Appalachian History
On a quiet day in Edmonton the brick courthouse on the public square and the stone jail a block away look like ordinary pieces of a small Kentucky county seat. Their lines are simple, their scale modest. Yet the records that survive around them tell a story of cavalry scouts surprised on a local farm, courthouse records turned to ash, and a community trying to govern itself in the middle of a border state at war.
Two dates frame Metcalfe County’s Civil War story. On 7 June 1863 a small detachment of Union cavalry rode east from Glasgow and stumbled into John Hunt Morgan’s men near Edmonton. Less than two years later, on 15 March 1865, pro Confederate guerrillas swept into town and burned the original courthouse to the ground. Taken together, the skirmish and the courthouse fire show how even a newly created, sparsely settled county could find itself pulled into the conflict’s orbit.
A new county in a divided state
Metcalfe County was not yet five years old when the Civil War began. Created by the General Assembly in 1860 from pieces of Barren, Adair, Cumberland, Green, and Monroe Counties, it took its name from former governor Thomas Metcalfe. A later highway marker on the courthouse lawn sums up the county’s origins and notes that Edmonton was laid out as a town in 1800 and chosen as the new county seat because it sat near the geographic center of the new jurisdiction.
The war arrived before Metcalfe’s institutions had time to harden. A stone jail went up about 1861 on East Street near the south fork of the Little Barren River, built of two foot thick limestone blocks by Scottish stonemason John Wilson. The county’s early records suggest that the jail was among the first substantial public buildings completed, and family tradition remembered Wilson still at work on the structure when his wife and children arrived in Kentucky.
The first courthouse was more fragile. According to a later National Register of Historic Places nomination for the jail, Metcalfe’s original courthouse burned twice. The first fire came during the war. On 15 March 1865 approximately sixty to seventy guerrillas under Captain Jacob Coffman Bennett of the 10th Kentucky Cavalry, a pro Confederate partisan unit associated with Morgan’s command, rode into Edmonton and burned the courthouse along with its records. A second fire in July 1868 destroyed its replacement.
The courthouse that stands on the square today was built in 1868 and 1869 after those two shocks. The brick, two story Italianate building with its arched doorway, bell above the entrance, and paired brackets under the eaves became the long term home of county government and, in the phrasing of the courthouse’s own nomination form, the unofficial symbol of Metcalfe County. Its endurance owes something to lessons learned during the war. Thickened vault walls and other fire protection measures ordered in the county’s Order Book show officials trying to protect documents after watching earlier records vanish.
Scouts on the Little Barren: the skirmish near Edmonton, 7 June 1863
The best documented Civil War combat in Metcalfe County came two years before Bennett’s raid. Official warfare reached Edmonton on 7 June 1863 when a Union cavalry detachment under Colonel Charles D. Pennebaker of the 5th Indiana Cavalry rode east out of Glasgow on a scouting mission. The regiment’s service record places detachments in south central Kentucky in the summer of 1863, guarding roads and probing for Confederate raiders.
A modern historical marker at Bowling Park on Stockton Street condenses what the Official Records and regimental reports say about the encounter. On that Sunday a seventy man scouting party of the 5th Indiana Cavalry encountered about two hundred men from the First Brigade of Morgan’s Cavalry on the farm of Mrs. F. E. Wood outside Edmonton. The Confederates clearly had the advantage in numbers. In the brief fight that followed the Union force lost two men killed, four wounded, and fifteen taken prisoner. Confederate reports claimed no casualties of their own while noting that nine captured Confederates were freed in the action. After the clash, Morgan’s troopers pursued the retreating Hoosiers to within six miles of Glasgow.
The Official Records index for Series I, volume 23, lists an entry under “Edmonton, Ky., skirmish near, June 7, 1863,” pointing researchers to the reports of Pennebaker and Captain William J. Davis, a staff officer with Morgan’s cavalry. In those documents Federal officers described the encounter as a reconnaissance gone wrong, while the Confederate side slotted the action into the larger pattern of Morgan’s 1863 operations in Kentucky and Tennessee.
Though small by battlefield standards, the fight near Edmonton mattered locally. It confirmed that a heavily Confederate cavalry force could move with relative freedom through Metcalfe County while Union authority remained anchored at larger posts such as Glasgow. It also foreshadowed the kind of mobile, irregular warfare that would intensify as the war dragged on, especially after Morgan himself was captured in Ohio later that summer and his veterans filtered into guerrilla and partisan bands.
