From the hilltops around Somerset you can still trace the old roads running toward the Cumberland River and the Tennessee line. In the winter of 1861 and the spring of 1863 those roads carried refugee families, hungry cattle, and two very different armies. Pulaski County sat on a military fault line. Whoever controlled Somerset and the fords of the Cumberland controlled the doorway between central Kentucky and East Tennessee.
Today Mill Springs Battlefield has become a National Park Service unit and Dutton’s Hill is marked by an obelisk and a highway marker. Underneath those tidy sites lies a deep paper trail left by officers, civilians, and veterans who tried to explain what happened here and why it mattered. The Official Records, wartime maps, local manuscripts, and late life pension files all pull the same landscape into focus.
Pulaski County on the edge of war
When the Civil War opened in 1861 Kentucky tried to remain neutral, but the corridor around Somerset quickly became a military zone. Union commanders in the Department of the Ohio watched the Cumberland Gap and the river crossings near Mill Springs. Confederate leaders in East Tennessee looked north toward the same roads and tried to rally southern leaning Kentuckians to their cause.
One of the earliest official mentions of Pulaski County in the war record comes from a Union officer writing from “McClaries’, Pulaski County, Kentucky” in late October 1861. Major William Hoskins reported rumors that Confederate troops several thousand strong, with artillery and a long wagon train, were moving along the Cumberland and might threaten the area. He begged for reinforcements and warned that the countryside was full of frightened Unionist families.
The War Department later preserved Hoskins’ letter in Series I, Volume IV of The War of the Rebellion: Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. That dispatch is not dramatic by itself. It reads like a worried county officer trying to hold a thin line. Yet it anchors Pulaski County in the official story of the war months before the more famous battles reached the newspapers.
By the winter of 1861–62 Somerset had become a forward base for Union forces watching Confederate General Felix Zollicoffer’s encampment across the Cumberland River at Mill Springs. Brigadier General Albin Schoepf’s troops garrisoned the town and nearby Camp Hoskins while Brigadier General George H. Thomas moved south from Lebanon toward a crossroads farm belonging to William Logan.
Even at the planning stage maps were part of the Pulaski story. A detailed “Sketch of the country about Somerset, Ky.” later appeared in the Atlas to Accompany the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, printed in color by Julius Bien and Company for the War Department in the 1890s. The plate shows the roads running from Somerset toward Logan’s, Mill Springs, and the river, along with Fishing Creek and the surrounding hills. It is essentially a cartographic snapshot of the landscape the officers in the Official Records were trying to describe.
Mill Springs, Logan’s Cross Roads, and the winter of 1862
The Battle of Mill Springs, also known to contemporaries as the Battle of Fishing Creek or Logan’s Cross Roads, erupted on a raw January morning in 1862. Zollicoffer had pushed across the Cumberland into Pulaski and Wayne Counties in an effort to extend the Confederate defensive line through southern Kentucky. His winter camp at Beech Grove, near Mill Springs, sat on the north bank of the river, a position that many of his superiors considered dangerous.
Thomas marched toward the area with roughly four thousand Union troops, including Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, and Minnesota regiments. Schoepf waited at Somerset with additional forces. Confederate scouts learned that the Federals were concentrating around Logan’s Cross Roads, near the modern community of Nancy, and decided that their best chance lay in a night march and surprise attack. That march went badly. Cold rain, mud, and darkness slowed the column and soaked men who were already poorly equipped. Many Confederates still carried older flintlock muskets that misfired in the wet, a detail repeated in both Union and Confederate recollections.
Around dawn on January nineteenth the Confederate advance collided with Union pickets near Logan’s farm. The attack initially pushed back several Federal regiments, including the 4th Kentucky Infantry and the 10th Indiana. Smoke, fog, and tangled woods turned the fields into a confused brawl. In the center of the line General Zollicoffer, wearing a light colored raincoat, rode forward trying to stop what he believed was friendly fire. In the murk he approached men of the 4th Kentucky United States rather than his own Tennesseans. When one of his aides shouted a warning the Union soldiers fired and Zollicoffer fell dead near the fence line.
