Appalachian History
Most people who pass through Pikeville today remember the Cut-Through, the bypass, and the steep hills that hem the Levisa Fork into a narrow river bottom. During the first years of the Civil War, that same narrow valley became one of the most hotly contested corridors in eastern Kentucky. Armies pushed through on desperate campaigns, local Home Guards tried to hold the line, and guerrillas and regular troops alike turned Piketon, as wartime sources called it, into a true borderland town.
Two place names capture that story. In November 1861, Union Brigadier General William “Bull” Nelson made his headquarters at “Camp Hopeless Chase” in Piketon after the Battle of Ivy Mountain. A few months later, Colonel James A. Garfield and the Eighteenth Brigade settled into “Camp Brownlow” at nearly the same spot, using Pikeville as a forward base in the valley. Between those camps and the later creation of the 39th Kentucky Infantry under Pikeville merchant John Dils Jr., Pike County’s story reaches from regular armies to bushwhackers, from court records to family memories.
What follows traces Pikeville’s Civil War through the primary sources first, then through the scholarship that has grown up around them.
From Neutrality to invasion: the Big Sandy in 1861
Kentucky’s brief experiment with neutrality collapsed in early September 1861, when Confederate forces moved into Columbus on the Mississippi and into the central and southeastern parts of the state. Within weeks, eastern Kentucky had its own Confederate presence. Former U.S. Congressman Humphrey Marshall took command of the Army of Eastern Kentucky, with recruiting and camps concentrated around Piketon in Pike County.
Union leaders worried that the Big Sandy valley might become a Confederate highway into the Bluegrass. Brigadier General William “Bull” Nelson received orders to assemble a brigade and drive the Confederate “Peace Men” and States’ Rights recruiters out of eastern Kentucky. This “Big Sandy Expedition” moved in three phases. In October 1861 Nelson pushed columns through Hazel Green and West Liberty, then consolidated at Licking Station before driving toward Prestonsburg and Pikeville.
On November 8, 1861, Nelson’s column met Confederate forces near the mouth of Ivy Creek, roughly fifteen miles west of Pikeville. The ground was miserable. Official accounts and later summaries describe a narrow mountain road curling around a steep hogback ridge, hemmed in on one side by the West Levisa Fork and on the other by Ivy Mountain’s rocky slopes. Mud was knee deep, artillery had to be manhandled along the line, and the Union infantry advanced in single file. Confederate Captain Andrew Jackson May and a few hundred men lay in ambush above the road.
In the fight that followed, Nelson’s men took the slopes under fire. Accounts in the Official Records and in later National Park Service battle summaries agree that Union casualties numbered around thirty, with roughly similar or slightly higher Confederate losses. The battle at Ivy Mountain was not large by national standards, but it was the first significant clash in the Big Sandy valley and blunted the Confederate effort to hold eastern Kentucky.
Colonel John S. Williams soon realized he could not hold his position. After additional skirmishing and a hard retreat, Confederate forces abandoned Pikeville. By November 9, Union detachments out of Joshua Sill’s column had entered town, and Nelson’s main force followed on November 10, pushing through to Piketon on the Levisa Fork.
“Camp Hopeless Chase” on the Levisa Fork
Once in Piketon, Nelson established his headquarters and christened the site “Camp Hopeless Chase,” a jab at the kind of mountain campaigning that involved more marching than decisive battle. In an after-action order dated November 10, 1861, and issued from “Headquarters Camp Hopeless Chase, Piketon, Ky.,” he addressed his soldiers directly. The order was later reprinted in the Richmond Daily Dispatch, which mocked it as “a genuine Yankee Mexican document” but preserved the text for us.
In the order, Nelson thanked his men for their endurance. One short passage captures his sense of what the Big Sandy push had required:
“Soldiers, I thank you for what you have done. In a campaign of twenty days you have driven the rebels from Eastern Kentucky.”
The tone mixes pride and frustration. On one hand, Nelson claimed success in clearing the valley. On the other, he knew how tenuous that success was. Correspondents in Kentucky and Ohio newspapers pointed out that eastern Kentucky’s geography and divided loyalties made permanent control nearly impossible, a point later historians and the National Park Service would echo when they describe Ivy Mountain as only the first phase of the “War on the Big Sandy.”
