Carlos Brock serves as our Sergeant of Arms is a resident of Perry County. He has proven to be one of the hardest working members the Caudill Camp has ever seen. No individual in the Sons of Confederate Veterans has ever tackled as many Confederate stone setting projects as Carlos Brock.

Carlos was born and raised at Typo in Perry County. He attended M.C. Napier High School and in 1966 he married Dorothy Johnson. Carlos and Dorothy have two children, Carlos Junior and Billy Wayne. He moved to Chicago where he worked for approximately five years. He also worked on various construction jobs all over the nation from New York City to Kansas. He eventually returned to Perry County where he worked with Jack Dean and also operated his own business, Brock Fence Company in the 1970s. While working in the fence business he was contracted to put up a chain link fence around the historical grave of Perry County’s oldest Combs resident at Scuddy, which we attest to be an early tie to his future love of discovering and restoring our area’s oldest graves and cemeteries.

He joined the Perry County Historical Society and soon did more than anyone has ever done before or since in locating and recording the cemeteries of Perry County. His work led to the publication of a number of Perry County Cemetery books that to this day continue to provide valuable information to researchers all over the country.

Through the Perry County Historical Society he met Faron Sparkman and joined the Caudill Camp of Sons of Confederate Veterans entering under Private John Whitaker of Company H of the 13th Kentucky Cavalry who enlisted in Perry County in March of 1863. Initially working together with Faron Sparkman on setting stones for Confederate soldiers, the two traveled literally thousands of miles together in Carlos’ red Ford pickup truck. On most of the trips Carlos was joined by his son Carlos Junior who helped set hundreds of stones. Carlos Brock set stones in Indiana, Maysville, Carrollton, Winchester and throughout southwestern Virginia as well as practically every county in Eastern Kentucky including Bath, Breathitt, Carter, Floyd, Jackson, Knott, Lee, Letcher, Magoffin, Menifee, Morgan, Owsley, Rowan and Wolfe. Carlos Brock took special pride in going to extraordinary lengths to see that the Confederate soldiers of his home county of Perry were finally found and remembered. Before Carlos Brock, one Confederate soldier in Perry County had a Confederate marker. After Carlos Brock, 79 Confederate soldiers in Perry County are now properly marked.

Carlos worked countless hours in various libraries throughout the region helping to gather the research that was essential to finding these soldiers. He made countless trips with Steve Bowling in locating and marking lost Confederate graves in every corner of Breathitt County. The stone setting trips made by Carlos Brock with Faron Sparkman, Steve Bowling and other Caudill Camp members included many of the most difficult stone setting missions any SCV camp in the nation has ever encountered including James Allen, John J. Amburgey, Isaac Caudill, John Collinsworth, Daniel Francis, Reuben Smith and the upright marker for Booker Short that required stringing five come-alongs together to winch the stone up a sheer cliff in Menifee County. He also helped set stones for some of the 13th Kentucky’s most important leaders including Major Chenowith, Major Whipple, Captain S.R. Brashear, Captain Henderson Combs, Captain W.J. Hall, Captain Levi Kash, Captain Adam Martin, Captain Hiram Stamper and Captain A.J. White.

Carlos Brock has greatly distinguished himself by being the only known SCV member to set 300 stones and he has been recognized and awarded by the Caudill Camp for this outstanding service to preserve the memory of our Confederate ancestors. One person once asked Carlos how he could set stones like that and he replied, “you pick ‘em up, put ‘em in the truck and you got set em.” A lot of people have the interest, but few indeed in the whole country have the drive and the determination to finish the job it took to set 300 stones high on the remote mountaintops of Eastern Kentucky.
[Camp Newsletter]