Appalachian History
Rowan County on the War’s Ragged Edge
When the Civil War reached the upper Licking River, Rowan County was still a young place. Created in 1856 from parts of Fleming and Morgan Counties, it had a new courthouse at Morehead, scattered farms along Triplett Creek and the Licking, and roads that threaded east and west toward Mt. Sterling, Flemingsburg, and the Virginia line.
Compared to bluegrass towns or major river cities, Rowan saw no large set piece battle. Yet wartime reports and later markers trace three sharp moments when national conflict crashed into this Appalachian county. In June 1863 Union cavalry struck a Confederate raiding column at Triplett’s Bridge on Triplett Creek. In early 1864 guerrillas burned the Rowan County courthouse in Morehead, erasing the county’s first decade of records. In June 1864, as John Hunt Morgan’s last Kentucky raid collapsed, his surviving cavalry camped at Farmers along the modern U.S. 60 corridor before slipping back toward Virginia.
Pieced together from the Official Records, contemporary newspapers, and later state markers, these three episodes show Rowan County as part of a violent corridor that connected the eastern Kentucky hills to larger campaigns in the Ohio Valley.
Everett’s Raid and the Action at Triplett’s Bridge
In June 1863 a Confederate mounted force under Captain Peter M. Everett pushed into northeastern Kentucky. Everett’s command operated as part of the loose Confederate cavalry network in the upper Ohio watershed, raiding supply depots, seizing horses, and trying to stir up support in a region that mixed Unionist and Confederate sympathies.
Federal commanders in the Department of the Ohio moved quickly to cut the raid off. Brigadier General Samuel D. Sturgis, based at Lexington, ordered Colonel John F. De Courcy to take a mixed column of Michigan and Kentucky cavalry, a detachment of the 14th Kentucky Cavalry, and sections of the 8th Michigan and 10th Kentucky batteries into the hills east of Mt. Sterling.
On June 16, 1863 De Courcy finally caught Everett’s column at a crossing on Triplett Creek that the records call Triplett’s Bridge. Sturgis summarized the fight in a dispatch to General Ambrose Burnside the next afternoon. From Lexington he reported that De Courcy had met Everett’s command “at sundown yesterday, at Triplett’s Bridge, Rowan County,” had “a brisk engagement,” and drove the raiders off into the brush. He relayed De Courcy’s first estimate that twelve prisoners and thirty horses had been taken, while a courier claimed eight Confederates killed and twenty prisoners, along with one hundred captured horses, at the cost of two Union wounded.
A general order issued from Sturgis’s division headquarters later in June elevated Triplett’s Bridge from a minor skirmish to the climax of the entire pursuit. In that order he praised De Courcy’s column for cutting off Everett’s retreat from Maysville and credited them with inflicting a combined loss of thirty killed and wounded and capturing one captain, two lieutenants, one sergeant, and thirty seven privates, along with one hundred horses and an equal number of arms.
The Confederate view survives through Everett’s own report, preserved in the Official Records and reprinted in modern studies of the raid. Writing after his retreat, he recalled running into a Union force he estimated at several times his own strength, supported by artillery, near the Triplett Creek crossing. Realizing that enemy cavalry and guns were pressing his front and rear, he described pulling his men out under pressure while leaving behind some prisoners and captured property.
Newspapers carried the news into Kentucky towns that had never heard of Triplett’s Bridge before. Within ten days the Louisville Daily Democrat printed brief items titled “Prisoner taken at Triplett’s Bridge” and “Cut off at Triplett’s Bridge,” passing along Lexington reports that a considerable number of Everett’s men had been rounded up and moved under guard toward Union posts.
Even the dry unit histories compiled after the war confirm how important the action appeared to Federal officers. The National Park Service regimental summary for the 10th Kentucky Cavalry lists “Operations against Everett’s Raid in eastern Kentucky, June 13–23” and “Triplett’s Bridge, Fleming County, June 16” among the regiment’s principal engagements. The county label reflects the older boundary lines and the way eastern Kentucky place names blurred across county edges. Sturgis’s own dispatch, however, anchored the fight in Rowan County, on a creek that still winds past farms northeast of Morehead.