Confederate memories of the approach to Ivy Mountain offer a very different angle. In an account later published by the Pike County Historical Society under the title “Wholly Ignorant of Our Presence,” a Confederate observer recalled watching Nelson’s column on the State Road near Hazel Green: the bluecoats marching “gayly along, wholly ignorant of our presence,” the road “filled” with men, wagons, and horses before the trap was sprung.
The name “Camp Hopeless Chase” endured in the public imagination because both sides repeated it. A modern historical marker in Pikeville, “Garfield at Piketon,” notes that after Nelson’s campaign Confederate soldiers used the phrase jokingly, while Union supporters saw it as a badge of persistence against an opponent who refused to give open battle.
For Pike County residents, however, the label also fit the experience of living in a valley that would see repeated occupations, raids, and skirmishes over the next four years.
A courthouse town without law
Pikeville before the war was a small county seat clustered around its courthouse and a few businesses along the Levisa Fork. That changed rapidly after 1861. The Pike County Historical Society, drawing on local court records and reminiscences, summarizes the situation bluntly: from the end of October 1861 forward, “there was no civil rule in Pike County.” Confederate occupation under Colonel John S. Williams, followed by Nelson’s Union army and then the January 1862 murder of County Judge William Cecil, left “every man a law unto himself.”
Newspapers in Virginia and Kentucky followed events in Pike County closely. On November 13, 1861, the Richmond Daily Dispatch ran an item headlined “two fights in Pike county: occupation of Pikesville by the enemy; the enemy advancing on Virginia; great excitement in Tazewell and Buchanan.” From a Confederate vantage point downriver, Union control of Pikeville meant the enemy was at the door of southwestern Virginia.
Arrests only heightened tensions. Kentucky military records and later syntheses point to an early episode in which William Ferguson, John Dils Jr., and Clinton Van Buskirk were arrested in Pike County and taken to Richmond in November 1861, accused of functioning as Unionist officials under the “Lincoln Government.”
The combination of military occupation, assassinations, and politically charged arrests made Pikeville feel less like a quiet courthouse town and more like the front line of a civil war fought among neighbors.
Garfield and Camp Brownlow: life in an occupied river town
By late 1861, Union commanders knew that Nelson’s brief campaign had not permanently secured eastern Kentucky. Confederates slipped back across Pound Gap, and recruiting resumed. In December, General Don Carlos Buell turned to a young Ohio colonel, James A. Garfield, to lead another expedition up the Big Sandy. Garfield’s Eighteenth Brigade fought at Middle Creek in January 1862, driving Humphrey Marshall’s force back toward Virginia. Pikeville and Piketon again became essential staging grounds.
From mid February into March 1862, Garfield and his brigade established “Camp Brownlow” at Piketon. The camp’s name honored William G. “Parson” Brownlow, a famously outspoken pro Union editor from East Tennessee. In a report preserved in the Official Records and printed in a modern edition of the Shiloh volumes, Garfield’s adjutant wrote from Piketon on March 10: “I am now at this place, with three regiments of infantry and one squadron of cavalry.”
Other sources flesh out what that actually looked like on the ground. Letters collected by the Pike County Historical Society and by independent archivists show soldiers thinking about everything from flooded rivers to the quality of camp cooking.
In February 1862, Jasper Stansbury Ross of the 40th Ohio wrote home from Camp Brownlow. One of his letters, preserved in a private collection and transcribed by historian Griff in the “Spared and Shared” project, describes the routine of soldiering in Piketon: the long marches that brought the unit into the county, the scattered detachments on provost duty, and the odd mix of boredom and nervousness as men waited to see where they would be sent next.
Another soldier, G. P. Robinson of the 40th Ohio, wrote to his father from Camp Brownlow on April 13, 1862. The Marysville Tribune in Ohio printed his letter later that month. Robinson explained that his regiment was “still encamped at Piketon,” that he liked the camping ground, and that the men had “good bunks to sleep in and plenty of good blankets.” He bragged on their cook and listed their rations in detail, but he also noted that no steamboats had come up the river for weeks and the camp had been “without news” longer than at any time since they had left home.
