Appalachian History
Mt. Olivet did not yet have a county of its own when the Civil War came through on tired horses in June 1864. The crossroads village sat on the old Maysville–Lexington road, between the mineral springs at Blue Licks and the market towns strung along the Licking River. On paper it belonged partly to Bracken, partly to Harrison, Mason, and Nicholas. Only in 1867 did those pieces come together as Robertson County, one of Kentucky’s last and smallest counties.
Most wartime documents therefore speak of those parent counties rather than the name Robertson. Yet the roads, farms, and springs that would make up the new county were present all along. The people who lived there watched the same war that scarred Kentucky’s larger courthouses and rail depots. Their Civil War story sits at the edges of bigger campaigns, along the retreat routes, in the aftermath of burned hotels and in the pension files of old soldiers who later answered their census taker on the hills above the Licking.
Today that landscape is anchored by Blue Licks Battlefield State Resort Park, a state park in both Robertson and Nicholas counties that commemorates the 1782 Revolutionary War battle and preserves the historic springs, museum, and lodge. The park’s monument and museum speak of Daniel Boone, buffalo traces, and the last major battle of the Revolution in Kentucky. Tucked into that story are quieter traces of another war that passed by the same salt licks eight decades later.
A Health Resort On The Eve Of War
By the middle of the nineteenth century Blue Lick Springs had become a well known spa rather than a battlefield. Travelers came by stagecoach or on horseback to take the mineral waters that seeped up through the salt rich ground. Descriptions of the resort speak of large hotels, promenades, and guests from across the South who believed the springs could ease everything from asthma to rheumatism.
That tourism economy gave the future Robertson County an unusual profile for a rural hill county. Farmers along the Licking and on the ridges between Mt. Olivet, Piqua, and Kentontown supplied the resort with meat, produce, and labor. Enslaved people worked in nearby households and at the springs themselves.
On the night of April 7, 1862, in what one modern historian calls “the beginnings of the Civil War” for the resort, a destructive fire swept through Blue Lick Springs and burned the main three story hotel. Contemporary and later accounts agreed that the timing was suspicious and soon rumors of arson began to circulate. Local memory held that the resort never fully recovered to its antebellum prosperity until well after Reconstruction, even though new buildings rose and guests eventually returned.
The flames at Blue Licks did not show up in the major regimental histories or in the federal “Official Records” of the war. They appear instead in local reminiscences, newspaper pieces from Maysville and surrounding towns, and county sketches that look back to that April night as the moment when war arrived in their corner of Kentucky. Those are fragile sources, but they match a broader pattern across the Bluegrass where hotels, mills, and bridges suffered sudden fires once Union and Confederate patrols began moving along the pikes.
Roads, Markers, And A Last Kentucky Raid
If the Blue Licks fire marked one kind of entrance, John Hunt Morgan’s last Kentucky raid marked a violent exit. The best documented Civil War event tied directly to today’s Robertson County is not a battle fought there, but a retreat that passed along its main road.
In late May 1864 Morgan and a reduced Confederate cavalry command slipped through Pound Gap into eastern Kentucky. Union and Confederate reports in the War Department’s Official Records, Series I, volume 39, track his movement west and north: skirmishes in eastern counties, the capture of Mt. Sterling on June 8, heavy fighting there on June 9, occupation of Lexington on June 10, and the seizure of Cynthiana on June 11.
At Cynthiana on June 12 the raid collapsed. Brigadier General Stephen G. Burbridge brought together a mixed Federal force and struck Morgan’s men near the railroad and Keller’s Bridge. In an afternoon dispatch from Lexington, an officer at headquarters reported that Burbridge had come up with Morgan that morning “near Cynthiana” and, after an hour’s fighting, broken his command into fragments. Some of Morgan’s men escaped, but their horses were exhausted, their ranks thinned, and the element of surprise was gone.
Frederick H. Dyer’s Compendium of the War of the Rebellion, along with Federal unit histories, help reconstruct the opposite side of that story. These summaries record that the 47th Kentucky Infantry and other regiments operated “against Morgan May 31–June 20,” fought at Mt. Sterling on June 9, and at Keller’s Bridge and Cynthiana on June 11–12. Those Union troops and Morgan’s retreating men used the lattice of pikes and traces that ran through what would become Robertson County.
