Appalachian History A Little Mountain At The Crossroads In the nineteenth century Mount Sterling looked like a small county seat on the edge of the Bluegrass. Its courthouse and brick storefronts clustered around a public square, while the old Little Mountain mound, built by Adena people centuries earlier, had already been leveled to make room for houses. Location gave the town outsized importance.

Appalachian History A Border County at War In the summer of 1862 the war along the Upper Cumberland was already older than the official battle names suggest. Monroe County, Kentucky, sat on a rough frontier between the Bluegrass and the Cumberland Plateau, tied by road and river to nearby Celina and Livingston in Tennessee.

Appalachian History On top of Big Hill, motorists on U.S. 421 cross three county lines in a matter of seconds. To the south lies Jackson County, carved from surrounding counties in 1858 and tied to older paths that long predate the Civil War. Historical markers at Gray Hawk recall the Warrior’s Path, an Indigenous route that followed War Fork Creek before climbing toward the Bluegrass.

Appalachian History On a quiet day in Edmonton the brick courthouse on the public square and the stone jail a block away look like ordinary pieces of a small Kentucky county seat. Their lines are simple, their scale modest. Yet the records that survive around them tell a story of cavalry scouts surprised on a local farm, courthouse records turned to ash, and a community trying to govern itself in the middle of a border state at war.

Appalachian History On a summer morning in 1864 a small Union scouting party rode west from Mud Lick Springs toward a narrow cleft in the hills. When they reached McCormick’s Gap they suddenly drew fire from “four or six rebels,” one man dropping from the saddle with a slight wound before the patrol pulled back to safety.

Appalachian History “Bloody Breathitt” Before It Had A Name On a cold November day in 1864, about twenty Kentucky militiamen rode along the Middle Fork of the Kentucky River in Breathitt County. Somewhere near the water, they met a band of twenty five mounted Confederates under a young lieutenant named Jerry W. South Jr. Within minutes, one militiaman was dead and six more were mortally wounded.

Appalachian History In the last week of August 1862, the old road that climbed Big Hill into Madison County turned into a funnel of war. Confederate cavalry pushed north from the mountains, untested Union horsemen tried to stop them, and within days two full armies collided between Kingston and Richmond.

Appalachian Figures When people talk about the Stennis name, they usually mean Senator John C. Stennis, the Kemper County lawyer whose career stretched from Brown v. Mississippi in the 1930s to Vietnam hearings and aircraft carriers in the Cold War. For local history, though, it matters that he was not the only Stennis in public life.

Appalachian History A Warfield Skirmish on the Tug Fork On the riverbank at Warfield, where Kentucky looks across the Tug Fork into West Virginia, a green highway marker compresses a complicated Civil War story into a few sentences. It tells of “a plundering, burning, Confederate detached force” under Col.

Appalachian History A crossroads county at war Magoffin County was barely on the map when the Civil War began. Created in 1860 from parts of Johnson, Morgan, and Floyd Counties, it counted only 3,485 residents in the 1860 census. Later research for the Magoffin County Civil War monument shows that 431 local men would serve in the conflict, 308 in Union blue and 123 in Confederate gray.

Appalachian History On a hot Saturday in July 1861, a young Union officer named John W. Tuttle rode up the hill that overlooks Albany, the little courthouse town at the heart of Clinton County.