Appalachian History
A Courthouse Town On The Edge Of The Mountains
In the early 1860s Powell County sat where the Bluegrass began to wrinkle into mountains. The Red River threaded past small farms, iron works, and timber land on its way toward the Kentucky River. Stanton, a modest crossroads town, had been chosen as county seat after Powell County was carved out of surrounding counties in 1852 and named for Governor Lazarus W. Powell.
The first Powell County courthouse stood near the center of Stanton, not far from later routes that would carry visitors to Natural Bridge and Red River Gorge. Later photographs and postcards show a two story courthouse with a central tower and simple classical lines, the kind of public building meant to anchor a young county’s sense of order.
When the Civil War began in 1861, that courthouse was less than ten years old. The people who used it were farmers, craftspeople, enslavers, and small town professionals caught between competing pulls. Some had commercial and family ties to Lexington and the Bluegrass. Others were linked by kin and culture to the hill counties further south and east. In that sense Powell County embodied Kentucky’s identity as a border state, perched between Union and Confederate worlds.
For a time the war passed mostly at a distance. Confederate and Union columns moved along the great roads through central and southeastern Kentucky. Farther up the Red River valley, Powell County saw smaller movements of Home Guard companies, refugee families, and cavalry scouts rather than massed armies. Before long, though, the county’s courthouse town found itself on the wrong end of a kind of fighting that official battle maps rarely show clearly: guerrilla war.
Official Records, Cavalry Scouts, And A Guerrilla Camp
The main printed record of army operations in Kentucky during the Civil War is the massive compilation usually called the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion. Published by the federal government between 1881 and 1901, these volumes gather letters, orders, after action reports, casualty returns, and other documents produced by Union and Confederate officers while the war was underway. They are organized into four series, with Series I devoted to campaign and battlefield operations.
Within Series I the volumes that cover Kentucky in late 1862 and 1863 include Powell County among hundreds of indexed place names. The index for Series I, Volume 20, which gathers operations in Kentucky and Tennessee from November 1862 into early 1863, lists an entry for “Powell County, capture of guerrilla camp.” That quiet line signals that somewhere in the Red River hills a Union detachment broke up an irregular band significant enough to make its way into the army’s official paperwork.
The unit most closely associated with this work was the 14th Kentucky Cavalry, a Union regiment raised largely in the eastern half of the state. According to the National Park Service unit history, the regiment spent much of its service “scouting in mountains of Eastern Kentucky and operating against guerrillas” rather than fighting in large set piece battles. The summary lists specific operations in Bath, Estill, Powell, Clark, Montgomery, and surrounding counties during the fall of 1862. It notes actions in Powell County on December 26, 1862 and again on January 26, 1863.
Later compiled histories of the regiment flesh out the terse notices from the Official Records. One regimental sketch describes how Major Robert C. Stivers led about 150 men in a winter dash against a guerrilla band in Powell County. The narrative claims that Stivers surprised the camp, captured its leader and eleven of his men, and seized their horses and weapons.
Taken together, the regimental history, the NPS unit summary, and the Official Records index sketch a small but telling scene. Sometime during that bleak winter of 1862 to 1863, Union cavalry rode into Powell County’s hollows hunting irregular fighters who had been raiding roads and farms. They struck a camp hard enough to make a reportable success, but the fact that the regiment continued to list “Powell County” among its duty stations suggests that guerrilla activity there did not end with one raid.
For residents the distinction between “army” and “guerrilla” likely mattered less than the immediate experience. A column of Union horsemen might arrive demanding forage and information about bushwhackers. A few weeks later another set of men on horseback might come down the same road, this time identifying themselves as Confederate partisans and insisting they were the rightful protectors of the county. Each group expected loyalty. Each could punish perceived enemies.
Courthouse Burned, Jail Destroyed
The state’s own reference works and highway markers preserve the starkest outline of what happened next. The Kentucky Encyclopedia’s entry on Powell County notes that “Powell County, especially Stanton, received its share of hardships during the Civil War” and that most of the damage came at the hands of Confederate guerrillas. It summarizes two key events. In the spring of 1863 a guerrilla force raided Stanton and burned the courthouse. About a year later, on June 1, 1864, raiders struck the town again and destroyed the county jail.