Official accounts in Series I, Volume VII of the Official Records give the view from the headquarters tent. Thomas’ General Orders from “Camp opposite Mill Springs” congratulated the troops on the “splendid victory achieved over the enemy yesterday,” noting that his command had met more than double its number and driven the Confederates from their entrenchments, capturing supplies, baggage, and artillery. Colonel Mahlon Manson’s report described how his brigade took the advance on January seventeenth, camped at Logan’s farm ten miles from the Confederate works, and then held the crucial part of the line during the battle at “Logan’s field.”
Thomas also reported that among the trophies captured was the order book of the Fifteenth Mississippi and copies of Zollicoffer’s brigade orders, documents that told the story of the Confederate winter encampment from the other side. For Pulaski County residents the more immediate trophies were abandoned wagons, tents, and personal goods scattered in the wake of the Confederate retreat toward the Cumberland River.
Burial, memory, and the making of Mill Springs National Cemetery
As at many early war battles, the dead of Mill Springs were buried in hurried trenches and shallow graves. The War Department later ordered the creation of national cemeteries for Union soldiers, but it took years for those instructions to turn into a physical cemetery on the hill near Logan’s. When Mill Springs National Cemetery was eventually formalized, local tradition held that some Confederates who had been buried in those first mass graves also ended up inside the new national cemetery fence.
A National Park Service teaching unit on Mill Springs collects postwar memories and wartime sources into a narrative that highlights both the battle and its commemoration. The lesson plan draws on diaries, letters, and the Official Records to show Union soldiers plundering the abandoned Confederate camp, Kentuckians debating loyalty, and local residents tending graves. It also preserves the story of Dorotha Burton, the ten year old girl who began decorating the “Zollie Tree” at the Confederate mass grave in the early twentieth century, a ritual that grew into annual commemorations at what is now Zollicoffer Park.
In 2020 Mill Springs Battlefield National Monument formally entered the National Park System. That designation capped decades of work by the Mill Springs Battlefield Association and the American Battlefield Trust, which together helped protect hundreds of acres of the field. For Pulaski County the battlefield is now both a preserved landscape and a research hub with a visitor center, exhibits, a short film, and a research library useful to genealogists and local historians.
Cattle, cavalry, and Pegram’s 1863 raid into Kentucky
Mill Springs did not end the war in Pulaski County. A year later Confederate cavalry again rode toward Somerset, this time under Brigadier General John Pegram. In March 1863 Pegram led a raid north from East Tennessee into central Kentucky. His primary goal was practical rather than grand. The Army of Tennessee needed beef. Pegram’s men scattered Federal detachments, occupied Danville, and drove off several hundred head of cattle toward the mountains.
Union authorities reacted quickly. Major General Ambrose E. Burnside, organizing a new army in the department, sent a mixed mounted column under Brigadier General Quincy A. Gillmore to cut off the raiders before they could recross the Cumberland. Gillmore’s force numbered only about twelve hundred men, roughly half Pegram’s reported strength, but it had the advantage of interior lines and fresh horses.
By March twenty ninth, Pegram had reached high ground a few miles from Somerset, near a rise that local residents called Dutton’s Hill. There he halted, deployed six cannon, and waited for Gillmore. The Confederate commander hoped to hold the position long enough to get his cattle and prisoners back to Tennessee. Instead he found himself on the defensive.
Dutton’s Hill and the Battle of Somerset
The Battle of Somerset, more commonly known as Dutton’s Hill, unfolded on March thirtieth and thirty first 1863. A short summary prepared for the Civil War Governors of Kentucky project describes the engagement as the culmination of Pegram’s expedition. Confederate cavalry took up a strong defensive position on the ridge. Gillmore’s smaller Union command advanced, fought for hours, and finally drove them from the hill, sending the raiders back toward the Cumberland River and out of the state.
Gillmore’s own voice survives in a dispatch printed in Series I, Volume XXIII, Part I of the Official Records. Writing from Somerset in the early hours of March thirty first, he informed his superior that he had attacked the enemy the previous day in a strong position defended by six cannon near the town, fought for about five hours, stormed the position, and drove the Confederates in confusion toward the river with several hundred casualties and prisoners. He estimated that his own losses in killed and wounded were under thirty and noted that “Scott’s famous rebel regiment” had been cut off and scattered.
