Appalachian History
A border county on the Cumberland
In the summer of 1863, Williamsburg was a small courthouse town on the Cumberland River, better known as Whitley Court House than as a battlefield. Whitley County itself was relatively young, carved from Knox County in 1818 with Williamsburg planted at the center as the county seat.
The county sat in a dangerous place. Its southern edge touched the Tennessee line. To the south and east the roads led toward Jacksboro, Huntsville, and the mountain passes into East Tennessee. To the north lay the Bluegrass and the railroads that fed the Union war effort. The Cumberland Gap corridor, only a short distance away, channeled armies, guerrillas, livestock, refugees, and rumor.
Whitley County never hosted a major set-piece battle. Instead, its Civil War story unfolded through raids, skirmishes, and the slow grind of guerrilla violence. The best-documented of those moments came on July 25, 1863, when Confederate cavalry under Colonel John S. Scott rode into Williamsburg and collided with pickets of the 44th Ohio Mounted Infantry.
Guerrillas and “depredations” in Whitley County
By the time Scott’s men appeared in town, Whitley County had already felt the war’s teeth. In December 1862 a Federal dispatch printed in the Official Records described how a loyal Tennessee soldier of the 2nd Tennessee Infantry was murdered while sick at home. The killers then “recrossed the mountains” and, on their way back toward East Tennessee, were reported to be “committing many depredations in Whitley County, Kentucky.”
The letter tied Whitley directly into the East Tennessee guerrilla theater. It preserved a few key facts that local families would have understood instinctively: armed bands could cross the state line with ease, Unionist pockets in Tennessee had friends in Kentucky, and no community very near the Cumberland foothills could feel secure.
Confederate officers also relied on Whitley residents. A Confederate report from East Tennessee noted that the command had questioned “persons of reputed veracity and loyalty to the South, residents of Whitley County, Kentucky” about Federal strength opposite their lines, using the county’s people as informants about Union movements. That testimony made its way into the Official Records along with the Federal complaints.
Together, those documents show Whitley County as more than a dot between larger places. It was a border community whose residents, on both sides of the conflict, carried information, cattle, and danger back and forth across the mountains.
Scott’s orders: a raid into Kentucky
In July 1863, that borderland became the route of a formal Confederate raid. Colonel John S. Scott commanded a brigade built around the 1st Louisiana and 2nd Tennessee Cavalry. As John Hunt Morgan rode north toward Indiana and Ohio, Scott was ordered out of East Tennessee to move into Kentucky.
Later summaries and marker texts, drawing directly on the Official Records, describe the mission in simple terms. Scott’s brigade, about 1,000 to 1,600 strong, left East Tennessee with three goals: disrupt Union communications, gather cattle, horses, mules, and arms, and pull Union attention away from Morgan’s raid.
A Confederate cavalryman later recalled that “about the middle of July” Scott led his men through Big Creek Gap into Kentucky. On July 25, they “drove a detachment of the 44th Ohio mounted infantry toward London,” then pressed on to attack that town as well.
Union records confirm that picture from the other side. The 44th Ohio Infantry’s service summary lists “Operations against Scott July 22–27” with a specific entry for “Williamsburg July 25 (Detachment).” In other words, a small portion of the regiment was spread out on picket and outpost duty in Whitley County exactly where Scott intended to break through.
July 25, 1863: skirmish at Williamsburg
Historic marker 513 on the Whitley County courthouse lawn offers the plainest summary of what happened next. It notes that Scott, with roughly 1,600 men of his cavalry brigade, “came up from Eastern Tenn. on raid to destroy USA communications and obtain cattle, horses, mules and arms.” At Williamsburg on July 25, 1863, “he was met by 100 pickets of 44th Ohio Inf. After a skirmish, he drove them toward London.”
ExploreKYHistory’s short essay on Scott’s Raid echoes that account. At the beginning of the raid into Kentucky, Confederate forces encountered “100 men of the 44th Ohio lined up as pickets in Williamsburg.” Within a day those same troops would be pushed back through London as Scott’s column continued north.
The Official Records place Scott’s brigade leaving Big Creek Gap and moving quickly through the upper Cumberland region. The cavalryman’s reminiscence gives the human detail: on July 25 they came through the gap, brushed aside the Federal detachment, and drove it toward London.
The Williamsburg fight was brief by Civil War standards. There was no entrenched line, no formal battle name. Instead, it looked like many borderland clashes in the Appalachian counties: a cavalry column riding hard into a small town, the local Union outpost scrambling to fall back, and a scattering of casualties in the streets and fields near the road north.
