Appalachian Figures
When a Confederate veteran came home to Hazard after the Civil War, he remembered looking out over fields and streets that no longer looked like a town at all. In a county history he described “the neglected farms, the roads and paths overgrown with weeds, and almost no business of any kind being carried on.”
That single memory, preserved through the Kentucky National Guard’s workbook The Paper Trail of the Civil War in Kentucky 1861–1865, hints at how hard the war hit Perry County even though it never saw a major set piece battle. Official records show only a few named engagements connected with the county: a skirmish “at Perry County, near Kentucky River” in November 1862 and a later skirmish on Troublesome Creek in April 1864, along with scattered clashes on Lotts Creek and other tributaries.
The paperwork behind those bare entries reveals something more complicated. Cavalry detachments rode the North Fork, salt works at Leatherwood changed hands, guerrilla bands harassed Unionist families, and local officers like Major John C. Eversole tried to raise troops in the middle of it all. This article pulls together what the Official Records, the Kentucky National Guard’s Paper Trail, Civil War Governors of Kentucky documents, and later county histories can tell us about Perry County’s Civil War.
A Mountain County on the North Fork
Perry County was carved out of Clay and Floyd Counties in 1820, anchored on the North Fork of the Kentucky River and its big tributaries: Troublesome Creek coming in from what is now Knott County, Leatherwood Creek near present day Cornettsville, Grapevine Creek close to modern Krypton, and Lotts Creek between the North and Middle Forks. The seat that would become Hazard began as a tiny river town sometimes called Perry Court House, tied by rough roads to Clay, Breathitt, Letcher, and Harlan.
Antebellum Perry was a place of small farms, timber, and livestock, with a growing salt industry at Brashear’s Salt Works near the mouth of Leatherwood. A highway marker and later local histories remember Brashear’s as the county’s largest nineteenth century industrial site, boiling thousands of bushels of salt a year for markets that stretched into Tennessee and southwestern Virginia. Enslaved people were present but relatively few compared with the Bluegrass counties. Most white residents balanced small scale agriculture with seasonal trade that followed the river and the salt roads.
Families like the Eversoles, Cornetts, and Combses had been in the valley for generations by the time secession came. Tradition holds that Jacob and Woolery Eversole built one of the county’s earliest substantial houses near what is now Chavies and Krypton; by the 1860s their descendants would play central roles in both Union military organization and later postwar feuds.
Politically, Perry’s location pulled it in several directions at once. To the north and west, counties along the upper Kentucky River and in the Bluegrass leaned strongly Union. To the south and east, communities nearer to Pound Gap, the Cumberland Valley, and Confederate recruiting grounds in Tennessee produced more southern regiments and more open secessionist sympathy. Modern scholars of the region, including Brian McKnight in Contested Borderland, describe eastern Kentucky as a patchwork of divided neighborhoods rather than a solid block for either side. That mix of loyalties, difficult terrain, and weak state authority made the Kentucky River valley fertile ground for guerrilla warfare.
Leatherwood, Salt, and a Borderland War
The first major Civil War event connected with Perry County grew out of the struggle for salt. Brashear’s Salt Works stood where Leatherwood Creek meets the North Fork of the Kentucky River, in a narrow valley ringed by steep ridges. Contemporary accounts and modern markers agree that the works changed hands several times during the war as both Union and Confederate forces tried to control the kettles that fed their armies.
On 19 October 1862, a detachment of the Harlan County Battalion, Kentucky State Guard, marched over the ridges from Harlan and struck Confederate Captain David J. Caudill’s company of the Tenth Kentucky Mounted Rifles, who were guarding Brashear’s. Later recollections and militia reports remember this as the Battle of Leatherwood or the Battle of Poor Fork. The fight was brief but sharp. Harlan officers claimed to have wounded Caudill and several of his men while suffering at least one fatal casualty of their own.
Although Leatherwood lay somewhat downstream from Hazard, the fight showed how vulnerable the upper river counties were. Confederate companies could use the saltworks as a base to threaten Unionist families up the forks, while Union militia from Harlan, Breathitt, and Owsley saw the works as both a strategic asset and a symbol of Confederate presence in the mountains.
Within days of the Leatherwood clash, Confederate cavalry out of Letcher County retaliated. Genealogical compilations and family histories, drawing on oral tradition and old letters, describe how men of the Thirteenth Kentucky Cavalry, C.S.A., ambushed the home of Major John C. Eversole between Krypton and Chavies on 14 October 1862, riddling the house with bullets and wounding or killing several men in the skirmish. For Unionist households along the river, there was no clean line between “home” and “battlefront.”