For families along Triplett Creek, the engagement meant more than a line in the Official Records. De Courcy’s column had already marched hard from the Bluegrass, foraging along the way. Everett’s raiders had done the same on their ride from the Ohio River. When the two forces collided near the bridge, local residents suddenly found themselves between artillery shells and cavalry charges, watching as hundreds of armed men splashed through a stream that had been only a neighborhood crossing the week before.
Fire in Morehead: The Burning of the Courthouse
Less than a year after the Triplett’s Bridge fight, Rowan County’s new seat of government became a target. By early 1864 Kentucky’s official battlefields lay mostly to the west, but the war in the interior had shifted into a bitter guerrilla phase. Bands of irregulars, some with Confederate ties and others essentially outlaw, struck at isolated posts, Unionist civilians, and symbols of state authority.
The Rowan County courthouse in Morehead, a two story frame building completed in 1857, represented one of those symbols. The Louisville Journal carried a short notice titled “Courthouse Burned” on March 3, 1864, reporting that the Rowan courthouse had been destroyed and dating the attack to February 21. The brief item did not go into detail, but its headline placed Rowan’s loss in the wider pattern of courthouse burnings that plagued the state in 1863 and 1864.
Later sources anchored the event a month later and gave it more context. The Kentucky Historical Society’s highway marker “Courthouse Burned,” installed on the courthouse lawn at Morehead, states that twenty two Kentucky courthouses were burned during the Civil War, most in its final fifteen months, and that the Rowan County courthouse was burned by guerrillas on March 21, 1864. The marker text adds that this was the easternmost courthouse damaged in the war and that the building later burned again in 1880, destroying all pre 1880 county records.
Local histories follow the marker’s date and expand on the narrative. A county government history of Rowan describes a guerrilla band riding into Morehead on March 21, 1864 and throwing flaming torches into the courthouse until the structure was fully engulfed. The same account stresses that this attack on the county’s judicial center was remembered as the easternmost wartime destruction of a courthouse in Kentucky.
Architectural and courthouse studies echo those details. A survey of Kentucky courthouses notes that Rowan’s first purpose built courthouse, a log structure replaced by a frame building in 1857, burned on March 21, 1864, that a second frame courthouse erected soon after the war also burned in the 1880s, and that the present brick courthouse was completed in the 1890s.
Taken together, these sources leave two firm points and one lingering question. There is no doubt that guerrillas burned the Rowan County courthouse during the war and that the destruction erased nearly all county level records from its first decade. There is also broad agreement among later compilers that the burning occurred on March 21, 1864 and that it represented the eastern edge of a wave of courthouse fires that swept Kentucky in the war’s final phase. The Louisville Journal’s February date may reflect a reporting error or confusion with earlier guerrilla activity, a reminder that even contemporary newspapers could misdate fast moving events in remote counties.
For Rowan County families the blaze had long shadows. Deeds, court cases, and tax lists that might have documented the years before the Rowan County War are gone forever. Genealogists and local historians now rely on fragmentary copies, private papers, and scattered state level records to reconstruct the period, a situation that has led some scholars to describe Civil War courthouse burnings as a kind of “paper destruction” aimed at the foundations of local society.
Morgan’s Raiders at Farmers, June 1864
While local guerrillas targeted the courthouse in the winter of 1864, a more famous Confederate cavalryman made his last appearance in Rowan County a few months later.
In early June 1864 Brigadier General John Hunt Morgan launched what would become known as his Last Kentucky Raid. Crossing from southwest Virginia through gaps in the Cumberland Mountains, his troopers struck Mt. Sterling on June 8, briefly occupying the town and looting supplies before being driven out by Union forces. They then moved toward Lexington, seizing that city on June 10, and pushed on toward Cynthiana along the Kentucky Central Railroad.
On June 11 Morgan attacked Cynthiana, defeating the small garrison and capturing large numbers of prisoners. The next day his luck ran out. Federal forces under Brigadier General Stephen G. Burbridge, a combined column of Ohio and Kentucky infantry and cavalry, hit Morgan’s scattered command in a series of actions around a railroad crossing known as Keller’s Bridge and on the hills east of town. The National Register nomination for the Second Battle of Cynthiana describes these June 11 and 12 fights as the climactic engagements of Morgan’s final Kentucky raid.
