Bragg's March to Kentucky

Van Buren County had a direct stake in the war that Bragg's army passed through. In 1860 its 2,337 people included at least thirty-five slaveholders who held 239 enslaved people. The county raised four companies for the Confederacy, and twelve Van Buren men died at Perryville on October 8, 1862. Union troops took the area in 1863 and burned Spencer, the county seat, in part because of that support. The county itself was named in 1840 for Martin Van Buren and formed from parts of White, Warren and Bledsoe.

What the plaque says

Bragg's March to Kentucky In the late summer of 1862, Confederate General Braxton Bragg marched northward down this valley with an army of several thousand soldiers, supply wagons, and artillery pieces en route to invade Kentucky. They traveled and camped along the east side of nearby Cane Creek. After the October 8, 1862 Battle of Perryville, Kentucky, the campaign to invade Kentucky was abandoned. During the battle, twelve soldiers from Van Buren County were killed and several others wounded.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fall Creek Falls State Park — 9.7 mi
  A New Deal park on the western edge of the Cumberland Plateau, where Cane Creek has cut a gorge and a 256-foot waterfall drops into it.
• Rock Island State Park — 13 mi
  A park where the Collins, Rocky and Caney Fork rivers meet at the head of Center Hill Lake, with a gorge of waterfalls below a 1917 dam and the remains of a cotton-mill town.
• Burgess Falls State Park — 20 mi
  A day-use park on the Falling Water River, where a short trail passes three smaller falls on its way to a drop of more than 130 feet into a limestone gorge.
• Cumberland Homesteads and the Homesteads Tower — 25 mi
  The largest of the New Deal's subsistence homestead communities, a plateau district of Crab Orchard sandstone houses around an octagonal stone tower that now holds a museum.

More markers nearby

• Burritt College — 4.5 mi
• The Rock House — 8.7 mi
• George Gibbs Dibrell April 12, 1822 - May 9, 1888 — 9.3 mi
• Lester Flatt June 19, 1914 - May 11, 1979 — 9.5 mi