In 1860, forty-three-year-old farmer John Dye lived here with his wife, Elizabeth, their four children, and six enslaved people on a 120-acre farm that produced hay, corn, and wheat, along with a few cows, horses, and mules. Two years later, during the Battle of Perryville, Confederate General Simon Bolivar Buckner used the house as his headquarters, and much of the Confederate army passed by as it deployed to attack the Union right flank about a mile away. After the battle, the house served as a hospital, and stains believed to be bloodstains still remain on the upstairs floor. Union troops stayed at the house for several weeks afterward. During that occupation, seventeen-year-old Martha Dye went upstairs to get flour to bake bread, and when a Union soldier refused to step aside as she came down the stairs, she dumped the flour over the soldier’s heads. Another soldier allegedly proposed marriage to fifteen-year-old Ruth Dye, but she refused. Buckner, born in Hart County, Kentucky, on April 12, 1823, graduated from West Point in 1844, taught there for one year, served in the Mexican War, and just before the Civil War was Kentucky’s adjutant general and leader of the State Guard. As a Confederate brigadier general, he fought at Fort Donelson, where he surrendered the Confederate army after his superiors fled, was captured and later exchanged, negotiated the surrender of the Union garrison at Munfordville, Kentucky, and then led a division at Perryville. Later in the war he fortified Confederate positions at Mobile, Alabama, and fought at Chickamauga. After the war, he edited the Louisville Courier, was elected governor of Kentucky in 1887, became a vice-presidential nominee in 1896, died near Munfordville, Kentucky, on January 8, 1914, and was buried in Frankfort, Kentucky.