A Kentucky Historical Society marker, part of a statewide series on burned courthouses, gives similar details. The text explains that twenty two Kentucky courthouses were burned during the war, nineteen of them in the final fifteen months. Twelve fell to Confederate regulars, eight to guerrillas, and two by Union accident. On the local side it notes that “courthouse and records at Stanton and other buildings were burned by guerrillas, spring of 1863” and that after buildings had been rebuilt “June 1, 1864, jail and records again burned.”
A local history note from the Berea College Labor Journalism and Appalachian Collections adds that Confederate guerrilla forces targeted Stanton and that their attacks “resulted in the destruction of the original Powell County courthouse and other municipal buildings.”
Those three layers of evidence line up. First come contemporary operations in the Official Records showing Union cavalry hunting guerrillas in Powell County in late 1862 and early 1863. Second comes the Kentucky Encyclopedia’s county history, written more than a century later but grounded in archival research, which ties Powell County’s wartime suffering to Confederate guerrilla forces and dates the key raids to spring 1863 and June 1864. Third comes the highway marker, erected in 1963 and drawing both on the encyclopedia and on Kentucky Historical Society research, which preserves those dates and emphasizes the destruction of courthouse records.
The marker is part of a broader interpretive effort that recognizes the statewide scale of courthouse destruction. A Kentucky National Guard history pamphlet, The Paper Trail of the Civil War in Kentucky, reprints both the Powell County entry and the general statement that twenty two county courthouses were burned, with nineteen fires occurring late in the war. Some, like Powell County’s, were attributed to guerrillas who looted and destroyed local symbols of Union authority. Others were burned by Confederate or Union regulars for tactical reasons or by accident.
For Powell Countians the consequences lasted long after the smoke cleared. The courthouse fires destroyed many of the county’s earliest records. Genealogists working through FamilySearch and county level finding aids quickly discover that Powell County record series such as wills and marriages often begin with volumes dated 1863 or 1864, precisely when officials began reconstructing what could be salvaged. Later microfilmed collections of Powell County marriages, wills, and probate records all note beginning dates in that era, a quiet sign of how much was lost in the flames.
The courthouse that stands today is a later building, completed in the late twentieth century, but images in the Library of Congress and on surviving postcards show earlier courthouses that themselves succeeded the war era structure. Even without knowing every construction date, a visitor who walks from the modern courthouse lawn to the “Courthouse Burned” marker is literally crossing ground where county government had to start over more than once.
Governors, Guerrilla Letters, And The Red River Iron Works
If the Official Records tell the story of Powell County’s war from the perspective of field officers, the Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition opens a window onto how those same events reached Frankfort. The project, sponsored by the Kentucky Historical Society and supported by the National Archives’ documentary editions program, gathers thousands of petitions, letters, and administrative documents that passed through the office of Kentucky’s Union governors and the short lived Confederate state government.
The project’s search tools reveal that Powell County appears in at least one set of “Guerrilla Letters” preserved by the Kentucky Department of Military Affairs. A search facet shows a document labeled as correspondence from July 17, 1861 tied to “Red River Iron Works, Powell County, Kentucky” in a collection focused on guerrilla activity.
Even without direct access to the full text, the metadata alone tells us several things. It confirms that state military authorities were receiving reports about guerrilla problems in Powell County as early as 1861, before the courthouse burnings. It ties those concerns specifically to the Red River Iron Works, an important industrial site in the county, suggesting that irregular warfare there threatened not only farms and homes but also a key economic and logistical asset. And it shows that these local troubles generated paperwork that climbed the chain of command to the governor’s orbit.
