Appalachian History
A New County on the Eve of War
When the Civil War began, Wolfe County itself was only a year old. Created in 1860 from pieces of Breathitt, Morgan, Owsley, and Powell Counties, it became Kentucky’s one-hundred-tenth county, with its seat at the little river town of Campton.
That timing helps explain why wartime records can be confusing. Federal and Confederate officers sometimes listed Hazel Green as part of Morgan County, even after the new county line ran just past its front porches. Postal maps, tax rolls, and later highway markers slowly caught up, but men who marched through the Red River valley in 1861 and 1862 often thought of Hazel Green as a Morgan County crossroads that simply happened to lie in the new Wolfe.
Before the first shot was fired, local men had already organized into state military companies. In 1860 the Kentucky State Guard recognized units like the Wolfe Greys of Campton and the Wolfe Rangers, reflecting the mix of Unionist and Southern-leaning sentiment that ran through the hills. Those early companies would splinter once open war came. Some officers later turned up in Confederate cavalry, others in Union home guards and state troops.
1861: Bull Nelson and the Capture of Hazel Green
Wolfe County’s first brush with full-scale war grew out of Brigadier General William “Bull” Nelson’s Big Sandy Expedition in the fall of 1861. Ordered to break Confederate Colonel John S. Williams’s foothold in the mountains, Nelson drove his new brigade southward through eastern Kentucky on rough roads that threaded the valleys.
On October 23 1861, one of his regiments, the 33rd Ohio Infantry, seized Hazel Green. The regiment’s official service record lists “Capture of Hazel Green, Ky., October 23, 1861” as its first engagement, a small entry that nonetheless anchors the community firmly in the wider campaign.
An Eastern Kentucky Civil War researcher has pulled together the story using the Official Records and family manuscripts. Nelson used the home of William Trimble, a wealthy local tannery owner, as his headquarters. From there he struck at Confederate forces at West Liberty while his men rounded up several pro-Southern Trimbles and freed Union prisoners from the county jail. Nelson’s own report in the Official Records describes Hazel Green as a town firmly in Union hands after a sharp surprise. Those events tied the Trimble name, and Hazel Green itself, to the Union cause in the eyes of many mountain Unionists and Confederates alike.
1862: Morgan’s Foot Cavalry in the Hazel Green Hills
The next major column to reach Wolfe County came from the opposite direction. In June 1862 Brigadier General George W. Morgan’s Union division occupied Cumberland Gap, a strategic doorway between Kentucky and East Tennessee. By September Confederate forces had cut his supply line, leaving Morgan’s nine thousand-man force stranded in the mountains.
Morgan chose not to surrender. Instead he led his men on a two-hundred-mile retreat across eastern Kentucky to the Ohio River at Greenup, the feat that later writers dubbed the march of his “foot cavalry.” Highway markers and the Kentucky National Guard’s Paper Trail project trace the route as it passed through Beattyville and West Liberty, then across what is now Wolfe County. One marker summarizing “Civil War 1861-1865 in Wolfe County” notes that Morgan’s nine thousand USA troops camped at Hazel Green for several days as they pushed toward safety.
Emerging Civil War’s study of the retreat, drawing again on the Official Records and soldiers’ letters, describes the division reaching Hazel Green around September 25. Morgan halted there long enough to rest his exhausted men and animals before driving on toward West Liberty and eventually the Ohio River. For several nights Wolfe County farms and hollows swarmed with hungry Federals, their wagons rattling over the ridge roads while Confederate raiders nipped at their rear.
1863: Hazel Green in the Path of Cluke and Pegram
By 1863 the Red River valley had become a corridor of raids and counter-raids. Central Kentucky newspapers reported that a mixed band of roughly seven hundred Confederate guerrillas and cavalry under Colonel Leroy Cluke swept out of the Bluegrass that February, striking Winchester, Mt. Sterling, Straw Hill, and Hazel Green, “robbing and destroying property of every description.”
The Department of the Ohio responded by sending mounted infantry into the region. The 44th Ohio Infantry, newly converted into a mounted regiment, rode out of Mt. Sterling in late February. Its official service record lists “Hazel Green March 9 and 19” among the regiment’s operations against Cluke and against Confederate cavalryman John Pegram. The National Park Service’s battle list for Kentucky likewise records skirmishes at Hazel Green on March 9 and March 19 1863, each involving detachments of the 44th Ohio Mounted Infantry.
One Civil War encyclopedia summarizes the March 9 fight this way. A small detachment of the 44th surprised part of Cluke’s force near Hazel Green, captured about twenty-five Confederates along with their horses and weapons, and suffered no reported loss in return. For local residents already weary of soldiers, it meant another round of gunfire in the streets and more forage stripped from barns and fields.
Letters from soldiers of the 44th later published in the collection To See the Elephant give a sense of central Kentucky campaigns in early 1863, with constant scouting from Mt. Sterling outward through Hazel Green and the surrounding hills. Though most of those letters were written elsewhere, they belong to the same campaign that put Wolfe County on the war’s official map.
