Appalachian History
Wayne County sits where Kentucky leans into Tennessee, a high ridge country that looks down on the Cumberland River. In the 1860 census the county was still mostly small farms and stock raisers, with only a handful of enslaved people compared to the Bluegrass. That did not keep the war away.
Local politics were tangled from the start. Wayne County voters sent a pro-Union majority to Frankfort, yet a strong minority leaned Southern in sentiment and kinship. Early companies from the county joined both sides, some riding with Union cavalry like Frank Wolford and Samuel Carter, others drifting south to John Hunt Morgan’s command or to Tennessee regiments.
An early twentieth-century county history tried to reassure readers that Wayne “suffered lightly” compared with neighboring counties, but in the same breath it listed a string of skirmishes, raids, and deaths that reached from Fishing Creek in 1862 through the cavalry war of 1863 and on into Morgan’s Great Raid that summer.
At the center of all of this stood Mill Springs, the old river landing and mill on the Wayne County side of the Cumberland, and the crossroads town of Monticello a few miles inland. Between them ran the road network that made this corner of the Plateau a natural war road.
Winter Quarters at Mill Springs
The story of the Battle of Mill Springs begins not with the clash at Logan’s Cross Roads, but with the Confederate decision to camp near the river in the autumn of 1861. Brigadier General Felix K. Zollicoffer, a Tennessee editor turned soldier, had been posted to guard Cumberland Gap and the mountain approaches into East Tennessee. In November he edged westward into Kentucky, out of the Gap and toward Somerset, in hopes of securing the upper Cumberland valleys for the Confederacy.
Mill Springs offered an attractive site. The springs that gave the place its name fed a gristmill whose history went back to the Metcalfe brothers and a rebuilt mill that stood on the bank by the late 1830s. A high bluff on the south bank gave good artillery positions, and roads led inland toward Monticello, Somerset, and the mountain gaps.
Zollicoffer made a fateful choice. Instead of keeping most of his force on the strong south bank, he shifted the bulk of his men across the Cumberland to low, muddy ground around the hamlet of Beech Grove, closer to the Federal camp near Somerset. His superiors, including Albert Sidney Johnston and George B. Crittenden, warned that the position was exposed, but Zollicoffer lacked enough boats to recross the unfordable river quickly and hesitated to move.
On the north bank the Confederates cut crude earthworks, felled trees for winter quarters, and squeezed into the narrow space between the river and Fishing Creek. One Indiana soldier who would soon face them, Sgt. Samuel McIlvaine of the 10th Indiana, remembered that his own regiment slogged over “about the worst and muddiest roads” he had ever seen on the way toward Somerset. The same roads fed Zollicoffer’s camp from Wayne County and from the Tennessee line.
On the Wayne County side of the river, the Brown-Lanier and West Metcalfe houses looked down toward the camp and the river crossing. Those two homes, still standing today, became headquarters, hospitals, and billets in turn as Confederates and then Federals occupied the area.
“Old Zollie” Comes Out to Fight: The Battle of Mill Springs
Union Brigadier General George H. Thomas led the opposing force. Ordered to break up Crittenden’s army and push the Confederates back across the Cumberland, Thomas marched south from Lebanon through rain-soaked, clay roads that turned wagon trains into slow-moving bogs. He paused at Logan’s Cross Roads, a tiny Pulaski County hamlet about ten miles from Beech Grove, and waited for reinforcements under Brigadier General Albin Schoepf to come up from Somerset.
The Confederates knew that if Thomas united his scattered brigades, their exposed position north of the river might be destroyed. On the night of 18 January 1862, in cold rain and deep mud, Crittenden ordered Zollicoffer and William H. Carroll to march out and strike Thomas’s camp at dawn.
McIlvaine, whose letter home was written two days after the fight, recalled that the men had hardly expected “Old Zollie,” as they called the Confederate general, to leave his fortifications and attack. At daylight on Sunday the 19th, though, the Confederate column emerged from the rain and woods and fell upon the half-awake Federal camps.
The fighting swirled through timber and cornfields near Logan’s Cross Roads. Colonel Mahlon Manson’s 10th Indiana and the 4th Kentucky took the first shock, with Frank Wolford’s cavalry and a mix of Ohio and Minnesota regiments feeding into the line. Confederate musketry, much of it from older flintlock weapons that misfired in the rain, hammered the Union front.
