In the shadow of the Unicoi Mountains, the Coker Creek community suffered deeply during the Civil War as the conflict closed its lucrative gold mines and brought devastation and terror to local inhabitants. Union and Confederate armies alike foraged for supplies from civilians, and violent vendettas between rival bushwhackers continued for years. Both armies used the Unicoi Turnpike Trail, now Joe Brown Highway and Tennessee State Route 68, to move soldiers and supplies. In early December 1863, after Confederate Gen. James Longstreet abandoned his siege of Knoxville, Union Gen. William T. Sherman ordered Col. Eli Long to pursue a Confederate wagon train south along this turnpike into northern Georgia, but Long captured only a few of the 300 wagons. Although the battles along the East Tennessee and Georgia Railroad did not occur here, deserters from both sides, called bushwhackers, attacked civilians and soldiers from behind trees, rocks, and curves. Evidence of this murderous brutality remained in Coker Creek Cemetery, where Lt. James K. Morrow of the 3rd Tennessee Mounted Infantry (US) was recorded on his tombstone as having been bushwhacked on Steer Creek Road while cradling oats five years after the war ended. The community slowly rebuilt, and gold mining resumed by 1869 but never reached antebellum production levels. Veterans, bushwhackers, and their victims buried in the nearby Ironsburg and Coker Creek cemeteries stand as reminders of an era when war and suffering dominated these mountains.