Appalachian History
Leslie County did not appear on the map until 1878, when the legislature carved it from Clay, Harlan, and Perry Counties and named it for Governor Preston H. Leslie. Its new seat, Hyden, rose at the mouth of Rockhouse Creek on the Middle Fork of the Kentucky River, in a landscape of steep ridges and narrow bottoms.
That geography matters. The Middle Fork begins in what is now Leslie County and runs north toward Hyden before joining the other forks near present day Beattyville. During the 1860s, the same river and its tributaries were already binding people together in small communities along Cutshin Creek, Hell for Certain, Thousandsticks, and Rockhouse. The people who lived there paid their taxes and recorded their court cases in Clay, Harlan, or Perry, but their daily lives unfolded in the valleys that would later become Leslie County.
For anyone trying to reconstruct the Civil War here, that missing county line is the first obstacle. The Official Records, wartime newspapers, and state documents almost never say “Leslie County.” Instead they speak of Perry, Clay, and Harlan, or they use creek names that show up today on Leslie County road signs. To find the war in this country, you have to read past the county headings and follow the water.
A borderland of guerrillas and home guards
Eastern Kentucky as a whole has been described by historian Brian McKnight as a contested borderland, a region where neither army ever held secure control and where local people often feared both blue and gray uniforms. The same pattern held along the Middle Fork. No large, set piece battles unfolded on Cutshin or Rockhouse. Instead, the war arrived in patrols, foraging parties, raids, and ambushes that blurred the line between soldier and outlaw.
In January 1863, the Louisville Daily Journal printed a stark report from the mountains, describing Perry, Breathitt, Letcher, and Owsley as being “in possession” of several hundred Confederate cavalry under Andrew Jackson May and Benjamin Caudill. Union families, the paper claimed, had been driven from their homes. That description almost certainly included the Middle Fork and its tributaries in what would become Leslie County.
Confederate units riding for General Humphrey Marshall used these valleys as corridors between Virginia and the Kentucky interior. Unionist men from the same creeks enlisted in new Kentucky regiments, especially the 39th Kentucky Infantry and the 8th Kentucky Infantry, or joined local Home Guard companies organized by the state to defend their neighborhoods from raids.
The result was a layered conflict. Regular Confederate cavalrymen and part time guerrillas operated from the same companies. Union soldiers alternated between federal service and Home Guard duty. Civilian households fed both sides, often under duress. The creeks that gave the area its memorable names, from Hell for Certain to Cutshin, became lines on a mental map of fear and loyalty.
The hanging on Cutshin Creek
One of the clearest glimpses into this shadow war comes from a single killing on Cutshin Creek in April 1863.
Later genealogical research and local memory identify the victim as Edward “Ned” Begley, a Union sympathizer who lived along Cutshin. In a compilation of eastern Kentucky incidents, researcher Marlitta Perkins brought together family accounts and manuscript material to reconstruct his death.
According to those accounts, a small party of Confederate soldiers under a man named Wells, belonging to Captain Bradshaw’s company in the 2nd Battalion Kentucky Mounted Rifles, rode into the Cutshin community sometime between 6 and 12 April 1863. The men pretended to be Union troops. Ned, who had been doing carpentry work, apparently greeted them with his hammer and saw still in hand and let slip that his family had been cooking in expectation of Union soldiers. That admission was enough.
The Confederates seized him, twisted rawhide bridles from their horses into a makeshift rope, and hanged him from a pawpaw tree beside the road at a place remembered as the “Nigh Way Point” on Cutshin Creek. At the time the spot lay in Perry County, but today it falls inside Leslie County’s boundaries.
Edward O. Guerrant, an educated Confederate staff officer who served as adjutant to General Marshall, mentioned the killing in his wartime diary. Guerrant wrote that Begley was “most cruelly hung” by Wells of Bradshaw’s company and identified the victim as a Union man connected with the local Home Guards who were “waylaying” Confederate forces.
Guerrant’s comment is worth pausing over. He was no Union partisan. Yet his entry suggests that even within Confederate ranks there were officers who viewed summary executions like Begley’s as excesses brought on by a cycle of bushwhacking and reprisal. The diary, preserved today in manuscript form and published in edited form after the war, has become one of the most valuable primary sources for understanding guerrilla violence in this part of Kentucky.
