Morgan’s Great Raid and the Legends of Hidden Gold
Morgan’s Great Raid: History, Chaos, and the Gold That Got Away
In July 1863, Confederate General John Hunt Morgan led roughly 2,400 cavalry troops on a raid that would stretch nearly 1,000 miles through Kentucky, Indiana, and Ohio—and defy his commanding officer’s explicit orders. The raid was audacious, chaotic, and ultimately doomed. It also left behind one of the Civil War’s most durable treasure legends.
The Raid: Orders Disobeyed
General Braxton Bragg explicitly told Morgan to disrupt Union supply lines in Kentucky and possibly threaten Louisville, but under no circumstances was he to cross the Ohio River. Morgan had other plans. On July 8, 1863, his force seized two Union steamboats at Brandenburg, Kentucky—the John B. McCombs and the Alice Dean—and ferried his men across the river into Indiana. He burned the boats behind him and began a sweep northward that would carry his cavalry deep into Ohio, well behind Union lines.
The intent was partly military: disrupt communications and supplies, tie down Union troops with his movement. But Morgan was riding toward disaster. By the time his column reached the Ohio River again, trying to ford back into Kentucky near Buffington Island, more than 50,000 Federal troops were converging on him. Union forces, including the militia regiment from Marietta, Ohio, moved to cut off his escape.
The Buffington Island Fiasco and the Condor Ruse
On July 19, 1863, as Morgan’s exhausted column reached the river near Eight Mile Island, they spotted what appeared to be a Union gunboat—the Condor—rounding the bend. The vessel had been disguised to look formidable and carried two companies of Union troops. Morgan fell for the deception and withdrew his men upstream toward Buffington Island, fearing the gun crew. This delay proved fatal to his escape. By the next morning, Union cavalry had surrounded him. In the fight that followed, over 700 Confederates surrendered, and more than 1,000 were captured in total.
Morgan and roughly 700 men escaped northward. But the end was near. On July 26, near Salineville, Ohio—far from Confederate territory—Morgan finally surrendered. His 2,400-man force had been reduced to approximately 364 survivors. It marked the farthest north that any uniformed Confederate cavalry would penetrate during the entire war.
The Treasure That Never Was (Mostly)
With Union troops closing in and escape routes evaporating, desperation set in. According to enduring local legends, Morgan’s raiders buried plunder along the banks of the Ohio River and in the hills of southeastern Ohio as they tried to shake their pursuers. The night before his capture, so the story goes, Morgan buried 5,000 gold coins—extorted from mill owners in Indiana—somewhere between West Point and East Liverpool. Large amounts of other stolen goods were allegedly hidden near the Ohio at various points.
Around 1905, an elderly man claiming to be a Morgan’s Raider veteran appeared at a farm in Starr Township, Hocking County, and described a specific burial: an iron pot full of gold coins, jewelry, and valuables that his party had buried as they headed toward Nelsonville. He spent considerable time searching the area near Oil Well and Berry Hollows but never found it. The pot, if it ever existed, remains lost.
The Plundering and the Townspeople’s Hidden Wealth
Morgan’s raids through Pike County—particularly the towns of Piketon and Jasper on July 15-16—were brutal. The cavalry burned buildings, destroyed canal infrastructure, looted stores, and in at least one case shot dead a local schoolmaster named Joseph McDougal. Residents had no way to know whether Morgan’s men would bypass their town or sweep through it. Those in the raiders’ path had minutes to decide: flee or hide their valuables.
Tom Felton, who owned a farm south of McArthur in Vinton County, heard the night riders proclaiming that Morgan’s force was coming. In the dark, he buried an iron pot containing $200 in gold coins and his wife’s best silverware. Morgan’s cavalry never reached him—they passed his farm by—but when the panic subsided and Felton tried to retrieve his wealth, he could not remember where he had buried it. Despite extensive searching, the pot was never relocated.
Felton’s experience was not unique. All along Morgan’s line of advance through Ohio, panicked citizens buried household treasures, family silver, cash, and jewelry. When calm returned and they tried to recover their hidden wealth, many simply could not remember the exact location—or found their landmarks gone, their memory unreliable. Some of these caches remain unaccounted for to this day.
Separating Legend from History
The core facts are solid: Morgan raided, he disobeyed orders, his men were desperate and looted heavily, and he was cornered and captured. But the treasure specifics—exactly how much gold, exactly where it was buried, exactly which raiders did it—tend to become more dramatic and precise with each retelling. Local historians and Ohio history societies have documented the actual looting records, property damage claims, and contemporary accounts. These paint a picture less of systematic burial of massive treasure and more of panicked men with limited time jettisoning portable valuables as they fled.
What remains is a layer of local legend that has endured for over 160 years: the possibility that somewhere in southeastern Ohio and across the river in northern Kentucky, there are caches of Civil War-era valuables waiting to be found. Whether they are real or the product of generations of storytelling is a question that metal detector enthusiasts and local historians continue to ask.