Divided Loyalties: Scott County in the Civil War

Julia Marcum was sixteen in September 1861 when Confederate soldiers raided her family's home on Buffalo Creek, east of Huntsville, hunting her Unionist father; she lost an eye and a finger to that night. What followed is the unusual part. With a Kentucky congressman's help she petitioned Congress and won a pension that began at $30 a month and rose to $40 in 1922, and she is described as the only woman the United States pensioned as a combatant. She later lived in Williamsburg, Kentucky, wrote an autobiography in 1926 and died there in 1936.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area at Bandy Creek — 11 mi
  The Tennessee gateway to a 125,000-acre Cumberland Plateau river gorge, from the Bandy Creek Visitor Center near Oneida, with Twin Arches and the old No Business country.
• Pickett CCC Memorial State Park — 18 mi
  A Civilian Conservation Corps park of sandstone buildings, natural bridges and rock shelters beside the Big South Fork, and an International Dark Sky Park.
• Frozen Head State Park — 20 mi
  A 24,000-acre Cumberland Mountains park around a 3,324-foot peak, made from Brushy Mountain prison lands and the CCC, and home to the Barkley Marathons.
• Historic Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary — 21 mi
  The coal-mining prison opened in 1896 after the Coal Creek War ended convict leasing, where James Earl Ray escaped in 1977, now a tourist site and distillery.

More markers nearby

• Rugby — 10 mi
• Wartburg in the War — 21 mi
• Mark Twain Spring — 22 mi
• Big Creek Gap — 23 mi