Land, timber, and commercial opportunities drew settlers to the banks of the Holston River, and as the Civil War approached the river's importance in the Tennessee Valley made it a contested transportation route. Hawkins County residents mostly voted against secession, but pockets of Confederate support existed, centered in part around the nearby Lyons store and post office, the commercial hub of Surgoinsville. There, on May 21, 1862, Clinton G. Lyons and Frank L. Phipps organized Company A, 12th Tennessee Cavalry Battalion; Phipps was elected captain, while Lyons, son of the store's Pennsylvania-born owner Williams Lyons, was first elected lieutenant and later captain. The next month, when Confederate Gen. Kirby Smith planned to invade Kentucky, he wrote that he thought he would order Colonel James W. Starnes to Rogersville to scout in Hawkins and Hancock Counties and that if Captain Phipps's company from Hawkins County could be found, they could act as guides for him. The war drew close to Surgoinsville in 1863, when an engagement occurred a few miles south at Big Creek on November 6. Confederate Gen. William E. Jones and his cavalry brigade surprised the regiments of Union Col. Israel Garrard, 7th Ohio Cavalry, and Maj. Daniel Carpenter, 2nd East Tennessee Mounted Infantry, and soundly defeated them. Clinton Lyons survived the war and returned home to a county that remained divided for many years thereafter, and he and his wife reared six children.