The clearest surviving statement of how that movement related to Mt. Olivet and the Blue Licks corridor comes not from a general’s report but from a roadside marker. The Kentucky Historical Society’s highway marker number 693, “Morgan’s Last Raid,” stands today in Mt. Olivet along US 62. The marker explains that on Morgan’s “tragic last Kentucky raid” his raiders entered the state on June 1, 1864, captured Mt. Sterling on June 8 and lost it the next day, took Lexington on June 10 and Cynthiana on June 11, and then suffered defeat at the hands of Burbridge’s forces. Morgan, it notes, retreated “through here,” reaching Virginia on June 20, and his raiders “never recovered from this reverse.”
That same wording appears in The Paper Trail of the Civil War in Kentucky, a state level compilation of Civil War markers and county sketches produced by the Kentucky Adjutant General and Heritage Council. In the entry titled “Civil War 1861–1865 in Robertson County,” the Paper Trail quotes marker 693 almost in full and adds that the retreat route through Mt. Olivet linked the county to a larger map of Morgan markers that trace the retreat from Mason and Fleming counties in the north to Floyd, Knott, and Pike in eastern Kentucky.
Although the Official Records do not treat the Mt. Olivet crossing as a separate engagement, this combination of sources makes the route clear. The raiders who survived Cynthiana pushed north through Mason County, then turned east and south along the Maysville–Lexington road and its connections. The path that links today’s Blue Licks Battlefield State Resort Park, Mt. Olivet, Mays Lick, and Sardis is also the path of a scattered Confederate column riding hard for home.
Soldiers From A County That Was Not Yet On The Map
Because Robertson County did not legally exist during the war, there is no “Robertson County” section in the Civil War rosters. The men who later lived in the new county enlisted under their original county names. Research therefore has to run through those parent counties.
The 1860 population and slave schedules for Bracken, Harrison, Mason, and Nicholas counties include the farms and hamlets that ring modern Mt. Olivet and Blue Licks. Men from those households appear in the service records of both Union and Confederate units. Federal compiled service records and the Kentucky Adjutant General’s volumes, accessible today through FamilySearch and other databases, show local men in outfits such as the 14th and 47th Kentucky Infantry, the 10th Kentucky Cavalry, and regional Confederate cavalry commands.
A generation later, the 1890 Veterans Schedule for Robertson County finally gathers many of those men in one place. That special census, transcribed on KYGenWeb, lists Civil War veterans living in Robertson County with their rank, regiment, and any recorded disabilities. Some line entries for Confederate veterans appear lightly crossed out, reflecting the fact that the original schedule was designed primarily to enumerate Union service, even while local enumerators sometimes recorded ex Confederates and then revised the page.
Other clues lie in Kentucky’s Confederate pension applications. Beginning in 1912 the state allowed elderly Confederate veterans and widows to draw small pensions if they could document their service. The statewide index includes several pensions filed from Robertson County addresses. These applications preserve details such as companies, regiments, and battles, along with narratives of illness, wounds, and prisoner of war experiences.
Local memory layered over those official lists. Genealogists and librarians at the Robertson County Public Library’s Kentucky Room have compiled rosters titled “Civil War Soldiers from Robertson County Area” and “Confederate Army Volunteers,” drawing on veterans schedules, pensions, obituaries, and family stories. Their clipping files preserve reunion notices and anniversary pieces that read the war backward from the twentieth century, when the last old soldiers on the Kentontown–Piqua road were passing away.
One obituary, for example, remembered George Henry Bradley as Robertson County’s oldest citizen and last surviving Civil War veteran, a farmer whose long life linked modern readers to the faded uniforms in the photographs on their parlor walls. Such notices are not precise military sources, but they show which units and battles loomed largest in county memory.
Enslaved People, Free People Of Color, And U.S. Colored Troops
The Civil War story of the future Robertson County is also a story of slavery and emancipation. Robertson County as a legal entity did not appear until 1867, after Kentucky ratified the Thirteenth Amendment. Its founding elite included Judge George Robertson, a prominent politician and slaveholder who once sued a Wisconsin officer, William L. Utley, for compensation after Utley refused to return an enslaved man named Adam during the war.
