Appalachian History Series – The Battle of Barbourville: Kentucky’s First Clash of the Civil War
On a cool September morning in Barbourville, traffic rolls past a small Civil War interpretive park at the intersection of Daniel Boone Drive and Cumberland Avenue. A walking path leads to a reconstructed bridge site and a cluster of markers that talk about fog, Home Guards, and the first clash of the war in Kentucky. It is easy to miss the site from a passing car, yet on 19 September 1861 this bend in the road and creek became the place where Kentucky’s uneasy neutrality finally cracked under the pressure of a national war.
What happened at Barbourville that morning was brief, confusing, and small by later Civil War standards. Confederate troops from East Tennessee crossed into Kentucky, brushed aside a force of Unionist Home Guards, and burned an unfinished training camp known as Camp Andrew Johnson. The exchange of fire lasted minutes, not hours, but the echoes ran far beyond Knox County.
Neutral Kentucky on the edge of war
In the spring and summer of 1861 Kentucky tried to stand apart from the coming conflict. State leaders declared a policy of neutrality, hoping to keep both Federal and Confederate forces out. The line they tried to hold was more political than geographic. In the mountains along the Cumberland Gap and the Wilderness Road, communities were already divided between Unionist and secessionist sympathies.
Felix Kirk Zollicoffer, a Tennessee newspaperman turned Confederate officer, became one of the most important figures along that border. In the late summer of 1861 he commanded several thousand Confederate troops in East Tennessee, with orders to secure the Cumberland Gap region and protect the western flank of Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston’s main Confederate army. By mid September his column of roughly 5,400 men had advanced to Cumberland Gap and then to the Cumberland Ford near present day Pineville.
Zollicoffer understood that Kentucky’s neutrality could not last. Unionist recruiters were already busy in the mountains, using the old Wilderness Road as a pipeline to Federal camps farther north. One of those gathering points lay a day’s march from his line.
Camp Andrew Johnson and the Barbourville Home Guards
In August 1861 Union sympathizers established a camp near Barbourville that they named Camp Andrew Johnson. Situated near town along the Wilderness Road, it served as a training ground for Unionist recruits from southeastern Kentucky and East Tennessee. Men from Knox County and surrounding communities drilled there in preparation for enrollment in the Union army.
The camp stood in a county whose voters were deeply divided. Knox County had strong Unionist sentiment, but it also lay on one of the main doors from Confederate Tennessee into central Kentucky. Local Unionists organized Home Guard companies to protect Barbourville and its approaches. Capt. Isaac J. Black commanded the Barbourville Home Guards, who served as both local defenders and a kind of screening force for Camp Andrew Johnson.
By mid September most of the recruits who had been drilling at Camp Andrew Johnson had already been ordered north to Camp Dick Robinson near Lancaster, where the Federal high command was building a larger army under Brig. Gen. George H. Thomas. The camp near Barbourville was not entirely abandoned, but it no longer held the hundreds of men it had hosted just weeks before. That detail mattered on the morning when Zollicoffer decided to strike.
Zollicoffer’s march along the Wilderness Road
From his base near Cumberland Ford, Zollicoffer looked north along the Wilderness Road at a state that was officially neutral but strategically vital. He wanted to disrupt Union recruiting, draw Federal attention away from Johnston’s main army, and secure the eastern approaches to the Cumberland Gap. Camp Andrew Johnson, sitting just inside Kentucky and linked to Unionist activity in the mountains, made an inviting target.
In the early hours of 19 September 1861, Zollicoffer ordered an advance toward Barbourville. According to his later report in the Official Records, he detached about eight hundred men under Col. Joel A. Battle to move along the Wilderness Road, surprise whatever force remained at the camp, and destroy it.
The Confederate column included infantry and mounted men drawn from Tennessee regiments that had already been operating along the border. Their march followed the old road through mountain gaps and along creeks that people in Knox County had used for generations. What had been a commercial and migration route became an invasion route overnight.
A foggy morning at the bridge
Barbourville woke under a heavy fog that morning, a detail preserved in several later accounts and in modern summaries of the battle. As Battle’s men approached the town from the south, they followed the road toward a bridge over the creek near the edge of Barbourville.
Capt. Black and the Home Guards received word that the Confederates were coming up the road. They moved quickly to the bridge, pulled up its planking to slow the advance, and took cover among trees, fences, and buildings near the creek. Later state summaries and National Park Service material agree that roughly three hundred Unionist Home Guards and recruits were present in the area, though not all of them necessarily fought from the bridge itself.