“At Perry County, Near Kentucky River”: November 1862
The skirmish that appears in modern battle lists as “Kentucky River, Perry County” took place in this tense autumn. The Kentucky National Guard’s Paper Trail workbook, which compiles earlier military histories, lists an action on 9 November 1862 with the notation “11th Kentucky Cavalry at Perry County, near Kentucky River, Kentucky.”
The National Park Service’s statewide Civil War engagement list records what is almost certainly the same event as a skirmish at “Kentucky River (Perry County)” on 9 November, assigning it to the Fourteenth Kentucky Cavalry instead. Federal service summaries for the Fourteenth Kentucky add a similar line, giving “Perry County, Kentucky River” on 8 November in the regiment’s chronology.
The discrepancy illustrates what historians often find when they chase small mountain actions through multiple compilations. Some lists copy Adjutant General reports that grouped scattered scouting operations into single lines. Others lean on Dyer’s Compendium or later battlefield summaries that occasionally misread unit numbers or dates. In this case the Paper Trail points toward the Eleventh Kentucky Cavalry, while NPS and several compiled rosters tie the event to the Fourteenth.
The Official Records do not preserve a detailed narrative of the fight, and no casualty figures survive in the standard references. What we can say with confidence is that a Union cavalry detachment operated along the Kentucky River in or near Perry County during the second week of November 1862 and encountered Confederate or guerrilla opponents there. The same season saw Eversole’s house attacked, Confederates streaming through from Letcher, and Harlan state troops marching to Leatherwood. Taken together, these fragments suggest that the upper North Fork was contested ground rather than a quiet backwater.
By early 1863, a Louisville newspaper summarized the situation across the upper river counties in stark terms. A widely copied report, later quoted in an eastern Kentucky Civil War timeline, said that Perry, Breathitt, Letcher, and Owsley were still largely “in the hands of the rebels,” that the families of Union men had been driven out, and that hopes rested on Major Eversole’s “hardy mountaineers” to retake their homes.
Major Eversole, Guerrillas, and Recruiting on the North Fork
The figure who ties many of these episodes together is John C. Eversole. Civil War Governors of Kentucky biographical notes describe him as a Perry County farmer who became a major in the Fourteenth Kentucky Cavalry, U.S.A., married into the Duff family, and later died violently in 1864.
A letter preserved in the Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition shows Eversole writing from “Camp near Grapevine, Perry Co. Ky” on 12 October 1863. Addressed to Governor Thomas E. Bramlette, the letter explains that loyal men in Letcher County want to raise companies to answer the latest call for volunteers but cannot safely establish a recruiting station there because of guerrilla incursions. Eversole asks whether they can instead establish a camp in Perry County near his headquarters.
On the same document, a clerk for the governor scribbled a brief response. He noted that the exposed situation of the county made organizing state guards there nearly impossible, a reminder that even on the Union side officials saw the upper Kentucky River counties as precarious ground.
Family and local histories fill in some of what the official paperwork omits. Genealogical research into the Eversole family, drawing on local tradition, places Major Eversole’s house on Grapevine Creek and recounts a second, deadly attack there in May 1864, when men of Caudill’s Confederate cavalry reportedly killed both John and his brother Joseph. Whether every detail of that account can be confirmed from military records or not, it aligns with a wider pattern that scholars of eastern Kentucky have described: an irregular war where personal rivalries, politics, and neighborhood feuds blurred into one another and where “peace” never fully returned when the armies moved on.
Troublesome Creek, April 27, 1864
If the Kentucky River skirmish hints at Perry County’s war, the later fight on Troublesome Creek shows it in sharper focus. In the spring of 1864 the Forty fifth Kentucky Infantry, a Union regiment raised largely in eastern Kentucky, shifted from guarding the line from Cumberland Gap to Louisa to operating out of Mount Sterling and then Irvine. Federal service summaries record that a detachment of the regiment fought at Pound Gap on 19 April, skirmished on Troublesome Creek on 27 April, and then moved on to Morganfield and other points during the anti Morgan operations that followed.
A consolidated National Park Service list of Kentucky engagements notes the “Skirmish, Troublesome Creek, Kentucky” on 27 April 1864, attributing it to the Forty fifth Kentucky Infantry. An index to the Official Records confirms that Colonel John M. Brown of the Forty fifth filed the corresponding report, which appears in Series I, Volume 32, Part I.
Later compilers, working directly from Brown’s report, summarize the action this way: on 27 April 1864 a Federal cavalry detachment struck a band of Confederates on Troublesome Creek and “overtake, capture, and kill 35 Confederates.” The report situates the fight in a broader campaign of small actions across eastern Kentucky that spring, with detachments of the Forty fifth chasing recruiting parties and guerrilla bands from Pound Gap toward the Kentucky River country.