Letters printed in the Cincinnati Gazette and preserved on Civil War blogs show Camp Brownlow as a jumping off point for further operations. A correspondent writing from “Camp Brownlow, Piketon, Ky.” on March 18, 1862, told readers about Garfield’s short, sharp raid on Pound Gap with a detachment drawn from the 40th and 42nd Ohio, the 22nd Kentucky, and McLaughlin’s cavalry. The force marched thirty seven miles in less than two days, surprised the Confederate camp, seized several hundred firearms and supplies, and then burned what they could not carry. The writer called it “a brilliant victory,” and noted with pride that the detachment returned to Piketon “without loss or damage to a man.”
Taken together, these primary accounts give us a vivid picture of Pikeville and Piketon as a river town in wartime. The Big Sandy’s water levels determined whether news and supplies could reach the occupying troops. The surrounding hills funneled every movement of an army into a few narrow roads. Residents watched as three regiments of Union infantry and cavalry bivouacked among their fields and along their streets.
Home Guards and a border county at war
Even as regular Union forces established camps at Piketon, local men were organizing to protect their own families and neighborhoods. Across Kentucky and other border states, citizens formed “Home Guard” units that could be called into state or federal service or operate informally against raiders and guerrillas. Pike County was no exception.
Reports collected in Civil War era newspapers and summarized by later historians show Pike County Home Guards repeatedly clashing with Confederate forces, particularly the Virginia State Line commanded by Colonel Ezekiel F. “Zeke” Menifee. In a July 23 letter quoted by the Pike County Historical Society, Menifee admitted that he had planned another move back into Kentucky but turned away when he learned that the Union Home Guards of Pike and Letcher counties were marching toward his position. One local historian notes that Pike County Home Guards were “more often than not, the object of Menefee’s ire.”
These Home Guards left their own paper trail. Union military authorities in Frankfort corresponded with Pike County leaders about arming and organizing loyalist companies, and one letter from Assistant Adjutant General John Boyle to John Dils Jr. in November 1863 appears in the Civil War Governors of Kentucky digital edition. That correspondence, along with affidavits and petitions, shows how local men appealed directly to the state to protect Pike County against guerrilla bands and retaliatory raids.
The Home Guards did not act in a vacuum. Later studies of the Hatfield McCoy feud point back to Pike County’s Civil War militias as one root of the violence. Asa Harmon McCoy, for example, served in a Pike County Home Guard company before joining the 45th Kentucky Infantry. According to feud historians, his earlier militia service and later Union enlistment marked him as a target and helped set the stage for the postwar blood feud along the Tug Fork.
In other words, the same Pike County Home Guards that Menifee feared in 1862 would echo in local memory long after Appomattox.
Menifee’s raid and the making of Colonel John Dils Jr.
Few Pikeville stories show the blurred lines between neighborly commerce and civil war as clearly as the raid on merchant John Dils Jr.’s store.
Before the war, Dils was a prominent Pikeville businessman, operating a general store and tannery near the courthouse. He leaned Union but, like many local elites, tried at first to navigate the early months of secession and neutrality. Eastern Kentucky and the Civil War, a blog that mines contemporary Kentucky sources, notes that in 1861 Dils himself was briefly arrested with William Ferguson and Clinton Van Buskirk and taken to Richmond, Virginia, accused of acting as a Unionist “provost marshal” in Pike County.
By August 1862, open neutrality had become impossible. A genealogical note compiled by descendants of Confederate scout Henry May describes what happened next. Serving as a civilian scout for Menifee’s Virginia State Line, May accompanied a Confederate raiding party into Piketon. The raiders looted Dils’s general merchandise store, and Dils fled Pike County for Louisville. The same account explains that in September 1862, “Dils was authorized to organize the 39th Mounted Infantry” for the Union and became its commanding colonel.
Dils did not forget the raid. Pike County court records, transcribed by the Pike County Historical Society under the title “John Dils vs Henry May & Others,” preserve his postwar lawsuit. In the complaint, Dils alleged that Henry and David May had entered his tanyard in Pikeville “with force” in 1862 and carried off leather worth $2,500, a huge sum in the mountain economy of the time.
The case illustrates how wartime violence flowed straight into Reconstruction era courts. Men who had ridden with Confederate units as scouts or auxiliaries found themselves facing civil suits from neighbors they had robbed under color of military service. Merchants like Dils used the courts to claw back some of what they had lost, even as they continued to shape postwar Pikeville through business and politics.
The 39th Kentucky and the fight at Coal Run
The regiment that grew out of Dils’s experience became one of the Big Sandy’s most important Union units.
