Appalachian History
A Little Mountain At The Crossroads
In the nineteenth century Mount Sterling looked like a small county seat on the edge of the Bluegrass. Its courthouse and brick storefronts clustered around a public square, while the old Little Mountain mound, built by Adena people centuries earlier, had already been leveled to make room for houses.
Location gave the town outsized importance. Roads from Lexington, Owingsville, and the Kentucky River converged here before pushing east along what locals called the Mount Sterling to Pound Gap road into the rough uplands near the Virginia line. Civil War commanders understood that whoever held Mount Sterling could threaten or protect supply lines running between the Bluegrass, the upper Kentucky Valley, and East Tennessee. Marlitta Perkins aptly calls it an important military base rather than a sleepy backwater.
That strategic value meant citizens watched both flags fly over their public square. Cluke’s Confederate cavalry, Union mounted infantry, guerrilla bands, and later John Hunt Morgan’s raiders all rode through town. By war’s end Mount Sterling had changed hands several times, lost a courthouse to the torch, and seen its streets turned into a battlefield more than once.
Mount Sterling’s First War Years
When Kentucky tried to stand neutral in 1861, Mount Sterling’s newspapers were already taking sides. The Mount Sterling Whig backed the Union, and its editor, J. Saige Dury, soon appears in the Civil War Governors of Kentucky archive as both local attorney and outspoken political figure.
One of the most vivid glimpses of early war anxiety comes from future president James A. Garfield. Writing from nearby Paris, Garfield copied a Whig editorial that had been published as Confederate forces threatened the region. The editor pleaded with “the loyal men of Montgomery and the surrounding counties,” warning that “our homes and firesides and all that we hold dear as freemen are again threatened with invasion.”
That invasion followed quickly. Eastern Kentucky and the Civil War research, drawing heavily on the Official Records and Louisville papers, traces repeated skirmishes along the Lexington to Pound Gap road in 1862. Small actions at places like Slate Creek and Stoner’s Bridge seldom make popular battle lists, but they show how often scouts and detachments brushed against each other near Mount Sterling as both sides tried to control the road network and intimidate local unionists.
Cluke’s 1863 Raid And The Burning Of The Courthouse
The town’s first true shock came on March 22 1863. About 300 Confederate cavalry under Colonel Roy S. Cluke swept into Mount Sterling, surprising a small Union force drawn from the 10th and 14th Kentucky Cavalry. Cluke’s men captured roughly 438 prisoners, 222 wagon loads of military stores, 500 mules, and 1000 stand of arms before riding out again.
The federal Rebellion Register and Dyer’s Compendium both list an “Action at Mount Sterling” on March 22 with a Union loss of four killed and ten wounded, casualty figures that match the modern county history markers. Confederate casualties were similar, with later summaries giving eight killed and thirteen wounded, numbers preserved today on a Kentucky Historical Society marker in front of the courthouse.
Cluke’s raid also foreshadowed a quieter disaster. Late that year, in December 1863, Confederate troops burned the Montgomery County courthouse. Local tradition connects the fire to efforts to deny Union authorities a paper trail, and modern histories note that about half of Kentucky’s county courthouses burned during the war. The Mount Sterling blaze destroyed many early deeds and court records, a genealogical wound still felt by families who trace their roots to the town.
A “Quiet Spring” With The 21st Massachusetts
Just before Cluke’s raid and the burning of the courthouse, Mount Sterling briefly hosted a New England regiment whose view of Kentucky comes down to us in rare detail. In April 1863 the veteran 21st Massachusetts Infantry arrived as part of the Ninth Corps, assigned to guard duty in central Kentucky while the army prepared for an East Tennessee campaign. They camped around the courthouse, a scene preserved in a wartime photograph now featured by the National Park Service.
Regimental historian Charles F. Walcott later remembered those months at Mount Sterling fondly. Reflecting on their stay, he wrote that “the 21st gained one of its greatest victories during those three pleasant inactive months at Mount Sterling; for they taught a people, many of whom had been born into a bitter prejudice against ‘Yankees,’ to regard Massachusetts troops with confidence, respect, and love.”
Diaries from the regiment flesh out that picture. Corporal Thomas Reed marveled at how carefully the men polished their weapons and kit, determined to look every inch the professional soldiers their hosts expected. The troops enjoyed church services, local food, and, as Walcott gently noted, the occasional drink. At least twice, when orders arrived to send the 21st elsewhere, petitions from Mount Sterling citizens persuaded army commanders to keep the regiment in place because of the danger from guerrillas.
