Appalachian History
On a summer morning in 1864 a small Union scouting party rode west from Mud Lick Springs toward a narrow cleft in the hills. When they reached McCormick’s Gap they suddenly drew fire from “four or six rebels,” one man dropping from the saddle with a slight wound before the patrol pulled back to safety.
The officer who wrote that report, Colonel Charles S. Hanson, probably did not know he was riding across ground that would later lie in the heart of Menifee County. For him the gap was a waypoint on a rough road between mountain camps. Today it is one of the few Civil War sites we can firmly place inside what became Kentucky’s youngest and least populated county.
Menifee’s later historians would insist that no major battles took place inside its borders. They were right. This was never Perryville or Chickamauga. Yet official military reports, regional histories, archaeology, and family stories all show that the war passed through these ridges in quieter, but still dangerous, ways.
A County That Did Not Yet Exist
Menifee County did not appear on Kentucky maps until 1869, four years after Appomattox. It was carved from five older counties: Bath, Powell, Wolfe, Morgan, and Montgomery, with Frenchburg as the new seat.
That timing helps explain why Civil War documents almost never mention “Menifee.” Union and Confederate officers instead wrote about places like McCormick’s or McCormack’s Gap, Olympian Springs or Mud Lick Springs, Slate Creek, Stillwater, Frenchburg, Owingsville, and West Liberty. The ground is the same. Only the county lines changed.
Modern archaeologists who studied the Indian Creek valley in Menifee have summed up the local record this way. By the 1860s the area held more farms and families than in the pioneer era. Men served in both armies. Skirmishes and guerrilla incidents touched the region. Yet “no major Civil War actions” were fought wholly inside the later county boundaries.
That verdict might sound like the war barely brushed Menifee at all. The primary sources tell a different story.
Gateway to the Mountains
Long before the first shots at Fort Sumter, travelers knew that the old Mount Sterling to Pound Gap road threaded one of the most important crossings through the low mountains of east-central Kentucky. The route climbed out of the Bluegrass, passed near Olympian Springs, then squeezed through a notch in the sandstone near present day Frenchburg.
In 1861 Union officers quickly grasped how critical that notch would be. When Brigadier General William “Bull” Nelson received orders to lead what became the Big Sandy Expedition against Confederate forces gathering in the eastern valley, he chose the springs at Mud Lick in Bath County as his base. He named the camp there in honor of resort owner Harrison Gill. From that point forward the official reports simply called it Camp Gill.
On October 7, 1861 Brigadier General Ormsby Mitchel wrote from Cincinnati that he had ordered the Second Ohio Infantry to take position at Olympian Springs in order to close “the mountain gorge” that enemy troops were using to slip toward Prestonsburg. He described the spot as a strategic key to any advance toward Cumberland Gap.
Two days later Colonel Leonard A. Harris reported his own arrival at Camp Gill with around nine hundred Ohio infantrymen. He found Colonel Lewis Braxton Grigsby already there with three hundred Kentucky militia and sent scouts into the hills while urging Nelson to hurry reinforcements and artillery toward the pass.
Local historian Rob Kiskaden, drawing on these and other Official Records, notes that when Nelson rode into Camp Gill on October 8 he did so partly because of the road that ran past the resort and on through McCormick’s Gap at Frenchburg. That gap, he writes, had long been considered a “Gateway to the Mountains.” On the same date Union troops secured the pass to keep Confederate forces from using it to threaten the expedition’s rear.
In other words, before Menifee County ever existed the ground around Frenchburg, Mud Lick, and McCormick’s Gap already formed part of a defensive hinge. It shielded the Bluegrass from Confederate columns coming out of the Big Sandy valley and, later, offered Federal forces a doorway into the mountains beyond.
Skirmish at McCormick’s Gap, September 20, 1864
The best known wartime incident inside modern Menifee County came three years after the Big Sandy Expedition. In the fall of 1864 Union General Stephen G. Burbridge launched a series of raids from Kentucky and East Tennessee toward the saltworks at Saltville, Virginia. In official summaries the War Department later grouped a “skirmish at McCormick’s Gap, Ky., September 20, 1864” with those operations.
The detailed report for that brief clash has not survived, if it was ever written. The Official Records index for Series I, Volume 39 points only to the date and location. Yet other documents help sketch the outline.
The 37th Kentucky Mounted Infantry, a Union regiment raised largely in south central Kentucky, lists “McCormick’s Gap September 20” in both the National Park Service’s regimental history and in Frederick Dyer’s Compendium as one of its service engagements. On the same line the summaries link the fight to “Burbridge’s Expedition into Southwest Virginia, September 20 to October 17.”