The 39th Kentucky Infantry Regiment was organized at Peach Orchard in Lawrence County in late 1862 and mustered into service in February 1863, with Dils commissioned as colonel. Although often referred to as mounted infantry and used in a highly mobile fashion, the regiment was never officially designated as such. It served under the Department of the Ohio and later under various district commands in Kentucky.
Official summaries of the regiment’s service show just how deeply it was woven into Pike County’s war. Its detailed roster of engagements includes “Action near Piketon, Ky., November 5, 1862,” skirmishes in Floyd County, actions at Piketon again on April 13 and 15, 1863, and, crucially for Pike County, a fight at the “Mouth of Coal Run, Pike County, July 2, 1863.” Later that year and in 1864, the regiment saw further action at Pond Creek and elsewhere in Pike County. After 1864, the 39th continued “duty in the Big Sandy Valley and in eastern Kentucky guarding and protecting the country” until it mustered out in 1865.
The official record gives only the barest outline: dates, places, and unit names. Local reminiscences fill in the human detail.
In a set of autobiographical sketches written in Pikeville in 1928 and 1929, Union veteran Thomas Wilson Elliott looked back on his service in Company A of the 39th. Elliott recalled that at the outbreak of the war, he volunteered alongside two brothers, and that Company A was stationed in Pikeville in 1862. He described a catastrophic flood on the Big Sandy that he called the highest the river had ever been, with Union forces using flatboats to move supplies upriver to Pikeville. According to Elliott, Confederate forces attacked the boats and fought a sharp engagement near Wireman’s Shoals and along the riverbank, killing a Union man named Hampton who believed himself sheltered behind a rock. Rebels, he said, sheltered in the house of Arnold Francis along the river, which was “shattered full of holes” by Union fire.
Elliott’s memory does not line up perfectly with the regiment’s official dates, which place Wireman’s Shoals in December 1862 and Coal Run in July 1863, but the overlap is clear. His description of boats, river levels, and close range fighting at river landings matches the pattern of engagements the 39th fought in Pike County.
Together, the Official Records and local testimony suggest that the clash at the mouth of Coal Run on July 2, 1863, was part of a larger campaign to keep guerrillas from seizing supply boats and to shield loyalist communities up the Levisa Fork. In this phase of the war, the 39th’s job was not to win famous battles but to keep Pike County from falling entirely under the control of Confederate raiders.
Pike County’s war and the long shadow of violence
For Pike County families, the war did not end cleanly with the surrender of Lee or Johnston. Lawsuits like Dils vs May dragged wartime grievances into the 1860s and beyond. Feud histories trace how memories of Union Home Guards, Confederate partisans, and betrayals during the war fed the resentments that later erupted as the Hatfield McCoy feud along the Tug Fork.
Court records in Pike County and neighboring counties, including cases like Zeigler vs Rice discussed by the Pike County Historical Society, show former neighbors accusing each other of wartime theft, assault, or collaboration. A study of Civil War era litigation in eastern Kentucky observes that the Big Sandy region emerged from the conflict with “lawsuits as the order of the day,” a phrase that fits Pike County as well as any place in the valley.
Religious and community life bore the marks as well. The Pike County Historical Society’s work on Civil War era marriages notes that in the years after October 1861, with civil government shaky and ministers sometimes unwilling to perform marriages in a lawless county, many couples married in neighboring places or under the protection of Union garrisons.
Yet the same sources also preserve quieter stories: soldiers swimming horses out of flooded stables in Garfield Bottom, families watching columns tramp past their cabins at the mouth of Ivy Creek, and veterans like Thomas Elliott living well into the twentieth century as the “last Civil War veteran” of Pike County.
Remembering Camp Hopeless Chase and Camp Brownlow today
Today, most physical traces of Camp Hopeless Chase and Camp Brownlow have vanished beneath modern Pikeville. The river has been straightened and confined, and the downtown has shifted since the era when the Levisa Fork curled against the foot of the hill where the courthouse stood.
Even so, public history projects in Pike County and beyond have brought this Civil War frontier back into view.
The Ivy Mountain battleground is marked by a tall granite monument and a Kentucky Historical Society marker that identifies the November 8, 1861 engagement as the first important Civil War battle in the Big Sandy valley. National Park Service battle summaries for Ivy Mountain (KY003) and interpretive material from the American Battlefield Trust frame the fight as the end of the first phase of the struggle for the valle
In Pikeville itself, a marker titled “Garfield at Piketon” recounts the presence of the Eighteenth Brigade at Camp Brownlow and reminds visitors that a future U.S. president once used the town as his headquarters.
