Appalachian History
In the fall of 1861 Rockcastle County stood on the edge of a war that had not quite arrived. The county seat at Mt. Vernon sat at the foot of Wildcat Mountain on the road toward London and the Bluegrass. The Rockcastle River wound through steep hills that funneled travel onto a few narrow crossings. For Union and Confederate commanders studying their maps, those crossings and ridges looked like gates.
Within a year the county and its borders would see two separate campaigns, each recorded in official dispatches as “Rockcastle Hills,” “Big Rockcastle Creek,” “Little Rockcastle River,” and “Mt. Vernon.” Those dry lines in the War of the Rebellion volumes mark moments when national armies brushed against small Rockcastle communities and turned the county into a Civil War crossroads.
This article follows those moments through primary sources from the Official Records, unit histories, and later county and battlefield studies. Together they show how Rockcastle County’s roads, rivers, and ridges helped decide who controlled the mountain doorway into central Kentucky.
Guarding the Rockcastle: Camp Wildcat and the 1861 Line
When Confederate General Felix Zollicoffer marched north from East Tennessee in September 1861 his goal was not simply to raid. He meant to push into Kentucky, test the state’s neutrality, and open a route toward the Bluegrass. After his men beat a small Union force at Barbourville they had an open road toward the interior of the state.
Union General George H. Thomas answered by ordering Colonel Theophilus T. Garrard’s Kentuckians to seize a strong position near the Rockcastle River. The Official Records describe Garrard’s camp as east of the Rockcastle, along the Wilderness Road at Wildcat Mountain, with orders to “secure the ford on the Rockcastle River” and block further Confederate advance.
In his post battle report Thomas called the engagement that followed the “Action at Rockcastle Hills, or Camp Wildcat, Ky., October 21, 1861.” Brigadier General Albin F. Schoepf, who took field command at Wildcat, headed his own report “Camp on Rockcastle River, October 22, 1861,” and described the troops as holding the approaches from the river toward the heights. Colonel John Coburn of the 33rd Indiana filed his account from “Camp Wildcat, Ky.” the same day. Those reports together fix the battle’s identity in the minds of contemporary commanders. It was a fight for the Rockcastle line as much as for a particular ridge.
Schoepf’s brief dispatch from the day after the battle reads almost casually. From “Camp on Rockcastle River” he asks Thomas for more supplies and reports that the Confederates have retreated. Yet the context makes clear that the Union army had just protected a key mountain bottleneck. The American Battlefield Trust’s modern summary echoes that point, describing how Garrard’s detachment had been sent specifically to guard the Rockcastle River ford and Wilderness Road and how Zollicoffer’s failure there checked his push into the Bluegrass.
Later studies add topographic detail. A historic sites survey for the Daniel Boone National Forest notes that Wildcat Mountain near the Rockcastle–Laurel line, “approximately one and one half miles east of the Rockcastle River,” had been used in three wars and that Garrard’s men spread along the Wildcat ridge after being dispatched from Big Hill to support the Rockcastle line. Memoirs of the 14th Ohio and other regimental histories call the fight “Camp Wild Cat, or Rockcastle Hills,” reinforcing the sense that this was a Rockcastle River battle even if modern county boundaries place the preserved core of the field in Laurel County.
For Rockcastle residents the effect was simple and immediate. The road between Mt. Vernon and London became a military highway. Garrard’s Kentuckians, Coburn’s Hoosiers, and detachments from Ohio regiments filled the camps around Wildcat while Confederate pickets gathered farther south along the Wilderness Road. Rockcastle County’s landscape, especially the river crossings and steep ridges, suddenly sat at the center of an early Union stand that helped keep Kentucky in the Union camp for the winter of 1861–62.
“Wild Cat Country”: Rockcastle in the 1862 Kentucky Campaign
Camp Wildcat and the Rockcastle River did not fade from the war after Zollicoffer’s retreat. In August and October 1862 the same roads reappeared in campaigns that carried larger armies across central Kentucky.
Big Hill and the approach from the north
On August 23, 1862 cavalry from Confederate General Edmund Kirby Smith’s invading column clashed with a small Federal force under Colonel Leonidas Metcalfe at Big Hill. Kentucky Historical Marker 1124, set on U.S. 421 near the junction of Madison, Jackson, and Rockcastle counties, records how about 650 Confederate horsemen routed the Union defenders as part of Smith’s advance toward the Battle of Richmond.
Local tourism pieces and marker descriptions place the skirmish “near Mount Vernon in Rockcastle County,” emphasizing that this fight on a county line still brushed Rockcastle’s doorstep. Though small compared to the Richmond battle that followed, Big Hill showed how cavalry and couriers used Rockcastle’s ridge roads as they felt for enemy positions between the Bluegrass and the mountains.
