"A Hard March"

On December 31, 1861, Union General George Thomas left Lebanon, Kentucky, with about 3,000 men and marched toward Logan`s Crossroads. What should have taken two or three days became a two-and-a-half-week ordeal as heavy winter rains turned the roads into ankle-deep mud, and the troops, wet, cold, and at times on half rations, struggled through the forty-mile journey. After arriving on January 17, Thomas planned to rest his exhausted army, join Union General Albin Schopf`s forces at Somerset, and attack the Confederate camp at Beech Grove, but events unfolded differently. During the battle, Thomas rode to a hilltop on the outskirts of the Union camp and from that vantage point directed the victorious Union forces. At the time, Logan`s Crossroads, now Nancy, was a small settlement of mostly log buildings, a few fields, and broad woods. After the battle, the Union dead were gathered from the field and buried in their camps, and in 1867 Mill Springs National Cemetery was established, with the disinterred bodies of Union dead among the first buried there.

Kentucky · United States