When the Confederate advance guard came within range, the Home Guards opened fire. For a short time the fog along the creek bank filled with black powder smoke and shouting. Confederate sources remembered charging across the stringers of the stripped bridge under fire. One later account, preserved in a guide to Kentucky battlefields, even recalled a bullet that neatly shot the peach brandy out of a canteen without harming its owner.
The imbalance in numbers quickly told. Zollicoffer’s men pushed onto and across the bridge, their superior strength forcing the Home Guards back through the town. Barbourville residents later told stories of civilians ducking behind houses and fences as the shooting passed down the street. What had begun as a short stand at the bridge turned into a running skirmish that ended with the defenders withdrawing toward the hills.
Deaths at Barbourville
The fighting at Barbourville produced casualties on both sides, although the exact numbers vary from source to source. The National Park Service estimates that the approximately three hundred Unionists and eight hundred Confederates involved suffered about twenty casualties in total.
Local research by Ray Adkins and others has focused more on individual names than on totals. Adkins’s study of the battle identifies Lt. Robert Powell of the Nineteenth Tennessee as the first Confederate officer killed in Kentucky. It also highlights the death of Pvt. John Hendrickson, a Barbourville Home Guard, as likely the first Unionist from the town to fall in battle.
Adkins argues that only about thirty Home Guards actually stood at the bridge when the shooting started, with others arriving too late to take part. That interpretation paints the skirmish as a lopsided clash in which a handful of local men tried to block an eight hundred man Confederate column long enough for friends and neighbors to escape.
Whatever the exact numbers, the dead at Barbourville marked an undeniable turning point. Kentucky’s neutrality had already been strained when Federal troops occupied Paducah in early September. After Barbourville, it became harder for anyone to pretend that the war was not already in the state.
Burning Camp Andrew Johnson
Once the Home Guards retreated, the Confederates moved to their main objective. Zollicoffer’s men pushed on to Camp Andrew Johnson and found it largely empty of recruits, since most of them had been pulled back to Camp Dick Robinson. What remained were camp structures, supplies, and some arms.
In his report Zollicoffer told his superiors that his detachment entered Barbourville at daylight, engaged about three hundred of the enemy, dispersed them, destroyed the camp, and captured weapons and equipment. Early twentieth century Kentucky highway markers and the Kentucky National Guard’s Paper Trail of the Civil War in Kentucky repeat that basic outline.
For the Confederates, Barbourville was a tactical success. They had scattered a Unionist force, burned a recruiting camp, and gathered badly needed arms for Tennessee regiments that often lacked modern weapons. For Union commanders, the raid was a warning shot that convinced them to reinforce central Kentucky and block Zollicoffer’s route north.
From Barbourville to Camp Wildcat
Barbourville was only the first move in a larger campaign. In the days that followed, Zollicoffer’s men continued raiding along the Wilderness Road corridor. They scattered Home Guards at Laurel Bridge in Laurel County and struck at the Goose Creek Salt Works in Clay County, seeking to disrupt Union supply and recruiting in the mountains.
Historians like Brian McKnight and Kent Masterson Brown place Barbourville within a broader Confederate effort to control the borderland between Appalachian Kentucky and Virginia. The raid showed how easily Confederate troops could move through the Cumberland Gap region and threaten the Bluegrass if left unopposed.
The Union answer came quickly. Federal commanders sent troops to occupy key points along the Wilderness Road and to fortify the heights at Wildcat Mountain in Laurel County. When Zollicoffer tried to push north again in October, his men met a prepared Union force and suffered a setback at the Battle of Camp Wildcat. Barbourville thus became the opening note in a campaign that soon drew national attention to obscure Kentucky ridgelines and crossroads.
Skirmish or battle
Official documents from 1861 sometimes treated Barbourville as a skirmish. The brief nature of the fight, the relatively low number of casualties, and the absence of large formal battle lines made it easy for later writers to file it away as a small action. The Essential Civil War Curriculum essay on Kentucky in 1861 calls Zollicoffer’s strike a raid on Camp Andrew Johnson and notes that the “skirmish was thereafter called the Battle of Barbourville.”
Yet in local memory the word battle mattered. Kentucky highway markers, county histories, and National Park Service battlefield listings all use “Battle of Barbourville.” Adkins’s book title does the same. The label reflects more than pride. For people in Knox County the day when war came to their bridge and their streets was not just a footnote in someone else’s campaign. It was the first time local men died in uniform on their own ground.
The debate over whether Barbourville was truly a battle or only a skirmish also feeds into a larger question about firsts. Many modern summaries, including the National Park Service, describe Barbourville as the first Confederate victory in Kentucky and often as the first Civil War battle fought in the state. Other early confrontations, such as the seizure of Paducah or local clashes between rival armed groups, complicate that claim. What remains clear is that Barbourville sits at the very beginning of open warfare in Kentucky.
