”
A Valley of Raids and Guerrillas
The Big Sandy valley rarely saw the kind of set piece battles that fill national textbooks, but it mattered strategically. The forks of the river pointed straight into the heart of the Confederacy’s western Virginia counties and offered narrow water routes from the Ohio deep into the mountains. In 1861 and 1862 Union forces under William “Bull” Nelson and James A. Garfield pushed up the Levisa and Tug forks to break Confederate bases in eastern Kentucky, a campaign that shows up in the Official Records as the “Big Sandy Expedition.”
Local communities experienced those movements as a mix of occupation, foraging, and sudden skirmishes. John David Preston’s regional study of the Civil War in the Big Sandy valley emphasizes how the same families could produce Union volunteers, Confederate partisans, and hard pressed neutrals in a single hollow. Brian McKnight, in his broader work on Appalachian Kentucky and Virginia, treats counties like Lawrence and its neighbors as a contested borderland where small cavalry detachments and guerrilla bands did as much to shape daily life as any formal campaign plan.
Out of this environment came Vincent A. “Clawhammer” Witcher and William S. “Rebel Bill” Smith, names that would become legendary along the Tug Fork. Witcher commanded the 34th Battalion Virginia Cavalry, a hard riding Confederate unit that specialized in quick raids in West Virginia and eastern Kentucky. Smith led a mixed band of Kentuckians and Virginians that modern scholars and bloggers alike describe as guerrillas or partisan rangers, depending on one’s sympathies. Together or in loose cooperation they struck riverboats, small Union detachments, and isolated depots all along the Big Sandy.
The Official Records preserve Witcher’s own reports on operations in the Kanawha Valley and along the Big Sandy in November 1864. In one of these he describes the capture and burning of the U. S. steamers Barnum and Fawn on the Big Sandy and the destruction of Federal supplies near the forks of the river. Later compilers of battle lists summarize the same episode as “Capture of U. S. steamers Barnum and Fawn on the Big Sandy River,” dating it to early November 1864. Newspapers as far away as Indiana reported that two small steamers had been taken by guerrillas above Louisa.
An Earlier Clash at Warfield
The marker at Warfield focuses on a skirmish in the fall of 1864, but the town had already felt the war more directly. Perkins, drawing on research by Damian Beach, notes that on August 16 1862 Confederate cavalry “repulsed and defeated a unit of Kentucky Home Guards near Warfield.” That line is one of the few surviving references to this engagement, and no detailed report appears in the Official Records under the town’s later county name since Martin County did not yet exist.
Taken together with the property records and the evidence of coal mines being used as hiding places, the 1862 clash suggests that Warfield was already a useful base for Confederate scouts and small units moving along the river. The sheriff’s sale earlier that year had transferred legal ownership to Union men, but control on the ground depended on whoever could mass a dozen horsemen or Home Guards at short notice.
Witcher’s 1864 Raid and the Warfield Skirmish
By 1864 the war in the Big Sandy valley had settled into a cruel rhythm. Formal Confederate armies had mostly withdrawn, yet cavalry detachments and guerrilla leaders continued to raid across the Kentucky and West Virginia line. Witcher’s November operations in the Official Records show his battalion slipping down the Tug Fork, disrupting Union supply lines, and then disappearing back into the hills.
The Warfield skirmish fits this pattern. The Kentucky Historical Society’s marker text, reproduced in modern compilations and local histories, describes Witcher’s men as a “plundering, burning, Confederate detached force” that harassed eastern Kentucky and West Virginia “during most of the Civil War.” In the fall of 1864 they took horses and cattle in the Warfield area “from friend and foe.” While the raiders prepared barbecue near town, Home Guards from Louisa approached from the western hill and attacked, triggering an exchange of gunfire that ended with both sides withdrawing.
Compared with the dense reports usually filed by Union and Confederate officers, the Warfield episode is frustratingly thin. The official correspondence on Witcher’s raid focuses on the loss of the steamers Barnum and Fawn and the destruction of Federal supplies rather than on small arms fire in a single river town. Local summary histories, such as those maintained by the Martin County Historical Society and KyGenWeb, treat the Warfield encounter as a stand alone skirmish in which the Louisa Home Guards “stood off” the Confederate raiders.
Yet the pieces fit together. Witcher was operating in the region in exactly this period. Unionists at Louisa, which functioned as a Federal post on the Big Sandy, had strong incentives to organize Home Guard companies to protect the river and nearby farms. The men at Warfield controlled a property that once belonged to a Confederate general, sat on a rich salt and coal resource, and lay directly along the route of a raiding column that wanted horses and cattle.
Fighting Over a Town That Belonged to Both Sides
Viewed from the ground, the Warfield skirmish was not a neat blue against gray clash so much as a fight over who could use a river town for a few hours. Witcher’s men needed livestock, fresh food, and perhaps a place to rest near the Kentucky shore before moving on. Local families, some with Union sons and some with Confederate cousins, needed their stock and their homes. Home Guard units from Louisa likely knew many of the people in Warfield personally and may have come at community request as much as on military orders.