Other Civil War Governors documents linked to Stanton and Powell County, though not all currently easy to open, likely cover the familiar themes that recur in guerrilla ridden counties across Kentucky. Citizens petitioned for protection from bushwhackers or for the release of relatives accused of aiding them. Local officials reported on Home Guard companies, loyalty oaths, and the difficulties of enforcing state and federal laws in communities divided by politics and kinship. In some cases county officers begged the governor to intervene when courthouse records were destroyed or when courts could not meet. Although we cannot quote those Powell County specific texts directly here, the project’s broader coverage makes clear that similar stories unfolded across the Commonwealth.
How Newspapers And Local Archives Remember The Raids
While the courthouse fires consumed many mid nineteenth century records, later newspapers and local projects have worked to reconstruct the story. The Kentucky Digital Newspaper Program at the University of Kentucky Libraries coordinates the digitization of historic newspapers across the state, including a special focus on titles from roughly 1850 to 1875 that cover the Civil War era.
Complementing that statewide effort, the Library of Congress Chronicling America site maintains a directory of Kentucky newspapers and hosts digitized runs for several titles. Its Kentucky section lists Powell County papers such as The Stanton Citizen in later decades, along with regional papers that would have carried recollections of the war and the courthouse fires as anniversaries approached.
Closer to home, the Powell County Public Library’s digital archives provide free access to historic newspapers, genealogy indexes, and other local records. The Community History Archives profile of the project describes it as a partnership that preserves “firsthand community perspectives that document history as it happened,” with Powell County newspaper runs, vital record indexes, and court and land records indices among the highlighted holdings.
For a historian or family researcher, that combination of digitized newspapers and index projects offers a way to fill in the human detail behind the neutral phrases of the Official Records and highway markers. A short article in a late nineteenth century Stanton paper might recall where residents fled during the raids, whose houses were burned, or how long it took for a new courthouse to open. Obituary notices for veterans of the 14th Kentucky Cavalry or of local Home Guard companies sometimes mention skirmishes with guerrillas in Powell County by name.
Regional repositories amplify that picture. The Filson Historical Society in Louisville maintains extensive manuscript and clipping files organized by county and by subject. Guides to its newspaper clipping files and historical files note coverage of Civil War topics and guerrilla warfare, often including carefully curated folders on courthouse burnings and local incidents across Kentucky.
The Kentucky Digital Library serves as a statewide portal that brings together digitized collections from university and local repositories, making it easier to find scattered references to Stanton and Powell County in memoirs, pamphlets, and local histories.
Finally, family researchers continue to rebuild what the 1863 and 1864 fires destroyed. The FamilySearch catalog and wiki entries for Powell County list reconstructed marriage, probate, and will records from the 1860s onward, much of them preserved on microfilm or in digitized images. These records, pieced together from surviving volumes and later filings, allow descendants to trace lines that might otherwise have vanished with the courthouse.
Landscape, Memory, And A Burned County
Walk across the courthouse square in Stanton today and the most obvious reminder of the Civil War is not a monument to generals but a metal sign. The “Courthouse Burned” marker stands near the modern Powell County Courthouse, summarizing in a few sentences what took years for residents to live through and more than a century for historians to piece back together.
Behind that brief inscription lies a layered story. The Official Records show cavalry detachments operating in Powell County, hunting guerrillas whose activities were serious enough to demand attention from regional commanders. County and state level histories describe how irregular fighters attacked Stanton twice, burning the courthouse, the jail, and crucial public records. The Civil War Governors project and military affairs files confirm that state officials were receiving reports from sites like Red River Iron Works, wrestling with how to defend a divided community. Newspapers and library archives, finally, preserve the way later generations talked about those events as they tried to make sense of lost documents and shattered institutions.
Powell County’s Civil War story is not one of grand pitched battles. It is instead a story of raids and counter raids, of guerrillas and scouts, of courthouse fires and reconstructed ledgers. That makes it emblematic of how the war unfolded in many Appalachian and border counties where the conflict took the form of irregular violence and political uncertainty rather than massive armies clashing in open fields.