That tells us that on the day Burbridge launched his Saltville raid, men of the 37th were somewhere near McCormick’s Gap. The army later tagged whatever happened there as a skirmish, a term usually reserved for short, small scale actions.
A few months earlier Colonel Charles S. Hanson had written the letter that opened this article. In July 1864 he reported riding “from Mud Lick Springs to McCormick’s Gap” with twenty one men when his party was fired upon by four or six rebels, one man slightly wounded. He immediately sent a stronger scout toward the gap and ordered patrols toward Owingsville as well.
Hanson’s encounter predates the official McCormick’s Gap skirmish by two months, so it cannot be the September 20 action itself. It does, however, reveal the conditions along that road. Small Confederate detachments or guerrilla bands felt bold enough to lie in wait inside the pass. Federal patrols knew they were riding through contested ground.
When the 37th Kentucky later marked a skirmish there, it was almost certainly that same pattern on a slightly larger scale. Mounted infantry or cavalry, probably Union, moved through or near the gap. Local Confederate troops, irregulars, or perhaps men tied to one of the region’s guerrilla bands opened fire. A few casualties fell. The Union force held the road. The official record reduced it to one brief line.
For residents of the Slate Creek and Beaver Creek valleys and the hill farms above Frenchburg, the memory of such gunfire would have lingered longer than any index entry.
Menifee’s War on the Margins
While formal battles bypassed Menifee, the broader region around it lived under a kind of rolling low grade war. That conflict blurred the lines between regular soldiers, Home Guard companies, and outright bushwhackers.
Confederate staff officer Edward O. Guerrant, whose massive diary later appeared in edited form as Bluegrass Confederate, left one of the most vivid contemporary accounts. In an entry from April 1863 he described how a man named Wells in a Confederate mounted rifles company hanged Union sympathizer Edward “Ned” Begley from a pawpaw tree on Cutshin Creek in what was then Leslie County. Guerrant remarked that Begley had been involved with Union Home Guards who were “waylaying us every day.”
That passage appears in Marlitta H. Perkins’s Eastern Kentucky and the Civil War blog, which compiles dozens of such incidents from diaries, newspapers, and court records. Her chronologies trace a grim pattern of hangings, executions, and house burnings carried out by both Confederate raiders and Unionist militia from Breathitt and Perry County eastward into the high valleys that fed into the Licking and Kentucky Rivers.
Those counties bordered or contributed territory to what would become Menifee. In Wolfe County, for example, where the future Menifee line would later run, Perkins notes the killing of James “River Jim” Allen, a Confederate cavalryman gunned down in retaliation for the earlier murder of a Union man named Sanford Shackleford.
Closer to Frenchburg, local tradition remembers similar blurring between defenders and predators. A genealogical essay on the Mynhier family of Menifee County, published in The Kentucky Explorer in the 1990s, recounts how a self styled “Home Guard” band in the Beaver Creek neighborhood used the cover of Union loyalty to raid farms and intimidate neighbors during the war years.
These stories echo the complaints found in official correspondence. Union commanders in the Big Sandy and central Kentucky districts routinely begged for more mounted troops to suppress guerrillas and protect roads between Mount Sterling, Owingsville, West Liberty, and Hazel Green. The very routes that crossed present Menifee County were some of the same ones that both sides sought to control or disrupt.
Mud Lick Springs and the Menifee Backcountry
Mud Lick Springs, better known to Victorian travelers as Olympian Springs, sat just outside the later Menifee line in Bath County. In peace time it was a resort. In war time it became a camp, battlefield, and staging area.
On June 15, 1863 Confederate Captain Peter Everett led about three hundred men of the Eighth Kentucky Infantry against a detachment of the Fourteenth Kentucky Cavalry camped at the springs. The resulting fight left eleven Union soldiers dead, a dozen captured, and several resort buildings in ashes.
From there the road eastward climbed toward Frenchburg and the ridge that McCormick’s Gap cuts through. The same My Hometown essay that describes the Mud Lick battle notes that a historical marker today stands near the site, one of several scattered across Bath, Rowan, and Menifee counties that quietly commemorate the war’s footprint.
Statewide compilers like the Kentucky National Guard’s Paper Trail of the Civil War in Kentucky have tried to pull those scattered references together. Their entry for Menifee County notes that residents served in both armies and that scattered skirmishes, including McCormick’s Gap, brushed the area, but reiterates that the county saw no large scale battles.
Taken together, the letters, markers, archaeology, and family reminiscences offer a picture of a backcountry whose men rode off to larger battles, whose ridges hosted camps and scouts, and whose families sometimes faced the war on their own doorsteps without the dignity of a named battle.
