Appalachian History
McCreary County did not exist when the first shots of the Civil War echoed through the Cumberlands. The land that would become the county in 1912 lay along the rugged Big South Fork of the Cumberland River, divided among Wayne, Whitley, and Pulaski Counties. Its people watched armies march and guerrillas ride, buried their dead on ridgetop cemeteries, and tried to keep farms and families intact in a landscape that outsiders increasingly described as a no man’s land.
Half a century later Kentucky carved out a new county in this same country and named it for James B. McCreary, a former Confederate cavalry officer in the 11th Kentucky Cavalry who went on to serve two terms as governor and a long career in Congress.
The Kentucky Historical Society’s highway marker for “Civil War 1861-1865 in McCreary County” captures the irony in a single sentence. It notes that the area was intensely loyal to the Union and overwhelmingly Republican in the war’s aftermath, yet still took the name of a Confederate veteran and Democratic governor. Civil War memory in McCreary County has always been layered like the cliffs above the Big South Fork. The ground underfoot is Unionist, but the name on the map is Confederate.
To understand how that happened, you have to follow the river.
The Big South Fork Borderland
The Big South Fork of the Cumberland River cuts a deep gorge through the Cumberland Plateau, forming the southern edge of modern McCreary County before turning north toward its confluence with the main Cumberland. Today this landscape is protected as Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area, a 125,000 acre park that stretches from McCreary County, Kentucky, south into Morgan, Scott, Fentress, and Pickett Counties in Tennessee.
During the Civil War there was no park, no scenic railway at Stearns, and no formal state boundary in the canyon itself. Families on both sides of the river worshiped in the same churches, intermarried, and traded along the same rough roads. When war came, that shared geography pulled them into the same conflicts, whether they lived on the Kentucky benches above Barren Fork or in the Tennessee communities of No Business, Parch Corn Creek, and Oneida.
Historians of the Upper Cumberland have come to see this region as a single Civil War landscape. Michael O’Neal’s 1982 National Park Service study “The Civil War on the Upper Cumberland Plateau” and the Kentucky Archaeological Survey’s 2012 report on “The Civil War in the Upper Cumberland Plateau and its Effects on the Local Population” both emphasize how communities along the Big South Fork experienced the war as one continuous story in which county and state lines meant little.
That story begins with regular armies, but it does not end there.
Mill Springs and the Making of a Union Stronghold
The first large taste of war for men from the future McCreary County came at the Battle of Mill Springs, also known as Logan’s Cross Roads or Fishing Creek, fought on 19 January 1862 in neighboring Pulaski and Wayne Counties.
Union Brigadier General George H. Thomas led roughly 4,400 Federal troops against about 5,900 Confederates under George B. Crittenden and Felix Zollicoffer. In hard fighting around Logan’s Cross Roads, Kentuckians in units such as the 4th Kentucky Infantry and the 1st Kentucky Cavalry helped stop the Confederate advance. Federal forces suffered an estimated 262 casualties, while the Confederates lost roughly 552 men, including Zollicoffer, who was killed on the field.
The National Park Service describes Mill Springs as the first significant Union victory in the western theater, one that helped break the Confederate defensive line in south central Kentucky and opened the way for future operations into Tennessee.\ Men from Wayne and Whitley Counties who fought there carried that sense of early Federal success back home to the Big South Fork country.
Dyer’s Compendium and Kentucky unit histories show that regiments raised in this borderland went on to serve at Somerset, Dutton’s Hill, Monticello, and even Brimstone Creek in Tennessee, keeping the war close to the Cumberland Plateau. Mill Springs helped anchor a strong Unionist political identity in the region which would shape local loyalties long after the guns fell silent.
“The Yankees Are Coming”
If Mill Springs set the tone for Federal success, Ambrose E. Burnside’s 1863 campaign into East Tennessee brought the war physically across the ground that is now McCreary County.