Guerrillas, Home Guards, and the Devil’s Creek Country
If major regiments appeared in Wolfe County only occasionally, irregular fighters visited often. Eastern Kentucky and the Civil War, a blog that leans heavily on the Official Records and nineteenth-century county histories, describes a “brisk little skirmish” at Compton, the hamlet that would later be renamed Campton. Guerrillas who had slipped in from Owsley County tried to overawe the town. Instead they found the local Home Guard and the so-called Three Forks Battalion waiting in ambush, and were driven off after a short, sharp fight.
Another episode from the same blog follows Captain J. A. Stamper, a militia officer from neighboring Breathitt County. Learning that marauders were moving toward Wolfe County, Stamper gathered a dozen mounted men and pursued them into the Devil’s Creek area. There he fought a brief skirmish that scattered the raiders, then rode on to catch them again at Holly Creek in Breathitt County, where he charged and captured their leader, Lieutenant South. It is one of the few near-contemporary accounts that puts named officers on the ground in a Wolfe County fight.
Local memory adds more color. A now-partially restricted compilation titled Wolfe County Civil War Tales pulls together early twentieth-century newspaper reminiscences about raids around Devil’s Creek and the Lewellyn Bush neighborhood. Dr. Cable, one of the main storytellers, recalled that families in that area felt “under constant attack” from roaming guerrillas until local home guards and state troops finally pushed them out.
The Three Forks Battalion Comes to Wolfe County
By 1864 the Commonwealth leaned more heavily on state troops to police the mountains. Among the most active units was the Three Forks Battalion, Kentucky State Troops, recruited from Breathitt, Owsley, and neighboring counties. The Report of the Adjutant General of the State of Kentucky, Volume 2, prints full rosters and brief service sketches for the battalion, listing scores of officers and men who would later appear in Wolfe County censuses and cemeteries.
A contemporary-based chronology preserved on early web pages about the battalion notes that in December 1864 the Three Forks men “clash with rebels in Wolfe County,” killing three and wounding two. Although the surviving summary does not specify the exact hollow, its placement among other entries about Devil’s Creek and Red River fights suggests it was part of the same running guerrilla war.
Historian T. R. C. Hutton, in Bloody Breathitt, argues that the Three Forks Battalion operated at the blurry edge between counter-guerrilla warfare and outright terror. He traces how several veterans later took part in postwar feuds and political violence, carrying Civil War grudges into the Gilded Age. When we read those rosters today, we can see not only the names of Wolfe County’s wartime soldiers but also the outlines of its later conflicts.
Devil’s Creek and the Late-War Spike in Violence
A separate compiled timeline titled Appalachian Mountain Civil War Timeline lists “Nov. 9, 1864 – Skirmish at Devil’s Creek, Wolfe County, KY,” connecting it to the guerrilla war that plagued the Red River country. Combined with the Stamper narrative and the Three Forks chronology, that date suggests one of several clashes in the same rugged fork of the county where raiders could slip across county lines and vanish into narrow hollows.
The Wolfe County Civil War timeline assembled on RootsWeb adds more late-war entries. It notes, for example, that on January 28 1865 the 11th Michigan Cavalry skirmished with rebels near Hazel Green, and that on February 2 the Three Forks Battalion again fought guerrillas in Wolfe County. Each entry is only a line long, drawn from muster rolls and the Official Records, but together they show that even as the main armies fought in Georgia and Virginia, Wolfe County remained a contested patch of ground.
1865: Hazel Green as a Federal Outpost
The most concrete proof that the Union saw Hazel Green as a strategic point comes from the Official Records themselves. On February 8 1865 Brigadier General Edward H. Hobson’s headquarters in Lexington sent an order to Colonel Simeon B. Brown of the 11th Michigan Cavalry. The order directed Brown to station individual companies for garrison and scouting duty at a chain of small posts, including Hazel Green in Wolfe County, along with towns like Stanton, Owingsville, Jeffersonville, Poplar Plains, and the Iron Works in Clark County.
Hobson’s staff emphasized that these scattered companies were not to “live on the country” but to draw rations from regular army depots, a sign that Federal commanders understood how hard previous raids and requisitions had already hit local civilians. By that winter the war in Wolfe County looked less like marching armies and more like a cordon of little outposts, each watching the roads for one last rebel band.
The 11th Michigan’s own service history lists Hazel Green among its Kentucky engagements in 1864, underscoring that its troopers had already patrolled the area before Hobson ever turned them into static garrisons.
Who Fought from Wolfe County
Behind these movements stand the individual Wolfe Countians who chose sides. Compiled lists of Wolfe County Civil War soldiers, drawing on the Kentucky Adjutant General’s rolls and pension files, identify local men in both blue and gray.
On the Confederate side, ResearchOnline and FamilySearch note that Company E of the 14th Kentucky Cavalry (C.S.A.) included many men from Wolfe County. Other Wolfe County natives rode with guerrilla leaders or with regular units like the 10th Kentucky Mounted Rifles.