The modern roadside marker at Dutton’s Hill condenses those reports into a few sentences. It notes that roughly 1,250 Union troops under Gillmore attacked about 1,550 Confederates under Pegram, that the Confederates were driven from one position to another and withdrew across the Cumberland, and that while Pegram’s men had captured hundreds of cattle during the nine day expedition, they lost over two hundred men killed, wounded, or missing and brought only a fraction of the cattle out of Kentucky.
Dutton’s Hill was smaller in scale than Mill Springs, but it mattered locally. It confirmed that Federal control in Pulaski County was no longer fragile and it sent another wave of wounded men and captured Confederate troopers through small towns in both Kentucky and Tennessee. For families along the old Somerset roads, the raid left its mark in burned fences, missing livestock, and a new set of names to remember.
Pulaski County people in the records
The big printed volumes of the Official Records and the atlas map are the skeleton of the story. The flesh is in the person level sources that tie specific Pulaski County men and women to Mill Springs and Dutton’s Hill.
Compiled Military Service Records at the National Archives are often the first place to look. For Kentucky soldiers they include cards abstracted from muster rolls, hospital registers, and prisoner lists for regiments such as the 1st Kentucky Cavalry and the 4th Kentucky Infantry, both of which served in the Mill Springs campaign. Cavalry regiments that later fought at Dutton’s Hill, including the 1st Kentucky Cavalry and various Tennessee mounted units, have similar files.
Confederate veterans who settled in Kentucky left another trail in the state level pension system that began in 1912. The Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives holds “Confederate Pension Application Packets,” now digitized and indexed, which often contain affidavits describing wounds, captures, and movements. The National Archives notes the interaction between these state pensions and federal records, and FamilySearch hosts a research guide that points to images and indexes for the Kentucky pension series.
One can see how these layers fit together in the record of units known to have fought at Dutton’s Hill. A published casualty list for the 1st Tennessee Cavalry, for example, includes men noted as killed or wounded at “Somerset, Ky., March 31, 1863.” That list, combined with their compiled service cards and any surviving pensions, allows descendants to trace individual troopers from East Tennessee farms to the Pulaski County ridge and back home again.
Local manuscript collections deepen the picture. The Wait–Beaty Family Papers at the Filson Historical Society in Louisville include Civil War era material from Somerset, including at least one short report and a supply list. The finding aid suggests that these documents touch on local provisioning and the way Pulaski families interacted with nearby Union forces.
The Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition, which brought together the Somerset battle summary cited above, also preserves petitions, letters, and administrative records from Pulaski County citizens who appealed to the governor about stolen horses, damaged farms, or questions of loyalty. Those documents are searchable by place name and often mention Mill Springs, Somerset, or the Cumberland crossings directly.
Newspapers carried the Pulaski fighting far beyond Kentucky. Reports on Mill Springs soon appeared in Northern and Southern papers, and the accounts of Pegram’s failed raid circulated in regional weeklies that delighted in telling how a Confederate cattle drive had been turned back. The Library of Congress’ Chronicling America site, along with its Civil War research guides, gives modern readers a path into those columns and the rumor networks they carried.
Walking the ground today
For a modern visitor it is possible to stand in several of the landscapes described in those nineteenth century sources. Mill Springs Battlefield National Monument near Nancy preserves key portions of the Logan’s Cross Roads area, the Confederate cemetery around the old “Zollie Tree,” and the ridges and ravines where Union infantry charged in the rain. Driving east from there toward Somerset, one crosses Fishing Creek and follows roughly the same route Federal columns took in 1862 and 1863.
In Somerset itself Dutton’s Hill rises just off the old Crab Orchard Road, marked by a Kentucky historical marker and a marble obelisk that stands over a small cemetery. The marker summarizes Gillmore’s victory and notes that the dead from the battle are buried on the spot. Local tourism materials highlight the site together with Mill Springs as part of a broader heritage corridor along Lake Cumberland.
The visitor center at Mill Springs doubles as a research starting point. The museum exhibits outline the battles and display artifacts recovered from the area. A short film introduces both campaigns. Just as important for Appalachian family historians, the center’s research library makes regimental histories, local cemetery transcriptions, and copies of key primary sources available in one place.
Following the paper trail
Researchers who want to dig deeper into Pulaski County’s Civil War story can follow roughly the same path the sources above suggest.
