Civil War Effects on the Home Front: Scott County and Nearby Areas of the Upper Cumberland Plateau
Des Jean T and Herrmann N. 2011. Civil War Effects on the Home Front: Scott County and Nearby Areas of the Upper Cumberland Plateau. University of Tennessee; National Park Service. Knoxville, TN
Numerous oral history accounts collected over the last three decades describe a Civil War era skirmish that resulted in the deaths of seven or more marauders at the site of the Jonathon Burke cabin along the Big South Fork of the Cumberland River. This event occurred at the Duck Shoals location in early June of 1863. The dead were all placed in a large mass burial pit whose location was lost. Through a partnership with the National Park Service, the University of Tennessee’s Archeological Research Laboratory, and a grant from Eastern National, Incorporated, two attempts were made to locate this pit. The goal of these efforts was to establish whether the oral accounts were true and further, to document this site and place interpretive markers at this location. Finally, any human remains found here would be analyzed to document the physical characteristics or pathologies of members of these guerilla bands. After two unsuccessful attempts to locate the mass burial site an effort to locate another burial possibly related to this skirmish was undertaken with the result that a grave and an associated stone marker was found and re-set.