In the confusion, Zollicoffer rode forward in a white raincoat and, in the smoky half light, mistook the 4th Kentucky for his own men. Colonel Speed S. Fry of that regiment rode up, and the two officers spoke briefly before a nearby Confederate fired at Fry’s horse. The Kentuckians realized the mistake and fired a volley that killed Zollicoffer and his aide.
The death of “Old Zollie” shook Confederate morale, though Crittenden tried to rally his line for a renewed assault. When Thomas finally arrived on the field, he committed his reserve brigade. The veteran 9th Ohio, many of whose men were German Forty-Eighters, swung into a bayonet charge that rolled up the Confederate left. The Southern line broke and fell back toward Beech Grove.
The retreat became a rout. Confederate soldiers crowded the small ferry and boats at Mill Springs in an attempt to escape across the Cumberland, abandoning twelve guns, around 150 wagons, and more than a thousand horses and mules at the north-bank camp. Union losses totaled 39 killed and 207 wounded; the Confederates lost roughly 125 killed and more than 400 wounded or missing.
Newspapers across the North hailed Mill Springs as the first significant battlefield victory for the Union. Within weeks it was overshadowed by Grant’s twin blows at Forts Henry and Donelson, yet in southern Kentucky the result was obvious. The Confederate defensive line anchored on Columbus, Bowling Green, and the Cumberland Gap had been pried open in its eastern sector.
For Wayne County families, the victory was more complicated. Confederate dead lay in a mass grave at what is now Zollicoffer Park in Pulaski County, while many of the Union fallen and later dead of the war rest in Mill Springs National Cemetery. Men from Wayne County had fought on both sides at Fishing Creek and would continue to do so as the war shifted into a fast-moving cavalry struggle.
Wayne County’s Men at Fishing Creek
The Official Records and local histories together show Wayne County men scattered among several regiments present at Mill Springs: Union infantry like the 4th Kentucky and 10th Indiana, and cavalry companies that later became part of the 1st and 11th Kentucky Cavalry. On the Confederate side, Wayne and neighboring Clinton County sent riders to Zollicoffer’s Tennessee brigades and to emerging Kentucky Confederate cavalry units that would later serve under John Hunt Morgan.
“A Century of Wayne County, Kentucky,” published in the early twentieth century, preserves some of these names and memories. The author noted that Captain Shelby Coffey led a Wayne County company in Confederate service, while other local men rode with Wolford and Carter in Union blue. Like many Appalachian counties, Wayne saw its church rolls, family gatherings, and even households split by the choice of flag.
When the smoke cleared at Fishing Creek, Zollicoffer’s army had retreated into Tennessee, but the river line and the roads from Jamestown and Burkesville to Monticello remained contested. Within a year, Morgan’s cavalry and Federal horsemen would be fighting over the same ground.
“Cavalry Country”: The 1863 Expedition to Monticello
By the spring of 1863 the war in this corner of Kentucky had become a cavalry war. Morgan’s command, with Kentucky and Tennessee horsemen, used Wayne and Clinton Counties as a screen for raids into the Bluegrass and as a gateway toward the Ohio. Union authorities in the Department of the Ohio feared that the upper Cumberland valleys might serve as the launching pad for a major Confederate raid.
To break this pattern, Federal commanders organized what the Official Records call the “Expedition to Monticello and operations in Southeastern Kentucky,” carried out from 26 April to 12 May 1863. Reports from Colonel Richard T. Jacob of the 9th Kentucky Cavalry, Captain Wendell D. Wiltsie of the 20th Michigan, and Colonel Samuel A. Gilbert of the 44th Ohio describe a coordinated movement toward Monticello, with columns crossing the Cumberland at several points.
On the Union side were mixed mounted commands: the 9th, 11th, and 12th Kentucky Cavalry (US), parts of the 44th Ohio Mounted Infantry, and the 20th Michigan Infantry acting as mounted infantry on the campaign. Regimental sketches for the 12th Kentucky later summed up the itinerary in a few clipped lines: “Expedition to Monticello and operations in Southeastern Kentucky April 26–May 12. Narrows, Horse Shoe Bottom, April 28–29. Horse Shoe Bend, Greasy Creek, May 10.”