From the Federal perspective, the skirmish at Williamsburg marked the opening move in a running fight that would stretch through London, near Rogersville, and on toward Richmond, Paris, Winchester, Irvine, Lancaster, and Stanford as Scott’s men probed the Bluegrass. For Whitley County residents, it marked the day the war’s cavalry campaigns finally arrived in force.
Whitley County in the crosshairs
Scott’s Raid did not create the violence in Whitley County; it simply concentrated it. The December 1862 dispatch about guerrilla “depredations” showed that irregular war was already in motion months before the raid.
Other records point to arrests, paroles, and divided loyalties in the broader Cumberland Gap region. Brian McKnight’s Contested Borderland uses cases like that of Daniel Steele of Whitley County, captured by Confederates at Barbourville and released on parole, to show how “upstanding men in the community” were caught between occupying forces.
Civil War Governors of Kentucky documents, written from Whitley Court House and nearby communities, describe local conditions in the language of petitions and complaints. County officials and private citizens wrote to Frankfort about guerrilla bands, arrests, and questions of loyalty. Although the details vary from case to case, the pattern is familiar: a remote county seat where civil government survived, but always under pressure from armed men who could ride in from Tennessee or out from the hills at any time.
Demographically, Whitley County was overwhelmingly white and small slaveholding. The Notable Kentucky African Americans Database counts forty-six slave owners, about 135 enslaved Black people, 66 enslaved people listed as mulatto, and only a handful of free Blacks in 1850–1870. Even in a war fought over slavery, many white residents experienced the conflict first through loyalty, conscription, and cattle raids rather than through emancipation policy. Yet enslaved and free Black residents were present, and some men from the region eventually entered United States Colored Troops regiments or supported the Union war effort as laborers and guides.
Julia Marcum: from Tennessee skirmish to Whitley County legend
Whitley County’s most famous Civil War figure was not a soldier at Williamsburg, but a teenage girl who fought for her life in neighboring Scott County, Tennessee.
On 7 September 1861, guerrillas and Confederate sympathizers surrounded the home of Hiram and Permelia Marcum in northern Scott County. Hiram was a Unionist and an officer in the local Home Guard. His farm doubled as a safe house for men slipping north to enlist in Federal regiments. That made the Marcum family a target.
In her own later account, preserved in the Kentucky Historical Society’s Julia A. Marcum Papers, sixteen-year-old Julia described how armed men burst into the house and threatened to kill the women if they would not reveal her father’s hiding place. When a raider chased one of her sisters up the stairs, Julia grabbed a chopping ax and attacked him. He slashed her with a bayonet, leaving her with a shattered skull, a blind eye, and a mangled hand. Her father then shot and killed the intruder.
The fight at the Marcum home never appeared in the Official Records. It survived because Julia and her family told the story, and because the Federal government eventually agreed that she had been wounded “in the service of the United States.”
After the war, the Marcums crossed the state line and resettled in Williamsburg. By the late nineteenth century Julia was a familiar figure in Whitley County. Her scars were visible in photographs, which she did not hide. A U.S. Senate report on her case, Pension to Julia A. Marcum (Serial Set 2274, Senate Report 1361), laid out witness testimony from officers like General Frank Wolford to justify granting her a military invalid pension even though she had been a civilian.
The pension card in the National Archives indexes her as “Private Citizen U.S. Vols.”, a unique designation that acknowledged her combat wounds while still marking her as outside the usual soldier categories.
In later years, Julia joined the Grand Army of the Republic post in Williamsburg and was treated as a veteran in county memory. When she died in Whitley County in 1936 at roughly ninety-one years old, local reports and the ExploreKYHistory marker note that she received a full military funeral. She was buried in Highland Cemetery above town, where her grave remains a focal point for Civil War memory in the county.
Memory on the courthouse lawn
Today, most visitors encounter Whitley County’s Civil War story through historical markers and driving tours rather than battlefields.
On the courthouse lawn in Williamsburg, two Kentucky Historical Society markers sit only a short walk apart. Marker 513, “Scott’s Raid,” tells the story of the July 25, 1863 skirmish between Scott’s cavalry and the 44th Ohio pickets, summarizing the raid’s goals and route. Marker 672, “Aunt Julia Marcum,” condenses her Tennessee ax fight, her move to Williamsburg, and her military pension into a few lines.
The ExploreKYHistory “Whitley County Civil War Tour” pulls those sites together with cemeteries and other locations, mapping how events clustered around the river crossings and courthouse.