For historians of Appalachia and for residents who trace their roots through the Red River valley, Powell County is also a reminder that the physical destruction of records can shape how we remember the past. The fires of 1863 and 1864 erased deeds, court cases, and early marriage records, forcing later researchers to rely on scattered copies, private Bibles, and reconstructed indexes. At the same time, the survival of military reports, governor’s correspondence, and twentieth century local newspapers means that the story of Stanton’s courthouse and jail can still be told, even if some of the names inside those lost books can never be fully recovered.
Sources & Further Reading
Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, Series I, esp. Vol. 20, “Operations in Kentucky, Middle and East Tennessee, North Alabama, and Southwest Virginia, November 1862 to January 1863,” which includes indexed entries for operations in Powell County and the capture of a guerrilla camp.Western Illinois University+2The Portal to Texas History+2
Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, General Index and Additions and Corrections (Serial 130), used with the Western Illinois University War of the Rebellion guide to locate serials and volume references for Kentucky operations.Western Illinois University
National Park Service, “14th Regiment, Kentucky Cavalry,” unit history summarizing the regiment’s service scouting in eastern Kentucky and listing actions in Powell County on December 26, 1862 and January 26, 1863.National Park Service+1
Compiled regimental sketches of the 14th Kentucky Cavalry that recount Major Robert C. Stivers’s raid on a guerrilla band in Powell County, capturing the leader and several men along with their horses and weapons.Civil War Encyclopedia
Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition, including correspondence tagged to “Red River Iron Works, Powell County, Kentucky” in the “Guerrilla Letters” collection from the Kentucky Department of Military Affairs.National Archives+1
Kentucky Historical Society marker 587, “Courthouse Burned,” at Stanton, Powell County, Kentucky, summarizing the burning of twenty two Kentucky courthouses during the Civil War and detailing the 1863 courthouse and 1864 jail fires in Powell County.Kentucky Historical Society+2Kentucky Historical Society+2
Ron D. Bryant, “Civil War 1861 to 1865 in Powell County,” in The Paper Trail of the Civil War in Kentucky 1861 1865 (Kentucky National Guard history publication), combining Kentucky Encyclopedia county entries with highway marker text to describe guerrilla raids on Stanton and the burning of the courthouse and jail.KY National Guard History+1
“The War of the Rebellion in the Internet Archive,” Western Illinois University Libraries guide to the Official Records and related indexes, including a concise explanation of the four series and instructions for using the general index to track campaigns and localities.Western Illinois University
Civil War Governors of Kentucky project description, National Archives National Historical Publications and Records Commission catalog entry, outlining the scope and goals of the digital documentary edition and its focus on reconstructing lives that intersected with the governor’s office during the war.National Archives
Kentucky Encyclopedia entries on Powell County and on Civil War courthouse burnings, as excerpted in The Paper Trail of the Civil War in Kentucky, providing county level overviews and statewide statistics on the number and causes of courthouse fires.KY National Guard History+2KY National Guard History+2
Community History Archives profile of the Powell County Public Library Digital Archives, describing free online access to Powell County newspapers, genealogy indexes, and court and land record indexes, and situating those resources within local library history.Community History Archives
Kentucky Digital Newspaper Program, University of Kentucky Libraries, including research guides and Civil War era title lists that identify digitized Kentucky newspapers from the 1850s through the 1870s.Internet Archive+1
Library of Congress Chronicling America, Kentucky newspaper directory and digitized holdings, including records for The Stanton Citizen and other regional titles that preserve later recollections of Civil War events in Powell County.National Council on Public History+1
Filson Historical Society, guides to Newspaper Clipping Files, Historical Files, and manuscript collections, which include county and subject files on Civil War operations, guerrilla warfare, and courthouse burnings across Kentucky.uky.edu+2The Library of Congress+2
Kentucky Digital Library, statewide portal aggregating digitized material from Kentucky institutions, used here to locate Powell County related items such as local histories, photographs, and pamphlets.Filson Historical Society
FamilySearch catalog and related Powell County resources for marriages, wills, and probate records beginning in the 1860s, illustrating how record series restart after the courthouse fires.FamilySearch+3FamilySearch+3FamilySearch+3