The Notable Kentucky African Americans Database summarizes what the federal censuses reveal once the new county appeared on the rolls. In 1870, the first census to list Robertson County by name, enumerators recorded 136 Black residents and 93 people listed as Mulatto. By 1880 the totals had shifted to 231 Black residents and 47 Mulatto residents, and by 1900 the census listed 130 Black residents in the county.
That same NKAA entry highlights at least three men whose United States Colored Troops service tied them to the area. Jerry Brooks enlisted in 1864, Abraham Norrington in 1863, and Thomas Thompson in October 1864, each listing Robertson County, Kentucky, as a birthplace in USCT records. The compilers note that this may reflect confusion with Robertson County, Tennessee, or the fact that local residents were using the name Robertson County before the legislature officially created it in 1867.
Whatever the exact geography, those enlistments represent young Black men from the Licking River region who entered Union service in 1863 and 1864. Their service points to the complicated position of African Americans in a border county where slavery remained legal throughout the war, but where geographic proximity to Ohio and to Union recruiting posts made enlistment possible.
To reconstruct the lives behind those enlistments, researchers can pair the 1860 slave schedules of surrounding counties, which list enslaved people only by age, sex, and color, with the named entries in 1870 for formerly enslaved families in Robertson County. When a USCT pension file survives, it may add details about birthplace, family composition, and the struggles of veterans and widows navigating labor contracts and disability in Reconstruction era Kentucky.
Governors, Appointments, And A County Seat On The Margin
Even before the county lines shifted, the government in Frankfort was already dealing with people at Mt. Olivet and Blue Lick Springs as distinct communities. The Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition preserves scattered pieces of that bureaucratic conversation.
A search of the CWGK database reveals correspondence created at “Mount Olivet, Robertson County, Kentucky” between 1863 and 1867, much of it involving petitions and recommendations for civil appointments under Governor Thomas E. Bramlette. These documents show local men appealing for positions such as magistrate or county officer, often citing their Union loyalty or war service as qualifications.
Similar entries created at “Blue Lick Springs, Nicholas County, Kentucky” in 1862 and 1863 involve militia organization and wartime administration, including letters sent from the resort to Governor James F. Robinson. In those years, Blue Lick Springs was not only a spa but also a vantage point where politicians, officers, and businessmen met, debated, and reported on the state of the war.
Seen together, these documents suggest that the Mt. Olivet–Blue Licks corridor was not simply a quiet rural backwater. It was plugged into the political network of wartime Kentucky. Men there argued over who should command the local militia, who should hold civil offices, and how to manage the disruptions caused by raids, conscription, and guerilla activity.
After the war those same networks helped secure the creation of Robertson County itself. When the General Assembly established the county in 1867, carving it out of its four parents, Mt. Olivet became the county seat. The new courthouse, schools, and roads grew up in a place that had already learned to navigate the demands of wartime governors and military commanders.
Memory, Reunion, And The Landscape Of Blue Licks
The Civil War did not leave Robertson County with a Chickamauga or a Perryville. Its landmarks of that conflict are more modest. A roadside marker at Mt. Olivet, another at nearby Mays Lick, and others in neighboring counties trace Morgan’s last raid along US 62 and connecting roads. Blue Licks Battlefield State Resort Park, while devoted chiefly to the 1782 battle, houses a museum with Civil War artifacts and interpretive panels that touch on later conflicts.
By the late nineteenth century Blue Lick Springs had once again become a gathering place for vacationers, politicians, and veterans. Confederate veterans of the famed “Orphan Brigade” held early reunions at the resort in the 1880s, turning its porches and dining room into a ritual space where speeches, songs, and flags revived wartime comradeship in a peacetime setting. The very name of the lodge’s Arlington Room today hints at those layers of memory.
Local newspapers, preserved on microfilm at the Robertson County Public Library and regional repositories, carried Civil War reminiscences alongside ads for Blue Licks seasons. Columns written by aging veterans recounted Morgan’s raids, Union camp life, and home front tensions. Obituaries noted whether the deceased had “served in the late war,” sometimes adding whether he had worn blue or gray. Reunion announcements for Union and Confederate organizations appeared side by side, reflecting the mix of loyalties that had run through the community.
Even the Revolutionary War story at Blue Licks intersected with Civil War memory. When the Blue Licks monument was dedicated and later refurbished, speakers drew parallels between the 1782 pioneers and the Union and Confederate soldiers of the 1860s. They framed both conflicts as tests of courage on the same rocky ground above the Licking River. That layering continues today, as visitors follow trails that interpret prehistory, the Revolution, and the Civil War within a single protected landscape.