Why Menifee’s Quiet War Still Matters
If you drive U.S. 460 today through Frenchburg you follow, in rough outline, the same path that Civil War soldiers and guerrillas once used. The climb into McCormick’s Gap is gentler now. Cut rock and asphalt soften what was, in the 1860s, a narrow mountain gorge. There are no markers at the exact spot where Colonel Hanson’s patrol took fire or where the 37th Kentucky skirmished in September 1864.
Yet the pass links three overlapping stories.
First, it anchors Menifee County in the broader geometry of the war. Union generals worried that Confederate troops might slip through McCormack’s Gap into the Bluegrass, so they fortified Camp Gill at Olympian Springs and pushed thousands of Ohio and Kentucky soldiers along the road toward the Big Sandy valley.
Second, it reminds us that official records often reduce real fear and danger to a single line. For the men of the 37th Kentucky, “Skirmish at McCormick’s Gap, September 20” probably meant muddy horses, quick shots from the timber, and the sickening moment when a friend dropped from his saddle. Their own recollections, if they ever wrote them, survive only in scattered letters and pension files. The index entry outlived their memories.
Third, it places Menifee within the Appalachian experience of a war without a clean front line. Guerrilla killings like Ned Begley’s, reprisals against Union and Confederate families, and the abuses of undisciplined Home Guards all reached into the hills around the county’s parent communities. For many mountain families the Civil War did not look like neat lines of blue and gray. It looked like night riders, burned homes, and small patrols edging through gaps with their fingers on the trigger.
Menifee County’s Civil War story is therefore not about grand charges or sweeping campaigns. It is about the importance of a single road and a narrow pass, about small patrols and unsung skirmishes, and about how a war officially fought over the Union and slavery unfolded in the daily lives of people who lived far from big battlefields but directly along the paths both armies needed.
Sources & Further Reading
Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Series I, Volume 39, Part I (Reports) and Part II (Correspondence), including the July 16, 1864 letter from Colonel Charles S. Hanson describing an ambush between Mud Lick Springs and McCormick’s Gap.The Portal to Texas History+1
Official Records, Series I, Volume 4, especially correspondence relating to General William “Bull” Nelson’s Big Sandy Expedition, Camp Gill at Olympian Springs, and the securing of McCormack’s Gap.My Hometown Blog+1
Regimental histories of the 37th Kentucky Mounted Infantry, including National Park Service unit summaries and Frederick H. Dyer’s Compendium of the War of the Rebellion, which list McCormick’s Gap, September 20, 1864, as an engagement tied to Burbridge’s southwest Virginia raid.Wikipedia+2National Park Service+2
“Big Sandy Expedition” entry, Wikipedia and related scholarship, especially Donald A. Clark’s chapter in The Notorious “Bull” Nelson, for context on Camp Gill and the strategic importance of McCormack’s Gap and the Mt. Sterling to Pound Gap road.Wikipedia+1
Rob Kiskaden, “A House Divided: Bath County’s Involvement in the Civil War,” My Hometown: Historical Tales of Owingsville and Bath County’s Past, for local synthesis on Camp Gill, Mud Lick Springs, McCormick’s Gap, and Bath County soldiers.My Hometown Blog+2My Hometown Blog+2
Marlitta H. Perkins, Eastern Kentucky and the Civil War blog, especially “The Eastern KY Mountains 1861–1865,” which compiles contemporary accounts of guerrilla warfare and Home Guard activity in the counties surrounding present day Menifee, including quotations from the manuscript diary of Edward O. Guerrant.Eaky Civil War+3Eaky Civil War+3Eaky Civil War+3
Edward O. Guerrant, Bluegrass Confederate: The Headquarters Diary of Edward O. Guerrant, ed. William C. Davis and Meredith L. Swentor (LSU Press, 1999), for a published selection of Guerrant’s diary covering operations in the eastern Kentucky mountains.Confederate Saddles+1
“The Archaeology of Kentucky: An Update” and “Indian Creek: Jewell and Elkins Sites” (Kentucky Archaeological Survey, 2022), for historical context on Menifee County’s formation, settlement, and the conclusion that no major Civil War actions occurred within its modern borders despite resident participation in the war.Kentucky Archaeological Survey+1
Armando “Al” Alfaro, The Paper Trail of the Civil War in Kentucky 1861–1865, for statewide summaries of Civil War actions, county by county entries, and references to Kentucky Historical Society markers related to Menifee County’s wartime history.Ky National Guard History+1
Barbara Wells Ingram, The History of Menifee County, Kentucky, and Menifee Graveyards, along with G. Boswell’s Menifee County (Morehead State University series), for county level narrative context and identification of local Civil War veterans and burial sites.
Charles B. Gillespie, “A Look at the Mynhier (Manier) Family of Menifee County,” The Kentucky Explorer (March 1995), for local family reminiscences about Home Guard activity and wartime lawlessness in the Menifee valleys.Pinterest