Morgan’s Revenge
Something has returned…
On July 14, 1863, at about 7:30am, General John Hunt Morgan and his division of approximately 2,460 cavalrymen and a battery of four guns entered Clermont County, Ohio. He moved north of Miamiville along the railroad line that ran between Loveland and Union’s Camp Dennison. Morgan’s men placed a formidable obstruction on the train tracks by filling up a cattle guard with cross-ties, standing end-upward on a curve, so that the engineer could not see it until it was too late to stop the train. Afterwards they hid in a cornfield about one-half mile north of the obstruction. Shortly, a distant whistle alerted them to an approaching train.
There were four passenger cars, a baggage-express car, and the locomotive named “Kilgore”. Aboard the passenger cars were 150 unarmed recruits heading for Camp Dennison. As the train passed the hidden Confederates, they opened fire. The train’s engineer, John T. Redman, increased the speed to forty miles per hour, hoping to outrun the hail of bullets. “The train shot past us like a blazing meteor,” wrote Lt. Kelion Peddicord, “and the next thing we saw was a dense cloud of steam about which flew large timbers. Our next sight startled our nerves, for there lay the monster floundering in the field like a fish out of water, with nothing but the tender attached. Her coupling might have broken, for the passenger carriages and express were still on the track, several yards ahead. One hundred and fifty raw recruits were on board, bound for Camp Dennison. They came tumbling and rolling out in every way imaginable.” Engineer John T. Redman was seriously injured and one man was killed, the fireman Cornelius Conway. Stories are still being told and sightings are made of the ghost of Conway carrying his lantern along what used to be the train tracks in this area.
The apparition was first reported in the late 1800’s, and stories circulated throughout the area that the ghost of Cornelius Conway still stalked the tracks were he was killed. In 1905 a young man was walking home along the foggy track when he was startled as he noticed a figure holding a lantern about 20 feet ahead of him. The boy told his Father about what he had seen and he was told that it was the ghost of Cornelius Conway warning the travelers of the fog-obstructed view ahead on the track. People who fish at night in the nearby Little Miami River have also reported seeing the misty figure holding the lantern on foggy nights, waving it as if warning them of something. In the summer of 1932 a late night passenger train leaving from Cincinnati was speeding through the area when the engineer reportedly saw a man walking in the middle of the tracks with his back to the train. The engineer blew the whistle and stopped the train, but after going out to search for the man, no one was found.
At 8:00am on the morning of July 14, 1863,Captain Williamson, who commanded the 116-man Loveland militia, dispatched twenty scouts to explore along the Little Miami River south of the town. Commanded by Lt. Paxton and Sgt. Ramsey, the Loveland volunteers followed the twisting course of this major tributary that flows all the way to the Ohio River to check on telegraph wires that had been cut between Loveland and Camp Dennison. As Lt. Paxton stared at the sky ahead, he could see wisps of smoke. He wondered “What’s burning?” The scouts picked up their pace and soon came upon Morgan’s men burning the train. Lt. Paxton directed Sergeant Ramsey to take ten men and attack the left flank of Morgan’s force. Taking cover, he gave orders to begin firing. The Loveland militia were soon forced to retreat by the Confederates, but not before one of the rebels was shot in the neck. He was carried away by his comrades and died at the village of Ward’s Corner, very near were Wallace Manor stands today. Morgan told the local citizenry to give his cavalryman a Christian burial or he would return and burn the town to ground. They should have heeded his warning.
General John Hunt Morgan was shot and killed by Union forces on September 4, 1864 in Greeneville Tennessee.
It is said that every year on Samhain, when the veil between the world of the living and the dead is the thinnest, that Morgan and his men return to seek their revenge on the local townspeople.