Conclusion: A Small County In A Big War
Robertson County’s Civil War story is not one of large armies clashing in its fields. It is instead a story of how a small rural district, not yet officially a county, was woven into the fabric of a much larger conflict.
The spa economy at Blue Lick Springs drew enslaved and free workers into contact with wealthy southern tourists just as war approached. A devastating hotel fire in April 1862 signaled how fragile that economy could be once the war heated up. The June 1864 movements of John Hunt Morgan’s raiders and Stephen Burbridge’s pursuers turned the region’s roads into part of a theater that stretched from Pound Gap to Cynthiana. Official reports, regimental summaries, highway markers, and state compilations all point to Mt. Olivet and the US 62 corridor as waypoints on a raid that ended in strategic failure.
At the same time, censuses, USCT records, and Kentucky pension files reveal how the area’s Black residents and white soldiers experienced the war and its long aftermath. They show African American men claiming service in the United States Colored Troops, former Confederates seeking pensions, and Union veterans listing Robertson County as their home in 1890.
Finally, state parks, roadside markers, and local historical rooms remind us that the Civil War never belonged only to the places where cannons roared the loudest. For residents of Mt. Olivet and Blue Licks, the war lived on in the stories told on courthouse steps, in reunion photographs taken on hotel porches, and in the quiet fact that a small county born in Reconstruction still carries the name of a slaveholding judge whose lifetime straddled both slavery and freedom.
In that sense, the Civil War history of Robertson County is a history of edges and intersections. It is where a famous raid passes through, where two wars centuries apart share the same springs, and where a county not yet on the map found itself pulled into the currents of a national crisis.
Sources & Further Reading
United States War Department, War of the Rebellion: Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Series I, Vol. 39, Parts 1–2. Reports and correspondence relating to operations in Kentucky in the spring and summer of 1864, including actions at Mt. Sterling, Lexington, Keller’s Bridge, and Cynthiana that frame Morgan’s last raid and Burbridge’s pursuit. The Portal to Texas History+1
Frederick H. Dyer, A Compendium of the War of the Rebellion (Des Moines, 1908). Concise summaries of Union regimental service, including Kentucky units that fought against Morgan’s raiders in June 1864. American Civil War Forums+1
Kentucky Adjutant General and Kentucky Heritage Council, The Paper Trail of the Civil War in Kentucky, 1861–1865.County by county summaries anchored in highway markers and official reports. The “Civil War 1861–1865 in Robertson County” entry quotes marker 693 and emphasizes Morgan’s June 1864 retreat through Mt. Olivet. KY National Guard History
Kentucky Historical Society, Highway Marker Database, “Morgan’s Last Raid” (marker 693, Mt. Olivet) and related markers along US 62 and connecting routes. These markers, along with the ExploreKYHistory digital stories tied to them, provide a mapped narrative of Morgan’s last raid and retreat across multiple counties. Kentucky.gov
Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition. Entries created at Mount Olivet, Robertson County, and at Blue Lick Springs, Nicholas County, including petitions for civil appointments and militia related correspondence that illuminate local governance during the war and in the early Reconstruction years. Civil War Governors of Kentucky+2Civil War Governors of Kentucky+2
Notable Kentucky African Americans Database, “Robertson County (KY) Free Blacks and Free Mulattoes, 1870–1900.”Provides population statistics for Black and Mulatto residents from the 1870, 1880, and 1900 censuses and identifies Jerry Brooks, Abraham Norrington, and Thomas Thompson as USCT soldiers listing Robertson County as their birthplace, while noting the ambiguity in that designation. Genealogy Trails
Blue Licks Battlefield State Resort Park, Kentucky Department of Parks, and related historical summaries. These sources outline the long history of Blue Licks as a salt lick, Revolutionary War battlefield, nineteenth century health resort, and modern state park and museum that lies partly within Robertson County. Wikipedia
Robertson County Public Library, Kentucky Room, local manuscript and clipping files. Especially the compiled lists “Civil War Soldiers from Robertson County Area,” “Confederate Army Volunteers,” and local reminiscence pieces such as the Kate Farris letter “The South Mourns Her Dead” (1866), which preserve community level memories of the war, its casualties, and its veterans.