Remembering the foggy bridge
For decades after the war the physical traces of the battle faded as Barbourville grew. The original bridge site changed, streets were widened, and successive generations walked past the ground where the Home Guards had pulled up planks and fired into the fog.
Local historians and genealogists in Knox County kept the story alive. The Knox Historical Museum’s magazine, The Knox Countian, has published articles on the battle, on Civil War era cemeteries, and on efforts to locate the original bridge site using old land records and maps. Adkins’s book and his later revised edition built on that work and on oral history, pension records, and land deeds to pin down where men stood and fell on 19 September 1861.
In the 1990s the Civil War Sites Advisory Commission classified the Barbourville battlefield as heavily fragmented. Urban development and changing land use had erased many visible features, leaving only scattered remnants of the wartime landscape. Even so, the commission pointed to the site’s potential for commemoration.
That potential became reality in the early twenty first century. In 2008 the city dedicated the Battle of Barbourville Civil War Interpretive Park near the creek and bridge crossing, with signs and structures that help visitors imagine the scene on that foggy morning. Tourism materials from Barbourville and regional heritage organizations now highlight the park as a place to learn about Kentucky’s first Civil War clash.
Why this small battle still matters
By the standards of later battles at places like Perryville or Chickamauga, Barbourville was a small affair. No thousands died here. There were no sweeping maneuvers, only a brief struggle at a bridge and a burning camp. Yet for Appalachian Kentucky the story of the Battle of Barbourville opens a window into how quickly national conflict could turn into local crisis.
On that September morning in 1861, Knox County farmers and townsmen who had spent the summer drilling as Home Guards found themselves facing professional soldiers from Tennessee. Their attempt to hold a half dismantled bridge marked the end of an era in which Kentucky could pretend to stand apart from the war. The deaths of Robert Powell and John Hendrickson, remembered in local histories and unit rosters, brought the cost of that war home in very personal form.
Today the interpretive park, highway markers, and museum files in Barbourville do more than preserve one morning’s confusion in the fog. They connect a small Appalachian town to the larger story of how armies moved through the mountains, how neutrality collapsed, and how ordinary people remembered a brief, violent encounter that changed the way they saw their own place in the Civil War.
Sources & Further Reading
U.S. War Department. The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. Series I, Vol. 4. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1880–1901. https://cdl.library.cornell.edu/moa/browse.monographs/waro.html Internet Archive+1
National Park Service. “Battle Detail: Barbourville (KY001).” The Civil War (National Park Service). https://www.nps.gov/civilwar/search-battles-detail.htm?battleCode=KY001 National Park Service
National Park Service, American Battlefield Protection Program. Update to the Civil War Sites Advisory Commission Report on the Nation’s Civil War Battlefields: Kentucky. Draft report, 2008. https://npshistory.com/publications/battlefield/cwsac/updates/ky.pdf NPS History
National Park Service, American Battlefield Protection Program. Civil War Sites Advisory Commission Report on the Nation’s Civil War Battlefields: Technical Volume II – Battle Summaries. Washington, D.C., 1993. https://npshistory.com/publications/battlefield/cwsac/technical-v2.pdf NPS History
Kentucky National Guard and Kentucky Historical Society. The Paper Trail of the Civil War in Kentucky, 1861–1865. Frankfort: Kentucky National Guard, c. 2005. https://kynghistory.ky.gov Ky National Guard History
Richmond Daily Dispatch. “Engagement at Barboursville, Ky.” Richmond Daily Dispatch (Richmond, Va.), September 24, 1861. https://dispatch.richmond.edu Daily Dispatch
Williams, Samuel C. The Wild Riders of the First Kentucky Cavalry: A History of the Regiment in the Great War of the Rebellion. Louisville: Press of R. H. Carothers, 1894. https://archive.org Amazon
Knox Historical Museum. “Museum Has Records of Soldiers from Revolutionary War, War of 1812, Civil War.” Knox Historical Museum, Barbourville, Kentucky. https://knoxhistoricalmuseum.org/history/of-knox-county-kentucky/military-history-of-knox-county-kentucky.html Knox Historical Museum+1
