Civil War gold worth millions of dollars may have been buried in Laurel County, historian David Owens has posited in his article “The Legend of Crews’ Gold.”

And Owens believes the treasure has never been found.

Through grafting together different accounts of the life of James Crews, Owens has pieced together an intriguing story.

“I took different accounts and put them all together,” he said. “I like to go off first-hand accounts. I was searching diaries and they talked about Civil War soldiers being ferried across the river.”

“The legend of James Crews’ treasure goes essentially like this,” Owens wrote. “During the opening days of the Civil War in Kentucky, Federal forces were establishing an outpost camp atop Wildcat Mountain in Laurel County along the Wilderness Road.”

The day before the battle on Oct. 21, 1861, Col. Theophilus T. Garrard, who was the commander of the 7th Kentucky Infantry from Clay County, seized James Crews’ ferry flatboat in the name of the U.S. government. He took the vessel “to ferry Union troops across the rain swollen Rockcastle River at the Wilderness Road Ford just below present day Livingston,” Owens stated.

Crews wasn’t happy about Garrard’s move, however, and demanded the U.S. government pay for using the flatboat. Garrard refused and, though the two men argued about the matter, Crews went home without receiving payment.

The situation must have particularly irked Crews, who had a reputation for “counting his pennies.” He made his money working as a ferryman and a tavern operator on the Rockcastle River.

After returning home, Crews evidently became concerned soldiers would come to his tavern and steal his money.

“Keeping paper money and small denomination coins to maintain his business, he devised a plan to hide away his silver and gold coins,” Owens wrote. “Taking a high, two-wheeled ox cart, he loaded a hogshead cask barrel full of silver coins and a hogshead cask barrel half full of gold coins from his tavern on the Laurel County side across the river to the Rockcastle County side to bury at the foot of the ridge where the State Road followed the west side of Horse Lick Creek up to White Oak Branch.”

Crews didn’t go alone, however. He took a young slave with him, whom he ordered to dig a hole in which he would bury his treasure.

“At this point the stories differ,” Owens wrote.

One account states Crews, under threat of death, made the boy promise not to disclose the location of the treasure. Another account notes Crews killed the boy after he dug the hole and buried the boy with the loot.

There are also two accounts of what became of Crews.

One story indicates Crews’ son-in-law, Joel Elkins, who was a “minor business partner,” was away on a business trip when Crews decided to bury the treasure. When Elkins returned, Crews told him the coins had been stolen by “marauding soldiers.”

But in September 1962, Elkins got wise to his father-in-law’s tale and asked him again about the missing money. When Crews refused to tell Elkins where it was, Elkins shot him.

In the second account, Crews is again fatally shot, but this time by a Willis Parker, the original owner of the Crews ferry site.

Parker “demanded payment for some endeavor and Crews responded he did not have enough cash to make payment,” Owens wrote. “Evidently Parker had knowledge, or suspected, that Crews had buried his loot and pulled a revolver and demanded payment. When Crews again refused, Parker supposedly pulled the trigger.”

Regardless of how Crews was killed, Owens does not believe the treasure was ever found.

An article in the Mount Vernon Signal newspaper did report in June 1975 that a gallon fruit jar, full of gold and silver Spanish coins, had been found in the 1950s in the stone foundation of where the Crews tavern kitchen had stood.

But Owens doesn’t believe the discovery was Crews’ big fortune.

“My belief is the main treasure has never been found,” he said. “It would be worth in the millions of dollars because the coins back then were thicker than they are now. And they were made of pure gold and pure silver.”

Staff writer Tara Kaprowy can be reached by e-mail at tkaprowy@sentinel-echo.com.