Using the Official Records, local historian articles in the Encyclopedia of Scott County describe how Burnside advanced into East Tennessee with roughly 16,000 men in late summer 1863. One column marched out of Williamsburg, Kentucky, across the plateau along the route of today’s KY 92 toward Pine Knot. A second column came south from Somerset toward the same crossroads. The two forces converged in the vicinity of present day Pine Knot before continuing down the Big South Fork valley toward Oneida and on to Knoxville.
For families in what would become McCreary County, this meant that thousands of Union soldiers passed through or very near their farms. The Northeast Tennessee Civil War site notes that almost two thirds of Burnside’s army used routes through the Big South Fork country, while the Official Records record reports from officers in Whitley and Wayne Counties complaining of Confederate raids and guerrilla activity in the same period.
The war was no longer something that happened in distant Kentucky towns or Tennessee river valleys. It marched down local roads and drank from local springs.
A No Man’s Land on the Cumberland Plateau
Regular armies did not stay long on the Upper Cumberland Plateau. Once Burnside’s forces pushed through toward Knoxville and Confederate regulars shifted toward bigger fronts, the Big South Fork gorge and the high plateau above it became a kind of military vacuum.
O’Neal’s Civil War study for Big South Fork uses letters, memoirs, and the Official Records to describe how this landscape turned into a place where neither side could maintain firm control. Guerrilla bands, deserters, and partisan rangers roamed the ridges. Home Guard companies formed to defend local communities, sometimes on Union lines and sometimes on Confederate ones.
Later interpretive work by the Kentucky Archaeological Survey and by the Tennessee Civil War National Heritage Area describes this broader Upper Cumberland region as one of the most violent guerrilla theaters in the western war, a place where neighbor fought neighbor and the formal front lines meant almost nothing.
For the people living along the future McCreary County side of the Big South Fork the war became deeply personal and intensely local.
Duck Shoals and the Battle of No Business
One incident along the Big South Fork encapsulates this borderland violence. On 3 May 1863, a group of Confederate guerrillas under Capt. Alec Evans rode into the remote No Business Creek settlement in Scott County, Tennessee, just across the river from modern McCreary County.
Accounts collected by H. Clay Smith in his 1985 local history Dusty Bits of the Forgotten Past and by descendants like Houston Blevins tell how these men raided river farms, seized horses and provisions, and captured several Union men from the community. The guerrillas forced their prisoners to guide them upriver along the Big South Fork toward what locals called Duck Shoals.
Scott County Home Guard companies, themselves local farmers in Union blue, gathered quietly along the gorge. In the night they surrounded the guerrilla camp near the mouth of Parch Corn Creek. According to the Encyclopedia of Scott County’s reconstruction of the fight, based on Smith, a contemporary New York Times report, and family letters, they attacked at dawn, killing between seven and eleven Confederates and scattering the rest.
Different versions disagree on how many men were present and who commanded the guerrillas. Some later sources even call the fight a massacre. But nearly all agree on one haunting detail. The dead Confederates were buried together beneath a rock wall near the river, creating a mass grave that local tradition still remembers as part of the Big South Fork landscape.
From the Kentucky side, this was not some distant Tennessee affair. Many of the surnames in the No Business stories Slaven, Blevins, Burke, Boyatt also appear in family and cemetery records in what would become McCreary County. The gorge tied these communities together. A skirmish on the south bank sent ripples into hollows on the north.
Guerrillas, Pilots, and the Politics of Fear
The No Business fight was only one episode in a wider swirl of guerrilla conflict that swept the Upper Cumberland.
At the regional level, names like Champ Ferguson and “Tinker Dave” Beaty loom large. Ferguson, born in nearby Clinton County, Kentucky, became infamous for killing Unionists, prisoners, and civilian enemies across southern Kentucky and Tennessee. The Kentucky Historical Society’s highway marker for him estimates that over one hundred murders were attributed to Ferguson alone.
Beaty, a Unionist guerrilla from Fentress County, Tennessee, led his own band in retaliation. The Tennessee Civil War National Heritage Area’s “Borderlands” guides and local Scott County histories describe a grim cycle of ambushes and revenge between the two men that scarred communities all along the state line, including Wayne County and the headwaters of the Big South Fork.