Opposing them were Morgan’s brigades and local Confederate cavalry under officers like Basil W. Duke and Champ Ferguson, using the steep hollows and river bends of Wayne County as natural fortifications. Duke’s wartime narrative, “Morgan’s Cavalry,” explains that long before his own rise to prominence, Confederate commanders had recognized Monticello and its nearby fords as crucial for controlling the Cumberland.
Alcorn’s Distillery: A Fight in the Woods, 9 May 1863
The first sharp engagement of the expedition came not in town but at a country distillery. On 9 May, a Federal column moving out from Monticello ran into Morgan’s men near Alcorn’s Distillery, a small operation in the hills south or southeast of town. The Official Records list it as a skirmish, yet reports from Jacob and Wiltsie describe hard fighting among thickets and farm buildings.
Regimental histories and postwar compilations like “All Known Battles & Skirmishes During the American Civil War – Kentucky” preserve the basic outlines. Federal cavalry and mounted infantry pushed out along the Monticello roads, scouting for Morgan’s pickets. Near the distillery they met a Confederate force that used fences, outbuildings, and wooded ridges to pour fire into the Union advance. The Federals eventually forced the Southerners to fall back toward the river line, though with casualties on both sides.
The action at Alcorn’s Distillery was small in numbers, but it marked a change in the war for many Wayne Countians. The same country stills and hillside farms that distilled corn whiskey for local markets now became landmarks in official dispatches and regimental diaries. The cavalry war was literally moving into people’s backyards.
Horseshoe Bottom and Greasy Creek, 10 May 1863
The centerpiece of the 1863 operations came the next day along the Cumberland. The river here bends and twists through high ridges, creating a looping bottomland known as Horseshoe Bottom, or Horseshoe Bend, where Greasy Creek enters from the north. One Union diarist, Thomas M. Coombs, took pains to explain that Greasy Creek “enters the Cumberland from the north, opposite Horseshoe Bottom … in western Wayne County,” so that readers could grasp the tactical map.
“A History of the 11th Kentucky Cavalry,” compiled from veterans’ accounts and the Official Records, tells how Colonel Richard Jacob’s column rode by way of Jamestown and the mouth of Greasy Creek to the Cumberland, intended as a diversion to help General Carter cross the river near Mill Springs and Waitsboro. The 11th Kentucky, with elements of the 9th and 12th Kentucky Cavalry, pushed to the Narrows of Horseshoe Bottom, drove off Confederate pickets, and began forcing a crossing.
Word soon arrived that Morgan’s men were crossing farther downriver at Rowena in an attempt to flank Jacob’s force. Part of the Union column recrossed to guard that flank, while the rest pressed along the river road. Over the next days scattered fighting flared along Greasy Creek and at points inside the great bend of the river.
On 10 May, the day most sources label the “Action at Horseshoe Bottom” or “Horse Shoe Bend, Greasy Creek,” Morgan attacked a Union force that had taken position along the edge of woods overlooking a field and orchard. Accounts agree that the Confederates advanced on foot across the open ground under artillery fire and managed to scatter the smaller Federal detachment, although at a cost of roughly thirty killed and wounded.
From the Confederate perspective, the fight checked the immediate Federal advance toward the main body of Morgan’s command. From the Union side, the expedition still achieved its larger goal. The presence of substantial Federal forces along the Cumberland convinced Morgan and his superiors that Wayne County could not be held as a secure base. Within weeks, Morgan took his cavalry north on the great raid through Kentucky, Indiana, and Ohio, leaving only scattered detachments to watch the river fords.
“Heavy Fighting Along an Eight Mile Front”
The cavalry struggle in Wayne County did not end in May. Despatches in the Official Records and county histories alike note renewed activity in early June 1863, when Confederate General John Pegram fell back through the county before a Union advance under General Samuel Carter.
“A Century of Wayne County” relates that on 9 June, as Pegram retreated and Carter pressed behind, there was “heavy fighting along an eight mile front” near Monticello, with skirmishing that touched multiple farms and cross-roads. Nineteenth-century compilers and modern battle lists tie this date to affairs around Rocky Gap, Steubenville between Monticello and Mill Springs, and other points where roads from the river converged.