Troublesome Creek itself runs west and north from the present Knott County seat at Hindman, winding through a narrow valley before joining the North Fork of the Kentucky River near the community of Haddix in Breathitt County. In the 1860s families along Troublesome had kin in Perry, Breathitt, Letcher, and what would later become Knott and Leslie, and the creek served as a corridor between those counties.
The April 1864 fight was not the only wartime violence on Troublesome. A timeline of the Three Forks Battalion, a militia style command that operated in the upper river country late in the war, records a skirmish on Troublesome Creek in Perry County in December 1864 in which the battalion lost a horse while killing at least one rebel and capturing a gun. An earlier entry in the same eastern Kentucky chronicle notes Confederate Major Thomas Chenoweth’s men burning a house on Troublesome in 1863 after hunting a local bushwhacker there.
When read alongside Brown’s official report, these smaller incidents show Troublesome as more than a single skirmish site. For at least two years it was a contested valley where Union state troops, Federal infantry, and Confederate partisans all moved, fought, and occasionally punished local households.
Lotts Creek, Grapevine, and the Micro geography of War
The official battle lists that modern readers encounter tend to highlight only those events that produced clear reports or casualty figures. For Perry County that means Leatherwood, the Kentucky River, and Troublesome. Yet scattered references in militia chronologies and county histories show that the war’s footprint reached into other branches of the North Fork.
The same Three Forks Battalion notes that recorded the December 1864 fight on Troublesome also mention a skirmish on Lotts Creek in Perry County that month, with two rebels wounded and their weapons captured. Local genealogists and family storytellers place Eversole and Duff farms along Grapevine Creek and at Krypton, recalling firefights there that never made it into formal after action reports.
Together with Eversole’s correspondence and the scattered pieces of the Forty fifth Kentucky’s itinerary, these fragments suggest that by the end of the war very few hollows near Hazard had been untouched. Some saw formal skirmishes. Others saw raids, night time arrests, or houses burned in reprisal for alleged bushwhacking.
Hazard After the War
The Confederate veteran whose memory opens this story was quoted in a mid twentieth century county history that the Kentucky National Guard’s Paper Trail used for its summary of Perry County. He remembered returning to Hazard after his service to find neglected farms, overgrown roads and paths, and almost no business being carried on.
That description fits what we know from other upland counties. Men had been off in Federal or Confederate regiments or hiding from conscription. Guerrilla bands and foraging parties from both sides had taken livestock and destroyed crops. Refugees from more exposed neighborhoods crowded into what they hoped were safer hollows, while those suspected of aiding the wrong side might find their houses burned or their barns looted.
Perry’s recovery was slow. A general history prepared for the Kentucky County Histories series notes that significant economic growth in Hazard did not come until decades later, when coal development and a railroad finally reached the town in the early twentieth century. Yet even then, memories of the Civil War years lingered in family stories, in feud traditions like the later French Eversole conflict, and in the quiet acknowledgement that the war had left the county less a place of set battles than of long lasting disruption.
Sources and Further Reading
The core military framework for Perry County’s Civil War comes from the War of the Rebellion: Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, especially Series I, Volume 32, Part I, which includes Colonel John M. Brown’s report on operations that produced the 27 April 1864 skirmish on Troublesome Creek, and from the Official Records Atlas for regional mapping.
The Kentucky National Guard’s The Paper Trail of the Civil War in Kentucky, 1861–1865 provides the starting point for the 9 November 1862 “Perry County, near Kentucky River” action and preserves the postwar Hazard recollection taken from the Hazard Chapter, Daughters of the American Revolution’s History of the Perry County, Kentucky and from the Kentucky Encyclopedia entry on the county.
Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition offers windows into local politics and military organization, particularly J. C. Eversole’s 1863 letter from Camp near Grapevine and associated biographical notes on Perry County figures.
For unit level context, the Civil War Archive’s summaries for the Fourteenth and Forty fifth Kentucky regiments, the National Park Service’s Kentucky battle index, and compiled engagement lists such as Carolana’s Kentucky battle pages and geocities era chronologies like “14th KY Cavalry” and the “Three Forks Battalion” timeline help locate the small skirmishes in time and space, though they must be checked against the original Official Records for precision.
Local and regional context comes from county histories and modern scholarship on eastern Kentucky’s Civil War, including Brian D. McKnight’s Contested Borderland, studies of guerrilla warfare in Kentucky, and a growing body of work on salt works like Brashear’s at Leatherwood and on the Eversole family’s role in both wartime service and later feuds.