Closer to McCreary’s present borders, the Civil War Governors of Kentucky project preserves rare letters from ordinary citizens who found themselves caught in this chaos. In November 1863 O. J. Skinner wrote from Bark Camp Mills in Whitley County, an area just north of the modern McCreary line, to Governor Thomas E. Bramlette. Skinner reported conversations with “many citizens of our county” and pleaded for protection against guerrilla bands operating in the region.
His letter appears in a curated set the project labels “Guerrilla Letters,” where county officials, Union officers, and frightened civilians describe raids, robberies, and murders from Whitley and Wayne Counties to the Cumberland Gap. Taken together with Tennessee newspapers and memoirs, they show how the Big South Fork country became a corridor for fugitives, deserters, and self styled “pilots” who guided Unionists over the mountains into Kentucky, while hostile bands hunted them.
To people living along what is now McCreary County, the Civil War was not a clean line between blue and gray. It was a world in which the knock at the cabin door after dark might be Home Guard, Confederate raiders, or neighbors settling old scores under the cover of war.
From War Ground to Coal Camp
By the late nineteenth century the sound of gunfire along the Big South Fork had been replaced by the clatter of coal cars and the ring of axes. Yet those new industries grew directly out of the war scarred landscape.
The Barren Fork Coal Camp and Mine Archaeological District near Whitley City, today listed on the National Register of Historic Places, began as property purchased in 1879. The Lexington Stave and Mining Company later Barren Fork Mining and Coal Company and then Eagle Coal Company developed a company town there, which was relocated in 1912 with a company store and other facilities. The mine stayed active into the 1930s before closing after a unionization vote.
The most visible remnant of that community is Barren Fork Cemetery, now recognized as part of the National Register district. Photographs and cemetery transcriptions show rows of monuments under hardwoods and scattered fieldstones on the ridges above the gorge. Several markers commemorate Civil War era veterans, tying postwar coal families back to the generation that survived guerrillas and marching armies.
Farther downriver, the Blue Heron coal camp near Stearns also occupies ground shaped by the war years. The National Park Service’s Blue Heron interpretive site highlights how this twentieth century mining operation overlaid older farms, home sites, and family burial grounds dating back to the antebellum and Civil War eras.
When Congress created Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area in 1974, the park’s foundation documents identified both coal heritage and Civil War history as core interpretive themes. Modern hikers who follow trails to No Business, Parch Corn Creek, or Barren Fork walk through a landscape where wartime skirmish sites, forgotten farmsteads, and ghost coal camps lie almost on top of one another.
Cemeteries, Markers, and the Mystery of Memory
If the Big South Fork forests hide many traces of the war, McCreary County’s cemeteries and markers bring some of them back into view.
Local genealogists and county history groups have documented Civil War era burials in family plots and community graveyards around Pine Knot, Stearns, and Whitley City. At Barren Fork, volunteers with the McCreary County KYGenWeb project photograph and transcribe stones, including worn government style markers that appear to belong to Union soldiers and Confederate veterans who later settled in the camp.
In 2018 the McCreary County newspaper published a piece titled “The Mystery of the Confederate Markers” after a cluster of weathered Confederate gravestones surfaced in the county. The article set those stones in the context of the 1861 to 1865 conflict and postwar patterns of reburial and commemoration, suggesting that some markers may have been moved or reset long after the war as families tried to make sense of scattered burials.
The state highway marker for “Civil War 1861-1865 in McCreary County,” based on research compiled in The Paper Trail of the Civil War in Kentucky and the statewide “Civil War Monuments in Kentucky” nomination, stands as the county’s most official recognition of that past. Its short text compresses decades of experience into a few lines about loyalty and naming, but it also invites deeper questions.
Why did a county that remembered itself as intensely Unionist choose a Confederate namesake in 1912. How did the politics of Lost Cause commemoration and Democratic patronage shape that decision. And how did local families who had lived through guerrilla terror respond when the state mapped their home under the name of a former Confederate cavalry officer.
