Salt, Strategy, and Civil War Kentucky
In the fall of 1862, the American Civil War surged into the salt‑rich hollows of Perry County. Confederate armies had just retreated from the state after the bloody Battle of Perryville, yet detachments and partisan bands lingered in the southeastern mountains, hunting provisions the South could no longer import. Chief among those essentials was salt. Without it, armies starved; with it, they marched. Thus a back‑country saltworks at a place called Leatherwood—hardly a dot on most wartime maps—suddenly became a military prize.
Leatherwood: A Valley Worth Fighting For
Brashear’s Salt Works (founded 1834) stood where Leatherwood Creek meets the North Fork of the Kentucky River, ringed by steep ridges and cut off from the Bluegrass by rough trace roads. The works could fire thousands of bushels a year, enough to keep meat rations edible from Knoxville to Abingdon. For Confederates clinging to eastern Kentucky and Unionists guarding their mountain homes, ownership of those evaporating kettles meant the difference between full mess‑kits and famine.
The Opposing Forces
Union: Harlan County Battalion
Major B. F. Blankenship’s State‑Guard battalion—forty riflemen drawn from Companies A and B—set out from Harlan County on October 18 1862. Captains George W. Morgan and Ambrose Powell led the volunteer detachment; legendary scout James “Clabe” Jones padded over the leaf‑litter ahead of them. Their mission was blunt: drive “the rebels out of Perry.”
Confederacy: Caudill’s Company
Guarding the saltworks was Captain David J. “Dave” Caudill’s Company B, 10th Kentucky Mounted Rifles—about one hundred local horsemen mustered by his cousin, Colonel Ben Caudill. These men knew every gap and grapevine in the hills, and they camped within shouting distance of the boiling vats their cooks kept simmering.
Tactics in the Hollows: October 18‑19 1862
Blankenship bivouacked on Poor Fork the night of the 18th, then at dawn ordered his forty volunteers toward Leatherwood. Hoping to link with friendly Home Guards, the column bush‑whacked through dense timber. Confederate sentries, however, spotted the movement and relayed word to Captain Caudill. By midday the graycoats had laid an ambush near the creek’s mouth—iron‑sighted rifles resting across mossy logs, watermelon rinds strewn where lunch had been interrupted.
Fifteen Minutes of Fire
The first volley cracked through yellow poplar. Union muskets answered in a heartbeat, and for roughly fifteen minutes the mountains rang like an iron kettle. Jones later claimed he shot Caudill “in the hind‑quarters” as the captain wheeled to rally his men. Whether or not the boast was true, Caudill fell wounded, and the sudden loss of leadership sent the Confederates reeling upstream. When the smoke thinned, five Southern soldiers lay dead, several more were hit, and the lone Union casualty—mortally wounded—would die of his injuries days later.
Aftermath: A Saltworks Secured
Blankenship’s handful held the field, gathered abandoned arms, and—most importantly—denied the kettles to the Confederacy. Lacking numbers to garrison Leatherwood, the Kentuckians withdrew that evening; but Caudill’s command, bloodied and leaderless, never again established itself at Brashearville. A week later Humphrey Marshall’s remaining troops quit the state. A skirmish measured in minutes had helped end a campaign measured in months.
Legacy & Living Memory
For Perry County, the Battle of Leatherwood remains the largest Civil War engagement fought on its soil. Stories of pawpaws dropped for rifles and a fifty‑pound cake of cornbread captured from the rebel cook‑fire long ago slid into mountain folklore, told beside autumn campfires and, since 2002, reenacted on the original ground. Each fourth weekend of October, cannon smoke curls once more above Cornettsville as blue and gray lines clash for the crowd—proof that even a fight over salt can echo through generations.
Sources & Further Reading
Blankenship, B. F. “Report of Operations, October 1862.” Kentucky Adjutant‑General Papers.
Jones, James H. Clabe Jones: Autobiography of a Mountain Union Scout. Harlan County Historical Society, 1901.
Sparkman, Faron. “A Little Salt With Your Watermelon—The Battle of Leatherwood.” East Kentucky Civil War Blog, 2016.
Kentucky Historical Marker #2478, “Battle of Leatherwood.”
Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, Series I, Vol. XVI, Part I.
Hazard/Perry County Tourism Commission. “Battle of Leatherwood Re‑enactment, Fourth Weekend of October.”
Author Note: [Blank]