Guerrillas in the hills
By the middle years of the war Kentucky’s greatest military threats were no longer formal Confederate armies but small, fast moving bands of cavalry and guerrillas. Metcalfe County lay along routes used by raiders moving between Barren, Hart, Monroe, Green, and Cumberland Counties. In August 1862 a Union dispatch from Louisville reported that roughly three hundred “rebels” were in Metcalfe County, twenty five miles away, which points to the county’s early exposure to mounted Confederate forces and irregulars who slipped through the gaps between Union posts. That report, preserved in the correspondence volumes of the Official Records, reads very much like the first warning sign that a supposedly quiet interior county was becoming contested ground.
The paper trail deepens as the war wears on. Like residents of many Kentucky counties, Metcalfe citizens wrote to Frankfort complaining of theft, threats, and violence from men claiming both Union and Confederate loyalties. Collections such as the Civil War Governors of Kentucky project preserve letters from Metcalfe County that describe guerrilla attacks, criminals hiding behind military labels, and petitions for relief and protection. These documents make it clear that when men like Bennett rode into town in 1865, they were drawing on several years of experience operating in the shadows of the regular armies.
At the state level, the Kentucky National Guard’s reference work The Paper Trail of the Civil War in Kentucky notes that twenty two Kentucky courthouses burned during the conflict, nineteen of them in the war’s last fifteen months, with twelve burned by Confederates, eight by guerrillas, and two lost to Union accidents. Metcalfe’s courthouse fire fits that grim pattern, one incident in a wider wave of attacks on county seats meant to destroy tax rolls, court records, and symbols of Union authority.
“Guerilla Jake” and the burning of the courthouse, 15 March 1865
The most dramatic of those attacks in Metcalfe County came near the war’s end. On 15 March 1865, according to the jail’s National Register nomination and entries in the surviving court order books, a mounted guerrilla band estimated at sixty to seventy men descended on Edmonton. They were led by Captain Jacob Coffman “Guerilla Jake” Bennett, a Metcalfe County native who commanded a company in the 10th Kentucky Partisan Rangers, a Confederate cavalry organization closely associated with Morgan.
Order Book 1 records that Bennett’s men burned the courthouse and that “all records were lost.” The same nomination draws on a diary kept by a fifteen year old local girl, Elizabeth Beauchamp, to fill in additional details. She remembered that the guerrillas ordered a man named John Will Compton to set fire to the stone jail as well, threatening to shoot him if he refused. Compton managed to escape down a hill while their attention was elsewhere. The raiders did release one of their comrades who lay in the jail sick with measles and freed two others who had only recently been confined there.
The guerrillas targeted the jail’s original wooden doors, reportedly thick with square headed nails, which contemporaries believed would have burned intensely and quickly once ignited. Later accounts in the Edmonton Herald News and local interviews collected for the jail’s nomination suggest that the stone walls may have helped save the structure even as courthouse records went up in smoke.
What motivated Bennett’s men that day is harder to pin down from surviving documents. The nomination and local histories point to a mixture of revenge, opportunity, and politics. Some of the guerrillas had recently been released from the jail. Others may have been angry about local Union prosecutions or property seizures. Whatever their motives, they chose to strike at the heart of county government.
For Metcalfe County the loss was immediate and long lasting. Land titles, court proceedings, tax rolls, and many personal documents perished. When officials later rebuilt their dockets they had to rely on affidavits, memory, and whatever stray papers citizens could produce. The courthouse fire put Edmonton in the same category as places like Crittenden, Hart, and other Kentucky counties whose archives bear an obvious Civil War scar.
Rebuilding from ash
Within three years of the raid the county had erected the brick courthouse that still anchors the square. Designed by architect H. P. Bradshaw and built by contractor Henry Perry, the two story structure rose on a stone foundation laid by the same stonemason who had built the jail. The building’s nomination emphasizes that the walls are brick laid in common bond, capped by a low hipped roof, and that two fireproof vaults were inserted into the clerk’s offices with thickened walls and arched ceilings. Order Book entries instruct that the vaults be “modified and strengthened,” a telling reaction to the recent loss of records.
The courthouse’s National Register documentation also reminds us that the building is one of the oldest surviving courthouses in south central Kentucky and one of the few nineteenth century brick structures still standing in Metcalfe County. Its endurance has turned it into a visual shorthand for the county itself, appearing on Christmas ornaments, afghans, and book covers, much as the jail has become a symbol of early local government.