Those questions are still open, and they point toward the next chapter of research on McCreary County’s Civil War memory.
Why McCreary’s Civil War Story Matters
From a distance, McCreary County can look like a blank space in Civil War atlases. No major battlefields, no famous generals headquartered in Whitley City, no sprawling national cemeteries.
Look closer and a different picture emerges.
This was a place where men from the surrounding counties fought at Mill Springs and carried the Union flag in some of the war’s earliest western victories. It was a corridor for Burnside’s march to Knoxville and for thousands of East Tennessee Unionists who slipped north through the mountains to join Federal forces.
It was also a landscape of guerrilla war, where Home Guard companies and irregular bands battled along the Big South Fork gorge, where local people like O. J. Skinner wrote desperate letters to Frankfort about lawlessness, and where the dead of the No Business fight still lie in a mass grave at Duck Shoals.
After the war the same hollows saw timber booms, coal camps, and company towns, which in turn left behind cemeteries, foundations, and oral histories that keep the Civil War generation just within reach.
McCreary County’s Civil War story matters because it reminds us that the war in Appalachia was not just armies maneuvering on big fields. It was also families wedged between those armies, living along rugged rivers, navigating divided loyalties, and then trying to remember it all in a twentieth century shaped by coal, politics, and the naming of new counties.
In the cliffs above the Big South Fork, the war years are another layer in the stone, not always visible, but always part of the structure.
Sources and Further Reading
Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, Series I, especially volumes 7, 16, 20, 30, and 31 for operations at Mill Springs, in eastern Kentucky, and during Burnside’s Knoxville campaign.Wikipedia+1
O. J. Skinner to Governor Thomas E. Bramlette, Bark Camp Mills, Whitley County, Kentucky, 18 November 1863, Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition.test.discovery.civilwargovernors.org+1
Kentucky Historical Society Highway Marker 1243, “Civil War 1861-1865 in McCreary County,” printed in The Paper Trail of the Civil War in Kentucky 1861-1865, Kentucky National Guard.Ky National Guard History+1
Kentucky Historical Society Highway Marker 780, “Champ Ferguson,” in The Paper Trail of the Civil War in Kentucky 1861-1865.Ky National Guard History+1
New York Times report on the Duck Shoals fight, 1863, as cited in H. Clay Smith, Dusty Bits of the Forgotten Past and in “The Battle of No Business,” Encyclopedia of Scott County.Ihoneida+1
Michael R. O’Neal, “The Civil War on the Upper Cumberland Plateau of Tennessee,” National Park Service, 1982.NPS History+1
Kim McBride et al., “The Civil War in the Upper Cumberland Plateau and its Effects on the Local Population,” Kentucky Archaeological Survey Report 236, 2012.National Park Service+1
“Civil War in the Upper Cumberland Plateau,” Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area, National Park Service web feature, including links to O’Neal’s report and the Kentucky Archaeological Survey study.National Park Service
“The Battle of No Business” and “The Battle of No Business: A Confederate Massacre,” Encyclopedia of Scott County, ihoneida.com.Ihoneida+1
“Murderous Mayhem: Tinker Dave vs. Champ,” Encyclopedia of Scott County, ihoneida.com.IRP CDN Website+1
“Explore Big South Fork,” Kentucky Living, 2019, on the modern park landscape from McCreary County, Kentucky, to Morgan County, Tennessee.National Park Service
“Battle of Mill Springs,” National Park Service and American Battlefield Trust battle overviews and teaching resources.National Park Service+2National Park Service+2
“Barren Fork Coal Camp and Mine Archaeological District,” National Register of Historic Places listing and Archaeology of Kentucky references.Wikipedia+2Kentucky Archaeology+2
“The Mystery of the Confederate Markers,” McCreary County newspaper (2018).McCreary Journal
Barren Fork Cemetery transcriptions and photographs, McCreary County KYGenWeb and related genealogy sites.Wikimedia Commons
Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area interpretive materials, including the “We Just Wanted to Be Left Alone” Civil War program.National Park Service+1