Burbridge’s own dispatch, relayed to Washington and reprinted in the Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, claimed that his men attacked Morgan “at daylight” and, after an hour of hard fighting, completely routed the raiders. He reported three hundred Confederates killed, nearly as many wounded, and close to four hundred taken prisoner, along with more than a thousand captured horses and the recapture of many Union prisoners who had fallen into Morgan’s hands the day before.
Whatever the exact numbers, the result was devastating for Morgan. Survivors of his command, now short on ammunition and mounts, streamed away from Cynthiana in small groups. Some moved south, others east. State marker writers and battlefield historians agree that Morgan led the main remnant of his force northeast through Flemingsburg, angling for the passes that led back into Virginia.
One of those passes ran through Rowan County. The Kentucky Historical Society highway marker “Morgan Raiders’ Camp,” located near Farmers on U.S. 60, commemorates the night that Morgan and his men spent in Rowan on that retreat. The marker text explains that on this last and “tragic” raid, Morgan’s men had taken Mt. Sterling, briefly held Lexington, and captured Cynthiana on June 11 before being dispersed by Burbridge’s Federals the next day. As they fell back toward Virginia, the raiders passed through Flemingsburg and “camped here June 12,” one mile east of the Licking River at Farmers. The marker concludes that Morgan and his men never fully recovered from the reverse at Cynthiana.
For Farmers and the surrounding countryside, the presence of Morgan’s column must have been memorable. This was not the flamboyant raiding force of 1862, still confident enough to dash into Ohio. It was a battered column of Kentuckians and Tennesseans riding borrowed horses, many of them wounded or exhausted, moving along the old road that roughly parallels modern U.S. 60. Local tradition collected in Rowan County genealogical files remembers Morgan’s men stopping at farmhouses for food, leaving behind stories of that one night when the most famous Confederate cavalryman in Kentucky huddled in the creek bottoms near town, trying to get home.
Within weeks Morgan would be dead, killed in Tennessee that September. The camp at Farmers stands as Rowan County’s closest brush with his legend, marked now not by trenches or monuments but by a roadside sign where motorists race past on the route from Morehead to Mt. Sterling.
Rowan County’s Civil War Map
Viewed together, Triplett’s Bridge, the burning of the courthouse, and Morgan’s camp at Farmers sketch a rough Civil War map of Rowan County. Triplett Creek, to the northeast, pulled De Courcy’s and Everett’s cavalry through the hills as they fought over the crossings that led toward Maysville and the Ohio River. Morehead, in the central valley, became a wartime target not because armies fought over it, but because guerrillas understood that destroying the courthouse crippled county government and erased records that underpinned land titles and lawsuits. Farmers, to the west, lay on the east west road corridor that linked Mt. Sterling and Flemingsburg to the Virginia line, a path Morgan had already learned to value on earlier raids.
These episodes also connect Rowan to broader patterns in Civil War Appalachia.
The fight at Triplett’s Bridge grew out of a Confederate attempt to raid the Ohio Valley that failed in part because Union commanders could move mounted troops quickly along improved roads and railways, then force a decision at a river crossing like the one on Triplett Creek. The Official Records and the 10th Kentucky Cavalry’s service summary show how often eastern Kentucky skirmishes revolved around such crossings rather than entrenched lines.
The courthouse burning fits into a statewide wave of attacks on county seats, often by small bands who knew exactly which buildings housed tax rolls, court minutes, and bonds. Rowan’s loss was especially severe because the county had existed for less than a decade. When the guerrillas burned the courthouse, they did not just strike at Union authority. They wiped out almost every official record of Rowan’s early years, a blow whose effects still shape what historians and families can know about the period before the Rowan County War.
Morgan’s camp at Farmers ties Rowan County to the story of how Confederate raiding lost its effectiveness by 1864. Works by historians of the Cynthiana battles emphasize that Burbridge’s victory showed how Union numbers, improved mobilization, and combined arms tactics had turned the tables on raiders who had once moved almost at will across Kentucky. The state marker at Farmers quietly marks the place where that reality set in for Morgan himself, in a camp from which his command never fully recovered.