Yet the “quiet spring” also exposed deep fault lines over slavery and justice. In early June 1863 an enslaved man in Mount Sterling was tried for attempting to kill his enslaver and sentenced to public hanging. Local officials asked the 21st Massachusetts to furnish a guard for the execution. The enlisted men were outraged. Private George A. Hitchcock wrote that “there was an ominous muttering among the Yankee soldiers,” and the regiment refused to participate.
After a delay, a detachment of the 14th Kentucky Cavalry escorted the condemned man out of town, where he was executed beyond sight of the camp. Hitchcock, who supported emancipation, saw the episode as proof that Kentuckians who stayed loyal to the Union did not always share New Englanders’ ideas about Black freedom. The National Park Service’s curated excerpts from Walcott and Hitchcock turn Mount Sterling into a case study in how divided loyalties, race, and occupation played out on the ground.
Morgan’s Last Kentucky Raid
By the summer of 1864 the war had turned sharply against the Confederacy. John Hunt Morgan, once celebrated as the “Thunderbolt of the Confederacy,” led his last independent campaign that June. Kentucky Historical Society markers and the Kentucky National Guard’s Paper Trail of the Civil War summarize the sequence: Morgan’s command entered Kentucky on June 1, took Mount Sterling on June 8, lost it on June 9, seized Lexington on June 10, then fought and lost at Cynthiana on June 12 before retreating toward Virginia.
At Mount Sterling the raid unfolded over two days. On June 8 Morgan’s cavalry struck a small United States garrison that guarded a supply depot and Farmers Bank. Modern summaries, drawing on the Official Records, report that the Confederates captured around 380 prisoners and seized roughly 59,000 dollars from the bank before Morgan pushed west with his main column.
Morgan left a sizable detachment behind. According to the Kentucky Historical Society marker “Battle June 9, 1864” and Perkins’s research, Colonel R. M. Martin’s Confederates camped along Camargo Pike south of town, while forces under Colonel H. L. Giltner waited on the Levee Road. Their task was to hold Mount Sterling and its stores while Morgan sought larger prizes farther west.
The Battle Of June 9 1864
Just after dawn on June 9, Brigadier General Stephen G. Burbridge marched United States troops against Martin’s camp. Accounts derived from the Official Records and Dyer’s Compendium list a mixed force that included Independent Battery C, Kentucky Light Artillery, several Kentucky infantry regiments, the 11th Michigan Cavalry, and the 12th Ohio Cavalry.
Burbridge’s men first struck the Confederate camp on Camargo Pike. They drove Martin’s command toward town, then met a counterstroke as Giltner hurried his brigade in from the Levee Road. Fighting surged back and forth through Mount Sterling’s streets, much as earlier skirmishes had done, but now on a larger scale. Kentucky Historical Society markers and later summaries agree that the Confederates mounted a determined counterattack, only to be repulsed and forced out of town along the Winchester road.
Casualty figures for the battle vary. Many modern references, following Kentucky Historical Society markers and local tourism materials, give losses as four killed and ten wounded on the United States side, eight killed and thirteen wounded for the Confederates. Dyer’s Compendium and the National Park Service battle chronology, however, list a much higher United States loss at Mount Sterling on June 9, about thirty five killed and one hundred fifty wounded, totals that may reflect the wider scope of the Morgan raid or additional skirmishing in the countryside.
Whatever the exact numbers, all sources agree that fighting was sharp for a town of Mount Sterling’s size. Later reminiscences speak of sabers and ammunition still turned up by plows in fields outside town, a memory preserved in both local tourism writing and online battle summaries.
Prisoner records show how personal the consequences could be. For example, a Confederate cavalryman in the 10th Kentucky appears on rolls at the Louisville military prison as having been captured at Mount Sterling in June 1864, illustrating how Morgan’s raid scattered men into distant camps long after the battle smoke cleared.
Home Front Voices And The War’s End
Even in the middle of military reports and casualty tables, local civilians kept writing. The Mount Sterling Whig and, later, the Kentucky Sentinel covered raids, enlistments, and politics. The Sentinel’s surviving issues and later scholarship show postwar advertisements for a school “for colored youths” in Mount Sterling, a reminder that emancipation created new educational possibilities even in a town that had once staged a public execution of an enslaved man.