For families along Cutshin, the hanging left a long memory. Later Begley descendants and local chroniclers in works such as Trails Into Cutshin Country and Rugged Trail to Appalachia repeated the story, sometimes with minor variations, as one of the defining Civil War episodes in the community.
Men from the Middle Fork
If Ned Begley’s death shows what happened when guerrilla war came to the doorway, the service of other Middle Fork men shows how Leslie County’s future leaders carried the war with them into Reconstruction.
Rosters of the 39th Kentucky Infantry, a Union regiment raised in eastern Kentucky, show Company F filled with familiar mountain surnames, including Sergeant Felix T. Begley and Corporal Hiram K. Begley. Biographical fragments preserved in later genealogical compilations and pension affidavits place Felix’s birth in the Cutshin country in the 1830s and connect him to the same extended family network shattered by Ned Begley’s hanging.
Pension testimony from veterans of Company F, filed decades after the war, shows how far men from Leslie County’s creeks ranged during their service. In one affidavit, Felix Begley, writing from Hyden in the 1890s, recalled an injury suffered while pursuing Confederate forces near Trout’s Hill in what is now West Virginia. That single statement, preserved in the National Archives and echoed on local web transcriptions, links a Hyden storekeeper’s later life to a muddy scout hundreds of miles away.
Another figure, Samuel L. Begley, illustrates how Union service fed directly into county leadership. Records compiled by the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War show that a Grand Army of the Republic post formed at Hyden in 1888 was named for Private Samuel L. Begley of Company I, 8th Kentucky Infantry, identifying him as the first county judge of Leslie County.
By the time Leslie County was organized, the Middle Fork produced not only veterans but officeholders, teachers, and merchants who had come of age during the war. Later local histories and biographies published in the early twentieth century emphasize how frequently county sheriffs, school superintendents, and legislators had worn Union blue in their youth.
In that sense, the absence of big battles in Leslie County does not mean the war passed it by. The men who garrisoned distant posts or rode against guerrillas elsewhere brought back pensions, fraternal ties, and political capital. The creeks that had been contested borderland in the 1860s became the home base of a firmly Unionist county government after 1878.
The silence of the official record
When modern researchers open the great gray volumes of the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion and search for “Leslie County,” they find nothing. Even “Cutshin” and “Hell for Certain” rarely appear. Instead, the official war is mapped to county seats like Hazard, Manchester, and Harlan, or to major skirmish sites such as Leatherwood Creek and the Middle Fork farther down in Breathitt and what would become Lee County.
A skirmish on the Middle Fork in November 1864, for example, appears in the record as an attack by Confederate Lieutenant Jerry W. South on twenty Kentucky state militiamen near the mouth of Holly Creek. Contemporary reports placed the fight in Breathitt County. Later county histories and heritage guides reassigned it to Lee County after that county’s creation in 1870. The soldiers and guerrillas who rode that day were using the same river corridor that runs up into present Leslie County. On the printed page, however, the fight belongs somewhere else.
The Kentucky National Guard’s reference booklet, The Paper Trail of the Civil War in Kentucky 1861-1865, illustrates the problem in another way. Its county by county section on military activity lists a heading for “Civil War 1861-1865 in Leslie County” but offers little narrative detail beneath it, in contrast to fuller entries for neighboring counties. The implication is that Leslie saw “limited military activity,” at least in terms of tracked battles and skirmishes.
Yet pension files, local histories, and diaries suggest that home guards drilled on these creeks, that guerrillas passed through, and that households here felt the same strain that McKnight traces elsewhere in Appalachian Kentucky. The official record is not false so much as incomplete. To recover the war along Cutshin and the Upper Middle Fork, researchers have to move beyond the familiar federal reports.
Finding Leslie County in the archives
Because Leslie County did not exist during the war, the most fruitful primary sources are those that can be searched by creek name, regiment, or individual rather than county heading. The list below sketches how the major repositories mentioned in the research plan fit together for this particular piece of Kentucky.
The Official Records remain the starting point. Digitized volumes make it possible to search for “Perry County,” “Clay County,” or “Middle Fork of the Kentucky” and then read closely for references that plainly fall in the headwaters area that would later become Leslie County. Reports covering Confederate cavalry under leaders such as Andrew Jackson May and Ben Caudill, or Union operations by the 14th Kentucky Cavalry and other mountain units, help place local incidents like the Begley hanging in a wider operational picture.