Unionist Wolfe Countians can be found in the Three Forks Battalion, in regular Kentucky infantry and cavalry, and even in Ohio regiments that happened to recruit or enlist men working north of the river. Local “soldier of the week” profiles, such as those compiled on the Bookhiker genealogy blog, trace individual stories like that of Ibzan Dudley McGuire of the Three Forks Battalion, whose postwar life in Lee County still tied him to the Wolfe-Breathitt region.
Together these rosters remind us that the skirmishes at Hazel Green and Devil’s Creek were not faceless events. They involved neighbors whose kin often lived on both sides of the new county line and both sides of the war.
From Civil War to Feud Country
Violence in Wolfe County did not simply stop with Appomattox. Petition files and correspondence in the Civil War Governors of Kentucky project show former Union officers and local officials from the Three Forks region wrestling with postwar lawlessness, still using the language of “guerrillas” and “outlaws” to describe opponents who sometimes looked more like political rivals than soldiers.
Hutton’s Bloody Breathitt places some of these men at the heart of Eastern Kentucky’s later feuds. Veterans who had fought guerrillas at Booneville, Campton, or Devil’s Creek reappeared as sheriffs, faction leaders, or targets in the violent politics of the 1870s and 1880s. In that sense Wolfe County’s wartime history cannot be cleanly separated from its later reputation for rough justice and local vendettas.
Hazel Green itself eventually turned from crossroads to schooltown, home of Hazel Green Academy, the college-prep school whose historic buildings now look out over a landscape once marched and fought over by Ohio infantry and Michigan cavalry.
Why Wolfe County’s Civil War Story Matters
Compared to the great battlefields at Perryville or Chickamauga, Wolfe County’s Civil War story is a patchwork of small actions. A captured town in 1861. A camping army in 1862. Two short skirmishes in 1863. A handful of guerrilla clashes in 1864 and 1865. A single official order posting one company of cavalry at a little river town.
Yet stitched together from the Official Records, state rosters, highway markers, and family stories, those pieces show how fully the war penetrated even the most remote Appalachian counties. Wolfe County’s experience illustrates how lines on a map, like the creation of a new county, could tangle wartime record-keeping. It shows how regular armies used mountain crossroads like Hazel Green as stepping stones, and how local home guards and state troops bore the brunt of fighting irregulars along creeks with names like Devil’s.
Most of all, the story of Wolfe County reminds us that for many mountain communities the Civil War was less a single battle than a long season of anxiety and skirmish fire. The echoes of that season, carried by men of the Three Forks Battalion and their Confederate neighbors, helped shape the county’s politics and memory for generations.
Sources & Further Reading
Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, Series I, especially Volumes 4, 23, and 49 (Nelson’s Big Sandy Expedition, Pegram’s 1863 raid, and Hobson’s 1865 orders). Internet Archive+1
Report of the Adjutant General of the State of Kentucky, Volume 2, 1861-1866, including rosters and service notes for the Three Forks Battalion, Kentucky State Troops. Google Books+1
“When and Where We Met Each Other on Shore and Afloat,” index to Union engagements, listing Hazel Green skirmishes on March 9 and March 19 1863. Wikimedia Commons
National Park Service, battle-unit history for the 33rd Ohio Infantry and Kentucky battle list entries for Hazel Green, March 9 and 19 1863. National Park Service+1
Larry Stevens, “44th Ohio Infantry,” Ohio in the Civil War, and related 8th Ohio Cavalry materials, summarizing operations at Hazel Green and against Pegram. Ohio Civil War+1
Eastern Kentucky and the Civil War blog, especially “Eastern Kentucky Mountains 1861-1865,” “The Yankee Hounds after the Reb Fox,” and posts on Devil’s Creek and Morgan’s retreat, which synthesize Official Records, county histories, and family manuscripts. Eaky Civil War+2Eaky Civil War+2
Kentucky National Guard History, The Paper Trail of the Civil War in Kentucky, 1861-1865, including the text of Kentucky Historical Society markers “Civil War 1861-1865 in Wolfe County” and “USA Gens. Morgan CSA.” KY National Guard History+1
“Wolfe County, 1860” and related markers on the Historical Marker Database and Kentucky Historical Society websites. HMDB+2Kentucky History+2
“Wolfe County Civil War Soldiers” and “Wolfe County Civil War” genealogical compilations drawing on Adjutant General reports, service records, and local research. RootsWeb+1
John A. McKee, To See the Elephant: The Civil War Letters of John A. McKee, 1861-1865, for soldier-level perspectives from the 44th Ohio in central Kentucky. Wikipedia
T. R. C. Hutton, Bloody Breathitt: Politics and Violence in the Appalachian South (University Press of Kentucky, 2013), for the broader context of Three Forks Battalion veterans and postwar mountain violence. DOI Resolver
Henry P. Scalf, Kentucky’s Last Frontier, and John David Preston, The Civil War in the Big Sandy Valley of Kentucky, for regional background on eastern Kentucky’s Civil War campaigns. Eaky Civil War+1