Ezekiel F. Clay, born in Bourbon County as the son of Congressman Brutus J. Clay and nephew of Cassius M. Clay, organized a Bourbon County mounted company in October 1861, took it to Prestonsburg to join the newly formed First Kentucky Mounted Rifles, C.S.A., helped organize the regiment, earned praise from Colonel John S. Williams after the Battle of Ivy Mountain, served with Marshall's Army of southwestern Virginia during the fall 1862 invasion of eastern Kentucky and the failed spring 1863 raid on Louisa, then in Georgia served with General Nathaniel B. Forrest's cavalry after Chickamauga and with Wheeler's cavalry in Middle Tennessee, was badly wounded at Shelbyville but recovered for the Knoxville campaign, and in April 1864 led a cavalry brigade into Eastern Kentucky before being surrounded, defeated, wounded in the eye, and captured at Puncheon Creek in Magoffin County, after which he was imprisoned on Johnson's Island near Sandusky, Ohio, until Lee's surrender; after the war he returned to Bourbon County, where he bred horses at Runnymede, a farm that became famous for its thoroughbreds. John S. "Cerro Gordo" Williams, a hero of the Mexican War, helped organize the 5th Kentucky Infantry in the fall of 1861, later became a brigadier general commanding the Department of Southwestern Virginia, commanded the cavalry brigade that opposed Burnside's Corps in Eastern Tennessee in the fall of 1863, and played a key role in the Confederate victory at Saltville, Virginia, in the fall of 1864. Lionel A. Sheldon, educated at Oberlin College and principal recruiter of the 42nd Ohio, fought after Middle Creek with Sherman's Corps at Chickasaw Bayou, Port Gibson, and Thompson's Hill, and after being wounded in the last of those engagements spent the rest of the war building forts and repairing levees.