Civil War Governors of Kentucky (CWGK), an online edition created by the Kentucky Historical Society, adds another layer by publishing petitions, letters, and legal papers addressed to the governor between 1860 and 1865. Although these documents are filed under the parent counties, they often mention creeks, post offices, and surnames that tie directly to the future Leslie County. Petitions about Home Guard units, militia pay, or complaints about “bushwhackers” can reveal the impact of the war on specific neighborhoods.
The wartime Adjutant General’s reports and rosters for Kentucky units, along with the National Park Service’s Civil War Soldiers and Sailors index, make it possible to identify the men from the Cutshin and Middle Fork area who served in Union and Confederate units. Once a name and regiment are known, the compiled military service records and pension files at the National Archives provide personal details, including ages, occupations, physical descriptions, and sometimes sworn testimony that mentions creek names, neighbors, and particular skirmishes. The pension file for Eli Griffitts and the records concerning veterans like James Asher of Hoskinston exemplify the kind of place rich testimony that can emerge from these federal records.
State level repositories fill in the picture. The Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives holds indexes to service records, prison registers, and amnesty applications that touch on irregular warfare and postwar reconciliation. The Kentucky Historical Society’s military records branch and manuscript collections offer both expertise and documentation for mountain counties, and its Register has published peer reviewed articles on guerrilla warfare and Kentucky’s Civil War home front that provide essential context.
Newspapers are another vital primary source. Chronicling America and the Kentucky Digital Newspaper Program pool scattered issues of papers like the Louisville Daily Journal and the Weekly Kentucky Yeoman, whose correspondents reported on raids, enlistments, and militia movements across eastern Kentucky. The January 1863 report on Confederate forces in Perry, Breathitt, Letcher, and Owsley, and the April 1863 letter describing Andrew Jackson May’s burning of Abijah Gilbert’s home in Owsley County, both survive through these newspaper collections and reprints like Perkins’s Eastern Kentucky and the Civil War blog.
Diaries and manuscript collections help bring those brief newspaper references back down to creek level. Guerrant’s diary, held in manuscript at institutions such as the Filson Historical Society and published in edited form, is the single richest firsthand source for operations and violence in the counties surrounding future Leslie County. Archive discovery tools such as ArchiveGrid point to other diaries and letter collections that mention specific communities or families along the Middle Fork and its branches.
Finally, eastern Kentucky repositories knit the story together. Eastern Kentucky University’s special collections, Morehead State University’s digital “County Histories of Kentucky” typescripts, and local collections at the Leslie County Public Library preserve WPA era histories, family manuscripts, and early newspapers. These materials often capture Civil War memory as it was told in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including stories of bushwhackers, Home Guards, and veterans’ organizations.
Local histories and folk memory
Because Leslie County’s formal archival footprint for the Civil War is small, local histories and folklore carry unusual weight. They must be handled with care, but they are indispensable.
Sadie Wells Stidham’s Trails Into Cutshin Country and Mary Taylor Brewer’s Rugged Trail to Appalachia were both written in the 1970s as county histories. They devote substantial space to the Begley, Sizemore, Asher, and other families of the Middle Fork and Cutshin valleys and often include Civil War anecdotes preserved in family tradition.
Leonard W. Roberts’s Up Cutshin and Down Greasy approaches the same landscape through folklore. Based on years of fieldwork with a single extended family, it records folktales, songs, and oral history from the Cutshin area and has been described as a classic study of eastern Kentucky folkways. Though Roberts’s book deals mainly with the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many of the family stories he recorded look back to the Civil War era and to the experiences of veterans who settled along the creeks after the fighting ended.
Broader works such as Harry Caudill’s Night Comes to the Cumberlands and later studies of eastern Kentucky feuds and politics use the county’s vivid place names and local conflicts as symbols of the region’s difficult history. When Caudill listed streams like Cutshin, Hell for Certain, and War Branch as keys to reading the region’s past, he was pointing indirectly to the kind of experiences described in Guerrant’s diary and in local Civil War anecdotes.
Used critically, these local histories and folkloric collections help modern researchers match names and stories to the documentary record. A family tradition of a man killed by “bushwhackers” on a certain branch may line up with a line in a pension file or a brief newspaper item. In a county where the official record is thin, those overlaps are often the best anchors we have.