For local residents that constant, shifting contact may have been more disruptive than the set-piece battle of Mill Springs. Fences went down to feed cavalry fires. Corn in the field disappeared as forage. Houses along the roads became hospitals and headquarters. Men like guerrilla leader Champ Ferguson, mentioned in both county histories and the Official Records, added another layer of violence as they used the unsettled front to settle personal scores.
By late summer, as Burnside’s army moved into East Tennessee, the formal lines of battle shifted south, but Wayne County remained a contested rear area, supplied by the same roads and landings that had drawn Zollicoffer there in 1861.
Mill Springs, Monticello, and Memory
Today most visitors encounter Mill Springs as a battlefield, a national monument, or a picturesque mill site rather than as a living community of farms and crossroads. Lake Cumberland has changed the geography, turning what was once a river bluff into a lakeshore. Yet the historic core remains recognizably the same.
Portions of the battlefield in Pulaski County around Logan’s Crossroads and Zollicoffer Park preserve the ground where Thomas’s men broke the Confederate assault and where Zollicoffer fell. Across the water in Wayne County, the Brown-Lanier and West Metcalfe houses stand near the old Mill Springs road, survivors of the winter camps and the January rout.
The mill itself, rebuilt after earlier fires and now famous for its forty-foot overshot wheel, is a reminder that this was also a working landscape. Long before tourists watched cornmeal ground for demonstrations, the mill supplied local farmers and travelers on the river road. During the war that same commercial hub became an encampment, a hospital complex, and a logistic prize.
Monticello bears fewer obvious scars, but its streets and surrounding farms still follow the patterns that guided Wolford’s and Morgan’s riders. Markers and local museum exhibits nod to the cavalry fights of 1863, yet many of the stories survive mainly in family papers, old cemetery stones, and the yellowing pages of county histories.
For Wayne County, Mill Springs was not only the famous winter battle of 1862. It was the entrance to a longer war of cavalry forays, river crossings, and restless skirmishes that swept up neighbors on both sides.
Sources and Further Reading
Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, Series I, Vol. 7, “Mill Springs and Somerset, Ky.,” and Series I, Vol. 23, “Expedition to Monticello and operations in Southeastern Kentucky,” provide the core campaign reports for both the 1862 battle and the 1863 cavalry fighting. Many of these are available online through Cornell University’s Making of America collection and other digital archives.National Park Service+1
Sgt. Samuel McIlvaine’s letter of 21 January 1862, printed in “By the Dim and Flaring Lamps” and reproduced online as “The Battle of Logan’s Cross Roads,” offers a vivid Union enlisted perspective on the march into Kentucky and the fight at Fishing Creek.Clayton Cramer
For Confederate and cavalry viewpoints, Basil W. Duke’s memoir “Morgan’s Cavalry” and the regimental history “A History of the 11th Kentucky Cavalry” trace the use of Monticello, Greasy Creek, and Horseshoe Bottom in the broader story of Morgan’s raids.Project Gutenberg+2MCOE CBAM COEP WPRD 01+2
“A Century of Wayne County, Kentucky,” especially Chapter 7, ties these larger movements to local families, churches, and communities and preserves traditions about Wayne County soldiers, guerrillas, and the June 9 fighting along an eight mile front.Genealogy Trails+1
Modern battlefield overviews, including the American Battlefield Trust’s “Battle of Mill Springs” and “10 Facts: Mill Springs,” along with the National Park Service’s Mill Springs Battlefield National Monument pages and teaching materials, help situate the battle within Kentucky’s wartime politics and the opening of the Union offensive in the Western Theater.Seeking My Roots+3American Battlefield Trust+3American Battlefield Trust+3
Finally, resources like “The Paper Trail of the Civil War in Kentucky, 1861–1865,” county-level genealogy compilations, and the Kentucky National Guard’s online histories provide useful chronologies of small actions around Monticello, Alcorn’s Distillery, Greasy Creek, and Horseshoe Bottom, along with pointers to pension files and other records that carry the story of Wayne County’s war down into individual lives.kykinfolk.org+3KY National Guard History+3National Park Service+3