Mt. Vernon and the Rockcastle crossings in October 1862
After the Battle of Perryville on October 8, 1862, Confederate General Braxton Bragg began to withdraw his army southeast toward Tennessee. Union forces under Don Carlos Buell pursued. The Official Records and later chronologies turn that long chase into a series of short entries. To Rockcastle County those entries read like a roll call of nearby skirmish sites.
A compiled list based on the Official Records cites a “Skirmish at Mt. Vernon” for October 16, 1862, specifically labeling it part of the campaign that followed Perryville. The same list notes “Skirmish at Big Rockcastle Creek” on October 16, “Skirmishes about Camp Wild Cat” on October 17, and “Skirmish at Little Rockcastle River” on October 18, followed by further contact near Wildcat on October 19 and 20.
General Joseph Wheeler’s Confederate report on the campaign, preserved in the Official Records and summarized in the Perryville Battlefield site’s transcription, confirms that Confederate cavalry fought small actions at Big Hill, Little Rockcastle River, “Mountain Side,” and other points on October 18 while covering Bragg’s retreat. The American Civil War High Command chronology pulls those scattered entries together and lists “Skirmishes at Crossroads, Big Hill, Little Rockcastle River, and Mountain Side, Ky.” for that same date.
Unit histories add texture. The 6th Kentucky Infantry’s official service record notes that during the pursuit of Bragg the regiment fought at “Wild Cat Mountain, near Crab Orchard, and Big Rockcastle River, near Mt. Vernon, October 18.” The 27th Kentucky Infantry’s detailed history lists “Big Rockcastle River October 16” just after the post Perryville skirmish near Crab Orchard. A summary of the 24th Kentucky Infantry explains that the regiment later spent months “at Mt. Vernon and Wild Cat engaged in outpost duty until June,” which kept Rockcastle County on the front line of small scale scouting and guard work.
Taken together those reports mean that during a single October week in 1862 multiple Kentucky regiments and allied units marched through Mt. Vernon, crossed both the Big Rockcastle and Little Rockcastle, and skirmished around the old Camp Wildcat positions as they moved between Perryville and London. The same ridges and creek crossings that had anchored Thomas’s defensive line a year earlier now framed a moving front as two armies slid past each other through Rockcastle County’s hills.
Home Ground: Rockcastle Residents in the Records
The Official Records and regimental histories mostly track officers and troop movements, but other primary sources reveal Rockcastle County people caught between those armies. The Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition includes petitions and correspondence from Rockcastle residents such as merchants Alfred Smith and Robert N. Ferguson. Those documents range from business complaints to militia matters and show how local men navigated a wartime economy shaped by nearby camps and columns.
Diaries and memoirs from soldiers who served along the Rockcastle line also hint at the county’s civilian landscape. The diary of Private Richard Hancock of the Second Tennessee, serialized in modern form, describes Confederate movements toward Camp Wildcat in October 1861 and references the surrounding hills as a “natural fortification, almost inaccessible,” a phrase that matches the terrain near the river. Later recollections by Union soldiers in Ohio and Kentucky regiments remember Rockcastle Hills and Wildcat as a place of rain, mud, and steep climbs where local guides and farmers pointed out the best road forks.
These scattered voices confirm that Rockcastle County was more than a set of names in campaign maps. It was a lived landscape of farmsteads and small stores that suddenly found itself under federal and Confederate requisition orders. Telegraph lines and wagon trains threaded through Mt. Vernon and the Rockcastle crossings. Guerrilla complaints and militia petitions from the area remind us that after the big campaigns moved on smaller bands still used the same hard timber and hollows to wage irregular war.
“At the Foot of Wild Cat Mountain”: Rockcastle Memory
In the generations after the Civil War Rockcastle County residents wove those brief contacts into a local story that places the county at the edge of a major battlefield. Modern Rockcastle promotional material from the county’s Industrial Development Authority describes Mt. Vernon as standing “at the foot of Wild Cat Mountain, the site of a famous Civil War battle,” an echo of older county histories that tie the town’s identity to the Wildcat fighting.
The Kentucky Historical Society’s marker for Camp Wildcat itself physically stands in neighboring Laurel County along the old Wilderness Road, but the ExploreKYHistory entry emphasizes that the camp guarded the Rockcastle River crossings and notes its location along the mountain road between London and Mt. Vernon. The battle summary on the American Battlefield Trust site underlines that General Thomas had sent Garrard to occupy a position “near the Rockcastle River” in the Wildcat Mountains, connecting the official battlefield listing to the Rockcastle watershed.
The Daniel Boone National Forest’s historic sites survey goes further. In its discussion of a Rockcastle County saltpeter cave the report explains that Wildcat Mountain at the Rockcastle line was used in three different wars and that Union commanders dispatched the 33rd Indiana from Big Hill “with instructions to support Colonel Garrard at Camp Wildcat and to initially occupy approximately one and one half miles east of the Rockcastle River, known as Wildcat Mountain.” That paragraph quietly stitches together Big Hill, the Rockcastle River, and Wildcat into a single geographic corridor, much as the Official Records had done in lists of skirmishes.