Begin with the Official Records. Series I, Volume IV gives the early war correspondence that mentions McClaries and Camp Hoskins. Series I, Volume VII contains the campaign and battle reports for Mill Springs and Logan’s Cross Roads. Series I, Volume XXIII, Part I holds Gillmore’s dispatches and the formal reports for Pegram’s expedition and the Battle of Somerset. These volumes are available digitally through portals such as the Internet Archive, the Portal to Texas History, and CivilWar.com.
Pair those reports with the Atlas to Accompany the Official Records. The “Sketch of the country about Somerset, Ky.” plate, which survives in collections such as the David Rumsey Map Collection and the Osher Map Library, lets you trace the roads and streams mentioned in the text across the actual ground.
Then bring in local voices. The Wait–Beaty Family Papers and similar manuscript collections at the Filson Historical Society and the Kentucky Historical Society preserve civilian snapshots of wartime Pulaski County. The Civil War Governors of Kentucky project adds petitions and correspondence that reveal how county residents navigated military occupation, martial law, and divided loyalties.
Finally, tie those narratives to individual lives using compiled service records and pension files from the National Archives, Kentucky’s Confederate pension applications at KDLA, and the scattered but valuable regimental histories and casualty lists that name men killed or wounded at Mill Springs and Dutton’s Hill. Newspapers accessible through Chronicling America round out the picture by showing how the rest of the country heard about battles in places like Nancy and Somerset.
Pulaski County’s Civil War history sits at the crossroads of official dispatches and family stories, of a national park on a quiet hill and boxes of musty paper in archives and courthouses. For anyone willing to follow the trail from McClaries and Camp Hoskins to Mill Springs and Dutton’s Hill, the records still have plenty to say about how one Appalachian county experienced the war.
Sources and Further Reading
Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Series I, Volumes IV, VII, and XXIII, Part I, including the Mill Springs campaign reports, Thomas’ general orders from Camp opposite Mill Springs, Pegram’s expedition summary, and Gillmore’s Somerset dispatches. Civil War+1
Atlas to Accompany the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, plate titled “Sketch of the country about Somerset, Ky.,” printed by Julius Bien and Company, 1890s. Maps of Antiquity+1
Wait–Beaty Family Papers, Filson Historical Society, Louisville, Kentucky, including Civil War era reports and supply lists from Somerset. From The Page
Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition, item set “Military Engagements – Somerset, Battle of, Ky., 1863” and related Pulaski County documents. From The Page+1
Compiled Military Service Records and pension files held by the National Archives for regiments engaged at Mill Springs and Dutton’s Hill, including the 1st Kentucky Cavalry, 4th Kentucky Infantry, and 1st Tennessee Cavalry. National Park Service+2Wikipedia+2
Kentucky Confederate Pension Application Packets, Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives, with indexes and digital access described by the National Archives and FamilySearch. FamilySearch+2FamilySearch+2
National Park Service, “Battle of Mill Springs” battle summary and Teaching with Historic Places lesson plan “The Battle of Mill Springs: The Civil War Divides a Border State.” National Park Service+1
National Park Service, Mill Springs Battlefield National Monument Foundation Document and related planning materials that outline the park’s significance and interpretive themes. NPS History+1
American Battlefield Trust, Mill Springs Battlefield pages and “The Making of Mill Springs Battlefield,” describing preservation work and current interpretation. American Battlefield Trust+1
ExploreKYHistory entry on the Battle of Mill Springs, with Kentucky centered context and marker information. Explore Kentucky History
Kentucky Historical Society and Kentucky Transportation Cabinet historical marker “Dutton’s Hill,” along with Lake Cumberland tourism materials on the Dutton’s Hill Battle site. Somerset-Pulaski Chamber of Commerce –
Civil War regimental histories and casualty lists related to Mill Springs and Dutton’s Hill, including published histories of the 10th Indiana Infantry and 1st Tennessee Cavalry and later newsletters that reproduce casualty rolls. Internet Archive+2Twin Cities Civil War Round Table+2
Library of Congress Chronicling America newspaper archive and research guides on Civil War topics, which aggregate contemporary reporting on Mill Springs, Somerset, and the wider Kentucky campaigns. Geni+1