The Radcliff area was known as Bloomington during the Civil War and was located on the Louisville-Nashville Turnpike at the junction of the Bloomington to Garnettsville Road.  One of the earliest written references to Bloomington comes from an article in the September 30, 1862 issue of the Cincinnati Commercial.  The reporter describes his journey between West Point and Elizabethtown.   During the course of his journey he ran into 50,000 soldiers under the command of General Buell who were traveling north toward West Point. 

On this journey, the reporter learned of recent losses of a man who lived at Bloomington named Milton Stith.  He was deprived of all his cattle, sheep, and corn, and in the morning had nothing but Quatermaster recepts, payable in Louisville.  Mr. Stith's farm was located in present day Radcliff on Hill Street where the old Moonlit Drive-In Theater was located in the 1950s.

The reporter wrote, "On Wednesday afternoon...Mr. Villard and I found ourselves thirty-five miles from Louisville, with the road between us so completely blocked with soldiers and army wagons, but there was no possibility of us driving home the way we came for several days.  We remained overnight at Bloomington hoping the army would get past early on Tuesday morning, but at nine o'clock on Thursday morning, General Thomas' division and two division trains had yet to go by.  On inquiry, we learned that there was another road to Louisville, a county road that lay through hills and valleys and in addition to being somewhat longer, was very much worse than the pike.  But it seemed to us that anything would be better than the unbearable dust of a road traveled by seven hundred army wagons and sixty-thousand soldiers.  We did not know how many guerrillas might be on the route we were abou to take, but to be caught by our enemies was a secondary consideration compared with being suffocated by our friends.. So we took the dirt road for a little town called Garnettsville, thence to West Point."