The Pike County Historical Society, in partnership with the Big Sandy Heritage Center and the University of Pikeville, has digitized local court records, autobiographies, and soldier letters. Their online exhibits on “Letters from the Past: Piketon, Kentucky,” “The Jasper Stansbury Ross Letters,” “Wholly Ignorant of Our Presence,” and “John Dils vs Henry May & Others” give readers direct access to the voices and documents that make Pike County’s Civil War feel immediate rather than abstract.
Read together with the Official Records, Richmond and Cincinnati newspapers, Civil War Governors of Kentucky documents, and the reminiscences of veterans like Thomas Elliott, those local sources confirm that Pikeville was far more than a place the armies passed through on the way to somewhere else. It was a crossroads town that saw repeated occupation, local resistance, and the long aftershocks of a war that divided neighbors for generations.
Sources and Further Reading
United States War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Series I, Vol. 4. Reports filed from “Camp Hopeless Chase, Piketon, Ky., November 10, 1861,” and related dispatches on the Big Sandy Expedition and Piketon operations.Wikipedia+2Appalachianhistorian.org+2
Richmond Daily Dispatch (Richmond, Virginia), November 13, 1861, “two fights in Pike county: occupation of Pikesville by the enemy,” and December 7, 1861, publication of Nelson’s Camp Hopeless Chase order.Daily Dispatch+2Daily Dispatch+2
Marysville Tribune (Marysville, Ohio), April 30, 1862, letter of G. P. Robinson from Camp Brownlow, Piketon, Ky., April 13, 1862, reprinted by the Pike County Historical Society in “Letters from the Past: Piketon, Kentucky.”Pike County Historical Society+1
Jasper Stansbury Ross letters from Camp Brownlow, February and March 1862, preserved by private collectors and transcribed in the Pike County Historical Society’s “The Jasper Stansbury Ross Letters” and the Spared and Shared project.Pike County Historical Society+2Spared & Shared 22+2
Thomas Wilson Elliott, “Histories of Thomas Wilson Elliott, 1845–1939,” written in Pikeville in 1928–1929 and reproduced by the Pike County Historical Society, especially his sections on service in Company A, 39th Kentucky Infantry, and the fight near Wireman’s Shoals and the Big Sandy flood at Pikeville.Pike County Historical Society
Pike County court records, “John Dils vs Henry May & Others,” as transcribed by the Pike County Historical Society, and genealogical notes on Henry May and the Menifee raid on Dils’s store, preserved by descendants and posted on the May family history site.Pike County Historical Society+2Mayhouse+2
Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition, Assistant Adjutant General Letter Book, entry “John Boyle to John Dils Jr., 17 November 1863,” concerning Home Guards and Pike County defense.Civil War Governors of Kentucky+1
National Park Service, “Battle Detail, Ivy Mountain (KY003),” and related Civil War Sites Advisory Commission and American Battlefield Trust materials on Ivy Mountain and the Big Sandy valley.National Park Service+2American Battlefield Trust+2
“War on the Big Sandy” and related entries at ExploreKYHistory, Kentucky Historical Society, for contextual overviews and marker texts on Ivy Mountain and regional campaigning.Explore Kentucky History+1
Donald A. Clark, The Notorious “Bull” Nelson: Murdered Civil War General, especially the chapter on the Big Sandy Expedition, Piketon operations, and Camp Hopeless Chase.Wikipedia
Brian D. McKnight, Contested Borderland: The Civil War in Appalachian Kentucky and Virginia, for analysis of Garfield’s time at Camp Brownlow and the interplay of regular and irregular warfare in the region.Civil War Books and Authors+1
Pike County Historical Society, “Civil War” and “Military” collections, including “Wholly Ignorant of Our Presence,” “The Jasper Stansbury Ross Letters,” “Letters from the Past: Piketon, Kentucky,” “John Dils Jr. Biography,” and related articles on raids, court proceedings, and local memory.Pike County Historical Society+2Pike County Historical Society+2
Wikipedia and derivative summaries for the 39th Kentucky Infantry Regiment and the Big Sandy Expedition, used as guides to unit itineraries and cross checked against Official Records and local sources.Wikipedia+1