The stone jail tells its own story of survival. Constructed around 1861, enlarged and repaired after the war, and used as a jail until the 1980s, it outlasted multiple courthouse fires and changing standards for incarceration. The nomination notes that prisoners once shoveled coal from a pile outside the front door and pumped their own water, and that later renovations added steel cells and plumbing without eliminating the building’s fortress like appearance.
Together the courthouse and jail encapsulate a county’s response to war. One burned; the other nearly did. Both were rebuilt or modified with an eye toward permanence, even as the people who used them tried to rebuild their own lives in the war’s wake.
Lives threaded through the record
Metcalfe County’s Civil War experience was not limited to raiders and officials. Men from the county served in both Union and Confederate regiments, a divided pattern typical of Kentucky’s border counties. State level studies such as the Kentucky National Guard’s Paper Trail and local genealogical compilations point to Metcalfe soldiers scattered across units in the Union 13th Kentucky Infantry, mounted home guard companies, and Confederate cavalry regiments that passed through the region.
The same courthouse and jail that appear in architectural reports also show up in personal stories. Pension files and county histories preserve accounts of Metcalfe men who returned from distant battles to find a county more violent and fragmented than it had been when they enlisted. The postwar creation of a Grand Army of the Republic post at Edmonton, named for Private John F. Dulin of the 13th Kentucky killed at Shiloh, suggests that a visible community of Union veterans lived alongside neighbors who had ridden with Morgan or sympathized with Bennett’s partisans.
Civil War Governors of Kentucky materials hint at the civilian side of this divide. Petitions and letters from Metcalfe County describe widows asking for relief, citizens complaining about horse theft and drunken brawls, and neighbors accusing one another of treason or disloyalty. These documents reveal the lingering trauma of guerrilla era violence and the ways that ordinary people tried to use the governor’s office to restore order.
Why Edmonton’s Civil War story still matters
In a state crowded with better known battlefields, the skirmish near Edmonton and the burning of the Metcalfe County courthouse can seem like footnotes. Yet for the people who lived through them they were defining events. The cavalry fight on Mrs. Wood’s farm brought the war quite literally into local pastures and fence rows. The courthouse fire erased a young county’s paper memory and forced residents to reconstruct property rights and legal histories from scratch.
Metcalfe County’s experience also illustrates larger Appalachian Civil War themes. Small, newly created counties in the uplands often sat far from major battle lines but directly in the path of raiders and guerrillas. In these places the most important “battles” were sometimes short skirmishes and night raids that never made national headlines but permanently reshaped local politics and memory.
Today visitors who stand on Edmonton’s square, read the “Civil War Skirmish” marker at Bowling Park, or walk down to the old stone jail can still see traces of that wartime landscape. The brick courthouse represents not only nineteenth century architecture but also a community’s determination to rebuild something lasting after war and fire. The jail’s thick limestone walls recall a time when justice, security, and survival felt fragile.
For historians the story of Edmonton’s skirmish and courthouse fire offers a reminder that the Civil War’s front lines ran not only across famous battlefields but also through courthouse squares, farm lanes, and small towns scattered across the Appalachian borderlands.
Sources and further reading
Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Series I, volume 23, index entry for “Edmonton, Ky., skirmish near, June 7, 1863,” and related reports of Colonel Charles D. Pennebaker and Captain William J. Davis.
Kentucky Historical Society, Highway Marker Database, “Civil War Skirmish” (Marker 2332), Bowling Park, Edmonton, Metcalfe County, Kentucky. Kentucky.gov
National Register of Historic Places, “Metcalfe County Courthouse,” nomination form and continuation sheets, 2000. NPGallery
National Register of Historic Places, “Metcalfe County Jail,” nomination form and continuation sheets, especially historical background drawing on Metcalfe County Order Book 1, Elizabeth Beauchamp’s diary, and the article “Civil War Guerrillas Burn Courthouse,” Edmonton Herald News, 30 June 1974. NPGallery
Armando “Al” Alfaro, compiler, The Paper Trail of the Civil War in Kentucky, 1861 to 1865, Kentucky National Guard history project, sections on burned courthouses and county by county Civil War summaries. Kyng History+1
Local histories and oral interviews cited in the courthouse and jail nominations, along with county marker texts on Thomas Metcalfe and the founding of Edmonton, provide additional context on Metcalfe County’s creation and built environment in the nineteenth century. Kentucky.gov+2NPGallery+2