Kentucky’s Civil War leaders…
Charles Mynn Thruston was frustrated
in protecting railroad from Rebel raiders

(EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the 30th in a series about Kentucky’s officers and battle leaders during the Civil War.)

Charles Mynn Thruston, a Union brigadier general, probably was one of the more frustrated residents of Maryland during the Civil War.

The Lexington, Ky., native, was serving as mayor of Cumberland, Md., a critical railroad hub, when the Civil War began. He had resigned his commission in the army in 1836 to become a farmer in the Old Line State.

On Sept. 7, 1861, Thruston was appointed brigadier general of U.S. Volunteers, giving him military authority to protect the B&O Railroad from Confederate raiders such as McNeill's Rangers. He was largely unsuccessful at stopping the Confederate raids from randomly destroying railroad tracks, and, in April 1862, Thruston resigned his commission and allowed a younger commander to assume responsibility for protecting the railroad from the enemy cavalrymen.

The U.S. Military Academy graduate served as mayor of Cumberland from 1861-62. Following his graduation from the Academy in 1814 at the age of 16, he served during the War of 1812 as an engineer on Governors Island, New York City. After the war, he was promoted to the rank of captain in the artillery branch and later fought in the Seminole Wars of the 1830s.

He was the son of Kentucky U.S. Senator Buckner Thruston and the grandson of his namesake, Col. Charles Mynn Thruston, a Virginian who led a regiment in the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War.

Thruston died in Cumberland at age 74 and is buried in that city’s Rose Hill Cemetery.