Petitions and letters preserved in the Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition add another layer. Citizens from Mount Sterling and the surrounding counties wrote to governors Beriah Magoffin and Thomas Bramlette about guerrilla activity, contested loyalties, and the legal status of men accused of aiding the enemy. J. Saige Dury appears repeatedly as attorney and editor, signing petitions and handling cases that put the war into the courthouse even as that courthouse faced literal threats of fire and occupation.
By late 1864 the worst of the fighting had moved away from Mount Sterling. Morgan himself would die in Tennessee in September, and his command never recovered from the defeats that began with Burbridge’s counterstroke at Mount Sterling and culminated at Cynthiana.
Legacy, Markers, And Memory
Today visitors who walk through downtown Mount Sterling encounter layers of that Civil War history. State historical markers titled “Battle of Mt. Sterling,” “Battle June 9, 1864,” and “Morgan’s Last Raid” stand near the courthouse and along U.S. 60, summarizing Cluke’s 1863 capture, the burning of the courthouse, and the two day fight that helped break Morgan’s final campaign.
Tourism materials and local museums echo those themes. The Montgomery County Historical Museum’s “Cross Roads of Conflict” exhibit and the downtown walking tour map both highlight Civil War sites, from the courthouse square that once hosted Union camp tents to spots along Camargo Pike where Martin’s camp stood in June 1864.
For genealogists and local families, the burned courthouse remains a barrier, yet later deed books, tax lists, and cemetery records help reconstruct who lived in and around Mount Sterling when the town changed hands again and again. The Civil War cemetery on the edge of town and the rows of stones in Machpelah Cemetery record the names of men who fought on both sides and of civilians who watched them ride past.
Mount Sterling’s Civil War story is not simply a tale of a “small battle.” It is a study in how a crossroads community in the Appalachian borderlands lived through repeated occupations, watched a courthouse burn, debated loyalty in its newspapers and courtrooms, and saw enslaved and free people navigate the shifting ground between Union power and local custom. From Garfield’s copied editorial about homes and firesides to the quiet outrage of Massachusetts soldiers who refused to guard an execution, the surviving sources let us hear the town’s many voices as war rolled up and down the Little Mountain.
Sources & Further Reading
War of the Rebellion: Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Series I, Vol. 39, Parts 1 and 2, reports and correspondence relating to operations in Kentucky, including actions at Mount Sterling in 1863 and 1864. The Portal to Texas History+1
Report of the Adjutant General of the State of Kentucky, Union and Confederate volumes, 1861 to 1865, for rosters and brief service notes for units stationed at or engaged near Mount Sterling. FamilySearch+1
Charles F. Walcott, History of the Twenty First Regiment, Massachusetts Volunteers in the War for the Union (Boston, 1882), especially the sections on Mount Sterling, as quoted and contextualized by the National Park Service. National Park Service
George A. Hitchcock diary, 21st Massachusetts Infantry, excerpts in “In the Footsteps of the 21st Massachusetts Infantry,” National Park Service, Camp Nelson National Monument. National Park Service
James A. Garfield letter quoting the Mount Sterling Whig editorial, “Fellow citizens: Our homes and firesides…,” Library of Congress, By The People transcription project. Crowdsource The Library
Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition, entries relating to J. Saige Dury, Mount Sterling, and Montgomery County during the 1860s. From the Page+2discovery.civilwargovernors.org+2
Marlitta H. Perkins, “Mt. Sterling – An Important Military Base During the Civil War,” Eastern Kentucky and the Civil War blog, with timeline of raids, occupations, and the June 9 1864 battle. Eaky Civil War+1
“The Civil War in Montgomery County, Kentucky,” USGenWeb, for synthesized local history of Mount Sterling’s skirmishes, courthouse burning, and Morgan’s raid. USGenWeb+1
Kentucky National Guard, The Paper Trail of the Civil War in Kentucky 1861–1865, for county level summaries and unit service data, including Morgan’s June 1864 movements. KY National Guard History+1
Kentucky Historical Society markers 177 “Battle of Mt. Sterling” and 629 “Battle June 9, 1864,” along with associated ExploreKYHistory entries. Human Metabolome Database+2Kentucky.gov+2
Medina Dean, “Discovering Mt. Sterling: History and Culture of a Historic Town,” Kentucky Historic Travels, for concise summaries of the 1863 raid and its casualties within the broader story of the town. Kentucky Historic Travels
Battle of Mount Sterling entry, Civil War Sites Advisory Commission derived summaries and modern encyclopedic articles, used cautiously and cross checked with primary sources and markers. Wikipedia+1