For modern visitors, Rowan County’s Civil War story is easy to overlook. The original courthouse that burned in 1864 is long gone. The bridge at Triplett Creek has been replaced. The fields around Farmers have changed with the coming of modern highways. Yet the archival fragments that survive, and the markers that interpret them, show how even a relatively remote Appalachian county experienced the war as more than distant news.
Along Triplett’s Creek and the Licking River, on courthouse lawns and roadside pull offs, Rowan County’s Civil War history connects local memory to a wider web of raids, guerrilla campaigns, and shattered communities.
Sources & Further Reading
War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Series I, Volume 23, Part 1, especially General Samuel D. Sturgis’s June 17, 1863 dispatch and General Orders No. 1 praising Colonel John F. De Courcy’s command after the engagement at Triplett’s Bridge, accessible through The Portal to Texas History. The Portal to Texas History
Official Records, Series I, Volume 23, Confederate reports of Captain P. M. Everett on the June 1863 raid into northeastern Kentucky, including his account of the encounter at Triplett’s Bridge, available through digitized editions and summarized in modern studies of Everett’s raid. Eaky Civil War
Louisville Daily Democrat, June 26, 1863, “Prisoner taken at Triplett’s Bridge,” and June 27, 1863, “Cut off at Triplett’s Bridge,” as digitized in the Morehead State University “County Histories of Kentucky” collection. Morehead Digital Archives+1
Louisville Journal, March 3, 1864, “Courthouse Burned,” reporting the destruction of the Rowan County courthouse and dating the event to February 21, 1864, preserved in the Morehead Digital Archives. Morehead Digital Archives
Kentucky Historical Society Highway Marker No. 972, “Courthouse Burned,” Morehead, Rowan County, Kentucky, and related descriptions preserved in the Historical Marker Database and local interpretive materials, which date the burning to March 21, 1864 and attribute it to guerrillas. HMDB+1
Rowan County government historical summary “Foundation of Rowan County,” describing the March 21, 1864 burning of the courthouse by a guerrilla band and its significance as the easternmost courthouse destruction in Kentucky during the Civil War. Rowan County, Kentucky+1
“Rowan County,” Courthouses.co, architectural and historical overview of Rowan County’s courthouses, including construction of the first building in 1857 and its destruction during the Civil War, along with subsequent courthouse fires. American Courthouses
Kentucky Historical Society highway marker entry “Morgan Raiders’ Camp” (Marker No. 567), Farmers, Rowan County, summarizing Morgan’s 1864 raid, the capture and loss of Mt. Sterling and Lexington, the battle of Cynthiana, and the retreat through Flemingsburg to a camp at Farmers on June 12, 1864. Kentucky.gov
National Park Service, “10th Regiment, Kentucky Cavalry,” unit history and service summary listing “Operations against Everett’s Raid in eastern Kentucky June 13–23” and “Triplett’s Bridge June 16” among the regiment’s engagements, and related entries in Frederick H. Dyer’s Compendium. National Park Service+2National Park Service+2
National Register of Historic Places, “Second Battle of Cynthiana Battlefield,” Harrison County, Kentucky, nomination form detailing the June 11–12, 1864 engagements at Keller’s Bridge and Cynthiana and interpreting them as the climactic actions of Morgan’s last Kentucky raid. NPGallery+1
Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, June 15, 1864, publication of General Stephen G. Burbridge’s dispatch summarizing his victory over Morgan at Cynthiana, preserved and transcribed by The Siege of Petersburg Online. The Siege of Petersburg Online
William A. Penn, Kentucky Rebel Town: The Civil War Battles of Cynthiana and Harrison County, University Press of Kentucky, and related chapters on the Second Battle of Cynthiana that place Morgan’s defeat in the broader context of Confederate raiding and Union countermeasures in 1864. JSTOR+1
Ron D. Bryant, “The Paper Trail of the Civil War in Kentucky, 1861–1865,” Kentucky National Guard History Program, for broader context on Kentucky units, courthouse burnings, and the use of Kentucky Historical Society marker texts to trace local Civil War actions. KY National Guard History+1