Why Leslie County’s Civil War matters
At first glance, the Civil War in the land that became Leslie County looks like a story of absence. There were no famous generals encamped at Hyden, no large battlefields with interpretive signs, and no long entries in the National Guard’s summary of the war in Kentucky.
Look closer, and another picture comes into focus. Along Cutshin Creek, a Union carpenter was tricked and hanged by Confederate partisans who themselves were part of a regular cavalry battalion. On the Middle Fork, young men left their families to serve in the 39th Kentucky or the 8th Kentucky, riding far from home but returning after the war to build a new county government and to organize a Grand Army of the Republic post at Hyden.
Their experiences tie Leslie County to the broader story of guerrilla warfare and divided loyalties in Appalachian Kentucky. They also show how a place that rarely appears in the Official Records still lived the war in an intimate way, through fear on lonely roads, the arrival of scouting parties at the gate, and the long process of stitching together a community after neighbor had fought neighbor.
For genealogists, local historians, and descendants, the task now is to keep following the creeks through the archives: to trace names across county lines, to read every stray reference to the Middle Fork and Cutshin, and to place Leslie County’s quiet but consequential Civil War firmly on the historical map.
Sources and further reading
Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, series and volume entries relating to operations in eastern Kentucky, especially reports mentioning Perry, Clay, and Harlan Counties and the Middle Fork of the Kentucky River.
Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition, Kentucky Historical Society. Online collection of gubernatorial correspondence, petitions, and legal documents from 1860 to 1865, searchable by county, personal name, and place.
Kentucky Adjutant General’s reports and rosters for Civil War era regiments, including the 39th Kentucky Infantry and the 8th Kentucky Infantry, available in print and via digitized compilations of unit rosters. Military History Online+1
National Archives, Compiled Military Service Records and pension files for Union and Confederate soldiers from the Middle Fork and Cutshin area, including men such as Felix T. Begley, Eli Griffitts, and James Asher of Hoskinston. Ancestry+3RootsWeb+3Fold3+3
Louisville Daily Journal and other Kentucky newspapers accessed through Chronicling America and the Kentucky Digital Newspaper Program, especially January and April 1863 coverage of mountain counties and the Middle Fork region. Eaky Civil War+1
Edward O. Guerrant, wartime diary (manuscript volumes and published edition). Entries for 1862 to 1864 provide detailed firsthand accounts of operations and guerrilla violence in eastern Kentucky, including the note on Ned Begley’s hanging on Cutshin Creek. Eaky Civil War+1
Marlitta H. Perkins, “The Eastern KY Mountains 1861-1865,” Eastern Kentucky and the Civil War blog. Compiles newspaper excerpts, pension notes, and diary quotations on guerrilla incidents in the counties surrounding present day Leslie County. Eaky Civil War+1
Grand Army of the Republic Records Program, Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War, “GAR Posts in Kentucky,” documenting the Samuel Begley Post at Hyden and identifying Private Samuel L. Begley of the 8th Kentucky Infantry as the first county judge of Leslie County. GAR Records+1
Brian D. McKnight, Contested Borderland: The Civil War in Appalachian Kentucky and Virginia (University Press of Kentucky). A key interpretive study of guerrilla war and civilian experience in the broader region that includes present Leslie County. Internet Archive+1
Harry Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area. Includes reflections on eastern Kentucky place names such as Cutshin and Hell for Certain and on the longer legacy of frontier violence and isolation. Internet Archive
Sadie Wells Stidham, Trails Into Cutshin Country (1978). Leslie County local history with rich detail on families, settlements, and Civil War era recollections along Cutshin and the Upper Middle Fork.
Mary Taylor Brewer, Rugged Trail to Appalachia (1978). Leslie County centennial history that preserves community memory of the Civil War and its veterans.
Leonard W. Roberts, Up Cutshin and Down Greasy: Folkways of a Kentucky Mountain Family (University Press of Kentucky, 1959). A folklorist’s portrait of life and storytelling in the Cutshin area, drawing heavily on oral tradition. Internet Archive+1
Kentucky Heritage Council, Kentucky’s Civil War Heritage Guide. Statewide overview of major Civil War sites and archival resources, including eastern Kentucky counties. KY National Guard History
Kentucky National Guard, The Paper Trail of the Civil War in Kentucky 1861-1865. County by county summary of military activity and guerrilla incidents, notable for its sparse entry under Leslie County, which underscores the need to look beyond conventional battle narratives. KY National Guard History+1