Today hikers following the Sheltowee Trace from Rockcastle County toward the Wildcat Battlefield walk a landscape still shaped by those Civil War concerns. Trail guides and visitor information describe Rockcastle County as a gateway to Daniel Boone National Forest, with one route leading toward the Camp Wildcat Battle Monument and another tracing Horse Lick Creek and other historic byways. Modern tourism blogs list Camp Wildcat among Rockcastle’s family activities, treating the battlefield as part of the county’s mix of caves, rivers, and hiking.
Why Rockcastle’s Civil War Story Matters
Compared with battles like Shiloh or Chickamauga, the actions at Rockcastle Hills, Big Hill, Big Rockcastle Creek, Little Rockcastle River, and Mt. Vernon were small. Casualty counts were modest and the engagements often lasted only hours. Yet the primary sources show that major armies repeatedly treated Rockcastle County as a strategic hinge.
In 1861 Union forces dug in at Wildcat to keep Zollicoffer from bursting through the mountains toward Lexington. In 1862 both Kirby Smith and Bragg used the same corridor while invading or retreating, and Union troops answered with a string of skirmishes and outpost duties that kept Rockcastle’s roads under watch. The 6th, 24th, and 27th Kentucky Infantry regiments all recorded service at Wildcat, Big Rockcastle, or Mt. Vernon in their official histories, tying Kentucky’s own Union volunteers to that ground.
For Appalachian history the Rockcastle story also illustrates a larger point. Many mountain counties never hosted a single famous battle but instead saw waves of small contacts, scouting parties, requisitions, and guerrilla scares. Those events rarely show up on big battlefield maps. They do appear, however, in Official Records indexes, in unit histories that mention a quick fight at a river ford, in Kentucky Historical Society markers set along U.S. 25 or 421, and in local economic development blurbs that casually mention a town at the foot of a Civil War mountain.
Reading those sources together lets us see Rockcastle County not as an empty gap between better known sites but as a continuous Civil War landscape tied to Barbourville, London, Richmond, and beyond. The Rockcastle River crossings that once carried saltpeter and livestock to market also carried troops from Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, and Tennessee. Wildcat Mountain, Big Hill, and Mt. Vernon served as both physical and symbolic thresholds where national armies tested who would control the roads of central Appalachian Kentucky.
For anyone driving today between Mt. Vernon and London, the modern highways and interstate overpasses can make that history easy to miss. Yet just off the pavement the old Wilderness Road still curls past the Camp Wildcat markers. The same ridges rise from the Rockcastle valley. With the help of the Official Records, regimental histories, and local markers we can recover the stories of soldiers and civilians who once watched war roll through those hills and understand why Rockcastle County, for a few intense seasons, mattered deeply to the fate of Kentucky and the Union.
Sources and Further Reading
War of the Rebellion: Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Series I, Vol. 4, reports on the “Action at Rockcastle Hills, or Camp Wildcat, Ky., October 21, 1861,” including those by Brig. Gen. George H. Thomas, Brig. Gen. Albin F. Schoepf, and Col. John Coburn.Civil War+2Civil War Notebook+2
War of the Rebellion, Series I, Vol. 16, reports and correspondence on the Kentucky Campaign of 1862, including entries for skirmishes at Mt. Vernon, Big Rockcastle Creek, Little Rockcastle River, and “skirmishes about Camp Wild Cat,” tied to Brig. Gen. Joseph Wheeler’s report.Carolana+3The Portal to Texas History+3Carolana+3
Regimental and unit histories for the 6th Kentucky Infantry, 27th Kentucky Infantry, and 24th Kentucky Infantry, especially the sections noting service at Wildcat Mountain, Big Rockcastle River, Mt. Vernon, and outpost duty at Wild Cat and Mt. Vernon.Massie Civil War Images+4Wikipedia+4Wikipedia+4
Kentucky Historical Society and ExploreKYHistory markers for Camp Wildcat (Marker 1919) and Big Hill Skirmish (Marker 1124), along with HMDB entries that place the markers along U.S. 25 near Hazel Patch and along U.S. 421 near the junction of Madison, Jackson, and Rockcastle counties.HMDB+3Kentucky.gov+3Kentucky Historical Society+3
Robert F. Collins, “Daniel Boone National Forest Historic Sites,” Filson Historical Society, including the Camp Wildcat section that describes Wildcat Mountain east of the Rockcastle River and the dispatch of the 33rd Indiana to support Garrard.Filson Historical Society
American Battlefield Trust, “Camp Wildcat: Battle Facts and Summary,” and related material on the 1861 campaign in Kentucky.American Battlefield Trust
Rockcastle County Industrial Development Authority, “Our History,” and related county tourism and outdoor guides that connect Mt. Vernon and Rockcastle County to Wildcat Mountain, Daniel Boone National Forest, and the Camp Wildcat Battlefield.Kentucky Family Fun+3Rockcastle County IDA+3Outdooractive+3