Neither side had the numbers to hold the line permanently. After the volley of shots, both forces pulled back into the hills or onto the river, leaving behind a rattled town and stories that would be retold for decades. In that sense the Warfield skirmish belongs to the same world as other Big Sandy incidents in which Rebel Bill Smith’s men burned a steamer, or Union scouts ambushed a guerrilla camp, only to vanish before regular troops could arrive in strength.
Warfield After the War
Once the fighting ended, Warfield’s story returned to property and resources. The salt works resumed production after the war, with salt and coal once again moving downriver to Catlettsburg. On September 14 1866 the Moore, Gallup, and Tromstine interests sold the Warfield property to Robert W. Hughes acting for Sallie B. Floyd, closing the loop that had begun with the sheriff’s sale of 1862. Later oil and gas exploration in the Big Sandy valley built partly on the same river networks and landholdings that had made Warfield valuable as a prewar industrial outpost and wartime prize.
In the twentieth century the town would feel new booms and busts tied to coal markets, railroads, and the broader Appalachian economy. Through it all the Civil War story lingered in family lore and in scattered references in county histories and the Register of the Kentucky Historical Society. When Martin County was created and Warfield became its first seat in 1870, that choice implicitly recognized the town’s longstanding importance on the Tug Fork.
Memory, Markers, and Martin County’s Civil War Story
The highway marker standing at the junction of Kentucky 40 and 971 does more than commemorate a single volley of shots. Its two sides condense an entire local narrative. One side tells of the founding of Warfield as a coal, salt, and lumber community, of river trade to Catlettsburg, and of coal mines turned into hiding places in the war years. The other side freezes the Warfield skirmish into one of the few officially recognized Civil War events in what is now Martin County.
For many visitors, that signage is the first hint that the Tug Fork shore here was once a contested front. The marker also illustrates how much work remains for historians and genealogists. A handful of lines on metal refer back to a web of primary sources: War Department reports in the Official Records, county deed books in Lawrence and Martin counties, scattered wartime newspaper stories, and the memory work of early twentieth century residents who told and retold tales of Rebel Bill and river raids.
Projects like Preston’s Civil War in the Big Sandy Valley and McKnight’s broader study of Appalachian borderlands show how the Warfield story fits into a regional pattern. Company towns built on salt and coal became strategic positions. River valleys turned into corridors for fast moving cavalry. Local Home Guards blurred the line between civil defense and military service. The fact that Witcher’s men could stop long enough at Warfield to roast stolen cattle says as much about Federal vulnerability in the region as any long report from a general.
Today, when residents and travelers pass the Warfield marker, they are looking at more than a roadside label. They are standing where local farmers watched mounted men ride off with their herds, where Unionists and Confederates traded shots across the hillside, and where coal miners once slipped into the dark for safety instead of work. The skirmish may have lasted only minutes, but it anchors Martin County in the wider story of the Civil War in Appalachia.
Sources and Further Reading
The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Series I, Volume 43, Part 1, reports on Lt. Col. Vincent A. Witcher’s operations in the Kanawha Valley and along the Big Sandy, including the capture and burning of the steamers Barnum and Fawn. The Portal to Texas History+1
Lawrence County, Kentucky, Deed Books F, H, and I, documenting the 21 January 1862 sheriff’s sale of Warfield property from George R. C. Floyd to Laban T. Moore, George W. Gallup, and Joseph Tromstine, and postwar transfers to Sallie B. Floyd through trustee Robert W. Hughes, as cited by Marlitta H. Perkins and the Pike County Historical Society. Pike County Historical Society+1
“Kentucky Historical Marker 726, ‘A Warfield Skirmish / Warfield,’” Kentucky Historical Society marker program and associated county level reproductions. Historic.one+1
Evansville Daily Journal, Indiana, 8 November 1864, contemporary reporting on guerrillas capturing small steamers on the Big Sandy River above Louisa. Hoosier State Chronicles
Early twentieth century reminiscences and regional newspaper pieces on Rebel Bill Smith, as preserved in The Big Sandy News and later summarized in local histories and in Eastern Kentucky and the Civil War. Eaky Civil War+1
Marlitta H. Perkins, “Salt Works of Eastern Kentucky” and “Confederate General John B. Floyd and the Warfield Salt Works,” Eastern Kentucky and the Civil War blog, detailed narratives tying Warfield’s salt works, coal mines, and wartime role to specific deed books and county records. Eaky Civil War+1
John David Preston, The Civil War in the Big Sandy Valley of Kentucky (Gateway Press, 1984; 2nd ed.), a county by county synthesis of military operations and home front experience along the Big Sandy. Google Books+1
William Ely, The Big Sandy Valley: A History of the People and Country from the Earliest Settlement to the Present Time (Catlettsburg, 1887), an early local history with rich detail on antebellum development, river transport, and communities like Warfield. Internet Archive+1
Brian D. McKnight, Contested Borderland: The Civil War in Appalachian Kentucky and Virginia (University Press of Kentucky, 2006), a broader study of guerilla warfare, divided communities, and campaigns in eastern Kentucky and southwestern Virginia, including the Big Sandy region. JSTOR+1
Joseph D. Carr, “Garfield and Marshall in the Big Sandy Valley, 1861–1862,” Filson Club History Quarterly 64 (1990), closely analyzing the early Union campaigns up the Big Sandy and providing context for later raids and skirmishes. The Filson Historical Society+1