Cole, David. “Gen. Zollicoffer’s Troops Attacked Barboursville on Sept. 19, 1861.” The Knox Countian 3, no. 1 (Spring 1991). Indexed at Knox Historical Museum. https://knoxhistoricalmuseum.org/history/knox-countian-magazine/compiled-contents-of-article-titles.html Knox Historical Museum
Adkins, Ray. Battle of Barboursville, Kentucky: September 19, 1861. Self-published, 2005 (later revised ed.). https://www.booksamillion.com Appalachianhistorian.org
Adkins, Ray. One Foggy Morning in Barbourville, Kentucky. Charleston, SC: CreateSpace, 2008. https://www.amazon.com arcadiapublishing.com
Coulter, E. Merton. The Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1926; repr. 2011. https://uncpress.org/9780807868447/the-civil-war-and-readjustment-in-kentucky/ The University of North Carolina Press+1
McKnight, Brian D. Contested Borderland: The Civil War in Appalachian Kentucky and Virginia. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1dnncdq JSTOR+1
Sanders, Stuart W. The Battle of Mill Springs, Kentucky. Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2013. https://www.arcadiapublishing.com Eaky Civil War
Daniel, Larry J. Days of Glory: The Army of the Cumberland, 1861–1865. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004. https://lsupress.org
Hurt, Douglas. “Kentucky in the Civil War, 1861–1862.” Essential Civil War Curriculum. Virginia Center for Civil War Studies, Virginia Tech. http://www.essentialcivilwarcurriculum.com/kentucky-in-the-civil-war-1861-1862.html Amazon
Bishop, Randy. Kentucky’s Civil War Battlefields: A Guide to Their History and Preservation. Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing, 2012. Sample chapter PDF at https://pelicanpub.com/content/9781455616077_ch%201.pdf Pelican Publishing Company+1
American Battlefield Protection Program and American Battlefield Trust. “Kentucky.” State battlefield profile, including Barbourville (KY001). https://www.battlefields.org/sites/default/files/atoms/files/ky.pdf American Battlefield Trust
Kentucky Heritage Council. “Kentucky Civil War Preservation Efforts.” Civil War Sites Preservation Program. https://heritage.ky.gov/historic-places/military-heritage/Pages/civil-war-sites.aspx Kentucky Heritage Council
“Kentucky Civil War Battle Barbourville – Camp Andrew Johnson.” AmericanCivilWar.com. https://americancivilwar.com/statepic/ky/ky001.html American Civil War
Civil War Notebook. “Official Reports: Action at Barboursville, Ky., September 19, 1861.” Civil War Notebook (blog). https://civilwarnotebook.blogspot.com Civil War Notebook
Eastern Kentucky and the Civil War (Marlitta H. Perkins). “One Foggy Morning in Barbourville, Kentucky.” Eastern Kentucky and the Civil War (blog), 2012. https://eakycivilwar.blogspot.com Visit Kentucky
ACW Scots. “That Dark and Bloody Ground: The Kentucky Campaign of 1861.” ACW Scots website. https://www.acwscots.co.uk HathiTrust
City of Barbourville Tourism Commission. “Civil War Interpretive Park.” Barbourville Tourism. https://barbourvilletourism.com/civil-war-interpretive-park/ Barbourville Tourism
City of Barbourville Tourism Commission. “Historic Barbourville.” Barbourville Tourism. https://barbourvilletourism.com/historic-barbourville/ Barbourville Tourism
City of Barbourville Tourism Commission. “Street View Murals.” Barbourville Tourism. https://barbourvilletourism.com/street-view-murals/ Barbourville Tourism
Historical Marker Database. “The Battle of Barbourville.” HMdb.org – Historical Marker Database. https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=35810 Human Metabolome Database
Civil War Sites Advisory Commission. Report on the Nation’s Civil War Battlefields. Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 1993. https://capitalregionland.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Civil-War-Sites-Advisory-Commission-Report.pdf Capital Region Conservancy
Bearss, Edwin C., and Bruce Catton, eds. The Civil War Battlefield Guide. 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. Entry on “Barbourville, Kentucky (KY001).” https://cincinnatistate.ecampus.com/civil-war-battlefield-guide-2nd/bk/9780395740125 Cincinnati State Online Bookstore
National Park Service. “Prelude.” Mill Springs Battlefield National Monument (U.S. National Park Service). https://www.nps.gov/misp/learn/historyculture/prelude.htm National Park Service
National Park Service. Kentucky Wildlands National Heritage Area Feasibility Study. 2023. https://npshistory.com/publications/nha/kentucky-wildlands-nha-fs-2023.pdf NPS History
Author Note: I wrote this piece to trace how a brief morning of gunfire at a Knox County bridge helped pull Kentucky fully into the Civil War. I hope it gives you a reason to look twice at the markers and interpretive park in Barbourville and to see that foggy little battlefield as part of a much larger Appalachian story.