Local histories from Williamsburg and Whitley County, many of them compiled in the late twentieth century, reinforce that memory landscape. They tend to highlight the county’s modest growth before the war, the acceleration of development afterward, and the way a handful of Civil War episodes, including Scott’s Raid and the life of Julia Marcum, became central to the county’s sense of its past.
Standing on the courthouse lawn, it is easy to see why. The ground where Scott’s men rode in at a trot and Federal pickets scrambled to the north is the same ground where Julia later walked as a celebrated veteran and where modern residents pass the markers on their way to work.
Why Scott’s Raid at Williamsburg still matters
On paper, the skirmish at Williamsburg looks small: perhaps 100 Union pickets facing a Confederate cavalry brigade on its way to more famous engagements in the Bluegrass. Yet when read alongside the guerrilla complaints, the informant reports, the letters from Whitley Court House, and the life of Julia Marcum, it becomes something more.
Scott’s Raid at Williamsburg shows how a strategic diversion ordered from far away became, on the ground, another moment of risk for people living along the Cumberland. It reminds us that the Civil War in Appalachian Kentucky was not simply a story of big battles elsewhere, but of local raids, cross-border feuds, and civilians who sometimes ended up in the official records and sometimes did not.
On the courthouse lawn in Williamsburg, the pairing of Scott’s Raid and Aunt Julia on two metal signs captures that dual legacy. One marker memorializes soldiers who passed through; the other honors a woman whose war began in a Tennessee farmhouse and ended in a Whitley County grave with full military honors. Together, they tell us that the Civil War on the Whitley County line was fought both by men in uniform and by civilians caught in the middle.
Sources & further reading
War of the Rebellion: Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Series I, vol. 20, pt. 2, pp. 178–179 (Federal dispatch on guerrilla “depredations” in Whitley County).Northeast Tennessee Civil War+1
War of the Rebellion: Official Records, Series I, vol. 23, pts. 1–2 (reports and dispatches on Scott’s Raid, including skirmish at Williamsburg and related actions).Carolana+1
“Civil War 1861–1865 in Whitley County,” in The Paper Trail of the Civil War in Kentucky, 1861–1865 (Kentucky National Guard).KY National Guard History+1
Confederate cavalry reminiscence quoted in “CSA Cav Letters,” describing Scott’s operations against the 44th Ohio and the advance from Big Creek Gap into Kentucky.Scribd
Cheri Daniels, “Teenage Girl with an Ax: The Civil War Skirmish of ‘Aunt’ Julia Marcum,” Kentucky Ancestors Online (2015), using Julia Marcum’s own handwritten accounts and pension records.Kentucky Ancestors+1
Pension to Julia A. Marcum, U.S. Senate Report 1361, 48th Congress, 2nd session (1885).Kentucky Ancestors
Julia A. Marcum Papers, SC 741 and SC 208, Kentucky Historical Society (letters, autobiographical accounts, and photographs).Kentucky Ancestors+1
Kentucky Historical Marker 513, “Scott’s Raid,” and Marker 672, “Aunt Julia Marcum,” Williamsburg courthouse lawn, summarized by ExploreKYHistory and the Kentucky Historical Society.Kentucky History+2Kentucky History+2
“Scott’s Raid,” ExploreKYHistory Whitley County Civil War Tour.Explore Kentucky History+1
Notable Kentucky African Americans Database, “Whitley County (KY) Enslaved, Free Blacks, and Free Mulattoes, 1850–1870.”nkaa.uky.edu+1
Black in Appalachia, “Slave Schedule, Whitley County, Kentucky: 1860.”blackinappalachia.omeka.net
FamilySearch Wiki, “Whitley County, Kentucky Genealogy.”FamilySearch+1
Stirling D. Popejoy, The Second Tennessee Cavalry in the American Civil War (CGSC thesis and later book), especially chapters on Scott’s Kentucky Raid.CONTENTdm+1
Brian D. McKnight, Contested Borderland: The Civil War in Appalachian Kentucky and Virginia (University Press of Kentucky, 2006).Vdoc+1
“Civil War History” overview, Cumberland Gap Region tourism site, on the military importance of the Cumberland Gap corridor.Cumberland Gap Region+1
City of Williamsburg, “History of Whitley County,” and related local history materials.Williamsburg Kentucky+1
National Park Service and unit histories for the 44th Ohio Infantry, summarizing the regiment’s 1863 operations and actions against Scott’s Raid.Ohio Civil War+1